Kvadrat CEO Anders Byriel discusses why the Danish textile producer is deliberately tackling sustainability "the hard way" in this exclusive interview.

The company sees itself as having a history of corporate responsibility – but Byriel said he was taken aback after it signed up to the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTI) on reducing emissions in 2019.

"When we measured our footprint I [was] surprised – I thought we were close to net-zero," he told Dezeen.

Far from being net-zero, the brand found it was actually emitting 2,364 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year from direct company operations.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. A staggering 98 per cent of Kvadrat's emissions occur in its supply chain – known as scope three emissions – outside of its direct control.

One major contributor to the company's direct (scope one and two) emissions is the company fleet of vehicles. Kvadrat therefore has decided to replace all fossil-fuel based and even hybrid company cars in Denmark to an all-electric fleet in 2024.

It is also considering adopting the same standard in countries with well-established electric-vehicle infrastructure as it seeks to halve its direct emissions by 2026.

Meanwhile, the company's biggest sustainability challenge is persuading its suppliers to follow suit.

Crucially, the SBTI does not allow for carbon offsetting, so emissions targets must be achieved principally through direct reduction.

"It's the hard way," said Byriel. "But we want to be the undisputed leader in sustainability."

"If you don't measure your footprint scientifically, how can you measure your goal anyway?" he added.

Kvadrat has also recently committed to the Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), a global standard that seeks to measure and reduce the environmental impact of products and services transparently.

"As a company with a history of using clean and responsible materials and manufacturing, following these new standards, is still eye-opening for me," said Byriel.

"It comes with pains but we all need to transform"

He took wool as an example of the surprising things to emerge from Kvadrat's deep dive into its environmental footprint.

"Wool is a wonder material that we are very close to – it lasts three times longer than a man-made material, it's grown in nature," he said.

"But if you calculate the footprint of the textile against that of recycled polyester, it does not perform that well due to the footprint generated by transport and the sheep."

"So we have to adapt one-third of our wool production using hydropower to reduce the overall footprint of wool, so that it can compete with recycled polyester."

Taking sustainability seriously comes with challenges, Byriel acknowledged.

"It's not making our lives easier because it makes our product more expensive," he said. "It comes with pains but we all need to transform."

However, the company hopes that by getting ahead of the curve it will be left in a stronger position if and when governments start regulating to reduce the industry's environmental impact.

"Due to all these things that we have done for many years, when the regulation eventually catches up we would already be compliant with that – we don't have to do anything to change," said Byriel.

Kvadrat has committed to spending 80 per cent of its investment over the next five years on sustainability-related projects, including material innovations and developing machines to aid re- and up-cycling.

As part of that work, it is on a mission to replace all man-made plastic in its products with recycled plastic.

In October, it launched a new textile developed in collaboration with 2023 Dezeen Awards winner Patricia Urquiola that it claims is the world's first recycled polyester upholstery textile made from 100 percent ocean-bound plastic waste.

Named Sport, the new textile was created through four years of research together with Tide, a Switzerland-based company that specialises in building a global supply chain for premium second-life materials made from ocean-bound plastic waste.

"It's made out of 100 per cent ocean plastic, which is a big achievement, as the ocean-plastic-made textiles out there usually only contain 10 to 15 percent ocean plastic," Byriel said.

Speaking to Dezeen during Design Republic's Festival of Design in Shanghai, where Sport was on display in an exhibition, Byriel claimed that ocean-plastic polyester textiles often incorporate plastic collected up to 50 kilometres from the coastline.

As a result, the plastic has already started to disintegrate so the textiles typically have to integrate either virgin polyester or polyester recycled from other post-consumer plastic sources.

Biomaterial textiles and recycling factory

The plastic used to manufacture Sport, on the other hand, is mostly collected less than 10 kilometres away from the coastline of remote islands in Thailand.

"We collect good-quality plastic to make yarn from," explained Byriel.

"The dissolving process only comes with the mechanical movement of the waves and the exposure of the sun, so once it's been taken out of the ocean and made into textile, it's safe to use just like every other plastic product we live with everyday."

Kvadrat is also working on bio-based materials, including a leather alternative made out of hemp and food-waste polyesters, with the first product due for release in two years' time.

Meanwhile, it has set up a 20,000 square-metre factory to take back waste materials from clients and turn them into new products.

"This is the result of a six-year technology development," said Byriel.

"For example, we can take back old uniforms and press them with our machines to make a tabletop," he continued.

"When the tabletop is at the end of its lifecycle, we can take it back again and create something new – this is an endless loop."

The images are courtesy of Kvadrat unless stated otherwise.

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The use of robots and AI is a "new form of colonialism" that will lead to a resurgence of Arts and Crafts, according to trend forecaster Li Edelkoort.

Edelkoort has been a trend forecaster since she was 21 and says the discipline has "informed every single step of my life".

During an on-stage interview with Dezeen deputy editor Cajsa Carlson at Downtown Design during Dubai Design Week, Edelkoort explained that she is currently thinking about the return of Arts and Crafts, the 19th-century movement mostly associated with British designer William Morris.

"I'm craving fantasy – I don't know where it comes from, but it's there," she said. "I'm craving almost childish initiatives and design, I'm craving colour, I'm craving painting, motif and ornamental finishes."

"It's been building up for a few years," she added. "I really believe in the return of Arts and Crafts, as it has been described by William Morris. And I think it might also be our future."

Edelkoort predicts society will soon have "universal allowance of money"

Edelkoort anticipates that in the next few years, we will look more to our inner child – a trend she claims she's already seen evidence of.

"As a kid, you always want to use cardboard to make a new building, or a box becomes your house," she said. "And sure enough, Max Lamb recently made an exhibition of cardboard furniture."

"That's how trends work – he's maybe not going back to childhood, but I use this way of thinking and then we come together on a similar idea."

The Dutch trend forecaster was also influenced by Morris' book News from Nowhere, which envisions a future society where money is allocated in a different way to a capitalist system.

"There's no stealing, there's no judge, there's no prison, there's no marriage so there is no divorce – there's money, but there's not a monetary system," she said.

Edelkoort believes this could become a reality in just a decade.

"It's more like the universal allowance of money, which will come to us very soon, I think in 10 years from now," she said. "That will allow us to develop our own world, because the work will be done by artificial intelligence."

AI and robots will lead to the "age of the amateur"

The rise of AI and robots will also mean we need to rethink the reason for our existence since it will no longer be tied to work, she says.

"You see that people with money are using AI and robots like their new slaves, it's a new form of colonialism," she said. "And we have to share the money that is made by the bots."

"We will have to give [people] a reason for being here," she added. "[Otherwise], a baby will be born without a future and no reason to be born, because there's no way there's going to be work – if we define the future as work, which we do."

But she believes that if a future in which robots and AI do all the work comes to pass, creativity can help us find reasons to live.

"I think we will create an Arts and Crafts world next to this billionaire world and they will sort of coexist," she said. "I call it the 'age of the amateur'".

"What is new is what's coming from the Global South"

As well as looking at long-term societal changes, Edelkoort's work focuses on more contemporary trends. Her latest book, Proud South, looks at fashion, photography and art from the Global South.

In Dubai, which she described as "the platform of the Global South", the trend forecaster explained why we should be looking to designs from the southern parts of the planet.

"In the North, it's very boring because people keep designing the same thing," she said. "They already have a cupboard full of the same thing. Sometimes you buy something and come home and say, oh shit, I already have that – you forgot."

"What is new is the South, what is coming from the Global South. That's why I made a book called Proud South, which is celebrating what is happening in the regions in the southern part of the planet."

Rather than being about specific designers and design movements, her focus is on broader influences.

"It's really more of a vision, I would say, than individual brands or people," she explained. "It's to do things from the heart, from the origin, from the tribe, sometimes from the indigenous culture, from whatever inference you can pick up in the South, and how do you translate that into, in this case, fashion and photography."

A second book in the series will look at design and craft, and Edelkoort hopes the books will help create "happiness" for people in other regions of the world.

"There are a lot of health problems, mental health problems, with young people especially," she said.

"I think the South is giving us solutions as a form of intrinsic happiness, which is translated in colour, in motif and in the destination of fashion and photography. And it has a power which we have lost."

"There is this possibility for a change"

As well as Proud South, Edelkoort is working on a trend book about Paris, a city that she says "is fascinating because it hasn't changed and everything else changed."

"In Paris, people don't like to change – French people hate change, they love tradition," she said.

She is also focusing on the World Hope Forum, which she founded together with Philip Fimmano with Dezeen as a media partner to be a "holistic global platform for the exchange and expansion of knowledge, innovation".

The idea came to her after doing a talk with Dezeen during the coronavirus pandemic.

"I did this talk with Dezeen, and it was seen by more than a million people," she said. "So I was like 'wow, what is happening now – if there is this impact of what I think and say, maybe I can reach people to create a better world.'"

The World Hope Forum aims to reach people with good news, rather than the negative news stories that Edelkoort feels we're constantly being fed. Its YouTube channel showcases hopeful films under different themes.

"We have bundled hopeful scenarios: making money, making people happy, being better for the planet, being better for the future," Edelkoort explained.

"When you see them adding up, it really becomes notable, and you can feel in your soul that there is this possibility for change."

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Architecture studios in Central Europe have been chronically overlooked, claims Chybik + Kristof co-founder Ondřej Chybík in this interview.

Chybík, who says his own studio is the largest in the Czech Republic, is on a mission to put architecture from his home country – as well as Slovakia, Poland and Hungary – firmly on the global design map.

"No-one can name anybody" from Central European architecture scene

"If I go somewhere and I talk about Czech architecture or Central European architecture, almost no-one can name anybody," he told Dezeen.

"I think there is a huge opportunity to show off a bit," he added. "I'd like to work on that for the next decade – not just to promote our studio, but to explain what our generation is about to the general public all around the world."

To that end, Chybik + Kristof will next month open an office in London, sharing a space with local studio Haptic.

That is partly because Chybik + Kristof has become a big fish in a small pond at home, he explains, but also to raise the international profile of its peer group.

"The true motivation was to offer the opinion of our generation to other territories – our right to be a voice in the contemporary architecture discussion," Chybík said.

In an attempt to contribute to that discussion, Chybik + Kristof is accompanying the opening of its London outpost with the launch of its inaugural monograph, titled Crafting Character.

The book spotlights in detail 14 of the studio's projects, organised around eight themes that it considers important to contemporary architecture including adaptive reuse, affordability and materiality.

"The profession is changing"

Chybík explained that the book's central concept picks up on the changing nature of the architecture profession in a world where the built environment is beset with issues, chiefly sustainability and affordability.

"We believe that buildings should have a certain character, but not in one direction," he said.

"Previous generations of architects were very proud of their very strong formal style. I think that's not the case today, because the profession is changing from making design into solving problems – the architectural form should represent the quality of the solution."

As a result, he argues, the idea of studios maintaining a trademark house style that they apply to all projects is losing relevance.

"Each project is different, and I believe that there's no common architectural language for such diverse topics – that's very fundamental."

"I think we should still care about the beauty, about proportions, about materiality, and those classical aspects of architecture," he added.

"But on the other hand, or on top of it, we should also be aware that there are other issues we have to take into consideration."

"We were competing against each other"

Chybík traces his own interest in architecture back to childhood memories of visiting the Faculty of Architecture at Brno University of Technology, where his father was a professor.

"I saw the corridors full of sketches and models, and architecture students smoking in the corridors with long hair, and it impressed me a lot," he recalled. "Since then I knew that I wanted to be an architect."

Later studying architecture at Brno himself, he was successful in landing several student competitions – working up a healthy rivalry with classmate Michal Kristof.

"We were not working together, we were competing against each other," explained Chybík. "It motivated me a lot, because there was some young Slovak guy doing the same competitions as me, and we got a certain monopoly in student competitions within the country."

In 2010, soon after graduating, the pair were talking in a Venice bar during the architecture biennale in the early hours of the morning when they decided to open a studio together.

Having been established later that year, Chybik + Kristof now employs 60 people, including, Chybík claims, more architects than any other Czech firm.

But Chybík says Chybik + Kristof is just one of a number of architecture studios in the region doing noteworthy work.

"Particularly in my country, there's something very interesting happening, because we are not the unicorns," he said.

"We are maybe the largest, but there's lots of like 30-40 people architecture studios – I can count like 10, maybe, 15 this size," he added. "It's becoming a hotspot of contemporary architecture, in my opinion."

Unique historical perspectives

In the Czech Republic, Chybík namechecks Mjölk Architekti, Bod Architekti and OVA, as well as the Center for Architecture and Metropolitan Planning in Prague.

Then there is Gut Gut, Plural and Sadovsky & Architects in Slovakia and Hungary's Archikon and Paradigma Ariadné.

A wave of Czech architecture studios were founded during the 1990s as the country underwent rapid transformation following the fall of the Iron Curtain, appointing themselves the moniker "the Golden Eagles".

Though this generation of architects rose to prominence within the Czech Republic, a language barrier meant they struggled to promote their work abroad, according to Chybík.

"So I'm very happy that my generation is able to communicate and is also willing to present their projects internationally," he said.

"If I open Dezeen today, I can see lots of Czech architecture firms publishing their projects, and many of them are my age."

Now, the region's unusual recent history – from communism to the capitalism of the 1990s – in combination with a significant need for new infrastructure, means Chybík believes it is fertile ground for new modes of architectural exploration.

He points, for instance, to Chybik + Kristof's transformation of a brutalist bus station (pictured top) constructed in the 1980s under communism but already in a dilapidated state due to a lack of investment by its private owner, as well as its project to build an ice-hockey arena in Jihlava.

"There are always tools to achieve a positive perception among users"

Meanwhile, he cites the studio's Lahofer Winery as the very epitome of Chybik + Kristof's "crafting character" concept.

Completed in 2020, it features an undulating roof bearing a publicly accessible amphitheatre that was not part of the brief.

"The amphitheatre is a magnificent tool, not just for the promotion of the brand of the winery, but to bring people together and to let them enjoy a cultural event every Saturday in the middle of vineyards," said Chybík.

"Even though the winery has this very contemporary architectural language and I was afraid about if the community will take it or not, they're always telling me that they experience lots of great moments in this particular place, it's great," he added.

"There are always tools to achieve such a positive perception [among] the users of architecture."

This type of approach, Chybík argues, is key to making the building industry more sustainable – though he resists using that term himself.

"The average age of a commercial building in Europe is around 40 years, and that's something that is extremely unsustainable," he said.

"I think one of the major [reasons] why we demolish those buildings is that they are lacking a character, and they are not flexible enough for future transformation."

"Our mission is to create buildings people like and will maintain," he added.

"I don't want to say sustainable – I hate this word, it's overused. I don't want to be another architect talking about sustainability. Every building we design should be designed in this way."

The photography is by Alex shoots buildings unless otherwise stated.

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Former Ferrari-designer Lowie Vermeersch has created a new type of micro vehicle intended to push traditional cars off the road. In this interview, he discusses new start-up Komma and his vision for the future of mobility.

"I always say, moving an 80-kilo person with 2.5 tonnes of material is not something we should consider as the best we can do, especially in an urban environment," said Vermeersch.

The Granstudio founder has previously overseen the design of the Ferrari FF and 458 Italia while design director at Pininfarina and led work on the Maserati Birdcage 75th concept car.

His latest project – Komma, invented together with Punkt founder and CEO Petter Neby – has a much smaller footprint. A covered, electric two-seater vehicle with car-like seats but a narrow width like a motorcycle, it is designed to take up less space on the roads and use less material to manufacture.

"Just making cars electric is not fully answering what is needed," Vermeersch told Dezeen. "We also need to be looking at how we can use less resources."

Neby and Vermeersch intend to do more with Komma than only manufacture vehicles, however; they plan to use the company to advocate for a shift in mobility away from the car and towards other, diverse modes of transport.

They hope that Komma can influence urban design in the 21st century in a similar way to how cars shaped cities in the 20th century, this time not with highways and suburbs but features that promote sustainability and wellbeing.

Startup seeks to "ignite a change in urban mobility"

Komma began life in late 2019, after Neby approached Vermeersch with "a need that he had lived himself, for a type of vehicle that he felt was missing", Vermeersch said.

The design and development were handled by Vermeersch's team at Granstudio, the transport-focused design studio he founded in 2010, while entrepreneur Neby brought experience in minimalist electronics from his company Punkt, whose devices include a dumbphone designed by Jasper Morrison.

The Komma car – which comes in two models, one fully closed and one open at the sides – is designed to carry one or two people as well as a small amount of cargo, such as shopping, on trips around the city or suburbs.

The company claims the vehicle covers 90 per cent of car-use needs while requiring only 30 per cent of the material resources and energy, and that it can bring pleasure back to the daily drive.

The narrow maximum width of 90 centimetres is, says Vermeersch, particularly key to the transformative potential of the vehicle.

"We always looked at: what will be the consequence if you have mass adoption of this kind of vehicle, and is that consequence positive?" said the designer.

"That's why we worked so hard on making a vehicle that is only half of a car width – which is narrower than a motorcycle – because only then can you ignite a change in urban mobility."

"At a certain point, a city could decide to just paint one extra line in the middle of the street that could become dedicated to such kinds of vehicles," he argued. "Whereas most of the microcar offerings, which are wider, do not have that potential because they need to behave like cars and need to move together with cars."

Push for change in mobility about being "true to what in essence cars stood for"

Vermeersch and Neby plan to be active in shaping the future of mobility through Komma. They see vehicle design and urban design as feeding into each other, and believe that if a new, nimble vehicle archetype emerges, it could enable cities to gradually reduce the road space and parking given to cars and allocate more room to pedestrians and community activities.

Vermeersch says the company will try to partner with local governments and infrastructure and mobility companies to develop pilot projects in this space, claiming the Komma is a good fit for car share schemes, taxi services and private ownership alike.

While it may seem like blasphemy for a car-lover to actively pursue a reduction in their manufacture and use, Vermeersch contends that his position is about honouring the idea behind the invention rather than being "stuck to the object" itself.

"If you want to be true to what in essence cars stood for, they stood for a sort of individual freedom of mobility," he said. "And I think everybody would agree that a car being stuck in a traffic jam is not living up to that."

Future vision for transport needs to have "human pleasure at its heart"

Vermeersch insists he is not anti-cars. He believes they will, and should, continue to play a role in the transport ecosystem, albeit a reduced one.

"For me, the future of cars is as part of a more diverse mobility spectrum, whereas until now, the car has been rather dominating the spectrum," he said. "The problems that we have with cars are not so much in the car itself but how we use it and where we use it."

"I think the car will still be in the future the best and most ecological solution for many, many uses," he continued. "And with 'car', I mean a kind of improved future car, so electric is definitely one step of it. I'd also like to see cars developing more lightness."

Vermeersch is also keen to shift the discourse away from being either "for or against" cars, which he sees as feeding into a culture war where freedom is pitched in opposition to over-consumption.

"The search for a better way of living is not helped if we take these absolute positions," said Vermeersch. "It's as if the car is the origin for all the bad things that's going on. That's not true."

Rather, he thinks we should see the move away from cars in cities as a "positive story" of the evolution of mobility.

"For me, in that picture of a more diverse mobility spectrum there's also place for having the cars that you really have fun with," he said. "And maybe it's not the car you own; maybe it's the car that you use on the weekend or share."

"Any scenario that we think about the future, if it will not have human pleasure at its heart, it's destined to fail. I think that's the part that keeps me connected to what people are passionate about with cars."

Designers must "look beyond the archetype of cars"

Komma hopes to release its vehicle by the end of 2025 targeting Europe as well as the USA and Canada as its first markets.

It will have a top speed of 130 kilometres per hour, equivalent to some of Europe's highest road-speed limits, and include car-like active safety features such as anti-lock brakes, airbags and anti-collision controls.

For the battery, there will be the option of either a single 7.5 kilowatt-hour or twin 15 kilowatt-hour module – both much smaller than in a standard-sized electric car but giving an expected range of up to 200 kilometres, similar to an electric Mini Cooper.

Vermeersch says that Granstudio designed the vehicle from the ground up to take advantage of the "geometric freedom" offered by electric drivetrains, which allow the engine to be virtually hidden inside the wheel rather than shaping the layout of the vehicle.

To add the desired element of pleasurability to the driving experience, there is torque vectoring on the wheels for improved grip, and the semi-open version of Komma has been given motorcycle-like handling, with a handlebar for steering and a tilt mechanism on the wheels.

"Knowing so well how cars are made also allows you to see new opportunities when new technologies come," said Vermeersch. "I think what is needed is more people looking into solutions who are, on one hand, broad-minded enough to look beyond the archetype of cars, but on the other hand, have enough knowledge of them to also understand how you can do that."

"There's fantastic things happening within the car business, and there's fantastic ideas about mobility at the broader scale, the urban scale, but they have a hard time overlapping," he continued. "Komma and also Granstudio for me is really about that."

The photography and images are courtesy of Komma.

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When textile company Byborre launched a digital platform, the aim was to be a disruptor like Airbnb or Uber. In an interview three years on, founder Borre Akkersdijk says it was "too big a jump" for an industry resistant to change.

Akkersdijk hoped that Byborre Create, billed as "a Photoshop for textiles", would kickstart a digital revolution by enabling fashion and furniture manufacturers to source their fabrics more responsibly.

With the textile industry producing 92 million tonnes of waste every year, he thought that brands would welcome a free-to-use tool that made the process more transparent.

Instead, the Dutch designer and entrepreneur found brands unwilling to deviate from what they were used to.

"We wanted to change the textile industry but it wasn't ready for it," Akkersdijk told Dezeen.

"We made the process easier, faster and more responsible, all at the same price. What we didn't anticipate was for the conversation to stop, just because it's not the normal routine."

"The industry is broken"

Byborre made its name as a fashion label, but after the launch of Create – named product of the year at the Dutch Design Awards in 2021 – it stopped releasing clothing collections and rebranded as a mission-driven innovation company.

Now, the company's sole focus is to make the textile industry fairer and more sustainable with the use of digitisation.

"The industry is broken; it has scaled to a size that we cannot comprehend," Akkersdijk said.

"Digitisation is the only way to [fix it]," he continued.

"I want to digitise the textile industry so that there is less overproduction and more balance. I want everybody who makes products using textiles to have access to a fully transparent supply chain."

When Dezeen interviewed Akkersdijk in 2021, he said the aim of Create was to start the ball rolling on this process.

The open-source platform provides free access to the pioneering 3D-knitting technology on which Byborre built its reputation, as well as the company's wide-ranging supplier network.

This makes it possible for users to easily create bespoke textiles and find the most efficient and eco-friendly way of producing them – but Create has failed to have the impact Akkersdijk had hoped for.

Now he understands that this shift was too radical for furniture manufacturers, who rarely design or produce their textiles.

Most source their fabrics from multinational textile producers, which gives them less control over the material supply chain or the production volumes.

"Everybody in the business is so used to selecting from existing textiles without understanding the consequences of doing that, and it results in so much overproduction," said Akkersdijk.

"We gave them the innovation to change. But because the system is already set, the heels just went into the sand."

"I never set out to compete"

In response, Byborre has had no choice but to adopt a more traditional approach.

In November 2022, the brand launched a ready-to-order textile collection of its own, aimed at the interiors market. The collection currently includes 19 designs, available in 147 variants that are all fully customisable.

Akkersdijk said the aim was not to take business away from other textile brands, but rather to demonstrate how the system could be improved by introducing on-demand production.

It led to collaborations with furniture brands including Fogia and Lapalma, but also created friction with textile brands.

"There are so many great textile companies; I never set out to compete with them," Akkersdijk said.

"I just wanted them to change for the better. But I realised the only way to do that was to compete with them."

Akkersdijk had envisioned that other textile producers would join the Create platform, allowing it to evolve into a complete ecosystem for sourcing responsible textiles.

So far, he said he has been mostly met with either resistance or confusion.

He claims that one brand he approached thought he was looking for a buyout. He accuses another of actively blocking partner companies from working with Byborre.

"I want us all to move together, but that's not how it is seen," he said.

Many of the major textile producers, meanwhile, are working on in-house digitisation. Akkersdijk likens the situation to the early days of satellite navigation in the car industry.

"All the big car companies built their own navigation systems, but today everybody just uses Google Maps," he said.

"Why didn't the car companies just work together with Google? Why did they think they had to do it themselves? And that is a bit like what the textile industry is doing right now."

"Small stepping stones" towards change

Akkersdijk trained as a designer, studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and Design Academy Eindhoven before going on to work in the Paris studio of trend forecaster Li Edelkoort.

He co-founded Byborre with former business partner Arnoud Haverlag in 2015, on the back of a series of high-profile collaborations with brands including Nike, Moncler and Louis Vuitton.

In February 2023, the company secured €16.9million in Series B funding from a consortium of investors that include Invest-NL, VP Capital, SHIFT Invest and Amsterdams Klimaat en Energiefonds (AKEF).

The brand has unveiled numerous fashion collaborations in recent months, with brands including Ace & Tate, Palace, NN.07, Diemme and Albino & Preto.

However Akkersdijk is particularly focused on interiors, where the lifespan of products is typically much longer and customers are more accustomed to paying for high-quality textiles.

"If you look at the markets where textile is used best, it's not fashion," he said.

"We're not neglecting the fashion world, but when we started growing the business it became contradicting to what we wanted to do. For the average garment, you talk about use in terms of days of use, while for a sofa it's years."

The company staged the exhibition The Elephant in the Room at Milan design week in April and Dutch Design Week in October, to give insight into the impact of material supply chains.

Byborre has also hosted workshops that introduce emerging and established designers to the Create platform, in the hope they might become brand ambassadors.

Akkersdijk still believes change is possible, but understands that it can only be achieved with "small stepping stones".

"If I had anticipated all the obstacles we have faced, I would have never dared to start," said Akkersdijk.

"It gives me hope and energy every time I hear that somebody has used our textiles because it is a little step closer to changing the status quo."

The photography is courtesy of Byborre.

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AIA Gold Medal winners Ted Flato and David Lake share their views on how "architecture is being driven forward by a response to climate" in this exclusive interview.

Flato and Lake of Lake Flato Architects argue that in order to address the social and environmental issues of our time, architects must focus on regionalism to make buildings more sustainable and enjoyable for all species.

"We've moved beyond just the need for shelter, now's the time to shelter all species and think about the natural realm," David Lake told Dezeen.

"Architecture should intrinsically make us more connected to the natural realm; that goal is just something we live and breathe – and we love what we do."

Lake and co-medalist Ted Flato founded their studio, Lake Flato Architects, in San Antonio, Texas in 1984.

They have since completed projects ranging from stadiums to residences in 45 American states as well as in Mexico and the Caribbean.

The pair met after architecture school in the late 1970s as employees in the office of American architect O'Neil Ford, whose work attracted both men for its "regional modernism".

