New York architecture studio Arquitectonica has designed a residential skyscraper with undulating fins on its facade and a landscaped terrace garden in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Called The Launiu, the 40-storey skyscraper is located in the Ward Village development in Hawaii's capital Honolulu on the island of Oahu.

According to Arquitectonica, the design for the structure was informed by natural formations and the movement of wind, water and sand in Oahu, the third largest in the chain of islands that makes up the state of Hawaii.

"The natural beauty of O'ahu served as our primary design inspiration for The Launiu," said Arquitectonica founding principal Bernardo Fort-Brescia.

"With the neutral-toned facade and soft rippling exterior created by balconies, we sought to pay homage to the surrounding environment through an interpretative, elemental design that conveys movement, emulating the effects of water, wind or markings in the sand."

"The resulting concept is organic yet contemporary."

Sited near the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean, the structure will consist of a glass-curtain-wall-lined tower set on top of a rectangular podium.

Its podium will also be covered in a glass curtain wall, with white paint-aluminium panels framing each of its sides. The first storey will cantilever out over the ground floor, creating a canopy around the building that will be supported by concrete columns.

The entrance will be marked by a series of sand-coloured aluminium panels undulating in waves up the face of the podium,

The tower of The Launiu will be set back significantly from the edges of the podium. This is to create a large terrace that will be covered in palm trees and amenities for the residents of the 486 condominiums, 90 of which will be in the podium.

The remaining residences will be spread throughout the tower. Its facades will also be covered in white-painted aluminium panels cut to form a wave-like texture up the face of the building.

California studio Odada will bring a minimalist interior design schema to the project, adorning the white-washed spaces with woven furniture and textiles.

Landscape studio Vita, also based in California, will carry out the design of the green terrace and surrounding grounds, weaving paths and lounge areas among the pines and pools of the development.

Ward Village is a planned community developed by Howard Hughes and contains several residential and commercial structures. The development is meant to represent "the next generation of sustainable development and land-use planning on O'ahu," according to the company.

Arquitectonica was founded in 1977 and has carried out several high-profile architecture projects, especially in Miami, where it created the building that houses the University of Miami's architecture school.

Other big-name firms from the mainline have created similar residential projects on the islands, including a 41-storey building by Studio Gang informed by the form of sugarcane.

The renderings are courtesy of Arquitectonica. 

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Architect and developer Alloy has released images of its glass-clad Brooklyn skyscraper, which has a "wedding cake-like" shape and will reportedly run on all-electric power.

The residential skyscraper, called 505 State Street after its location in downtown Brooklyn, has already topped out at 482 feet tall (146 metres).

With 44 storeys, the skyscraper is sited on a triangular block where three Brooklyn streets converge. This gives it a wedge-like plan, similar to the iconic Flat Iron Building in Manhattan. The majority of its face is clad in glass and aluminium.

"The site itself is triangular, and weirdly enough, if you draw the Flat Iron floor plan on our site, it's almost identical. The heights are very similar," Alloy design director Ben Meade told Dezeen, noting that the structure is the studio's first "major ground-up skyscraper".

"It's a plan that references old school architecture, a wedding cake-like stack."

On one side, the tower is flat. On the other side, it steps back from the street to maximise views of downtown Manhattan over the East River and to cohere with the street-level brownstone buildings and historic architecture, like the historic Williamsburg Savings Bank tower.

In order to blend into the surrounding architecture as seamlessly as possible, the bottom three floors of the skyscraper were clad in dark textural concrete.

"We wanted to make sure we weren't dropping a spaceship into downtown Brooklyn," said Meade.

"We wanted to be respectful of a landmark that's been there for a long time, while still forming a gateway up from Prospect Park to greater downtown Brooklyn."

Meade said that rather than creating an "imposing" tower, the team wanted to create a "backdrop" for the people of Brooklyn.

The use of aggregate on the lower levels will also help integrate the building into the remainder of the block, which is also being developed by Alloy and will include what it claims will be the first two schools to meet Passive House environmental standards in the city, designed by local studio Architecture Research Office.

An energy-efficient approach was also taken for the skyscraper itself. Alloy claims that when completed, the 441 residences within will be powered completely by electricity.

This will require the installation of electric induction cookware in the kitchens, electrical water heaters, heat-pump dryers and high-quality glass.

The studio also said that it has filed a request to the city for the building to be powered completely by renewable energy sources.

"Alloy is the first developer to pursue such a program following a rule issuance by the New York City Department of Buildings around Local Law 97 confirming developers can comply with the law through off-site solar programs," said the firm.

For the interiors, Alloy worked with local interior design studio INC Architecture and designer Rebecca Robertson to design all of the furniture.

The apartments feature ceilings between nine and 12 feet tall and exposed concrete mixed with oak flooring and detailing.

Currently, the cladding for the structure is almost complete, with only the bulkhead still unfinished, and the tower will be completely finished by 2025.

Historically smaller in vertical scale than neighbouring Manhattan, Brooklyn has seen a flurry of skyscraper development in the past few years, including the SHoP Architects-designed Brooklyn Tower, the borough's first supertall skyscraper, and a skyscraper with an undulating facade by Studio Gang.

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Local studio MacDonald Architects has designed the safety nets recently installed on each side of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to prevent people from jumping from its sides.

Designed by MacDonald Architects on behalf of Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District (GGBHT) – the state district that manages the bridge, the deterrent nets were completed on earlier this month.

According to the GGBHT, the nets were installed on 95 per cent of the 87-year-old bridge, with some sections currently under construction having vertical fences installed.

The marine-grade stainless steel nets were installed 20 feet (six metres) below the sidewalk and stretch 20 feet out from the bridge, suspended at intervals by red-painted steel arms that match the colour of the bridge.

"The net is a proven design"

They run through the whole 1.7-mile length (2.7 kilometre) of the bridge and were installed to prevent people from taking their own lives by jumping from the bridge.

They are meant to catch people who jump from the bridge, allowing the on-site security to retrieve the individuals from the net.

According to GGBHT, there have been an average of 30 confirmed suicides every year on the bridge for the past 20 years.

"The purpose of the net is to reduce the number of deaths associated with individuals jumping off the Bridge," said GGBHT in a statement.

"The net is a proven design that deters people from jumping, serves as a symbol of care and hope to despondent individuals, and, if necessary, offers people a second chance."

Work began on the project in 2017, and the GGBHT reported the net to be "already working as intended", saying that less than half of the average number of people died on the bridge in 2023.

"There have also been several instances where people have jumped into the net, and we, along with partner agencies, have successfully rescued many of them," added GGBHT.

The nets come after years of advocacy from local groups including the Bridge Rail Foundation, which comprises people in the community with personal connections to the issue.

"The prices are astronomical"

MacDonald Architects has been the main design consultant on the bridge since the 1980s, implementing transit retrofits like bike rails and improving the structure's seismic rating over the years.

The studio's principal Donald MacDonald spent years researching various suicide prevention barriers in order to submit recommendations to the local government on possible design solutions.

According to a report by the Guardian, the net was approved more than a decade ago but has faced numerous challenges including local complaints due to the historic nature of the bridge and construction delays, some stemming from a lawsuit launched by contractors.

MacDonald told Dezeen that the biggest challenges in the design were the variety of inputs from local interests, the impact of wind on the bridge when new aspects were installed along with the high costs of the project.

For the Golden Gate Bridge, the design called for modifications to the travellers – platforms installed under the bridge for maintenance.

"The prices are astronomical," said MacDonald. According to GGBHT, $224 million (£130 million) was spent on the installation.

The changes to the bridge also underwent a historical evaluation, according to MacDonald, who has installed a variety of deterrent systems from fences to nets on bridges in the United States and Canada.

"It had to comply with the national guidelines," he told Dezeen. "When I did it, there wasn't a lot of data available on bridges. So I had to work out a whole system evaluating the bridge in a historical format."

Other newer structures have become locations for suicide, sparking controversy from local communities.

These include the Heatherwick Studio-designed Vessell in New York City, a sculptural vertical walkway that was forced to close in 2021 after multiple suicides followed its 2019 opening, even after a "buddy system" was put in place by its owners.

The photography is courtesy of Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District.

International helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. In the USA, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 800-273-8255, while in the UK the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123.

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American hotel brand Bunkhouse and interior design studio Reurbano have used motifs derived from the history of a Mexico City structure when converting it into a boutique hotel.

Hotel San Fernando is located in the Condesa neighbourhood of Mexico City, a largely residential zone that in recent years has seen an influx of national and international travellers.

Bunkhouse worked with local interior design studio Reurbano to take a 1940s apartment building and convert it into a 19-room hotel, with finishes informed by the neighbourhood.

The face of the structure was restored and painted a light green, with darker green used on the awnings that provide coverage for seating attached to the hotel's lobby and restaurant, which open to the street through glass-paned French doors.

An art deco-style logo spells out the name of the hotel above the door. Saint Fernando is known as the patron saint of engineers, and the team wanted to highlight this by maintaining the name of the original building in the branding of the new structure.

"We wanted to honour this building," said Bunkhouse senior vice president of design Tenaya Hills.

"We love the story and the history and like to imagine what it has been for people over the decades."

This primary entrance features a metal door with glass panes informed by the original stained glass of the building.

The entry corridor leads past a lobby lounge, with lighting by Oaxaca studio Oaxifornia and furnishings by local gallery Originario; and design studios Daniel Y Catalina, and La Metropolitana, which also created custom furniture for all of the guest suites.

At the far end of the lobby lounge is the restaurant's bar, which features a large semi-circular cabinet with mirrored back to hold the spirits. A chandelier by local sculptor Rebeca Cors hangs above the clay-clad bar.

The entrance corridor has green encaustic concrete tiles from the original building. Other original details include the wainscotting and casement windows.

A reception area is located at the end of the corridor and behind it is a circular staircase with metal-and-wood railing that leads all the way up through the building, with landings on each of its five floors, terminating at a terrace on top of the building.

The guest rooms range from single-room setups to multi-room suites, the largest of which are accessed through French doors with opaque windows.

Here the studio departed from the greens used on the exterior and the lobby and utilised soft orange, pink and white paints.

Floors in the rooms are either tile or wood and furniture made from light-coloured wood is covered by locally derived textiles. Three rooms on the rooftop level feature furniture designed by Bunkhouse and fabricated by local design outfit B Collective Studio.

Pendant lamps and sconces by local ceramicist Anfora are found in the kitchens and bathrooms.

The rooftop features a tiled dining and lounge area surrounded by sculptural breeze blocks, designed to mimic the original building's patterned stained glass.

Mexican design studios Mexa and Comité de Proyectos contributed furniture pieces for the rooftop.

Other hotels in Mexico include a tile-clad structure in San Miguel de Allende by Productora and Esrawe Studio and a hotel in Mexico City with wooden lattices by PPAA.

The photography is by Chad Wadsworth. 

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Infrastructure consultants AECOM and Spanish architecture studio Luis Vidal + Architects have created a terminal for Boston's Logan Airport capped by a long, bright-red roof.

The project adds 390,000 square feet (36,232 square metres) of space to Logan International Airport. The largest airport in the city, it is located on a piece of land that juts out into Boston Harbor.

A massive red roof slopes over the south facade of the terminal, where it was interspersed with windows to create views of the city. On the opposite side, where the gates are, the face of the structure is mostly glass.

The standing-seam metal roof was painted in Boston Red, a shade of prismatic paint custom-developed for the project at Monopol Color Lab in Switzerland. It is the first time prismatic paint has ever been used for an airport facade, according to Luis Vidal + Architects founding principal Luis Vidal.

The four-storey terminal rises to 96 feet (29 metres) at its tallest point, from which it slopes down towards the rest of the airport.

During the day, the prismatic nature of the paint allows the colour to shift slightly between red and orange, depending on the light.

"The red color is intended to establish the terminal as a landmark and iconic gateway to the city and the region," Vidal told Dezeen, adding that the paint was originally developed for military usage.

"Boston itself inspired the color: from the historic brick buildings to the institutions for whom red is a signature color – like Harvard and MIT – to the dramatic sunsets and foliage to the Red Sox."

According to Vidal, the roof's form has a subtle aeronautic shape. Its corners taper to sharp edges that "cut through the sky with precision".

Where the form bulges out on its south side, a series of darkened panoramic windows were installed under the lip of the roof, along the edge of the terminal's crescent-like form.

The terminal was meant to stand out while adhering to the strict requirements of the site and integrating with the existing airport facilities.

"The building is the first and last building you see arriving and departing at the airport," AECOM principal Terry Rookard told Dezeen.

"The terminal becomes the iconic front door to the entire airport campus. Simultaneously, the building blends into the existing airport, as it tucks in and defers to the existing terminal geometry forms, allowing both buildings to talk to each other – while expressing themselves independently."

On the gate-side, the overlapping slopes of the roof create clerestory windows that bring light into the terminal's great hall.

Many of the walls and the ceilings of the interior are also standing-seam metal, but painted in white.

Inside, large black columns rise to support the graduated ceiling and airport amenities, such as restaurants and stores, are laid out in an open format.

Several elements aimed towards the terminal's "resiliency" were also included, the designers said.

Photovoltaic glass gathers energy for the terminal, while the windows were placed to ensure plentiful natural light throughout the year.

Because of the terminal's proximity to the water, all of the critical infrastructure was lifted six feet (1.8 metres) above grade "to allow for a rapid return to service in a flood event and to protect capital-intensive utility investments", according to Rookard.

The design team also took into account "passengers who require a visual and auditory separation from a busy terminal", it said.

Working with the New England Center for Children, the team integrated an all-ages room where flyers can use an airplane simulator room to prepare for their flights.

"The building's shape, passenger journey, color and sustainability are holistically integrated into a design response that is understood from the scale of the city as well as the passenger’s experience," said Rookard.

The terminal will begin full operations later in 2024.

Other recent airport add-ons include an expansion to Kansas City International Airport by SOM, which includes a massive mass-timber canopy over the entrance program.

Meanwhile, Foster + Partners has unveiled designs for an airport in Cambodia with a "tree-canopy" roof.

The photography is by Ema Peter.

Project credits:

Architect: AECOM
Vision architect: Luis vidal + architects
Construction manager: Suffolk
Structural engineer, sustainability, protective design: Thornton Tomasetti
Structural engineering (existing building renovations): Simon Design Engineering
Geotechnical engineering/environmental: GEI Consultants, Inc.
MEP engineering, special systems, asset management: Arora Engineers, Inc.
Baggage handling systems, BHS & passenger simulation modelling: BNP Associates, Inc.
LLC building code consulting: Code Red Consultants
Lighting design: Collaborative Lighting
Cost estimating: Dharam Consulting
Cost estimating: RLB
Rain, ice, wind and snow analysis: RWDI
Terminal planning & programming: Ricondo & Associates, Inc.
Resident engineering: Keville Enterprises, Inc.
Communications: speXsys, LLC IT
Hydrant fuel system design: TECS, LLC
Specifications: Kalin Associates
Simulation modelling: HNTB Airfield
Irrigation systems: Irrigation Consulting
Interior landscape design: Hammer Walsh
Roof consulting (canopy): Gale Associates

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Local architecture studio Provencher Roy has included the "lighthouse"-like Port of Montreal Tower with cantilevered platforms in the renovation of a disused industrial pier in Montreal.

Provencher Roy placed the 65-metre-tall tower on the edge of a pier in Montreal's Old City that once served as a grain exporting hub for the region. It now functions as a departure point for cruise ships.

The entirety of the pier was restored by the studio, with the tower rising at the end of a similar horizontal structure that serves as a boat terminal and was completed in 2019.

Called the Port of Montreal Tower, the structure is made of glass and steel and has a series of cantilevers that jut out as it rises. An observation deck protrudes from its side 55 metres off the ground, offering views of the river, the city and Mount Royal mountain.

According to the studio, the tower was meant to serve as a "lighthouse" for both pedestrians approaching the quay by land and for visitors arriving at the city by sea.

"We wanted to make a statement to attract Montrealers to the end of the pier thanks to quality public spaces, beautiful views from the Tower, access to the river, and a space for citizens," said Provencher Roy principal Sonia Gagné.

The glass-and-metal construction of the tower serves a few functions. It allows light to illuminate the tower at night, adding to its function as a "beacon", while creating viewpoints for those inside at multiple points throughout the structure.

"Industrial architecture is based on rationality and forms that are qualified by the need they fill. In this case, the volumetric development is a response to offering visitors and Montrealers an elevated experience, while creating a visual landmark for the Port of Montreal," Gagné told Dezeen.

"The architectural vocabulary developed for the Tower alludes to the area's rich industrial past through its rigorous, expressive structure and compact, pragmatic massing."

The glass facade also allows for daytime passersby to see an expressive staircase inside the structure, an important element of the design.

Described as a "sculptural helicoid", the staircase begins where the two vertical aspects of the tower connect, leading 10 metres up to the observation deck.

It was wrapped in gold-coloured balustrades – meant to reference both the staircases of historic Montreal and the gold of wheat crowns that once filled the industrial silos on the quay.

A platform at the top of the stairs leads to a small, "jewell-like" belvedere – or viewing chamber – that juts out of the facade.

The tallest building around, the tower rises from the end of the restored grounds of the pier – collectively called the Grand Quay – which was organised with the help of landscape architecture studio Nip Paysage.

A restored ferry terminal occupies the majority of the pier and is split in half by a roadway. On one side, where the tower sits, the team created a series of steps that lead to the roof of the terminal.

At the front of a terminal is a large cantilevered volume that serves as an event space.

Green spaces and a wooden walkway lead down and off the terminal roof. This promenade passes greenspaces with native plants, dotted with sculptural light wells that filter light to the terminal below.

The promenade is meant to be the terminus of a series of walking routes that run through the Old City.

It ends in a tree-covered platform with a wooden herringbone-patterned deck and steps on one side. These increase in number as the rest of the pier slopes down from the platform towards a large green space, interspersed with chairs and a monumental sculpture by artist Yann Pocreau.

Other projects by Provencher Roy include a bridge made with recycled glass in Montreal and offices in the city's Olympic Stadium tower.

Photography by James Brittain unless otherwise noted.

Project credits:

Architect: Provencher_Roy
Landscape: NIPPAYSAGE
Structure: NCK
Electromechanical: Pageau Morel
Civil: GÉNIPUR
Maritime infrastructure: WSP Group
Structural glass: Elema
Lighting: CS Design
Consultant: Arup
Builder: Pomerleau

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Architecture studio Renzo Piano Building Workshop has created a justice building for Toronto to display "the identity and values of a modern justice institution" while respecting nearby historical buildings.

Working with local studio NORR Architects and Engineers, Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) designed the structure for downtown Toronto, where it will house many of the city's criminal courtrooms.

