Mantis is a family of tables that wears its intellect on its sleeve. In tackling the assembly, Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe set an additional challenge for themselves: Could a singular approach to stabilizing the tables’ legs be adapted to tops of different sizes and dimensions? The pair realized that, by 3D-printing custom components from […]

By massing four volumes with shed roofs in a cross, this 84-square-metre, three-bedroom/three-bathroom ski cabin in Norway, an hour north of Oslo, achieves the footprint and angles of a pinwheel. The unique design was Casper Mork-Ulnes’s response to the municipality’s unwavering insistence on a gabled roof. Inside, the pine-plywood-clad interior is as practical as it […]

Maison Wilson in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood is signature la SHED architecture, a design-build firm known for deftly updating legacy housing stock by adding contemporary gestures while preserving homes’ heritage elements for maximum authenticity. In this latest coup, a two-storey addition at the rear of a home exemplifies the firm’s backyard-to-front-curb approach and contains a new […]

Vanoosh Villa’s va-va-voom derives from an undulating post-and-beam exoskeleton that makes a one-to-two-storey-high frame of broken planes and mimics the topography of the surrounding mountains in northern Iran’s Mazandaran Province. Once the garden’s climbing vines mature and fill in the voids, the foliage of this work in progress will enshroud the villa’s first and second […]

When contemplating this historic Seville residence with a facade from the 11th century, the Madrid architects charged with renovating it resigned themselves to the fact that they weren’t the first and likely wouldn’t be the last to update this building. Given their bit parts in the home’s evolution, they resolved to tidy up its existing […]

Hangzhou firm gad·Line+ Studio consulted with its end users during the planning stages of this 50-unit affordable-housing project for farmers disenfranchised from their land due to China’s rapid urbanization. As a result of this consultation, the design for the new community broke with the government’s conventional, high-rise form of social housing and embraced rural traditions […]

A crucial tool for the football program’s recruiters, UCLA’s 6,800-square-metre football centre acts as an interactive history book. To link the team’s past accomplishments to prospective players’ future glory, the centre’s nearly 200 signs and wayfinders incorporate motifs ranging from varsity-jacket lettering to digital displays and football plays – all handsomely rendered in wood, brass […]

Cities are largely designed around the flow of traffic. The modular Expansion Cityline office system evokes a comparable daily ebb and flow through collaborative spaces, mixed-use areas and adjustable-height private workstations. Like any good city, Expansion Cityline is configured according to its infrastructure – in this case a structural spine called “the beam,” which also […]

Completed in September 2017 by Boston-based NADAAA, the near-decade-long transformation of the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design included relocating it to a landmark roundabout in the southwestern corner of the school’s downtown campus. The $69-million renovation and expansion of a 19th-century building in the middle of Spadina Crescent […]

Shanghai-based Neri&Hu Design and Research Office conceived this 4,200-square-metre, 20-room boutique hotel, restaurant and cultural-event space in the Hanjiang District of Yangzhou using the local vernacular of a courtyard residence. The architects connected a patchwork of new and existing structures via a dramatic grid of slightly-below-grade passageways that incorporate varying open-brickwork motifs and skylights. Ensconced […]