"When we both got out of architecture school in the late 70s, post-modernism was what was going on," Flato told Dezeen.

"And O'Neil's approach to modern regionalism was something that was all about craft and how one built; it was a great counterpoint to some of the popular things that were going on at the time."

Lake and Flato have continued this tradition, working closely with clients and institutions to create work that responds to and helps the environment – a philosophy spurred by both men's appreciation of the highly varied environment of the state of Texas, their home.

Indicative of this work are pavilions constructed in Texas to help protect and promote the health of watersheds.

The first, in Decatur, Texas was the first Living Building Challenge-certified project in the state. It implemented a complex water collection and treatment system in a relatively simple structure.

Lake said that this land-based approach should be applied as widely as possible, focusing on the unique needs of people, plants and animals in each.

"We need to move away from that international-style approach to architecture and think about how architecture is very much being driven forward by a response to climate," said Lake. 

"When you respond to climate, when you use local resources, when you craft and merge both the art and architecture with the science of engineering, resource conservation and high-performance buildings that yields an architecture that isn't driven by form. It's driven by purpose, is driven by resilience."

Flato said that while a focus on locality is important, it's also important for architects to get out of their regions and be exposed to other conditions.

He added that a focus on longevity and output can be applied to a variety of situations and that architects can gain perspective by working in these different conditions.

Lake Flato has expanded on these environmental concerns, with projects that make buildings comfortable and sustainable in difficult environments.

In 2013, Flato led the charge on an expansive addition to the campus at Arizona State University that increased density and added landscaped elements to help students brave the heat. Lake said that this is still one of the studio's "best projects".

"Not only did we do an adaptive reuse of an old Air Force Base, but we made a place there in Arizona, where it's harsh; Ted managed to make everybody comfortable outdoors and convince the owners that all the corridors should be outdoors," Lake said.

"That's part of what we do. We try to find pathways that connect people to their place, and also think about the future," he added.

Beyond dealing with ecosystems, the studio has also engaged in work that engages the flow of goods and services over a wider supply chain.

Notably, the studio worked with climate organisation the Rocky Mountain Institute to make a series of grocery store chains H-E-B in Texas and Mexico more energy efficient in both operation and in their supply chain.

The studio has also worked on large-scale projects, such as an NBA stadium in San Antonio, which they said was an interesting project in that it proved they could scale up their regionally oriented, sustainable approach.

"One of the really exciting aspects of the work we get to do is just the range of work that we get to work on the range of places and programs," said Flato.

"Ultimately we're problem solvers and we like to have new and interesting problems."

Lake and Flato both said they were honoured to receive the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award bestowed by the American Institute of Architects.

The duo was awarded the 2024 AIA Gold Medal for their engagement with "controversial environmental and socio-political issues".

"We felt that in the beginning that buildings could make people more connected to the environment," said Lake.  "What an honor to have our peers recognize our 40 years of effort to do that."

Other projects by Lake Flato include residences such as a Corten-steel-clad house in Texas that was designed to "sit lightly on the land", an education center in Mississippi built on a site destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and a house with 3D-printed elements in Austin.

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Louis Vitton, Dior and Tiffany & Co owner LVMH is aiming to become more sustainable – but not because customers are demanding it, explains the CEO of the luxury goods company's North America arm, Anish Melwani, in this exclusive interview.

"Sustainability is something we do not because we think our customers care – we do it because it is existential to our business, on top of being the right thing to do for society," Melwani told Dezeen.

"We know that today the average customer doesn't care terribly much about sustainability," he continued. "They say they do, but when you actually get down to the brass tacks, we don't have people walking into our stores today and asking us, 'Hey, is this done sustainably?' – well, at least not many."

Climate change an "existential" threat

The world's largest luxury conglomerate, Paris-based LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH) owns 75 brands including many of the world's biggest names in the fashion, alcohol and watches and jewellery industries.

Melwani explained that although sustainability is not currently a driver for sales, he believes that attitudes are changing and that it will become a concern for a growing number customers of LVMH brands.

"We believe that over time, more and more of our customers, as generations progress, will care more about this – they will ask questions, be it in the stores or through online channels – they'll start demanding it," he said.

"And we think that'll be good for us. But we're going to do it anyway."

LVMH is aiming to improve the sustainability of both its stores and supply chain, with fashion reportedly responsible for eight per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Melwani, climate change poses an "existential" threat to LVMH, as many of the products created by its brands rely on natural materials. He cited the impact of the growing number of wildfires on its wine businesses.

"[We want to] future proof in many ways," said Melwani. "It's future proofing from a customer perspective, but also future proofing from a practical perspective."

"From a manufacturing perspective, we're vertically integrated," he continued. "If we don't grow grapes in Champagne, we can't make any more Champagne. The French government is not about to expand the limits of the region of Champagne."

"One of the challenges is that we are renters"

Melwani was speaking to Dezeen following the launch of a partnership between the company and Miami Design District that is aiming to reduce the environmental impact of its stores within the district, as part of an ongoing strategy to improve the sustainability of its 5,600 global stores.

The initiative will see its stores in Miami powered by solar by 2025. Melwani said that "all the pieces [had] come together" on the project, but that LVMH faces challenges at the majority of its stores, where the properties are rented.

"One of the challenges is that we are renters – we are tenants in most of our stores – we don't actually purchase our energy directly," he said. "We've been purchasing green energy in the parts of the world where we own the building, and we are able to purchase right from utility."

"We've been doing that for a while," he continued, "But in the vast majority of our stores we are tenants and so it requires this coordination and commitment by the landlord, as well as frankly, having a utility provider that has the right programmes to make this all work."

The company aims to start replicating the Miami partnership with its other landlords in the US and has begun similar initiatives in China and the Middle East.

Melwani added that sustainability was becoming part of the company's messaging, although its brands are not pushing the agenda on their customers.

"The first thing is we believe that attitudes will change over time, and secondly, much the way that we have beautiful art and design in our stores, it's an element of storytelling that becomes part of the brand," he explained.

"Some customers care about the art that they see and ask questions about it and we're able to talk about that – why is that particular art or that artist in that store?" he continued.

"If people ask us about our sustainability methods, we will be able to tell them that this is what we do. But you know, luxury is kind of a fun retail experience. And no one wants to be lectured. No one finds a lecture to be fun."

Earlier this month, British fashion designer Stella McCartney and LVMH presented a market of sustainable material innovations at climate conference COP28. The market showcased 15 innovators that provide plant-based alternatives to plastic, animal leather and fur, as well as regenerative alternatives to traditional fibres.

"The fashion industry accounts for eight per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions," McCartney said. "We need to get creative and innovative with alternatives, moving beyond the limited materials that the industry has been working with traditionally."

"If we can work collaboratively with these goals, we can actually begin doing business in a way that regenerates our planet instead of only taking from it."

The photo is courtesy of LVMH.

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With a major retrospective now on show at MAD Brussels, Spanish designer Jaime Hayon tells Dezeen how his "serious fun" style has helped him jump between fine art and industrial design in this interview.

Hayon presents over 350 works in the Nuevo Nouveau exhibition, with paintings and sculptures on display as well as the design objects and installations he is famous for.

Hayon started his career as an artist trying to prove he could also work as a designer, but said it is now often the other way around.

He believes the key to doing both is developing a uniquely recognisable style.

"I believe that if you have a concept and a style, you can do anything you want," he told Dezeen.

"If I'm making an oil painting or I'm making an object, I don't make a division in my brain. The world makes a division for my work, not me."

Hayon's signature style is set in a world of fantasy characters and creatures. These are expressed in free-flowing lines and vivid colours.

Examples of this in Nuevo Nouveau include the now-familiar Green Chicken rocking horse, the yeti-like Happy Susto vases and a series of huge tapestries that look like decorated masks.

"I'm building characters from out of my imagination," Hayon said.

"The forms, the organic elements, the colour – that has all become a language that people now recognise."

Despite the playful aesthetic, Hayon said there is meaning or function in everything he produces.

"I play with serious fun," he said. "It's serious because it's made by the best artisans and manufacturers, but it's also trying to be nice to you."

He points to a recent design for Danish brand &Tradition, the stainless-steel Momento Jug, as an example.

"To me, it's a character," he said. "It looks like a pelican."

"But it's also a very serious industrial design object," he continued. "We made so many prototypes to get the right balance, so it never spills a drop of water."

Nuevo Nouveau marks the first time Hayon's work has been shown in Belgium.

The exhibition forms part of a city-wide programme of events marking the 130th anniversary of the art nouveau movement, which is believed to have been founded in Brussels.

MAD Brussels' creative director Dieter Van Den Storm said that Hayon's approach, particularly its combination of art and design, is akin to the spirit of art nouveau.

"We were looking for somebody who would embody the essence of the art nouveau movement today," Van Den Storm told Dezeen.

"Jaime Hayon is that kind of designer. From sketches and paintings to furniture and accessories, but also unique pieces, interior design and installations, it is hard to imagine everything in this exhibition comes from one designer/artist."

Hayon set up his studio in 2001. One of his most successful early projects was Mediterranean Digital Baroque, a limited-edition series of characterful cactus-inspired totems created for David Gill Galleries.

He said that, back then, he was struggling to be taken seriously as a designer.

"I was getting featured in art magazines, but I was frustrated because I wanted to create products," he said.

A turning point came when he began collaborating with Spanish brand BD Barcelona. In 2006, they unveiled the Showtime furniture collection, with pieces including the popular Multileg tables and cabinets.

"People said I was a clown," Hayon reflected. "But I made a serious point. The collection was a success and after that, big companies wanted to work with me."

"There were always two sides to me," he added. "I dressed up and did a lot of crazy shit. I wanted to have fun but, at the same time, there was a discipline."

This discipline, according to Hayon, is an obsession with detail and craft.

Despite working across all kinds of materials – the list includes glass, ceramics, wood, textiles, metal and plastic – his ambition is always to be as inventive as possible.

"I try to use classic materials but give them a twist," he suggested.

Hayon hopes the exhibition will help people understand him better.

His favourite room in the show is a small gallery between two larger rooms. It contains 20 glass objects, including the animal-inspired Faunacrystopolis crystal vases, displayed opposite a painting that features the same colours and characters.

"In that moment, you understand who I am," Hayon said.

"I am someone who sees everything as an opportunity to make something unique and special," he explained.

"In every space I create, whether it's The Standard Hotel in Bangkok or a little house in the Mediterranean, every detail is an excuse to experiment and go crazy."

The photography is by Sam Gilbert.

Nuevo Nouveau is on show at MAD Brussels in Belgium from 22 September 2023 until 27 January 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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Following the opening of his first hotel in Portugal, French designer Christian Louboutin, famous for his red-soled shoes, discusses creativity and sustainability in this exclusive interview.

"The secret to good design – and it's a very basic answer – is to be true to yourself," Louboutin told Dezeen. "You can take advice from people but at the end, someone has to be the boss: someone has to decide. At one point, someone has to decide to stay true [to the original idea]."

Best known for his shoe design, Louboutin's career spans more than 40 years, across which he has remained true to his creative impulses.

"The most important thing is that it looks good"

These impulses have been most recently expressed in his latest venture, Vermelho – an opulent 13-room boutique hotel in the quiet Portuguese village of Melides, south of Lisbon, which he designed in collaboration with architect Madalena Caiado.

Louboutin cites the hotel as an example of always staying true to himself. He recounts telling the team "let's have a lot of chimneys – the kind that you see on the roofs in the south of Portugal – because it's very nice".

The architects tried, and found it difficult, to connect all the chimneys through to fireplaces in the rooms so that they would function as flues.

"I just want the roof with the chimneys," Louboutin told them. "We don't need working chimneys. It doesn't matter if they don't go where they should go – it's okay if it doesn't work!"

The team were concerned that purely ornamental chimneys, where form did not follow function, were problematic because "they are not useful", Louboutin recalls.

"But they're absolutely the most beautiful thing," he contended. "The most important thing is that it looks good. That's the most important thing at the end of the day."

"I could feel that I was a bit alone at the beginning going 'more chimneys! more chimneys!' – because they were really, completely useless. But it's fine to be useless, totally fine."

"You don't have to be useful all the time," the designer added. "The chimneys were definitely a decision that I took by myself. You sort of have to be perseverant. And when you are believing in something, you have to go for it."

"When you do something that you love, you will have never wasted your time"

Louboutin left home at the precocious age of 12, going on to design women's shoes for Charles Jourdan, Roger Vivier and Yves Saint Laurent before founding his own company in 1991.

The eponymous firm has since grown to a $2.7 billion business that incorporates the design of leather goods, pet accessories, perfume and beauty products.

Despite his enormous success – or perhaps because of it – Louboutin continues to seek pleasure in creative projects.

"When you do something that you love, even if it doesn't work, even if it's useless, as long as you have pleasure doing it and it pleases you, you will have never wasted your time," he said.

"If you do something that you don't really love, but you think 'oh it's better like this, it's more comfortable, it's more useful' and you don't really like it, at the end the level of satisfaction – yours and probably other people's – is way lower," he added.

"But also if it doesn't work, then you really have wasted your time."

While these principles have guided his design practice, the business landscape since the early '90s has changed significantly.

Louboutin, who turned 60 in January this year, continues to navigate them successfully. For instance, the brand has nearly 17 million followers on Instagram.

"Everything has definitely changed due to social media," the designer said. "When I first started, every brand name had a face which corresponded to the brand name. Yves Saint Laurent wore glasses and he was called Yves Saint Laurent. Givenchy had a person behind it called Hubert de Givenchy."

"The names are just the brands now," he went on. "It's a different ballgame, completely. I don't say if it's good or bad or whatever, I have no time for judging – but it's completely different and the sense of freedom has kind of disappeared."

Something else that has changed over the decades is the conversation around sustainability.

The Christian Louboutin business now has a whole department dedicated to sustainability, which he says attempts to look at "everything: how it's made, where it is made, where it's coming from, have people involved been well treated, et cetera – which is all important – but also discussing how to work in a better way".

"Sustainability is not only for products but is also to do with people," he added. "Sustainability comes back to respect."

Louboutin feels strongly that social sustainability and supporting creative industries in their indigenous setting is just as much a part of sustainability as the eco-credentials of materials and the supply chain.

"When there is a part of a shoe which features some carving that is made in a very specific place – let's say by artisans of a special region – in this instance, I always refuse to copy that savoir faire and go to a country which could, and in a cheaper way, copy it."

Louboutin has a track record of valuing craft and the handmade.

Caiado, the Portuguese architect who co-designed the Vermelho hotel, told Dezeen how, especially during the construction phase, Louboutin "brought a more tactile way of thinking – almost as if the hotel was designed at the scale of the hand of those who built it".

"Artisanship is really a very important part of the culture of countries – it speaks about people, about the culture or a part of a country, and it's a necessity to keep it alive," emphasised Louboutin.

"You cannot use artisanship by reproducing it elsewhere. Why? Because if you take the essence of artisanship from a specific place, and you give it to another place, to make it cheaper (which is the only real reason), you are basically starting to eat – and to destroy, a bit – the ecosystem of a region or country. Sustainability goes all the way to protecting artisanship."

"You may not like colours, but you still like red"

Over the years Louboutin has had to protect his own artisanship – and there have been several instances of litigation to prevent trademark infringement on his signature red sole.

But while it has become the designer's calling card, Louboutin does not feel the iconic red sole has pigeonholed his creative output or opportunities.

"Every creative project in itself is an exciting thing," he explained. "I don't have a projection of what I should do. Projects with me are pretty organic – there is no business plan."

Louboutin has never limited himself to shoe design – and while the colour red has become his signature, he insists it is not because of the success he found with it but because of his abiding passion for the hue that he continues to use it across his projects.

Vermelho, the name of the recently-opened hotel, is also the word for red in Portuguese.

"Red is a transition. It's such an emotional colour, but also it's not necessarily linked to colour. You may not like colours, but you still like red," Louboutin enthused.

"If I had to go back and choose another colour, I would still choose red. If I have to stick to one as an identity, I will still keep my red."

The lead image is by Jose Castellar.

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MoMA curator Paola Antonelli believes humans will go extinct, quite possibly as a result of climate change, but is "very positive" about how designers can help to slow the decline, she tells Dezeen in this interview.

The Museum of Modern Art curator is the author of several books including Design Emergency (co-written with Alice Rawsthorn), and runs the Instagram account of the same name that explores how design can help build a better future in the face of serious global issues.

Among the exhibitions she has curated is Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, which showcased architecture and design projects from the last 30 years that explore our fractured relationship with the planet.

To Antonelli, the vital importance of focusing on these issues is obvious.

"When one has a pulse and a brain, one can not be aware of the climate emergency and not be concerned and tempted to do whatever one can, whatever is possible," she told Dezeen.

"Design is a force for any kind of change that needs to happen"

Antonelli believes that design is well-placed to play a leading role in the global effort to solve or mitigate issues relating to climate change.

"Design is a force for any kind of change that needs to happen," she said. "It's a force for propaganda, for changing people's behaviour, for re-addressing issues, for changing products so that they can become more attuned to needs."

"It is like an octopus that has different tentacles and can touch multiple point pressures in the ecosystems that make up our life."

"When it comes to the climate emergency, design can take on many different roles," she added.

"I don't feel that design by itself can change or save the world – that is always a utopia, and it's unrealistic – but I find that it is a fundamental part of any team effort, and all efforts have to be team efforts at this point to change the status quo."

One way in which designers can work towards slowing the climate emergency is by creating products which, rather than using materials that contribute to the pollution of the planet, focus on upcycling, re-use and using waste instead of new materials.

MoMA exhibition explores design's impact on the ecosystem

This is the theme of Antonelli's latest exhibition at MoMA, Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design, which explores "the regenerative power of design", examining how design can be elegant and innovative while still respecting the ecosystem.

Among the pieces on show are works by Mexican designer Fernando Laposse, who has created a marquetry material from the husks of heirloom corn species, and by designer Mae-Ling Lokko, who has a company in Ghana that creates building products from mushroom mycelium and coconut shells.

"[Lokko's work] is about agricultural waste, but very localised to where it is, and I see many designers behaving that way," Antonelli remarked.

In that vain, she believes designers should look to how people in their local environment have dealt with disastrous natural events in the past to help prepare for a future in which they will become more frequent.

"When you're dealing with a disaster, it's usually is a disaster that happens near you, so you could learn a lot from how things are done near you," Antonelli explained.

"Floods have happened for centuries and they might be more frequent now, but cities and regions of the world have been dealing with them for a really long time," she added.

"So they might have some structures already in place that need to be either relearned or deepened."

This is already underway, Antonelli believes, with designers and architects increasingly "studying the local".

"That is happening at many different levels," she said. "There are architects and landscape designers that are really trying to understand Native and First Peoples approach to land, respect, land-use or land non-use."

"Global technological efforts are important, but without that attention to local realities they will be simplifying, or at least overlooking, many important aspects."

Coronavirus pandemic "gave us a feeling of what clean skies could be"

She argues the coronavirus pandemic also underlined how quickly things can change and that we can have an impact on the climate and how it behaves.

"The pandemic brought everything to a stop and gave us a feeling of what clean skies could be – I mean, we rapidly forgot about it, but there was still this moment of stunned recognition of the fact that skies can be blue if we all stop using cars for a few days," Antonelli said.

And with much of the world currently in turmoil, whether from the climate emergency or other human-driven disasters and wars, she thinks there is more of a willingness to take these questions seriously.

"There are so many tragedies that are happening in the world right now, there's no respite, but I feel like it brings everybody more on an alert kind of attitude," she said.

"So I feel that the climate emergency is considered with more seriousness because it undergirds many of the other crises."

"Our task is to leave the planet in a better condition"

While Antonelli doesn't think humans can design our way out of our own extinction, she believes design can play an important role in slowing the decline.

"Slowing the decline is very, very positive; I am very positive," Antonelli said.

"Even though – as I was saying at the time of Broken Nature – I believe we will become extinct, we have a little bit of control on the when and a lot of control on the how," she added.

"I'm optimistic that we can be dignified, responsible, and compassionate towards other people, towards other species and towards the planet."

"And that is our task. Our task is not to live forever. Our task is to leave the planet in a better condition than we found it, or at least as good as possible."

The exhibition photography is courtesy of MoMA.

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Mexico is experiencing a "renaissance" in architecture and design because of its embrace and promotion of artisanal practices, says designer Héctor Esrawe in this exclusive interview.

According to Esrawe, who runs a studio in Mexico City, the last 10 years have seen Mexican creativity being taken more seriously at home and abroad.

"There is this renaissance where all the creative activities have evolved, and the standard that we can create now in Mexico is being expressed and accepted worldwide," he told Dezeen.

Esrawe pointed to increasing interest in Mexico's various cultures and artisanal traditions by the architecture and design community as the key element in the success of the country, which just last month held its 15th annual design week.

"We started to look inward, we started to value and appreciate what we were made up of," said Esrawe.

"We started to relate to our ancestors, to our narratives, and understand the vastness and richness and skills that we have as a culture, and I think that eventually became contagious."

Esrawe is one of a handful of architects and designers at the forefront of a new wave of Mexican design. He is known for his sculptural architectural and design work that incorporates artisanally crafted materials such as wood, bronze and stone.

An important aspect of Mexico's design renaissance, according to Esrawe, has been supporting handmade objects and artisanal processes in the country without falling into the trap of mass-producing cultural objects for consumption.

He said that artisans such as stone workers or wood carvers are often "put on a pedestal" but expected to conform to the needs of mass production.

Instead, Esrawe argues that the collaborations between designers and these groups, which have fed into his own practice, should push everyone towards new forms and provide artisans with a platform to get the best results.

"We should create a dialogue in a horizontal way, and create a platform that allows for the artisan to express and create those collaborations – it's extremely rich and powerful," he said.

"I see [collaboration] in a positive way," he added. "I see more experimentation. I see new languages appearing."

Collaborating with artisans comes with challenges that must be respected, he acknowledged.

"There's a risk on the side that has to do with the ambition of more and faster," he continued, adding that designers need to understand that working with materials like metal and stone in small-batch operations takes time.

Esrawe said he has also struggled with a conception among Mexicans that things produced natively should be cheaper.

He recalled that when he opened his gallery in the early 2000s people would ask why the work was so expensive, with greater value typically placed on objects from countries like Italy.

"There was this conception that we were only labourers and not so creative and didn't have the power to become something that could challenge another culture, which was more 'stylish'," he explained.

However, two moments marked turning points for Esrawe's own perception of the potential of Mexican design and architecture.

The first was the ascendency of chef Enrique Olvera's restaurant Pujol. For the first time, the best restaurant in Mexico was by a Mexican chef.

"This has been a transformation that started happening in parallel in many activities, in many activities that you can perceive as unrelated like food, but then in others that are more connected, like art, fashion, architecture and design," he said.

The second was his experience of an exhibition in Finland.

"For me, it was completely new to see in the same gallery an artist, a designer, and an artisan exhibited together," he said.

"That was not common for me. That was not common in Mexico. So in a way that shaped my understanding of how it should be."

Since then, Mexico City has become a hotspot for design and last year, Masa, a collective run by Esrawe and designers Age Saloe and Brian Thoreen, put on a show featuring contemporary and historical Mexican art and design underneath the Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Esrawe said that this wide recognition has been accompanied by an influx of designers into the city, all wanting to explore the potential of production in Mexico.

"It became more attractive," he said.

"Many other artists from all over the world have moved to Mexico, understanding that those [production] possibilities are disappearing in many cultures," he continued, referencing again the wide array of artisans and craftspeople in the country.

"You cannot even think of that in the States, for example."

Esrawe has in recent years further dedicated himself to the principles of smaller production and artisanship.

He recently closed his factory, limiting production to focus more on architecture projects and smaller-batch design items.

"I decided to do this because I fully believe in it," he explained.

"I believe sometimes you need to burn the ships in order to really practice your principles, or your aspirations or what you believe."

Esrawe Studio recently collaborated with Productora on a Mexico hotel outfitted with planes of green tile and Cadena on spinning, woven chairs at FORMAT festival in Arkansas.

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The strength and availability of bamboo give it the potential to be as dominant in construction as concrete and steel, argues Atelier One engineer Chris Matthews in this interview.

"This idea that we have a sheet of rigid, extremely polished buildings, built from all kinds of steel and concrete, it has to change," Matthews told Dezeen.

"Bamboo has a real part to play as a low-carbon material, and it needs to be part of the toolkit that we have moving forward," he continued. "It's going to be a major player."

"The speed of growth is amazing"

Matthews spoke to Dezeen from the London office of British engineering firm Atelier One, where he is an associate director specialising in structural bamboo.

Bamboo is an extremely fast-growing species of giant grass that grows abundantly, quickly and cheaply around the world. Atelier One believes so much in its potential to become a dominant construction material that it has a team dedicated to its use in architecture.

While wood takes approximately 30 years to grow before being harvested as structural timber, a bamboo culm takes just three years.

"The speed of growth is amazing," Matthews explained. "And the other wonderful thing is that you can grow bamboo on degraded land," he continued.

"Land that wouldn't otherwise be being used, you can actually regenerate using bamboo."

Another key property of bamboo is that it is incredibly strong. In fact, its strength is comparable to aluminium, Matthews said.

"People always say it's as strong as steel – it's not as strong as steel, it's close to aluminium," Matthews said. "It is also actually stronger than concrete," he continued.

"So in terms of structures, there's no reason why you can't use it."

Locking carbon in buildings "the way forward"

Yet for Matthews, one of the characteristics of bamboo that makes it most attractive for the future of architecture is that it is an effective carbon store.

Similarly to timber, it sequesters carbon as it grows. There is even ongoing research to suggest that the material stores more carbon than timber, Matthews highlighted.

"There's no kind of definitive paper on this yet because it's such a hard thing to measure, but some papers say it's between two and six times as much [sequestered carbon]," he said.

"It's a great way of taking carbon out of the environment and making sure it doesn't get re-released."

As with many other advocates of sustainable materials, Matthews believes that the architecture and construction industries must urgently turn focus to the use of biomaterials such as bamboo to design buildings that sequester carbon, rather than expel it.

"In general, the idea of bio-based materials where we are capturing carbon and locking it up in a building, that has to be the way forward," he said.

"So instead of thinking of a building as something that we have to use up our carbon budget to make, we're instead thinking of the building as a way of locking up some carbon over the lifetime of the building," he added. "I hope more and more of that will happen."

Atelier One now testing structural limits of bamboo

Atelier One's interest in bamboo was sparked by its founder Neil Thomas' involvement in The Arc, a bamboo gymnasium at the Green School Bali designed by architecture studio Ibuku.

The sculptural building, which was highly commended in the 2021 Dezeen Awards, is distinguished by its complex double-curved roof made entirely from tensioned bamboo.

"The school has shown that, whereas bamboo was once seen as a 'poor man's timber', actually, the beauty of the structures that result really is amazing," reflected Matthews.