The Ontario Court of Justice building is located adjacent to a number of 19th-century judicial structures as well as the Viljo Revell-designed Toronto City Hall.

Two primary elements make up the courthouse – a four-storey podium that includes a massive atrium and a 13-storey tower set on top of it.

From the outside, the tower and podium are separated by a cantilevered floor plate that extends out towards the street and a recess in the facade.

The entrance to the podium is fronted by a series of massive columns supporting this cantilevered floor plate as well as two smaller cantilevered floor plates stacked over the primary entrance.

According to the studio it placed as much space as possible in front of the building, which faces Nathan Phillips Square, to increase public space and tie it into the "urban fabric".

The building rises only 96 metres, to make sure the courthouse did not exceed the height of the nearby City Hall.

"The design seeks to balance the need to express the identity and values of a modern justice institution without imposing over the adjacent iconic City Hall," said the studio.

On the south side of the structure, a large architectural "mast" was affixed to the side of the building. According to the studio, the mast was placed to line up with the east side of Osgoode Hall, an 1832 structure by architects John Ewart and WW Baldwin.

"In this manner, the project complements the judicial precinct that began to take shape over a century and a half ago," said RPBW.

Inside the podium, the atrium rises 20 metres tall. It was enclosed in a type of glass that was designed to have "minimum reflectivity" and has a pattern printed on it to make it bird-friendly.

A cable tension system was used on the facade to limit the interference of structural elements inside the building and make the atrium as open as possible.

For the facade of the tower, the team also relied heavily on class cladding, with hydro-formed embossed metal panels set back from the glass. The glass stops at the corners of the building, revealing the metal underneath.

"This carefully designed composition involved an extensive development process that included many factory visits, prototypes and mock-ups," said RPBW.

"The result is a highly dynamic effect created by the tower facade, which constantly oscillates between reflective and transparent, depending on daylight and weather conditions."

The interior of the atrium houses a series of elevator cores clad with yellow quartz panels. A large, white staircase was suspended from the high ceiling, connecting the ground floor of the building with the courtrooms on the first floor.

The entry program is characterised by concrete and stone. However, the studio noted that there is a "progression of increasing amounts of beech" for the interiors as one moves up through the tower towards the courtrooms, where the wood dominates.

On top of the building, its mechanical systems were moved down into the floors below to create a rooftop garden with benches, as well as a field of photovoltaic panels.

The design also nods towards the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which attempted to investigate and make recommendations for ameliorating violence towards the nation's Indigenous communities.

Working with local architecture firm Two Row Architects as consultants, the team included a publicly accessible Indigenous Learning Centre and has added other "cultural acknowledgements" throughout the site.

The project began in 2016 and will open later this year. At 72,000 square metres, it will be the largest courthouse in the province of Ontario.

Italian architect Renzo Piano founded his studio in 1981 and has since completed several high-profile projects in Europe and internationally, including Centre Pompidou in Paris in collaboration with British architect Richard Rogers, as well as the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

The photography is by Nic Lehoux. 

Project credits: 

Architect: Renzo Piano Building Workshop, NORR Architects
Structural: Stephenson Engineering Ltd.
Mechanical: The Hidi Group
Electrical: MBII
Facade: Knippers Helbig
Building envelope: BVDA Group Ltd.
Vertical transportation: HH Angus
A/V consultant: Sight N Sounds Design Inc
Civil engineer: WalterFedy
Energy & sustainability: Morrison Hershfield
Microclimate consultant: Theakston Environmental
Acoustics: Valcoustics
Traffic: Tranplan Associates
Blast consultant: Thornton Thomasetti
Geotech: Amec Foster Wheeler
Heritage consultant: +VG Architects
Indigenous consultant: Two Row Architect
Code: Muniak Enterprises
Wayfinding: Frontier
Landscaping: Vertechs

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California architecture studio AO has put forward plans for a supertall skyscraper as part of a development in Oklahoma City that, if completed, will be the second-tallest building in the United States.

The skyscraper will be part of a development called the Boardwalk at Bricktown in downtown Oklahoma City. Plans consist of three 345-foot-tall (105 metre-tall) towers and one larger tower that could be as tall as 1,750 feet (533 metres).

As it stands, the plan for the three-acre site has gained approval for the smaller towers, but is still seeking approval for the supertall tower. If built, it would be only 26 feet shorter than the SOM-designed One World Trade Center in New York, the tallest building in the US.

Its height puts it well within the supertall range, a category given to skyscrapers with heights between 900 and 2,000 feet tall (300-600 metres).

AO said the height was a response to the city's growing population. The tallest building in Oklahoma City currently is Devon Tower, which has a height of 844 feet (257 metres).

"The tower's height evolved to align with the visionary goals set by both the developer and the city," AO managing partner Rob Budetti told Dezeen.

"As Oklahoma City experiences a surge in market growth, characterized by increasing demand, population, and the development of employment hubs, the design for The Boardwalk at Bricktown has progressed in response to the dynamic expansion and advancement within this thriving urban landscape."

Designed for developers of Matteson Capital and Thinkbox, the complex will hold retail and entertainment spaces and the towers will hold residences and a hotel.

Renderings show three smaller towers flanking a central corridor decked out with storefronts, a mezzanine, water features and light installations, with the supertall skyscraper at the back of the complex.

The supertall skyscraper will be relatively flat with a uniform shape that tapers up slowly towards the structure's crown.

The skyscraper and the towers will be clad with glass and illuminated at points by strips of light at their corners.

Thornton Tomasetti has been brought on for the structural engineering of the project.

AO is based outside of Los Angeles and the project will be its first foray into supertall skyscrapers.

Other supertall buildings in the works in the United States include a 1,388-foot-tall (423 metres) skyscraper for JPMorgan Chase in New York City by Foster + Partners.

The images are by AO Architects.

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Mexican architect Javier Guzmán Cervantes has collected urban waste materials including cinderblocks and rebar to create a series of furniture for a show in Mexico City.

Working with his research project Ex Soup, Cervantes gathered materials from construction sites and waste deposits throughout the city to create an exhibition at design gallery Utíl.

Curated in collaboration with the arts organisation Lugar Vivo, the Construcciones Domésticas exhibition (Household Constructions) includes objects ranging from tables and chairs to lighting and day beds.

Cervantes told Dezeen that the project was exercised to shed light on the ecological effects of waste in construction, the lack of options in affordable, durable furniture and the need for architects to free themselves from the "mental realm of design" and focus on making.

"I think these times that we are living in require us to explore new lifestyles and new ways of configuring our domestic interiors, more attuned with the present global economic and environmental reality," said Cervantes.

He added that new values must be garnered from industrial landscapes and ecological ruin.

"This is exactly the spirit of Ex Soup, to take discarded materials and transform them into something beautiful and useful to life in a process that prioritizes energy efficiency and practical thinking."

Cervantes said that he has been working on creating furniture from salvaged materials since his teens, but only recently began formalising the practice, founding Ex Soup in 2022.

Much of the material comes from the architect's daily life, while driving or walking, as well as from materials discarded from construction sites and given to him by friends.

The name, Ex Soup, is a reference to his preferred materials: industrial products like metal and glass that "were heated liquids in their production processes and were given shapes".

Projects included in Household Constructions consist of mixes of different materials stacked to create recognisable forms, and many were created without the use of glue to create "ergonomic shapes" held together by tension.

Among the works is a coffee table constructed using steel beams with surfaces created from a discarded mirror and glass.

The work of tension is most obvious in some of the taller pieces, such as a desk. Cervantes stacked pieces of paving stone and PVC piping in two pillars and used strapping to hold up the desktop, which was created from a reused headboard.

Many of the pieces are simple and have a brutalist effect, given the steel and concrete used in their construction, while others are more colourful, such as a divan covered with an expressive weave of scrap clothing.

Rolls of electrowelded mesh also feature heavily in the collection, at times serving as supports for a console and at others serving as lamp shades.

Cervantes said that the pieces were meant to show the large number of combinations possible in using these materials.

"There are some pieces that are easily replicable since many times trash comes in patterns, but I would say I see Ex Soup more as an endless search for new shapes and ways of perceiving materials, so the focus is in constantly adapting to change and variation," he said.

Other furniture made using scrap materials includes a chair made from old musical instruments by Jay Sae Jung and a series of Knoll chairs refashioned with used car parts by Noel Mercado.

The photography is by Javier Guzman.

Household Constructions is on view at Utïl in Mexico City from 8 November to January 2024. For more events and exhibitions in architecture and design visit the Dezeen Events Guide. 

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Local studio Formation Association has completed a renovation project in Los Angeles, placing asymmetrical volumes clad in plaster in the shell of a masonry building to create a dramatic "canyon-like" interior passage.

Formation Association renovated the building, located in the city's Atwater Village neighbourhood, on a street lined with shops and restaurants.

Called Atwater Canyon, the renovated building was originally erected in the 1920s and had an arched facade that had been covered up significantly through a series of past renovations.

"Importantly, at the street elevation, when the existing standard height storefront glazing system was removed, along with layers of subsequent remodeling, large openings were revealed, which now comprise a key characteristic for the accessibility and porosity of the updated elevation," Formation Association founder John Chan told Dezeen.

After foregoing the option to demolish and rebuild, the team decided to retain and restore the freestanding masonry structure, which features expressive crown decorations.

The studio opted to place a new program within the shell, reinforcing it in sections to meet the strict seismic codes in Los Angeles.

Trellises were added to the facade, which will be planted with California Morning Glory.

The new storefronts are pushed back from the street elevation so that a gap was created between the facade and the beginning of the new build.

Three primary retail spaces were placed into the side, divided by a long "canyon". Glass was placed in arches facing the street and on the sides of this passageway, while the new walls were covered in pink trowelled plaster with a textured pattern.

"Minimal instructions were given regarding the directionality of the raked pattern," said Chan.

"The hand of the applicator is expressed in the patterned texture of the walls, pointing to the craft and labor contributing to the work."

Exposed ceiling joists run the width of the building, and skylights were placed over the internal passageway to bring light into the middle of the structure.

All of the previous renovations had created a slight slope from the front to the back of the structure, which was mitigated in the redesign.

An open-air courtyard was placed at the end of the passageway. A roughly triangular section was removed from the ceiling, while the wooden joists at the remainder of the ceiling on both sides terminate at an exposed masonry wall.

This courtyard space holds the entry to the building's gender-neutral washrooms, and at the rear of a space is a smaller passageway that leads to parking lots, allowing visitors to enter through both sides.

Most of the mechanical systems were outdated, according to the studio. Based on the newly placed interior spaces, new split-system heat pumps were installed.

Formation Association also used plaster and skylights over joists in combining a series of older buildings into the new home of the Phillips auction house in the city.

Elsewhere in the city, Kadre Architects used bright paint to renovate a 1980s motel into a homeless shelter.

The photography is by Here and Now Agency.

Project credits: 

Architects: Formation Association
Consultants: Structural, Nous Engineering
Landscape: Terremoto
Signage: Still Room
MEP: Mars Engineering

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Local studio Hopson Rodstrom Design placed a sawtooth roof on top of this black-clad apartment building with an interior courtyard in southern California.

Located in West Los Angeles on a busy thoroughfare, the project is called The Jagger – named after the massive sawtooth roof that tops it.

Pasadena-based studio Hopson Rodstrom Design (H/RD), designed the structure to "embrace" the higher-scale zoning that exists along thoroughfares in areas of the city generally filled with low-lying structures.

It was made possible by the Transit Oriented Communities program in the city.

"West Los Angeles has long been a low-rise and sleepy commercial corridor, but has seen significant growth over the last half-decade," H/RD told Dezeen.

"Since The Jagger began design and construction, another 10 or so projects have sprung up on that same stretch of boulevard."

The seven-storey structure has a ground-level podium clad in green-painted concrete interspersed with steel gates. Along this, gates lead into the complex and into glass-fronted retail and restaurant components.

These aspects are set back slightly from the primary envelope, a massing clad in black-painted plaster with many long windows spread across it.

"The window pattern is based on the maximum allowable percentage of opening along the exterior, broken up into a staggered, offset and repeated pattern around the middle levels of the building," said the studio.

"This enabled every unit to get the maximum allowable amount of light while serving to unify the exterior envelop in an overarching pattern; this pattern in turn contrasts against the changing levels of opacity and materiality in the facade."

These changing levels include a massive screen draped over the middle of the structure.

Made of perforated metal panels fastened to "a rhythm" of vertical steel posts, the screen has multiple functions. It serves as a protective guard for the courtyard staircase, helps maintain the facade, and creates privacy for the interior courtyard.

The screen also allowed the studio to bypass certain height requirements put in place by the city.

"The perforated metal cladding that encases the green exterior stairs on both ends of the courtyard was designed specifically to get the Fire Department to allow an exterior stair to rise higher than six stories, which is the maximum allowed in the code," said the studio.

"We were able to get approval for a 7th story by wrapping the top in the perforated metal."

The interior courtyard is accessed by operable gates at ground level and is "semi-public".

This courtyard has a small footprint at ground level and a concrete stepped feature, covered with planters and transversed by a simple staircase with metal railing.

The staircase leads up to another section covered with planters, and at the far end sits a sculptural staircase painted green that leads to the upper levels.

Office interiors on the ground floor open up to the courtyard via floor-to-ceiling windows.

On one side, the wall of the courtyard going up the height of the structure is interspersed with windows and balconies and on the other are multiple levels of open-air hallways that lead to other apartments.

Because of the courtyard, all the units in the structure have a window to the outside, and the sawtooth-roof was formed to allow for maximum sunlight to enter the courtyard.

It also acts as a "chimney" meant to keep the whole structure cool, according to the studio.

The Jagger was originally part of a larger architectural program by H/RD, with buildings planned for adjacent lots, but one of these lots was ultimately sold and the other similar, barrel-vault-roof building was not built.

Other similar structures that utilise a sawtooth roof include an apartment block in Melbourne by Six Degrees Architects and a mass-timber building in Portland by Lever Architecture.

The photography is by Here and Now Agency (HANA), Paul Vu.

Project credits:

Architect: H/RD; Nick Hopson, Klara Rodstrom, Chris Gassaway, Zach Blaue, Jennifer Bui, Kevin Pazik
Landscape architect: Tina Chee
Structural engineer: Amir Pirbadian
Civil engineer: KPFF
MEP: Henderson
General contractor: Integrare

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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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David Lake and Ted Flato of Texas studio Lake Flato Architects have been awarded the 2024 AIA Gold Medal for their engagement with "controversial environmental and socio-political issues".

Lake and Flato won the 2024 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Gold Medal, which is considered one of the most prestigious awards to be given to architects.

The two architects, who co-founded their studio Lake Flato Architects in San Antonio, Texas, in 1984, were cited by the eight-person jury for their ability to make "sustainability exciting in a way few other architects have accomplished".

"The projects they envision have raised the collective consciousness surrounding our climate crisis while simultaneously captivating a broad audience with buildings that are both beautiful and sustainable," continued the AIA.

"While Texas, a region grappling with unprecedented growth and climate change, seems an unlikely place for a firm focused on sustainability to thrive, they have nevertheless helped clients see architecture and sustainability as inextricably linked."

The pair has been at the helm of their studio for the last 40 years after meeting while working in the office of American architect O'Neil Ford in the late 1970s.

It has expanded over the years, opening up offices in Austin and creating projects internationally, while always focusing on Texas' built environment.

"This honor is particularly wonderful in his time now," Flato told Dezeen.

"We've got so many environmental challenges and it shows to us how important it is as architects to try and solve these really big, tough topics."

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

The jurors cited projects such as a pavilion in Decatur, Texas, as examples of the studio's focus on sustainability.

This pavilion, the first Living Building Challenge-certified project in Texas, was designed for an organisation promoting healthy water systems and included features that mitigated wastewater's effects on marshland.

The studio has since replicated this method in projects such as a pavilion at Confluence Park.

Also cited was Lake Flato Architects' work on a grocery chain operating in Mexico and Texas called H-E-B, for whom it created sustainable elements that set "the benchmark for resiliency in a big-box store".

Restoration has also been high on the studio's agenda in projects such as the Marine Education Center in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, which was constructed on the site of destruction from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and was built to withstand further disasters.

Lake Flato Architects has also designed many works of residential architecture, such as a recent Corten-steel-clad house in Texas that was designed to "sit lightly on the land".

Technological innovation also features in its work, and Lake and Flato's studio has been on the cutting edge of 3D printing in architecture, working with Texas building technology company ICON to create houses with 3D-printed elements in Austin.

According to the AIA, the studio's approach has led to important ties between conservation and architecture.

"Throughout all of their groundbreaking work, Lake and Flato have ensured their buildings sit lightly on the land and nurture the life that interacts with them," said AIA.

"Their process, collaborations, and tireless environmental advocacy have directly preserved access to more than 50,000 acres of land in Texas, where less than four per cent of land is publicly available, and conserved 35,000 acres of habitats stretching from West Virginia to Florida's Everglades."

Lake Flato has been the recipient of other honours, including the AIA Firm of the Year Award in 2004, as well as hundreds of other awards including COTE's 15 Top Ten Green Project Awards and the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture in 2014.

The Gold Medal was established in 1907. Last year, the award went to Chicago architect Carol Ross Barney and other recipients include Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa (jointly) as well as British architect Richard Rogers.

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Tech company Google and architecture studio Jahn have released visualisations of the planned revamp of the James R Thompson Center, an iconic postmodern-style building in Chicago's Downtown.

The plans for the redesign retain the original rounded form and the 17-storey atrium inside. Its glass curtain wall will change, moving from the slightly darkened patterned glass of the original to a more uniform, sleek look.

Located in the core of Downtown Chicago – known as the Loop – the Thompson Center was designed in the 1980s by local architect Helmut Jahn. It housed offices for the Illinois state government and connections for the Chicago Transit Authority.

Last year, tech company Google purchased the building from the city and plans to make it a centre for its offices and to rent extra space. Google will retain Jahn's practice, named Jahn, for the redesign.

"For the Thompson Center, we're working with the building's original architects at Jahn to help bring the design into the 21st century while maintaining its iconic form," said the company.

It said that the redesign was meant to "honor the postmodern legacy of the building".

However, certain details of the facade are set to change, such as the red and beige panelling of the ground-level collanade. Google's plans see a heightened entry program, with tall collonades that make more clear the ground-level recess in the facade.

The renderings show a second-storey amenities space placed above these columns on the interior of the building.

The developers on the project, The Prime Group and Capri Investment Group, confirmed that the train connections accessible through the atrium will remain under Google's plans, which means that some part of the atrium's ground and subterranean levels will remain open to the public.

Before, these areas held restaurants and services such as postal and licensure offices.

"When it opened, the Thompson Center was intended to be a new kind of gathering space for Chicagoans," said Google.

