The Autonomous Travel Suite – the brainchild of Steve Lee of Aprilli in Toronto – is a mobile hotel room. Equipped with sleeping, working and washroom amenities, the self-driving electric vehicle will pick up travellers at their front door (or the airport) and take them wherever they want to go. Lee envisions a chain of […]

Natural Dimensions – New York designer Jill Malek’s mixed-media wallcoverings for residential or commercial interiors – are made of metallic vinyl with hand-sewn dimensional-felt embellishments. The line’s richly tactile surfaces come in four distinct patterns: Melt (which looks like a hazy sunset), Rainfall (evocative of sleeting rain), Terrains (resembling shifting landscapes) and Babylon (akin to […]

Pink, grey and mint seem to dominate the moiré-patterned kilim rugs that Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, the Paris-based industrial designers and siblings, developed for Barcelona’s Nanimarquina. On closer inspection, however, their patterns are actually distinct sets of tightly drawn red, black or green stripes layered and running at slightly different angles against a white background. […]

Claus Porto’s New York outpost – the Portuguese beauty and fragrance house’s first international store – is located in Manhattan’s Nolita district, just a block away from the Bowery. Distinguished by 1,500 faceted diamond tiles, a stunning 13-metre-long white-cork arch both lures shoppers into the space and doubles as unique display shelves for the luxury […]

Housed in the interlinking buildings of a former palace, the Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden celebrated its centennial in 2017 by unveiling an extensive 1,200-square-metre renovation. The surprisingly modern intervention by Amstel-based i29 Interior Architects layers simple minimalist elements over the historic framework to create a new ground-floor exhibition […]

Part of Toronto’s ongoing waterfront revitalization, this pioneering urban landscape planned and designed by local studio Public Work is a communal corridor running under the surprisingly majestic 15-metre-high exposed-concrete bents holding up the Gardiner Expressway near Exhibition Place. A $25-million gift from a philanthropic private citizen funded this city-building initiative, which has transformed 1.75 kilometres […]

For the reconstruction of a 10-kilometre stretch of the famous Rockaway Boardwalk in Queens, New York, which had been destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, local government officials demanded more resilient structures, rebuilt to standards that would survive future storms. The result, overseen by Claire Weisz of WXY Architecture + Urban Design, is a new […]

The M’Bopicuá saltery – or, rather, what’s left of it – is a vine-covered relic from the 19th century, when the business of packing and curing meat was the main economic driver in Uruguay. The forest has slowly reclaimed the decaying plant, which was shuttered in 1878. Nicolás Franco Schicke, an architecture and design student […]

We are, all of us, suffering for fashion. Our ecosystems are suffering, too. The clothing we wear today will be the trash we take out tomorrow. Every time we do a load of laundry, toxic nanofibres poison our water system. Plus, the textile and garment industry contributes hugely to carbon emissions and, ultimately, to climate […]

The Coscienza Intuitiva, a conceptual piece and the thesis project of Italian student Federico Fauli, belongs to no particular era in design history – or, rather, it belongs to multiple eras at once. Fauli’s speculative tower, envisioned for the Piazza Caracciolo, in a once-thriving Palermo marketplace, would be constructed using the debris of the past. […]