California-based artist Kelly Akashi has created a glass chimney to recount her personal experience of loss after the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles for the 2026 Whitney Biennial exhibition.

Titled Monument (Altadena), and made from 821 handcast glass bricks, the recreated chimney piece evokes chimneys that remained visible on the charred landscape in the aftermath of the devastating wildfire in Pacific Palisades and Altadena in January 2025, which destroyed tens of thousands of structures.

It was placed on a terrace of the Whitney Museum in New York City's Meatpacking District for the institution's biennial survey.

Akashi, who lost her 1926 home and studio in the fire, has been a part of a local artistic cohort working to recover materials following the January 2025 fires.

The 6,550-pound (2,971-kilogram) piece was fabricated and assembled in her Hudson Valley studio to work in unison with a 538-piece replica of the home's former walkway.

She told Dezeen that each of the bricks installed can be viewed as pieces of a metaphorical puzzle that bring her closer to salvaging hope from the ruins of her lost home.

"The work is not a literal reconstruction, so using clay bricks didn't feel appropriate. Solid glass bricks allowed me to rebuild the chimney through a different material language, where weight and fragility coexist." Akashi said.

"In rebuilding each element, I was thinking about how memory is constructed through care and persistence. The form remains, but is transformed. Light passes through it, and the solidity we associate with a chimney is unsettled."

Akashi's work has long interrogated notions of time and memory, leveraging her knowledge of casting and glass blowing to produce art that comments on social and urban issues.

This time, she has applied her practice to the personal experience of losing her own home, and towards recovery.

In Los Angeles, the rebuilding process has been fraught and varied, an element Akashi emphasised in Monument (Altadena).

"The tension between its recognizable form and unusual materiality felt akin to the act of rebuilding in my neighborhood. While we will rebuild, it can never be the same," she added.

"The act of rebuilding is not simply about material endurance; it is a deliberate labor of care, an engagement with history, and an act of reclamation. Each brick carries the record of labor and material transformation; together, they compose a new body that holds the traces of its past," Akashi said.

Her sculpture at the Whitney Biennial is accompanied by a work called Inheritance (Distressed), a relief replica of her grandmother's Corten steel dolly, a family artefact also lost to the Eaton Fire.

Akashi is also a slated participant in the upcoming 61st Venice Biennale.

Earlier this year, Dezeen covered the delivery of prefabricated homes to the afflicted communities in Los Angeles.

Architect Shigeru Ban recently joined the recovery effort through his contribution of a community centre made from shipping containers after other architects raised concerns over the disjointed nature of the recovery.

The photography is by Timothy Schenck.

The 2026 Whitney Biennial is on view from 8 March to 13 August in New York City. For more exhibitions in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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Canadian design studio Verge Select has designed a studio for painter Janna Watson in Ontario, composed of three square volumes fused together to form a secluded forest retreat.

The Grey County studio is located in the county of the same name in Ontario, and, unlike a second, more urban studio operated by Watson, provides a space that "slows time".

Located in a forested glade, the structure is composed of three square volumes of varying size. They are slightly askew of one another and fuse where they meet.

The entire studio is clad in weathering steel, which will patina over time and "allow the building to recede chromatically into the forest floor" according to Verge Select.

Watson's programmatic needs largely informed the distinct shape.

"The studio takes shape as three distinct yet connected outcrops each responding to Watson's brief for service functions, a light-filled workspace, and a flexible zone for photography and rest," said the studio.

"The volumes nest around a central service core, opening outward through generous glazing that frames views of moss-covered stone and woodland canopy."

On the interior, two of the cubes are largely open-plan, while the other is separated by a wall.

Watson's painting area sits in the middle volume, surrounded by wide-open glazing. On one side, the central space steps up into the lounge area, while the service wing is off to the other side.

This service space includes a washing area tucked into a sharp corner, and also a bathroom shaped like a right triangle.

Across a central corridor is the main entrance to the studio via a steel catwalk, while a door on the other side of the structure also leads outside.

"Two arrival sequences – one compressed and inward-facing, the other emerging from the forest via a steel catwalk – establish a rhythm of transition that echoes the artist's working process," said the studio.

The studio's ceilings reach ten feet high at their tallest, and are lined with "a gallery-style lighting system" for Watson's work.

The space also contains a wood-burning fireplace and reflective, contemporary lounge chairs by designer Paolo Ferrari.

"Here, observation, walking, and seasonal change become active components of the creative cycle," said the studio.

Verge Select is based in Thornbury, Ontario and was founded in 2009 by Michael Curtis. The studio specialises in architectural, furniture, lighting and interior design.

Other recent studio projects include a Vermont barn conversion for a photographer and painter and a garden studio in London by Delve Architects.

The photography is by Finn O'Hara

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Brazilian design exhibition Aberto is hosting its fifth edition in Casa Bola, architect Eduardo Longo's globular self-built 1970s São Paulo home.

Aberto/05 is the fifth iteration of the platform's art and design show, which has been staged in a range of modernist buildings, including Le Corbusier's Maison La Roche in Paris.

This year, the exhibition features installations, sculpture and painting by 50 creatives housed within the 1979 Casa Bola, which demonstrated Longo's utopian architectural vision for an urban community, where residents would live in pods suspended above the street.

The building stands out on São Paulo's bustling Faria Lima for its spherical ferrocement facade, positioned above three floors of separate gallery-style subterranean spaces that still serve as Longo's home and office today. A bright-yellow slide snakes around the sphere as an alternative to the winding staircase.

Among the pieces is a striking aluminium curtain by Spanish artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, positioned at the entrance of one of the floors.

Characterised by a playfully cut-out coated-steel frame, the curtain was one of many works created specifically for Casa Bola.

"The pieces developed for the exhibition establish a direct dialogue not only with the spherical form of the house, but also with its materiality, its lightness of tone and the sense of humour that is so characteristic of Eduardo's architecture," Aberto founder and curator Filipe Assis told Dezeen.

Brazilian artist Sandra Cinto painted two works for the home, which Assis described as perfectly complementary to Casa Bola's "spaceship vibes", while German-Brazilian artist Janaina Tschape also produced a large-scale mural for the exhibition.

While most of the pieces are displayed below the building's spherical volume, works are also on show in this space.

Multimedia paintings by artists Laís Amaral, Paloma Bosquê, and Tatiana Chalhoub were hung to "engage in the building's curves and angles".

"These works, among others, demonstrate how the artists engaged thoughtfully with both the physical and symbolic dimensions of Casa Bola, creating pieces that feel intrinsically connected to its identity," said Assis.

Except for last year's show at Maison La Roche, the first three editions of Aberto were held at other Brazilian architectural landmarks, including Oscar Niemeyer's Casa Oscar – the architect's only residential project in São Paulo.

"Having explored several landmarks of modernist architecture, I felt it was the ideal moment to innovate once again and to present the singular, disruptive universe of Eduardo Longo," reflected Assis. "He's an architect I consider a true genius."

Aberto/05 is the first of the Aberto shows where the curatorial team and the participating designers had the opportunity to work with a living architect, which Assis said proved "invaluable".

"It has allowed us to delve far deeper into the conceptual foundations of the building, to hear first-hand accounts of its creation, and to understand the intentions behind each decision," he said.

São Paulo features many examples of Brazilian modernism, with architects working adaptively with the structures.

Last year, Brazilian design practice Estúdio BRA reconfigured an apartment in the city's Niemeyer-designed Copan building to make the most of its iconic facade.

The photography is by Ruy Teixeira.

Aberto/05 takes place from 7 March to 31 May 2026 at Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima, 2889, Itaim Bibi, São Paulo, 01452-000, Brazil. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Artists Clementine Keith-Roach and Christopher Page have collaborated to design the cavernous Bar Far installation in Rome's Trastevere neighbourhood.

Bar Far is an installation curated by Vittoria Bonifati and commissioned by Villa Lontana, a non-profit art space that investigates links between ancient and contemporary creative practices.

Villa Lontana's exhibition space in Trastevere was renovated by architecture practice Studio Strato to create the temporary, site-specific bar, characterised by immersive catacomb-like corridors with plaster-clad arches.

British sculptor Keith-Roach and British painter Page looked to "ancient and baroque Rome" when decorating the interior with Keith-Roach's peculiar plaster reliefs shaped like body parts, which offer an uncanny take on traditional sculptures.

"The effect is an environment that is at once church and tomb, prophecy and ruin, heaven and hell," said Bonifati.

A glowing neon sign features on the facade, which leads to a cavernous hallway defined by various plaster legs, arms and hands, including two palms clasping ecclesiastical-style candles.

Lifelike sculptures of lower bodies with legs were used to support small tabletops, which were fixed to the wall close to the minimalist plaster bar itself.

On the wall opposite the bar, Keith-Roach and Page collaborated to create a circular portal from plaster and wood, which features an abstract, sunset-style painting in the middle, surrounded by interlaced plaster arms covered in chains and a single breast.

The artists used a mixture of other materials throughout the venue, including cement binder, stucco, silicon glue and scrim, to bring the interior to life.

The back room of Bar Far features a floor-to-ceiling trompe l'oeil mural by Page. Tall archways were painted with the same reddish orange hues as the portal and designed to look as if they lead to another dimension.

"Page's perspectival wall-painting is believably deep from some angles, but warps and distorts as we move around the space," said Bonifati

"It turns the final room into an illusory colonnade or cloister, though one that surveys not a heavenly landscape but an ominous infinity that draws us in with an ambiguous, otherworldly glow," she added.

Bar Far will be open until 14 March.

Located on the west bank of the River Tiber, which runs through Rome, the city's Trastevere neighbourhood is known for its creative community. Local practice StudioTamat previously updated a small 19th-century house in the area with glass floors and mirrored ceilings.

Studio Strato was founded in 2007. Among its portfolio of projects is Pointing House, a one-bedroom apartment renovated to include a cosy reading den.

The photography is by Jasper Fry.

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From Es Devlin's lauded Library of Us to an installation at one of Miami's most haunted locales, here are ten projects that stood out amongst the crowded creative field of Miami art week, selected by Dezeen US editor Ben Dreith.

Ranging from the explicit design focus of collectible fair Design Miami to art gallery furniture and hotel commissions, design has a small-but-mighty presence during the annual art super-week that takes place throughout Miami and Miami Beach.

This year, design institutions took an even more hands-on role, with Italian trade fair heavyweight Salone del Mobile sponsoring and designing the Collectors Lounge at mega-fair Art Basel Miami.

The collaboration, which spokespeople for Salone del Mobile called a "marriage" between the two institutions, seems to solidify the growing inclination for the design market towards the art market.

"Our inaugural presence at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, represents a natural and strategic evolution of the international trajectory that the Salone is tracing to expand opportunities for relations between Italian design and new global audiences with a high cultural involvement," said Salone del Mobile president Maria Porro.

Read on for 10 design-focused exhibitions from Miami art week 2025:

Library of Us by Es Devlin

Installed on the beach as part of the Faena Arts program, Library of Us is an iteration of a book-forward concept first launched by British designer Es Devlin in Milan this spring.

The rotating library was informed by Devlin's own reading, and featured an LED screen with text from the books accompanied by audio and live English-Spanish translation via rentable Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

A selection of books was placed for reading on the desks that encircled the reflecting pool. Though, reportedly, the installation was later fenced off after an influencer walked into the pool while filming a video.

Find out more about Library of Us ›

The Observer Effect by Pilar Zeta

Argentinian designer and former Dezeen Awards judge Pilar Zeta scaled up her surreal column series with a massive installation on the beach, which was also the site for performances.

Departing from her past use of colour, Zeta opted for a chromatic car paint that reflected the sun for the massive series of pillars that led toward the ocean. It was, according to Zeta, informed by the observer effect in quantum physics.

Find out more about The Observer Effect ›

Neon Sun by Emmett Moore presented by Nina Johnson Gallery

Miami-based Nina Johnson Gallery presented the work of designer Emmett Moore both within Art Basel and in the sculpture garden adjacent to the fair.

The collection of furniture by Miami-based Moore sought to translate "Miami's vernacular filtered through industrial materials". The metal chairs and tables of the collection featured expanded polystyrene elements, shaped and painted to resemble corral formations.

Climate Responsive Installations by Breakfast Studio

At 1 Hotel South Beach and Tala Beach, New York-based Breakfast Studio presented one of the largest Miami installations.

The series of interactive kinetic installations responds in two different ways.

On the one hand, they are reacting by vibrations to live climate data such as water levels and ice melt, while also reacting directly to the movements of viewers in proximity to the installation, combining interactive art and design with climate awareness.

Rewilding the Future by Rivian

Car manufacturer Rivian set up a massive installation in Miami Beach's Collins Park to showcase its new colourways and present a series of explorations in scent design.

Designed by the company's in-house team, the wood-and-metal pavilion was informed by a "solar storm". It featured displays and seating, and hosted talks for Art week visitors.

Find out more about Rewilding the Future ›

American Art Furniture by Superhouse at Design Miami

New York gallery Superhouse showcased a series of playful art furniture from the 1980s and '90s, including a Batman chair by Alex Locadia.

Design Miami also featured architecture studio Arquitectonica's first dedicated furniture collection, as well as a special curated section by curator Glenn Adamson featuring a piece by Stephen Burks Man Made that used wood to recreate Kuba textiles.

