The Israeli artist’s project for living is both monastic and militaristic.

A Birmingham gallery expertly rehashed the idea of eating as performance.

The much-maligned motorway service area gets the history it deserves.

The cities created for video games are not just interchangeable killing fields. They are designed without constraints, charismatic protagonists in their own right – and well worth exploring.

Disney’s sequel to cult sci-fi classic Tron was placed in the hands of Joseph Kosinski, an architect best known for his commercials. He talked us through the creation of his virtual world – Blade Runner as designed by Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn.

Zaha Hadid Architects’ opera house in Guangzhou is the product of a supreme technological effort. The practice explains the brainpower and computing prowess needed to capture the simplicity of two boulders washed up by the Pearl River.

Japan’s “love hotels”, where amorous couples spend a night (or less) in themed rooms with zany decoration, get a designer update courtesy of Suzanne Oxenaar.

Soft, yielding felt is made rigid and supportive in design duo Raw-Edges’ latest experimental line of furniture.

Spanish studio Subarquitectura has built a family home that resolves its sloping site by looping the loop.

A new campus-on-stilts by Coldefy & Associés Architectes Urbanistes is inspired by the utopian floating cities of the 1960s.

Inspired by fog, StudioGreenBlue’s family home in a Tokyo suburb uses perforated metal screens to create varying degrees of privacy and visibility.

Rachely Rotem and Phu Hoang’s delicate, dynamic pavilion on Miami Beach resembles a swarm of creatures from the deep.

You’d expect a facility built to research “smart materials” to have something special about it – in this case it’s a unique metal skin.

NORD Architecture builds a house for Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture project in the nuclear landscape of Dungeness. It’s the best yet of this series of modernist holiday homes.

The tallest tower in the world, designed by Information Based Architecture, opens in Guangzhou, China.

Technics turntables have dominated nightclubs and the airwaves since the middle of the 1970s but now face extinction.

I have chosen my five objects of desire based on things that I feel make life less stressful, more sensual and more engaging, while injecting some sort of human spirit into the everyday.

Why do we allow developers to cover every possible seat in spikes, turning our urban spaces into beds of nails?

Christoph Thetard’s pedal-powered kitchen unit puts old techniques to new uses in an effort to reduce our dependence on electricity.

Influenced by houses in hill towns, Olson Kundig Architects’ residence for an art collector is integrated into the rocky landscape by force.