"[O]ur hope is that this reimagined building becomes something more: a thriving community destination for all Chicagoans in a revitalized Loop neighborhood."

Google has also set ambitious sustainability goals for the structure, aiming for "carbon-free" operation by 2030.

This will be achieved in part through the replacement of the facade with triple-pane glass and by completely replacing the mechanical systems.

The new facade will also allow for less artificial lighting during the day. Google said that the redevelopment will take "several years to complete".

The tech company recently worked to complete its campus in Silicon Valley with Danish studio BIG and UK-based Heatherwick Studio.

Jahn Studio also remains relevant in other ways in the Chicago infrastructural landscape, working towards the completion of a skyscraper in the south of the city, which will be one of the tallest in the area.

Images are courtesy of Google.

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Chicago architecture firm Studio Gang has expanded a California college through the addition of mass-timber structures that were informed by how fungi grow in the wild.

Kresge College is a part of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Most of its campus was originally designed by American architects Charles Moore and William Turnbull in the early 1970s.

Studio Gang was tasked with expanding the footprint of the project along the northwest extent of its property, nestled in a lush Pacific forest.

Four buildings were designed to complement the existing structures – California modern-style buildings with stucco walls and splashes of colour – and the woodland environment. All of the buildings feature concrete podiums, which support load-bearing timber walls.

"Our goal was to add new qualities to the sense of place offered by Moore and Turnbull's design, rather than to replicate the architecture,” said studio founding principal Jeanne Gang.

"We wanted our expansion to retain the qualities of surprise and free-spiritedness that have defined Kresge College, while at the same time opening it up to students of all abilities, the incredible natural ecology of its site, and the larger university community beyond."

The expansion's centrepiece is an academic centre with a series of protrusions that jut out asymmetrically from a core. Three simple, bow-shaped structures were placed to its southeast to house students.

The Kresge College Academic Center sits on an uneven site next to a steep ravine. To navigate this site, the studio used methods it said were inspired by the growth patterns of polypore fungi, by simultaneously "stepping down the slope and flaring out".

The centre's flared form was clad in a metal curtain wall, rendered in a light colour to reflect the mid-century buildings, while the faces of each protrusion feature floor-to-ceiling glass trimmed with timber.

At the centre is a large lecture hall, surrounded by a triple-space atrium with smooth concrete hallways and elevated walkways that connect to the four protruding spaces.

These hold classrooms and utilise the slope with three storeys that line up with the two-storey central structure.

The largest of these protrusions features a smaller lecture hall on the top level, with a roof that slopes up and out in a sizeable lip.

The smaller residential buildings are all bow-shaped, a move the studio said was implemented to preserve as much of the redwood tree groves on the site as possible.

These buildings are five storeys tall and have a central core set back from the wood-clad exterior, with large window boxes on each end that create sheltered patios on the second storey.

The recesses between the window and the facade were painted bright yellow, which resonates with the colours used in the Moore and Turnbull designs.

Like the academic centre, these structures have concrete podiums with load-bearing timber walls. However, cross-laminated ceilings were included and in many places, these elements were left exposed.

The bottom floors of these residential structures were left open for social spaces and amenities, while the top floors hold habitations: about 100 students can live in each structure.

Studio Gang also made interventions in the landscape, restoring and expanding the paths already connecting the campus and a long pedestrian bridge that crosses the ravine next to the academic centre. It also added a square at the building's primary entry.

Studio Gang has completed a number of high-profile projects this year, including museum expansions in Arkansas and New York City. Kresge College is part of the studio's move towards using more mass timber, and it has been selected to complete a theatre using this material in the Hudson Valley.

The photography is by Jason O'Rear.

Project credits: 

Design architect and architect of record: Studio Gang
Contractor: Swinerton Builders
Expansion plan associate architect: TEF Design
Interior designer: Studio Gang
Structural engineer: Magnusson Klemencic Associates
Structural engineer: MME Civil + Structural Engineering
Landscape architect: Joni L Janecki and Associates Landscape Architects
Landscape architect: Office of Cheryl Barton
Civil engineer: Sherwood Design Engineers
MEPFP: Introba
Sustainability consultant: Atelier Ten
Lighting consultant: Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design
Acoustic consultant: Salter
Envelope consultant: Simpson Gumpertz & Heger
Wayfinding and graphics: Cheng+Snyder
Code consultant: Holmes Fire
Quantity surveyor: Directional Logic
Accessibility consultant: Jensen Hughes
Elevator consultant: Elevator Consulting Associates
Technology consultant: TEECOM
Theater consultant (for Kresge College Academic Center): The Shalleck Collaborative
Food service consultant (for residential buildings): Ricca Design Studios

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Milan-based design exhibition Alcova has launched its Miami edition at Miami art week, meant to create a space for independent and experimental design studios at the annual event.

The exhibition took place at the Selina Gold Dust Motel in the north of Miami during the annual city-wide art festival.

More than 50 designers were showcased in solo and group shows in the motel, a three-storey structure with open-air causeways wrapped around a central pool, where the exhibition hosted talks and social space during the daytime.

According to Alcova founders Joseph Grima and Valentina Ciuffi, the institution saw a gap in the programming during art week that it could fill. Miami was Alcova's first international exhibition.

"It was surprising to us – like something was missing," Ciuffi told Dezeen.

Alcova addressed a need for "more design to happen" in the city, she said, adding that they wanted the exhibition to also be "complimentary" to the other design offerings.

"We wanted to do something different from what everybody else was doing," added Grima. "And of course when you're doing something different there's very little precedent to base yourself on."

The pair also said that, although different from its usual heterogeneous spaces, the repeated scale of the motel room format resulted in "beautiful surprises" as the designers decorated their own spaces.

Chief among the concerns of the curators was to present an "alchemic reaction" between the designers involved. The exhibitions were grouped into several themes, which included Material Experimentation, Emergent Designers and New Way of Living with Colors.

"It's not as homologous even as Design Miami itself; it is a branching out into different fields of investigation of design," said Grima. "But nevertheless [the exhibitors were] bound together by this idea of looking for something, of research."

The curators selected several designers working with innovative materials, such as Slovakian studio Crafting Plastics! bio-based plastic decor objects and solar-reactive dividers. This theme was also the subject of a talk during the exhibition, in which Dezeen took part.

Danish outfit Natural Material Studio – led by the inaugural winner of Dezeen's Bentley Lighthouse Award, Bonnie Hvillum – showcased lighting with screens made from bio-polymers.

Belgium studio JOV, meanwhile, collaborated with Studio Mary Lennox to present a mushroom-shaped rug made out of wool, which was surrounded in the installation by shelves of live mushroom cultures.

Designer Rich Aybar included a line of amber rubber furniture that was laid against a backdrop of the same blankets in which he shipped his pieces.

Netherlands-based Studio Loop Loop took the prompt of research-based material design strategies even further, providing insights into its innovative use of aluminium via a table with components and a pattern roller.

This was overhung by a chandelier surrounded by metal flaps dyed with the studio's natural dyes, which it has begun cultivating itself.

Important to the curators was also a focus on emergent designers, particularly those from the western hemisphere.

"There is no one similar to Alcova in the US," said Ciuffi. "It is very difficult for them to find a space and to come to Milan is more difficult for them."

Among these exhibitors was a group show organised by Brooklyn-based studio Forma Rosa, which included works by that studio as well as Californians NJ Roseti, Caleb Ferris, Tristan Louis Marsh, Wallpaper Projects and Sam Klemick.

Also among the Californian designers present was Objects for Objects, which created a series of furniture made with the multicolour pillars of trophies.

One of the most visually stimulating rooms was a metallic gold-lined room by CYKIK that featured a record with a sleeve that turned into a chair.

Among the works under the heading of New Way of Living With Color was a series of furniture with bases that made them appear to be dripping by Unform Studio.

At least one larger institutional player was involved in the curation: MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art, which curated a series of smaller rooms with singular objects by designers such as Kostas Lambridis and Objects of Common Interest.

The Alcova team took a direct hand in creating spaces in a room called Alcova Project Space.

This space showed a collection of design objects under the heading Digital Ornamentalism and featured works by Ryan Decker and Hanna Lim, among others.

"Informed by extremely heterogeneous visual influences, the works presented here strike us for an aesthetic language that seemingly attempts to transmute the digital obsession of recent years back into material form," said Alcova.

Several market-ready furniture designs were also present, including works by Studio Jialun Xiong, Bieke Casteleyn and Dean Norton.

Grima and Ciuffi, who also hosted dance parties at the hotel's canal-side club throughout the week, said that they were pleased with the turnout and response from the crowd.

"It was really about resetting the atmosphere and the energy and about seeing that the kind of work that we're interested in is of interest to the Miami crowd," said Grima.

"So yeah, so I think that was super, super encouraging."

Other design exhibitions during Miami art week included Design Miami and a series of outdoor installations at the Miami Design District.

The photography is by Piergiorgio Sorgetti

Alcova took place at the Selina Gold Dust Motel in Miami from 4-10 December 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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From skyscrapers by SHoP Architects and BIG to the world's largest spherical structure in Las Vegas, we select 10 of this year's most talked-about architecture projects in the United States as part of our 2023 review.

This year's roundup of the biggest and best from the United States also includes some residential projects from New England to California, including a sculptural home in the Hamptons and a black-brick home in Washington.

Read on for Dezeen's top 10 US architecture projects of 2023.

The Brooklyn Tower, New York City, by SHoP Architects

This 1,066-foot-tall (325 metres) skyscraper is the first supertall skyscraper in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The skyscraper is characterised by its blackened panels and bronze and copper pilasters, which make it stand out on the borough's skyline.

The skyscraper holds luxury residential units and the interiors were informed by a historic bank that was attached to the structure at its base. The tower sparked debate in the architectural community and was selected by Dezeen's readers as the year's best skyscraper by an open poll.

Find out more about the Brooklyn Tower ›

The Gilder Center, New York City, by Studio Gang

Informed by cave formations, the Gilder Center is an extension of the American Museum of Natural History alongside Central Park in Manhattan.

An undulating stone facade conceals the cavern-like interior. The sloping walls and bridges were covered using Shotcrete, a method that allows concrete to be sprayed onto formwork.

Find out more about the Gilder Center ›

Oxford Triangle Home, Los Angeles, by Matthew Royce 

Glass, concrete, steel and wood characterise the facade of this home on a corner lot in Venice Beach. The front of the home is wrapped in a pool and patio and the site includes a wood-clad guest house.

Inspired by Iranian architecture, Royce, who designed the home for himself and his family, included some passive cooling elements such as subterranean reflecting pools.

Find out more about Oxford Triangle Home ›

MSG Sphere, Las Vegas, by Populous

This theatre in Las Vegas achieved double records. Not only is it the largest spherical structure in the world, its exterior is also fitted with the largest LED screen, which allows for any number of projections.

Large-scale visual displays are also a feature of the interior. The Sphere's theatre has a massive sloping screen that allows for immersive concert experiences.

Find out more about MSG Sphere ›

The Spiral, New York City, BIG

The Spiral rises 1,031 feet (314 metres) into the air in the city's Hudson Yards development and is the Danish studio's first-ever supertall skyscraper.

Inspired by "ziggurats" the structure has a stepped facade that contains a terrace that wraps around the structure. The terrace has been planted with outdoor gardens and allows for outdoor access on each of the office building's 66 storeys.

Find out more about The Spiral ›

(W)rapper Tower, Los Angeles, by Eric Owen Moss

Standing out against the low-lying structures in the vicinity, (W)rapper Tower is an office building with a T-shaped form outside of Los Angeles.

Built to be earthquake-resistant, the structure is characterised and named after the steel beams clad with a cementitious material that stretch from the interior to the exterior.

Find out more about (W)rapper Tower ›

Hamptons Home, Southhampton, by Timothy Godbold

This renovation of a 1970s house in the Hamptons included painting the trapezoidal exterior in black to distinguish its perched picture windows.

The architect, who lives in the house, took influences from the hideouts of James Bond movie villains and included industrial elements in the interior.

Find out more about Godbold's Hamptons home ›

Blue Dream, East Hampton, Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Though completed in 2017, this home in the Hamptons in New York was kept under wraps for years. Its beachside location and expressive roof distinguish the home.

In order to accomplish the smooth, sculptural roof, the studio used a glass-reinforced polymer often used for boats and in the aerospace industry. The smooth lines of the roof continue to the interior.

Find out more about Blue Dream ›

The Rambler, Seattle, by GO'C

Located on a wooded site northwest of Seattle, the Rambler consists of a simple rectangular form placed on a concrete plinth. Black brick and glass characterise the exterior facade, with breeze-block walls at places to create semi-enclosed spaces.

The single-floor house includes an overhanging roof with soffits of Douglas fir and features an open floor plan.

Find out more about The Rambler ›

The Perelman Center, New York City, by REX

Part of the World Trade Center site, the Perelman Center is a performance art centre with an expressive facade made from thin pattern-matched marble that allows for the structure to appear illuminated like a lantern at night.

Because of the complicated city infrastructure, the whole of the theatre was suspended above the base and includes several elements that enable to cubic structure to attain dozens of different configurations for performances.

Find out more about the Perelman Center ›

2023 review

This article is part of Dezeen's roundup of the biggest and best news and projects in architecture, design, interior design and technology from 2023.

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Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen has unveiled a series of furniture pieces and showcased them in a multi-sensory installation with Mexican stone company Arca during Miami art week.

The Gravitas collection consists of seating, shelving and tables made with stone from Arca, sourced from quarries in Spain, Mexico and Italy.

Gravitas includes 18 pieces made from Porfido, lava stone, Carrara marble and Cafesino. The forms range from small stools to monumental shelving and tables.

Each piece has rough surfaces, rendered by hand, and more than 80 hours of labour went into some of the large pieces.

The stone was polished for particular elements of the pieces, such as the seats of the chairs.

With the exception of a large circular table, each of the pieces consists of a single blocks of stone, which were machine cut from larger blocks before being shaped by the artisans.

"It's incredible to see how a stone can transform simply by applying different treatments," Van Duysen told Dezeen.

"This process involves a juxtaposition of textures from the same stone, engaging in a dialogue with the overall shape of the object."

Van Duysen worked closely with Arca and the artisans to carry out the project. Artisans were selected from locations near the quarries.

"The pieces speak for themselves and are the result of the skilled craftsmen who have left their mark on this collection," said the architect.

"I'd like to express my gratitude to them. Above all, this is a very human collection."

Van Dusyen credited Arca, a stone distributor based in Mexico, for sourcing of the stone and connecting him with the artisans on the project.

Arca CEO Gerardo Cortina said that the precision of Van Duysen's vision worked well to showcase the "innate beauty" of the materials selected for the project.

"Vincent Van Duysen's work embodies a philosophy that aligns perfectly with our own – a deep appreciation for the intrinsic beauty of natural materials," said Cortina.

"His creations exemplify the elegance and timelessness that our marbles embody, consequently it was an organic choice to enlist Van Duysen's practice to reimagine our extensive material curation, and create a collection that transcends the ordinary."

To showcase the release of the collection, the team put together an installation at Arca's Wynwood showroom during Miami art week. The furniture pieces were placed on top of a large-grain gravel and the room was lined with curtains.

Van Duysen selected a soundtrack to accompany the work that included the sounds of water to further emphasise the natural shaping of the stone.

"The public there is not just interested in art but also in design and creativity all around," said Van Duysen.

"As these pieces exist at the crossroads between art, sculpture, and product design, we thought that the event would shine the right spotlight on the collection launch."

Van Duysen is known for his architectural approach to furniture design, and for being the creative director of Italian furniture outfit Molteni&C.

Along with Alex Vervoordt, Van Duysen helped design a house for American celebrity Kim Kardashian in California.

The photography is by Nick Hudson. 

Gravitas is on view at Arca Wynwood from 7 to 10 December during Miami art week. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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UK-based designer Lara Bohinc has unveiled a series of bulbous furniture and decorative objects for public use at the Miami Design District during the city's art week.

Called Utopia, Bohinc's collection comprises four different clusters of sculptural forms, placed both in the Miami Design District and outside of the Design/ Miami fair in Miami Beach.

The pieces are ergonomic, taking the shape of chairs, benches and tables with bulbous forms rendered in cork and then finished with pastel colours. Among the designs is an egg-shaped object with hollow insides meant to be a play-place for children, surrounded by two pink benches arrayed in front of a Balenciaga storefront.

A series of hundreds of birdhouses, also egg-shaped, were hung from the trees throughout the Design District.

Another ring of seating was placed around an expressive sculpture with a slightly humanoid figure. It was placed in front of the district's famous geodesic dome by modernist architect and thinker Richard Buckminster Fuller.

The juxtaposition seems fitting given the utopian impulse of Fuller and the explicit utopian themes of Bohinc's installation and she told Dezeen that she picked the spot – a feature of winning the design competition that decides the commission each – for that reason and for its "organic" appearance.

Bohinc aimed to work with this natural form, working in dialogue with the form of Fuller's work.

"His project was the direct inspiration for the piece," she said.

"It's called fly-eye dome, but to me, it looks like a cell multiplying and overtaking the square and – and I thought, what if those cells kept multiplying?"

In line with the "natural" theme, it was also important for Bohinc that she used organic materials. The structures were constructed using blocks of cork pasted together and supported by steel frames, fabricated by a family-run studio in Portugal.

The pieces were then painted with a water-resistant paint used for outdoor furniture.

"It's a natural material," Bohinc said. "That was very important for me, because it's really about nature, and life and cells and organism and growth, and this kind of lifeforce."

A reusable material was also important because the installation is temporary. Bohinc wanted to create work that would engage with the public and noted that even just a few days after the installation she noticed people interacting and even carving into the work.

"The site itself is very important," she said. "The site inspired it and the colours were inspired directly from the buildings around it."

Bohinc, who was born in Slovenia, displayed pieces with similar forms but made with wool at Milan's design week in 2022. Utopia is among several large-scale installations on show during Miami art week 2023; we rounded up 10 of the most interesting here.

Miami art week takes place from 6 to 19 December in Miami, US. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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A beach maze by Sebastian Errazuriz, the first US show for AI artist Tilly Tabot and the first physical work by digital artist Andrés Reisinger are among the design-forward installations on view during Miami art week 2023.

Many installations, events and fairs are planned for Miami's annual art week, which draws participants and visitors from all over the world to showcase art, design and technology.

The event is based around a few large fairs including Art Basel, Design/ Miami and Faena Art, which all take place in Miami Beach.

In recent years, Miami Design District, a development in Miami that is the brainchild of collector and developer Craig Robbins, has also become a hub for public art and showcases. These are held by the brands that have storefronts in the district.

This year, many institutions have been moving away from the focus on digital art trends such as NFTs, which featured heavily in previous years.