Find out more about Design Miami ›

After Utopia by Marco Brambilla

Presented at The Wolfsonian–FIU building in Miami Beach's Art Deco District, After Utopia featured Brambilla's extensive research into the architecture and memorabilia of world's fairs.

The exhibition included posters and models from the fairs and concluded with massive digital works that compiled different structures over the years of the fairs to show how "dreams of the future" are now presented through technology.

The Future Perfect

Showcasing its new Miami gallery at the historical (and possibly haunted) Villa Paula, which we covered this fall, The Future Perfect showcased works by a variety of talents, including Chen Chen and Kai Williams and Lindsey Adelman.

The most striking room, somewhat ironically, was in an outbuilding from the main villa, which featured metallic walls and slime-green carpet. Here, a red cabinet by Orior was presented next to a mosaic table by D-Haene Studio and an impressive chandelier by Jason Miller.

Find out more about Future Perfect Villa Paula ›

Alcova Miami

Experimental design showcase Alcova returned to Miami for its third iteration at the Miami River Inn, with a pink-metal entry desk by Present Forms and a chequered carpet courtyard decked out by Patricia Urquiola and Haworth. Designers were asked to fill in the rooms in the houses of the historic hotel, the oldest in the city.

Stand-out exhibitions included a rubber-lined room showcasing the work of LA-based Ombia Studio, flat pack metallic furniture by Vincent Laine, lamps by Evan Fay and a collection by Marlot Baus.

IKEA Open House Miami

Swedish furniture brand IKEA showcased its Grejsimojs children's collection through a colourful exhibition during the week.

A series of thematic installations matched the designs, which included a dog-shaped light by Marta Krupińska and chairs by Carl Ojertsam.

Miami art week took place throughout Miami and Miami Beach from 1 to 7 December. Find out more about city-wide fairs and international exhibitions at Dezeen Events Guide. 

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The concrete-clad Princeton University Art Museum has opened in New Jersey, USA, the first major project designed by British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye to open since he was accused of sexual misconduct.

The Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) is a major expansion of the art museum on the Princeton University campus in New Jersey, which includes the re-cladding of the existing building to match the precast serrated concrete exteriors of the new building.

It features nine bunker-like pavilions with deep cantilevers and corners that have been shaved off to reveal the aggregate of the concrete. Throughout the exterior, anodised aluminium panelling marks window-boxes.

Ron McCoy, the university architect at Princeton, told Dezeen that elements of classic brutalism feature in the project.

"Because of the mass, people are going to see traditional brutalism in the building and Kahn," he said.

"I think there's a kind of timeliness to that architecture that the building captures."

The 146,000-square-foot (13,563 square metres) facilities are organised around two main levels, with most of the collections occupying the second level.

There are entrances on multiple sides of the building, with the primary entrance being tucked down a slope and through an outdoor atrium space that features a large-scale installation by artist Nick Cave.

The aluminium window boxes face inwards here, allowing views from the galleries out into the exterior atrium.

This exterior atrium space is echoed in the monumental Grand Hall, which serves as a social and performance space. It has massive cantilevered supports made with a dark concrete aggregate and a quadrant skylight with wood mullions.

A contrast between stone and wood carries throughout the exteriors, with glued-laminated (glulam) beams supporting the ceiling, seen most obviously in the grand staircase and mezzanine that provides entry from the ground floor into the collections.

Each of the galleries is fronted by a smooth granite entry portal, and the flow of the museum was designed so that the galleries run into one another, allowing for multiple and seamless transitions.

The museum said this organisation was chosen in order to "break down hierarchies" within the collections.

"The design of the new building allows the museum's globe-spanning collections to be exhibited substantially on a single level, shaping new ways of encountering the collections, privileging ideas of cultural contact and exchange, and fostering new modes of storytelling," said Princeton.

"By challenging the traditional hierarchies inherent in multilevel gallery display, the museum will foster moments of discovery and surprise as visitors encounter ideas and objects in narratives that move beyond the boundaries of geography and chronology."

Throughout the galleries, smaller, wood-clad sitting rooms, some with ceiling murals, allow for moments of respite. A restaurant with an expansive terrace sits at the top of the building.

In many of the gallery spaces, recessed skylights with heavy tint allow a small amount of light in.

PUAM is the first major project designed by Adjaye and his firm to be completed after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct in 2023, causing many clients to distance themselves from the studio. Adjaye has denied the allegations, saying they are "untrue".

Representatives from Princeton highlighted the fact that at the time of the allegations, most of the design work and at least 50 per cent of the construction had already been completed.

"David stepped back from day-to-day involvement in the project, leaving it in the hands of executive architects Cooper Robertson, who participated in site visits all the way through to project completion in fall 2024," said a representative for Princeton, who also noted that Adjaye was not invited to the opening celebrations in October.

Since the accusations, which were detailed in an extensive Financial Times report, Adjaye has stepped back from operations and given over aspects of leadership to CEOs in his New York and London offices.

PUAM is the first of a slew of buildings by Adjaye slated to open in the United States this year, which include the Studio Museum in Harlem.

The photography is by Richard Barnes.

Project credits:

Design architect: Adjaye Associates
Executive architect: Cooper Robertson; Erin Flynn, RA, partner-in-charge
Landscape architect: Field Operations
Civil engineering: Nitsch Engineering
MEP engineering: Kohler Ronan
Structural engineering: Silman
Building envelope: Heintges
Lighting designer: Tillotson Design Associates
AV/IT: Harvey Marshall Berling Associates
Acoustic consultant: Cerami
Security: Layne Consultants International
Sustainability and waterproofing: Socotec
Cost estimating: Directional Logic
Foodservice consultants: Clark Wolf Company and KDS
Construction manager: LF Driscoll

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Japanese architect Tadao Ando has unveiled the design for an art museum in Dubai, which will be housed in a rounded, twisting building overlooking the emirate's natural saltwater creek.

Renders of the five-storey Dubai Museum of Art reveal a curving building finished with white walls, punctuated by triangular windows as they swoop and twist upwards.

Designed by Pritzker Prize-winner Ando for Dubai-based conglomerate Al-Futtaim Group, Dubai Museum of Art, also known as DUMA, is hoped to become a cultural landmark for artists and art enthusiasts.

Its distinctive silhouette draws on the sea and pearls and will be raised on a circular platform that extends over Dubai Creek.

Gallery spaces will be located on the first and second floors, illuminated by a central circular skylight designed to cast light with a pearl-like shimmer.

A VIP lounge and restaurant will be situated on the top floor, where full-height glazing will open onto a sheltered outdoor terrace with panoramic views of Dubai.

Elsewhere in the museum will be a library, study rooms and spaces to host initiatives dedicated to training young creatives.

"The Dubai Museum of Art is more than an architectural landmark," said Al-Futtaim Group CEO Omar Al Futtaim. "It is a cultural statement that reflects Dubai's openness to creativity and affirms its role in connecting cultures and celebrating talent from around the world."

"We are especially proud to have entrusted the design to the world-renowned architect Tadao Ando, whose architecture speaks the language of light, silence, and soul," he continued.

"In Dubai, his vision for the Museum of Art will stand as a serene dialogue between nature, water, and the human spirit, a masterpiece of restraint and emotion that embodies both ingenuity and timeless elegance, perfectly capturing the depth of his philosophy.”

Dubai Museum of Art will exhibit contemporary artworks by established and emerging artists, while its event spaces will be used for artist talks, panel discussions, educational events and art fairs.

"The Dubai Museum of Art will be a new beacon for the city, enhancing its arts scene and further strengthening its global cultural status," said Dubai ruler Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.

"Dubai has become a destination of choice for creatives from around the world, home to communities and industries working together to accelerate the growth of the creative economy," he continued.

"This new cultural landmark advances our strategic goal to position Dubai as a global hub for creativity and culture, and cements its place on the modern art map."

Elsewhere in Dubai, Diller Scofidio + Renfro is designing a cascading wellness resort with a transparent facade, and English football team Chelsea Football Club recently revealed plans for a residential skyscraper topped with a football pitch.

Earlier this year, Tadao Ando created a cave-like concrete gallery for a permanent installation by British sculptor Antony Gormley in South Korea and he also recently revealed designs for the National Museum of Uzbekistan, which will be formed of a series of interlinked geometric forms.

The images are courtesy of Al-Futtaim Group.

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Designer Colin Knight has presented an exhibition of conceptual furniture called Hero's Wreck at Superhouse Gallery in New York with materials and symbols relating to world war two, including a piece based on the Eames glider chair prototype.

Virginia-based designer Knight, created the exhibition at Superhouse Gallery as a conceptual story between a fictional British fighter pilot and an actual Nazi pilot, Joseph Beuys, experiencing different stages of war.

The story is told in a series of leather panels that were displayed on the wall of the Tribeca gallery.

It references complicated mid-century design and art legacies, such as Beuys' participation in the Nazi air force before his career as an artist and the leveraging of mid-century modern design talents such as Charles and Ray Eames for the war effort.

"One of the more subtle underlying narratives shows the ultimately direct and troubling connections between mid-century design and world war two," Knight told Dezeen.

"When wartime manufacturing hit full steam in the early 1940s, many furniture manufacturers gained military contracts to begin producing objects such as weapons, gear, and aviation components," he continued.

"With new manufacturing abilities and worker skillsets gained after the war, furniture production and designs were heavily influenced, especially with materials such as plywood, fiberglass and aluminum."

The most explicit reference to this dynamic is Knight's Pilot's Seat reading chair, a direct reference to the Eames prototype for a lightweight, moulded-plywood seat for an engineless glider.

It features a wall divider shaped like the hull of a plane and a reading lamp resembling a gun turret.

"While the piece symbolizes the characters call to adventure/journey into war, the piece explores an unhealthy and unrealistic romanticization of war as a heroic conflict," said Knight.

"I see the characters/user sitting in the chair, imagining seeing the world and travel in planes, while in reality they will face the horrors of world war two."

All of the pieces in the exhibition are functional, a constraint decided on by Knight and gallerist Stephen Markos so that the "comfort and functionality in the work helps break them out of any 'gallery setting only'", according to Knight. 

Other pieces in the exhibition include a hanging lamp with rice paper shade created in the shape of a wing and an aluminium-and-leather chair in the shape of a liferaft.

As well as, a chair in the shape of a stretcher, a shed that represents the different phases of Beuy's actual survival of a plane crash in Crimea and a bleached maple table that showcases tableware adorned with symbols representing the characters and their "rebirth" after the war.

Knight said that the focus on fighter planes aims to emphasise the way war design can be romanticised despite its ultimately violent function.

"By romanticizing the object, we view it only for its heroic narrative, the same way an Eames splint, 200,000 made to contain mass trauma to the limbs of young American soldiers, now hang among the homes of collectors," said Knight. 

The showcase demonstrated Knight's belief that storytelling can be an important function of design because of its "intimate relationship to humanity".

"Investigating the relationship between world war two and mid-century design has emphasized to me the fact that design always reflects the world around it through method, material, and form," said Knight.

"As history continues to repeat itself, I am left wondering and eager to see how modern furniture will reflect this moment and how designers will tell those stories."

Other collectible design shows that tell a story include an exhibition by Nifemi Marcus-Bello that explores the exploitation of natural resources and a Kim Mupungilaï collection that probes her own multi-ethnic identity.

The photography is by Matthew Gordon.

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American studio Kennedy & Violich Architecture has adapted a vaulted 1960s ice skating pavilion into an education building with workshops in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA.

The Colorado College Honnen Arts Hub was completed in 2024, the latest iteration of the 1961 Lusk and Wallace skating pavilion, which featured seven, 180-foot (55-metre) thin-shell barrel vaults.

The open-air pavilion, made entirely of cast concrete, was enclosed in the 1980s to create a hockey arena. Now, the 30,000-square-foot (2,787-square-metre) structure holds a series of art studios, workshop spaces and galleries.

"When we first visited Honnen, it was cavernous, dingy and dim," Juan Frano Violich, principal of Boston-based Kennedy & Violich Architecture (KVA), told Dezeen.

"The barrel vault roof somehow rose above it all. It was so familiar and seemed strangely connected – in conversation – with other vaulted structures, the great Mosque of Cordoba and Louis Kahn's Kimball Art Museum."

On the exterior, the studio broke down the enclosing walls added in the '80s, opening the undersides of the vault with thin-profile glazing and painting the new recessed entry a warm terracotta colour derived from the red sandstone of the alpine desert landscape.

Inside, KVA closed off the exterior into bays, determined by the 30-foot (9-metre) lateral span of the vaults.

On the north end of the rectangular plan, the back-of-house workshops have additional ventilation, make-up air systems, power and acoustic mediation; while on the southern end, the spaces are more public-facing with studios, classrooms and an exhibition space for the college's fine arts department.

Outside of the art studios and classrooms, the vaults are emphasised by orange-painted walls that align with additional painting on the ceiling of the wide-open central space in the centre of the plan. Orange detaling continues outside and can be seen in subtle details such as curtains in the machine shops.

Inside the art studios, the walls were left relatively unadorned with exposed mechanical systems. The glass-covered exteriors of the vaults bring in additional outdoor light.

In addition to directing views out to the Colorado Rockies, the vaults act as ducted plenums, contributing to an air conditioning-free ventilation system, contributing to the overall efficiency of the design.

"[The vaults] are a large part of why the building is so adaptable, welcoming, and resilient," the studio said.

Following the college's achievement of becoming carbon neutral in 2020, the studio employed a displaced air system, eliminating the need for refrigerated cooling in the high desert climate.