He argued that it also demonstrates it is possible to overcome the main disadvantage of the material, which has previously been a susceptibility to insect and fungal attacks, which in turn reduces its longevity.

This is achieved by ensuring the bamboo is not exposed directly to the sun, water or the ground. The bamboo is also treated to remove starch to help prevent these attacks, said Matthews.

"The issue has been that [bamboo is] prone to fungal attack and insect attack," he said. "You've now got a material that not only has this amazing speed and strength, but it's also able to have longevity as well."

Today, Atelier One's focus is primarily on maximising the strength and structural capabilities of bamboo, specifically through 3D-printed connections to link culms together.

"So you've got this amazingly strong material and now what we're trying to play with is how you actually get the full strength out of it," Matthews said. "It's all about the connections."

"We've started playing with 3D-printed connectors to link pieces of bamboo and get a longer piece of fabric. Once you start playing with the shapes, there's no end to the possibilities."

Laminated bamboo "seems to be performing better than timber"

The team is also exploring the potential of laminated bamboo – engineered bamboo products typically formed of layers of bamboo glued, stacked and pressed together.

According to Matthews, laminated bamboo can be used in the same ways as cross-laminated timber (CLT) but actually outperforms it in terms of strength.

"You don't just have to use the crops whole and unprocessed, there is a whole industry of laminated bamboo," Matthews said.

"Laminated bamboo actually seems to be performing better than timber, and also just like timber you can encapsulate it, so you put plasterboard on if you need to, it can be used as part of a build-up."

"People are doing it, it's early days, but the properties are amazing," he added. "And it's really starting to take hold."

Among the varieties of engineered bamboo are scrimber, cross-laminated timber-bamboo (CLTB) and a type of radial laminated bamboo called Radlam.

The latter is Atelier One's favourite, Matthews said, as it is processed in a way that retains all the layers of a bamboo culm, reducing waste and maximising strength.

"The reason we like this is because you get the whole culm, so the whole thickness of the bamboo – you're not wasting material as you process it," he said.

"And also, by not passing off the outer skin, you're getting the full strength," he continued. "It's three times stronger than standard timber, so the properties are amazing."

Another advocate for bamboo is Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia. In an interview with Dezeen, he described the material as the "green steel of the 21st century".

"I think bamboo and laminated bamboo will replace other materials and become the 'green steel' of the 21st century," said Nghia.

"I hope many architects realise the potential of the material and build with bamboo more and more."

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Designers need to participate in the development of AI or face having the future world designed without them, warns Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky in this exclusive interview.

Speaking to Dezeen at the River Cafe in London, Chesky, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), warned that history may be repeating itself as designers fail to embrace the potential of artificial intelligence (AI).

Designers "came to digital very late" he recalled, predicting that if they are also late to embrace the changing world of AI "the world will be designed without them".

"Designers gave away a lot of their power"

"My recollection in the 1990s is that a lot of the most prestigious design jobs weren't in the internet, they weren't web designers, they were print – people came to digital design very late," Chesky told Dezeen.

"A consequence of the best designers not going to the internet or into web design till very late was that people designed a world without them," he continued.

"I think designers gave away a lot of their power during the development of the internet by not participating."

Chesky warned that if designers do not adapt to and adopt AI, then they will end up being "subordinate" to engineers, mirroring what happened on the internet where the majority of websites are created by "product managers" not designers.

"It's gonna happen," he said. "So either you can be part of the change, or the world can be designed without you and then you have to fit into that change. And you're going to be a subordinate."

AI is "unstoppable"

Online rental website Airbnb was founded by Chesky with Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia in 2007. Since then it has grown to become the world's largest short-term rental website, with 1.5 billion stays booked through the site. Currently there are seven million listings on the site in almost every country in the world.

Chesky believes that AI is set to have an impact on everyone and that companies need to consider what that impact will be.

"My lesson to everyone with AI is it might have a negative near-term effect on your business," he said. "It might not, I don't know. But unless you think it's going to get uninvented, if you think there's gonna be more AI in the future than now, then the genie is out of the bottle."

"I'm not here to say it's a good thing – I think it's on balance good, but my opinion about whether it's going to be good or bad, kind of irrelevant, because it's unstoppable."

"My general advice is to participate in it"

He believes that the inevitability of AI's impact means that design graduates should embrace the emerging technology.

"I think AI can either displace a lot of creatives or it can empower a lot of creatives," he said.

"As a RISD graduate running a tech company, I would implore creative people, journalists, writers, people that identify as technologists, RISD graduates, Royal College of Art graduates... if you think AI's here to stay and you think it's going to be more important – and how could you say none of that's true – then my general advice is to participate in it."

As well as benefiting those people's careers, Chesky argues that designers and creatives becoming more involved with AI could lessen the negative potential impacts of the technology.

"By having large numbers of designers and creatives involved in the development of AI, and AI-centred products, the potential negative impacts of the technology could be reduced," he said.

"The best chance is for the most creative people, the humanistic people [to be] in charge, participate in what appears to be an inevitable revolution," he said.

"And that will probably also limit the downside of that revolution. Do we really want only some types of people participating in the future and design the future? Or do you want all these people, especially the creative community to participate?"

"Wary of fetishization of technology"

Chesky explained that Airbnb was slowly adopting AI as he believes that it can be used as a tool to rethink what the company is doing. However, he doesn't want the company to jump on the AI bandwagon, and will only be adopting the technology where it can be useful to its customers.

"I think one of the best ways to keep your balance in the technology world is to keep moving, to be on the leading edge, and we will be with AI," he said.

"But, I am also wary of fetishization of technology, so we have not done a lot and not rushed to ship out things just to be on the bandwagon. I only want to adopt technology that is useful and helpful to people."

Following its rapid growth, Airbnb is currently in its "second-album problem" phase, said Chesky. He explained that the company is aiming to launch a second product in the near future with the aim of replicating the success of multi-time entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

"The sheer number of entrepreneurs that have one idea, they do one thing, it's incredibly successful, but they struggle to do a second thing, is numerous," he said.

"Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos – there's a reason they're so famous. Steve Jobs six, seven times; Jeff Bezos, with Amazon retail prime and AWS, Elon with his multitude of companies," he continued. "I'm part of that next generation on."

"There's one more phase for Airbnb"

Chesky explained that he will dedicate his future time at Airbnb to reinventing the company with the launch of a new product or idea that will rival the original home-letting idea.

"There's one more phase for Airbnb, it's probably what I spend the rest of my time at Airbnb doing, which is reinventing ourselves like all the great companies have done."

However, before this can happen, Airbnb needs to improve its core offering, explained Chesky. It has been trying to manage expectations amid a wave of new users on the platform following the pandemic.

"I want people to be in love with the Airbnb service so as to want new things from us," he said. "And there is a lot of love for Airbnb, but if I'm being critical, there have been a lot of complaints, especially when we got really popular because of the pandemic."

"A lot of new people tried us and those people have expectations," he continued. "They want the uniqueness of Airbnb and the reliability of hotel and that's hard to do in 100,000 cities."

Airbnb to launch product that is "going to surprise you"

The company has been working on "perfecting" its service to build the basis for a new launch.

We've been really focused this last year on really perfecting our service," he said. "Hopefully we will kind of turn the corner and people will say 'wow, they really improved their service, it's really great'. Is it perfect? No, probably never be perfect, but it's really better than other platforms."

Chesky was coy about the upcoming product release, but hinted that it would be a service based on people meeting and going to events together.

The product is set to be launched at an event that's "going to surprise you" in a manner similar to Apple's much-anticipated, past product launches.

"I'm very interested in business ideas that go beyond booking your house on a short-term basis. And I think about like how with our assets we have today, we have this system of trust, we have identities, we have profiles, you've verified more than 100 million profiles, we have a two-sided reputation system," he said.

"We knew about you, we learned about what you wanted in life and we get to kind of potentially match you to people and places experiences all over the world – that's kind of the conceptual space that we're playing."

The photo is courtesy of Airbnb.

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The Las Vegas Sphere could set a new standard for tour design much like the iPhone did for mobile phones, set designer Es Devlin tells Dezeen in this interview.

Devlin started her career in London's theatre scene of the 1990s before going on to conceive some of the most recognisable sets in the history of modern touring – from Kanye West's floating stages to Beyoncé's record-breaking Rennaisance world tour.

Her projects have ramped up in scale over the last three decades, culminating most recently in her contribution to U2's viral opening performance at the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas, which is billed as the world's largest spherical structure.

But no matter how big a venue or how monumental her stage design, Devlin says her work is not primarily about creating a spectacle.

Instead, she argues that tour design, since its inception, has been almost entirely about recapturing the feeling of closeness that audiences were first able to experience when watching giant acts like The Beatles and Elvis Presley on their TV.

"The reason that tour design came about on a mass scale was because singers had always sung, records had begun to be sold but the TV was what arrived in the 1950s," Devlin told Dezeen. "And it was this sense of intimacy in your own bedroom, in your own sitting room that a TV brought to an audience."

"The last 60 years has been about trying to emulate, through 75 or 17 or three trucks full of stuff – of speakers and screens and pyrotechnics and lighting – the intimacy that you achieve by sitting and watching the TV."

The Sphere is the "ne plus ultra" of tour design

With its giant 15,000-square-metre wraparound screen hiding nearly 160,000 speakers, Devlin argues Madison Square Garden's Sphere venue in Las Vegas is the closest that stage design has come to capturing this ideal.

"It has, in a way, done the final magic trick, which is to put the screen and the speaker as one unit," Devlin said. "So you do not see any speakers, you just see an almost infinite acreage of screen, in which the speakers are embedded."

"You're almost inside a film and the band are accompanying that film, and the band are augmented within that film through live relay."

Plans to erect a sister venue to the Sphere in London were recently put on ice after local councils, members of parliament and a 2,000-strong petition voiced concerns over the fact that its glowing LED exterior would prove disruptive to the local area.

But Devlin believes that at least the interior set-up pioneered by the Vegas venue could set a new standard for tour design, much like the iPhone did for mobiles.

"It's almost the iPhone-ification – in terms of a Jony Ive, ne plus ultra of phone design that then thereafter all phones will kind of emulate – it's almost that applied to tour design," Devlin said.

An Atlas of Es Devlin

Devlin spoke to Dezeen to mark the launch of her debut monograph, a 900-page tome titled An Atlas of Es Devlin that looks back at the last three decades of her career and took nearly seven years to complete.

The book compiles some 122 different projects, from her early work at London's National Theatre to designing catwalks for Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent, two different Olympic ceremonies, various operas, a Superbowl halftime show and installations for the Tate Modern and the V&A.

"It's a small object compared to a stadium," Devlin said. "But the amount of energy myself and my team have put into it is as huge as any stadium show we've done."

"It's a black hole, in the way that it has contained a reverse Big Bang of everything we've done for 30 years, condensed into this one book."

The projects are presented first chronologically, through sketches and models from her archive, and later thematically through glossy photographs that reveal repeating forms and colours throughout her oeuvre.

"Every early version of this book felt kind of exhausting," she admits. "It was too many projects. It looked kind of interesting, maybe even kind of impressive because there was so much variety."

"But it didn't quite add up to a thesis or a nourishing read. It took a lot of time to find a form that might offer some kind of useful communication to a reader."

"We urgently need ritual"

Ultimately, Devlin hopes that accumulating her genre-bending work in one place will stand as a testament to the fact that designers today do not need to pick just one lane.

Instead, she says, they can and should be more "chameleon-like and amphibious", working across disciplines to serve as a model for how societal divides can be bridged.

"The more connectivity we have between art forms, the further we're likely to progress in these urgent conversations about understanding each other's point of view," Devlin said.

"Because you could argue that the crises we face now with what's going on in the Middle East, what's going on with our climate, what's going on with social inequity and the cost of living crisis, all of these could be said to stem from a lack of ability to see through the eyes of others. And that's what theatre has always been about – empathy."

Cultural gatherings, whether they are intimate plays or giant stadium concerts, have a unique ability to bring people together, she argues.

But so far, this function has largely been held back by seeing entertainment primarily as an industry, which is valued by the amount of money it generates rather than its larger societal impact.

"We urgently need ritual and we need ritual that isn't monetised," Devlin said.

"At the moment, we're feeling the pain of seeing the worst of what humans can do to each other," she said. "But if you can gather a group of human beings and invite them to all sing the same song, invite them to all feel the same thing, the best of humans comes out."

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On the heels of taking home this year's Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting, journalist Mona Chalabi discusses the pitfalls of visualising skewed data in this exclusive interview.

In the technical, male-dominated world of data journalism, Chalabi is known for "rehumanising" statistics through her hand-drawn illustrations, making abstract numbers tangible and digestible for the general public.

Often, her infographics paint a picture of hidden social injustices, tackling everything from housing inequality and its effects on mental health to the unfathomable wealth gap between Jeff Bezos and the average person, which she visualised for the New York Times.

Earlier this year, this very illustration earned Chalabi the world's most prestigious journalism award, a Pulitzer Prize, in what she describes as a "very, very weird but mostly joyous" experience.

"Fundamental asymmetry" in Israel-Palestine coverage

The Pulitzer Prize was announced in May, but the ceremony itself didn't take place until five months later on 19 October, when the world's headlines were dominated by the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.

"The world has changed since May," Chalabi told Dezeen. "But I was surprised that, for something that felt so joyous, actually the ceremony itself felt quite sad. It didn't feel good."

"I just kept on thinking about Palestinian journalists right now," she added. "It was so incongruous knowing that I was dressed up and I have colleagues in Palestine who are literally getting bombed."

Israel declared war on Hamas on 7 October after militants carried out an attack in Israel that killed at least 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took over 200 hostages. Since then, Israel has responded with thousands of airstrikes against Hamas in Gaza.

According to the health ministry in Gaza, more than 11,000 people have been killed in the strikes so far. Most of those killed are women and children, as well as at least 42 journalists.

Many of Chalabi's latest illustrations address the conflict, including a series based on data collected by UC Berkeley researcher Holly Jackson, which suggests there is disproportionate coverage of Israeli deaths compared to Palestinian ones in major US publications and a marked difference in the language used to describe those deaths.

"There is just a fundamental asymmetry there," Chalabi said. "It's causing me to have this big meta-crisis about journalism, about the ways that actually very often we are reporting using the voices that are able to speak the loudest and I don't know how we fundamentally address that."

Illustrations can be "as accurate as any computer graph"

Chalabi is only the second person ever to win a Pulitzer for illustrated reporting and commentary, which last year replaced the long-standing category of editorial cartooning.

This pivot, she believes, is a reflection of how news outlets are increasingly using graphics and illustrations as part of their regular reporting.

"I really welcome the fact that the Pulitzer board has adjusted those categories to keep up with the way that journalism is shifting," said Chalabi, who has been the Guardian's data editor since 2015.

"When I first started doing this, everyone was just like: what a load of bullshit," she continued. "Everyone else was building these really complicated data interactives and that was seen as the cutting edge and the fact that I was drawing it was seen as feminine. It was seen as innocuous."

In fact, Chalabi says all of her graphs and charts are millimetre-accurate – even if they are shaped like penises to illustrate the overwhelming percentage of men working in different tech companies.

"The thing that a lot of people don't realise is I'm creating these charts in Excel, in Google Sheets, rarely but sometimes in R," she explained.

"And then I load the charts into Photoshop and digitally alter all of my hands-on illustrations to line up pixel-for-pixel with the computer-generated graphics, so they're as accurate as any computer graph that you're going to see anywhere else."

Data won't save the world

By combining digital accuracy with graphics that are hand-drawn using pencils, felt tips and ink, Chalabi hopes to remind viewers that data is collected by humans and is therefore fallible.

"I don't have this data-is-going-to-solve-the-world mentality," she said. "Very often, data replicates the existing systems of power."

"The existing systems of power say there are two sexes, female and male, so for the vast majority of datasets that I'm looking at, that's all I can break the data down by."

"Until the systems of power recognise different categories, the data I'm reporting on is also flawed," she added.

In a bid to account for these biases, and any biases of her own, Chalabi is transparent about her sources and often includes disclaimers about her own decision-making process and about any gaps or uncertainties in the data.

"I try to produce journalism where I'm explaining my methods to you," she said. "If I can do this, you can do this, too. And it's a very democratising experience, it's very egalitarian."

Nuance and transparency can hinder instant comprehension

In an ideal scenario, she is able to integrate this background information into the illustrations themselves, as evidenced by her graphics on anti-Asian hate crimes and the ethnic cleansing of Uygurs in China.

But at other times, context is relegated to the caption to ensure the graphic is as grabby as possible.

"What I have found is literally every single word that you add to an image reduces engagement, reduces people's willingness or ability to absorb the information," Chalabi said.

"So there is a tension there. How can you be accurate and get it right without alienating people by putting up too much information? That's a really, really hard balance."

Often, this need to ensure quick and easy comprehension is also at war with the illustrator's desire to avoid stereotypical depictions that could reinforce existing biases.

"When you're looking for fast comprehension, very often you're relying on people's existing visual semantic connections," she explained. "Let me take the example of men and women."

"We are so used to seeing a silhouette of somebody in a dress and somebody in trousers and we're like: man, woman," she added. "It's fast comprehension, even if it's utter bullshit."

"So how do you come up with a more nuanced, smarter way of saying man and woman that isn't bewildering?"

Chalabi has previously created illustrations to take people's minds off the coronavirus pandemic and was among a number of graphic designers and creatives who shared illustrations supporting the Black Lives Matter movement after the killing of George Floyd.

The top image is by Mary Kang.

Comments have been turned off on this story due to the sensitive nature of some of the subject matter. 

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The Sharjah Architecture Triennial aims to show the positives of architecture created using scarce resources, says its curator Nigerian architect Tosin Oshinowo in this interview.

Titled The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability, the triennial focuses on the innovations and strategies of re-use and re-appropriation often driven by scarcity in the Global South.

"The triennial is looking at the under-celebrated building innovations and designs that tend to still exist within the Global South and that result from conditions of scarcity," Oshinowo told Dezeen.

"There's also re-teaching, or reminding people in the Global South, that what we may not have considered as valuable or essential or even positive, actually has been," she continued.

"So it's also making the Global South realise and re-evaluate itself and optimistically position that we're not in a bad place."

"I'm ultimately looking at what lessons we can learn"

Many of the installations, which have been designed by studios including Cave Bureau, Wallmakers, Asif Khan, 51-1 Arquitectos and Formafantasma, focus on architecture that was designed utilising the locally available materials and skills that constrained building practices.

However, Oshinowo was keen to find people working within contemporary situations where wider lessons can be learnt.

The majority of the participants are from the Global South with around 30 per cent from Africa, 30 per cent from South America and 15 per cent from the Gulf region.

"What's been really exciting is finding people whose work resonates around these things, but who are existing within a modern context," she said.

"I'm ultimately looking at what lessons we can learn from these circumstances, particularly as a lot of the locations where these practices exist are also able to work better with the environment – when you work with limited resources you can coexist in balance with ecology."

"We need to rethink what we consider as progress"

Along with those in the Global South re-assessing the value of local processes, Oshinowo believes that we should reconsider what we think of as progress.

And that those in the Global North can also learn from the examples in the triennial.

"I think it's important for us to now question what is what is seen as progress," she said.

"Everyone's model is this Global North attainment – this is how it's done, this is how we need to develop, this is how we need to live, this is how we need to dress – but why this reference, this single reference? Maybe then we need to rethink what we consider as progress."

"We need to think, what can we learn from these southern regions?" she continued. "How can we be in better balance with our environments?"

Through the installations, she hopes visitors to the triennial will rethink how they currently practice and see the potential of operating in a variety of ways.

"There are two things that I would really like people to take away," she said. "One – to see the diversity of solutions that can exist or do exists, and functioning and thriving in specific locations."

"And, I would like people to take away an awareness of the challenges that our current model of progress and consumption and the implication has on the climate," she continued. "Within that, I hope people see the possibilities of how, as individuals and practitioners, we could potentially have a change of mindsets and how we practice and how we train."

"We wanted to very obviously include architecture"

To convey this message, Oshinowo aimed to make the triennial as accessible as possible by including numerous, full-scale works built especially for the event, believing that "only architects read text".

Asked if Zaha Hadid Architects principal Patrik Schumacher, who was very critical about the content of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, would be happy with what is included in the event, she said there was a conscious effort to include actual examples of architecture.

"We wanted to very obviously include architecture and very obviously include architecture that is about experimentation," she said.

"The mediums that we are using to share information are about experience," she continued. "There's no project here that is pinned up drawings – we have quite a few installations, we do have some films, but we also have built projects and built projects that are about experience."

She believes that this approach will mean that the triennial and its exhibits will be broadly understood by visitors and locals from Sharjah and the UAE.

For anyone who's not an architect, the experience of being in the exhibit, how it makes you feel, what you see, how your senses are evoked, is very important, because that's what you remember," she explained.

"If a 15-year-old comes to this exhibition, there will be certain things that they will see that they will say, I really like Yussef Agbo-ola's work – it's a temple, which is in celebration of ecology and the natural environment."

"We've created the problem, but we also part of the solution"

Overall she hopes that the triennial will send a positive message by drawing attention to practices that may offer some solutions to the climate crisis.

"Apparently, this year is the hottest in human history – so, you know, it's not great, and it's based on all the decisions that we all make," she said.

"So I hope that by seeing some of the possibilities and solutions that exist and understanding the wider narratives that are based on limits where people are able to function and thrive, people can leave with an optimism – we've created the problem, but we are also part of the solution."

The second Sharjah Architecture Triennial was originally scheduled to take place in 2022 but, like numerous design events, was delayed as a result of Covid-19 uncertainty. It follows the inaugural event in 2019 that saw installations from Marina Tabassum and Cooking Sections.

The photography is by Tom Ravenscroft.

Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023 takes place from 11 November 2023 to 10 March 2024 at various locations across Sharjah. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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The increasing need to protect cities from environmental hazards is a chance to transform communities for the better, says Rebuild By Design managing director Amy Chester in this interview for our Designing for Disaster series.

Rebuild by Design began in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in New York as a competition run by the US government to instigate projects that would ready the region for future extreme weather events.

A decade later, the now independent nonprofit works with municipalities around the world on climate resilience and is sought after for the community-rooted approach that it pioneered in the Hurricane Sandy Design Competition.

"We don't come with any answers"

The organisation's collaborative working process, which engages a wide range of stakeholders, is "definitely a big piece" of what makes Rebuild by Design unique, says Chester, who has been managing the organisation from the beginning.

"The second one is that we don't come with any answers," she added. "We come with questions and we research everything together."

In the Hurricane Sandy Design Competition, that meant that entrants didn't pitch a project or a vision. Instead, they pitched themselves as teams of professionals from various backgrounds.

From 150 international applicants, 10 groups were chosen to participate in a collaborative research phase, which involved touring the Sandy-affected region, meeting affected people and eventually presenting multiple concepts for interventions that could make a difference in the face of future climate events like flooding and hurricanes. Selected architecture firms included OMA, BIG and WXY.

Ten of their concepts, one per team, were selected by a jury for funding and gradually developed into fully fleshed-out projects, again using collaborative approaches like workshops and community outreach events.

"We kind of turned transparency on its head by inviting those most involved to the table from the very beginning, to actually create the table together," said Chester.

Collaboration and transparency are not just buzzwords for Chester. She advocates for more genuine candour in communication between governments and their citizens in the face of climate change.

"Every single city has to understand what their own risks are and really have conversations with the population about how much risk are we willing to take on," she said. "You can completely fortify your city and say, 'We don't want any risk', or you can say 'hey, you know what, it's okay if we flood six inches, or two inches, or a foot, or whatever it might be'."

"Then you can design your adaptation practices to meet that risk," she continued. "If you don't have those conversations out in the open, then communities just feel that their government will protect them 100 per cent and they're floored anytime that there's a climate event and something happens to their homes and their livelihoods."

Best climate-resilience projects "help us on wet days and dry days"

Projects to have come out of Rebuild by Design include Scape's 2023 Obel Award-winning Living Breakwaters coastal defence system, which helps calm the water around Staten Island while fostering marine life, and BIG's Big U, a horseshoe of raised parkland, floodwalls, berms and sewer system upgrades encircling lower Manhattan.

For Chester, the most important climate-resilience projects are situated on a community level not an individual building level, and improve public space as much as they protect people from the elements.

"If we're doing it on a community scale that means that everybody is participating, everybody is excited about the outcome, and you are creating interventions that aren't only for climate change — they can also be enhancements to public space," said Chester.

Her favourite example of a place that has done this well is the city of Hoboken, across the river from New York City in New Jersey.

There, the Rebuild by Design-funded project titled Resist, Delay, Store and Discharge, by OMA, complements the city's plans to build a series of interconnected resiliency parks to store stormwater, three of which are now open and the last of which is under construction.

The interventions have not only helped alleviate flooding in the city, which is mostly built on a flood plain, but they have delivered on community requests for infrastructure like safer pedestrian crossings and bike lanes. The improvements are credited with cutting the pedestrian death toll down to zero for four years running.

"Ten years ago, I would have never said that a landscape architect is on the frontlines of climate change, but they really are," said Chester. "And so are architects."

"It's really about leveraging the opportunity that we have at this moment to rethink our communities and do it in a way that will help us on wet days and dry days and everything in between."

Most current building still "something that we're going to have to fix later"

Chester still sees many flaws in planning and design for disaster prevention. There's a failure to consider heatwaves — what Chester calls "the silent killer from climate" — as a natural hazard in the US, which means mitigation is underfunded, while too many developments are being built without measures to protect them from events like flooding, because they're not seen as being at risk.

Homes in recognised floodplains are built to set standards, said Chester, but those standards are based on the frequency and intensity of events in the past, not predictions of what is to come in the future. And homes outside of those areas may have no adaptations, even though they are vulnerable.

"When we aren't creating something that is thinking about the future, we are creating something that we're going to have to fix later," Chester said. "Already 50 per cent of all floods happen outside of a floodplain."

On the positive side, she considers that the last two years have brought a change in how disaster relief and prevention is understood in the USA, with a shared understanding that events are on the increase.

"There's just something about the past two years that feels very, very different," said Chester, citing the passing of the Environmental Bond Act by voters in New York in 2022, making US$4.2 billion in funding available for climate-resilience projects, as a key moment.

And although she is worried that recent rhetoric from the UK government "that decarbonisation costs too much", marked by a U-turn on net-zero targets, is about to be replicated across the Atlantic, for now she considers there is unity in the US on at least the question of adaptation.

"Republicans may use the word weather and Democrats may use the word climate, but we're talking about the same thing," she said. "Everybody's communities are suffering and everyone is experiencing it."

The photography is courtesy of Rebuild by Design.

Designing for Disaster

This article is part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series, which explores the ways that design can help prevent, mitigate and recover from natural hazards as climate change makes extreme weather events increasingly common.

