A personal review of design creations
Amman, Accumulated: The Return of Amman Design Week
After seven years of silence, Jordan’s design week has reopened under new directors Bisher Tabbaa and Sarah Hejazin and curators Faysal Tabbarah and Khaled Al-Bashir, with a theme that fits its long pause.
Ten Years in Rope: Studio Lloyd and South African Design
A decade after its debut, the Cape Town lighting studio is a useful case study in what South African design has gained, and what it still has to prove.
Living Territories: Biodesign Comes to Mexico
Mexico's first biodesign exhibition, at the Museo Franz Mayer, treats plants, fungi and microbes not as raw material but as fellow designers, and asks us to take a humbler seat at the workbench.
Life of Forms: AlUla Lands in the Marais
A desert exhibition lands in the heart of the Marais this September, as AlUla and Lafayette Anticipations pair centuries of Saudi craft with contemporary French collecting, proof that sand and concrete have more in common than the map suggests.
Open Storage, Open Secrets: Herzog & de Meuron Let Hong Kong Into the Workshop
The firm that built M+ hands over its sketchbooks. Discretion, it turns out, was never the point.
The Sagrada Família Was Never Waiting on Gaudí
Everyone blames the delay on a dead genius. The real culprit is a business model and it is one every self-funded museum should study.
The Uncommon Beauty of Common Things
Charles Eames drove through Nuevo León nine years before he ever met Ray, a footnote so small he barely mentioned it for decades. Now it's the opening scene of Mexico's first-ever Eames retrospective.
Tashkent Just Got Its Concrete Crown
Uzbekistan has just become the first country in Central Asia to see its twentieth-century architecture recognised by UNESCO, and Tashkent's modernist landmarks are now, officially, the youngest buildings on the World Heritage List.
The Volcan: Oscar Niemeyer's Artistic Emergence in Le Havre
How a Brazilian modernist dropped two white volcanoes into the middle of France's most rigorously rebuilt city… and won!
Concrete Independence
Concrete convictions: how seven newly independent nations built their identity in glass and reinforced concrete — and why MoMA's latest show could not have landed at a more Instagram-ready moment.