Overpopulation could lead to food shortages on a global scale, so design duo Dunne & Raby is imagining a future where people digest food in the same way animals do.
In an age of terror alerts, “preparedness” and paranoia, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a Los Angeles-based research organisation specialising in human geography, has documented the shadowy, unreal world of southern California’s emergency service training sites.
The uranium in François Roche’s Venice exhibit was confiscated by police. His practice, R&Sie(n), has been hit hard by the financial crisis. But architecture’s professional outsider is still out to infiltrate and contaminate the world.
Cold War nuclear paranoia led to a string of entrepreneurs promising to build bunkers for the paying public. Now, in the age of terrorism, ecological meltdown and an approaching Mayan doomsday, one company is building $50,000-a-bed shelters in America and central Europe.
The nomads in Mary Mattingly’s post-apocalyptic landscapes carry their homes on their backs. The artist is now putting her high-tech designs into production.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic was designed to withstand a nuclear bomb and, in the event of apocalypse, act as a Noah’s Ark for plants.
Brazil’s flagship design event is sophisticated but a little smug.
Owen Hatherley’s “autopsy of the urban renaissance” is fearless and funny.
Two beautiful books document the construction of Brasília and the life of its inhabitants.
The seventh London Design Festival kicked off with a rather lacklustre installation of Audi robots in Trafalgar Square by German-Swedish duo Kram/Weisshaar. But the mood picked up as the week went on and we found ourselves, as usual, drawn to the smaller, more independent events, showing off what London is best at: new talent.
The seventh London Design Festival kicked off with a rather lacklustre installation of Audi robots in Trafalgar Square by German-Swedish duo Kram/Weisshaar. But the mood picked up as the week went on and we found ourselves, as usual, drawn to the smaller, more independent events, showing off what London is best at: new talent.
A visitor centre by Portuguese architect Aires Mateus is a serene addition to a rugged volcanic crater in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Once part of the apparatus of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, a Santiago building is opened up for a democratic Chile – literally.
When it found itself short of an idea for a lecture, Czech practice Mjölk decided to spend the evening building something instead. Thirteen hours later, this was the result.
Senseable City Lab’s wheel uses stored energy to electrify conventional bikes, and collects environmental data every time it’s taken out for a ride.
A client instructed Japanese architect Eastern Design Office to build a home in which he could die watching the sun rise over the ocean.
A cookbook that is given away free in Ikea stores in Sweden has become an unlikely hit.
A disused pillbox in the Netherlands is cut in half and turned into a new public space by landscape architect Rietveld Landscape and artist Erick de Lyon.
Thom Andersen’s nostalgic film about Los Angeles shows the world’s most photographed city with the stagecraft removed, from vanished buildings to billboards faded in the desert sun.
Zaha Hadid Architects opens its first school – a zigzagging bridge of glass, concrete and steel. It’s a slice of shining Hadid swagger for a deprived part of south London.
It was the death of his father in a plane crash that inspired David Warren to invent the flight data recorder. While it may not be much to look at, it’s a design that’s built to endure.
My selection is from Talk to Me, an exhibition I’m curating at the Museum of Modern Art. It’s about the communication between people and objects, and features recent work by designers, students and scientists. The exhibition opens in July 2011.
If you have to get to grips with a germ-covered door knob or lever to get out, it rather spoils the point of washing your hands in the first place. Is a hands-free toilet door too much to ask?
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