The team said the project required them to "tread lightly and be generous," due to the diverse needs of the various programmatic elements, including volume, air-flow and occupants.

"In many ways [the building] represents a cross section of a city, where there are places of learning, work, public gathering, and even industry, all under one column-free vaulted roof," the studio said.

"This juxtaposition of programs with apparent conflicting needs, in this instance, works together to create a unique tension bringing energy to the space and its activities."

Other recent projects that employ a similar vaulted roof system to provide both structure and organisation include an Argentinian house by Fabrizio Puglisese, an Ecuadorian hotel extension by Ignacio Muñoz Bustamante and Javier Mera Luna and a Mexican community centre by Aidia Studio.

The photography is by Frank Ooms.

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Architecture studios Heneghan Peng Architects and WXY Architecture have co-led a renovation of the grounds at Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York, adding a serpentine restroom pavilion and fabrication building.

The first major renovation to the grounds of Storm King sculpture park in 65 years, the project comprises the addition of wood-clad pavilions, a building dedicated to conservation and fabrication and the redesign of a portion of the landscape by studios Reed Hilderbrand and Gustafson Porter + Bowman.

The new pavilions, including a curved restroom facility and covered area, are located around an existing stone building used for ticketing. All three structures hug the far side of a main parking lot to create a new arrival sequence.

Heneghan Peng Architects and WXY Architecture focused on building "only what's necessary for the project".

"We began by considering the entry experience, reinterpreting what was already there by removing extra roads, adding three new pavilions to frame the existing stone house, and reimagining the shutters, porches, and outdoor sink that form the first view of the Art Center," said WXY principal Claire Weisz.

"The choice to use native stone and modified fast-growth wood at the visitor entrance reflects the site – its land, art, and environmental legacy."

The structures are unified by the use of a light-coloured wood cladding, which will grey over time, and concrete.

They are also each powered by electricity and incorporate sustainable strategies, such as passive cooling and rooftop solar arrays.

The restroom facility, for instance, is cooled by large operable shutters that open to the outdoors. Handwashing stations are located just below the shutters, while a grey water system circulates sink water to flush toilets.

Located elsewhere on the property, the new David R Collens Building for Conservation, Fabrication, and Maintenance is clad in black siding and features large bays for fabrication, as well as interior workspaces.

The project also included converting former parking lots into five acres of landscape for additional programming and the planting of 650 new trees.

The opening coincides with large-scale temporary landscape installations by artists Kevin Beasley, Sonia Gomes, and Dionne Lee.

Other recent projects in Upstate New York include an in-progress theatre for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival by Studio Gang and a house designed by Steven Holl Architects to hold a collectible design collection.

The photography is by Richard Barnes

Project credits:
Architecture: Heneghan Peng Architects and WXY architecture + urban design
Landscape architecture: Gustafson Porter + Bowman and Reed Hilderbrand
Structural engineering: Arup
Facade engineering: Front
Civil engineering: VHB
Lighting design: Arup
Geotechnical engineering: Tectonic
Acoustics: LSTN
Construction Management: Consigli Construction Co.

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Artist Lauren Bon has embarked on an ambitious project to access water from the Los Angeles River. In this interview, she explains why she believes infrastructure should be treated like nature.

Bon and her LA-based practice Metabolic Studio are known for large-scale conceptual artworks.

She told Dezeen that her starting point is always viewing the built environment as deeply interconnected with the natural one, forming what she refers to as "cyborg entities".

"I treat infrastructure like I would nature," said Bon. "Because there is almost no space left in North America where nature hasn't been intervened upon."

"In places that look more natural, just under the ground is usually full of pipes and wires where we've terraformed the land for utilities and agriculture."

Metabolic Studio's work includes Bending the River, an ongoing project to shift water and land use practices around the Los Angeles River – a heavily polluted waterway that runs through a concrete channel.

The concrete channels that make up much of the Los Angeles River were constructed to protect the city from flooding, but as a result, the waterway was closed off to organic life.

Water that once irrigated the area around the river now flows straight out into the ocean, dramatically shifting the ecosystem of the Los Angeles Basin.

To address this, the studio spent years obtaining permits to gain the first private access to the river water. After achieving that, Metabolic Studio built a mechanism into the concrete channel to bring water into its adjacent studio to be cleansed.

The river water will then flow to the LA State Historic Park, where that greenspace will be irrigated. It joins a number of initiatives launched in the last decade to reimagine the river's role in the city.

Metabolic Studio wants its approach to show that small interventions can be made to ill-conceived urban systems to make a difference, without the wholesale removal of necessary infrastructure.

Near the Bending the River site, Bon has also experimented with urban farming, removing concrete to create space for plants to grow.

Her Un-development 1 project, for example, is a restoration of a formerly industrial site into one more closely resembling the pre-urban floodplain.

Bending the River is the culmination of years of combining conceptual art with ecological initiatives. It was preceded by another project, Not a Cornfield, that saw the conversion of a railyard into a cornfield, in an attempt to reconnect the city with natural processes.

"Strategically removing tarmac and enabling native plants to take root makes a lot of sense," she said. "And it is not difficult to do."

A "post-capitalist creative practice"

Bon founded Metabolic Studio in 2005, in part motivated by the terrorist attacks in New York City in 2001 that destroyed the World Trade Center skyscrapers.

"There was something about the catastrophe of 9/11 that made me think quite differently about this vast home that we have, the United States, as an organism, as a living being," she said.

"Metabolic Studio developed around a guiding question: 'can art practice intervene in the stagnation that occurs as a byproduct of extractive industry and unchecked capitalism?'"

"We're interested in a post-capitalist creative practice that looks at reevaluating the building blocks of the web of life, Earth, seed, water, air and community processes."

The studio defines "post-capitalist practice" as one "that resists extractive logics and centers regeneration and care".

It views the environment in its entirety – built and natural – in contrast to the US's historic tendency to ignore natural systems, like in the covering of the drainage basin of Los Angeles with concrete.

For Metabolic Studio, the question is not so much how to undo these infrastructural features, but how to work with them, while educating people on how extensive our intervention into the environment has been.

"Devices of wonder"

Bon cited the Hoover Dam and the redirection of the Chicago River as examples of infrastructure projects that have had an outsized impact on the environment and have become features of the landscape in themselves.

She is interested in how to utilise the sense of wonder provoked by large-scale infrastructural projects.

"How can we create devices of wonder with these cyborg entities that are both nature and urban?" she asked.

However, the resiliency found in smaller scales can have an impact as well, said Bon.

"I think people find it in small things, too, like when there's a crack in a sidewalk or a road and they see plants growing up from there. There's that sense of the power of the seed really coming up."

She gave the example of peeling back some of the concrete for the Bending the River project and discovering seeds that had been dormant underneath the concrete for decades.

When the dirt that was excavated from the project was stored, volunteer species began to sprout.

"People are looking for new forms of animism, and with [Bending the River] in particular, I can see that in the public, their excitement when they found groundwater underneath the concrete," she said. "It feels like an awakening".

"This industrial corridor is so alive just under the crust, and that's a very spiritual concept. We want to feel that the world around us is a living thing, and I think that's been taken from us."

Most architecture "wants sameness forever"

Bon is hopeful that as more initiatives with missions like Metabolic Studio's begin to sprout up, the positive effects will start to multiply.

She has encountered this herself as her projects have spun out into dozens of projects, some of which, like the uncovered seeds, were largely unexpected.

"Every living thing creates a pathway or portal for more living things to get in there. And that's the thing about the metabolic system – if it self-complicates, it's a good thing."

Bon thinks the fields of architecture and design could take cues from this flexibility and to the surprises that come with rethinking systems.

Many of Metabolic Studio's works, such as Un-development 1, are constantly live-streamed on her website to further highlight the interventions and the produce a sense of duration.

"The thing about most landscape architecture or architecture is that it wants sameness forever, which means it's, by definition, not alive."

"Metabolic Studio is interested in thinking through thermodynamic properties, which is the idea that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and that matter and energy are about transformation."

"How do we regain balance or homeostasis in the world we live in?"

The top photo is by Dave Baine.

Dezeen In Depth

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Le Corbusier's Maison La Roche provides a rich historical backdrop for the first international show from Brazilian design exhibition Aberto, on display at the World Heritage-listed home in Paris.

Aberto/04 is the fourth iteration of the platform's art and design show, which has been staged in a range of modernist buildings, including a 1970s brutalist house in São Paulo by architect Chu Ming Silveira that hadn't previously been open to the public.

For its latest exhibition, Aberto founder Filipe Assis and the curatorial team opted for a more well-known setting to house 40 artworks and design pieces by a mix of contemporary and 20th-century Brazilian creatives – the 1925 Maison La Roche constructed by pioneering modernist Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret.

The works are spread across the open-plan house, originally designed as a home-cum-gallery for art collector Raoul La Roche and characterised by ribbon windows, 17 distinct colours and a famed indoor ramp.

Among the multimedia pieces on show is a colourful painting of an ageing building by artist Luiz Zerbini. Hung in the light-filled entrance hall, the work echoes Le Corbusier's iconic Cité Radieuse in Marseille.

Also on the ground floor, the old caretaker's room presents a series of historical documents and architectural models, including a scale model of Rio de Janeiro's Ministry of Health and Education, completed by Le Corbusier and his renowned Brazilian collaborators Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa in the 1940s.

Moreira Salles explained that all of the works throughout the exhibition were selected to highlight Le Corbusier's significant contribution to Brazilian architecture and his lasting influence on Niemeyer and Costa, who famously designed the country's new capital Brasília in the 1950s.

"Corbusier was their role model," said Claudia Moreira Salles, who curated the exhibition alongside Lauro Cavalcanti and Kiki Mazzucchelli.

"After he left Brazil, Niemeyer and Costa continued his work, but they made changes, which is a story we want to tell with this show," she told Dezeen during a tour of the exhibition.

"Brazilians were inspired by this modernist, but they did things in their own way, influenced by their own culture and geography."

Upstairs, the main gallery space features a series of works from Brazil's neo-concrete movement. Among the pieces is a 1950s stainless steel hinged sculpture by artist Lygia Clark, splayed across a central table and defined by its spiky shape.

The gallery room is arguably the most recognisable space in Maison La Roche, known for its distinctive vantage points that paved the way for Le Corbusier's Five Points – the key features he felt necessary for modern architecture.

"Because the walls of the room are not parallel, you have all these diagonal lines, so we ended up choosing pieces that reflect this," explained Moreira Salles.

"We wanted objects that act in dialogue with the house itself," added Assis.

A collage by contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes is suspended from a nearby wall. The work is made from a mixture of ribbons by French fashion house Chanel and Brazilian Sonho de Valsa chocolate wrappers, playfully connecting the two countries.

"We gave Beatriz this wall and she came up with the idea of doing her collages in conversation with Corbusier," said Assis, referencing the original 1958 Le Corbusier collage that hangs next to Milhazes's piece.

More contemporary sculptures, textiles and paintings made from diverse materials feature across the house, including an intricately woven silk canvas by Sidival Fila – a priest who makes art out of scrap fabric in his spare time.

Elsewhere, visitors can find a lumpy sculpture by artist Anna Maria Miolino, finished in white marble powder and structural cement.

When installing the exhibition, the team made use of Maison La Roche's permanent picture rail hanging system, fitted by Le Corbusier and Jeanneret.

This will make it easier to dismantle the exhibition without disrupting the interior – an important aspect of presenting shows in heritage buildings, according to Assis.

"I think the most difficult part was that since the relationship between Corbusier and Brazil was so rich, we really had to do the story justice," reflected Assis. "I hope Corbusier would like it."

Born in 1887, Le Corbusier designed 17 buildings over his lifetime that are now UNESCO World Heritage sites. Alongside Maison La Roche, the list includes France's Cité Frugès housing complex and Switzerland's Villa Le Lac, which he designed for his parents.

The photography is by Thomas Lannes unless stated otherwise.

Aberto/04 takes place from 14 May to 8 June 2025 at 10 Square du Docteur Blanche 75016, Paris, France. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Artist Do Ho Suh has created a colourful, woven-together model of his former homes for the Walk the House exhibition, which opens today in London.

Named Walk the House after a Korean expression related to how a traditional hanok house could be disassembled and reassembled, the Tate Modern exhibition comprises architectural installations, videos and drawings.

According to Suh, architecture is fascinating because while people often can't choose where they live when they're young, it has a major impact on their lives.

"I guess it all started from my interest in the notion of personal space and how to define the personal space and a person's identity," he told Dezeen.

"The built environment came very naturally because for most of us, as soon as you're born, you're surrounded by the built environment without your choice," he continued.

"The architectural spaces are some of those preconditions that are imposed on you, like gravity, for example, and your parents; you cannot change those things, and that is such an important element in terms of forming your identity."

At Walk the House, visitors are first met by Suh's Rubbing/Loving Seoul Home, which the artist began creating in 2013 by covering the walls and roof of his childhood home in paper and rubbing it with graphite.

The paper was then left on the house for months to be marked by the weather. The end result, with its intricate stone pattern and traces of rain and sun, has been spanned over an aluminium frame.

The installation encapsulates Suh's fascination with the relationship between home as a physical space and the more intangible connotations of the word, which he has explored throughout his career.

"The word home is interesting because it implies not only the physical architectural space, but intangible elements, like a family or memories – I'm interested in both dimensions, but the idea of the home became more apparent when I left Korea and moved to US to to go to school," he said.