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The coordinator of the mammoth Great Green Wall project to heal land in Africa's Sahel region, Elvis Paul Tangem, calls for help from landscape architects in this interview conducted as part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series.

One of the world's most ambitious climate initiatives, the Great Green Wall is targeting around 780 million hectares of degraded land – an area roughly the size of Australia.

"We're talking about a massive, massive, massive endeavour, but it's the only way we can do it," Tangem told Dezeen. "There's no option to that. If we don't do it at that massive scale, it's not going to have the impact."

"Africa is suffering a lot"

The Sahel stretches right across Africa just below the Sahara desert, from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east.

It is on the frontline of the impacts of climate change despite contributing only a miniscule proportion of the world's emissions.

Once rich in biodiversity and vegetation, the region is now prone to persistent and severe droughts as well as flash flooding. The Horn of Africa, for example, has been suffering its worst drought in 40 years since 2020.

Increasingly extreme weather conditions are making it impossible to farm in many parts of the region, where an estimated 135 million depend on degraded lands for their livelihoods.

As a result large numbers of people are leaving in search of a better life in the Global North.

"The impact of climate change on this region has been seriously under-appreciated," said Tangem, who is coordinator for the Great Green Wall Initiative at the African Union Commission.

"The whole narrative is about the Sahel not being capable of taking care of itself. Nobody's talking about the root causes of these things, which is about the extreme weather conditions that is pushing what we have today," he continued.

"Africa is suffering a lot and the Great Green Wall is trying to provide a long-term solution for these challenges."

Governments in the Sahel began attempting to salvage land following a string of severe droughts during the 1970s, before climate change was widely understood.

"But they were doing that in silos," Tangem said. "And when you work in silos for things to do with climatic challenges, it becomes very difficult."

In 2007, the African Union launched the Great Green Wall initiative to be a unified, multi-state response to increasing desertification across the region, with 11 main national partners.

"There was an urgent need to develop a kind of pan-African, broad-base sustainable land-management initiative," explained Tangem, whose own background is in ecology and conservation.

As its name suggests, the Great Green Wall was initially conceived as a continuous belt of trees running from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea, only 15 kilometres wide but almost 8,000 kilometres long.

It was later reimagined as a vast series of reforestation, land-management and water-conservation projects across the Sahel intended to increase biodiversity and rainfall and reduce poverty.

"The main goal is to ensure sustainable and stable drylands so that people can grow in their areas without having any reason to migrate," explained Tangem.

"People don't leave for the pleasure of leaving," he added. "The livelihoods of those people, their subsistence means, have been destroyed by climate change."

Region "very diverse and capricious"

At the official launch in 2007, the African Union set a target of restoring 100 million hectares of land by 2030 – sequestering an estimated 250 million tonnes of carbon and creating 10 million jobs.

The ambition still stands, but progress has been hampered by funding issues, waning political cooperation and violence in the region.

"You are dealing with a sector that is very diverse and very capricious – it can change at any time," said Tangem. "For instance, we were doing so well in Burkina Faso, we were doing pretty well in Mali, but now there are conflicts there."

"There's never a dull day because we have a lot of problems coming up as we solve problems."

A United Nations report published in 2020 found that 18 million hectares of land had been restored – only 18 per cent of the target, with only 4 million hectares in the initial target area.

There are not currently any architects, landscape architects or designers engaged on the initiative, but Tangem indicated that is something he would like to change.

"I think it's something that we have to start considering because design is very important to the work we are doing," he said.

"We are basically doing landscapes. It could be very important if we could have some advice from architects and engineers when we are doing these large projects."

Tangem cited landscape architects and engineers' experience of using technology to take precision measurements on very large sites as an example.

"We have projects where we want to restore a million, two million hectares of land, so it would be very interesting to talk to architects about how we could work together," he said.

With work underway on a new Great Green Wall strategy, help with managing resources at such a large scale would also be beneficial, Tangem added.

"By the sheer size of the ambitious nature of the Great Green Wall it's very difficult to follow every aspect of it, so that's a challenge," he said.

"This is really big, and it's dynamic – by providing solutions to one site, you might be creating a lot of problems for another site," he continued.

"But with all these challenges we have huge opportunities for collaboration, for sharing of best practices and things like that. So it's one day at a time."

Designing for Disaster

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Cities should plant more trees to help prevent tens of thousands of annual deaths from extreme heat, Arup specialist Dima Zogheib tells Dezeen as part of our Designing for Disaster series.

Worsening heatwaves are emerging as the number-one climate-related killer, with an estimated 62,862 deaths associated with extreme heat across Europe in 2022, according to a study published in Nature Medicine.

Building consultancy Arup produced the Urban Heat Snapshot in August this year, demonstrating how city temperatures can vary dramatically between neighbourhoods and identifying where hotspots arise in the built environment.

Based on analysis of heat data in six major cities, it found that areas with large amounts of green space had significantly lower temperatures than those without – and therefore that increasing urban planting is one of the key ways to reduce heat-related deaths.

"Some of the very impactful actions are very simple such as tree planting, which has been demonstrated to reduce air temperature significantly and also reduce heat-induced mortality," said Arup nature positive design lead Zogheib, who helped lead on the research.

According to the European Commission, increasing tree coverage in European cities by 30 per could have prevented an estimated 2,644 heat-related deaths in 2022.

Zogheib explained that various open spaces in the built environment can be utilised to increase planting and cooling strategies, including roads and rooftops.

"More than 50 per cent of cities is actually open space if you include all the roads, streets and roofs, so these spaces have to play a role, whether it's in cooling cities, inviting biodiversity, or in supporting other resilience challenges," she told Dezeen.

"There are other actions that cities can take, like creating more permeable paving to cool spaces, provision of water fountains and drinking water fountains to keep people cool, and retrofitting buildings by putting in green roofs."

One of the ways to cool the built environment advocated by Arup is retrofitting roofs in London to curb the Urban Heat Island effect, the phenomenon where urbanised areas experience significantly higher temperatures than their rural surroundings.

Working with the Greater London Authority (GLA), the firm published a proposal in June to add reflective and photovoltaic roofs to existing buildings to reduce energy use and lower temperatures in and around buildings, ultimately aiming to improve the health and wellbeing of Londoners.

Research for the GLA proposal and the Urban Heat Snapshot was sourced from Arup's UHeat digital tool, which uses satellite imagery and open-source climate data to map air temperatures.

Air temperature was measured rather than surface temperature because it is closer to the temperature we feel, according to Zogheib.

The snapshot found that in the six city case studies, Cairo, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mumbai and New York City, temperatures can vary by up to eight degrees Celsius from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.

For each city, a 150 square-kilometre focus area was selected and data was collected for the hottest day in each city in 2022. The focus area was divided into 60,000 square-metre hexagonal blocks to map the differences in air temperatures for both day and night.

As well as temperatures, the UHeat tool modelled building heights, surface reflection, impervious surfaces, and green and blue infrastructure to build a picture of the impact of the built environment on urban heat.

By mapping where hotspots are in cities, Arup aimed to reveal where people can go for cool retreats and also areas where cooling interventions would be most beneficial.

Zogheib argued that as city temperatures rise, it will become increasingly important for everyone to have access to cool refuge.

"The aim of the tool was to raise awareness about the challenge of urban heat," she said. "It's also a call to action to designers, planners, local authorities and municipalities to really take action."

"Yes, this is a design issue, but also this is an equity issue," she stressed. "People who are the most vulnerable are hit by urban heat the most."

Urban heat is becoming an increasing problem as a result of climate change. The number of cities reaching temperatures of 35 degrees Celsius and above is expected to almost triple by 2050.

"We need to curb climate change – all of the climate impacts we are experiencing is because we haven't reduced emissions as much as we should have," said Zogheib. "We need to help cities adapt and we need to help people adapt to this changing climate."

She highlighted that increasing green space in cities is known to have other benefits as well as reducing air temperatures, such as increasing biodiversity and improving the wellbeing of residents.

"I think the opportunity is not just to use heat as an entry point, but to address multiple challenges and deliver co-benefits," said Zogheib.

"For example, if you introduce nature to cities in the form of trees, green roofs and permeable surfaces, this is an opportunity to cool temperatures but also have cities and buildings giving back to the urban environment."

Arup biodiversity and nature specialist Neil Harwood, who also contributed to the Urban Heat Snapshot, argued that built-environment organisations have a leadership role to play in tackling urban heat.

"We can collectively be a real driving force for positive action in this space, not only in our own projects but in influencing the customer base on how they think about some of these issues and deal with it in their day-to-day lives," he told Dezeen.

By looking at a range of cities with different climates in the snapshot, the Arup specialists hoped it would reveal different ways the built environment can adapt to concentrated areas of heat.

"The six cities are very different geographically, climatically and also very different in terms of urban form," said Zogheib. "We wanted to get a diversity of results."

As well as mapping the number of hotspots in cities, the tool can also be used to record changing temperatures after a cooling initiative has been implemented, such as how heat around a street changes after it is lined with trees.

"The failures that have occurred in recent decades in our attempts to deal with these crises have shown us that we need as many tools in our arsenal as possible in order to convince and persuade decision-makers of the benefits of action and change," said Harwood.

"We're seeing a real shift at the moment in terms of evidence-based decision-making. We're hopeful that these tools can be part of the broader suite of efforts to really underpin our decision-making with the right sets of information," he added.

The images are courtesy of Arup unless otherwise stated.

Designing for Disaster

This article is part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series, which explores the ways that design can help prevent, mitigate and recover from natural hazards as climate change makes extreme weather events increasingly common.

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Increasingly prevalent disasters mean collaboration and humility in architecture are more important than ever says Mehmet Kalyoncu, the architect coordinating efforts to rebuild following the Turkey-Syria earthquake.

"Our problems in the world are more complex than ever and we are in a time where we need teamwork," Kalyoncu told Dezeen.

"The era of starchitects is finished because the problems are much harder than one single person should carry," he said. "The new approach is going to be people working together."

Kalyoncu is a Turkish architect who serves as chair of the Turkey Design Council, a non-governmental organisation founded in 2015.

It is currently spearheading the rebuilding of the earthquake-ravaged Hatay province in southern Turkey.

The province was among those affected by the Turkey-Syria earthquake in February this year – a disaster that claimed at least 56,000 lives.

Turkey Design Council gathering "best brains in the world"

The Turkey Design Council has recently put together a consortium of 13 local and international companies spanning various disciplines to help rebuild Hatay.

Described by Kalyoncu as the "best brains in the world", the group consists of firms working across sectors including design, engineering, sustainability and heritage.

Among them are Danish architecture studio BIG, British engineering firm Buro Happold and British architecture studio Foster + Partners, which is leading the masterplan.

"After the devastating earthquake, unfortunately, placemaking and developing cities became the number one priority of Turkey," he said.

"As a non-governmental organisation, we felt great enthusiasm to involve ourselves and make this process as participatory as possible at local, national and international levels to create something really meaningful," he continued.

Kalyoncu said that international and cross-disciplinary collaboration, such as in this project, are vital for Turkey's recovery efforts due to the scale and complexity of the disaster.

"This is the most sophisticated urban problem in the world in this century," he said. "That's why we need the best brains. That's why we invited Foster and Partners, Buro Happold and Bjarke Ingels."

However, he believes that NGOs are the "driving force" when it comes to designing for disasters and suggested that architects have little power without them.

"An architect cannot make a social impact without involving other experts," Kalyoncu explained.

"The participation of non-governmental organisations is important," he continued. "I cannot say one single architect or one single architectural office can change something."

"We should listen more than we talk"

Increasing collaboration in architecture will require architects and designers to learn to practice with humility, he added, something he believes they will find to be a "challenge".

"Humility is, I think, very important," Kalyoncu explained.

"Working with designers is very hard," he continued. "Our approach is that the less area we occupy on the table, the more other people will come. We should listen more than we talk."

Turkey Design Council's project stemmed from discussions with Turkey's Ministry of Urbanisation and Ministry of Culture, which asked the organisation to help protect Hatay from future disasters and honour its history respectively.

The project is expected to take between five and 10 years to complete.

The rebuild will focus largely on the reconstruction of important sites such as places of worship and bathhouses, as well as an urban masterplan for the city of Antakya – the heart of the province.

With 80 per cent of Antakya destroyed during the earthquake, the team is relying on an archive of material documenting the city to guide the reconstruction.

"We don't want to make the new design, the new atmosphere, the new feeling very different from the old," said Kalyoncu.

"So we created an archive showing the cultural essence of Antakya," he explained. "There are many images, many stories and many videos taken with the people living there describing their city, how was it, how they felt, which areas they feel are important and make Antakya different than any other place in the world," he said.

"We don't want to design something that can be anywhere in the world."

Project aims to be a model for disaster recovery

In the wake of February's earthquake, it was widely reported that the scale of the disaster in Turkey was exacerbated by poor quality construction in the country resulting from a disregard for legislation.

At the time, the government issued more than 100 arrest warrants linked to buildings that were destroyed while Turkish architects called for urgent improvements to architectural education and practice.

To prevent history from repeating itself, Kalyoncu hopes that the project will set a precedent for high-quality earthquake-proof construction in the country outside of Hatay province.

"Hatay will be built back starting from the centre," he explained. "So if the centre will have good design, good planning, and really [align] with regulations, then the rest we hope will follow that."

While informing the post-earthquake rebuilding in Turkey, Kalyoncu hopes the project will also set an example for disaster recovery worldwide.

"There has never been an era that we lost so many cities in such a short time, we lost Beirut, we lost Aleppo and we are losing Gaza now. We lost them because of disasters," he added.

"That's why city planners, architects and people in the built environment, this field, it's our responsibility to build back."

In particular, he hopes the project and the consortium behind it will also highlight the value of international collaboration.

"Politicians, if you ask me, cannot do this without the support of international cooperative organisations," he said.

"So as Turkey Design Council, as a non-governmental organisation that has lived through a recent and the most challenging experience, we want to continue in other geographies of the world."

For now, many people displaced by the earthquake in Turkey remain living in temporary housing.

Among the organisations to help deliver this accommodation was Voluntary Architects' Network, the non-governmental organisation founded by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban in 1995.

The team used Ban's Paper Partition System, which makes use of cardboard tubes and fabric, to divide evacuation centres into private living spaces for survivors.

The images are courtesy of the Turkey Design Council unless otherwise stated.

Designing for Disaster

This article is part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series, which explores the ways that design can help prevent, mitigate and recover from natural hazards as climate change makes extreme weather events increasingly common.

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Emergency planner Lucy Easthope explains why she gets "chills at the back of the neck" when hearing that architects are working pro bono on disaster recovery in this interview conducted as part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series.

Easthope is the UK's leading disaster expert, having advised the government and the military on responses to every major disaster involving British citizens for the past two decades.

A professor at Durham University, she co-founded its After Disaster Network, and has also written two books on the subject of disasters, most recently When the Dust Settles.

"The death toll is often human-created"

Like many of her peers, Easthope is staunchly opposed to using the term "natural disasters" to describe the devastating effects of events like floods, wildfires and earthquakes.

"People have traditionally tended to categorise geographical and seismic and climate events as 'natural', but what we see is that the disaster itself is usually human-made," she told Dezeen.

"The tectonic plates will shift or the sea will surge, but the death toll is often human-created, because of decisions made politically or economically."

She draws little distinction between the main causes of the devastating Turkey-Syria earthquake earlier this year and the deadly Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017 – both, she argues, were disasters resulting primarily from corner-cutting within the construction industry.

Hurricane Katrina, meanwhile, is not a story about a weather event to Easthope, but about "systemic state-failing in terms of the catastrophic failure to upkeep the levees".

"Almost all of the deaths that I see are a failure of design," she said.

"I would go so far as to say that what 'natural disasters' have done over the years is simply cloak massive design failings. For me, it's very rarely in some way not a design failure."

One major part of the problem, Easthope contends, is a chronic human difficulty in thinking seriously about the worst that can happen.

"People kind of fundamentally stop themselves before they get to the reasonable worst-case scenario," she said.

"That's very much a failure of imagination. It impedes our planning, and it's one of the things that's impeding our design."

For designers in particular – for example, architects working on projects in places prone to flooding or wildfires – a testing mental balancing act is required.

"You can be incredibly imaginative and incredibly exciting and incredibly innovative and push the boundaries of 'failure is not an option', while simultaneously preparing for it to go very wrong," Easthope said.

"I think that's a real challenge in design, to hold both thoughts simultaneously."

Global North "arrogant" about risks

As climate change accelerates, there is wide consensus among meteorologists and emergency planners that extreme weather events are likely to become increasingly common and severe.

In Easthope's eyes, this means that planning for disaster is more important than ever.

"It's not pessimism, I think it's a healthy dose of realism – we will not solve this problem, we will have to find a way to live alongside it," she said.

That should be a concern for wealthy countries as well as poorer ones, Easthope argues, adding that the notion that the world's more developed economies are better prepared is a "myth".

Instead, she claims the Global North has much to learn from the Global South when it comes to disaster management.

"The only thing really that Britain and America and Europe do is we're much more arrogant about how well we're going to defeat this risk," she said.

"Basically, in the countries that this is happening to right now you either adapt or you die, and so they're doing things like managed retreat, they're rebuilding whole villages, they do turn their infrastructure design upside-down."

"We're seeing all kinds of things happening that I think are really brave and innovative."

She points to ongoing disagreements in California over the best way to deal with worsening wildfires while Indonesia energetically builds a new capital city in response to extreme land subsidence in Jakarta.

For designers and architects keen to aid the effort to mitigate and respond to impending climate-related disasters, Easthope has some stark messages.

"Sometimes you want them put off, bluntly," she said. "I very rarely want to see goodwill."

"When I hear, 'we've got a volunteer architecture firm and they're doing this pro bono' – chills at the back of the neck."

"I want you paid, I want you commissioned by the government, I want money from the reparations fund, I want your best effort, your best people."

By definition, disasters are highly difficult scenarios ridden with tough decisions and failure is likely to be catastrophic, so genuine expertise is vital.

Disasters "will always win"

If you are designing for disaster, Easthope cautions, you must be in it for the long haul.

Even well-intentioned projects can go awry – and for that reason, she is sceptical of competitions inviting the uninitiated to undertake disaster-related projects.

"Often when things go wrong it's people coming up with good ideas from the heart that are really lovely ideas, but have got this kind of hidden tail – and one of the areas most vulnerable to that is surely architecture and design," said Easthope.

"I think there's a responsibility here on the field for really probing critical thinking."

Readers may be reminded of the Make It Right Foundation fronted by Brad Pitt, which saw big-name architects design replacement homes in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

The charity settled with residents of the homes for $20.5 million last year over a litany of issues including leaks, black mould and unstable foundations.

Another common issue is a failure to work effectively with impacted communities in the aftermath.

"We see architects brought in to reimagine a place after it's been destroyed and with almost no exception those meetings go terribly," said Easthope.

"And architects will stumble through and they're nervous and they use words that become very toxic like 'regeneration' – they often will erase, when actually what the community wanted was to enhance things that to the outside world may look undervalued and unnecessary."

Another thing to consider is that, in the case of disaster planning and management, the solution is not always new and innovative.

Easthope confesses to "delighting in the mundane" and "keeping what works".

Finally, disaster-related design can be punishing work, she warns.

"Be prepared to watch your projects burn down and wash away," she said. "You're designing things for a world that is very unstable. You don't get to win with disasters – they will always win."

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Designing for Disaster

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Known for a string of boundary-pushing projects, Japanese architect Junya Ishigami discusses his unusual approach to designing buildings in this exclusive interview.

Ishigami's surreal work often challenges fundamental ideas of what a building is – such as his mud-covered underground house and restaurant in Ube, which was one of the most popular projects published on Dezeen last year.

His other projects include a vast, sloping plaza covered by a chequered roof for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology and, more recently, a kilometre-long visitors' centre in China that appears to emerge eerily from a lake.

"We have to invent a lot, I think"

Delivering a keynote at the In Focus: Radical Repair conference hosted by The World Around and Fondation Cartier last month, Ishigami explained that his enduring focus is "to re-interpret the boundary between landscape and architecture".

Speaking to Dezeen after the event, Ishigami argued that architects need to be inventive and push at boundaries, particularly as the world becomes more fractured.

"In the 20th century, Corbusier or something – the modern architect – created one solution," he said. "In that era everyone believed the same future, I think."

"But now each person believes a different future and [has] a differing imagining of the good things, bad things," he continued,

"So maybe the role of the architect in this era is not to create one solution but to create a lot of different solutions. So that means we have to invent a lot, I think."

In particular, Ishigami emphasises the importance of creating architecture "from non-architecture things".

For his own projects, that means basing the design of the structure entirely around the site on which – or in which – it will stand.

"We get inspiration from the condition or the existing environment in each project," he said.

"For me architecture is not just man-made, and also architecture should be one of the elements of the scenery," he continued. "So the architecture itself is not important, but the importance is the relationship with the surroundings."

Many architects would argue that their buildings draw on the surrounding context, but Ishigami takes this concept to extremes.

Blurring lines between architecture and landscape

For instance, in a recently completed visitors-centre project in China not yet officially unveiled, the glassy walls of the long, narrow volumes allow the lake water to flow inside, making the structure part of the landscape itself.

His house and restaurant for chef Motonori Hirata similarly blurs the line between indoors and out.

To create the extraordinary building, a series of meticulously planned holes were dug into the ground and concrete poured in.

The structure was then excavated as if it were an ancient ruin. From completion, it carried the aura of a prehistoric cave.

"The important point is that it is in-between the man-made and nature," Ishigami said of the project.

Such an unconventional project required an unconventional design process. For example, the glazed walls that seal the building were not decided by drawings.

Instead, once the concrete structure was excavated it was scanned to produce a 3D digital model, with glass then cut by lasers to fit the openings between the irregularly shaped columns and roof.

Despite designing such unusual structures, Ishigami says he does not find conventional buildings boring.

"Not so much," he said. "Even if it looks a normal building, sometimes they are very special I think."

"I want to see a lot of different ways of thinking about architecture," he continued.

"So [with] the historical building, or local or vernacular building, there is a lot of information I don't know, so that is very inspiring."

And while he recognises the eccentricity of his own work, he does not think strangeness alone is enough.

"I don't want to make a very crazy kind of building," he continued. "I want to create a good balance with the surroundings."

"The surroundings are normally normal, so the important point is how we can fit the strange idea to the normal things."

After graduating from his masters in 2000, Ishigami spent four years at acclaimed Japanese architecture studio SANAA.

He established his own practice, Junya Ishigami + Associates in 2006, and quickly attracted international attention.

His glass-walled KAIT studio project led to Ishigami become the youngest-ever recipient of the Architectural Institute of Japan Prize, and he won the Golden Lion for best project at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010, as well as the inaugural Obel Award in 2019.

But Ishigami was also the subject of negative press that year surrounding his Serpentine Pavilion project.

A major row erupted after it emerged that his studio was advertising unpaid internships while working on the prestigious commission, with the Serpentine Gallery later demanding that all staff working on the pavilion be remunerated.

People "very hysterical about sustainability"

Four years on, he still winces when the subject is raised, and declines to answer a question about what he learned from the experience.

"It's very difficult to make an answer, because somebody [will] always criticise," he said.

Ishigami's work has always defied trends – including the current shift among other prominent Japanese architects such as Shigeru Ban and Sou Fujimoto to adopting more sustainable building materials.

He is somewhat cryptic when questioned about his own approach to lowering the carbon footprint of his projects.

"Sustainability is very important, but at the same time, I think the balance is also important," he said.

"So for example, sometimes in this situation with the weather changing, I think a lot of [people are] kind of very hysteric[al] about sustainability," he continued.

"If everybody [has] to follow sustainability, that does not create a lot of value… in that case I think the way will be very uniform."

"That's very risky, I think. So we have to prepare a lot of directions [for] the solutions, I think."

Photography by Junya Ishigami + Associates, unless stated.

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Production designer Jack Fisk built a railway station from scratch and researched historic documents to recreate early 20th-century Oklahoma in his sets for Martin Scorsese's new film Killers of the Flower Moon.

Fisk has worked in the film industry for more than 50 years and collaborated with a number of big-name directors, including Roger and Gene Korman, Brian de Palma and Terrence Malick, for whom he built a house for the film Days of Heaven in less than four weeks.

Killers of the Flower Moon marks the first time Fisk has worked with Scorsese, who reached out to the designer because of his experience of building outdoor sets.

"It was exciting when he called me on this project – my experience has been, since Days of Heaven, building sets out on location," Fisk told Dezeen on a video call from Los Angeles, which he was visiting to attend the premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon.

"He wanted to tell the story. He wanted to shoot it in Oklahoma, he wanted it wide, big, like a Western."

Killers of the Flower Moon is based on the true story of how members of the Native American Osage Nation were systematically murdered in the 1920s after oil was discovered on their land, making them very wealthy but also making them targets.

It was shot in Oklahoma, with the city of Pawhuska in Osage County turned into Fairfax, where much of the story takes place.

Fisk, who had worked on another film in Pawhuska years earlier, already knew some of the background about the Osage Nation.

"I started investigating, and I went back to some of the first treaties around 1808 and 1825 and saw how the Osage were taken advantage of by our government, to move them around, to open land for European settlers," he said.

Fisk also investigated the backgrounds of the film's characters in order to build sets that would be historically accurate, including that of the central character Mollie Burkhart, played by Lily Gladstone.

"I wanted to figure out where Mollie lived in 1920," he explained. "Nobody knew, there was no record. But then I started going through the county records, and by the time the film started shooting, I found four of her houses."

Two of those were recreated in the film, including a house in Fairfax that Burkhart buys with her husband Ernest, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

To recreate the town, Fisk looked at photographs from the time as well as fire insurance maps that stated what materials the buildings were made of.

"I was able to lay out the whole town, every building, for different years and how they evolved," he said.

"They gave us two blocks of decrepit buildings in Pawhuska that we could use for our town, and I started to try to integrate as much of the information I learned about Fairfax into these two blocks," Fisk added.

"At the end of the road, we put up a blue screen for CGI and when we were done, we were able to paint the prairie going off the town – today there are a lot more trees than there were back in 1920s."

An integral part of the Killers of the Flower Moon set was the Fairfax train station, which Fisk built from scratch.

"The train station was torn down, but I had some beautiful pictures of it," he said. "I found plans for that station in some old books about the Santa Fe Railroad and we were able to recreate it in a lot in Pawhuska."

"We put in 1,600 feet of train track," he added. "We built the train station to the plans of the original, and we brought in a steam locomotive and three Pullman cars from Arkansas and put them on the track."

Fisk also tore out the ceiling of an old appliance store, revealing clerestory windows and turning it into the light-filled pool hall and barber shop that is one of the film's central sets.