In line with this, designer Errazuriz has erected an installation challenging the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital designer Reisinger will install his first-ever physical work.

Read on for our ten picks for the week and visit the Dezeen Events Guide for a full schedule of events happening during Miami art week 2023.

Gravitas by Vincent Van Duysen 

Architect Vincent Van Duysen has collaborated with Mexican stone distributor Arca on a new collection accompanied by an atmospheric installation in the brand's showroom in Wynwood.

Using Arca's selection of stone, the architect created 18 pieces of furniture that will be displayed for the first time.

Sculptures in Arca stone by artist Hank Willis Thomas will also be on view outside of the showroom as part of the brand's art week presence.

MAZE: Journey Through the Algorithmic Self by Sebastian Errazuriz

Errazuriz will install a large-scale maze on Faena Beach for Faena Art, one of the week's premiere art fairs.

Visitors will walk through the ocean-side maze, which will be designed by AI image-generating platforms and feature a monolithic sculpture at its centre.

The installation will be accompanied by a book written by Errazuriz about AI's effects on contemporary art and culture, which will be accessible via a series of QR codes placed throughout the maze.

Gustaf Westman x The Standard Spa

Swedish designer Gustaf Westman will take over the cafe at the Standard Spa in Miami Beach to showcase several of his furniture and decor pieces.

The Scandinavian-style spa will be outfitted with a wall of mirrors, including the designer's well-known Curvy Mirror, and marks the beginning of a collaboration between the designer and the brand.

House of Tilly by Studio Snoop

London-based Studio Snoop will take over the lobby at the Standard Hotel in Miami Beach to feature designs by its AI designer, Tilly Tabot, for the first time in the United States.

Tilly3.0 is the third iteration of the AI designer, which was first showcased at Milan's design week earlier this year.

The installation will feature five designs conceptualised by Tabot and created by artisans and fabricators, and visitors can ask her questions about the works.

Utopia by Lara Bohinc

UK-based designer Lara Bohinc was commissioned by Miami's Design District to create a series of brightly coloured, sculptural furniture pieces made from cork.

The pieces range from ergonomic furniture to light fixtures that will be illuminated at night and hundreds of egg-shaped birdhouses suspended from the surrounding trees.

Clusters of the pieces will be on show both on the promenades in the Design District and in front of the Design/ Miami fair in Miami Beach.

A Subtle Alchemy by Dan Lam

Sculptor Dan Lam will show a sculpture at Wynwood Walls as part of the institution's programming for Miami art week.

The sculpture was crafted using metal and styrofoam and coated in automobile paint and a "chameleon" finish to make the colours change depending on the angle of the viewer.

EXPRESSION SERVICE ESSENCE by Samuel Ross

British designer Samuel Ross has been commissioned to create a permanent installation for the Miami Design District.

Twelve powder-coated steel benches have been placed in public areas to align with the design week festivities.

The benches have three different designs that were conceptualised by Ross and created using CNC techniques.

Alcova

Italian design platform Alcova, known for its exhibitions at Milan design week, will showcase several group shows at the Selina Gold Dust Motel in the north of the city.

Artists, designers, material innovators and interior designers will all contribute to the different shows, and the program will feature creators such as Caleb Ferris, Objects of Common Interest, Kostas Lambridis and Natural Materials Studio, whose founder Bonnie Hvillum recently won Dezeen's inaugural Bentley Lighthouse Award.

Alcova will also feature programming, including talks and events in partnership with Dezeen.

Miami Take Over by Andrés Reisinger

Known for his digital art, Reisinger will present his first-ever physical work in collaboration with Miami Design District.

Based on the artist's dream-like digital works, the installation will feature fabric draped over a storefront in the district, pulled aside at the entrance.

8 Minutes and 20 Seconds by Marjan van Aubel

Solar designer Marjan van Aubel will present her first-ever public project in Miami, an installation that explores the potential of harnessing carbon-neutral energy and "pays homage to the sun's journey".

In partnership with Lexus and Random Studio, the installation will feature Lexus's electric LF-ZC car at scale. The car was constructed with photovoltaic sheets that will act similarly to a prism, with integrated light and motion sensors adding to the display.

The work's title, 8 Minutes and 20 Seconds, references the time it takes the sun's light to reach the Earth.

Miami art week takes place from 6 to 19 December in Miami, US. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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A Cesca Chair decked out with hundreds of air fresheners and Spoleto Chair adorned with speakers are among American artist Noel Mercado's modification of classic Knoll chairs using salvaged chair parts.

The Chicago-based artist was commissioned by Pennsylvania furniture company Knoll to modify three classic chairs using found objects.

Mercado visited Chicago junkyards, car washes and body shops to collect objects used to modify the chairs, a method Mercado has used before and at times with Knoll chairs specifically.

"I've watched and read a lot on the history of these designs and have done many deep dives on the brand and their designers," Mercado told Dezeen.

"When it came time to work on the chair frames it helped that I had experience with Knoll furniture from past work so I was prepared when I took them to my studio."

The decision to use car parts came from Mercado's ongoing fascination with automobiles as objects that lend themselves to self-expression. After Knoll gifted the designer three chairs for the works, he formulated new ideas based on this aspect of cars and drew from his past work and notebooks for ideas.

"The story I wanted to tell here was the mundane process of getting in your car, putting on your seatbelt, turning on your music, and adjusting your rearview before shifting into drive," said the artist.

"Highlighting these aspects of a car that can often go unnoticed, the things we might look past due to repetition."

The first of the works is called Junkyard Dogs and uses a Wassily Chair, created by Hungarian-American designer Marcel Breuer in the 1920s.

Mercado deconstructed the classic metal-and-leather chair, reupholstering it with seat belts garnered from a junkyard in Chicago.

"[It is] supposed to be a bit more chaotic and layered while still retaining its function," said Mercado of the work.

Next Mercado took a Cesca Chair, also designed by Breuer, and created Little Trees.

Using hundreds of tree-shaped air fresheners bought from a local car wash, Mercado filled see-through boxes placed where the cushion should be on the chair to reference the collection of used air fresheners that accumulate on the rearview mirrors of his friends' cars.

"The attendant pulling them was definitely curious why I was buying these by the hundreds," said Mercado, who noted that being "intentionally playful" is a component of his work.

"You could say it's a bit tongue-in-cheek, playful in delivery but very intentional in craft and process."

For the third and final work, Mercado used a Spoleto Chair – a version of the cantilever chair type, a popular and widely used modern chair design.

Called Noise Violation, the work features speakers placed in the seat and backrest of the chair, laid in grey upholstery used in many older vehicles. The speakers were hooked up to a radio that sits alongside the chair.

"In the Noise Violation Spoleto chair the goal was to show the speakers in action when usually they are hidden as much as possible inside our car doors, it was important to me that the speakers were salvaged from cars and were still able to play music," explained the artist.

Knoll was founded in New York in 1938 and in 2021 merged with other American furniture giant Herman Miller, creating a joint company called MillerKnoll.

The photography is by Adam Jason Cohen.

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Japanese architecture studio Kengo Kuma and Associates is set to create a sculptural block of buildings that will serve as retail locations for the Miami Design District.

Called Mirai – Japanese for "distant future" – renders of the development show a series of colourful fluted pillars wrapped around a retail building on a corner in the north of the city.

The Kengo Kuma and Associates (KKAA) design is meant to combine elements of both Japanese and Floridian architecture, with colourful facades meeting minimalist retail environments.

It will include several modular retail units on the ground floor that renters can combine or separate based on their needs.

The angle and setbacks of the building will allow for each store to have "corner conditions", according to the team of developers, which includes Lionheart Capital, Leviathan Development, and Well Duo.

Building informed by Miami's "energy and natural beauty"

The second and third floors will be used as office space and the structure will include a green roof topped with solar panels.

Several planted pathways are planned for where the building meets the street and the building will include a central garden, with landscape design by Miami-based studio Island Planning Corporation.

"Inspired by the energy and natural beauty of Miami, Mirai embodies the harmonious blend of Japanese traditions and the intricate tapestry of old-world architecture," said KKAA founder Kengo Kuma.

“The purpose of Mirai is to fashion a space that not only frames the natural tropical elements of Miami but also harmonizes seamlessly with its surroundings," he added.

"It's about providing a haven that exudes tranquility and comfort, inviting all who visit and inhabit to partake in the essence of the vibrant city – a sanctuary where dreams can take flight amid the lush beauty of Miami."

Mirai to be completed by 2025

The team plans on breaking ground on Mirai in 2024, with plans to finish it by 2025.

Since 2010, the Miami Design District has become a hub for fashion and design brands. Marcel Wanders created a Louis Vuitton store for the area, while architect Rafael de Cárdenas created an outlet for Nodaleto.

The initiative of developer and gallerist Craig Robbins and his firm Dacra, the area has also attracted branches of important local art institutions such as the Institute for Contemporary Art.

Several programs and installations are also put on in the area during the city's art week. Dezeen has put together a guide for the upcoming 2023 iteration here.

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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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LA architecture studio Gehry Partners has completed the extension of media company Warner Bros' headquarters in Burbank, which juxtaposes two distinctive facade styles.

Called Second Century Burbank, the Gehry Partners-designed complex contains additional offices and studios for the headquarters, which is flanked by a major highway and the studio lot.

Its name marks the celebration of the film studio's second hundred years of operation.

Second Century Burbank is divided into two large blocks connected by a two-storey volume that is topped by a landscaped courtyard. The offices and studios are intended for use by Warner Bros and its potential tenants.

For the facades, Gehry Partners married two distinct designs. The first consists of sloping curtain walls with a white frit.

These are used across the building's highway-facing elevations and have an "icy white appearance" intended to evoke the form of icebergs.

On the side facing the studio lot, these curtain walls are interspersed with steel facades with punched windows modelled on the art deco-style buildings of early Hollywood.

"For the glass facades, we adopted the image of icebergs for the dynamic angled geometry of their vertical faces," Gehry Partners told Dezeen.

"As a counterpoint, we imagined metal volumes embedded within the crystalline glass forms," the studio continued.

"We wanted the articulation of the metal facades to convey a historic industrial feel, a throwback to Hollywood's bygone era when the architecture of the movie studios symbolized the grandeur of their ambitions."

Beyond these references, the different facade types also indicate the interior programmes.

The glass sections house the more collaborative workplaces while the metal sections contain the more private executive offices.

Gehry Partners' design also responds to the structure's proximity to the busy highway.

On the south end of the building's sloping site, the curtain wall is designed to minimise noise from the motorway while providing visual interest for drivers.

"This is where the image of the iceberg is most visible, and where the visual effect of the fractured geometries of the iceberg work best," said the studio.

"Carefully choreographed, the movement and rhythm of the faceted angled walls have been designed with an eye to how it is perceived from a moving car," it continued.

The other side of the structure is more geared towards pedestrians, with landscaped spaces by OJB Landscape Architecture directly outside of the building. These are complete with paths that meander through groves of mature trees and shrubs.

Inside, Gehry Partners designed the floors to be flexible and in a variety of sizes to accommodate the needs of different tenants. Warner Bros contracted international architecture studio NBBJ for the interior fit-outs.

The first two levels stretch across both blocks, while the third includes the rooftop terrace of the smaller structure.

Nearer the ground floor, the ceilings are higher with large expanses of glass. The ceilings are slightly lower on the upper floors, but outdoor terraces open them to the outside.

The building features three floors of subterranean car parking, alongside bike storage and water reclamation facilities used for cooling towers. Photovoltaic panels are installed on the roof.

Gehry Partners was founded by architect Frank Gehry in 2001. The studio is the architect behind the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles and it recently completed a pair of skyscrapers called The Grand in the city.

The photography is by Tim Hursley. 

Project credits:

Architecture: Gehry Partners; Frank Gehry (partner in charge), Tensho Takemori (managing partner), David Nam (design partner), Heather Waters (project architect), Meaghan Lloyd (partner/chief of staff)
Curtain wall: Curtain Wall Design & Consulting, INC.
Structural consultant: Englekirk
Civil engineer: Psomas
Elevator consultant: HKA Elevator Consulting, Inc.
Facade access consultant: Lerch Bates
Lighting consultant: Kaplan Gehring McCarroll
MEP/FP engineer: ARC Engineering
Landscape architect: OJB Landscape Architecture
Acoustical consultant: Newson Brown
Code consultant: Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, Inc.
Hardware consultant: Finish Hardware Technology
Contractor: Krismar Construction

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Architecture firm Jones Studio has designed an educational centre in Arizona with the aim of raising awareness about water resources and infrastructure in the region.

The Water Education Center will form part of a Central Arizona Project (CAP) facility north of Phoenix and highlight the "contested topic of water in the west", according to Jones Studio principal Brian Farling.

Prospective designs show a sloping weathering-steel canopy supported by stone-clad buildings on each side of the 336-mile-long (541 kilometers) canal that brings water from the Colorado River to central Arizona.

"A lot of architects are great at dealing with sun and capturing the qualities of light," Farling told Dezeen.

"Less of them deal with engaging and celebrating this precious resource that falls from the sky very, very rarely. Architecture here has a responsibility to remind people of that preciousness."

Farling said that the centre, which includes educational materials and a direct view of the canal, will expose people to the whole water system in order to dispel the disconnectedness he sees in most people from where they get their water.

This education is particularly important now, Farling said, because of the dwindling water supplies in the American Southwest and the political battles over it. He said these stem from water allotments to the Southwestern states from the Colorado River, which are based on century-old agreements.

As part of the proposal, the team has planned exhibitions for the centre that will illustrate the waterways and "engineering marvels" that bring water to the Southwest. These include Hoover Dam and the Phoenix canal system that covers more miles than those in Amsterdam and Venice put together.

A series of cylinders arranged around the canal will also provide physical representations of water usage in the area, such as the amount an average household in the area consumes per year.

According to Jones Studio senior associate Shawn Swisher, the architecture itself aims to show best practices in water conservation.

These practices include the avoidance of fountains or unnecessary grass as well as waste and stormwater retention systems.

On the north side of the canal, a community gathering space placed under the solar panel-covered metal canopy will look out on a preserved desert landscape.

"It will show that architecture can adapt to the site and reinforce everything that the exhibits will try and tell about in more detail the story of water in our region," Swisher told Dezeen.

In general, Farling and Swisher believe that the educational aspects of the centre can lead to the cities in central Arizona being more sustainable.

Swisher pointed to the long history of desert cities and the complex system of canals implemented by the Indigenous people of Arizona as signs that human life can and has been sustainable in the region.

However, the prevalence of concrete and bad drainage, as well as high water usage by agriculture and landscaping typical of post-war American cities needs to be rethought, Swisher added.

He pointed to Las Vegas as a nearby desert city that has a sensible approach to water retention, as it limits water usage and diverts all domestic water used back to the water supply to combat drought.

"This is an opportunity to tell these stories and raise the level of education of everybody," concluded Farling.

"Architecture should contribute to a larger understanding of living in this watershed and dealing with the arid climate and all the great and challenging things that come with it."

The Water Education Center is scheduled to be completed in 2026.

Other structures that were built to promote education in sustainability include an Amsterdam school clad in timber panels by Bureau SLA.

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Canadian architecture studio Provencher Roy has created Darwin Bridges, a curved bridge on Nuns' Island outside of Montreal constructed with concrete that utilises recycled glass in its mixture.

The structure replaces a set of two-lane bridges constructed in the 1960s to service the growing suburban community and connect it with the highway system.

The original bridges had fallen into disrepair, and local studio Provencher Roy was tapped to remake them. Provencher Roy conceptualised a curving form that continued its function as an automotive route but also considered the pedestrian access at its shoulders and underneath.

"The concept was always there, but the design and construction standards of the time favoured the automobile, with corrugated galvanized iron guardrails to prevent vehicles from falling," said Provencher Roy project manager Jacques Rousseau.

"For this project, we were therefore working in a paradoxical 1960s context, on an innovative urban project to improve the user experience, while also contending with the formal urban treatments required for road transportation."

The curved bridges have arches along their length and were constructed using a cast-in-place concrete aggregate with a "less raw colour" than traditional concrete.

Recycled glass converted to ground glass pozzolan (GGP) was included in the aggregate, comprising about ten per cent of the mix. According to the studio, this both reduces the total C02 emissions necessary for the bridge's construction and creates a "strengthening of the mechanical properties of concrete".

This strengthening occurs because of how the cement in the aggregate reacts with the GGP, forming calcium silica hydrate. More than 40,000 kilograms of glass – the equivalent of around 70,000 bottles of wine – went into the mixture.

"When ground into a fine particle powder and introduced in concrete, GGP reduces the permeability and increases durability," said the studio, who noted that this method has been approved by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). Stainless steel reinforcements bolster the strength of the bridge.

Besides the strength of the cement, the studio also said that the mixture could help with the resistance of the material to the harsh climatic conditions in Montreal. It estimated the lifespan of the bridge at 125 years.

Provencher Roy also focused on the experience of the pedestrian walkway that winds underneath the bridges. The median that runs along the highway was expanded, giving the bridges a bow-like form.

Between the bridge structures, the studio created a retaining wall that was lined with plants to create a space that it described as "a soothing secret garden".

The concrete on the exterior faces of the bridge was stylized, impressed with half circles and flower stems. LED lights were included to create a safer walking environment.

According to the studio, the Darwin Bridges are the first road bridges to be completed by engineers in Montreal for "half a century".

Provencher Roy has completed a number of high-profile projects in the city including the conversion of Montreal's Olympic Tower to offices as well as the design of a spiral ramp under the National Assembly of Quebec in Quebec City.

The photography is by Stéphane Brügger.

Project credits:

Architecture: Provencher Roy
Structure: SNC-Lavalin
Civil: SNC-Lavalin
Lighting: SNC-Lavalin
Landsacpe: Provencher Roy

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Ross Barney Architects has created a pavilion dedicated to Haitian entrepreneur Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, the first non-Indigenous settler of Chicago, for the city's architecture biennial.

Parallel Histories is a pavilion made up of small, temporary structures representing the footprint of DuSable's homestead, on a park that Ross Barney Architects is revamping where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan.

Commissioned for the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial, the installation is meant to shine a light on this early history and bring attention to the park, which served as an industrial site for many years. Architect Ryan Gann was a collaborator on the project.

"We wanted just to make a physical representation of the impact that he had on his site. We built his house, basically out of scrim on the site," studio founder and AIA Gold Medal-winner Carol Ross Barney told Dezeen.

The result is a "lantern-like" structure that is illuminated by solar lighting at night and has "vital questions" about the site and its relationship to the city written in bold white lettering across the side.

The questions include "Who Was DuSable?" and "Who Found Chicago?".

"That's kind of a trick question because everybody who comes here has found Chicago," Barney explained.

