Architecture and interior design, written for people who shape spaces. New stories, fresh thinking, published regularly.
The French duo who won the 2021 Pritzker do not renovate a facade so much as build a second, self-supporting one in front of it — an unheated winter garden that hands each flat tens of square metres while the tenants never move out.
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A charring timber column protects itself with the carbon crust it forms, until the glue line lets that crust drop off. The fire performance of tall timber is an adhesive problem, not a combustion one.
Physiological research pins the restorative power of natural patterns to a measurable mid-range fractal dimension around 1.3 to 1.5 — and only when the pattern is statistically irregular, not mechanically repeated.
A bright, code-compliant office can still leave its occupants under-lit for their body clock, because circadian health is set by melanopic light at the eye: vertical, blue-weighted, and unrelated to the lux measured flat on the desk.
Barrier tanking asks one unbroken layer to hold back the water table and fails invisibly the moment it is breached. A Type C cavity-drain system does the opposite, and BS 8102 puts the habitable grade in the sump and pump, not the plastic.
The Tokyo studio's real invention is not the look of its timber houses but the relocation of the factory itself into forestry towns, where locals cut and assemble a house from a file.
Every 2026 trend list calls unlacquered brass a living finish and then explains it as a warmer gold. It is not a colour at all but a solid copper-zinc surface left bare to oxidise, which is exactly why you can polish it back to bright and restart the clock, and why a chipped lacquer or worn PVD coating never can.
A 2026 Singapore exhibition reframes Kengo Kuma's lifelong instinct to let buildings disappear as a precise construction method: break the mass into thousands of small parts so the site itself can pass through.
A motion sensor goes blind the instant you sit still. Millimetre-wave radar keeps the room occupied by reading the rise of a breathing chest, and in doing so moves the design work from the ceiling into the floor plan.
A good Windsor holds its legs without glue or screws for two centuries because the maker builds a moisture differential into every joint, a bone-dry tenon in a wetter socket, that clamps tighter as the wood ages.