"I remembered, as a kid, getting my hair cut in the pool hall in a little town in the Midwest," Fisk said. "I said to Marty [Scorcese] that we could combine the pool hall and the barber shop – he loved the idea, and it became a really interesting set."

"All the people in there planning to get the Osage money looked out the window to see the Osage world going by, they knew who had money and who had lost it, and it was a great place for them to conspire."

The designer also painted about 40 houses to shoot one of the neighbourhoods in Fairfax. All the houses were originally white, the most common colour in the US after world war two, and didn't fit the colours from the 1920s colour charts that Fisk had bought from eBay.

"We told the house owners 'we'd like to paint two sides of your house in one of these colours, and when we're done shooting, we'll come back and either paint the other two sides the same colour, or we'll paint those two sides back to white'," Fisk said.

After filming was wrapped, only one house decided to go back to white.

For one of Mollie's houses, Fisk chose a yellow colour found in another of the buildings used for the film.

"I found that yellow in the Masonic Lodge, behind a wall," Fisk said. "There were some boards that colour and I took one to the painters and said, 'this would be a good colour for Mollie's house'."

It is these kinds of discoveries, based on research, that Fisk appreciates most about his work.

"It's an investigation, but it's exciting," he said. "You feel sort of like a detective, and you can't really design things until you get you get the knowledge of the research."

As well as the house in the city, Fisk and his team built Mollie's house in the Osage settlement town of Gray Horse and its surrounding environments.

"We built a piece of the Osage reservation, which she was looking at, and we built the cemetery, which was important because there were so many people ending up in the cemetery," he said.

Fisk also built an oil derrick from scratch, using the same plans for an 1896 derrick that he had used for Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film There Will Be Blood.

More oil derricks were added using CGI to create the right atmosphere for film character William Hale's ranch, which was also surrounded by cattle to give it the feel of a Western.

"Marty is from New York City, so he went crazy when he saw the prairie and cattle, he got so excited – it was like a kid in a candy store," Fisk said. "He wore those cows out!"

The team ended up building around 40 sets for Killers of the Flower Moon, which Fisk believes adds to the final result.

"It takes a different mindset to build in the environment, but I think the reward is that you really get a sense of time and place," he said.

Other recent films with impressive worldbuilding include Wes Anderson's Asteroid City and Greta Gerwig's Barbie.

The photography is courtesy of Apple TV+. Killers of the Flower Moon will be released in cinemas on 20 October. 

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Landscape architects must prioritise creating "sponge cities" in the face of increased flooding, Oberlander Prize-winner Kongjian Yu tells Dezeen in this interview.

Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu believes that landscape architects need to take the lead in transforming "grey infrastructure into green infrastructure" if our cities are to resist flooding caused by changing climates.

He spoke to Dezeen after winning the US-based Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize.

"We have to do better"

"As climate change makes floods and drought more frequent, the climate in the regions like Europe and some part of the US that used to have more predictable and mild climates become monsoon-like, changeable climates, just like in China," said Yu.

"The centuries-old grey infrastructure failed and will fail due to their non-resilience," he continued, pointing to the recent debilitating flooding in urban cores like New York City.

Yu's experiences of rapid development in his home country in the late 1990s informed his approach to landscape design.

"I saw how wrongly the urbanisation in China happened at the sacrifice of the healthy ecosystem of the wetland, the rivers and the spaces for water in 1996 to 1997," he said.

"I knew I could do better, and I knew we have to do better to reach a sustainable relationship between man and nature."

Yu and his studio Turenscape have been working for years to help convert urban centres in China from concrete-dominated landscapes into places where water can freely flow through the city and into integrated parks and restored waterways.

Sponge-city concept based on "ancient wisdom"

Yu calls his theoretical approach to flood mitigation "sponge cities". The theory was informed by Yu's experiences of flooding in the late '90s in China.

"Sponge city is a water-resilient city built on nature-based ecological infrastructure, which is called a green sponge," he explained.

"Its strategy is to retain water at the site, slow down water flow, and be adaptive to the force of water, which is totally opposite to the grey infrastructure that all industrial and modern cities are dependent on – big dams to accumulate water, channel rivers back to flush away floods, and building floods wall to keep out a flood."

"The sponge city is rooted in the ancient wisdom of monsoon climate adaptation and is nature-based, and therefore can be upgraded and be inspiring to solve the problems of global climate change."

Yu and his studio have put these theories into practice in projects like Sanya Dong'an Wetland Park in China and Benjakitti Forest Park in Thailand, both projects that saw the conversion of dump sites and polluted waterways in urban centres into conservatory and recreation sites.

Turenscape has completed hundreds of similar projects internationally and in 2014 the Chinese government officially adopted Yu's sponge city concept as a "guiding theory" for future urban construction and revitalisation.

Yu believes that landscape architects must play a "leading role" in continuing to pressure cities and nations into thinking about flood mitigation when constructing urban areas.

"That is why I will advocate Sponge Planet," he said.

"By doing that, landscape architecture can also include political and social advocacy and use political and administrative force."

The main photo is by Barrett Doherty, courtesy of The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

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UK designer Thomas Heatherwick is launching his Humanise campaign today. In this interview, the director of the team leading the initiative, Matt Bell, explains what it aims to achieve.

Named Humanise, the campaign aims to put into action the ideas outlined in Heatherwick's book Humanise, a Maker's Guide to Building Our World – including putting "an end to boring buildings".

"This campaign is trying to stem the tide and spark a public conversation about the way buildings make us feel," Bell told Dezeen.

"We're trying to change the mindset and values behind a 'blandemic' that's bad for our health, bad for society and bad for the planet."

"A lot of cities around the world have been engulfed in boring, soulless buildings," he continued. "That's not a niceness problem, it's a civic and public-health issue, as research from the field of neuro-aesthetics reveals how this impacts on our wellbeing."

"Our first task is to change awareness"

Bell explained that the campaign's initial task will be to encourage people to care more about the buildings around them and build the belief that they can contribute to improving the overall quality of the built environment.

"Humanise is asking why so many places feel joyless and depressing, how did this happen and how can we start creating more buildings that last and are loved?" he said.

"Our first task is to change awareness – make it personal, make people care, give people some sense of agency over what gets built."

The project will initially be funded by Heatherwick Studio, which has completed numerous buildings that are rarely described as dull, including an art gallery in Cape Town carved out of grain silos, a park supported on 132 concrete columns above the Hudson River and a shopping centre in Shanghai covered in 1,000 trees.

Although not dull, many of its projects have been controversial, including its proposed Garden Bridge in London.

"You have to inspire public demand"

"Heatherwick Studio is paying for a team of three people for the next two years to get things moving," explained Bell.

"But this initiative belongs to anyone who chooses to get involved. We're looking to draw in cities, companies and community organisations as equal partners and turn it into a movement that can champion radically more human buildings."

Bell believes that the key to changing how buildings appear and improving people's experience of buildings is to encourage the public to have stronger opinions on the built environment and believe that they can impact it.

"I've been campaigning for 30 years since my first job as a youth worker, on everything from social justice to the built environment," he said.

"What I now know is you have to inspire public demand. It's not enough to win the professional debate, and government policies come and go – usually having been ignored," he continued.

"The thing that works is a shift in the public consensus about what is acceptable. It's happened on pesticides, plastic, drink driving, and racism. Now we need it on building design."

"Ten million conversations" target

According to Bell the team will consider the project a success if the campaign starts "10 million conversations" and leads to clients regularly wanting to understand the impact their projects have on people not directly using their buildings.

"We've set a target of sparking 10 million conversations around the world," he said. "That will give us a barometer to gauge whether people are interested."

"We need to get the idea of emotion as a function embedded in the way that architecture is taught. And we have to establish the concept of a human premium and use this to help people justify the additional investment it always takes to create genuinely human buildings."

"Ultimately, success will be a time when clients routinely ask how your design is going to impact on the passers-by, and every building of any scale is interesting, regardless of its style," he added.

Along with the book, Heatherwick has also recently outlined his thoughts on the "blandemic" in a three-part series on BBC Radio 4 called Building Soul with Thomas Heatherwick.

On the show, he stated that Le Corbusier was responsible for architecture's "global blandemic".

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With their own lifestyle brand launching today, design duo Carl Philip Bernadotte – who is Prince Carl Philip of Sweden – and Oscar Kylberg tell Dezeen how public scrutiny has kept them on their toes.

Prince Carl Philip is the only son of King Carl XVI Gustaf, and fourth in line to the Swedish throne, so he and Kylberg have had to deal with the spotlight ever since founding their Stockholm-based studio, Bernadotte & Kylberg, in 2012.

In an exclusive interview, the pair said this has driven them to work harder.

"It has been like that from the beginning, for good and bad," said the prince. "We know that everything we do is going to be looked at more."

"In the first years, it took a lot of energy from us, but today it's something that is just there," added Kylberg.

"It's like having your own cheerleading squad, in a way. You don't want to drop the ball; you want to work hard to show that you're up to the expectations."

Bernadotte and Kylberg have worked across fashion, homeware and industrial design, for Scandinavian brands including Georg Jensen, Stelton, Hästens and Skultuna.

These brands all sit in the luxury sector, so would all have reason to play up the royal connection. Yet the designers said they have previously avoided making themselves a focal point.

"When we launch something with a brand, we don't want to be the main focus," said Bernadotte. "We want the product to be number one."

Now, with the launch of their eponymous brand, the designers are deliberately putting themselves front and centre for the first time.

Their first own-branded products are scarves and blankets embellished with the B&K logo. This will later expand into a wider collection of products for the home.

"We want to make a statement," Kylberg said. "These are our products and this is our brand, our name."

"We designed that logo in 2012 and we haven't really used it before now," added Bernadotte. "It actually works really well on textiles."

The Bernadotte & Kylberg founders spoke to Dezeen via Zoom from their Stockholm studio, a former saddle-making chamber in the Royal Stables. While Kylberg appeared the more confident and articulate spokesperson, both were friendly and engaging.

The pair said they had dreamed of launching a Bernadotte & Kylberg brand "from day one" but that they didn't feel the time was right before now.

They have had reason to tread carefully. Back in 2013, Bernadotte came under fire when a previously unnamed collaborator claimed authorship for a product bearing the prince's signature, following accusations of plagiarism.

A decade on, the pair don't employ any other designers to work alongside them.

"Our promise to our clients is that we do the design and we take responsibility for it," said Kylberg.

This approach has its challenges, particularly as Bernadotte has to balance his design practice with the royal duties that come with being the Duke of Värmland.

But the pair said they have built up "a very natural symbiosis" after working closely together for more than a decade.

"It's a balancing act, but we make it work," said Bernadotte. "Sometimes I have to be away, but I always have B and K in the back of my mind."

"I think we have a very intuitive way of working together," added Kylberg.

"We take turns rowing the boat and we have a really high [level of] respect for each other's opinions. Today, if I came up with a design idea, it would just feel weird if Carl Philip didn't put his ideas to it."

The duo have had some important successes in the years since unveiling their first collaborative product, a set of playful stoneware dishes launched by porcelain brand Gustavsberg in 2012.

In 2016, they developed an innovative wine glass for German manufacturer Zwiesel Kristallglas, featuring a glass sphere that cleverly allows the wine to aerate.

The pair have also created a suite for Sweden's Icehotel, featuring blocks of ice filled with wildflowers.

While most of this hotel is famously melted down and rebuilt every year, this suite has been in place since 2021 and is set to remain for the foreseeable future.

According to Kylberg, they are driven by curiosity rather than ambition.

"Because it's only the two of us, we can only do so many projects," he said. "If we have to choose, we always pick the ones where there are interesting questions to be answered or problems to be solved. I think that's because we are extremely curious and detail-orientated."

He said that all the products they have made so far are "things that we love and use ourselves".

"What we do is us," added Bernadotte. "We do things we like and hope others will be inspired by them too."

The portrait is by Dion Morgan Norman.

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British fashion designer Ozwald Boateng says there is "definitely an opportunity" to disrupt the furniture industry in the same way he shook up the tailoring traditions of London's Savile Row in this interview.

Boateng has worked with Italian brand Poltrona Frau on his first-ever furniture collection, which includes a rework of the traditional Chesterfield sofa.

The London-based designer told Dezeen there was "a lot of space" for a more diverse cultural aesthetic in the market.

"There is a creative language that needs to express more in this space," Boateng said.

"I have a cultural aesthetic, in terms of my African roots, from being born in the UK and from my experience on Savile Row," he added. "There is definitely an opportunity to express this aesthetic in furniture."

Boateng was born in 1967 to parents who immigrated from Ghana in the 1950s.

He made history in 1995 when, at the age of 28, he became the youngest and first Black tailor to open a store on Savile Row, the heartland of bespoke suit-making.

The designer quickly earned renown for his fresh take on classic menswear silhouettes, which attracted a much younger and more diverse demographic to Mayfair.

"Starting on a traditional base is always the key for me," Boateng said.

"It's about taking something traditional and finding a modern language in which to express it."

When Poltrona Frau invited Boateng to collaborate, he saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate how the same thinking could be applied to furniture, he recalled.

The Chesterfield is one of the most iconic British furniture designs of all time, with almost as much history as the three-piece suit.

Characterised by quilted leather upholstery and a low back, this couch was first developed in the mid-1700s for Lord Philip Stanhope, the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, to seat gentlemen guests without creasing their suits.

Poltrona Frau has produced its own version, Chester, ever since the company was established in 1912.

"I have been sitting on a version of this chair for as long as I can remember; it represents so much historically," said Boateng.

"I knew that if I could find a modern way to interpret it, it would be a win."

Boateng unveiled new versions of the Chester sofa, armchair, daybed and ottoman as part of a capsule collection presented during London Design Festival.

The designs are upholstered in a unique embossed leather that incorporates a highly intricate pattern.

It took Poltrona Frau's team six months to develop a hot embossing technique to produce this effect.

The process has to be carried out manually, using a press that sandwiches the leather between a smooth metal surface and a bakelite plate.

Boateng believes this level of innovation is essential to ensuring that designs like the Chesterfield stay relevant, but claims it is often lacking in the British manufacturing industry.

"I have always said that tradition has to evolve or it dies," he said.

"In the UK, we only produce a fraction of what we did when I was first starting out. That has a lot to do with not evolving skillsets. If you're not willing to change, it doesn't work."

Boateng said the key to evolving traditions is "understanding the rules, so you can understand how to bend them".

"It's about adding friction into the process," he said.

Boateng's version of Chester is a clear expression of his multicultural heritage.

The embossed pattern that features on the design is Tribal, one of the designer's signature textile designs, which is based on prints from traditional West African cloth.

The collection also includes a rework of one of Poltrona Frau's landmark designs, the 1930 Vanity Fair armchair, which sees the Tribal pattern digitally printed onto matt-effect velvet.

Boateng described the collection as "a layered proposition, because of what it represents".

However, the designer said that he is more motivated by the quality of the end product than what it stands for.

"I have been navigating perception my whole life," he said.

"I knew that if I could be on Savile Row, respecting the traditions but finding interesting ways to evolve them, it would be accepted and would open doors in terms of perception. It's the same with Poltrona Frau."

Ozwald Boateng x Poltrona Frau was on show from 16 to 24 September as part of London Design Festival. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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Future-gazing architect and filmmaker Liam Young explains why he believes humans will fail to avert climate catastrophe in this interview with Dezeen.

Young spoke to Dezeen ahead of his Planetary Redesign exhibition, currently on display at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).

This features his latest film, The Great Endeavour, which proposes a radical solution to the climate crisis. The film depicts an alternative future where humankind unites to cut carbon emissions by building massive-scale wind farms in the ocean and solar farms in the desert.

To achieve this, the film imagines a mobilisation of workers and resources on a planetary scale, which Young believes is needed to "not go extinct".

"The Great Endeavour envisions the scale of global collaboration that's necessary," LA-based Young told Dezeen.

"The structure is so complex and expensive that no single nation would be able to afford them or conceive them, but if we make a decision not to go extinct we need to start building these machines."

Young's overarching point is that conventional approaches to sustainability fall far short of the level of action required to deal with climate change.

"All our visions about the future that come from popular culture and designers and architects are continuations of environmental ideals that began in the 1960s and '70s," he said.

"Architects putting trees on roofs, a community garden in Brooklyn growing tomatoes, recycling windows, trying to make vegan diets sexy as opposed to meat diet — all those things are valuable and important, but they no longer work at a scale of change that we need, which is systemic and planetary."

The barriers to making the necessary shift, he argues, are "no longer a technology problem, but a cultural and political problem".

"All the technology we need is already here," he explained. "If we wanted to, we can change tomorrow. In those terms, I'm incredibly optimistic and hopeful about the future."

"But do I think we are actually going to change and do this? No, I don't," he added.

"The more I dig into this research through these projects, the more I'm filled with dread where I see not only are we not limiting and scaling back, but instead we are increasing fossil-fuel production — we are doing the opposite."

Our current political systems, he says, are not capable of delivering the degree of change required at sufficient speed.

"What we are seeing is what we think of as democratic nations around the world completely failing in their responsibilities of doing anything in relation to climate change," he said.

"In the US, where I'm based, they can't even agree that climate change exists, never mind actually doing anything at a scale required to make a difference."

Non-democratic countries are the ones making the biggest strides, Young claimed.

"The nations that have made substantial moves in that direction are single-government nations," he said.

"China has taken offline thousands of coal-burning power stations across the last decade and has built the world's largest wind farms, the world's largest solar field, the world's largest hydroelectric dam. To build that dam, it displaced millions of people, but it could do that."

"I'm not advocating for a move towards dictatorship, but the current political system is not fit for purpose in the context of global collaboration needed for climate change."

Another non-democratic country displaying enormous ambition when it comes to projects touted as ways of reducing emissions is Saudi Arabia.

Its project The Line, currently being constructed in the desert, is planned as a renewables-powered, 170-kilometre-long linear city for nine-million people.

Young criticised The Line as "a very elaborate propaganda piece".

"Someone drew a line on the page and they saw the power of the headline-generating machine," he said. "They are not manufacturing a city, but manufacturing an image of a city."

"The architects working on The Line are great examples of the mercenary nature of the discipline, which has for a long time been purely in the service of those with money and power," he added.

Nevertheless, he suggested that the mega-project provokes an important discussion about which nations around the world have the sufficient ambition and capacity to do something at a scale that matches the threat of climate change.

"The Line is an intriguing example of the scale of construction that is required to deal with some of the problem," he said.

"It's a shame that the energy is focused on the ridiculous image of the city, but it's a useful conversation point nonetheless."

Young's work has previously explored the idea of a built-from-scratch, low-emission mega-city.

The Great Endeavour is being shown at NGV as part of Young's solo exhibition Planetary Redesign, which also features his short film Planet City along with photography and costumes made in collaboration with costume designer Ane Crabtree.

First commissioned for the 2020 NGV Triennial, Planet City is a short animation that imagines a new city housing the entire human population.

Young has continued to expand the Planet City idea with further research, particularly on the technology that could help the city be self-sustainable, such as food systems and agriculture infrastructure.

For instance, he imagines a canal system in the city feeding a massive network of vertical farms.

"Although the work I do is often described as science-fiction, it is all based on the technology in the present moment – there isn't any imaginary technology in there, unlike a lot of Hollywood science-fiction," Young said.

"My job as a world-builder is identifying the technology at the moment and turning up the volume," he added.

"My projects are really just science illustrators. All I'm doing is taking these technologies which have the potential to engage and deal with the problem, such as the scale of the climate crisis."

Despite his pessimism about politics, Young believes architects and designers still have an important role to play today to communicate viable and hopeful planetary-scale visions of systemic change to the public.

"We need to tell stories about what the future might look like as opposed to the technical solutions that architects and designers typically work through," he argued.

"We need to work with drama and emotion to get people on board with these changes."

"At the same time, we need to frame those changes – both the language we use and design images we create – in such a way that it doesn't look like it's just pure sacrifice."

In The Great Endeavour, for example, Young tried to portray the extraordinary enterprise of building giant energy-generating machines not as an act of sacrifice but as an act of celebration of planetary collaboration.

"Architects and designers occupy this really powerful place between culture and technology," he said.

"We need to use the same language that we used around the moon landing to rally the entire generation around this idea."

The images are courtesy of Liam Young unless otherwise stated.

Liam Young: Planetary Redesign is on show until 11 February 2024 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Fed Square, Melbourne, Australia. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Costume designer Ane Crabtree drew on the style of New York City's Washington Heights neighbourhood and created a coat to function as "a house that you wear on the street" for Apple TV+ series The Changeling, she tells Dezeen in this interview.

The eight-part series, which is based on a novel of the same name by author Victor LaValle, follows the lives of librarian Emma, played by Clark Backo, and used-book dealer Apollo, played by LaKeith Stanfield.

Spanning different timelines, it is set in an alternative version of New York that veers into a dark fairytale.

The city of New York and the specific neighbourhood in which much of the story takes place helped to inform Crabtree's choice when designing costumes for the character of Apollo.

"I thought about how beautifully men dress in New York City, throughout time, and certainly in Washington Heights where they live," Crabtree told Dezeen.

"There's something to the way that New York men dress that has a bit of flash and a bit of nostalgia that I really think translates to an individual."

"Imagine these two people, very well-read, surrounded by the ghost of all their favourite writers from Harlem, all of the jazz greats," she added.

"Who are their heroes? It's James Baldwin; for Apollo, I talked about dark academia, a fashion term but it has its roots in the celebration of all things literary."

Crabtree also chose a material palette that would work across the story's various timelines, with the costumes in the part of the show set in the present having a retro feel that nods to earlier periods.

"I did a lot of tweeds and checks and plaids because it's rich fabrics that could have existed all the way back to the 1800s and every time in between, in different ways," she said.

For Apollo, she also sourced a rare New York Yankees cap from a time in history when the baseball team had a Black league, creating a more contemporary look that still functions as a historical reference.

"The New York Yankees cap at first glance could be like 'a guy on the street, who looks really cute and he's wearing a New York cap because it's reality' – however, there's history to that as well," she said. "And a respectful nod to Black history that should be [seen] throughout the whole of the show."

For the character of Emma, Crabtree thought about how clothes could be used as a form of protection.

"Sometimes you're just looking for intimate personal space and you have your coat closed around you," she said.

"I always think of these carapaces that surround a person for protection, and it's almost a house that you wear on the street. So that was the ideology behind Emma's cape and cloak."

Cloaks are also rare to see in real life, Crabtree added.

"It's just fashionable on someone and you don't see it very often," she said. "That turns into a kind of bedraggled protective armour and it has a life of its own, it becomes its own character."

Most of the costumes were designed by Crabtree and made from scratch to suit her specific vision, though the designer also used vintage clothes.

"There were some vintage pieces of Emma's and Apollo's but it's hard – you can't always use vintage because you need so many as so much happens to them," she said.

The designer also drew on older films to get the right feel for The Changeling costumes.

"Colour is really important and colour is always emotional, it's all psychological," Crabtree said. "[It is] harkening back, nostalgia-wise, to many films that had a certain palette in the 1960s or the warm tones of the '70s."

"You started to see more Black film in the '70s," she added. "I wanted some warm, golden, nostalgic colours that would give us an empathetic approach, a connection to every character's history. But also on a very base note, beautiful, warm tones look fantastic on Black skin."

To Crabtree, who was born in Kentucky to Japanese parents, it was important to create costumes that would celebrate the history and background of the characters in The Changeling.

Her own background and a longing for more diverse representation in media also informed her decision to work on the TV series.

"Most of my best friends are Black Americans, and I do want to get it right," she said. "What led me to this is the opportunity to tell a story, as a person of colour myself."

"I'm 59 and there's not been a lot of stories about people of colour with me growing up that I was able to see. If I am able to help tell that story and inspire other people, I'm going to be really proud of that at 100 years old."

Crabtree has previously designed the costumes for TV series The Handmaid's Tale and created outfits for the imaginary future inhabitants of Planet City.

The photography is courtesy of Apple TV+.

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More can be done to support emerging designers in London says Jan Hendzel, who curated an exhibition focused on emerging talent at this year's London Design Festival.

Jan Hendzel Studio curated the 11:11 exhibition, which paired 11 established designers with 11 emerging designers, to draw attention to interesting south London designers.

"Our emphasis was on creating a platform to support the grassroots and emerging creators of south London," Hendzel told Dezeen.

"By forging new relationships and connecting the established design industry with up-and-coming makers, 11:11 aims to create a more inclusive and diverse future in design."

For the exhibition, 11 established designers – A Rum Fellow, Alison Crowther, Charlotte Kingsnorth, Daniel Schofield, Grain & Knot, Jan Hendzel Studio, Martino Gamper, Novocastrian, Sedilia, Simone Brewster, Raw Edges – each displayed their work alongside an emerging designer selected from an open call.

The emerging designers showcased were Alice Adler, Carl Koch, Dominic McHenry, Jacob Marks, Mariangel Talamas Leal, Moss, Silje Loa, Söder Studio, Unu Sohn, William Waterhouse and Woojin Joo.

Hendzel believes that events like LDF can create space for emerging talents to showcase their work, but often focuses on university-educated designers.

"The importance of offering a platform to emerging talent, especially that of grassroots and local level creatives, is to offer empowerment and to demonstrate that design is a profession that can offer meaningful and exciting careers," he said.

"When the design festival rolls into town, yes, I believe we do have platforms for emerging creatives; however, one big issue is that design shows can be cost-prohibitive and often focus on university-educated people, which by default puts the profession at the more elitist end of things," he continued.

"If you don't have cash or a degree then finding a platform to celebrate your ideas can be difficult."

He believes that LDF and others can do more to support emerging talents, and suggests that providing free space for exhibitions and installations would be a way of doing this.

"Emerging talents require nurture, they require safe places to practise their respective disciplines and they require opportunities for growth through connections and collaborations with established practitioners to elevate their craft," he explained.

"A great opportunity would be to find and offer more free spaces to emerging groups, alongside bursaries and support packages in how to promote your event and develop your respective craft within a design district."

The exhibition, which is taking place at Staffordshire St gallery in Peckham, includes numerous pieces of furniture with chairs designed by Gamper and Leal, as well as drawers by Jan Hendzel Studio and Crowther.

Sedilia's contribution was a Roll Top Chair and Roll Top Ottoman.

The exhibition also include mirrors designed by Jan Hendzel Studio, Novocastrian and Kingsnorth, and clothing by Soeder.

Also on display were lights by Schofield and by Marks.

Another exhibition showcasing the work of emerging designers at LDF was Drop02, which contained work from IKEA and H&M's Atelier100 design incubator.

Other projects currently on display as part of the festival include a prototype modular furniture system by Zaha Hadid Design and furniture by Andu Masebo crafted from a scrapped car.

The photography is by BJ Deakin Photography.