Walk the House marks the first time that Tate Modern has changed the layout of its Blavatnik building exhibition spaces, removing the interior walls to better showcase Suh's 1:1 scale installations and let the audience meander through the space.

A new work, Nest/s 2024, takes advantage of the sizeable room. Sat centre-stage, the installation comprises colourful textile full-scale versions of places in which Suh has lived, connecting Seoul, New York and London, his home since 2010.

While he sees his work as somewhat architectural, Suh describes his pieces as "a sculpture that has an inside and an outside".

"You not only see the exterior surface, but you can enter it, and then it becomes architectural," he said.

"At the same time, I don't really create a new space, I experience and interpret this space that is already built by someone else or designed by architects," he added.

"So I'm more like a consumer or user of the space, and then I recreate those spaces in different materials in a one-to-one scale – the scale is really important."

Suh's textile installations, replicas of former homes or dwellings, are perhaps his best-known works, but Walk the House also shows a piece made using a 3D-printer, a method the artist has been working with since the mid '90s.

Called Home Within Home, the 2025 installation merges his first home in Seoul with his first US home in Providence, with the Korean hanok house situated inside an American building.

"It's hard to know in my mind whether that Korean home has entered into the Providence home, or it started to grow inside of the Providence home," Suh said.

"The project is about investigating this negotiation between two different architectural styles."

Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul from 2024 takes the spatial shape and measures of Suh's current London home and fills it with architectural features – like doorknobs and lightswitches – from other places in which his family has lived.

Like Suh's other textile pieces, it is made from Korean textiles used to create traditional Hanbok outfits, which has a translucent quality.

Walk the House also shows Suh's ongoing Bridge Project, which explores the impossibility of a "perfect home", as well as two video works that examine the Dong In Apartments and Robin Hood Gardens housing blocks in Daegu and London.

Capturing Robin Hood Gardens on film before the housing project was demolished in 2024 was a way of delving deeper into issues around housing, something that Suh finds fascinating.

"Most of the places where I've lived, I don't see them as mine; it's like handed-over clothing, they have traces and energies of the people who lived there before," he explained.

"I've been very aware of housing problems in the world – so many people have been displaced for political or economical reasons, and so it wasn't that difficult to embark on this project, which is someone else's house," Suh added.

Time constraints meant that he wanted to make the most use of the time that he had in Robin Hood Gardens, with the end result being a time-lapse video that shows the space before it was torn down and connects back to Suh's feelings about his own former homes.

"That project was really special, to be able to record a building that was going to be dismantled," he concluded. "Because I think of all the homes where I lived, but I left; in a way, they share the same fate in my mind."

Previous works by Suh include a traditional Korean house installed above a London street and an installation that reflects on his experience of migration.

The photography is by Jai Monaghan unless otherwise stated.

Walk the House is at Tate Modern until the 19th of October. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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British artist Stuart Semple says that he "pulled an all-nighter" to create his Yolo paint in a colour that imitates one a group of American scientists claim to have just discovered.

Semple, who previously developed the "flattest, mattest, black acrylic paint in the world", made the paint to replicate the colour scientists at the University of California recently announced as a new hue that no one had ever seen before.

To find the colour the researchers fired laser pulses into their eyes to stimulate individual cells in their retinas, pushing their perception beyond its natural limits.

This revealed to them a blue-green colour that they named Olo, which was documented in the Science Advances journal earlier this month.

Semple told Dezeen that he "ran into the studio, pulled an all-nighter in the lab and made Yolo" – a paint version of the new colour.

The artist said that he used the spectral information detailed in the scientific paper to understand what he was aiming for before combining pigments with different materials.

Using a spectrometer, an instrument that separates light into colours, Semple measured his progress and added his own fluorescent optical brighteners to the paint to "get into that sweet spot of the colour space".

"What I got was a very weird kind of glowy teal," he said. "I also played a lot with the surface texture of the paint to enable time to narrow the bandwidth of the light coming off the paint."

The artist described Yolo as the closest possible physical emulation of Olo.

"Of course it's not a patch on having a real laser pushed in your eye," he acknowledged. "But I'm sure it's closer to the experience than the digital swatch that the scientists made."

"I can do more with the chemistry of paint in terms of colour than you can do on a screen or in a photo," added the artist.

Semple is selling Yolo via his website for £10,000 per 150 millilitres, or £29.99 if you are an artist. This stipulation nods to Semple's ongoing campaign to democratise colour for struggling creatives, he explained.

"Pretty much everything I do for colour is around making colours accessible and usable for creativity," said the artist, who previously made his own version of post-war artist Yves Klein's registered ultramarine blue paint.

"We are still very sadly at a time where artists and creators are being overlooked and I wanted the community to know that I made it for them. It's my way of making the scales a bit fairer," continued Semple.

"I'm also hoping to move the discussion about the new colour towards its importance to artists."

"The scientists are wonderful," he continued.

"I totally respect what they've done, but the aesthetics of their discovery aren't really on their radar. I reckon in the hands of artists and creators there's a chance that Yolo can make some really inspiring work."

Semple is known for his ongoing feud with artist Anish Kapoor, who previously bought the exclusive rights to the Vantablack pigment, said to be the world's blackest paint. In response to the acquisition, Semple created a shade that he claimed was blacker and made it readily available to everyone except Kapoor.

The photography is courtesy of Stuart Semple.

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Google has worked with artist Lachlan Turczan at Milan design week to present an immersive installation of mist and lasers that allows visitors to move light as though sweeping back curtains.

Turczan's artwork Lucida (I–IV) was the main drawcard of Google's Making the Invisible Visible installation, where the tech giant also displayed some of its products and design work.

Google's intention with the installation was to explore art and design "as acts of alchemy that bring ideas to life", said the company, which previously worked with Turczan on its 2023 installation in Milan with giant speakers that made water dance.

For this year's design week, which ended on Sunday, the artist turned his attention to how water and light can combine to make something appear solid even when it isn't.

In Lucida (I–IV), six-foot wide fixtures were suspended from the ceiling in a dark room, consisting of lasers and a concave parabolic mirror, helping to project their light below.

The room itself was filled with mist, so the light glinting off the mirror didn't just fall onto the floor but also onto the miniscule water particles hanging in the air, creating the impression of a curtain.

The curtains were still until the moment that sensors detected a person walking underneath or waving their hand through the light, at which point they wobbled and moved as if made of solid material.

The effect was achieved using proprietary software and heightened through the use of sound that was also triggered by the motion detection. Google described it as blurring "the boundaries between the tangible and intangible".

The installation brought out the gleeful side of visitors to Milan design week, some of whom danced below the light to see how it would respond.

Turczan told Dezeen that Lucida (I–IV) was based on outdoor artworks of his that could be enjoyed only at twilight, giving an ephemeral experience. For this installation, the goal was to create the same feeling indoors.

"It took about a year of engineering and prototyping and iterating over and over again," said Turczan. "We actually also never saw more than just one of them at a time, because my studio is only big enough to put one in."

"So seeing three of them overlap or all six of them in the space is like a dream come true," he continued.

"Sending the pictures, they just look like columns," added Google chief design officer of consumer devices Ivy Ross. "The beauty is when you push and pull and you hear sounds, and the shape changes."

Ross worked with Turczan to help realise his vision, and her design team created the rest of the Making the Invisible Visible installation, which highlights the stories behind Google's hardware.

"I've come to the Milan design show my whole career," said Ross. "We're committed to always giving people an experience, not just showing our things. And the idea is to let them see a little bit of Google thought leadership."

"The combination of giving you an experience, a person and showing you how it relates to how we think, that's always the objective," she continued.

Google explored a similar theme with its installation last year at Milan, titled Making Sense of Color. Developed with the studio Chromasonic, it sought to make light audible and sound visible, simulating the experience of synesthesia.

All photography courtesy of Google unless otherwise stated.

See our Milan design week 2025 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks that took place throughout the week.

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Our next Art Deco Centenary designer profile spotlights Hildreth Meière, a pioneering muralist who left her indelible mark on buildings including New York's Radio City Music Hall, but whose legacy was eclipsed by her better-known male contemporaries.

"Mural painting has a history of being undervalued," wrote academic Lydia Hamlett in 2020. The rich but often-overlooked life's work of 20th-century American artist Meière is no exception.

Defined as multi-media decoration for walls, ceilings, domes and floors, murals are an art deco hallmark that characterised many famous examples of 1930s architecture – including Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall and One Wall Street.

These two are among around 100 buildings across America that were decorated by Meière, brought to life by her trademark flattened forms, Byzantine-style imagery and almond-shaped mandorlas.

"Meière's work can be found in several of the sleek vertical setback skyscrapers now identified as art deco," historian Kathleen Murphy Skolnik told Dezeen.

"The art deco approach to design matched the modernity expressed by the architecture, making it a perfect choice for the decoration of these buildings," added the academic, who co-authored the 2014 book The Art Deco Murals of Hildreth Meière with Catherine Coleman Brawer.

Meière produced "remarkable decorative work"

Despite Meière's key role in introducing America to art deco, for which she was recognised with various accolades during her lifetime, the muralist's legacy diminished in the years after her death in a way that was at odds with the significance of her contributions – prompting Murphy Skolnik's and Coleman Brawer's book.

The same year the book was published, an article in The Atlantic by Steven Heller declared Meière "the best art deco designer who almost no one remembers".

"From one coast to the other are many more instances of the same artist's remarkable decorative work, forgotten in plain sight," wrote Celia McGee in the New York Times, also in 2014.

Meière – pronounced mee-air – was born in 1892 in the Flushing neighbourhood of Queens, New York City. From a young age, she was said to demonstrate artistic abilities, often designing costumes, sketching or painting during her education at her Manhattan Catholic girls' boarding school.

"This was just the beginning of her journey into a plethora of diverse mediums," wrote Melissa Anne Graf in 2019.

After graduation in 1911, Meière's mother rewarded her daughter with a trip to Florence. The future artist was seduced by the mastery of Renaissance frescoes, swapping dreams to become a portrait painter with a determination to carve out a life as a muralist.

"I fell in love, once and for all, with mural painting and great, beautiful walls," reflected Meière in 1946.

"The narrative quality of murals appealed to her and I think her love of murals also goes back to her belief that decoration should be integral to the architectural setting," explained Murphy Skolnik.

"As Meière once remarked, if the building looked just as well without the mural, it probably shouldn't be there," added the historian.

Nebraska State Capitol established Meière's career

In 1918, after further art studies, Meière earned her stripes serving as an architectural draftsperson for the US navy following America's entry into the first world war the year before.

It wasn't until 1921 that she completed her first professional mural, when architect Bertram Goodhue commissioned Meière to decorate the great hall at Washington DC's National Academy of Sciences.

This collaboration led to the muralist's biggest contribution to a single project – Goodhue's Nebraska State Capitol, completed in 1932.

Accomplished over eight years, the capitol's murals include polychromatic Guastavino tile mosaics designed by Meière depicting motifs ranging from ducks and eagles to sunflowers and national flags.

Central to the capitol is a grand rotunda, intricately decorated with celestial winged figures finished in colourful geometric forms that reference Byzantine art.

"The whole essence of Byzantine art is the dome, and when you put mosaics on a curved surface, the light striking them changes... the result will be moving light, and a surface that almost appears to be living," said Meière in 1957.

A famed marble floor panel depicting a figure – or "genius" – riding a cloud through the cosmos features at the threshold of the foyer.

Described as Meière’s "first full-blown art deco design", she conceptualised it while in Paris during the seminal Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925.

"Her classically inspired genius, with flowing hair and billowing drapery, and her geometrically patterned lightning, which strikes the surging, stylised waves, reflect the dynamism and fluidity of the emergent art deco style showcased at the exposition," wrote Murphy Skolnik and Coleman Brawer.

"Without question, the Nebraska State Capitol was her most significant work, which Meière herself acknowledged," continued Murphy Skolnik. "It was her largest commission and established her reputation as a muralist."

The appointment cemented Meière not only as an artist but as a business director who understood the importance of collaboration.

"In Meière's time, women were not routinely afforded large mural commissions," noted Heller.

"She was extremely conscientious about meeting deadlines and aware of the need to market herself," added Murphy Skolnik.

Muralist was "trailblazer for women"

Closer to home, Meière created striking gold-leaf glass mosaics and stained glass windows for New York's St Bartholemew's Church in 1930 – a project that the International Hildreth Meière Association describes as reflective of Meière's "versatility within her art deco style".

"Meière designed for diverse materials," agreed Mark Jenkins, writing in the Washington Post in 2011. "She did tapestries and stained glass as well as works in tile, metal, oil paint and glass mosaic."

Around 2.5 million Meière-designed crimson and gold mosaic tiles clad the walls and ceiling of the Red Room on the ground floor of one of New York's earliest art deco skyscrapers, One Wall Street. The intricate arrangement of the tiles results in a distinctively glittering spectacle, recently approved for interior landmark status.

The space, originally a reception room completed for the building's bank in 1931 and just converted into a luxury shoe salon for French department store Printemps, is a grand display of striking lines and opulent materials including Verona red marble columns and a bronze-clad entrance vestibule.

"Meière was a master muralist who was a trailblazer for women in the fields of architecture and design," remarked Printemps CEO Laura Lendrum earlier this month, emphasising the need to preserve the Red Room's legacy.

