Lacum Respira is a lakeside pavilion by .ket bureau on the shore of Lake St. Moritz in Switzerland. Set at the water's edge, the timber structure addresses a landscape shaped by seasonal rituals and a long tradition of outdoor life, where the lake acts as both foreground and horizon. The calm setting is defined by open air and backdropped by dramatic mountains. Any architectural move here carries weight.
The new lookout point at Point Vue le Jambon in Vresse-sur-Semois is conceived as a discreet and respectful gesture within an exceptional landscape. Rather than asserting itself as an object, the project carefully embeds architecture into the terrain, allowing the site's natural qualities to remain central to the experience.
This article won't start out well, because I'm sort of at rock bottom in my career and it seems that I'm projecting my frustrations of the industry out in the open. But I promise you, my rants are merely neutral observations and opinions. I love talking to people, and over the last 2 months of unemployment (I am now employed), I called upon designer friends all in Asia and Europe to get their opinion on the current state of Design leadership and how it has impacted our careers.
If there was only one interior design style setting the tone in 2026, it would be Japandi. Apartment Therapy's State of Home Design survey identified Japandi style as one of the year's top design aesthetics, according to insights from 140 designers - and it's easy to see why. As more people strive to create spaces that feel calming, intentional, and grounded in nature, Japandi's blend of Japanese restraint and Scandinavian warmth feels especially timely.
The debut explores the idea that while we create the world around us, that world simultaneously creates us. It's a concept long familiar to architects, for whom design has often been framed as a civic duty. Yet Censori's approach is not without precedent. A surge of feminist artists in the 1960s and 1970s, including Alina Szapocznikow, used the body, or its absence, in conjunction with furniture to explore domesticity and sexual liberation.
In line with the objectives of the German "Building Type E" initiative, which has already received broad political and professional support, the Climate Pavilion can be seen as an applied architectural experiment.
I was wandering through West Asheville one day, past vintage storefronts and sun-washed sidewalks, when I noticed a doorway overflowing with green. Ferns spilled outward, vines climbed the windows.
Studio Stipfold designs AltiHut Cottage as part of first sustainable high-altitude hospitality ecosystem, combining a compact layout, fiber- architecture, and panoramic glazing to minimize impact while maximizing experience. At 3,014 meters above sea level, AltiHut stands as more than a mountain . It is a statement of responsibility, vision, and care for the planet. The project challenges the idea of adventure tourism by uniting comfort, awareness, and respect for nature. Every element, delivered by helicopter and powered by the sun, reflects a belief that hospitality can exist in balance with the environment.
Design systems break not because designers don't care but because maintaining consistency at scale is genuinely hard. Tokens drift, naming becomes messy, documentation gets outdated, and what started as a neat system slowly turns into a fragile one. But AI can help you keep your design system up to date. One of my favorite coding tools, Claude, can act as a design systems assistant for another my favorite design tool, Figma,
Today we are at the cusp of revolutions in artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, renewable energy, and biotechnology. Each brings extraordinary promise, but each introduces more complexity, more interdependence, and more latent pathways to failure. This elevates prudence to be critical. Good design recognizes what cannot be foreseen. It acknowledges the limits of prediction and control. It builds not merely for performance, but for recovery.
The PU foam used in traditional and more recently developed memory-variant mattresses is not just harmful to the environment - as "everlasting" materials - but also to our health. Though often contained by fabric, they are riddled with toxic VOCs and other chemicals one wouldn't want to momentarily expose themselves to, let alone sleep on for multiple years. There hasn't really been another option till now.
Berdenesh Hills by NOA in Saranda, Albania, is a residential and hospitality development set along the southern Mediterranean coastline, where hillside terrain and sea views guide the project's architectural logic. The project occupies a sloping site within a quieter rural landscape outside Saranda. Approaching the area, the road traces low hills marked by scrub vegetation and exposed stone, with the sea appearing intermittently before opening fully toward the horizon.
Design tokens are all your design decisions, that define a design system's aesthetic properties, everything from colors and font sizes to spacing units and border radii. They are the modern evolution of hard-coded values. They are stored in a central, platform-agnostic repository, establishing a single source of truth for your entire digital product suite. This central management allows teams to consume the exact same design values across all platforms (web, native apps, documentation).
Seven years of development allowed Openspace Architecture and landscape designer Paul Sangha Creative to thread a 10,000-square-foot single-story home through mature forest without sacrificing the canopy that defines the site's character - a constraint that ultimately generated the building's gently curving plan and its sequence of connected spaces opening to Saanich Inlet views. The design draws from mid-century West Coast Modernism's timber traditions while incorporating Japanese structural principles that extend beyond aesthetic reference.
Kulhads, also known as terracotta mud cups, once defined the everyday ritual of tea at railway stations across India. Used briefly and discarded soon after, they accumulated along tracks and coastlines, leaving a quiet record of consumption. For this pavilion, more than 18,000 of these cups were gathered from local communities in Dharavi and reused as a building material with structural purpose.
LEGO has spent decades proving that plastic bricks can build anything from childhood memories to architectural masterpieces. January 2026 continues that tradition with designs that push beyond simple construction into genuine cultural commentary. These aren't just toys gathering dust on shelves. They're conversation pieces that bridge art history, gaming nostalgia, comedy legends, sports culture, and the maker movement into something you can actually hold.
Small businesses operating in niche sectors often face a paradox: projects become increasingly complex and large-scale, while the company's structure and resources remain at the level of a small, independent workshop. This is especially evident in architectural offices, design studios, creative agencies, and workshops working with unique physical objects. A church woodcarving workshop performing a full cycle of work on the creation of iconostases and interior ensembles for churches serves as a representative case.
Lu Wenyu-co-founder of Amateur Architecture Studio with Pritzker laureate Wang Shu-has shaped many of the practice's most emblematic works across China, including the Ningbo History Museum and the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Often working outside the spotlight, her leadership is unmistakable in the discipline of execution and the roles she has assumed: in 2003, together with Wang Shu, she established the Architecture Department at the China Academy of Art,
Its newest, though, is a single-fan book with more than 600 spot colors, and it's priced at just $99. Pantone for beginners. Pantone on Thursday announced its Pantone Capsule: Signature Edition. Housed in a collectible, cylindrical case that wouldn't look out of place in a Sephora, the guide is a sort of Pantone 101 that come on coated and uncoated paper stock with colors selected from across more than 60 years of Pantone history.
But as everyone is chasing micro-trends, choosing a neutral kitchen and following your personal style comes across as more wise and timeless than ever. As seen in the 10 neutral kitchens below, hues like whites and off-whites, blacks, grays, beiges, and earth tones can be combined in infinite ways and applied to different textures and materials, to create kitchens that are dynamic, clean, and classy all at once.