The 11:11 exhibition takes place 16-24 September at the Staffordshire St gallery as part of London Design Festival 2023. See our London Design Festival 2023 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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Pritzker Architecture Prize-winner Diébédo Francis Kéré may be known for his resource-light community buildings but would be open to designing a skyscraper when the time is right, he tells Dezeen in this interview.

Burkinabè architect Kéré has risen to become one of the profession's biggest stars in recent years, becoming the first African to win its most prestigious award in 2022.

Last week, he was also named by the Japan Art Association as the 2023 architecture laureate for the Praemium Imperiale awards.

Pritzker win "encouraged me to do more"

Speaking to Dezeen at the UIA World Congress of Architects in Copenhagen, Kéré reflected on how his Pritzker success has influenced his practice.

"It has encouraged me to do even more in the [same] direction – so to be more engaged and to push the ideas that I had further," he told Dezeen.

"It has changed, yes; it has given me a courage to keep doing what I started to do – what I love to do – with intensity, and more joy, because the recognition is there."

Kéré's work is often associated with sparing use of resources and clever responses to local climate conditions.

His portfolio is mainly made up of socially conscious projects such as schools, health centres and community buildings, with buildings completed in several African countries.

Among his more high-profile projects is the new parliament building for his native Burkina Faso, as well as a new parliament for neighbouring Benin.

He was also commissioned to deliver the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2017.

"It is important to keep awarding quality"

Kéré believes it is important for the big architecture prizes to continue recognising different types of architects.

"I will say it is important to keep awarding quality, no matter what it is – you know, just to see the range of the work in architecture and then within that select quality to award," he said.

"It is an important engine to allow quality to keep growing and not coming from a given group, but then to look at architecture in its entire form and really give the award for quality."

"And quality may have different faces – is it related to sustainability? Is it related to comfort? Is it related to a big inspiration?"

During a keynote address at the UIA conference, Kéré revealed that since his Pritzker win he has been approached to take on residential projects for wealthy clients.

He laughed when asked if we will ever see a Kéré skyscraper emerge on the New York skyline.

"Okay, for that I have to say I'm very open," he said. "You know, architecture is very broad, it's open."

"If there is a tower that I can do, and it makes a difference and makes me happy, and makes me introduce something that is new and fresh, and people get inspired, and the client is overwhelmed, I will go for it."

"But I don't fight to have it," he added. "I will go for it when the time is right, but I'm not dying to start to build a skyscraper, no."

"I want us to be more atelier-like"

Having trained as a carpenter in Burkina Faso, Kéré studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin, and his studio, Kéré Architecture, is now based in the German capital.

Based on his experience of working in both Africa and Europe, he believes that architects should be more in touch with the process of constructing buildings.

"We're getting more and more critical about the way we build and the way that the thinking of architecture is separated from the making of architecture," he said.

"I think we have to really connect more to the making of the buildings," he added. "Those 'thinking' buildings are often separated – some other people take it and just make it happen."

"I want us to be more atelier-like. Really go and check the material and be connected to the process of the making, but not to be isolated," he continued.

"The process is always something that is giving you something back, that will really foster your creativity."

As for the other major issues facing the built environment, such as climate change, Kéré suggested these are now well-understood but not yet subject to enough of a response.

"We're working in a way about climate change that is real, and we are also aware of the resource limitation that goes with it, we are aware of creating affordable housing in urban areas, but I think that we have to take more action," he said.

"That is what I want to highlight. We know about it in theory, but I think we're not taking action just to get these solved."

The main photo is courtesy of UIA World Congress 2023.

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This year's Sydney Design Week is informed by the work of a late French philosopher, creative director Keinton Butler tells Dezeen in this interview.

Butler, who is also a senior curator of design and architecture at the Powerhouse Museum, spoke to Dezeen ahead of the design week to explain her curatorial approach for this year's programme.

This year's edition of Sydney Design Week takes place from 15 to 24 September, featuring more than 60 events including tours, workshops and public architecture presented across the city.

Under the title of Amodern, the programme will delve into six themes exploring the cultural and environmental challenges facing architects and designers.

Butler explained that the theme of this year's programme is a direct response to the work of French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour, who died at the end of 2022.

Design week title a "provocation to rethink"

"It was around the time that I was starting to shape the design week programme," she said.

"I was revisiting some of Latour's prolific work — which pre-empted many of the important discussions that designers and architects are engaged in today around building stronger connections between society, culture and our natural and built environment."

"The title is a kind of provocation to rethink entrenched 20th century narratives and to establish new ways of thinking."

Latour is widely recognised for his work examining how humanity perceives the climate emergency differently around the world.

From a curatorial perspective, one of the main departures from previous Sydney Design Weeks is the division of the programme into six fields of enquiry – Eco Systems, Material Cultures, Communal Cities, Micro Cycles, Connected Threads and Photofields.

Materials science a key focus

Materials science, research and innovation are key focuses of this year's programme.

"As a curator, I wanted to frame the programme in this way and to design a programme that prioritised research-based practice, while embracing plural perspectives from our local communities," said Butler.

"Ultimately, I set out to create a programme with a planetary focus, and with a clear-eyed view of the work ahead of us."

South Korean designer Kwangho Lee is invited to deliver a keynote speech at Powerhouse Ultimo on 16 September to present his fabrication experiments with wood, stone and straw, and share insights into his recent work, such as his knotted nylon-cord furniture, as well as his collection for Swedish brand Hem.

A workshop on making bio-based plastics will be hosted by designers Nahum McLean and Ella Williams.

Meanwhile, Australian fashion designer Gary Bigeni and researcher Doris Li will lead a demonstration of the Shima Seiki Wholegarment seamless knitting machine.

The Japanese-designed machine can create entire garments in one piece, which reduces yarn and material waste and supports made-to-order and bespoke garment production.

"Materials science, research and innovation have been at the forefront of design discourse for a number of years, for good reason – materials have the ability to revolutionise large-scale manufacturing and production," said Butler.

"The design week programme looks at Australia's material resources and extractive practices at a time of climate crisis and investigates the cultural and political histories of materials."

In addition, the programme will examine Australia's colonial past, she said.

"The program also offers a platform to interrogate our colonial histories and museum collections. This year, I wanted to prioritise new perspectives, multiple curatorial and industry voices, as well as expansive practices from our local communities."

In a series of closed and public conversational programmes called Objects Testify, visitors are encouraged to explore the colonial legacies of Australia's built environment and its ongoing impact on the indigenous communities.

Multiple design perspectives

Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood Spring will present his work demonstrating how colonisers used "digging" and the extraction of raw materials as a foundation of colonial exploitation.

Meanwhile Clarence Slockee, director of Jiwah, an Indigenous company specialising in cultural landscape and design, will lead a guided tour of Australia's first Indigenous rooftop farm.

The 500 square-metre garden on top of a community building grows Indigenous edible, medicinal and cultural plants, including a variety of bushfoods.

Elsewhere, Punchbowl Mosque architect Angelo Candalepas will host a tour of the building, located in one of Sydney's largest Muslim communities.

It features 102 exposed concrete domes, each with a 30-millimetre opening at the centre to illuminate the main prayer space as the sun moves from dawn prayer through to midday and mid-afternoon prayer.

"I like to think that Sydney Design Week evolves alongside the industry, and I feel that this year's programme reflects the cross-disciplinary nature of design practice today," said Butler.

"Fundamentally, designers are tasked with responding to a changing society as well as a changing climate and have a large amount of cultural agency."

Sydney Design Week takes place across the city of Sydney from 15 to 24 September 2023. For more information about events, exhibitions and talks, visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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Relying on social media algorithms for visual inspiration has led to stage designs becoming increasingly repetitive according to Tobias Rylander, the designer behind The 1975's viral set depicting a house.

"All the artists are coming to us as designers with the same references," he told Dezeen.

"We're all looking at the same algorithms on Pinterest and Instagram, and therefore everything starts looking kind of the same and we all want the same thing," he added. "We're all doing what the AI tells us to do."

Rylander believes the theatrical house set he designed for The 1975's latest world tour ended up trending on social media precisely because it broke this algorithmic mould.

"I think the people that kind of crack outside of that shell are the ones that are going to get noticed," he said. "And I think that's what me and [lead singer] Matthew [Healy] did with this show. It's something that no one expected."

Tour will change "dramatically" for second leg

Rylander has collaborated with The 1975 for almost the entirety of the British band's 10-year touring career.

Relying heavily on his training as a lighting designer, he created a string of pioneering shows for the band over the years that used nothing but lights and video projections to create three-dimensional sets.

The latest tour, called At Their Very Best, represents a dramatic departure from this format. Centred around an elaborate set resembling a house, it looks more like it might host a play than a live music performance.

Complemented by a theatrical – though controversial – performance from frontman Healy, the show immediately trended on the platform formerly known as Twitter and has racked up more than 278.3 million views on TikTok so far.

Much like a real theatre set, the house features no internal dividing walls so as not to block sight lines. Instead, different rooms are delineated by freestanding doors, windows and columns.

There's even a spiral staircase and a small roof section, sturdy enough to hold up Healy during a particularly dramatic point in the set as he sings I Like America & America Likes Me.

"We wanted scenography for him and the band to interact with and a stage where we could tell a story," Rylander said. "It's really more or less a theatre stage that allows some rock and roll in it."

So far, the set has toured more than 30 countries – including The 1975's biggest show to date in London's Finsbury Park – and is now back in the US where the band is rehearsing for the second leg of the tour, Still At Their Very Best, which kicks off on 16 September.

The show "will change dramatically" for this next lap, Rylander revealed.

"It will be more of what everyone seems to love about this show, which is the theatrical performance that takes place on and beyond stage," he said. "But it's still the same house in the same universe."

Furnishings sourced from band members' homes

Architecturally, Rylander conceived the house to be a sort of everyman's home drawing on a smorgasbord of references, from Healey's own garage to the suburban American homes of Steven Spielberg films.

"Matthew really wanted it to be an invitation into his world and into more or less his home," the designer explained. "But we at the same time wanted it to be kind of generic so it could be anyone's home."

"We looked at a lot of these suburban streets that Spielberg always has in his films, where anyone and everyone can relate to what it was like growing up in that house."

In this spirit, Rylander and the band's creative director, Patricia Villirillo, sourced several chintzy lamps and other trinkets from yard sales in the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, where the band was rehearsing.

Over the course of the tour, the band members also filled the set with framed family photos and furnishings from their actual homes.

The result is an eclectic interior featuring classic design pieces like Emeco's Navy Chair alongside ceramic deer bookends and E.T. souvenir cups, while surfaces are finished almost entirely in white.

"We made it even more generic in the way that it's monochromatic," Rylander said. "So everyone can kind of project their own memories onto this house and these rooms."

The 1975 were "guinea pigs" for new modular set-building system

To allow the elaborate set to be quickly disassembled and packed down into touring crates, the structure of the house was created using a new modular framing system by production company PRG.

Designed specifically for touring, the system consists of square aluminium tubes that can be clipped together and stacked into grids to form a kind of scaffold.

This skeleton set can then be clad in different finishes to form everything from the floors to the roof and even part of the staircase.

"Our biggest challenge was to make something like a theatre set that can fold down really quickly and be built really easily," Rylander said.

"The whole house is built using a modular framing system so that it can be scaled, shrink in size, come apart fast and clip together in a modular way," he added.

Once the set has reached the end of its life, these modular parts can be returned to PRG for reuse in future builds instead of going to waste, which is what often happens to custom set builds.

The system was born out of a working group called Redefine Design, which Rylander founded in collaboration with a roster of other set designers during lockdown to address the environmental impact of touring.

"What we all wanted was a modular system that we could build more or less anything out of, that could then come apart at the end of the tour and go back on a shelf and be reused," he said.

"We were kind of the guinea pigs of this new system," he added.

Currently, the modular frames are still "a little bit more expensive" than a regular set, according to Rylander, due to the added development time required in advance.

But ultimately, he hopes that economies of scale will help to drive down costs so the system can be adopted across the industry to cut down on waste.

"It always comes down to what the artist is willing to do," he said. "You have to think a little bit further. You have to make some compromises. But I definitely think that it's something that we'll see much more of."

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Muyiwa Oki, the youngest-ever and first Black president of the RIBA, speaks with Dezeen about ambitions for his term and the grassroots campaign that supported his election in this interview.

Oki, aged 32, was inaugurated as the Royal British Institute of Architects (RIBA) president on 1 September having been put forward as a candidate by an informal group of young architects seeking a workers' representative.

An employee at global construction company Mace, Oki is the first RIBA president to be an architectural worker.

Most previous RIBA presidents, including Oki's predecessor Simon Allford of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, have been directors of their own studios.

Oki hopes to rebuild the connection between the 189-year-old institution and the next generation of architects during his two-year term.

"For quite a long time there has been an establishment of someone who runs their own practice in office, and in some ways we have lost the connection with the grassroots," he told Dezeen.

"With me here, I'd have that relationship with grassroots and I can bring a connection and bridge that gap between the established practitioners and young up-and-coming next-generation practitioners, so we can move forward in a more positive direction."

Oki was put forward as a presidential candidate by a group of grassroots organisations, including Future Architects Front (FAF) and Section of Architectural Workers (SAW), after winning in a vote against other architect workers.

It followed the emergence in March 2022 of an open letter signed by FAF, SAW and others calling for "the first worker at the helm" of the RIBA.

Now, Oki said he feels a sense of responsibility to represent the architects who voted for him, encouraged his campaign and signed the open letter.

"We wrote the letter and it got people excited," he explained.

"The organisation of those groups was very loose, but I think that was one of the winning reasons why it worked so well – it was a collective as opposed to one person telling people what to do," he added.

"There was a lot of sharing of ideas and I'm going to continue to have a relationship with them, and they can be holding me to account."

In maintaining a relationship with these groups, Oki hopes they will relay honest feedback that he can act on during his term.

"I hope they're going to be critiquing things that I do because I would like to be honest and understand what it is the architecture profession is getting up to," he said.

"We need to create avenues to get more feedback and one way is to be in touch with those groups."

Education reform is one of the main issues Oki plans to tackle as president.

In February this year, the Architects Registration Board (ARB) announced plans to scrap the current three-part structure – which exists as Part 1, 2 and 3 – and replace it with a more flexible method that supports different pathways into architecture.

The RIBA has previously stated its opposition to the changes.

"We are looking at reimagining the future of education with the ARB and one thing I would like to see is more flexible avenues of getting into the register," said Oki.

"The cost of living crisis and who gets to finish architecture education is a big issue, and this is why we're talking about going further and faster in education reform."

"If we can update this almost 50-years process that we've had, it would be very good for the next generation," he added.

British architecture was rocked in 2022 by a report detailing bullying, racism and sexual misconduct by staff at the prestigious Bartlett School of Architecture.

"If there is some positive to the Bartlett scandal it's that it's given us a kick up the bum to actually make a change in the organisation of education," said Oki on the issue.

"One key thing is we are going to try to engage more and be more open, and get in the voices of the membership and general profession."

Sustainability and encouraging a "culture shift within the profession" towards celebrating retrofit over new construction will also form a central plank of his presidency, Oki said.

"Over the years, rightly or wrongly, we have been exalting new builds as the coup de grâce for architectural practice," he said. "There's been a focus on new and modern is best."

"Bringing the conversation into this retrofit space and trying to solve big issues like climate emergency, I think are two things you could expect [from my presidency]."

Since being elected last year, Nigerian-born Oki said he has been overwhelmed with positive messages and support from RIBA and the wider architecture profession.

"Being the first of anything is somewhat daunting because there is no blueprint for what you should do, but I've also had a lot of positive energy," he said.

Oki studied at the University of Sheffield and before joining Mace worked at Grimshaw Architects, where he was involved in the overhaul of Euston Station in preparation for HS2.

"Coming from an immigrant family, there are only three or four things your parents want you to do, like a doctor or a lawyer, and those were never exciting or creative enough," he said.

"I think architecture gives you the opportunity to serve the common good – you can look back over your history of works and projects and people who've been impacted and have a positive feeling and sense of joy out of it."

The photography is by Ivan Jones shot for the RIBA Journal unless stated.

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Apple is pushing for carbon transparency in the supply chain as it aims to reduce the impact of its stores, claims the tech company's retail sustainability lead Rebecca Cully in this interview.

Created as the latest "evolution of the Apple Store", Apple's recently opened location in Battersea includes several material innovations aimed at reducing the shop's carbon impact. These were sourced with transparency in mind, according to Cully.

"That transparency piece is one of the biggest beasts that we battle on a regular basis," she told Dezeen.

"I think that's a big reason why finding the right partners, not only in the design space but the construction space and the entire value chain, is just so critical."

Apple seeking partners "absolutely committed to transparency"

Cully explained that Apple is seeking a commitment to transparency from all its construction partners as it aims to meet the company's wider commitment of becoming carbon neutral by 2030, which will mean not only reducing the impact of its stores, but also its products.

"There's so many brilliant products out there in the world, and so many incredible companies that are doing some really interesting things, but as far as innovation is concerned, if we can't identify a partner who's absolutely committed to transparency it's a no-go," said Cully.

Apple is working on building record-keeping of impact and transparency into all its contracts. However, Cully acknowledged that evaluating the full of the impact of all components and materials in its stores is still not possible.

"Evaluating products by manufacturer for carbon is still very early," she said. "And so contractually obligating our supply chain manufacturers to disclose that information as a result of award is certainly something that we are focused on right now."

"The entire store? I think that's a little ambitious right now, based on where industry is at," she continued. "Frankly, we have not gotten to the point where we're able to control that entire supply chain."

"You have to prioritise. For instance, the the nuts and bolts that go into the store are not as significant as our avenues and our ceilings."

"Industry is pretty slow to move"

The recently opened Battersea store, along with the reopened Tysons Corner store in the USA, are the first to use an updated set of fixtures and fittings that will be rolled out across other stores.

These include a timber framework for its walls and room dividers, flooring bound with a bio-polymer and acoustic baffles made from biogenic material.

"These are very visible, very large components within the store that we knew if we focused on in the original design intent were going to result in a superior outcome from a carbon perspective," said Cully.

Apple's current strategy with its stores is to focus on the most impactful, often physically largest areas that have traditionally been the most carbon-intensive.

"So it's really important that we are giving clear instructions to the folks that are sourcing for us to achieve particular outcomes," said Cully.

"That being said, the industry is pretty slow to move in a lot of these cases. So I would say that we are targeting certain elements within the store that are traditionally very high-carbon and very resource-stressed."

"We are targeting those manufacturers to make sure that they understand there is an obligation to deliver on transparency that is absolutely accurate."

Cully also highlighted that one major way that the carbon impact was reduced at its Battersea store was the decision to locate within the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station.

Along with the Apple Store within the former turbine hall, the technology company has placed its UK offices within the former power station.

"Partnering on a redevelopment project of a brownfield site in and of itself has a tremendous value from the standpoint of carbon emissions avoided as a result of the existing structure," said Cully.

"Certainly the partnership that we have with the landlord, was highly strategic in terms of positioning Apple to locate and operate as environmentally considerate as we possibly could."

Apple "certainly interested in pushing industry"

According to Cully, Apple wants to push the construction industry to be more sustainable and noted that the company's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson, has said she "intends to create a playbook that other organisations can follow".

"We are certainly interested in pushing industry," said Cully. "And because of scale, we have an ability to do that and hopefully pave the way to make it a little bit easier for other companies to follow suit – or at least start normalising conversations with manufacturers and industries so that you know, these things become a little bit easier or a little bit more cost effective for other folks to follow suit."

"There are a few organisations around the world, I think, that have the ability to invest in this space the way we have, because the market just doesn't exist."

In the past Apple stores have been focused on aesthetics, but Cully believes that the refocus on sustainability and accessibility means the shops align closer with the brand's values.

"This evolution of the store is so much more intrinsically linked to our values – it really is approaching the epitome of Apple's values realised through the retail store space," said Cully.

"We have evolved the store from kind of looking like a product, to now fully representing our values in every way that we can, within the context of the built environment itself."

However, store fit-outs are far from being Apple's biggest challenge in the race for carbon neutrality. Currently, 65 per cent of the company's emissions from its products so this thinking will also need to be replicated in it production supply chains.

The first Apple Store opened in 2001 and there are now more than 500 around the world. Dezeen recently rounded up 10 of the latest to open.

The photography is courtesy of Apple.

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Austrian architect Wolf Prix, who designed a section of The Line, hints at the hypocrisy of studios working on the Saudi mega-project and criticises the "main idea of the whole thing" in this exclusive interview.

Speaking to Dezeen from his office in Vienna, Prix praised the starting point of rethinking the layout of cities but questioned the linear concept of The Line, which is planned to be 170-kilometres long and only 200 metres wide.

"They have the possibilities and the money to do research and develop new materials, new structures, new mobility, but not in the way they currently pursue it," he told Dezeen.

"What I criticise is the main idea of the whole linear thing, but all the critics should see the possibilities which are behind the idea."

Prix is one of the first architects to have worked on The Line to speak publicly about it. He explained how his studio, Coop Himmelb(l)au, was one of several international practices invited to design a segment of The Line following the initial linear concept being decided on.

Coop Himmelb(l)au was named in a Riyadh exhibition as working on The Line megacity, but Prix said that the scheme had "vanished" and he has "no idea what happened" to the studio's design.

"Neom will end up as a new hotel"

Although Prix is no longer working on The Line, he is still hopeful that the linear concept of the city will be rethought.

He predicted that the project will only be realised in part, with one or two of the 800-metre-long modules completed and eventually used as a large, high-end hotel.

"I am still hoping that the major concept for The Line will be reorganised," he said. "What I am afraid of is that Neom will end up as a new hotel – maybe not the entire length, but one or two segments."

Despite these criticisms, he believes the project could act as an impetus to fundamentally rethink how cities work.

"I heard that criticism of the project is heavy," he said. "Everyone says it's impossible, it's stupid, because of climate issues, because of materials and so forth and so forth."

"But I can imagine these people are not thinking about the next step in the future – how cities have to be reorganised," he continued.

"In Europe, the city planners think about reorganising our cities with the rural method – everything should be very modest and green. I don’t know whether this method [The Line] will be successful, but this [the European way of thinking] for sure is not the point of departure for the future."

"I design what I want to build and take responsibility"

Prix also addressed the criticism directed at studios working on Neom, which has been criticised by human-rights organisations.

Coop Himmelb(l)au was one of the only international studios that chose to continue working in Russia following the country's invasion of Ukraine, and Prix suggested that some studios were being hypocritical by working on the Saudi project.

"A lot of people who said 'we will not work in Russia because of Putin', are now working in Saudi Arabia," he said. "This is a kind of tricky argument."

"I have no bad feelings. I design what I want to build and take responsibility for the building," he continued.

"I didn't build our opera house it Sevastopol for Putin, I did it for the people of Sevastopol and this is my decision."

"How will kids go to school?"

Prix said he agreed to design a segment of The Line as the project "sounded very interesting" and was a continuation of broader urbanism thinking being developed in the 1960s.

"We were very concerned with a new kind of city planning," he explained.

"So, when we got a call from Neom I was very interested because I thought we can finally develop our designs of vertical cities and complex structure of the '60s. I thought maybe we can design a city thinking more detailed about computerised traffic and connections."

Within the design for its segment of The Line, Coop Himmelb(l)au aimed to overcome some of the fundamental problems of connectivity created by the city being made of two parallel skyscrapers separated by a large void, Prix explained.

"How will kids go to school? This is very important," he said. "What I'm missing is the complexity of structures where also the kids can travel through the whole city without being in danger."

"The city as part of our life is what we are interested in," he continued.

"A city cannot exist only for one kind of people"

However, he explained that the "client doesn't want this" and he would "need more political power" to implement his ideas for The Line.

He believes that the city is being designed only for young people and will not function well due to the homogenous nature of the inhabitants.

"Neom has to think about who will live there," he said. "If you have two 500-metre-high walls with housing – I only can imagine that only young people will sit there without daylight because they are working on the computer like crazy. And in the evening, they're going down to the canyon to have parties."

"But a city is not a city only for one kind of people, we need to think of everyone old or young, middle class, poor or rich," he continued.

The Line is one of the world's largest and most controversial projects. A recent documentary outlined the current plans for the city, which is being designed to a concept created by US studio Morphosis.

While numerous studios have been connected to the city, the documentary stated that five studios are currently each designing a 800-metre module for The Line.

The project has been criticised on sustainability and liveability grounds as well as its human rights record with human rights organisation ALQST reporting that three people who were evicted from the Neom site have been sentenced to death.

Speaking to Dezeen, Amnesty International's Peter Frankental said that companies working on Neom were facing a "moral dilemma" and should "think twice" about their continuing involvement in the project.

The portrait is by Zwefo.

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Collaborations with artists, architects and designers are key to ensuring the longevity of a heritage brand and modernising design classics for a new generation, says Longchamp artistic director Sophie Delafontaine in this interview.

Speaking to Dezeen at the luxury handbag brand's showroom in London, Delafontaine said that though the push-and-pull of collaboration can prove tricky, it ultimately serves to force a heritage brand like Longchamp to develop outside of its comfort zone.

"It's our own responsibility as a company to make the best products that we can," Delafontaine explained. "[We create] iconic products that have a very strong character [and] are very well made, but my role is to push them."

The brand has recently launched a collaboration with Italian art magazine Toiletpaper.

Best known for its origami-informed Le Pliage tote bag, Longchamp was founded by Delafontaine's grandfather, Jean Cassegrain, as a tobacco and smoking accessories brand in post-war Paris.

"We don't need the same type of product now that we did 15 years ago"

Delafontaine, who grew up above the brand's first shop in the city's 9th arrondissement and previously designed for French luxury childrenswear brand Bonpoint, has been at the helm as artistic director since the early nineties.

She noted that some Longchamp products, like the Roseau leather shoulder bag, have gone through several redesigns over that time in order to keep up with changing trends.

"It's like Chanel's number five perfume – the juice has been remade many times. The quality of the material has improved, as well as the shape, detail and proportion."

"We certainly don't exactly need the same type of product now that we did 15 years ago because we have everything in our mobile phones and the bags are smaller," she added.

"It's hard to collaborate with architects"

Collaborations have become a mainstay of Longchamp during Delafontaine's tenure, with Turner-nominated artist Tracey Emin, Japanese design firm Nendo, Hood By Air design director Shayne Oliver and British designer Thomas Heatherwick all producing highly-publicised collections for the brand in the past three decades.

The key to managing these collaborations successfully, Delafontaine says, is "to keep the DNA of Longchamp" – in most cases, the structure and design of a Longchamp bag – while introducing "the DNA of the people [the brand] is collaborating with".

"The idea is for [collaborations] to feel both Longchamp and their universe," she says. "I don't like to impose too many restrictions because, for me, the idea is really to catch as much of that creativity as I can."

"The only restriction is our capability to produce it. It's always a challenge, but it's a great challenge for our know-how."