Across town at the Rockefeller Center, the 1930s entertainment venue Radio City Music Hall is chiefly famous for its glowing neon signage and recognisably art deco architecture by Edward Durell Stone and Donald Deskey.

But passersby who tilt their heads upwards, said McGee, "would suddenly be struck by brightly coloured figurative roundels on the 50th Street facade".

Fabricated in mixed metal and enamel, the illustrative relief sculptures were designed by Meière in 1931 in lavish art deco style to represent dance, drama and song.

Developer John D Rockefeller Jr is said to have been shocked when presented with the roundel designs, which he believed to exhibit inappropriately naked bodies.

"Meière agreed to alterations, but not much of the nudity vanished," noted McGee.

The muralist's lesser-recognised list of contributions to well-known architecture goes on. Meière was a decorated artist of her day and the first woman appointed to the New York City Art Commission, receiving awards including the American Institute of Architects' 1956 Fine Arts Medal.

But all too often, it has instead been many of Meière's male architectural contemporaries whose legacy has outlasted them.

"Unfortunately, so many women from that era have been forgotten or overshadowed," said Murphy Skolnik.

"And with time, buildings and their decoration tend to be associated with the architect who designed them, and artists responsible for the murals and sculptures don't get credit for their work," she added.

The historian also offered the post-war move away from representative art towards abstraction as a likely reason why the muralist's work was all-too quickly forgotten in the mainstream, remembered only by scholars and art appreciators.

While Meière famously wished to be known as an artist rather than a "woman artist", Murphy Skolnik noted the muralist's belief that professional women required greater levels of competence than the men of her day if they were to establish themselves in the competitive world of work.

"But her high level of professionalism overcame any possible drawback caused by her gender," argued the historian.

"For the most part, I think women artists, and especially architects, are still being singled out by their gender," concluded Murphy Skolnik. "And I think that Meière would still be fighting against this."

Meière passed away in 1961 after a 40-year career. The International Hildreth Meière Association was founded in 2004 to celebrate the muralist's legacy. The association is run by the artist's great-granddaughter, Anna Kupik, and her granddaughter, Hildreth Meière Dunn.

The photography is courtesy of the International Hildreth Meière Association.

Art Deco Centenary

This article is part of Dezeen's Art Deco Centenary series, which explores art deco architecture and design 100 years on from the "arts décoratifs" exposition in Paris that later gave the style its name.

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Continuing our Art Deco Centenary series we profile graphic designer and artist Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron, who under the pseudonym Cassandre created posters that thrust the style into everyday life.

From his striking, head-on poster of the SS Normandie to the iconic interlocking YSL logo for fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, Cassandre was instrumental in art deco's elevation of advertising and branding to a new art form.

Initially turning to poster design to avoid becoming another struggling young artist in Paris, he soon became enraptured by the role the format could play in the shaping of a new cityscape.

Cassandre was born in 1901 to French parents in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and spent his childhood moving between what was then the Russian Empire and France before his family settled in Paris in 1915 following the outbreak of the first world war.

Aged just 14, he briefly attended the staunchly classical Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris, before later moving to study in the studio of artist Lucien Simon and at the Académie Julian.

Cassandre's studies cemented his desire to be a painter, but having to now support himself financially, he looked to the world of commercial advertising in order to gain experience while also earning a regular income.

Given the distance between this world and that of fine art, he adopted the pseudonym Cassandre – occasionally combined with his surname, Mouron – in order to leave open the possibility of later becoming a painter under his birth name.

However, after his first major poster commission in 1923 for cabinet maker Au Bucheron, Cassandre would never really look back.

This poster depicted a great tree being felled by a muscular figure with an axe, framed by golden, stepped forms resembling sun rays in a drastically modern departure from the company's previous, more domestic brand image.

The design was exhibited at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris in 1925 – the event that introduced art deco to the world – where it was awarded the grand prix.

On the back of this newfound attention, Cassandre was able to co-found the design studio Alliance Graphique in 1926, and a prolific period of poster designs followed during the interwar period.

While broadly considered art deco in style, Cassandre was notable for his blending of influences from art nouveau, cubism and surrealism.

Among his best-known works are those associated with a new era of travel, including a cubism-inspired poster for the Nord Express in 1927, and the iconic design for the Ocean Liners SS L'Atlantique in 1931 and SS Normandie in 1935.

As his career grew, so did Cassandre's confidence in the poster as a new, modern form of artistic practice. He came to view the poster not just as a work in isolation, but as something that played a part in the shaping of the city, and should enrich it.

"A poster is made to be noticed by people who have not sought it out. It must elbow its way in," he wrote. "It should enliven not the individual advertisement board or building, but rather the huge blocks of stone and the vast area as a whole."

This was particularly evident in an idea he developed known as the serial poster – a storyboard-style series of images intended to be viewed in quick succession by hurried passers-by.

Cassandre's 1932 poster for drinks company Dubonnet – entitled "Dubo - Dubon - Dubonnet" – was the most famous example of this, depicting a cartoon silhouette and text which gradually gain colour and presence as the figure drinks the advertised aperitif.

Such was Cassandre's influence over the image of the cityscape that the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars called him "the first director of the street".

It was through his early designs that Cassandre met Charles Peignot, a founder of the Deberny and Peignot Foundry, and in 1928 they would begin an almost decade-long collaboration to create some of art deco's most iconic fonts.

First was Bifur in 1928, a Bauhaus-inspired, all-capital font that reduced letters down to their most recognisable features and rendered the resulting voids in blocks of grey and thin lines, creating almost a motion-blurring effect.

"The eyes of readers have been accustomed for two centuries to high-contrast characters," Cassandre said. "Let's push to the extreme the idea that the eye only sees the solids and eliminate the serifs."

Bifur was followed by Acier Noir in 1935 – a slightly more legible version of Bifur – and in 1937 by Peignot, an elegant font which mixed upper and lower cases with elongated verticals and was featured at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris.

From 1936 to 1940, following in the footsteps of fellow art deco icon Erté, Cassandre collaborated with Harpers Bazaar on a series of 38 covers.

In a stark contrast to the glamorous fashions depicted by Erté, Cassandre's covers were abstract and dark, an early example of the ideas of European surrealism coming into America.

American graphic designer Art Chantry described Cassandre's covers as being "part Dali, part Magritte and a little Max Ernst tossed in for shits and giggles".

"[He] depicted floating eyeballs over an outline of France to image Paris fashion on the brink of catastrophe. It's disturbing stuff – especially weird to see on the cover of a conservative fashion magazine," writes Chantry.

Following the second world war, during which Cassandre served in the French army, he continued his commercial work, including typefaces of Olivetti, and also returned to painting and theatre design, both of which he had dabbled with earlier in his career.

One of his final typographic designs came in 1961, after being approached by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé to design a new monogram for their fashion house, for which he made a single, elegant proposal still used by the brand.

In 1962 Cassandre was also awarded the Légion d'Honneur, but his commercial career would never return to the successes it had enjoyed prior to the second world war.

A revival of art deco was already appearing on the horizon, but Cassandre suffered increasingly with depression. He committed suicide in his studio on 17 June 1968, aged 67.

Cassandre had one son, Henri Mouron, with his first wife Madeleine Cauvet, who would later publish a biography, AM Cassandre in 1985. Today, much of his work has been published online by Cassandre's grandson, Roland Mouron.

The top illustration is by Vesa Sammalisto.

Art Deco Centenary

This article is part of Dezeen's Art Deco Centenary series, which explores art deco architecture and design 100 years on from the "arts décoratifs" exposition in Paris that later gave the style its name.

The post Cassandre's posters helped art deco to "elbow its way in" appeared first on Dezeen.

Architect Ronald Rael has created an angular installation out of 3D-printed mud as part of this year's Desert X exhibition, which features work by eleven international artists distributed across the Coachella Valley.

For the fifth iteration of Desert X, artistic director Neville Wakefield and co-curator Kaitlin Garcia-Maestas crafted a show informed by the "temporality and nonlinear narratives" of the surrounding desert.

Eleven artists and designers, including Rael and New York artist Agnes Denes, crafted large-scale installations for the exhibition.

"Curated by the place it temporarily inhabits, Desert X reveals the landscape of the Coachella Valley as a canvas of real and imagined histories, narrating tales of displacement, sovereignty, and adaptation superimposed over visible testaments of time," said Garcia-Maestas.

With his Adobe Oasis installation, co-founder of California-based architecture studio Rael San Fratello Ronald Rael built upon past work exploring material innovation and 3D printing.

Located within Palm Springs, the piece is made of a series of angular walls that bend and weave around a central palm tree, which ultimately informed the textural quality of the installation.

The designer crafted the piece using a large 3D-printing robotic arm that produced wavy layers of mud, or adobe, to create a scallop-like effect.

Rael sought to marry contemporary manufacturing processes with Indigenous and earthen construction techniques to offer "a powerful alternative" to exploitative real estate development.

This was further informed by Rael's connection to the San Luis Valley, where he splits his time, a historic borderland between the U.S. and Mexico before 1848.

"Against the backdrop of architectural relics from western expansion and 20th-century real estate development, Adobe Oasis stands as a powerful alternative, highlighting the potential of earthen materials amid the climate crisis," said the team.

Artist Jose Dávila chose to explore the current boundaries of the US-Mexico border with the piece The Act of Being Together, an installation composed of stacked marble blocks.

The blocks were taken from a quarry in Mexico and driven across the border before their installation in Coachella Valley, in part to highlight the "striking presence they create in a foreign landscape".

Other installations include the Living Pyramid by artist Agnes Denes, which was installed prior to the official Desert X opening. It is composed of plants that line its tiered steps, which will grow and transform the piece for the duration of its showing.

Artists Sanford Biggers, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Raphael Hefti, Sarah Meyohas, Alison Saar, and Muhannad Shono also displayed work, including a white, serpentine pavilion by Meyohas.

The last of the installations by Kapwani Kiwanga and Kimsooja will be installed beginning 15 March.

Previous iterations of Desert X featured work such as a pile-up of shipping containers by American artist Matt Johnson and 14 site-specific installations in the AlUla desert in Saudi Arabia.

Desert X is on show in California from 11 March to 11 May 2025. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

The photography is by Lance Gerber

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In the first of our Art Deco Centenary profiles, we look at the Russian-French artist and designer Romain de Tirtoff – better known as Erté – who became credited as "the father of art deco".

While the style of art deco filtered down to the most everyday forms of design in the interwar years, many of its origins lay in the era's most rarefied worlds: those of Parisian haute couture, New York's Broadway and the golden age of Hollywood.

Erté, who began his career working for the "king of fashion" Paul Poiret, and would go on to designs sets and costumes for a staggering roster of stars including Josephine Baker, Anna Pavlova and Mary Garden, was at the centre of these worlds.

His creations represented art deco at its most opulent and aspirational, and the spread of Erté's luxurious, modern visions of femininity – not least through the hundreds of covers he drew for Harper's Bazaar – saw him rise to be regarded as one of the key arbiters of the movement.

As the critic Brian Sewell wrote, "Erté had neither equal nor rival; he was and remains unique."

Erté was born Romain de Tirtoff in 1892 to an aristocratic family in St Petersburg, and it quickly became apparent that he had no interest in following almost all of the men in his family into a career in the navy.

When asked by his father what he wanted as a reward for passing his baccalaureate exams, Erté requested a passport, eager to return to France where a visit to the 1900 Exposition Universelle had left a profound impression on him as an eight year old.

"To a child, it was sheer enchantment," he told the New York Times in a 1976 interview. "There were the first illuminated fountains, there was Loie Fuller with her butterfly and fire dances; I fell in love with it."

In 1912 Erté left Russia for Paris, officially working as a special correspondent for the journal Ladies' World to both write and sketch about goings-on in fashion and high society.

Visions of modernity

Swapping the familial pressures of aristocratic St Petersburg for the bohemian neighbourhoods of Paris certainly proved more comfortable for Erté as a young, gay, fashion obsessive – although his sexuality was not something he would discuss openly until his 1975 biography, Things I Remember.

After an unsuccessful stint at a small boutique named Caroline, Erté decided to go for broke, gathering all of his drawings and sending them to the house of renowned couturier Paul Poiret, known as the "king of fashion".

The pair immediately found a shared aesthetic sensibility. While their collaboration was brief, its impacts were long lasting, not least as it was was Poiret who invented the nickname Erté – the French pronunciation of Romain de Tirtoff's initials, RT – which would forever remain.

The work they produced in this period (often credited solely to Poiret but later attributed to Erté) displayed a vision of modernity that typified much of what art deco would become – one based both in a romantic vision of ancient cultures and also an Orientalist perception of the "exotic".

Just as in architecture this manifested as geometries drawn from Egypt or Mesoamerica, in couture it meant casting off more restrictive forms of traditional dress like the corset and looking instead to looser silhouettes like the Japanese kimono and Turkish harem pants.

Sewell wrote how Erté "brought theatre into the field of fashion", but the reverse was also true, with the motifs of his work with Poiret finding their way into his earliest costume designs, most notably for the Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari in the 1913 ballet Le Minaret.

The illustrations he produced in this period were enough to garner the attention of Harper's Bazaar, with whom he signed a 10-year contract in 1915 to design the front covers.

This project that would end up lasting over two decades, during which Erté would draw more than 200 covers, and it was this launching of his visions into a much broader public that would go on to cement his status for many as the "father of art deco".

