Designers get down to earth with primitive huts, a shoe that blossoms into wildflowers and a tree-trunk Panton chair.

Chyutin Architects’ spare arrangement of concrete and grass strips creates a gateway to Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Some unlikely structures have started to appear in London parks and Kent woodlands – elaborate birdboxes inspired by council estates, gated communities and dictators’ palaces.

Ma Yansong shot to fame when he became the first Chinese architect to win a major international competition. Now, with those winning towers approaching completion, he reflects on what it means to represent a country and a generation – and keep from becoming stale.

As award-winning young designers, Christopher Lee and Kapil Gupta of Serie Architects are unlikely reactionaries against the spirit of the age. But their “deep structural” approach rejects digital-led design for a return to first principles – a stance that has won them commissions in India, China, the USA and eastern Europe.

China is the epicentre of copying, from knock-off handbags to the Venetian Macao hotel – itself a copy of an imitation. But this industrious fakery can be more than mere kitsch. It is creative, modern and raises questions about the value of originality.

Two fascinating new architecture zines show there’s life in print.

The interlacing stories of Sweden’s architecture and social democratic politics fascinate Kieran Long.

A trove of objects, hidden away for 40 years in Warsaw’s National Museum, reveals the glamorous aspirations of post-war Polish design.

This retrospective illuminates the artist’s 1990s heyday, but also his decline.

Hiroshi Nakamura has allowed the spaces traced by surrounding branches to dictate the form of his latest work, a museum in the Japanese city of Oyama.

Carlos Casanueva’s house is both an imaginative ruse to confuse Spanish planners and a bold architectural statement in its own right.

Architect Manuel Maia Gomes takes a brutalist approach to the baroque in a gallery and student flats carved out of a 16th-century house.

The design show celebrated its 60th birthday over five days in February, in the company of 40,000 visitors and 750 exhibitors from 27 countries.

A flagship store by Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects is the first building to be designed specifically for the fashion label.

The architect’s latest concert hall is an uncharacteristically box-like but highly sophisticated multimedia centre.

Jürgen Mayer H has designed a modernist airport and dropped it in the middle of nowhere.

Singaporean designer Tan Lun Cheak has returned a traditional South-east Asian cooking pot to the heart of social gatherings.

Spanish architect Ecosistema Urbano has built an environmentally friendly kindergarten that cohabits with the wild industrial hinterland of Madrid without hiding away.

Studio Job creates a teasing parody of a gentlemen’s club in the entrance hall of Alessandro Mendini’s Groninger Museum.

Tokyo practice Atelier A5 has taken a pragmatic approach to the city’s restrictive building codes with a ziggurat-style family home that reclaims every available inch of space for the private realm.

Battling it out with Cologne for the attention of journalists and buyers, design fair Maison & Objet put on quite a show this year at the Parc des Expositions in Paris.

Architect Ooze has tripled the floor space of a gable-fronted 1920s house with an extension that the building wears “like a hat”.

The dramatic facade of these apartments in the Portuguese village of Alcácer do Sal is a functional response to residents’ needs.

The space probe is about to become the first man-made object to leave the solar system. It is a beautiful expression of the best sort of human ambition.

This is not so much form follows function as form follows fiction, which is basically my outlook.

How long must the breakfast tables of the middle classes groan under this paper mountain of grainy paparazzi shots, illegible layouts and faux Victoriana?