Practice

“If a diagram is done right, it can engage the viewer as much as any perspective rendering.”

In this ongoing series, we aim to give you a travel guide to cities around the globe — with an archi tectural twist. These tours offer chances to experience great design away from the traditional tourist hotspots and an alternative angle on the world’s metropolises. After New York City, Los Angeles and Detroit, we head across…

Who said architecture students have to be architects?

J. Michael Welton writes about architecture, art and design for national and international publicati ons. He is the author of Drawing from Practice: Architects and the Meaning of Freehand (Routledge, 2015). When Studio-Tag opened in the Plant Building near New York City’s Times Square in April, it introduced a concept for commercial interiors as revolutionary as…

More than just an old-school power-lunch scene, The Four Seasons restaurant has long been considered a paragon of the international style and quintessentially New York. So when it was announced that the Philip Johnson–designed restaurant, located within the tony Mies-designed Seagram Building, would be shutting its doors on July 16, it caused quite a stir.…

At the Aalto-Theater in Essen, Germany, the annual Red Dot Gala recently honored outstanding product designs — as judged by a panel of 41 — running the gamut from software tools and power tools to furniture and personal accessories. While all of the categories offered up some exciting and innovative finds, the kitchen and bath…

The latest craze in pop culture has just been handed to us from an unlikely source: Pokémon, the dec ades-old Japanese media franchise, has hit the jackpot with its extraordinarily popular mobile game Pokémon GO. A perfect storm of 90s nostalgia, gimmicky but impressive tech and social media share potential, the game has been hailed for…

Sometimes, the search for perfection pays off in spades. Just ask German bath manufacturer Duravit, which this spring introduced a new technology and, as a result, a new aesthetic. “C-Bonded” uses precise-fitting technology to merge ceramic elements with furniture, hiding the material thickness of a washbasin from view and creating a singular, uniform vanity that’s…

These are spaces of invention, idea-testing and collaboration.