These strikingly modern covers established many of the motifs that would become so closely associated with both Erté's work and art deco more broadly: fashionable figures laden with fur, feathers and jewels; simple, strong geometries contrasted by intricate and complex floral motifs, and a bold colour palette.

Unsuccessful Hollywood stint

The magazine's owner and publisher William Hearst is once said to have remarked "what would Harper's Bazaar have been if it wasn't for Erté?"

By 1925, as art deco's global influence grew following the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, Erté's fame had proved sufficient to attract the attention of Louis B Mayer, who had recently founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios.

Erté was invited to Hollywood, his arrival heralded like that of a star, where he was contracted to work with MGM on both costume and set designs.

 

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While this anticipated art deco's taking of the United States by storm, it did not prove a hugely successful match for Erté. The cotton costumes he designed for La Boheme were refused by the star Lilian Gish, who said "I can only stand silks on my skin", and none of the films he worked on ended up being produced.

Erté soon tired of Hollywood's pretence, and moved on to more exciting projects in New York, where by the late 1920s there was hardly a Broadway revue that he had not worked on the costumes and sets for, from George White's Scandals to the Ziegfield Follies.

He also continued to find success in Paris, creating costumes for the opera and shows at the Folie Bergère – one of which he recalls using a "mile and a quarter of gold lamé".

While art deco fell out of favour following the second world war, Erté survived to see its resurgence in the 1960s, which brought with it a surge in new appreciation for his work.

He had his first exhibition in London 1967, which was the first time his famous Alphabet series was displayed, a project begun in 1927 to depict each letter of the alphabet as a scantily clad, feminine figure.

Erté also turned to sculpture, finding a whole new market for his work in the creation of bronze figures that resembled his original illustrations of the 1920s as well as jewellery.

Erté was named Officer of Arts and Letters by the French Government in 1976, and the Medal of the City of Paris followed in 1986.

But these were not laurels on which he rested, continuing his work until the very end. When the broadway show Stardust was revived in 1990, it was Erté who designed its costumes. He died in Paris later that year, aged 97.

The top illustration is by Vesa Sammalisto.

Art Deco Centenary

This article is part of Dezeen's Art Deco Centenary series, which explores art deco architecture and design 100 years on from the "arts décoratifs" exposition in Paris that later gave the style its name.

The post Erté was the art deco pioneer who had "neither equal nor rival" appeared first on Dezeen.

Iranian-French architect India Mahdavi has put her characteristic maximalist spin on PoMo, a contemporary art museum in Trondheim, Norway, with a salmon-pink gift shop and a mandarin-hued staircase.

PoMo, which opened its fuchsia doors on Saturday 15 February, is housed within Trondheim's Grade I-listed Art Nouveau Post Office building originally constructed in 1911.

Known for her use of bold colour and shape, Paris-based Mahdavi collaborated with Norwegian architect Erik Langdalen to renovate the site and transform it into a five-storey modern and contemporary art museum spanning 4,000 square metres.

The pair sought to balance the building's history with references to Trondheim's skyline and Norwegian folk art and craftsmanship.

Visitors enter via the hot-pink metal and glass entrance, which contrasts with the otherwise untouched brick-clad facade. Arched rainbow signage reading "our magic hour" was erected on the roof of the museum, acting as a vibrant beacon and landmark.

Inside, three gallery spaces feature on floors one, two and three, while the basement is reserved for special projects and the fourth floor is a dedicated private lounge.

"We orchestrated the spaces of the building through the prism of hospitality," Mahdavi told Dezeen.

"The museum is different from a restaurant and different from a hotel, but features both the experiences of sharing and intimacy," she continued. "It was about creating a sense of permeability and a place where visitors can feel welcome."

The designer explained that the interior is interspersed with distinctive "in-between spaces". These include the all-pink gift shop that is finished with floor-to-ceiling ash cabinetry.

"The shop is a chromatic reference to the famous Norwegian salmon," said Mahdavi.

Langdalen designed a meandering back-lit steel staircase in a mandarin-orange hue, informed by the colour of the many warehouses located on the nearby Nidelva river.

"My first invitation to design a museum was an opportunity to widen the spectrum of my signature style of using colour and wonder," explained Mahdavi.

A gabled reading room on the third floor was created in Mahdavi's trademark style, complete with a pixelated green carpet and decorative murals depicting oversized sea creatures, alphabets and flying books designed with Dutch "ornamental modernism" studio Freeling Waters.

"The space draws inspiration from a forgotten Nordic folkloric art – its codes are renewed to create a pop version of folklore," said Mahdavi.

PoMo will host two major exhibitions per year as well as a permanent collection, which has dedicated a minimum of 60 per cent of its acquisitions budget to women artists.

"At the moment, we are already approaching 40 per cent of women artists in the PoMo collection," said museum director Marit Album Kvernmo. "The collection consists of works across media, including sculptures, installations and paintings."

PoMo currently includes pieces by late leading artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Franz West and Sol LeWitt as well as the work of emerging artists.

"It's always exciting to address new subjects in new countries," reflected Mahdavi, considering the experience of designing her first museum.

"It's also the first time I have worked in Norway – I'm very grateful to have had this unique opportunity as an interior designer to have been able to express my vision of joy," she added.

"For the past two years, I have felt like a lucky conductor directing an orchestra of talents, from artisans to workers and artists."

Mahdavi's portfolio, which spans architecture and design, also includes the decadent remodelling of the Gallery dining room at London restaurant Sketch and the renovation of six rooms within Rome's 16th-century Villa Medici.

The photography is by Valérie Sadoun.

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American artist James Turrell has unveiled plans for an expansive installation connected by a series of tunnels and staircases in Saudi Arabia's AlUla desert.

Defined by a series of interconnected "chambers" nestled into the landscape, the artwork will form the first of five initial projects to be completed by global artists for the region's upcoming Wadi AlFann cultural venue.

The designs were unveiled at the Wadi AlFann presents James Turrell exhibition, which opened in Saudi Arabia's desert region last week as part of the AlUla Arts Festival 2025.

Curated by Michael Govan, the on-going exhibition forms part of the centre's pre-opening programme, which spotlights the artists behind the commissions. Other artists set to create work for the destination include Manal AlDowayan, Agnes Denes, Michael Heizer and Ahmed Mater.

Renders of the interiors by Turrell reveal bright, dome-like structures illuminated by oculus openings and wrapped with built-in seating space for visitors. The project is the latest in a series of Skyspace installations created by the artist.

A circular motif runs through the design, with rounded walkways, seating and openings used throughout.

"The work envisioned for Wadi AlFann will have two large Skyspaces and two small Skyspaces, that each address different aspects of sky," Turrell said.

"All of my Skyspaces engage the natural light of the area," he added. "The light quality in AlUla is of dry desert air with little moisture, which yields a light in the sky that is crisp and clear."

The artwork will be an interactive experience for visitors.

"Visitors can view plans for Turrell's upcoming Wadi AlFann commission where he is creating a monumental sequence of chambers within the canyon floor which will generate a sensorial experience of space, colour, and perception," Wadi AlFann said.

"Experiencing the 'thingness of light' as well as elements of sky and terrain, the viewer will explore these spaces via a series of tunnels and stairs."

"The large-scale commission will examine the very nature of seeing and offer a profound opportunity to experience art in dialogue with nature."

Also included in the exhibition are light installations and highlights from the Royal Commission for AlUla's contemporary art collection, which includes the Jubilee, Circular Glass artwork created by Turrell in 2021.

Work from Turrell's Hologram series will also be shown, including "a luminous geometric shape floating in space".

The exhibition is taking place across two venues in AlJadidah Arts District: the historic old town of AlUla and the AlUla Arts Festival, which will run till April 19.

Other recent developments in AlUla include a trio of lookout points held in tents informed by those of the nomadic Bedouin people and the opening of the Design Space AlUla gallery, which is held in a Corten steel-latticed building.

The images are courtesy of James Turrell Studio and Royal Commission for AlUla.

Wadi AlFann presents James Turrell runs from 16 January 2025 to 19 April 2025 at the AlUla Arts Festival. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world. 

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Living spaces are arranged around a central courtyard at this house in Valencia, Spain, which local studio Viruta Lab has designed to celebrate the legacy of influential feminist artist Ángela García Codoñer.

Casa Gesso aims to establish a dialogue between contemporary architecture and some of the pioneering work created by the artist in the 1970s, deconstructing how women were traditionally portrayed in Spanish society.

Viruta Lab founders David Puerta and María Daroz are fans of García Codoñer, who is best known for her collages, screen prints and acrylic paintings featuring stylised depictions of the female form.

García Codoñer was also Puerta's professor at the Valencia School of Architecture and later his mentor at the university's Artistic Heritage Fund.

He explained that the artist's approach to colour and form informed the material palette and minimalist aesthetic of the house, which he described as a "habitable blank canvas" for reflecting on her work.

"In essence, it is a home that allows one to inhabit the ideas of Ángela García Codoñer and demonstrates that residential spaces can also be conceived for reflection and questioning established norms," the duo said.

The 145-square-metre property in the suburb of Picanya is composed of two volumes that reflect the different heights of the neighbouring buildings.

The main living spaces are contained within a one-and-a-half-storey high structure that adjoins a two-storey high block housing the bedrooms and bathrooms.

The building's facades are clad with vertical bone-white porcelain tiles chosen to evoke the traditional washhouses that once housed local artists' studios.

A courtyard at the centre of the house provides natural light and ventilation to the living room and kitchen-dining room located on either side.

This space is clad with the same porcelain tiles as the facades to create a sense of continuity between interior and exterior, while a section of the adjacent hallway floor is finished with slimline tiles to match the courtyard's surface.

"The day area sequence is composed of three completely pure architectural prisms, geometrically and visually uninterrupted, with the second being a void positioned between two solids, emphasising views through transparency," Puerta told Dezeen.

"These volumes are designed as perfect spaces of calm and contemplation, suitable for working or exhibiting artworks like an exhibition hall, thus projected with half-height ceilings."

Each of the living spaces in Casa Gesso was inspired by a particular series in García Codoñer's oeuvre, with furniture, fabrics and artificial lighting chosen to reinforce their different themes.

"Within the design's rich details, the effect of calm and unity allows Ángela García Codoñer's work to dominate the space, becoming the architectural protagonist, supported by changing elements like light that make their nuances vibrate in diverse ways," said Daroz.

The living room at the home's entrance houses a 1979 work from her Labores series exploring traditionally female handicrafts, which Viruta Lab referenced through the inclusion of rugs, upholstery elements and decorative details that evoke cross-stitch.

A painting from the 1973 Morfologías series, in which García Codoñer deconstructed the way women are portrayed in Spanish society, features in the kitchen. Here, rounded forms recall the sinuous shapes found in the paintings, while a female bust provides a focal point in the courtyard.

A wall that extends the full length of the house and separates its two programmatic volumes is lined with storage that incorporates a door leading to a concealed staircase connecting the two floors.

The main bedroom houses a 1974 collage from the Misses series, which denounced the objectification of women in beauty pageants. The work is paired with a tweed headboard alluding to the meticulous "construction" of the female image, as well as the artist's collage work.

A pared-back material palette creates a sense of warmth and neutrality throughout the interior. Large-format porcelain tiles used for the floors are complemented by the natural tone of the stained-oak cabinetry, while upholstery introduces a softer element to the scheme.

The architects told Dezeen that the way Casa Gesso is organised and decorated results in spaces that are suitable for observing and experiencing García Codoñer's work, without explicitly feeling like an exhibition.

"Architecture, with its constraints, was designed to perfectly respond to the initial concept, and together with materiality, they cohesively created this universe of reflection," Daroz said.

"Spaces possess specific functions and are created for activities but we attempted to blur the rigid lines limiting them, enabling them to serve purposes beyond their initial design."

Daroz and Puerta founded Viruta Lab in 2020 as a reflection of their shared artistic and architectural passions. The studio aims to deliver organic, warm and timeless spaces that balance function with emotion.

Previous projects by Viruta Lab include the renovation of a former fisherman's house in Valencia's El Cabanyal neighbourhood, featuring chequerboard tiles that reference the building's nautical heritage.

The photography is by David Zarzoso.

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This year's Design Miami was characterised by experimental work, but that wasn't always the case at the fair, art-design duo the Haas Brothers tell Dezeen in this exclusive interview.

By embracing the avant-garde, galleries and designers at Design Miami have begun to carve out a style that blurs the boundaries between design and art, according to twins Simon and Nikolai Haas.

"It's a total movement, and it's very recognisable," said Simon Haas. "In the last 10 years, the trajectory at Design Miami is clear – and that defines a movement."

"I see the work at Design Miami as its own subset in the creative world," added Nikolai Haas.

The Haas Brothers referenced designers like Misha Kahn and forerunners such as Wendell Castle, as well as galleries such as Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Southern Guild and The Future Perfect.

They said the fair has been increasingly becoming more experimental and allowed makers to push the boundaries of what could be shown there.

The brothers are known for their fantasy-laden works, including a series of furniture and sculptures based on the 1992 animated film Ferngully and a collection of alien-like objects with tentacles made from porcelain accretions.

"We've always pushed what can be shown"

"Design Miami was our first market and we've always pushed what can be shown there, to the point where one year we almost got kicked out of Design Miami because they said the work wasn't 'design' – and, fair enough, it wasn't," said Nikolai Haas.