One such designer who challenged the brand's ability to produce was Heatherwick, whose 2004 Zip Bag was "very hard" to realise, Delafointaine recalls.

A zip wound in horizontal concentric rings ran the length of the cowhide leather bag, allowing it to expand and contract like an accordion.

"It was really nearly like an architectural bag," Delafontaine explained, citing the malleability of leather as counterintuitive to Heatherwick's carefully engineered design.

"And Thomas also has a very precise vision," she added. "So it was super hard, but we were very happy to be able to make it."

Though now a rare find on resale sites, the bag that Heatherwick pitched and produced for Longchamp was the beginning of a long-running relationship, which saw the British designer commissioned to design the brand's global flagship store in Manhattan in 2006.

Now, Delafontaine says, Heatherwick is currently in the process of completing a "very surprising" renovation of the same store.

The Heatherwick collaboration wasn't Longchamp's first foray into architecture: the brand tapped French architect Paul Andreu, the lead architect on Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, to design a bag for its 50th anniversary in the late nineties.

"It's hard to collaborate with architects," she admitted. "They are used to doing hard things and I am used to doing soft."

"So sometimes it's difficult because their product is going to stay exactly as it is. My products are going to live."

Toiletpaper is a "very optimistic, playful vision of life"

If architecture is an outlier for Delafontaine, then Longchamp's latest collaboration with art title Toiletpaper has a richer precedent.

It follows on from collections with Emin – which Delfontaine cites as the brand's "first major collaboration" – Swedish-French graffiti artist André Saraiva and American-British artist Sarah Morris.

"I think [art] is a way of being creative without constraints, which is not my case as a designer – I create with constraints," says Delafontaine.

"Of course, I've been following Toiletpaper for a very long time. It's really a very optimistic, playful vision of life, which I really love and which is also something I try to input when creating at Longchamp."

Founded in 2010 by Italian artist and photographer duo Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, the bi-annual photo magazine is known for highly saturated images that satirise the zeitgeist.

Toiletpaper's designs for Longchamp's Le Pliage range feature everything from a French bulldog smoking an archival Longchamp pipe designed by Delafontaine's grandfather to a flying horse.

Despite its many modern reinventions, Longchamp has retained the same logo for the past 70 years – a jockey on a galloping racehorse that nods to the origin of the brand's name, which Delafontaine's grandfather borrowed from the Longchamp Racecourse in Paris.

"I think we have an emblem that is speaking about what Longchamp really is," says Delafontaine. "He's a winner."

Asked why the brand has chosen to keep the same logo, she replied: "Well, because we like it."

The photography is courtesy of Longchamp.

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Over-reliance on AI tools for architecture like floor-plan generators could result in boring buildings, Online Lab of Architecture co-founder Daniel Escobar tells Dezeen in this interview.

While the most popular use of artificial intelligence (AI) in architecture and design today is for creating visualisations with text-to-image models such as Midjourney, building configurators such as LookX and 3DGuru are beginning to enter the market.

Online Lab of Architecture (OLA) co-founder Escobar warned that too much dependency on these kinds of technologies could result in the human touch being lost from design.

"There's still the issue of having that custom or very tailored design approach that design firms have," Escobar explained.

"You would get these generic, typical developer base buildings, where they just optimise it for a certain specific efficiency. That will be one of the things to look out for."

"It's like the age of the internet"

For this reason, he doesn't think architects will lose out to AI. This has been a hot topic in the industry ever since New York-based designer Sebastian Errazuriz caused a stir with his claim that 90 per cent of architects could lose their jobs to machines in 2019.

Design technology firm RevitGods also recently conducted a survey that found that 55 per cent of US architects were "moderately concerned" about being replaced by AI in the future.

Escobar is less pessimistic. He believes that architecture will continue to be defined by human-to-human interactions but with some tasks delegated to AI.

"Architecture is a very nonlinear, iterative feedback loop of ideas, questions, suggestions, and conversations back and forth between people," he explained.

"I would actually want to see [AI] be used more to automate parts of it that we don't like doing as much or that take too much time."

Escobar is a designer specialising in architecture and machine learning, with his studio OLA focused on exploring the intersection between ​​artificial intelligence (AI) and construction.

He also runs the popular Instagram page Diffusion Architecture, which explores the "most unique concepts of architecture imagined by AI artists".

He believes AI has the potential to be as influential as the internet, but is hopeful that its impact will be predominantly positive.

"I'm pretty optimistic that we're going to see a lot of good things come out of [AI]," Escobar said.

"The people that I know exploring this technology, they're definitely doing more good than bad," he continued.

"It's like the age of the internet. We didn't know what was going to happen and now the internet is used worldwide and it's one of the most useful technologies that we have."

"I don't think AI knows what humans like"

Escobar's current focus is on the use of AI for developing 3D architectural models with specific aesthetics.

He predicts that this could become one of the areas in which architects using AI could become commonplace.

"If they can get automated, that would be really helpful because then it lets architects focus on the more creative parts and having better discussions with clients," said Escobar.

"After all, we do design for humans. And as far as I know, I don't think AI knows what humans like," he continued. "We're not there yet."

To ensure AI has a positive impact on humanity, Escobar said it is important for developers to question their motives and weigh up the potential impacts of their creations.

"One of the questions that I always have is: what are we trying to optimise for, what are we trying to automate?" Escobar said.

"And by automating certain things, who does that impact – what kind of people does that impact? Or is it something that we can all benefit from, or what does it displace? And then how do we balance that?"

He believes that designing within these parameters will be especially important when it comes to the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI, sometimes dubbed "God-like AI", typically refers to a computer being able to perform any intellectual task that a human can. All AI systems currently in existence are narrow AI, only able to complete specific tasks.

"I don't think we should be scared"

"I don't think we should be scared [of AGI], but we should definitely put thought into what we want to optimise," said Escobar.

"Do we want a massive AGI that just does everything for us?" he asked. "I think the scary part will be if a company does have control of it, then what do we do?"

"It always comes back down to the humans who have control over it," Escobar said.

The fears surrounding AGI, such as it leading to humans becoming obsolete or even extinct, are often what come to mind when people think about AI.

However, Escobar highlighted that humanity is "still a big way from" a computer this powerful, and that right now focus should be on discovering the opportunities and addressing issues in narrow AI.

This is the same view as Sony's AI ethicist Alice Xiang, who recently told Dezeen that killer robots and god-like computers are far from the most pressing threats posed by AI.

The images are courtesy of OLA.

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AItopia

This article is part of Dezeen's AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

The post "I don't think AI knows what humans like" says Daniel Escobar appeared first on Dezeen.

Designing using artificial intelligence is a fundamentally new form of creativity that is tantamount to an evolution of our species, AI-specialist architect and designer Arturo Tedeschi tells Dezeen in this interview.

Tedeschi argued that for the first time in history, developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have allowed humans to abandon their hands as design tools and instead create using thought alone.

"It's the first time probably in history where we stop being monkeys," Tedeschi told Dezeen.

"When we work with 3D-modelling tools and algorithms we are still using a mouse," he continued. "We were still humans, of course, but also some kind of monkey because we use our hands and our fingers."

Instead, designing using AI is an entirely intellectual process, he said, consisting of a two-way communication between the human designer and the system that marks a profound shift in the creative process.

"For the first time, we [are] actually starting to communicate with the computer in order to get something back," he explained.

"I realised that we were abandoning the hands in order to have a new kind of human-computer interface that was mind-blowing to me."

"We are experiencing a very fast evolution of these tools"

Tedeschi is a Milan-based architect and computational designer who first started working with algorithmic-aided design in 2004.

He has since worked as a consultant offering services relating to AI, algorithmic modelling and digital fabrication, as well as creating concepts for Milan's trams and collaborating with Ross Lovegrove on a footwear project.

In 2022, Tedeschi was selected by leading AI lab OpenAI to test the early systems of its image-generating model, DALL-E 2.

Tedeschi noted the fast development of AI and believes that, if the rate of advancement continues, diffusion models such as DALL-E and Midjourney will soon be able to transform text or sketches into 3D works.

"It's very important to say that we are experiencing a very fast evolution of these tools."

"The next step will probably be diffusion models that will maybe turn text or sketches into 3D and that will be really game-changing for a lot of industries."

Tedeschi recently used AI to assist with the beginning phases and ideation of designing a stage for a musician. He said that through using AI systems he was able to "expand his vocabulary" and think outside of the box.

According to Tedeschi, humans have begun to neglect ideation and the initial stages of creative conception when designing. He believes AI advancements will help to bring ideation back to the forefront of the creative process.

"AI is separating ideation and process," he said. "Even more centrally to ideation, we can see the absence of human beings and improvement."

"I guess that we've failed on so many levels during the last 50 years because we forget about ideation and we focus only on process," he added.

"The problem with process is that you are totally absorbed by the present without thinking about the future. I'm sure that the future of our profession will see a change in its DNA."

"We probably will enter a new creative area where it will be very important to have a story to tell rather than a process to apply."

"I'm not scared AI will kill humanity"

AI is delivering a new design language that represents a departure from existing popular aesthetics, Tedeschi added.

"There will probably exist a new race, a new breed of designers," he said. "This is something that is already happening, if you open Instagram or you go on LinkedIn or Pinterest, you can see this new language and new design solutions."

"I guess it will be a new world super-rich of symbols, more colourful probably – or if not, more colourful in a metaphoric way – rich in terms of stimuli, and for sure we are probably moving from this kind of minimalistic aesthetics into something new."

He warns that being slow to adopt and adapt to AI could see people in the creative industries suffer.

"When AI developers say we have to slow down, we need to somehow curb the evolution, to me it is because people are not prepared for the incredible change in so many areas."

"This is just my opinion, of course. I'm not scared that AI will kill humanity. I'm scared maybe or concerned about the effect in so many areas since AI will shorten [processes]."

"People that will not be able to embrace this change will probably suffer under this new change," he said. "This is completely new for human beings."

The images are courtesy of Arturo Tedeschi.

AItopia

This article is part of Dezeen's AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

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Visualisation artist Charlotte Taylor discusses how she is translating her digital design work into built architecture projects for the first time in this interview.

Taylor is the founder of 3D-design studio Maison de Sable, where she collaborates with other 3D designers on renderings of imaginary, fantastical interiors and buildings.

Recently Taylor's designs have become less fantasy-driven and closer to real spaces, with some of them set to get built as physical architecture projects.

"In the long term, I'd like to move more into architecture," Taylor told Dezeen.

Having not pursued formal architecture training, the designer believes there should be more non-traditional pathways to designing buildings.

"I didn't train in architecture at all," she said. "I think it would be great if there were more entries into architecture because it's such a hard career to get into."

"I'd like to think that there's hope that you can get into building physical spaces through unconventional means."

One of Taylor's designs due to be built is Casa Atibaia, a house that was originally conceived as an imaginary project in collaboration with designer Nicholas Préaud.

The duo imagined the house situated by the Atibaia River in São Paulo, creating a digital model of part of the riverbank based on information from Google Maps.

From this, Taylor and Préaud designed a concrete and glass fantasy home raised on huge boulders, the interior of which features on the front cover of Taylor's first book, Design Dreams, published last month.

Although the project was not originally intended to be built, Taylor is now in the process of finding a plot of land suitable to actualise the design.

Taylor has also collaborated with architectural designer Andrew Trotter on a house in Utah, which forms part of Trotter's wider design for a hotel and retreat centre named Paréa.

The house, which is currently under construction, was designed to blend into the desert landscape with large spans of glazing and walls finished in lime plaster.

According to Taylor her fictional designs have received a mixed response from architects, with some saying that "in the real world, it doesn't work like that".

But for Taylor, not having an architecture degree and exploring spatial design digitally without being constrained by lighting, noise, safety and budget requirements allows for more creativity.

"It acts as a sort of creative playground for me in which I can test out all these concepts and see how they work visually," said Taylor.

"Then bringing that into the physical world and working with engineers and architects, it becomes pared down."

"I think not having architectural education makes you find different solutions or ideas to bring to the real world that wouldn't have come from just designing an actual space," she added.

The designer mentioned that her design icon Carlo Scarpa also never became a licenced architect.

"My icon, Carlo Scarpa, never had his full qualification, so there are little stories that inspire me, but the general thinking is quite rigid – this particular entry is a bit frowned upon from what I've experienced," said Taylor.

Having learned most of her design skills from experimenting with digital design and collaborating with other designers, Taylor describes herself as "self-studious" and encourages other designers to create work that they feel best represents themselves.

"Strive to build a portfolio that excites you and represents you the most," Taylor said.

"Through building a portfolio and working with 3D designers and architects was how I learnt – it's very research-heavy."

Taylor's Design Dreams book features 3D designs of buildings and interiors created by herself and other artists.

The curation includes fantasy-like environments as well as renderings of interiors that appear like real, tangible spaces.

"[The book] became a space in which to share my personal projects, the artists I work with and work I admire around the field of interiors and architecture," said Taylor.

Although most of the images are already widely shared online, by collating them all into one volume Taylor hopes readers will enjoy getting lost in the printed format.

"The same way that the Instagram page acts where people go to get lost in the images, to have that in a physical format means you are able to spend more time in detail than you can on a phone screen," she said.

"To take something digital that doesn't exist in the physical world and bring it to print was quite important for me, to see it in that way," the designer added.

Although they work in the digital sphere, Taylor maintains that 3D-visual creators play a part in interior design trends.

"The arts trends that happen in 3D gradually make their way into interior spaces, and it's really interesting to see the Pinterest effect," she said.

"People love to collect images and make their ideal moodboard with them, and these spaces really play into that. People are constructing their own ideas and making architecture and interiors more accessible rather than something very professional."

In her own interior visual designs, Taylor includes elements from her actual home to make the spaces feel more relatable than traditional architecture renderings.

"It's down to the construction of the images, they have this sort of lightning and familiarity, and we always put little props that will often be things from my home," she said.

"These little details make it lived-in and more relatable versus traditional architectural visualisation, which can be very sterile and not aesthetically relatable."

Taylor has also previously worked on various NFT projects, including a video artwork informed by an OMA-design sculpture and NFT capsules that contain digital images of fantasy architecture projects.

The images are by Charlotte Taylor unless stated.

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Artificial intelligence could give rise to a "neoclassical futurist" architecture style and will become "an everyday tool of necessity", says designer Tim Fu in this interview for our AItopia series.

Architectural designer Fu, who works extensively in artificial intelligence (AI), showed his project The AI Stone Carver – a collaboration with stone mason Till Apfel – at the Borders Venice Architectural Art Fair earlier this year.

The project saw Fu generate a series of column capitals using AI image generator Midjourney that were then hand-carved in stone by Apfel. It is an example of how AI can combine different concepts, according to Fu, who thinks this is AI's main strength.

"AI's best ability is to fuse things," Fu told Dezeen. "So if you take two distinct concepts that are very recognisable and you fuse them, that hybridism would give you this very successful and unique result that is also novel."

This could be especially interesting when it comes to architecture, according to the designer.

"The ability to fuse classical architecture and futuristic architecture could be like neo-classical futurism, new fusions that never existed," he said. "It's what I call hybridism, which is a very unique concept."

By using AI design tools, Fu believes that architects could create modern buildings that hark back to more classical designs.

"I hope to usher in more ornamentation and move away from the minimalism that was ushered in by the industrial revolution," he explained.

"The industrial revolution was about human ideation and machine fabrication," he added.

"Finally, AI allowed us to put the machine at the ideation phase, so that potentially we can use human fabrication instead and revert the role of the two."

The hand-carved stone project is an example of this, according to Fu.

"We're flipping the narrative – it's now machine ideation and human fabrication. And that can potentially usher in a new sort of design narrative that has never been thoroughly explored," he said.

Much of the criticism against AI has focused on this idea that the creative control would be held by a machine, leaving humans to do the physical work. But Fu doesn't see this as a negative, arguing that human handicraft cannot be replaced.

"Handicraft such as carving stone is very human and it's also millennia of human knowledge," he said.

"It's well-respected as a profession and machines to this day cannot carve anything better than a human hand."

He believes that letting AI do the designs would free architects and designers up to create more innovative ornamental buildings.

"We love Renaissance cathedrals so much, yet we're building boxes everywhere," Fu said.

"So why not bring back ornamentation, bring back the beauty and the aesthetics that we once held so highly in the classical era, and also allow machines to continue to fabricate and produce feasibly for us and free us up to do the more intricate and beautiful parts?" he added.

"It is what we do with parametricism as well; we're celebrating maximalism and trying to bring back these essential beauties that we see in old architecture."

Fu thinks of the hybridist AI style as "neoclassical futurism" and has written a manifesto on the concept.

"AI, under the thoughtful control of the designer, can elevate classical styles into contemporary contexts, giving rise to what I believe to be the unique style to be described as neoclassical futurism," the manifesto states.

"This style holds the promise to flourish in the coming days as AI becomes more prominently used in design."

"Through AI and the emergence of neoclassical futurism, we potentially stand on the brink of a new era of architectural innovation, where the past and future converge in exciting and unanticipated ways."

The designer recently used the AI tool LookX to turn crumpled paper into buildings that look like they were designed by starchitects including Frank Gehry.

LookX was first founded in China as XKool by Wanyu He before the English-language version of the platform was launched, and Fu believes that China could eventually become a world leader in AI tools.

"China has huge amounts of resource," he said. "So it's one of the few instances I think, like TikTok, where a Chinese company can actually take monopoly over something."

"I think China is an interesting case when it comes to their economy and their growth," Fu said.

"They don't get enough credit by the media, but really they're starting to become a hub of innovation, surprisingly," he added. "My opinion of China used to be negative, but it has proven itself to really, really stand up in the innovation sector."

"They are booming in the tech industry of their own and innovation, so it's not surprising to see them trying to not only come up to par but compete and replace things like Midjourney with their own version, which in my experience right now is superior."

Eventually, AI will become an "everyday tool of necessity," Fu believes.

"There's an overarching concern with all of AI development with the public with regards to AI replacing us," he said.

"And I would always allude to historical precedence, like with any technology that has come – it will obviously replace certain elements of our task, but at the same time, it will transform our industry and where we focus," he added.

"Our human input will be reallocated, as opposed to being replaced."

The images are courtesy of Tim Fu.

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AItopia

This article is part of Dezeen's AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

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Materials can become a much bigger part of our everyday lives and the way we see the world if people are willing to give up mass production, Natural Material Studio founder Bonnie Hvillum tells Dezeen in this interview.

Hvillum and her Copenhagen-based design and research studio have been pushing at the boundaries of what's possible with different materials since 2018.

From charcoal-based garments to crockery made of surplus seafood shells, Natural Material Studio creates bespoke products using its own-developed biomaterials.

"Mass-produced materials are so homogenous"

"I prefer working from a 'leftover' kind of aspect," explained Hvillum, whose ethos revolves around a circular approach.

"I want materials to play an active role in our way of understanding the world," she told Dezeen. "I feel like we have become too familiar and comfortable.

"It's become too convenient with mass production – mass-produced materials are so homogenous and so refined. Machinery textiles are just the same when they come out, there's no variation," the designer added.

"We've had an industrial process where materials have become quite neutral, in a way. I just feel like they have so much more to give and they can be part of shaping how we think, talk about and perceive the world."

Natural Material Studio uses a combination of simple mechanical machinery – such as a process similar to "whipping cream" when creating its biodegradable B-foam – and more manual techniques.

For example, Procel is a home-compostable, protein-based bioplastic of natural softener and pigments developed by the studio that is made into sheets using hand casting.

"It's the handcrafted aspects that make the materials so special," said Hvillum, referencing the random and unique patterns that emerge on the surface of the materials produced by the studio.

Hvillum's belief is that this approach to making things can highlight the inherent value in their materiality. Sustainable design, she said, should only be "a base point".

"I'm more curious to talk about what these materials actually do," she added.

"How they affect us, what they make us think and do and how they can be part of transforming the world instead of just [approaching design] with this linear thinking of replacing materials with existing ones – although of course that is also needed."

"I needed that connection with the physical world"

Educated primarily as an interaction designer, Hvillum previously founded a consultancy called Social Design Lab.

The now-defunct company assisted professional organisations, including political parties, with "how they could think more holistically, or 'circular', as we call it today, in all aspects of resources including human and material resources," according to the designer.

"I wasn't critical of things. It was very much facilitating processes and advising and strategies and stuff. I needed that connection with the physical world," reflected Hvillum, explaining her decision to launch Natural Material Studio.

Despite the shift, Hvillum stressed that human interaction is still at the core of her practice.

"I'm very curious about and absorbed in what we could almost call the cognitive aspects of these unconscious processes that we have in our brain. Like, why do we experience some materials in this way and others in that way?"

During the most recent edition of Milan design week, the studio showcased Brick Textiles – stretchy panels made from a combination of Procel and highly porous repurposed bricks that were classified as waste after demolition projects.

The project, which is defined by uncharacteristically "soft" bricks, proposes fresh ways of thinking about an existing resource, according to Hvillum.

Hvillum is optimistic that a change in the way consumers and designers think about materials is possible.

"It's so inspiring speaking to young people because they really see the world differently," she said.

"These changes that we're seeing around social equality – fluidness in terms of genders, for example – all these things are also very inspiring when we talk about design and architecture and art, because it makes us start to understand that these fields can be fluid and equal, too."

"I feel these movements that we're seeing on the more cultural and societal and social levels could actually inform us in ways within design and architecture – but only if we are listening."

The photography is courtesy of Natural Material Studio.

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Multidisciplinary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei tells Dezeen why he thinks all objects have political significance in this exclusive interview.

Known worldwide for his use of art as a tool for activism, Ai has created decades' worth of projects spanning a range of media – from architecture and film to installations and performance art.

The artist recently presented his first design-focused exhibition, called Making Sense, at London's Design Museum. It featured vast collections of thousands of found objects, ranging from Stone Age weapons to crowd-sourced Lego bricks.

"Even daring to name anything is political"

"Every object, if it can be recognised or has a name or a definition, is a political work," Ai told Dezeen at the museum. "Because of our judgment about values, even daring to name anything is a political act."

The political energy of the object comes from the user or observer, who will respond to it differently based on their own lived experience, Ai explained.

"We see things differently," he said. "Someone from London may see something in a different way to someone from Africa or from Asia."

"We are products of given conditions – our practice, our ability, even our knowledge or definition of ourselves. And so it's really the reaction of a given condition."

Born in Beijing in 1957, Ai has created work with a consistent political angle throughout his career. In particular, the artist is openly critical of the Chinese government. He has often expressed his belief that the country's architecture is stagnating under its Chinese Communist Party leadership.

While Ai collaborated with architecture studio Herzog & de Meuron to create the National Stadium – the main arena for the 2008 Beijing Olympics – he later distanced himself from the project in direct protest against the Chinese state.

Among Ai's artworks that challenge his native country's government is Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn – a 1995 black-and-white photography series that shows the artist dropping and smashing a Han Dynasty-era urn, which was around 2,000 years old at the time. The project aims to criticise the destruction of countless antiques during China's Cultural Revolution that began in 1966.

Despite this political focus, Ai said that he is cautious about pigeonholing his own artwork – or anything else – into distinct categories, including art or design.

"The problem with categorising is [it is] trying to take a shortcut. When people like to use fixed ideas, those concepts become emptier and emptier. It is truly a problem."

He argued that categorising things in this way "is an issue of education first", particularly citing the limitations that can arise from a lack of multidisciplinary learning at institutions such as schools and universities.

"You're trying to quickly tell people that [only] certain vocabularies are safe to use. But very often you see people use empty words. Because [these terms don't] really relate to emotions, consciousness or self-interpretation under judgment," reflected Ai.

"So we are living in a fast food, plastic or AI [artificial intelligence] world," he added. "We become handicapped."

"We still know very little about humanity"

The artist highlights the plights of various marginalised people in his projects, having previously installed three cage-like structures in New York City in protest against then-president Donald Trump's strict border-control measures, and created a wall of 2,000 life jackets in Québec that were worn by Syrian refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea.

"Human environments are never really fully developed or protected," he said. "Most of the time [they are] ruined by education, even with all the good intentions."

"We still know very little about humanity," added the artist.

Ai expressed his interest in the process of creating artwork, rather than solely appreciating the physical end result.

"A process itself is to recognise yourself and to make judgments about your approach," he explained.

Considering the value of creativity, Ai argued that "we are all born with the same ability" to create art, but that "art can never really be taught but can only be untaught" by our education systems.

"To do art is very different to becoming an artist because artists as professionals are selling works to support themselves. And very often, they're all bad," he said.

"And of course, when they [the artists] become sophisticated that's when they have to find a new language to illustrate the complexity of their thinking. But the ones who call themselves artists very often relate to public assumptions. So, it's not so pure, it's very much informed by the market."

Despite this, Ai confirmed his faith in the communal benefits of using art as a form of self-expression.

"I think it's part of humanity. If anybody does not really care about that, I think that is probably the biggest waste."

The images are courtesy of the Design Museum unless otherwise stated. 

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The next generation of designers will need to account for a crisis of sexuality and should aim for an asexual design language, French designer Philippe Starck tells Dezeen in this interview.

Speaking at the release of a new collection of furniture for Spanish brand Andreu World, Starck said that his designs have approached a variety of problems from the ecological to the social, but that the biggest challenge for contemporary design is sexuality.

"Asexuality will be the biggest revolution"

Starck's Stories Collection for Andreu World features wooden furniture with soft edges that can be constructed from a pack without hardware, fitting together "like a puzzle".

He said the collection is indicative of a durable minimalism that represents a more "asexual" design aesthetic.

"I have fought all my life against macho products," Starck told Dezeen, which he said has included making designs oriented towards women, but also people "not interested in sex", seemingly in reference to gender identity.

"I have worked a lot to kill the macho side. To make products more woman-friendly and for 15 years, I've made products for gender-fluid."

"I work a lot for the people not interested in sex," he continued, citing his unisex perfume line, Peau d'Amour, as an example.

"Asexuality will be the biggest revolution because people today feel very alone," he added. "That's why, when I can, I try to design […] by taking sex completely out."

"The market of asexuality will be so revolutionary because everything we have produced in the world is driven by sexuality, everything. What will be human production without sexuality? That is very, very interesting."

Starck recently released a design for a skyscraper in Ecuador. Asked about the well-known phallic connotations of the form, he responded by saying that "Dubai is obsolete."

"This type of city was made for bad reasons, made to show power, to show money, mainly to wash money," he added.

Besides his interest in design less influenced by sex and gender, Starck said that he is still focused on ecological and democratic design as demonstrated by his recent work for Andreu World.

The furniture collection is constructed using plywood, with no glues or screws. He insisted that through this design he has arrived at "the maximum of ecology to a piece of furniture".

According to the designer, this line and others, like his series of bioplastic chairs for Kartell, are addressing the problem of affordable furniture that is not made of plastic.

