Giulio Iacchetti’s fountain of blue sanitaryware mixes humour and politics – Marcel Duchamp eat your heart out.

The prolific designer transforms the banality of everyday objects into something joyous – nowhere more so than in his new kitchen collection for Gorenje.

The Milan Furniture Fair presented a series of rooms inspired by the cult sci-fi film Tron – only without the movie’s convoluted lines.

The Spanish designer is on a mission to rescue the bathroom from dismal functionality and turn it into a place to linger. His art-deco inspired range for Bisazza is just the start.

Dror Benshetrit’s latest project – a geometrical truss system that can be used as table legs or to buttress a building or a bridge – is rebranding the one-time product designer as a serious player in the field of architecture and engineering.

London has two new skyscrapers: the Heron Tower, the tallest building in the City, and the Shard, the tallest building in the EU. We took sculptor Richard Wentworth to appraise them as additions to the street scene – and peek at OMA’s super-discreet bank HQ along the way.

Today, the space frame lurks quietly behind the skins of buildings by Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, as well as regional shopping centres, but in the 1960s it was central to architects’ visions of utopian megastructures and a future of unlimited expansion.

Stephen Holl’s recent projects range from vast “cities within cities” in Shenzen and Chengdu to smaller works in natural settings – a surf centre on Biarritz’s Atlantic coast and an art museum in Nanjing. Here he talks about the challenges of operating at both ends of the scale.

Michael Schindhelm’s year in charge of the Gulf city’s cultural life inspires a harrowing tale.

The vast, empty landscapes of the filmmaker’s photographs are an appropriately still counterpart to his films.

What kind of architecture magazines do we need in the age of the internet.

Cassina has recreated a 1940s bookcase by the celebrated neo-rationalist designer, solving the structural problems of 
an influential but precarious prototype.

The Munich-based designer had both new and old pieces on display this year. He talks about how he’s enjoying making furniture again.

The inaugural grouping of exclusive British design brands (sponsored by Icon), including Modus, Benchmark, 
Wedgwood and Anglepoise, was one of the highlights of the Zona Tortona district.

Philippe Starck’s Mary Poppins-inspired chandelier and Nathalie Dewez’s counterbalanced desk lamp both shone brightly this year.

A sculptural installation of porcelain tiles and fluorescent lights transformed an 18th-century courtyard at the University  of Milan during the furniture fair.

A selection of the best chairs from the Salone del Mobile, including one made from hemp, a ghostly outline of a classic, an architect’s angular creation and another designed as a tax dodge.

Not content with presenting 12 projects during the furniture fair, the Spanish designer also staged her first exhibition of limited-edition pieces on the theme of wastefulness.

The facade of Emmanuelle Moureaux’s design for a Tokyo bank layers planes of colour to draw the eye up from a nondescript suburban street.

A house near Madrid presents the softer side of concrete by merging it with the landscape and playing with light and shadow.

Paris architect X-TU has completed a reptile-like natural history museum which slinks across a prehistoric site in South Korea.

A Dutch government building might look like a throwback to the age of showing off, but has a prudent internal economy.

David Chipperfield’s second major UK gallery in as many months sits in the river Calder like a fortress, but is a modest and thoughtful building.

These vast silos, “monuments to the Prostestant work ethic”, were a seminal influence on modernism but are vanishing from the American landscape.

I’m lucky enough not to want anything else seriously. A complete makeover would be desired but tricky. Last year I got a couple of new titanium knees but the rest is a biggish job.