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Designers & Studios

Every Designers & Studios story on the Moodroom blog.

RenovationDesigners & Studios

The New Structure Carries Itself: How Lacaton & Vassal Enlarge Social Housing Without Emptying It

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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Sustainable DesignDesigners & Studios

VUILD Ships Data, Not Lumber: The Method Is a CNC Router Inside the Village Sawmill

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.

MaterialsDesigners & Studios

Kengo Kuma Builds by Losing: Particlization as a Method, Not a Mood

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.

MaterialsDesigners & Studios

Fragility as Method: Why Smiljan Radic Won the 2026 Pritzker

The 2026 Pritzker Prize crowned Chile's Smiljan Radic for an architecture of deliberate fragility, envelopes that reveal their own construction and masses that rest on raw boulders. Here is why the profession's quietest radical redefines what mastery means.

ResidentialDesigners & Studios

The Corridor as a Street: How the 2025 Stirling Winner Designs Loneliness Out of Old Age

The 2025 RIBA Stirling Prize went to Appleby Blue, an inner-city almshouse for the over-65s that turns its access galleries, garden room and street-facing windows into a machine for the small daily encounters that hold loneliness at bay.

MaterialsDesigners & Studios

The Wall That Stands Because It Wavers: LANZA's Crinkle-Crankle Serpentine Pavilion

For its 25th Serpentine Pavilion, Mexico City studio LANZA builds an entire public room around the crinkle-crankle wall, an 18th-century Suffolk garden trick whose curves let a one-brick wall stand without buttresses and save material doing it.

Outdoor & LandscapeDesigners & Studios

The Garden Built as an Ecosystem: How Phyto Studio Won 2026 Firm of the Year

Named the 2026 ASLA Firm of the Year, Phyto Studio won not for a signature look but for a method — building plantings as dense, layered plant communities that shade out their own weeds and drink only the rain.

MaterialsDesigners & Studios

Fragility as Structure: Why Smiljan Radic Won the 2026 Pritzker

The 2026 Pritzker went to Chile's Smiljan Radic, whose fibreglass shells resting on raw quarry boulders make fragility itself the structure. A look at why the field's quietest radical won its loudest prize.

MaterialsDesigners & Studios

Time as Material: How Frida Escobedo Builds the Day Into a Wall

Newly named the Cooper Hewitt 2026 National Design Award laureate for architecture, the Mexican architect keeps returning to one device — the celosia breeze-wall — to make sunlight, shadow and the slow occupation of space the true subject of her buildings.

Sustainable DesignDesigners & Studios

The Anti-Object Studio: How Formafantasma Made Research the Real Design Work

Named Monocle's 2026 Designers of the Year and the Serpentine Galleries' first ecology fellows, the Milan-and-Rotterdam studio Formafantasma has spent fifteen years proving that the forest, the flock and the supply chain, not the finished object, are design's real material.

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