Plastic "not good"

"I have made my career with plastic because it was the most ecological product – because when you used something created by humanity, which comes from fossils, and you don't kill trees, or you don't kill animals, it's super moral," he said. "Now we know it's not good."

Starck said that his drive to keep creating furniture despite questions of overproduction arises from the need to continually solve new problems, of which the sexual, ecological and affordable are just a few.

"You want to make something which you can be proud of – to make things well," he said.

Starck has also recently revealed designs for a school in Qatar and a furniture line for Italian homeware brand Alessi.

The photography is courtesy of Andreu World.

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Plastic has a crucial role to play in the battle against climate change, according to Thomas Drustrup, managing director of the Danish trade association for plastics.

Speaking to Dezeen in Copenhagen, the Danish Plastics Federation CEO said that people need to understand that plastics can have a positive impact on the planet if used correctly.

"Plastic has an image problem," he told Dezeen. "Plastic is a great material, but we need to make sure it doesn't end up in nature."

"We need to make sure we use it in the right places," he added.

Drustrup points to plastic's role in the shift toward green energy as a key example.

He said the material is essential in the development of wind and solar power solutions, which can enable a move away from using fossil fuels for energy.

"When we look at most oil consumption, it's for heating, energy and transportation, which together accounts for around 80 to 90 per cent," he stated.

"We want to move in a sustainable direction with wind power and solar. To do that, we need plastics," he continued.

"You can't build an effective windmill without fibreglass wings, for example."

Use plastic "where it makes sense"

The Danish Plastics Federation, also known as Plastindustrien, represents 270 plastic-producing companies including toy brand Lego and medical manufacturer Coloplast.

Dezeen spoke to Drustrup during the UIA World Congress of Architects, a conference centred around how the building industry can combat climate change, increase biodiversity and promote social inclusion.

The Danish Plastics Federation's contribution was the Plastic Pavilion, one of 15 SDG Pavilions built in Copenhagen to demonstrate sustainable construction practices.

Designed by architects Terroir, the pavilion was built almost entirely out of plastic, and mostly recycled plastic. Inside, it showcased applications where the Danish Plastics Federation believes plastic is the most suitable material.

These include for the medical industry, construction and food packaging.

"We want to tell a story about where plastic does make sense," Drustrup said.

"If we design it right, we have a great material that can be reused and recycled. What we don't need is products that we just make for convenience or to just use plastic without thinking because it's cheap."

"There are a lot of possibilities"

The demountable Plastic Pavilion was framed by I-beams made from glass-reinforced plastic, also known as fibreglass. These sat on 3D-printed "feet" made from a mix of recycled plastic and wood, filled with stones that weighed them down.

"There are a lot of possibilities that we want to show architects," said Drustrup.

"Fibreglass is stronger than steel, much more lightweight, and much more flexible in its use, so it's easier to reuse."

Drustrup is sceptical about the potential of bioplastics to replace oil-based plastics, highlighting claims that bioplastics could potentially be worse for the environment than conventional plastics.

He believes that advocating for bioplastics can have a negative impact, as it encourages people to treat the material as disposable.

Instead, he is optimistic that advancements in chemical recycling will make it increasingly easier to recycle oil-based plastics, reducing the need to extract oil from the ground.

"I don't think it will be in my lifetime that we'll be making plastics fossil-free," he said, "but we are going to get there."

Pandemic proved need for plastic

Drustrup highlights the Covid-19 pandemic, when plastic enabled the production of billions of test kits worldwide, as a turning point in proving plastic's ongoing importance to society.

The claim comes in spite of the estimated 26,000 tonnes of plastic waste that ended up in the world's oceans as a result of the coronavirus response.

The problem, Drustrup argues, is not the material itself but the systems in place for dealing with it after use.

The Danish Plastics Federation recently published a strategy document titled Responsible Plastics Production, which outlines how the plastics industry can tackle the issue of plastic waste.

"We as a society need to pay attention to how we use our resources," he concluded.

"As someone said to me, plastic doesn't have feet, arms or wings. So if it ends up in nature, it's probably because we put it there. The challenge for us is to make sure that doesn't happen."

Plastic Pavilion was on show from 19 June to 14 July 2023. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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With IKEA turning 80 this year, Dezeen spoke to its global design managers Eva Lilja Löwenhielm and Johan Ejdemo about AI, working with external designers and why it remains a "unique low-price brand".

Löwenhielm and Ejdemo oversee Swedish furniture brand IKEA's 23 in-house designers, as well as the 200-or-so freelance designers that help create its 2,000-2,500 new products per year.

While some design to specific pitches for different areas of the home, Löwenhielm and Ejdemo also work with teams that are looking further ahead.

"Some designers give us pitches or are in close collaboration with our business areas, and then we also work with what we call collections, where we are more explorative or curious about things," Löwenhielm said.

"We are in some early exploration projects as well, where we're working with our innovation teams and looking into things that are maybe five to 10 years ahead."

As well as creating in-house collections, IKEA also frequently collaborates with outside designers and recently worked with Dutch designer Sabine Marcelis on the Varmblixt collection.

According to Löwenhielm and Ejdemo, this is symptomatic of the brand's curiosity about designs that differ from its own.

"We are curious about other expressions that we don't normally do, or that are questioning," Löwenhielm said. "And those depend on the collaborators. So that is the beginning – why do we do this collaboration together?"

"An example could be a curiosity about how we bring light into the home in a different way," added Ejdemo. "It might be quite close to what we do, but still have a very specific point of view."

"We will continue to evolve in the ways we collaborate, and the portfolio of collaborations might look different in the future than it has in the past – most probably it will because we try to improve as well."

The brand's designs have often been adapted and copied, with a number of companies offering their own designs that can be used to refurbish existing IKEA products – something that Ejdemo sees as a positive thing.

"I personally have a very positive view of it. We enable creativity and we enable creative solutions at home," he said.

These adaptations can also help the IKEA team understand what people want from their products, according to the design managers.

"We probably learn a lot ourselves about things that we might not be doing that we should be doing," Ejdemo said.

"But those solutions that we refer to, they wouldn't fit in our vision of being affordable – they often become extremely expensive, and can take a lot of time before you get them."

In the past few years, IKEA has closed a number of its larger stores and created smaller locations in city centres including a car-free store in Vienna with a gridded facade and a Copenhagen store with a rooftop park that is set to open this year.

The brand is also set to open a store on London's Oxford Street this autumn.

This change from larger out-of-town stores to smaller stores hasn't affected the way in which the products are designed, according to the design manager duo.

"We still have the same design principles and we try to be where people are," Ejdemo said.

While customers are now perhaps more likely to see the products online before going to an IKEA store, the one thing that has been affected is the brand's logistics.

"The only change we're working towards is making the size of the packaging more accessible for online sales," said Löwenhielm. "We have always tried to minimise the material use and be smart."

"With IKEA, you always design [products] to fit into a box," Ejdemo said. "We don't want to transport air, that sits within sustainability and costs as well."

"It's in the DNA when doing an IKEA product design – you cannot do the design without having an idea of how it can be broken down to fit into packaging," he added.

In the past year, artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to have an increasing impact on the architecture and design industries, with architecture studios, including Zaha Hadid Architects, using it to get inspiration for projects.

Among the design outfits to have used it is Space10, IKEA's research collective, which recently created a concept for a foldable couch.

The technology has also been picked up by the designers working with Löwenhielm and Ejdemo.

"The design team is playing around with it already because they play around with everything new, that's just the nature of who they are," Ejdemo said.

"[Not using it] would be as wrong as saying that photography wouldn't be interesting for us because we are painting such realistic pictures," he added. "Obviously, we are curious about what's coming in the future."

The company recently celebrated its 80th anniversary with an exhibition at Milan design week that looked at IKEA's past as well as its future.

"We always get the question of what has to change and how to stay relevant, " Ejdemo said. "We are always reflecting the society that we are in."

"But there are also a lot of things in IKEA that are a constant – we know we have a vision, we know who we are: we are for many, maybe not for everyone," he added.

"We have an idea that is to make products that are affordable. If our products make you happy, help you imagine how to solve something in your home and don't put a big hole in your wallet, that's kind of what we do under our vision."

While mass-production often carries negative connotations, Ejdemo argued that IKEA sees it as an opportunity to drive progress and influence industries.

"For us, [mass-production is] a possibility to drive progress and change and actually influence industries to improve and become better," he added. "Low-price is an outcome of doing that more efficiently."

"I usually say that we are a low-price band but not any low-price brand, we are a very unique low-price brand with a very unique point of view on what we do," Ejdemo said.

"There are very few companies that invest as much in design as we do at IKEA."

"We're also a progressive company that wants to lean forward, like [with] AI, and I'm sure there will be mistakes there as well," Ejdemo added.

"But we are a company that encourages mistakes, as long as we don't repeat them."

The photography is courtesy of IKEA.

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Killer robots and god-like computers are far from the most pressing threats posed by artificial intelligence, AI ethicist Alice Xiang tells Dezeen in this interview.

Instead she argues the industry must first focus on tackling the more immediate, insidious harms AI is already causing by entrenching societal biases and inequalities.

"As an AI ethicist, I often get the question, 'is your job to prevent killer robots?'," said Xiang, a leading researcher and global head of AI ethics at technology company Sony.

"And I'm personally less concerned about that scenario where it's very obvious what the harm is," she added. "I'm more concerned about some of the invisible harms that tend to fly under the radar."

People might have "no recourse" against biased AI

There have already been several highly publicised cases in which algorithms were found to be biased against marginalised groups such as women and people of colour – often down to the skewed data on which they are trained.

And as AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous, especially in contexts as high-stakes as healthcare, employment and law enforcement, Xiang warns these biases could compound upon themselves to create an increasingly unequal society.

"It's very possible that over time, a lot of people could be living as second-class citizens in a society of AI, where systematically models might not work well for them or might be biased against them," she said.

"And they might have no idea or no recourse to actually do anything about this, especially if the AI models work well for people in power."

Designing out these existing algorithmic biases, Xiang argues, should take precedence over more far-off threats such as human-competitive algorithms, which several industry open letters and op-eds published in recent months have warned might one day "outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us".

"Compared to a lot of existential threats, there are a lot of decisions that would have to be made in order for AI to destroy humanity," Xiang said.

"I think we aren't actually at the point where we need to be focusing primarily on the very long-term speculative harms," she added.

"The mechanism by which we prevent those is by starting in the here and now, in terms of identifying these very concrete, currently existing harms and mitigating or preventing them."

Algorithmic bias "still not systematically fixed"

The issue of algorithmic bias first entered the public discourse in the second half of the last decade, most famously when Google's Photos app was found to be mislabelling photos of Black people as gorillas in 2015.

Since then, similar issues have sprung up across all different industries, with Amazon forced to ditch its recruitment algorithm because it systemically favoured male candidates over female ones, while a Nature study exposed how millions of Black people had suffered from the "rampant racism" of healthcare algorithms in US hospitals.

Similarly, an algorithm used by US courts to predict defendants' likelihood of re-offending – and therefore help determine their sentencing – was found to be biased against Black people, mislabelling them as "high risk" at nearly twice the rate as white defendants.

Xiang herself began researching AI ethics in 2014 after discovering that a machine learning model she was helping to develop as an intern at LinkedIn was trained on skewed data.

In the hopes of tackling these issues, major industry players including Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft banded together in 2016 to form the non-profit Partnership on AI, with the aim to set out ethical best practices for the development of artificial intelligence.

But today, eight years after the Google Photos incident, Xiang says the industry has still not found a systematic fix. The only solution offered by Google was to stop anything from being labelled as a gorilla – including an actual gorilla.

"It's still not been systematically fixed," said Xiang, who served on the leadership team of the Partnership on AI in 2020.

"There's been a lot of progress in terms of our understanding of these issues and research into it, but there aren't any silver bullets yet," she explained. "Bias is going to continue to be a problem that we're going to have to chip away at."

"I think for certain areas, the solution is: there are things that AI maybe should not be delving into at the moment, given its current abilities."

Image generators are not exempt 

The rise of generative AIs, including chatbots like ChatGPT and text-to-image generators such as DALL-E and Midjourney, is also opening the door to a new kind of representational bias amongst algorithms.

That's because they tend to reproduce any racist and sexist stereotypes found in the texts and images used to train them, studies suggest.

"For example, if you put a simple prompt like 'firefighter' into an image generator, are all the images that are generated of men and maybe particularly Caucasian men?" Xiang said.

"Pretty much all of them suffer from these kinds of problems," she added. "And as more people are using image generators for inspiration in creative fields, if they aren't aware of these biases and actively combating them, then they, in turn, might be influenced by them."

Efforts to prevent these kinds of harms are still in "very early stages", according to Xiang, with companies largely left to govern themselves with varying levels of rigour in the absence of comprehensive government oversight.

That means some are leaving decisions up to individual developers, while others have entire AI ethics teams such as the one Xiang heads at Sony, where she's responsible for ensuring that any new technologies use AI in an ethical way.

"It's very much a mixed bag," Xiang said. "Oftentimes, these really complicated legal or ethical problems are being solved at the level of AI developers right now."

"Most of these folks have a computer science or electrical engineering background," Xiang continued. "This is not really what they signed up to do."

AI companies should learn from civil engineers

To prevent biased algorithms from wreaking havoc on society, Xiang says there must be a more concerted effort from companies to place AI ethics at the core of their development process from the very start.

Crucially, this also involves investing more time and resources into the chronically underfunded, undervalued field of data collection to ensure that the datasets used to train AIs are unbiased and respect people's privacy and copyrights.

"My personal hope is that this is a growing-up point for AI," Xiang said. "If we compare AI to other engineering fields like civil engineering, there's a much longer tradition of safety and people thinking very carefully about those aspects before they actually build something in the real world."

"Whereas in AI, there's long been more of a fast-and-loose culture, just based on the newness of the technology and given that it's also often not in the embodied world, so people think about the harms as being less severe."

Regulations such as the European Union's AI Act, set to be ratified by the end of this year, will play a crucial role in bringing about these changes, according to Xiang, much like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) did for data privacy.

But regulation can only do so much, she warns, due to the rapid speed at which AI is developing and a lack of international agreement on what constitutes "ethical" AI.

"There's not really one singular conception of ethics," she said. "Different cultures, different kinds of people will be aware of different possible issues."

"And insofar as AI is being deployed on a global scale but only developed by people in a few countries representing a few demographics, it's unlikely to capture all of the possible harms that will actually happen in the deployment."

The portrait is courtesy of Sony.

AItopia

This article is part of Dezeen's AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

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The set for Wes Anderson's latest film Asteroid City was designed and built as a functioning town complete with underground power and sewers, production designer Adam Stockhausen tells Dezeen in this interview.

Set in 1955, the film largely takes place in the fictitious desert town of Asteroid City, famous for its meteor crater and celestial observatory.

A 1950s-style luncheonette, a gas station, a motel made up of 10 white cabins and a telephone booth populate the rest of the town.

Filmed on flat farmland in Spain, the Asteroid City set was built from scratch, including underground power and plumbing infrastructure.

"We took [the farmland] over and built the entire town and the entire landscape that you see, which is sort of an unusual thing to do on a film, and it was a tonne of fun," Stockhausen told Dezeen.

"We ended up doing underground engineering work to bring in power, plumbing and sewers so that the place functioned as the city, rather than just being a set that was dependent on infrastructure elsewhere," he continued.

The site, just outside of Madrid, was chosen because it provided a vast-looking landscape with a "clean horizon" while also being close to city amenities for the film team.

"We could have the rural quality that we needed, but also the benefits of the big city," said Stockhausen.

As well as building the entire set, the production team created a red desert landscape stretching around half a mile.

According to Stockhausen, the red colour of the ground was an important design decision from the early concept stages.

"Wes will have a big colour idea at the beginning of every film process, which will be a bold gesture starting from the very first sketch and carrying all the way through to the end of the film," explained Stockhausen.

"The very first sketch we were working on [for Asteroid City] was the luncheonette surrounded by the desert," he added. "For the very first drawing, I had a more brown kind of dirt in the desert and he was like, no, the desert is red, almost Mars red."

Red dirt from a nearby quarry was transferred to the site to achieve the Mars-like desert landscape.

"We started looking around for samples of what kind of super red dirt can we get and how much it would cost to import a tennis-court clay," said Stockhausen.

"At the end of the day, we found a quarry so close you could have walked there. We looked at all the different rocks they had and picked the reddest one."

"We put it on the site ground and in the sunlight it was a magnificent pinkish red, and it came from right next door," the production designer added.

After filming wrapped, all the infrastructure was removed and the site returned to farmland.

"Our deal with the farmers was that we would return the place to them in exactly the condition that we found it," said Stockhausen.

"It was really important for us to take a lot of care as we left so we weren't damaging anything and it could go to being farmed the next year."

Every shot in the Asteroid City movie was planned and tested in a digital model before the set was built.

"We designed the set in a computer first as a 3D model to get the spatial relationships correct," said Stockhausen. "Because this an open town, there was no way to reset the whole thing in between shots."

"We had a camera inside the computer model that was doing the exact same things [Anderson] was describing in the storyboards, and we were able to proof of concept every single shot to make sure that it worked."

Stockhausen pulled inspiration from details in old photos when designing the 1950s-style scenery to create a town that appeared based in reality, yet maintains a fictional quality.

"I think there is a strong amount of reality as the details are found in real things, but it's heightened in two ways – it's an assembly of all these great details in one place so it has a distinct quality of its own, but then in a second way Asteroid City isn't a real place, it's a set in a play," he explained.

"The landscape is not like any location – it's not like we went to a real desert like the Monument Valley in the US and set up our cafe and gas station," Stockhausen continued.

"It was more appropriate to build the whole thing from scratch and to build the landscape that you see outside of town as well, and for it to have that slight quality of a set."

Stockhausen reflected on his favourite part of the film – the scene where the fictional town of Asteroid City is introduced and most of the set is seen in one continuous sequence, commenting "it's funny to work on something for so long and to see it all in one shot".

"The first shot in Asteroid City where the train goes by and we turn to look at the luncheonette, and then we slide over and look at the motel, and then we turn again – it was so wonderful to do and so satisfying."

To coincide with the Asteroid City's release, London's 180 The Strand hosted an exhibition of sets, props, miniature models, costumes and artwork featured in the film.

Dezeen recently rounded up eight retro interiors that embody the distinctive cinematic aesthetic of Wes Anderson, including a makeup store designed to look like 1970s offices and a cafe in Milan designed by Anderson himself.

The images are courtesy of Pop 87 Productions/Focus Features.

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Waterless swimming pools, fridges with 2D food and hand-painted sunsets feature in the set of the Barbie film, production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer tell Dezeen in this interview.

Longtime collaborators Greenwood and Spencer, who have worked together on projects including Joe Wright's 2012 film Anna Karenina, created the set to display an "authentic artificiality".

"Even though it is completely artificial and absurd, it has to be real. You have to believe it," said Spencer via a video call.

"Greta [Gerwig, director and co-writer of Barbie] wanted a world-building film, and that's what we do," she added.

Released in cinemas tomorrow, the highly anticipated Barbie is a live-action depiction of the iconic 1959 Mattel-designed toy doll starring Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as her boyfriend Ken.

Greenwood and Spencer built the set for Barbieland, which plays a key role in the story, at Warner Bros Studios, Watford, in the UK.

On-screen, Robbie's character lives in a fuchsia-pink house with no external walls that was based on the original 1960s Barbie Dreamhouse as well as architect Richard Neutra's modernist Kaufmann House, built in 1946 in Palm Springs, California.

Among the house's design details is a striking spiral slide that leads from the roof to a flat blue swimming pool with no water in it, akin to a toy pool.

"What looks simple was not simple," quipped Greenwood, who explained that everything in Barbieland was made to be 23 per cent smaller in relation to the human actors to mimic the way in which a real-life Barbie doll is always "much bigger than her house even though it's built for her".

Continuing this theme, the designers combined 3D household objects such as oversized hair- and toothbrushes with decal stickers depicting playfully flat food containers stacked in Barbie's pink kitchen fridge.

"It was to try and get to the [idea of] what is it that's 'toy'? What makes it 'toy'?" explained Greenwood.

"If you actually scaled a lipstick to the size of Barbie's hand, kids would lose it," added Spencer.

The duo created various other design elements to reflect the fact that Barbieland is "a world with no air, water or electricity".

Barbie's house features a jacuzzi frothing with static pale pink bubbles made from materials including polystyrene that Spencer and her team suspended on wires to look as if they were frozen in the air.

Hand-painted skies, mountains and palm trees also provided the backdrop for the set, which becomes "two-dimensional" the further back you go, according to Greenwood.

"It's kind of artificially authenticated," she added.

"It was interesting to the eye, watching when Greta came on [set], and the actors – you did feel that they were in a toy world and it was like you were actually in the box," explained Spencer.

"It was like having a bath in colour," she continued, referring to the bright lighting used to illuminate Barbieland. "It was just the most stunning, you know, in the middle of the Watford winter – it was just amazing to be in that world."

Having never owned Barbies as children themselves, Greenwood and Spencer bought a Dreamhouse to examine before building their set, which also features a number of similar houses that belong to the other characters.

When creating blocky, geometric furniture for each dwelling, the duo took cues from the "classic, mid-century, strong shapes" of 20th-century designers such as Verner Panton.

"When you look at the classic shapes, they lend themselves to the silhouette, so when you're looking through the houses and you don't have walls and you've got this landscape beyond, you need a very strong shape that's going to say, 'table' – you don't need any kind of fuzziness about it," continued Spencer.

"And also because there's no electricity in Barbieland, the lamps – particularly his [Panton's] lamps – are so beautiful because they are like toys or sweets," she added. "It has to be appealing. The lamps have to stand alone as shapes, not sources of light."

Another playful touch was Barbie's wardrobe of meticulously arranged outfits in the form of a large box with a plastic covering that references toy packaging in a shop.

According to Greenwood and Spencer, their teams worked closely with the wider Barbie crew to unify the film's aesthetic – from costume designer Jacqueline Durran, who created the characters' vibrant garments, to hair and makeup artist Ivana Primorac, who was responsible for Barbie's wide-ranging beauty looks.

"You're making a statement with everything. Everything was doubly considered," reflected Spencer.

Considering the portrayal of gender dynamics in the film, the duo acknowledged the significance of the Barbie Dreamhouse being released in 1962, during a time when women's financial rights were still heavily restricted in the UK and the USA.

"She had more rights than any woman in Britain or America. She could own her own house, she could have her own car – she didn't need a man to sign anything," said Spencer.

"I was never aware of all that. I only knew the Barbie on the difficult journey we all know about," she added.

"I think the other thing that I never did that this film might do is maybe make it more acceptable to like Barbie, or to like pink, which we spent a lot of time not doing – particularly my generation was very scornful of Barbie in those days," considered Greenwood.

"What's fantastic about the film is that there's nothing nasty in it," she added. "There's a lot of goodness in the film, and without being preachy or anything, it's not twee, but it's great – there are no baddies in the film."

"I suppose the moral of [the film] is that you should be whatever you want to be," concluded Spencer.

"And don't be judged. If you like Barbie, great. And if you don't like Barbie, then great."

In the run-up to the film's release, rental website Airbnb unveiled a lifesize Malibu Dreamhouse in California with an outdoor disco and an infinity pool, while one of our latest lookbooks featured eight Barbiecore-style interior designs.

The images are courtesy of Warner Bros. Additional reporting is by Jennifer Hahn.

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For AI to properly emulate human emotions the field must become more inclusive, machine-learning art pioneer Refik Anadol says in this interview.

Known for his dreamlike, large-scale installations, Los Angeles-based Anadol has been creating art with artificial intelligence (AI) since 2016.

While he often uses machine learning to visualise data representing human memories, Anadol explained that AI is still a long way from having emotional capacity comparable to human beings.

"AI is not conscious at all," he told Dezeen, citing this as one of the prevailing contemporary myths about the technology.

"The concept is there, but truly and honestly conscious systems? I don't think we are there at all," added the Turkish-born artist. "It's a possible future, but it's not necessarily where we are yet."

One of the key reasons for this, he said, is that AI does not currently have access to "every single culture in every single language".

According to Anadol, if machine learning were ever to emulate human emotions entirely, it would require this universal experience as a minimum starting point, including "esoteric wisdom".

"I believe we have to bring new perspectives, fresh points of view and diverse minds, and we have to bring as many voices as possible to really be unifying this concept of machine intelligence," said the artist.

"It takes more than bringing brilliant people around a table. AI can generate some intelligence, mimic intelligence, it can do good things, yes, but making something for humanity needs everyone in humanity."

"And that inclusive mindset will take time," he added.

AI can "narrate the invisible world"

Since Dezeen spoke to Anadol, entrepreneur Elon Musk has announced the formation of a startup called xAI that he said will try "to understand reality", staffed by 12 men.

Among Anadol's previous AI-based projects is Machine Hallucination, a 2019 film that consists of millions of photographs of New York City that were sourced using open-source algorithm StyleGAN, which then created more abstract visuals from the data.

Originally presented as an immersive installation at digital art space Artechouse, the film was likened to the reshuffled memories of a human dream by "using AI to narrate the invisible world", Anadol said.

"I'm never inspired by the idea of mimicking reality," reflected the artist. "Like, if AI can do realistic things, it doesn't inspire me to be honest."

Currently, Anadol and his studio are working on Winds of Yawanawa, an NFT collection of 1000 unique "data paintings" that feature similar otherworldly forms to Machine Hallucination.

The collection of digital artwork is made by harnessing weather data from the Yawanawa tribe's village in the Amazon rainforest – including temperature and wind speed, gusts and direction – which is then merged with artwork by young Yawanana artists to form striking visuals.

"I think we will be creating the world's largest AI model," said Anadol. "We are researching with the Yawanawa family as our advisors."

Describing the project as a "humbling" experience, the artist said that using AI to preserve the Yawanawa language is especially crucial because out of around 16,000 native speakers, only 17 people can currently read and write the language.

"Understanding spirituality, understanding our deep emotions and the context of memory in life – I don't believe this is something that can be mimicked with large language models," he said, referring to ChatGPT-type AI systems.

"A deep understanding of humanity is way more complex than any algorithm. I don't believe in reducing this to a bunch of algorithms or papers. I don't believe that will be next year's work for any researchers."

While Anadol acknowledged the risks attached to AI, he argued that the technology is the "only way" to obtain data on such a grand scale, and stressed the overarching goal of connecting people through his work.

He explained that his ultimate ambition is to create what he described as a "library of everything" – a space where people have equal access to "every single data in the world".

"I don't believe in an elitist approach, I don't believe in borders, I don't believe in separations," he said. "I just want to find similarities."

The portrait is by Efsun Erkilic.

AItopia

This article is part of Dezeen's AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

Dezeen In Depth

If you enjoy reading Dezeen's interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.

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