Other elements of the homestead, including outbuildings, have been signified by smaller areas wrapped by orange temporary fencing.

"We had a very small budget," Barney said. "We had ideas about what we do if we had if we had more money – I think we probably would have continued to build DuSables estate."

While referencing the early settler history, Barney also wanted to shed light on the history and tragedy of the Indigenous people who interacted with DuSable and who were ultimately displaced from the site as the city was settled.

Barney and local studio Brook Architecture were commissioned by the city to remake the three-acre park, which was dedicated to DuSable in 1985 by Chicago's first Black mayor, Harold Washington. Construction is planned to start on the park in 2024

Ross Barney Architects kept the soil used to raise up the DuSable pavilion at the site and plans to convert it into three mounds representing the "three fires" used to describe the three Indigenous groups who inhabited Chicago at the point of colonisation.

The studio worked with a number of consultants, including representatives of Indigenous groups such as the Potawatomi, who are not unanimous in the acceptance of the "three fires" narrative, as well as groups who argue the importance of DuSable's Haitian heritage.

"One of the things that's really hard about this park, but I think it'll come out elegantly if we were getting long enough, is there are so many storylines that are important to contemporary people, and making them more coherent, and rational and respectful is hard," said Barney.

Barney said that the park was a physical manifestation of the conflicting histories that have gone into the making of contemporary Chicago.

However, for the installation and the permanent park, the important aspect for Barney was to reflect in the design "those layers of use and inhabitation".

The studio also included a map showing the changing geography and settlement of the lakeshore in a graphic installation presented at the Chicago Cultural Center as part of the biennial.

The park also marks an important cap in Barney's career, whose studio was operative in redesigning the city's riverwalk.

"For me, having spent you know, on our 20 years of my life, designing the riverwalk, it's really cool to get to the end where you touch the lake," she said.

The photography is by Kendall McCaugherty/Hall+Merrick+McCaugherty Photographers.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial is on from 21 September 2021 to 11 February 2024. For more events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design around the world visit the Dezeen Events Guide.

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New York design studio Stickbulb has launched Treeline, a series of lighting created using wood sourced from trees that had been removed from New York City's "urban forest".

The Treeline lighting series comprises long, wood-panelled fixtures that are suspended from each end by wire and range from four to eight feet (1.2 to 2.4 metres) in length.

Made from pin oak, one of the most prevalent trees in New York City, the fixtures were fabricated by the studio in the city.

They were made using wood collected from trees removed from the city's green spaces and streets through a collaboration with NYC Parks Department and Brooklyn wood supplier Tri-Lox.

"[Treeline] was specifically designed to be a product of a new supply chain in New York City, which is taking the wood waste from the urban forest operations, proving that it can be used locally and made into beautiful products," Stickbulb co-founder Russell Greenberg told Dezeen.

"It's all about reducing waste and raising the profile of salvage – and trying to mainstream it." 

New York City, which contracts outside parties to do maintenance on its trees, removes more than 10,000 from the seven-million strong stock of trees in the city each year.

Typically, the wood collected from the trees, which are downed for various reasons like disease and storms, ends up being mulched or sent to one of the local landfills.

According to Greenberg, the studio was made aware of this waste and decided to try and save the wood.

"Some of it is beautiful old-growth wood with really tight grain," Greenberg said. "This is the smartest, lowest-carbon material we could possibly be working with."

Because of the inconsistent size and quality of the wood, the studio has also set up a depot where it stores wood bought from the city.

At the depot, the Stickbulb team can ensure its stock of wood for further production as well as evaluate the wood, removing metal and other debris from the supply.

It was important for the team to raise awareness of the usefulness of the wood, without relying on an aesthetic that made the salvaged nature of the material obvious.

"Normally, when someone thinks of salvage, they think of something that has a lot of rustication, that screams salvage when you look at," Greenberg said. "For us, that's not the case."

He noted that as only a single design is currently in production, the wood type needed is very specific, but in the future hopes to scale up the project to include more of the salvaged wood.

Greenberg hopes to expand the pilot so that the money for production could also go towards a more robust forestry program in the city.

This could create a circular economy around wood that also incorporates the deaths of trees, which Greenberg noted is usually overlooked in favour of planting and maintenance.

"No one wants to talk about trees getting removed or dying in the city," he said. "Everyone wants to talk about how are we going to plant more trees – both of these are important conversations to have."

"But if you're not thinking about the full lifecycle, which includes death, you're not thinking about the whole thing," he added.

Stickbulb has worked with salvaged wood from other sources in the past, including a line made from wood recovered from a water tower. Other studios to use reclaimed wood include Ptacek Home, which created a line of decor with wood from trees downed by storms.

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American architecture studio Kohn Pedersen Fox has created a glass-clad skyscraper with an undulating facade and parapets on a sloped site in downtown Vancouver.

Located on a sloping site near Vancouver's waterfront, 320 Granville is a 30-storey skyscraper designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) to host offices in the Canadian city's urban core.

The building, which is clad in glass with powder-coated aluminium framing, sits among the modern and classical buildings of its surroundings. KPF wanted it to also respond to the site's waterside location.

"The brief was to design an office building that would take best advantage of an amazing site, where Granville comes down to the Waterfront Station," said KPF president James von Klemperer.

"Given this location, the natural inclination was to design a building that would respond to the seaside environment."

The skyscraper's relationship to the water was expressed formally in a series of concave and convex undulations on the facade of the building, which give it rounded edges at its three corners, where it conforms to the corner of the block.

Between each of the floor plates, the glass that bands the 10-foot-tall storeys were given additional variety up the facade, adding to the rippling effect.

"The curved form of the tower, and the waved top parapets, reflect our idea of giving the building an aqueous form," said von Klemperer.

"The resulting light reflections and scalloped shadows have the effect of breaking down the scale of the tower."

Because of the city's restrictions to maintain the lines of sight for surrounding buildings, the tower's height was capped.

Von Klemperer said that the form of the tower was designed to create a visual effect that would make it seem taller when viewed from certain angles.

"When seen from oblique angles, the volume of the tower appears to be made up of bundled turrets, accentuating the building's vertical proportions," he continued.

At street level, the building engages with the busy thoroughfare by having a recessed entry, with massive columns supporting the cantilevered edges of the upper floors, which reach out towards the street.

Flanking the entry program is a series of floor plates that work to shelter the area around the building from the rainy Vancouver winters.

Also on the ground floor is a cafe that is open to the public, while the lobby and other ground floor programs are open to the street via the double-height glass curtain wall.

The building's interiors are pared back, with stone floors and wooden battens on the ceilings of the public spaces. It also houses bike storage and other amenities such as a rooftop terrace.

KPF was founded in 1976 in New York. Other recent projects by the studio include the Scalpel skyscraper in London and an upcoming supertall skyscraper in Austin, Texas.

The photography is by Ema Peter. 

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Climate change is making it harder to prioritise retrofitting buildings to withstand earthquakes, architect John Lesak tells Dezeen in this interview for our Designing for Disaster series.

Lesak, a principal at California architecture studio Page and Turnbull, has spent decades making older buildings more resilient to seismic activity.

But he warned that rising costs associated with climate change are diverting money away from earthquake-proofing structures in the state.

"Earthquakes don't lie"

He used the example of air filtration systems due to wildfires as a prime example of more money going towards "non-structural systems".

"They are all connected, and they act upon each other quite a bit," Lesak said of competing environmental factors. "Almost everywhere in the United States is seeing red skies."

America's most populous state is highly prone to earthquakes, with the San Andreas fault running almost its entire length.

Seismic events have therefore played a large role in shaping construction and building in California.

Lesak pointed to the destruction of masonry buildings in the early 20th century as a reason for the construction of many concrete public buildings.

"I always say earthquakes don't lie," he told Dezeen.

"After the 1933 Long Beach earthquake our schools got rebuilt, and they're all concrete. The whole way of thinking about public buildings in Southern California was completely changed because of that earthquake."

Lesak's retrofit projects have included the 1928 Los Angeles City Hall, which at the time was the tallest retrofit of a building for earthquakes, as well as more contemporary buildings such as the Capitol Records Building.

"There are some buildings where it just doesn't make sense, but a lot of them it does," he said.

"From a carbon footprint perspective, it makes a ton of sense, because the shell and the cladding are the big carbon investments in buildings and you can keep that stuff here."

"You better have enough resiliency"

Usually, these retrofitting projects include placing isolating dampers at the foundations so that they can take on more force from the earthquake's shocks.

"I always think of them as stacks of coins that are surrounded by rubber," said Lesak of the isolators.

"And they have to create a moat around the building to allow it to kind of slide so you're trying to stop the kind of disparate motion that can happen."

Earthquake-proofing existing buildings in California is currently particularly focused on soft-storey structures – where there are voids in the lower part of the building, usually for parking.

Many of these buildings were hastily constructed in the 1970s to account for a rapidly growing population, but suffered badly during the Northridge Earthquake in 1994.

In the mid-2010s, Los Angeles declared that these types of buildings needed to be retrofitted.

Lesak estimated that of more than 12,000 buildings that were declared in need of retrofits, more than 8,000 have already been carried out.

Ultimately, despite conflicting priorities, cities need to protect themselves from earthquakes to maintain their industries and populations, Lesak contended.

"​​If you lose that industry, you lose the brain power, and that's your big resource for economic generation," he said.

"So if you want to keep all that you better have enough resiliency to make sure your buildings can handle earthquakes."

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 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial has opened with installations focusing on monumentality, race and material innovations on show at sites throughout Chicago.

This year's Chicago Architecture Biennial, its fifth edition, focused on themes of collaboration and community building through architecture, with a series of exhibits adhering to the exhibition's theme: This Is a Rehearsal.

It was curated by local art collective Floating Museum, comprised of poet Avery R Young, architect Andrew Schachman, community organiser Faheem Majeed and artist Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford.

The event was set up to be a "love letter to Chicago" that would create an ongoing dialogue that takes the "whole city as a site", according to the curators. It comprised 86 participants from ten different countries.

"We invited the public to participate in the process of learning and discovery, to collectively explore essential questions that are not just about architecture solely," said the Floating Museum at the event's opening ceremony.

"We challenged ourselves and our community to think about architecture not as just a static entity, but as a living, evolving practice."

Primary themes ranged from food production to water reclamation and land rights access, with exhibitions spread over different sites.

Two primary locations, both downtown, held the majority of the exhibitions. The first was the Chicago Cultural Center, a public building in the neo-classical style that used to be a public library.

The second was the James R Thompson Center, a postmodern building by architect Helmut Jahn that once held government offices and was recently purchased by Google.

A variety of installations were also placed at partner locations across the city while some of the structures, such as large-scale installations by AIA gold medal-winning architect Carol Ross Barney, are still in the process of being built.

Read on for Dezeen's picks of the nine best installations from the Chicago Architecture Biennial:

Bio-Block Spiral by SOM and Prometheus Materials

Located underneath the covered walkway at the Mews in the Fulton Design District, architecture studio Skidmore Owings & Merrill constructed a spiralling wall using algae-based cinder blocks created by Colorado materials outfit Prometheus Materials.

The installation represents the ongoing collaboration between the two companies to demonstrate the feasibility of masonry that does not use portland cement, a major contributor to global C02 emissions.

Read more about the Bio-Block spiral here ›

Pretty Wrecked by Asim Waqif

Indian artist Asim Waqif wrapped one of the grand entry staircases in the Chicago Cultural Center in a mass of tubing collected from a local site deemed unfit for use after production.

The black tubing wraps the stone staircase, supported by scaffolding and reaching three storeys in height. According to the artist, the work was meant to draw attention to both the excesses of waste under "industrial capitalism" and the decoration of the Chicago Cultural Center.

Hygroshell Research Pavilion by ITECH, University of Stuttgart

A team of students and researchers from the masters program at the Integrative Technologies & Architectural Design Research (ITECH) program at the University of Stuttgart installed a pavilion at the Thompson Center to demonstrate "self-constructing" timber systems.

The result was a structure with a roof that was created standing straight up and, after being introduced to air, dried to form a vaulted roof. The wooden "wings" of the installation are supported by metal foundations that create a breezeway and contrast with the industrial materials of the Thompson Center.

Read more about the Hygroshell Research Pavilion here ›

Building with Fire by Anupama Kundoo Atelier

The Berlin-based studio of architect Anupama Kundoo created an iteration of its ceramic housing forms for the festival. Working with ceramicist Ray Meeker, the studio creates small dwellings that are constructed with un-fired brick that is then fired in situ.

These ceramic dwellings are meant to provide low-cost housing and the team complements the bricks with found materials – such as bicycle parts for formworks. The iteration at the  Chicago Cultural Center used local bricks and is being constructed gradually throughout the duration of the biennial.

Tetisi = Listen by Norman Teague Design Studios

Local designer Norman Teague and his team created a plywood model of a forthcoming monument to American abolitionists Frederick and Anna Douglass.

Located in an unused lot in the south of the city, the installation comprises a central dome with wings, each highlighting a different aspect of the Douglasses' teaching. It also has a focus on recycled plastic as a material, which has been a preoccupation of the studio's.

Read more about  Tetisi = Listen here ›

Haywood House by Ruth De Jong

Set designer Ruth de Jong created a scale module of the facade of the house used in her set design for director Jordan Peele's film Nope.

The front of the house extrudes from a wall in the Chicago Cultural Center and is painted completely white to demonstrate the "imaginative" function of architecture in film. The wall facing the facade was covered in a looping view of the landscape outside of the house featured in the film.

Read more about Haywood House here ›

Ukwé·tase (newcomer/stranger) by Chris T Cornelius

In a room of the Chicago Cultural Center dedicated to "new monuments", designer Cornelius created an installation that is meant to be a "physical land acknowledgement" that references the complexity and diversity of indigenous identity.

Functioning both as an installation and dwelling, the structure was constructed using wood. It was also covered with furs and metal and intended to prompt individuals "to reflect upon the Indigenous land they are on".

100 Links: Architecture and land, in and out of the Americas by The Buell Center and AD–WO

At the Chicago Cultural Center, 100 Links featured a canopy made from surveyor chains strung from a double-height ceiling. The installation was meant to thematise and shed light on the architectural methods that went into the divvying up of North America during colonisation.

Surrounding the chain-link canopy were boxes of books, which explained the themes explored in the exhibition and were free to be taken by the public.

Cardboard Merzbau by Barkow Leibinger

German studio Barkow Leibinger created an installation based on an "abstract grotto" designed by Bauhaus artist Kurt Schwitters in the 1920s. Its jutting cardboard forms marked one of the entrances to the Chicago Cultural Center and was meant to highlight the collaboration between members of the Bauhaus movement who had moved to Chicago and the Container Corporation of America.

Cardboard Merzbau shines a light on that collaboration, which used "cardboard packaging to advocate for greater social and environmental awareness" in the 1940s. It also aims to highlight the potential afterlife of cardboard packaging today.

The photography is by Tom Harris and Cory Dewald. 

Chicago Architecture Biennial 2023 runs from 21 September 2023 to 11 February 2024.  See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Norman Teague Design Studios has erected a plywood structure as a full-scale model of the future monument to American abolitionists Frederick and Anna Douglass, for the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

The studio created the pavilion using wood, plastics and recycled materials to honour the legacy of American abolitionists Frederick and Anna Douglass. A copper version of the pavilion is set to built in a Chicago park.

Called Tetisi = Listen, the project stands 15 feet tall at its highest point and was constructed in an empty lot adjacent to an elevated metro line in the city's Bronzeville neighbourhood.

"[It] speculates on plastic politics, wire mesh architecture, recycling, and community-building," said Norman Teague Design Studios.

"Inspired by the teachings of Anna and Frederick Douglass, this project, initiated at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, focuses on Africa and communities of color as future laboratories, and promotes listening, environmental justice and recycling awareness."

The pavilion consists of a central dome with four tunnels spreading out from the centre. Each of the tunnels has a different theme, representing different aspects of the abolitionists' teachings.

The tunnels were topped with thick plastic that allows light to enter and their exteriors feature quotes from Douglass as well as chalkboards and chalk with prompts to promote engagement from people who come to see it.

Inside some of the tunnels, graphics from the Chicago Design Museum were installed, explaining the purpose of the pavilion and illustrating more quotes from Douglass.

Following the studio's interest in plastics, one of the tunnels was dedicated to recycling and features seating made from "plastic lumber" developed by local studio Redemptive Plastics.

Going along with the Chicago Architecture Biennial's 2023 theme – This Is a Rehearsal, Tetisi = Listen is a "one-to-one" model of a slatted copper monument that will be placed in the city's recently renamed Douglass Park.

"This is to honor and illuminate and to recognize the steadfastness of the ongoing intellectual contributions that the Douglasses have brought to our culture and our community," said Norman Teague Design Studios assistant Daniel Overbey.

"The piece in Douglas Park is going to just patina really nicely so the intention is for it to stand forever, but look like it's something that is old that is neoclassical," he continued.

Overbey noted that while the "formal language of neoclassicism" isn't usually "associated with Black people" the studio wanted to focus on the permanence and contemplation in order to make it "feel like the Sistine Chapel".

For the pavilion's dome, local artist Dorian Sylvain included a small mural. Sylvain has been commissioned to include a mural in the dome of the final structure in Douglass Park.

The installation is part of the off-site programming of the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial, curated by art collective The Floating Museum. The programming included a primary show at the Chicago Cultural Center as well as a number of installations installed at the postmodern Thompson Center in Downtown Chicago.

Norman Teague founded his studio in 2019 has created large-scale installations for past Chicago Architecture Biennials.

The photography is by Cory Dewald. 

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Local design studio Tian & Teague has created a series of furniture and homeware based on the everyday struggles of living in New York City, including a tufted rug made to resemble a run-over rat.

The NYC Series features three different pieces, designed by the studio's founders Tian Wang and Teague Miller based on aspects of living in the city that everyone "dreads".

It includes a lamp modelled on the handrails of New York's subway trains, a shelf made to look like scaffolding and a rug that resembles a flattened rat.

The pieces were gleaned from Wang and Miller's own experience of living in the city and locals' ability to live among things that might be considered jarring, taking the "discomforts of NYC" and turning them into a collection of home decor.

"The collection just came about from things we see on our daily commute," Tian & Teague (TNT) told Dezeen. "I think in New York, you kind of learn to tune everything out and you start to get used to things that maybe you shouldn't be used to."

The shelving unit, for example, takes on the appearance of the ubiquitous scaffolding seen throughout the city. It consists of vertical and horizontal aluminium tubes that are held together with clamps, while a single diagonal bar supports the back.

Made to look like the vertical bars that serve as handholds on the city's crowded underground trains, the lamp is made from powder-coated steel and has a single spherical bulb.

