The Milan Furniture Fair promises to be as vibrant as ever, although the recession is still likely to loom large.

Herzog & de Meuron did the sets and Miuccia Prada made the costumes for this bout of Verdi at the Met.

The Gagosian has gathered the art world’s great and good in tribute to the late author JG Ballard.

It’s all “me me me” at the Guggenheim, as the museum asks artists and architects how they might fill the emptiness in its heart.

Nottingham Contemporary probes the space race in the imagination of communist Europe.

The collected works of Herbert Muschamp, the last heavyweight architecture critic, exhilarate Justin McGuirk.

Conversation between architect Alejandro Aravena, filmmaker Gary Hustwit, designer Christien Meindertsma and journalist Bruce Nussbaum, moderated by Justin McGuirk, during Design Indaba, Cape Town, 26 February 2010.

Relics offers an alien vision of curious structures, at first entirely unplaceable.

The ghetto of San Agustin spreads across
a mountainside in the centre of Caracas – a typical slum, or barrio as they say in Venezuela.

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. The incessant ticking of the wall clock fills the Paris apartment every time the conversation goes quiet, as if it’s reminding Inga Sempé that time is running out.

Walking through the Rolex Learning Centre is like being inside a pinball machine. The building summons you on circuitous routes, propelling you around islands and dropping you into holes.

Is design playing with your 
emotions? What objects are most special to you? Which do you love?

Jon Harrison takes everyday objects and tweaks them to be more useful. It’s a clever second look at the life of mass-manufactured products.

Chairless will be one of the talking points of Milan: it’s a chair with none of the attributes the word implies.

The Milan Furniture Fair promises to be as vibrant as ever, although the recession is still likely to loom large.

La Llotja is a theatre and conference centre in Lleida, Spain, by Dutch architecture practice Mecanoo.

A photobooth has been transformed into a confessional by Zurich-based architect Rafael Schmidt.

Origami was the starting point for Masataka Matsumura’s first womenswear collection for the Italian-Japanese fashion brand Giuliano Fujiwara.

Eighteen kilometres of beams go into the vast undulating roof of the Centre Pompidou-Metz in north-east France, designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and Paris-based Jean de Gastines.

These Glasses cost five dollars to produce.

A quilted cube inspired by jellyfish has been erected in Barcelona’s 22@ science and technology district.

Daniel Rybakken is a designer with a singular mission.

The idea behind Edificio Cruz del Sur’s arrowhead shape was “to liberate the ground”, say its designers, Izquierdo Lehmann Arquitectos.

“It wasn’t created magically on the computer,” says Daniel Tobin.

A bridge is a chance to show off for many architects.

At the end of the 1970s, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art mounted a retrospective of the decade’s architecture, it chose John Portman’s Renaissance Center in Detroit for the catalogue cover.

“Violence against our staff will not be tolerated”.

We asked designers Sam Hecht and Kim Colin – Industrial Facility – 
to delve into their collection of cheap things. In the latest in the series, they (carefully) pull out a combination of two dangerous tools.