"We understood that pushing boundaries was a relevant conversation and now, the fact that the Nasher has commissioned five large-scale sculptures feels like a stamp of approval on the art side," he added. "Now we're moving in both directions."

For this year's Design Miami collectible furniture fair in Miami Beach, the twins showcased a massive bronze tree on a stone pedestal, crowned with petals made from thousands of Venetian beads woven together by a group of craftspeople in California using a biophilic system devised by Simon Haas.

The piece was originally commissioned by the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and represents, for the Haas Brothers, a "stamp of approval" for their aesthetic to move between art and design.

The pair say that their style has evolved alongside work that first coalesced at Design Miami a decade ago, taking advantage of the increasingly experimental nature of the fair.

"Decadent without being wasteful"

According to the designers, this experimental style pays homage to design tendencies while also embracing a playful approach to modern materials that have become more widespread.

"It's using design as a jumping-off point to express yourself in the same way that you would express yourself with a painting," said Simon Haas.

"And I don't really see the difference, honestly, except that you get to live with and use the piece of art in this sphere, and that's how I like to interact with art anyway."

"I'll say it's decadent without being wasteful, like an ornate early-modern Italian house," he added.

Having a function is often identified as the key distinguishing feature between design and art, but the Haas brothers seek to challenge conventional ideas of practical use.

"Cuteness is functional," argued Simon Haas. "For example a baby is pretty difficult to deal with, and a puppy is hard to deal with. But the cuteness makes you want to take care of it."

The Haas Brothers, who have backgrounds in design and carpentry, are known for their sculptural works that are often infused with colour and figurative.

Read on for the full, edited interview with the Haas Brothers:

Ben Dreith: This year you brought one of your works, The Strawberry Tree, from Nasher Sculpture Center into Design Miami. How does this represent a capstone moment in your attempts to bridge design and art?

Nikolai Haas: Design Miami was our first market, and we've always pushed what can be shown there. To the point where one year we almost got kicked out of Design Miami because they said the work wasn't "design" – and, fair enough, it wasn't. We understood that pushing boundaries was a relevant conversation and now, the fact that the Nasher has commissioned five large-scale sculptures feels like a stamp of approval on the art side. Now we're moving in both directions.

Simon Haas: We missed being here too. When there was a risk of us getting kicked out of the fair, I will say that Design Miami championed us and made sure we stayed in. I think everyone together was very interested in creating a movement.

Ben Dreith: It's funny, there is a street here that separates Design Miami from Art Basel, and it feels like you two are waltzing across it.

Nikolai Haas: Wherever the centre of our spectrum might be, Design Miami will always be the home base. It's its own solar system.

Simon Haas: What's cool about both of these fairs is they're a testing ground for galleries. It's experimental.

Ben Dreith: And by experimenting with the boundaries of art and design at Design Miami, do you think you and others have created a movement separate from "art" or "design" more generally?

Simon Haas: Exactly. It's a total movement, and it's very recognisable. In the last 10 years, the trajectory at Design Miami is clear – and that defines a movement.

Nikolai Haas: Design Miami has been around for 20 years. The first 10 were more about collectible, historical works. But now, the contemporary work has become so much more experimental. Everyone is in [Design Miami] saying "functional sculpture". I understand the wording, call it whatever you want. However, I see the work at Design Miami as its own subset in the creative world.

Ben Dreith: What are some attributes of this movement you're tracing?

Simon Haas: Paying homage to design, even if it's abstract, while focusing on the emotional impact of a piece of furniture. It's not pushing the boundary between art and design. It's using design as a jumping-off point to express yourself in the same way that you would express yourself with a painting. And I don't really see the difference, honestly, except that you get to live with and use the piece of art in this sphere, and that's how I like to interact with art anyway. I'll say it's decadent without being wasteful, like an ornate early modern Italian house. It lasts.

Nikolai Haas: The work will last. We build with the front end as expensive as possible, in a way that will be absolutely impossible even in 2030. This happens all the time, for example, mid-century buildings used a lot of cast concrete but now this is considered a decadent thing, using so much concrete. This can't ever exist again. For us, it's about about capturing this moment and preserving it in the work. Everyone's gonna look back at this and be like, ‘Wow that was a wild moment in time'. I do think it has a defining aesthetic, and the people here are riffing off of each other to further define it.

Simon Haas: If I were to make a comparison, I'd say it's like Art Nouveau.

Ben Dreith: There is a lot of figurative work, which reminds me of the decadent work of the early 19th century. Do you really consider the work decadent?

Simon Haas: We've reached a place where we have the luxury of having had modernist materials for a long time now and now we get to play with them. For example, modern buildings today don't have the same magic that the gorgeous modern steel structures had, because they were experimental then. I think now furniture design is entering a more experimental place, where we have access to every kind of material. It's definitely decadent. But what's nice about periods of decadence is that art and design flourish. If stuff gets tight then we can't afford to build stuff in the same way. That's what's beautiful about design, to me, is that this spectrum. It's not form versus function, it's how flexible you can be with the spectrum of decadence.

Ben Dreith: Is there any one material that you've seen that's driving some of the material experimentations you spoke about?

Simon Haas: I'd say YouTube, actually, because it's not just the material, it's the easy access to information and finding out how to make something. I have watched YouTube tutorials on how to crochet, and so now I crochet.

Ben Dreith: Many people would say that this work shouldn't be considered design because it doesn't function in a way that relates to everyday people. However, I often think that function can go beyond the body. Cross-culture exchange, for example, is a function of collaborative design at times. How do you think about function?

Simon Haas: Cuteness is functional, for example: a baby is pretty difficult to deal with, and a puppy is hard to deal with. But the cuteness makes you want to take care of it. So it's serving a purpose. Beauty does the same thing. Sometimes we use function as a punchline.

Nikolai Haas: For the Strawberry Tree, the problem was creating work in a place that has no studio space by having a community in California help to assemble the complicated beadwork. We could send a tote bag with beads and string, and someone could use that and take it and make parts for us to assemble into something much larger. The function was to make work available in any place, at any time. We also try and make work to be engaged with. Now that we've been a part of it for a while, you start to see other artists that are striving to use function in their work, and they're very inelegant at it, because they haven't been doing it like the rest of us have.

Ben Dreith: In places like Design Miami and Art Basel, inaccessible from a financial point of view, the design/art divide seems most important to marketing.

Simon Haas: The market is the main definer. Function versus form comes up all the time, but the truth is, we don't care all that much.

Ben Dreith: Who are some other people who define this movement and moment of design art? Maybe we can call it De-Art?

Simon Haas: I like that. I'd say, Mischa Kahn. Humans Since 1984 are good examples.

Nikolai Haas: Wendell Castle was a forefather of this. David Weissman, he's more on the decorative side. Campana Brothers. And also the galleries, Southern Guild, Carpenters Workshop, Future Perfect, Fumi. They almost invented it out of thin air.

The top photo is by Magda Wosinska.

Design Miami took place from 3 to 8 December. For more global events in architecture and design visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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British artist Alex Chinneck has designed knotted lampposts, a twisted telephone booth and a constricted postbox as playful public sculptures in Bristol, England.

Chinneck – whose recent work includes a six-metre-high looped canal boat in Sheffield – is known for his surreal public installations, which he defined as "intelligent sculptures that can laugh at themselves".

His latest project is a trio of permanent street furniture designs for Assembly, a workplace and waterfront park in Bristol.

First Kiss at Last Light is a pair of black-painted Victorian-style lampposts tied together in an oversized bow shape, and another pair intertwined in a knot. Both sculptures operate as functional lighting.

Chinneck made the posts from welded sections of zinc-coated cast steel, while the lamp heads are a combination of cast steel and cast aluminium with toughened milk-frosted glass.

"They are fairly significant objects with the bow design weighing 300 kilograms and the intertwining lamps standing four metres tall and weighing 250 kilograms," Chinneck told Dezeen.

"I wanted to create contemporary sculptures but in a style and materiality akin to the Victoriana of the neighbouring historic stone wall and cast iron railings of the harbour," he continued.

"That period of design and manufacturing has associations with solidity and rigidity, and the flowing forms of the lampposts subvert that with apparent fluidity."

Chinneck's second design is Wring Ring – a sculpture of a traditional red British telephone box, inverted with a dramatically twisted body. The sculpture was cast in bronze before it was painted and glazed.

"I've made buildings melt, hover and bend, but the phonebox was probably trickier than all of them," the designer reflected. "The glazing, which was far from straightforward, was slumped over 5-axis machined moulds."

Playfully called Alphabetti Spaghetti, the designer's third sculpture is an inversion of a similarly recognisable red British postbox characterised by a knotted main body.

"I try to weave playful but high-quality moments of surrealism into the public realm," explained Chinneck. "I think there's something uplifting about defying reality and challenging convention within the built environment."

"I'm suspicious of public art that has little visual or material resonance with its context," continued the designer. "It often feels irritatingly plonked and ill-considered."

"I think art can elevate places and people and that the experience of it shouldn't be confined to galleries or restricted to only those who visit them. The public realm is a far more interesting and dynamic place with the introduction of public art."

Chinneck has created a selection of complex temporary sculptures across the UK. His portfolio ranges from the facade of a derelict house in Margate that appeared to slump down into the front garden to a gravity-defying installation in central London featuring an upended car that looked as if it was surfing a wave of tarmac.

The photography is by Charles Emerson.

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US architect Thomas Phifer has unveiled the Museum of Modern Art in central Warsaw, which resembles two giant boxes stacked on top of each other.

Finished in Phifer's signature minimalist style, the completed building marks the end of a two-decade wait for the cultural institution to have a permanent home.

Inside, an angular double staircase rises to a glazed ceiling, flooding the central space with light. Phifer said the staircase at the Museum of Modern Art (MSN) was designed to function as "a playful social space for people to stop and talk".

Galleries of different proportions on the upper floors are interrupted by small meditative rooms made from European ash, inviting visitors to reflect while looking out to views across the city.

The ground floor was intended to be a more bustling space, featuring a bookshop and cafe with multiple entry and exit points. It is connected to two subway stations and close to a major bus station, helping it function as a public thoroughfare.

"It was important we had no barrier," said Phifer. "We want to see people come through on their way to and from work or school. This [the museum] has been conceived as a public space."

The gallery's ground floor will host a space dedicated to experimentation with a "non-standard approach to creating exhibitions and programmes", the museum said.

Artist collectives and other communities will be invited to combine art with activism and social work.

As well as showcasing the museum's collection of Polish and international art, the building also includes a 150-seat theatre, an auditorium and teaching spaces.

The building is sandwiched between a 1970s-era low-rise shopping centre on one side, and the Palace of Culture and Science commissioned by Stalin and completed in 1955 on the other.

Enveloping the MSN museum is Parade Square, the largest public square in Europe and the focus of an ongoing redevelopment project.

The square will see the addition of the TR Warszawa theatre in five years, also designed by Phifer, alongside an ambitious landscaping project to turn what was once a concrete wasteland into a park with a jazz bar and two ponds.

"This museum should make culture open and accessible for people from anywhere," said Aldona Machnowska-Góra, deputy mayor for Warsaw. She told Dezeen she anticipates the museum will attract 800,000 visitors every year.

The museum has been dogged by delays and false starts. The initial bidding process in 2005 was criticised for excluding foreign architects.

The second, a year later, saw Swiss architect Christian Kerez awarded the commission but plans for his design collapsed in 2012. Phifer’s scheme was selected in 2014 and also included the design of the adjacent theatre.

Phifer said he became aware his project since 2014 was part of a "remarkable renaissance" in Warsaw.

"This project, which is 20 years in the making, gives the Polish capital its first permanent home for international contemporary art," said Joanna Mytkowska, director of the museum.

Phifer said the museum was deliberately designed to be pared back and white, likening it to a "magic box" to allow the art to take centre stage, inside and outside.

"You don't really understand this work until you come inside and experience it with the art," he said.

Phifer recognised the museum and theatre projects in Warsaw represent the biggest milestone for his studio, both due to the scale and being located in Europe.

His previous work has largely been focused in the US, notably the expansion of the Glenstone Museum in Maryland and the Salt Lake City courthouse.

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Italian designer Martino Gamper has furnished an entire west London house with his eclectic designs for the exhibition Before, After and Beyond.

The exhibition, which concluded on 26 October, took place at 11 Mansfield Street – a Georgian residential property in London's Marylebone neighbourhood, owned by Swiss art collector Maja Hoffmann.

Before, After and Beyond featured a myriad of pieces made throughout Merano-born Gamper's career, which began in the 2000s. Each design was arranged across two storeys in a series of five staged domestic spaces, from a kitchen to a dedicated games room.

The designer wanted to avoid the "white cube" interior of a traditional gallery when presenting the project, which is his first London retrospective and a reflection of some 20 years of practice.

"I wanted to bring the pieces into a space where you could imagine someone living," Gamper told Dezeen. "All of the rooms have a very particular character."

Known for his rich and textured creations, Gamper showed a range of early works and recent pieces – from one-off experiments and museum projects to private commissions, industrial products and new site-specific designs.

On show in the bedroom was a low-slung bed with a geometric headboard from which angular lilac bedside tables protruded.

Created in collaboration with Italian brand Bolzan, the bed was paired with a diamond-shaped mirror-cum-mantelpiece displaying a selection of amorphous ceramics.

Gamper also designed a boxy travertine fireplace for the room, which will remain at the property permanently.