Meanwhile, the idea for the rat rug came from the designers seeing a run-over rodent on the street and being "in awe" of its morbid symmetry.

The final piece is "reminiscent of those Tibetan tiger rugs", according to TNT, and was hand-tufted by the studio using wool yarn.

"Our work never takes itself too seriously and we like the idea of solving a problem by making the problem a great problem to have," TNT told Dezeen.

"So for this collection, we wanted to take these objects that we don't even want to touch, let alone be in our homes, then turn them into furniture that you would want in your home."

TNT said that the works are meant to be conceptual and will not be mass-produced at this time.

Previously, the studio has worked on other conceptual furniture projects including Mother's inflatable sofa, which was designed to critique climate change complacency.

Other conceptual design objects that have recently been featured on Dezeen include a portable black cat radar, designed as a commentary on superstitious beliefs in everyday life.

The photography is by Matthew Gordon. 

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A wooden pavilion shaped by dehydration and banners made from found urban objects are on show at Chicago's James R Thompson Center for the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

The Floating Museum, an art collective and curator for the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 5), collaborated with stakeholders of the iconic, Helmut Jahn-designed structure to array a series of works in the space.

Large- and small-scale installations were placed inside the building, in its massive circular atrium, as well as outside, connecting the streetscape with the building, which was recently purchased by technology company Google.

A dialogue around public space

"We were interested in this atrium as a shifting space, from public to private – but it will still remain a public space," said Floating Museum co-founder Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford.

With the train connections and history of amenities, the atrium of the building will remain open to the public as it converts from governmental to corporate ownership.

"There's interest in starting a forum for discussion and dialogue around this space and what public means," added Hulsebos-Spofford.

Outside the building, Boston studio Stoss Landscape Urbanism arranged a series of sculpted tree stumps and burlap sacks filled with plants into seating areas.

Called Tree Cycles, the installation was designed to highlight "natural urban processes" through the decay and decomposition of natural materials.

It sat in contrast with the glass-clad Thompson Center, a contrast that continued with the first installation inside the building, a wooden architectural pavilion by ITECH masters program at the University of Stuttgart.

The Hygroshell Research Pavilion is a "self-constructing-timber building system". Its arched form is achieved through computational processes that calculate the way that flat-packed wood elements will bend after they are exposed to the environment.

Elsewhere in the atrium, the curators placed large banner-like textile pieces by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama. Using reclaimed materials, the artist stitched together massive tapestries that were then draped from the sides of the atrium.

The tapestries rely heavily on the burlap sack, an essential material in the transportation of global goods that reference the "history of resource extraction in Ghana," according to Hulesbos-Spofford.

Chicago-based practice Studio Inference placed a metallic band shell within the atrium, which will serve as a place for talks and lectures.

Two creative institutions from outside of the city made contributions to the exhibition. NPR Music recreated its well-known Tiny Desk Concert set up – a desk surrounded by a bookshelf covered with books and other paraphernalia from the music industry.

It is the first time the institution has allowed its iconic desk to be recreated outside of its Washington DC studios and is in line with the overarching theme of the biennial, This Is a Rehearsal.

Also present was a pop-up gallery by the New York-based organisation Storefront for Art and Architecture. The group took over a store once occupied by cell phone provider Sprint.

The Thompson Center was purchased from the government by Google in 2022. Located in Chicago's downtown core, the structure opened in 1985 and for years provided office space for government institutions, as well as a food court and train connection for the public.

According to Capri Investment Group, the developer renovating the structure, there are plans to pare the building back to its structure before reconfiguring it for Google's use.

The CAB 5 exhibition is taking place while the building still maintains much of its original cladding and construction.

"It seemed like a no-brainer to leverage this moment in time to do something in the Thompson Center to achieve, something spectacular, but it wasn't just about putting a few pieces and we want to really activate the space," said Capri Investment Group chief design officer Joel Putnam.

"So we're focused on trying to have events and ongoing discussions, lectures"

The exhibitions at the Thompson Center are just one aspect of the biennial's programming, which is taking place at institutions across the city.

The photography is by Cory Dewald.

The Chicago Architecture Biennial is on from 21 September 2021 to 11 February 2024. For more events, exhibitions and talks in architecture and design around the world visit the Dezeen Events Guide.

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Architecture studio Taller Capital has created a linear park in Mexico City that incorporates a walkway and made with materials optimised for water retention and dust mitigation.

Called Héroes de Tecamac Boulevard, the project was located in an urban area north of Mexico City.

The project saw the renovation of 2.1 kilometres of a vacant median that runs through the city, passing through a social housing complex.

Twenty metres wide, the structure allows for easy pedestrian use and features recreation areas strewn about its length for use by the local community, and the studio estimates it will serve more than 20,000 individuals who live alongside it.

According to Taller Capital, the boulevard was constructed in the early 2000s to facilitate the growing population, and though the median was dug it was never completed. The excavated materials from the roadway sat there, creating small dust storms.

"It works as a retroactive infrastructure: it is a device to control dust storms, absorb rainwater, facilitate non-motorized mobility to connect with the Mexibus stop, and bring ports and recreational facilities to the nearby community," said the studio.

Taller Capital was commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture, Territory and Urban Development to create the recreational spaces, but the studio recognised that the project provided an opportunity to improve the infrastructure of the area, which has very few pedestrian corridors.

"We were commissioned to design public recreational and sports facilities along the median strip," the studio told Dezeen.

"However, we realized that it could not become only that, but it should mainly work as an infrastructure, both in terms of pedestrian mobility and dust control," it continued.

"We were able to redesign traffic lanes at the ground level, broadening sidewalks, designating specific areas for parking and allowing two car lanes at each side of the strip."

To ensure the safety of the pedestrians, the structure was elevated, a move which also allowed for the soil conditions necessary to plant a series of trees for shade.

The studio included volcanic gravel along the elevation to allow for water absorption and to control dust. It also noted that the gravels consistency means that very little maintenance will be required during the lifecycle of the boulevard.

The route also connects the community with a transportation hub at its north end.

Opened in 2021, the park has already enjoyed use and areas have seen a number of fairs and concerts that go beyond its original program.

"If the place continues serving the purpose it has demonstrated to satisfy up till today, we can imagine that in the future it will become more lively and used, as the trees will have grown and shade will be provided during direct daylight hours," said Taller Capital.

Héroes de Tecamac Boulevard has been shortlisted for the mixed-use project category in the 2023 Dezeen Awards.

Other projects that revamp infrastructure for pedestrian use include New York's High Line, a former elevated train line that has been converted to pedestrian walkways and community space.

The photography is by Rafael Gamo.

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Embassies designed for the United States by Walter Gropius and Eero Saarinen feature in this roundup based on David B Peterson's book US Embassies of the Cold War: The Architecture of Democracy, Diplomacy and Defense.

"These mid-century modern embassies were built as a billboard for democracy," Peterson told Dezeen. "By the end of world war two, neoclassicism had come to be widely associated with fascism."

"By designing the United States' first purpose-built embassies in an explicitly modern language, and by building them on such a wide scale in the victorious exuberance of the post-war American moment, the State Department was seeking to differentiate American culture from fascism and communism."

Peterson, who studied the topic at Columbia University and whose father worked as a cabinet secretary for Richard Nixon, wanted the book to highlight how architecture set the stage for the global role that the US would play during the later part of the 20th century.

He contends that the "open" use of modernist designs, which relied heavily on glass, mirrored the democratic posture that the US was attempting to cultivate abroad.

The inclusion of architects who were persecuted by fascist regimes, such as Walter Gropius, added to this dynamic.

"Everything has changed"

However, Peterson also wanted the book to demonstrate how, with global unrest and war looming, the design of contemporary embassies contrasts with this mid-century mood.

Because of security concerns, embassies have shifted away from prominent urban areas, becoming more defensive and "fortress-like".

"Everything has changed, and not for the better, at least for fans of architecture and design," Peterson said.

"Due to security concerns after two terrorist attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, many of the US embassies of the Cold War have been decommissioned and sold because protective security is challenging in the dense, urban environments were most were built."

Peterson referenced the Kieran Timberlake-designed US Embassy in London's Nine Elms as indicative of this trend.

"I would call the recent embassy architecture 'the identity crisis of the American Embassy'," he said.

Read on for Peterson's 10 picks from US Embassies of the Cold War.

Havana, Cuba, by Harrison & Abramovitz (1953)

This compact, symmetrical embassy was designed in the Cuban capital before the country's socialist revolution by Wallace Harrison and Max Abramovitz, the designers of the UN headquarters in New York and the CIA headquarters in Virginia.

"It embodies the highs and lows of American foreign policy during this era: on the one hand, it was designed as a symbol of optimism and international cooperation and on the other hand, it was hastily evacuated in January of 1961, not long after Castro's revolution forced Batista to flee the country, just weeks before JFK's inaugural address," said Peterson. 

New Delhi, India, by Edward Durell Stone (1959)

Edward Durell Stone's New Delhi embassy features a cantilevered roof with small pillars and is set in front of a large water feature. It was praised by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright as "the only embassy to do credit to the United States," according to Peterson. 

"Edward Durell Stone's embassy in New Delhi stands out because it was universally praised as a modern masterpiece. It is also one of the few Cold War embassies on the US Secretary of State's Register of Culturally Significant Property," said Peterson.

"It still serves as a US embassy and just underwent a significant renovation to ensure its ongoing functionality."

Baghdad, Iraq, by Josep Lluis Sert (1955)

Modelled on the architecture of Middle Eastern antiquity, Spanish architect Joseph Lluis Sert's now-vacant embassy building exemplified the government's emphasis on "openness and accessibility", according to Peterson. 

"It is like a Babylonian hanging garden sprawling along the bank of the Tigris River, with diplomatic buildings widely spread out and the surrounding urban context porously connected," said Peterson.

"Sert's design perfectly captures the optimism of the State Department during this era, and its general lack of concern over terrorism and other security threats."

Since 2007, the US has operated a 104-acre complex as its embassy in the country.

Karachi, Pakistan, by Neutra & Alexander (1959)

American architect Robert E Alexander and Austrian-American Richard Neutra designed an embassy that featured a stark design interspersed by gold-painted louvres. It was quickly abandoned as Pakistan moved its capital from Karachi to Islamabad.

"Neutra & Alexander's Karachi embassy is significant because it was a failure," said Peterson.

"The architectural press hated it. Conservatives in Congress hated it. Less than a year after opening, the capital of Pakistan was moved from Karachi to Islamabad, rendering the building functionally useless."

Oslo, Norway, by Eero Saarinen (1959)

Eero Saarinen's design for Oslo featured a triangular layout and a facade covered with windows, some recessed and some not.

"Eero Saarinen's embassy in Oslo is among the most daring designs approved by the State Department," said Peterson.

"It is an interesting example of a modern building where form firmly dominates function. It was recently decommissioned and is now a national landmark."

Accra, Ghana, by Harry Weese (1957)

Harry Weese's design for the Ghana embassy featured a single-storey structure suspended off the ground with central staircases and local influences, in response to criticism that the international style being over-used.

"Widespread criticism resulted in attempts like Harry Weese's to incorporate local traditions and materials," said Peterson.

"Conceived as an inverted Wa-Naa palace, and extensively finished in local mahogany, the Accra embassy exemplifies this push towards contextuality."

Athens, Greece, by Walter Gropius (1961)

After fleeing Nazi Germany, Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus design school, designed a structure with a massive, cantilevered roof and some sections suspended by pilotis. It is still in use today and is under renovation.

"His design for the Athens embassy is one of the masterpieces produced by the State Department's program," said Peterson.

"As such, Athens is where we see one of the best examples of the amazing talent that poured out of Europe into the United States during this era."

London, England, by Eero Saarinen (1960)

Saarinen's London design featured a long building with floor-to-ceiling glass at its base and was heavily criticised by Londoners at the time, according to Peterson, who noted that it was "one of the most controversial" of the embassies.

"Tragically, in recent years it has been decommissioned, gutted and altered virtually beyond recognition except for parts of the facade," said Peterson.

"It is soon to be restaurants and a hotel, highlighting the vulnerability of these historic buildings and the need to preserve them, when possible."

The Hague, Netherlands, by Marcel Breuer (1959)

This brutalist work by Marcel Breuer was built in a historic part of the city that was partially destroyed by bombs during world war two and is now a contemporary art museum.

"In Europe, the modern embassies were often built in dense, historic city centers on land only made available as a result of aerial bombardment during world war two," said Peterson.

"Marcel Breuer's embassy in The Hague is one of the prime examples of this kind of architectural juxtaposition."

Dublin, Ireland, by John Johansen (1964)

John Johansen's design for the Irish capital featured a curved structure with a precast concrete facade based on Celtic fortresses and still functions as an embassy today.

"John Johansen’s embassy in Dublin was the last one completed under the modern embassy program, and it is one of the finest," Peterson said.

"The success of the Dublin embassy stands as a symbol of the poignant irony that the modern embassy program was curtailed just when it seemed to be hitting its stride."

The photography is courtesy of the Onera Foundation.

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Architecture studio Perkins&Will has placed a series of greenhouses on top of a concrete structure to create this agricultural research centre in California.

Called Riverside Plant Research One 1, the two-storey structure was created for the College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences (CNAS) at the University of California Riverside campus east of Los Angeles.

The facility is designed to support agricultural innovations such as drought-resistance crops and gives the university the ability to test novel agricultural techniques year-round.

"It's really a machine, a tool for research," said Perkins&Will Los Angeles design director Yan Krymsky.

"But beyond that, we wanted to create a structure that spoke to the legacy of the university," continued Krymsky.

Agricultural research has been taking place at the university since the early 20th century. The building sits amongst a cluster of greenhouses that have been in operation since the 1960s.

The 30,000-square-foot (2,787-square-metre) facility comprises a ground floor with serrated concrete walls. These help stabilise the temperature of potting rooms and growth chambers inside, located alongside staff amenities including a lobby, breakrooms and restrooms.

A series of narrow floor-to-ceiling windows are recessed into these walls to allow light in while not sacrificing the stable temperature inside.

The upper level consists of 16 greenhouse "modules" arranged horizontally, each with a gabled roof and cladding made from double-pane polarized glass.

Each module can operate its own specific climate, allowing for a diverse range of experiments to take place at any one time. While some of the units have air conditioning, much of the facility's temperature is controlled by an evaporative cooling system, which Perkins&Will said allows "temperatures lower than other research greenhouses on the campus".

Riverside Plant Research One 1 opened in 2021. Since then, experiments that have taken place there include the testing of bee pollination in different climates, the cultivation of drought-resistant rice and the potential for certain plants to decontaminate soil.

"We are anticipating placing priority on projects that need more specialized environment, things that need humidity and more accurate temperature control," said CNAS director of agricultural operations Peggy Mauk.

Riverside Plant Research One 1 has been shortlisted under the education category of the 2023 Dezeen Awards in architecture.

Perkins&Will was founded in 1935 and has dozens of offices across the United States, as well as studios in the UK, China and Brazil. Its other recent projects include a multi-generational community centre in Dallas and a proposal for a low-income housing complex in Los Angeles.

The photography is by Here And Now Agency.

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A team of master planners, including architecture studio HOK, has released plans for an office and research complex located within the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley designed to "expand the frontiers of knowledge".

The project comprises 1.4 million square feet of office and research space and features University of California Berkley, developer SKS Partners, architecture studio HOK and landscape architecture studio Field Operations among its master planners.

Planned for a wedge-shaped plot of land at NASA's Ames Research Center, Berkeley Space Center will include a number of low-rise buildings clad in glass as well as open space.

It will be adjacent to Moffett Federal Airfield and Hangar One, a massive dirigible hangar from the 1930s now owned by Google.

The glass-clad buildings on the site will be dedicated to research and retail, with some residential properties noted on the initial master plan.

At the centre of the complex will be a circular green space lined with a walkway covered with a perforated canopy, and a number of other green spaces have been planned for the site, according to the team.

"Berkeley Space Center would be designed from the ground up to foster a collaborative environment with the critical mass and infrastructure needed to expand the frontiers of knowledge and develop tomorrow’s defining technologies," said the team.

The centre would support research in aeronautics, computing and climate science.

The team said the construction of the facility itself also represents an occasion to explore innovation.

"[It's] an opportunity to redefine how large-scale developments are designed, constructed and managed not just from the ground up, but from the underground up," said the team.

"The grounds and the buildings would serve as a testbed to pioneer and advance novel low-carbon design and construction practices," continued the co-planners.

Such practices include solar power, on-site stormwater retention, and investment in the site's phytoremediation, a process by which the site's landscape development will "heal groundwater aquifers", according to the team.

Federal aeronautics research has been operated at the Ames site since the late 1930s, originally under the preview of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and was absorbed into NASA after its creation in 1958.

HOK was founded in 1955 and has other high-profile Silicon Valley projects in the works including a campus for technology company Apple.

It recently unveiled its design for the Penn Station renovation in New York City, which HOK is designing together with PAU.

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An exhibition showcasing designs by French designers and Mexican artisans as well as a retrospective on local studio EWE's work were on show during Mexico City's annual design festival.

With official programming as well as exhibitions at satellite galleries, stores and workshops, Design Week Mexico showcased the best furniture and decor design from across Mexico and the world for its 15th year.

The festival is based around a continuing set of programming organised by the leaders of the festival, Andrea Caesarman, Emilio Cabrero and Marco Coello, long-time friends and founders of local studio C Cubica Arquitectos.

The studio year kicked off this year's events, which run for varying times but are focused in early November, at its newly opened office block and gallery in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighbourhood.

This year's festival saw the continuation of the core exhibitions, with many other galleries and workshops across the city hitching their wagons to the festivities.

The core exhibitions included a yearly furniture design showcase called Inédito as well as Design House, the much-lauded event where 20 local makers partner with large brands to completely build out the interiors of a home in just one month's time.

Other galleries, such as Mexico City stalwart EWE and the electric Orginario opened up their locations for showcases.

Much of the work highlighted the strong relationship between designers and craftspeople working with local materials like wood and stone.

"It's exciting to experience a design culture that's exploring contemporary ideas and approaches while from a deep tradition of artisanship and craft," New York-based designer Joseph Vidich, who was visiting the fair, told Dezeen.

"The results of which are rich investigations of form and material through the precise and novel use of traditional techniques."

While the programming showcased the aesthetics of the country, talks such as a conversation between intellectual designers facilitated by Odile Hainaut and Claire Pijoulat of Manhattan's ICFF/Wanted Design festival also took place.

"Having the opportunity to meet many great talents from different countries makes the world feel smaller," said Guatemalan designer Esteban Paredes, who took part in the talk.

"It definitely opens a window to create interesting relationships and collaborations between designers from Latin America and the rest of the world."

Read on for Dezeen's picks of this year's best exhibitions.

Design House by Design Week Mexico 

This yearly showcase saw the transformation of an ageing home in the hilly, mansion-lined neighbourhood of Lomas into a multi-faceted design showcase. Not only were the interiors completely transformed in the styles of the individual teams, but the exteriors were too, with a sculptural terrace by Mood Estudio.

Other standouts in the three-storey home included a shop with bright colours and central shelving by local studio De la Cerda Estudio, a tranquil, wood-and-stoned line area by outfit Estudio Claudina Flores and gallery Covarrubias Collection, both of Guadalajara, as well as a spa-inspired room by Espacio Tangible.

Well-established outfits like Moltenic&C and Breuer Studio were among the companies that brought the vision of the home to life.

Los Acompañantes by Mughal and Rocca Luis César

Mexican designer Andrés Gutierrez hosted an exhibition at his shop Originario in the city's Roma neighbourhood. Called Los Acompañantes, it foregrounded a collaboration between Mexican artist Rocca Luis César and rug company Mughal.

The series of geometric rugs were placed on the walls and floors of the two-storey space and the entirety of the gallery was painted in shades of blues and oranges to reflect the textile's dominant colour schemes.

Gutierrez also hand-picked a selection of design objects and crafts to accompany the exhibition as it weaves through the spaces of the gallery.

Inédito by Design Week Mexico

The week's yearly showcase of Mexican furniture and decor filled the hall of a modern structure called Espacio CDMX in Chapultepec Park. A selection of emerging and established designers were placed alongside innovative projects from students from local schools.

Work from French designers such as the sinuous bamboo furniture of Aurelie Hoegy and the waste fabric brick of FabBRICK were included, highlighting 2023's collaboration with that country.

The furniture included by participants encapsulated a wide range of materials, from stone to fabrics, metals and plastics, showing the diversity of styles and processes at play.

Archivo Personal by Andrea Soler and Taina Campos

Part of the Diseña Colectiva series, Archivo Personal was an exhibition hosted at Laguna, a textile factory in the city's Doctores neighbourhood converted into an arts and community space. The exhibition, which was accompanied by a series of workshops, placed the work of women designers next to artwork by "dissident" practices.

Curated by local designers Andrea Soler and Taina Campos, the works filled the cavernous space. Included among the objects was a maximalist cupboard by local design studio Comité de Proyectos and a woven wooden chair by Perla Castañon. An installation of graphic design highlighting issues women's and LGBTQ+ issues was included.

In the space's courtyard, gridded dividers were turned into a community poll called Mi Calle, Nuestra Calle (My Street, Our Street) where visitors could vote on what they would like to see in their community – for example, clean streets or public space – with multi-coloured clothespins arrayed in a grid.

Retrospective by EWE

Founded by Age Salajõe, and designers Manuel Bañó and Héctor Esrawe, EWE has been a powerhouse on the Mexico City design scene since 2017. During this year's design week, the studio opened up its Roma location for a retrospective that looked at the processes and iterations of the studio's design objects.

EWE's commitment to artisanal processes can be seen in its monumental stone forms, its blown glass lamps as well as in a series of milking stools.

The stools, based on a traditional design, followed a variety of iterations, from wood to cast objects and even the moulds from past collections were showcased, highlighting the processual, yet innovative, nature of the work.

Visión and Tradición by Design Week Mexico and Mobilier National

Design Week Mexico partnered with the French Institute and France's furniture association Mobilier National to host an exhibition highlighting an initiative that paired French and Mexican designers with craftspeople from the Mexican state of Queretaro. The result was a series of objects that combined traditional techniques with contemporary design language.

Located on a pedestal in the entry building of the city's Museum of Anthropology, the exhibition celebrated the collaborations, which were arranged on tables and surrounded by documentation of the collaborations.

Standouts from the exhibition were a wood-and-glass coffee table created by French designer Sammy Bernoussi with Mexican artisan Uriel López López as well as a massive wicker sculpture created by Mexican designer Sebastián Ángeles and artisan Martín Cruz González.

Bernoussi told Dezeen that he used Google translate to communicate with López to plan the work after having meals with the artisan to understand the dining traditions of the region.

Bomboti by MYT+GLVDK

Mexican architecture studio MYT+GLVDK showcased an exhibition at its freshly opened concept store in the Polanco neighbourhood, Bomboti. Drawing from hundreds of design and art objects used throughout the architecture studio's work, the exhibition included graphics explaining the work.

Every space in the two-storey gallery was filled with art and design objects, from the stone sculptures of local designer Rebeca Cors to the glasswork and ceramics of Perla Valtiera.

More conceptual design was also shown alongside the handcrafted, such as upcycled plastic objects from local studio Bolsón.

Diseño Contenido by Design Week Mexico

Located at Parque Lincoln in the city's Polanco neighbourhood, Design Contenido saw dozens of studios and galleries fill shipping containers with work, creating a pop-up design space. Each studio had a single shipping container and only had a few hours to set up, placing objects, information and installations within the narrow spaces.

Works on show ranged from the wicker design objects of the local studio Hiato to the brutalist furniture of Mesawa. By far the most intensive installation was set up by lighting designer David Pompa's studio.

Showcasing a collection inspired by volcanic stone, the studio's container featured a narrow entrance where visitors could walk in and view the lights arrayed around mounds of rock.

Fall Group Show by Angulo Cero

Design gallery Angulo Cero opened up its newly opened location in a house in the city's Lomas neighbourhood. The exhibition saw a variety of works from local design studios such as Abel Zavala and ADHOC.

The works were arrayed in a white-walled space, spread throughout the first two storeys of the gallery. Rugs by Balmaceda Studio were arranged in many of the spaces, as the design studio shares the home as its office. Also included in the exhibition were works by artists Daniel Berman and Jesús Pedraglio.

Té Ahorita by Su Wu and Bettina Kiehnle

At Salon Rosetta, above the renowned Rosetta restaurant in Roma, curators Su Wu and Bettina Kiehnle selected more than 100 tableware objects from Mexican designers. Based on an exhibition curated earlier in the year by Wu at Studio IMA, the exhibition focused on dining rituals and the use of objects in them.

Working with Rosetta chef Elena Reygadas, the curators arranged the objects by designers such as Maxine Álvarez and Patricio Campillo on contemporary furniture. The exhibition included a daily tea service as well as a shop where visitors can purchase objects.

Design Week Mexico is on from 10 October to 4 November 2023. For more events, talks and installations in architecture and design, visit the Dezeen Events Guide. 

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New York architecture studio REX has completed the "most automated" performance building in the world at Brown University's campus in Providence, Rhode Island.

Called The Lindemann Performing Arts Center (The Lindemann) the 101,000 square-foot (9,383-square-metre) structure consists of a shoebox theatre with a long bridge-like walkway.

It stands between Brown's primary campus and Pembroke College, a women's college that merged with the primary campus in 1971.

According to REX founder Joshua Ramus, the brief for the project was to combine  small performance spaces with student facilities and a home for the Brown University Orchestra.

"We had these two diametrically opposed needs, which historically have never been combined," Ramus told Dezeen.

"I feel like the building is a bit of a holy grail. It's achieved something that most people thought was impossible."

In order to accomplish this flexibility, the studio, working with Brown Arts Institute (BAI), created a shoebox-style theatre with a variety of automated features that allow for different configurations.

Moving walls, ceilings, balconies, catwalks, gantries, staging and seating allow for the building to host both large and small concerts.

"It was effectively like building five buildings in one," said Ramus.

“It's more automated than any other performing arts building in the world."

Automation was important for the project because the Lindemann was designed as a learning institution. It features a grid iron that is easy to remove around so that students can use rigging.

It has a number of automated safety features including a laser system that halts operations if something is detected between two moving parts.

In addition to its flexibility, the structure was designed to make the arts visible to the campus.

To accomplish this, REX included a "clear storey", a glazed walkway that runs the length of the building, passing between the shoebox form and the exterior wall.

A lobby cantilevers with a Vierendeel truss off the east side of the structure, and all of the structural elements for the building are confined to the edges of the building so that no columns had to be put within the theatre itself, except for trusses that support the moveable gantries.

A light installation by US artist Leo Villareal has been installed in the lobby.

"There's this weird thing that you go into the lobby, and it's an eight-and-a-half foot space, that has all these tightly spaced columns," Ramus told Dezeen.

"And then you go into the main hall and it's this massive space and there's no structure. So it's this weird inversion."

Ramus added that the difference in width and structural composition between the lobby and the theatre allows for a "suspension of disbelief" as people make their way into a performance.

For the exterior, REX aimed to create a contemporary structure that "played nicely" with the surrounding historical styles.

It wrapped the building in iridescent aluminium cladding with fins of various depths that form a "fractal" pattern.

Most of the structure is above ground, with some below-grade facilities for practice and research included.

Passerbys can see directly into the theatre through the glass-lined walkway and the the theatre walls are also lined with glass on this side.

To improve acoustics, layers of glass were used and the theatre can be shut off from the outside by means of an acrylic curtain that has a metallic sheen similar to that of the aluminium cladding on the exterior.

Ramus was the principal of OMA's New York office before founding REX in 2000.

The studio has completed a series of performance venues that are iterations of the flexibility seen in the Lindemann. These include the Perelman Center in Downtown Manhattan at the World Trade Center site and the Wyly Theatre in Texas.

The photography is by Iwan Baan.

Project credits:

Architect: REX
Vibration consultant: Acentech
MEP engineer: ARUP
Sustainability consultant: Atelier Ten
Cost management consultant: Cost+Plus
Specifications Consultant: CSI
Fall arrest consultant: Diversified
Façade consultant: Front
Geotechnical engineer: GEI
Code, fire Protection, & life safety consultant: Jensen Hughes
Lighting design consultant: L'Observatoire International
Consulting structural engineer: Magnusson Klemencic
Structural engineer of record: Odeh
Security & IT consultant: Skyline
Vertical transportation consultant: Soberman
Building commissioning consultant: Stephen Turner
Landscape Architect: Stimson
Signage & wayfinding consultant: Studio Loutsis
Theater design & stage equipment consultant: Theatre Projects
LEED consultant: Thornton Tomasetti
Acoustical & audio/video consultant: Threshold Acoustics
Civil engineer: Vanasse Hangen Brustlin
Civil engineer: Woodard & Curran
Construction manager: Shawmut Design & Constructi

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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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Revery Architecture has designed the Sen̓áḵw residential skyscrapers for the Squamish Nation's land in Vancouver, which will aid economic development and "benefit all Canadians", according to the Indigenous group.

More than 11 residential towers, with heights ranging from 12 to 58 storeys, are planned for the development, as well as a series of smaller buildings.

Sen̓áḵw will be arranged around the Burrard Bridge, which connects Downtown Vancouver with the southwestern portions of the city.

The parcel of land is owned by the Squamish Nation government and is a fraction of the Indigenous group's ancestral homeland, which was expropriated from the group by European colonial settlers gradually over the last three centuries.

Sen̓áḵw is planned on land that was won back in 2003 by the Squamish from the Canadian government after a lengthy legal dispute.

Design architect Revery Architecture based the development on the concept of a "village in the park", which it says was informed "by the values and traditions of the Squamish Nation".

"The idea is to optimize the public realm with a new urban park supporting various forms of activity, circulation and landscapes," Revery Architecture principal Venelin Kokalov told Dezeen.

The studio used two distinct typologies when designing the towers, which together spread out like a "Y", flanking the bridge and extending past it in two directions. The first typology has wider towers with sloped sides and is called "mountain" – the other, "long", has more vertical towers with copper fins running their height.

The "long" towers have cores that are lifted off the ground to create the sensation of walking through a forest on ground level.

"This gesture increases the openness and porosity through the site, creates natural cover for outdoor areas, and forms a seamless connection between interior and exterior spaces at the ground level," said Kokalov.

Glass facades will be punctuated with copper details on both structures, a material that was chosen for its "cultural significance" to the Squamish Nation.

Squamish Nation culture to be integrated "at all scales"

The team said it is working with community members to integrate the culture of the Squamish Nation "at all scales of the project".

"The process was collaborative with a goal to honour the culture and heritage of the Squamish Nation," a representative from Nch'ḵay̓ Development Corporation, the Squamish government's development arm, told Dezeen.

"This included consultation with Squamish members leading up to the land designation," said the representative, adding that a Cultural Working Group has been formed in the development process.

According to Nch'ḵay̓ Development Corporation, possessing a large rental development in the middle of one of the most expensive cities in North America will help the nation on the path to "complete economic independence".

"As such, the project needs to consider the context of potential future development of the lands nearby, which are expected to increase in density significantly. In this context, the design and density of Sen̓áḵw is appropriate," the Nch'ḵay̓ representative said.

"It looks like the future of Vancouver."

While the project will bolster the economic future of the Squamish Nation, it said that it will also help to alleviate the housing crisis in Vancouver by adding thousands of apartments, some affordable, in a "relatively short amount of time".

"The new development at Sen̓áḵw demonstrates that reconciliation is not zero-sum," said Nch'ḵay̓ Development Corporation.

"It will ease Vancouver's housing shortage, will include tens of thousands of square feet of publicly accessible amenities, and will contribute tens of millions of dollars to service improvements in the City of Vancouver."

Nch'ḵay̓ Development Corporation also noted that the City of Vancouver has been "supportive" and an "excellent stakeholder", and added that the Squamish have an agreement with the city that works toward integrating the new development with already-existing infrastructure and adding new infrastructure, including a transit hub.

With its focal point on the Burrard Bridge, the Squamish Nation and Revery Architecture have stated that parking will only be available for about 10 per cent of the residences.

"Instead, the project shifts attention on alternative transportation through a unique on-site transit hub, and a transformative new underground bike hub providing storage and maintenance facilities for thousands of bikes," said Kokalov.

"The intent is to create a new infrastructure for a more integrated, inclusive and sustainable multi-modal network."

A number of other sustainable infrastructures will be implemented at the site, and the architecture team has claimed it will be the "first large-scale net-zero operational carbon housing development" in the country.

Some of the infrastructure will be built with mass timber, according to Kokalov — and green roofs, permeable paving and rainwater collection will be included on the site.

"Sen̓áḵw is reconciliation in action"

Canada-based energy company Creative Energy will also include and install a system that will utilise excess heat from the adjacent Metro Vancouver's infrastructure to generate energy.

Sen̓áḵw consists of mostly residential space, all rental, which will be open to the general public, with 250 units reserved for members of the Squamish Nation.

The project comes after the Canadian government's 2015 recommendations for a policy of reconciliation with Indigenous people in Canada after centuries of violence and expropriation.

It will be developed in phases, with the final occupancy planned for 2029. Kasian Architecture will be the architect of record, while Revery Architecture will carry out the project design and interior design.

"The development at Sen̓áḵw is reconciliation in action," said Nch'ḵay̓ Development Corporation, which is working alongside local developer Westbank to complete the project.

"When First Nations utilize their lands for value-creating developments within their jurisdiction, everyone benefits. This project is a legacy for the Squamish Nation, but also for the City of Vancouver – and for all of Canada".

Other recent skyscraper projects in Vancouver include a "sculptural and iconic" skyscraper by Kengo Kuma and a twisted skyscraper by BIG.

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Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu has been awarded the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize for his contributions to the field.

Yu is the second recipient of the prize, which is awarded by the Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) for global contributions to the field of landscape architecture.

The citation from the jury called Yu "a force for progressive change in landscape architecture around the world".

It added that he has moved landscape architecture away from "destructive confrontation with nature" and toward "a more optimistic position of cooperation and adaptation".

Yu, who founded the Chinese landscape architecture studio Turenscape, is known for his work in ecological architecture and his advancement of the "sponge city" concept, a way of urban planning that seeks to manage the way that cities shed and retain water.

Born in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, Yu attended Beijing Forestry University in 1980 and completed his masters degree in 1987.

In the 1990s, Yu was a part of the landscape studio SWA Group in California before returning to China in 1997 to found his own studio, which has completed more than 600 projects internationally in the last 25 years.

"I feel greatly encouraged by the jury's recognizing of my efforts and my work for this prestigious prize," Yu told Dezeen. "And it is also recognizing and honoring Oberland's vision and manifesto."

Yu's work has been influenced by the devastation that monsoons caused to cities in China, and in 2014 the government adopted his sponge city concept as a "guiding theory" for future urban development.

Yu also founded the department for landscape architecture at Peking University and still leads the program there.

"Kongjian Yu is operating at an ambitious scope and scale reminiscent of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr, the person who founded the landscape architecture profession in the US," TCLF CEO Charles A Birnbaum told Dezeen.

"Yu, like Olmsted, is an advocate, activist, inventor of new landscape typologies, influencer, and design visionary who takes a holistic approach to human and ecological systems without compromising design excellence."

Yu's projects with Turenscape have ranged from small urban parks and gardens to large-scale revitalisations of landscapes within cities and in exurban environments.

The studio transformed a river and surrounding wetlands in Liupanshui, Guizhou Province, creating terraced pools along the river as well as a winding, colourful bridge to connect the two sides of the river.

In Chengtoushan, the studio created a series of elevated walkways over wetlands that contain an archaeological site, a project that was awarded the World Landscape of the Year Award in 2017.

Other large-scale projects in China include the decontamination and redesign of a 168-acre (68-hectare) in Sanya, Hainan Province, and the conversion of a former dumping site into a wildlife preserve and recreation site in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province.

Turenscape has also completed projects abroad, including a number in the United States, such as Chinatown Park in Boston and Hing Hay Park in Seattle, both smaller urban renewal projects geared towards the local Chinese-American communities.

This year, Yu won a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for his contributions to the field of landscape architecture and in 2020, he won the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award.

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize is a biennial award and its winner receives a $100,000 prize (£81,898).

The seven-member jury awarding the prize in 2023 included MASS Design Group senior principal Christian Benimana, West 8 founder Adriaan Gueze and University of Toronto professor Jane Wolff. It was chaired by University of Technology Sydney School of Design dean Elizabeth Mossop.

The inaugural prize was given to American landscape architect Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T Studio in 2021. It is named after the late German-Canadian landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander.

Other recent prizes in architecture include British architect David Chipperfield winning of the 2023 Pritzker Prize, the highest accolade in architecture.

The cover photo is by Barret Dohery. All images courtesy of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. 

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Manhattan's first "public beachfront" and a salt marsh feature at Gansevoort Peninsula on the Hudson River, which was designed by local landscape studio Field Operations to serve as a buffer against rising tides.

Gansevoort Peninsula sits on the Hudson River on the site of a former pier and is part of a greater initiative known as the Hudson River Park, the result of the conversion of industrial spaces on Manhattan's waterfront into public parks and ecological conservation zones.

Field Operations – formerly called James Corner Field Operations – transformed the former pier into 5.5 acres of public space including a playing field, promenades and improvements to the coastline including a salt marsh and oyster habitat.

These ecological interventions were created to make the waterfront resilient to changing water conditions with global climate change.

To accomplish this, Field Operations utilised wood piles that had accumulated around the Gansevoort Penisula to anchor the salt marsh and habitats. The team also included soft edges to the north and south of the project that allow for tidal pools.

The studio said that these moves support "native intertidal habitat that previously was displaced in the Hudson River".

City officials lauded the project's gestures towards climate resilience.

"Gansevoort Peninsula is a true green space for the 21st century, incorporating innovative design and helping to prepare the west side of Manhattan for climate change," said New York City mayor Eric Adams on the opening of the park last week.

"Our administration is working to provide open space in every community and expand access to public parks in all five boroughs."

The site was once a landfill and sanitation site to facilitate the expansion of Manhattan, which accounts for the wideness of the site compared to some of the adjacent piers.

The south side of the park holds the "public beachfront", which was filled in with 1,200 tonnes of sand and dotted with beach umbrellas and Adirondack chairs. However, the Hudson River Park Trust, which manages this and other parks on the river, was careful to note that people will not be allowed to swim in the water. Kayak launches are permitted.

Also on the south side of the park is a large-scale, site-specific sculpture by David Hammons called Day's End, which was donated to the Gansevoort Penisula by the nearby Whitney Museum of American Art. The sculpture resembles the frame of a large industrial building and rises directly from the water near the shore.

At the centre of the project is a large lawn and sports field with a rest facility being completed by local studio nARCHITECTS.

"Inspired by community input, Gansevoort Peninsula is a place for respite, relaxation, exploration, sports, and play," said Field Operations partner Lisa Switkin.

"A defining characteristic is how the design embraces each side of the peninsula, offering new ways to engage with the Hudson River, with diverse and varied edges that elongate the transition from land to water," she continued.

Though the area is now mostly public, a division of New York City's Fire Department's marine division will maintain facilities on a pier that juts from the north of the site.

Gansevoort Penisula has connections to a strip of trails that connects a series of parks and recreation centres along the Hudson River, from Tribeca to the Upper West Side.

Just north of Gansevoort is Little Island, a park created on concrete pylons by British architect Thomas Heatherwick. According to the city, the Hudson River Park is nearing completion after more than 25 years of work.

Field Operations has been essential to the revitalization of industrial spaces on the city's West Side, playing a central role in the High Line elevated park. The studio also has played a role on the East River waterfront in Brooklyn, creating a series of landscaped spaces at the Domino Refinery site.

The photography is by Barrett Doherty, courtesy of the Hudson River Park Trust. 

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Seattle-based studio LMN Architects has created a university building in Santa Barbara, California, with two separate volumes connected by a series of walkways clad in perforated aluminium.

Called the Interactive Learning Pavilion, it is the first classroom building to be built on the University of California Santa Barbara's campus in more than 50 years.

The structure consists of two buildings facing one another to create an open-air breezeway or "paseo", lined on either side with ramps and terraces.

According to LMN partner Stephen Van Dyck, the pavilion was created to be a connector between different parts of the campus, in line with the Long Range Development Plan.

"The site, configuration, and design of the building represent a major step forward towards the goals of the University's Long Range Development Plan, anticipating the eventual extension of Library Mall to the south and realizing the eastward extension of Pardall Mall," said Van Dyck.

"The building represents both an advancement of this master plan vision as well as a contemporary reimagination of vernacular courtyards, terraces, and paseos."

The facades of the building were informed by the geology of the area, specifically the "Southern California seaside context" according to LMN.

This geologic approach resulted in two very different facade characteristics. The outward-facing facade is covered in smooth grey concrete panels and windows that create a "taut" effect, while the inward-facing facades have a "loose, organic formal language".

Layers of different shades of brick line the four-story structure's two volumes, with curving walls, bridges, ramps and terraces, creating a canyon-like effect.

"The resulting formal and material qualities of these spaces take inspiration from the local vernacular architecture and the adjacent seaside cliffs, recalling the sedimentary sandstone in its curvilinear, polished concrete block walls," said the studio.

However, according to the studio, the structure's organicism was also informed by the need for efficient classroom layouts.

The open-air interior causeway and stratified facade allow for generous light in the educational spaces and provide for the easy outdoor and indoor circulation of students between the spaces.

The program includes three lecture halls distributed across the ground floor and two lecture halls located on the second.

The remainder of the second- and third-storey spaces were filled with study halls and smaller classrooms.

Interior colour palates for the classrooms were also informed by geography, with the pigments of the Channel Islands replicated in colour blocks of the otherwise neutral interiors.

"We integrated natural light into every classroom and the upper floors offer contemporary learning environments with expansive views of the lagoon and ocean," said LMN principal Jennifer Milliron.

"The result is a building that we believe captures the essence of the campus and its surroundings."

LMN Architects was founded in Seattle in 1979. The studio recently completed a convention centre in Downtown Seattle as well as an extension to an Asian art museum.

The photography is by Patrick Price. 

Project credits: 

Architect: LMN Architects
Consultant: UCSB Design & Construction Services
Project contractor: C.W. Driver
Structural: Saiful Bouquet
Civil engineer: Stantec Consulting Services
Landscape architect: Arcadia Studio
MEP, lighting & sustainability: Integral Group
Acoustic, AV & IT: Arup
Environmental graphics: Entro
Wind: RWDI

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Design group Circular Economy Manufacturing has created a small factory that uses solar energy to convert plastic waste into household items and city infrastructure on Governors Island.

Named MicroFactory, the portable facility was designed to turn household consumer plastic waste into usable objects within communities.

Created by New York sustainability start-up Circular Economy Manufacturing (CEMfg), the factory was constructed within a 20 by 7.5 foot (six by two metres) shipping container and installed on Governors Island – a small car-less island off the shore of Manhattan.

Its shipping container envelope was designed to make it easy to install on the island and easy to be transported in the future. It was painted white to absorb less heat and keep the equipment cool.

A clear garage door and windows were installed on the facade to allow passersby to see the equipment inside at work.

An array of 25 photovoltaic panels – a ten kilowatt array in total – was placed on top of the container and run through a solar inverter connected to batteries, which store the power and allow the factory to be 100 per cent solar-powered.

To use the factory, people must bring used, cleaned plastics and place them in an on-site shredder. The shredded plastic is then placed in a machine that feeds it into a Rotational Molding Machine.

The machine uses heat and movement to melt and then cool the plastic into preset moulds. Multiple different moulds can be clamped on at each cycle, and the team said it could produce six large street traffic cones in one cycle.

"We plan on growing our start-up by selling the small products to citizens, the urban infrastructure products to cities, and our whole MicroFactory to communities or countries," said CEMfg co-founder Barent Roth.

"Every recycling center around the world could have a MicroFactory on-site immediately converting single-use plastic into durable essential products."

So far, the factory on Governors Island has produced lamps and planters that have been sold back to the public to fund future endeavours.

Because the company is still small, the sorting is done by hand, and Roth said the team does not melt plastic that it cannot identify.

"High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) #2 is our preferred plastic," said Roth. "It has a relatively low melting temperature and is readily available in a wide range of colors."

The project was made possible through an initiative started by entrepreneur Chris Graff who began a competition asking designers to come up with ideas to help deal with the waste problems in New York City called the NYC Curb-to-Market Challenge.

"Eventually, we hope to deploy a fleet of MicroFactories to locations around the country, to create green jobs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, divert tons of plastic waste from landfills, and educate community members about the potentials of Circular Manufacturing," said the team.

"We can bring our MicroFactories anywhere there is ample plastic pollution and consistent sunlight."

The team at CEMfg has made a 3D model of the MicroFactory available online, here.

Nearby, in Queens, a group of academics and designers launched a program that converts architectural mock-ups into community garden sheds.

Other urban recycling projects include designer Jeffrey Miller's conversion of London's waste into tiles for the city's underground trains.

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Mexican architecture studio Productora has restored a concrete industrial complex in Mexico City into a series of studios including its own office.

Productora has been gradually renovating the building, which was originally a textile factory built in the 1920s, since it moved its offices to the structure following an earthquake in 2017.

The studio originally took up residence in an empty "nave" in the factory in Mexico City's Doctores neighbourhood along a furniture company.

Since then, the studio has been "slowly rebuilding the complex while inhabiting it" and more than twenty other companies have moved into the complex, which is now called Laguna,

For the renovation, the studio focused on the interior of the complex while leaving the street-facing, painted-concrete exterior, generally untouched so that one might not know the complex is there at all.

The complex is now orientated around two courtyards that were cleared of existing structures to create new circulation and gathering areas.

Within these courtyard spaces, a mix of newly built concrete workshops and the renovation of existing brick-and-mortar and concrete buildings will continue to take place over the next several years. The studio said it hopes that the project will be one of "constant adaptation and transformation".

Now, the most significant aspects of the renovation have been the cleared courtyards and added buildings, as well as expressive walkways and a new freight elevator that towers above the site.

Green detailing was chosen because it was prominent in the trim of the windows and roof on the facade of the original structure, and these green details continue along the causeways and in the gridded window frames.

Social spaces have been installed in the courtyards so that members of the various companies can gather.

In the future, Productora plans to build wooden workshops on top of the preexisting structure to create flexible and modular extensions to the current program.

Jozz Gómez, a coordinator for Laguna, said that the presence of the complex has also positively changed the environment around the complex.

"It started to bring more employment, but also changed the neighbourhood," she told Dezeen. Adding that students and younger people are now often in the vicinity.

Productora was founded in 2006 and has additional offices in Brooklyn. Recent projects include a hotel in San Miguel de Allende clad in red and green tile as well as a bright-blue cohousing project in Denver, Colorado, USA.

The photography is by Pablo Manjarrez. Top photo by Camila Cossio. 

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Woven spinning chairs by Héctor Esrawe and Ignacio Cadena, and a hidden stage with entrances made from portable toilets were some of the highlights of FORMAT Festival in Arkansas.

FORMAT, which stands for For Music + Art + Technology, integrated a number of interactive installations directly into the festival grounds alongside the Momentary gallery in Bentonville.

Produced by C3 Presents and TRIADIC, the second iteration of the three-day festival was the first to take place at this location the city that is home to the headquarters of Walton Global, which owns shopping chain Walmart.

A variety of sculptural work from international and local designers were chosen to fill the manicured grounds outside of the gallery.

"We never wanted to just be decorative, but we wanted to really be an integral part of the festival landscape," said the TRIADIC team, which curated the installations and includes Elizabeth Edelman, Roya Sachs and Mafalda Millies.

"We really are able to give a platform to art and music and have them collaborate."

Esrawe + Cadena, a collaboration between Mexican designers Eraswe and Cadena, staged a series of spinning objects with platforms for spinning, covered in colourful nylon straps.

Called Los Trompos (Spinning Tops) the work was first exhibited in Atlanta and has since travelled around the country. It is based on the spinning tops commonly used as playthings by children, according to the designers.

Sydney-based design studio Atelier Sisu installed its Evanescent sculpture, a series of large plastic bubbles with iridescent sides that can be walked under.

To ensure local contributions, the TRIADIC team held an open contest for people in the surrounding area to design the entrance gate for the festival. This year's winner was an arch made up of discarded bicycle wheels by Zach Springer that spin and light up at night.

The sculptural walkway was intended to represent the region's position as a mountain biking destination.

Other large-scale installations included billboards with chalk-facing sides where visitors could record "complaints" by activist group Guerrilla Girls as well as a mobile photography lab that took portraits of visitors, printed them on large-format paper and then wheat-pasted them on plywood walls across the grounds.

New York installation artists Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman created a stage for the festival clad in the fronts of portable toilets. Through two entrances, one could walk through the portable toilet doors and enter a "psychedelic speakeasy" with six rooms and a dome structure in the middle where small concerts were performed.

Other stages and structures included a "disco barn" designed specially for the event as well as a large Quonset hut with open-ended sides that formed a marketplace for clothing and other goods.

The integration of the more standard music festival elements and installations with the gallery structure on the property was indicative of close ties between the different arts institutions in the city.

The Momentary is an extension of the Safdie Architects-designed Crystal Bridges Museum just a few miles away, which was founded by Alice Walton, daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

"We take immense pride in the dynamic, cutting-edge work that is being done here, in arts and culture and beyond," said Momentary interim director Jill Wagar.

"We're all working together toward a common goal, underscored by the drive to create exceptional, inspiring, and accessible experiences."

The greater area has seen a flurry of infrastructure in the past decades, and one resident told Dezeen that the building reminded him of the "Sims City" in its speed and placement.

Marlon Blackwell Architects, based in nearby Fayetteville, has designed a number of structures for the city's Thaden School, a private arts-oriented school backed by the Walton Foundation.

Other installations in the city include an architecture exhibition at Crystal Bridges called Architecture at Home, which featured experimental housing prototypes from a variety of international studios, such as Mexico City's PPAA.

Top photo is by Ismael Quintanilla III.

FORMAT Festival ran from 22 to 24 September 2023 in Bentonville, Arkansas. For more international events, installations and talks in architecture and design visit the Dezeen Events Guide. 

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Local architecture studio Practice for Architecture and Urbanism has installed a glass office building with a vaulted roof inside the shell of the 19th-century Domino Sugar Refinery on the waterfront in Brooklyn.

Called the Refinery, the 12-storey building is the conversion of an industrial factory into a contemporary office, reflecting how the borough's architectural needs have shifted.

The structure is the centrepiece of the redevelopment of the Domino Sugar Refinery site, developed by Two Trees Management with a master plan by SHoP Architects and Field Operations.

For the Refinery, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) wanted to create a functioning office space that kept the facade of the Romanesque Revival structure.

"We're not shortchanging today for some nostalgia," PAU principal Ruchika Modi told Dezeen.

"What was really important was this idea of palimpsest and embracing what was on the site without becoming slavish to history."

Because of the floor configuration, the original building could not simply be adapted.

The floorplan was industrial with large cavernous spaces inside, so the studio opted for keeping the historic building's facade intact while putting a whole new building inside of it.

"It's not a conventional adaptive reuse project in the sense of going into a warehouse building and adapting it," Modi continued.

"There was no building to adapt. And if we were to just go in and fill in the missing floors, it would lead to a really weird, idiosyncratic, completely bizarre, you know, interior configuration."

Instead, the new glass building sits back from the preexisting masonry and is anchored to it with metal beams that connect to the new building's curtain walls.

This gap allows for light to filter in through the windows and creates space for a "vertical garden" between the brick wall and the curtain walls.

Architectural details such as a large smokestack from the original structure were preserved on the facade.

The studio also used some of the original structural detailing to guide the new structure, such as a cantilevered glass overlook that juts out from the gap in the facade where an industrial chute once sat and has views of the Field Operations-designed parks on the site.

The new structure consists of 460,000 square feet (42,735 square metres) of offices with floor plans that differ depending on needs and a vast penthouse that sits directly underneath the glazed vaulted roof.

From the offices, inhabitants can catch views of the Manhattan skyline across the East River or of the urban environment of the Williamsburg neighbourhood in Brooklyn.

According to the studio, the building also runs on all-electric power.

On the ground floor is a triple-height atrium lobby with amenities spaces and retail. A replica LED sign displaying the Domino Sugar logo brand was hung from the river-facing facade.

The structure sits between two larger structures, a pair of linked skyscrapers by CookFox Architects and two in-progress skyscrapers clad in porcelain by Selldorf Architects.

The Refinery had been in operation for 120 years when it closed in 2004. The site was bought by Two Trees Management in 2012.

A six-acre park by Field Operations holds the space between the developments and the East River and has become a popular park for the local public.

Since being commissioned for the Refinery, PAU has landed a commission, along with HOK, to redevelop the beleaguered Penn Station in Manhattan.

The photography is by Max Touhey.

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A sculptural facade defines the Allan & Geraldine Rosenberg Residences, a housing block with affordable senior apartments in Freeport, New York, designed by architecture firm Studio Libeskind.

Located in Freeport on Long Island, north of New York City, the Allan & Geraldine Rosenberg Residences is a 41,833-square-foot (3,886-square-metre) apartment building.

It was developed by the local NGO Selfhelp Realty Group to house low-income senior citizens and a percentage of formerly houseless seniors with support from the state government.

The 44-room structure is Studio Libeskind's first completed building in New York State, though the German studio was responsible for the masterplan of the redeveloped World Trade Center site in Manhattan.

Though the project is smaller in scale than many of the architecture studio's other recently built work, founder Daniel Libeskind said that these projects are important for communities at large.

“Senior housing isn't just about accommodation; it's about people," said Libeskind. "It's about creating a home where occupants feel secure, dignified, and emotionally connected to their neighbors."

"Above all, it's about creating a vibrant community," he added.

The five-storey structure's facade features a white-coloured cladding and a standing-seam metal roof.

A series of facets and lines create visual interest as they cross the face of the building, bringing the roofline lower at points and creating asymmetrical protrusions on the facade.

Differently sized windows are arranged across the minimal facade, with a series of dormer windows above the roofline.

Besides providing light from the outside, windows also face inwards, towards an interior void that serves as a courtyard for the residents. The rear of the building includes a covered car park underneath.

"Large windows within units and hallways and multiple landscaped outdoor spaces create an open dialogue between inside and out, imbuing the interiors with natural light," said Studio Libeskind.

"The units are organized around a common corridor that looks out onto the central courtyard space, encouraging activity and communication," it added. "All aspects of this development are dedicated to bolstering seniors' quality of life."

The studio prioritised creating light-filled amenities spaces such as the laundry and recreation rooms.

Minimal interiors with white walls and grey flooring were interspersed with blocks of colour in the hallways and on the doors to the individual units.

To further encourage exercise, the studio placed a terrace and walking track on the rooftop of the building and added"active design elements" such as windows in the stairwells.

It also aimed to organise the hallway in a way that would encourage the building's residents to choose the stairs rather than elevators.

According to the studio, passive design principles were used in the construction to ensure sustainable operation of the building after construction.

These include an energy-efficient envelope, a green roof, stormwater storage and infiltration, as well as fully electric heating and appliances.

The electrical system has been hooked up to a backup power generator to ensure the proper functioning of life-saving machinery in the event of a power outage, and the community space can be converted to a "resilient hub" with emergency outlets.

Residents began moving into the apartment building late last year.

The studio is currently planning a similar housing block in nearby Brooklyn.

Studio Libeskind was founded in Germany in 1989 and moved its headquarters to New York City in 2003, around the time that work on the World Trade Center rebuilding began.

It has completed a number of high-profile buildings across the United States and globally including a number of museums such as the Holocaust Museum in Lisbon.

The photography is by Inessa Binenbaum.

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