"When Maja bought the house, she found that someone had stolen the original fireplace – it was just a hole in the wall," explained the designer. "I wanted to leave a trace of the exhibition."

Elsewhere, the games room floor was covered with a vast ombre black-and-white rug – designed with Italian manufacturer CC-Tapis – and fitted with multicoloured pieces including a vibrant recently designed backgammon set and spindly blue-legged chairs.

Among the exhibition's numerous seating designs were three chairs from Gamper's 2007 project 100 Chairs in 100 Days, when the designer made a chair a day from various found materials for 100 days.

It was important for the designer to reflect on the years of work when displayed alongside each other and form unexpected connections between the projects.

"Seeing all the pieces together felt like they were all from the same family – but maybe each with a different mother or father," he said.

"The show was also a conversation with the wider public," added Gamper. "I really felt like I wanted to give something back to the city," said the designer, who is based in London and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2000.

A range of materials were used to create the tens of pieces on display at 11 Mansfield Street, from bent plywood backrests to handblown and cut glass lamps.

"There are many different types of solid wood, reclaimed wood, linoleum, laminate," considered Gamper. "There are repurposed waste materials and recycled plastic," he added.

Three artists were also invited to collaborate on the project: painter Peter MacDonald, artist Alvaro Barrington and Gamper's wife, artist Francis Upritchard.

"I wanted to have some artworks that support my work. I work with artists and I support them – so in this case, their work was complementing my project," explained Gamper.

Before, After and Beyond kicked off during Frieze Art Fair, an annual art festival held in London's Regent's Park.

Previously, Gamper created a "psychological, psychedelic" plywood mask for a group exhibition during London Design Festival 2019. The designer also made a patchwork facade for a tiny temporary disco that took place in the city's King's Cross area.

The photography is by Angus Mill.

Before, After and Beyond took place from 7 to 26 October 2024 at 11 Mansfield Street, London W1G 9NZ, UK. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.

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London-based artist John Akomfrah has collaborated with LG OLED to present a five-screen film installation, as revealed in this exclusive video produced by Dezeen.

Titled Becoming Wind, the film was originally created by Akomfrah and has been reimagined for Frieze London using multiple LG OLED self-lit televisions.

Akomfrah's film plays over five LG OLED screens

The film explores the interconnecting themes of identity formation and the contemporary climate crisis, presented across five OLED televisions to create a unified and immersive viewing experience.

According to the brand, LG OLED televisions do not require a backlight, resulting in its 65-inch OLED TV using 60 per cent less plastic compared to an LCD TV of the same size.

The 31-minute film explores the identity formation and experience of trans actors and activists within the wider context of the climate crisis.

A montage of footage shows a representation of the Garden of Eden and its eventual disappearance, tied together with present-day issues such as biodiversity loss and racial discrimination.

Phrases such as "We need to be quick" and "It moves among us" are displayed on screen, highlighting the urgency of climate change.

Akomfrah is a Ghanaian-born British artist and filmmaker, who was a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective, established in London in 1982.

LG OLED Art invites artists to exhibit digital versions of their works using LG OLED TVs. The brand has collaborated with over 30 artists from around the world, most recently working with London-based artist Suh Do Ho on a presentation at Frieze Seoul.

Akomfrah's film installation is on show at Frieze London until 13 October in Regents Park, London.

The photography is by LG Electronics.

Frieze London takes place from 9 to 13 October at Regent's Park. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen as part of a partnership with LG OLED. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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Art and research organisation Metabolic Studio has showcased aspects of its Bending the River project, an infrastructure and art project designed to remediate water and land around the Los Angeles River.

For more than a decade, Metabolic Studio has been working with local agencies to divert water from the Los Angeles River as a source for irrigation in a region that often suffers with drought.

Metabolic Studio founder Lauren Bon has acquired the first private right to the river, which allows her to legally lift, clean, and transport one hundred and six acre-feet (123,348 cubic metres) of water to the LA State Historic Park. Much of the river is a massive, paved aqueduct that carries rainwater through the city to the ocean.

The studio has cut into the concrete canal, placed pumps and begun to source water directly from the flow.

Bon told Dezeen that the aim of the project was to "facilitate natural systems that want to repair themselves".

"When we keep floods from entering the city, we prevent all of the debris that comes with a flood from settling in these drainage basins, which is problematic over the long term, because the soil doesn't get enriched," she said. "And we don't have much soil to begin with, because we paved over everything."

The team used industrial equipment to cut triangles into the concrete bed to the well on the studio's property, which is then transferred to local and state parks.

In order to facilitate this process, the studio received approval for as many as 100 permits from the city, state, and federal authorities.

"Over the last 10 years, we have had to garner more than 100 federal, state and local permits to do this work, which is truly the most absurd part of this whole story, because what we're doing is essentially plumbing," said Bon.

"There is no trick pony in this. In this situation, this is gravity-fed water moving from one place to another with no power needs."

From the primary "mother well" aspect of Bending the River, several engineering, design and art projects have been spun out.

The two primary side projects are natural filtration systems and the shepherding of biological matter that was discovered underneath the concrete when the studio carried out its excavations of the river.

At the outset of Bon's experimentation with using LA River water, there were concerns raised by the city and her team over the filtration of the water, which is contaminated by the urban run-off.

However, Bon wants to avoid using chemicals for the process and experimented with natural solutions – currently her team includes a professional mycologist who experiments with fungi's ability to cleanse water of harmful materials.

"We're thinking through how to utilize what has stayed alive in natural systems into our water treatment so that we're not killing everything off in the water that does have pathogens that we need to take care of."

"Rather than just adding chlorine, which has a really heavy carbon imprint and kills everything in the water."

Some of the potential methods have been illustrated through a conceptual artwork called Portable Wetland for Southern California.

It is part of the studio's ongoing experimentation of alternative methods of cleansing wastewater.

The work was initially developed by Bon and her studio as part of Bending the River, as an experimental, natural cleansing method that passes the LA River water into an artificial treatment wetland comprised of native plants mimicking the means by which wetlands naturally cleanse water.

A version made for the PST ART exhibition Brackish Water Los Angeles is a conceptual artwork to demonstrate the studio's experimental proposal to naturally cleanse the water.

On the other hand, Bon and her team were surprised to discover that seeds and other living matter were still present in the soil dug up to place the well.

Some of this soil was placed in mounds inside of the Metabolic Studio headquarters, where it has begun to bloom after being given light and water.

Research on these native plants was conducted and other areas around the river controlled by the studio have been converted into gardens, where paving has been removed and plantings mixed with artwork.

Bon calls these areas "un-developments" and plans to continue to use them as places to put debris from the river and from the well projects, alongside artworks.

Bon believes that infrastructure should be viewed as material to work with and that one shouldn't see the difference between natural and human-made systems as black and white.

"The idea of enchantment is very much a part of the Metabolic Studio practice – how do we make things that feel enchanted, so that you want to understand more about what's happening?" she said.

"There is this excitement about infrastructure when people go to see the Hoover Dam or Lake Powell or a new bridge – devices of wonder. How can we create devices of wonder through these cyborg entities that are both nature and urban?" she continued.

"This most desperate place on Earth, possibly one of them, this industrial corridor, is so alive just under the crust."

The team expects the pumps to be fully functional within the next year and even plans to pump some of the water through the studio's headquarters to demonstrate the reinstatement of the distribution of water.

The project was supported by the philanthropic organisation The Annenberg Foundation, where Bon sits on the board.

The Los Angeles River has been the subject of a number of potential redesign projects. Architect Frank Gehry was selected in 2015 to redesign parts of it to rewild and make it more accessible to communities.

The photography is courtesy of Metabolic Studio.

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London-based artist Suh Do Ho has collaborated with electronics brand LG OLED to create digital versions of his late father Suh Se Ok's abstract ink paintings, as revealed in this exclusive video produced by Dezeen.

Titled "Suh Se Ok X LG OLED: Reimagined by Suh Do Ho, Shaped by Suh Eul Ho" the presentation debuted at Frieze art fair in Seoul.

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The exhibition space was designed by Suh Do Ho's brother, architect Suh Eul Ho, and was created to celebrate the life of their father Suh Se Ok, an artist and pioneer of modern Korean ink abstraction.

Suh Do Ho drew on his and his brother's experiences of watching their father paint abstract figures to create digital versions of his original works, which emphasise the movements of his painting process.

The exhibition's centrepiece was an installation composed of eight transparent OLED TVs, which presented the digitally reimagined works by Suh Do Ho.

LG OLED's transparent TV was first revealed at CES 2024. The technology uses self-lighting pixels to create a transparent display that can reveal objects behind it.

Called LG OLED T, the technology was utilised in the exhibition to enhance the transparency of the digital art and accentuate the movement of the works.

Suh Se Ok created over 3,290 works during his 70-year career and drew inspiration from calligraphy and poetry to create ink abstractions that reflect the human experience.

The exhibit also featured Suh Se Ok's original paintings and a semi-transparent fabric installation at the entrance, designed to create an immersive experience.

LG OLED Art has collaborated with over 30 artists globally, including Anish Kapoor, Barry X Ball, Damien Hirst, Shepard Fairey and the late Kim Whanki.

LG OLED's next presentation will be at Frieze London, which runs from 9 to 13 October in Regent's Park.

The photography is by LG Electronics.

Frieze Seoul took place from 4 to 7 September in Seoul. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen as part of a partnership with LG OLED. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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Art collective MSCHF has sliced off the tips of Italian furniture company Gufram's popular Pratone chair to highlight the "revolutionary" roots of contemporary design objects for a New York exhibition.

Held at Perrotin gallery in the Lower East Side, the For Industry Plants exhibition was launched to create a dialogue between Gufram's participation in Italy's 1960s Radical Design movement and contemporary consumerism in art markets.

MSCHF collaborated with Gufram on two "interventions" on the brand's Pratone chair and the Cactus coatrack, which were displayed alongside three new pieces and previous creations from the art collective.

"We selected two Gufram objects from the design canon that are artificial (foam even!) but simulacra of natural objects, namely plants!" MCSHF co-founder Kevin Wiesner  told Dezeen.

"We then set out to further investigate this artificiality, by cutting the grass to reveal the flesh, and by mounting America's favorite 5G hardware to the cactus."

The Gufram collaboration was meant to poke fun at issues in the creative industries and point to the radical roots of certain design pieces.

Gufram's Pratone chair, which is composed of bright green foam tentacles that resemble blades of grass, was originally designed in 1971 to question the conventions of seating design and society's relationship to the natural world in light of hyper-consumption, according to writer Elizabeth Koehn who produced an essay for the exhibition.

MSCHF sliced off the blade's tips, rendering the clippings' interiors a bright red, and scattered them around the base as a continuation of the original prompt and a "reconsideration" of the Pratone itself.

"Over fifty years later, in Cut Pratone, MSCHF prompts a reconsideration of both the original question and the design that posed it by slicing through the thicket, scattering clippings and revealing the Pratone's bloodied foam innards," said Koehn.

"It is only through MSCHF's dissection of Pratone that we can recognize the persistent, pulsing vitality of the original design's revolutionary aspirations and its immediate relevance to the conditions of our ecological and cultural present."

For the Cactus coatrack intervention, which has undergone multiple reimaginings since its creation in 1972, MSCHF placed a fibreboard and aluminium "antenna" around its arms.

The combination references the 5G antennas running along a highway, which are often concealed by faux branches.

"The feebleness of these attempts to naturalize (and neutralize) technology's omnipresence are often laughable, but they take on increasingly high stakes as bogus conspiracy theories surrounding the nefarious impacts of 5G technology," said Koehn.

MSCHF's other work for the exhibit includes two paintings based on the Animorphs book series as well as a sculpture that records and displays the touch of passersby. The sculpture was created in protest of the prohibition of touching art in many galleries and museums.

For the Botched Masters artwork, MSCHF sought to question "what constitutes a masterpiece" by purchasing two 17th and 18th-century religious paintings and covering them with their own designs.

MSCHF's previous objects on display include an oversized singlet of American cheese and the translucent Met's Sink Of Theseus work, which shows the result of a project where the team smuggled pieces of a sink from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and replaced them with nearly identical pieces marked with a MSCHF signature.

MSCHF is known for its objects, artwork and stunts that bring light to systematic issues within the design industries, including a handbag created to highlight the "hidden creative labor" undertaken by factories.

The images are by Guillaume Ziccarelli.

Industry Plants is open at the Perrotin Gallery in New York from 6 September until 19 October 2o24. For a comprehensive listing of architecture and design events, exhibitions and talks see Dezeen's Event Guide. 

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Spanish fashion house Loewe paid homage to its own craft history in this Seoul store, which features artwork including a multi-level bamboo sculpture and a basket woven entirely from horse hair.

The store is located in Seoul's Gangnam district and is the first Casa Loewe branch in South Korea.

A gleaming monolithic facade characterises the exterior, covered in handmade ceramic tiles in a verdant shade of green.

"With tiles crafted in Spain, the facade is a bold volume of colour and texture that sits in dialogue with the store's urban context and surrounding greenery," said Loewe.

The interior spans three floors and also features a selection of brown, green and blue tiles, which clad blocky plinths and shelves displaying garments, bags and footwear.

By incorporating art throughout the store, Loewe aimed to reference its origins as a leather-making collective in the 19th century, as well as nodding to its annual craft prize.

The collection of pieces includes a multi-level bamboo sculpture by Japanese artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV. The bamboo was used to form a duo of cylinders resembling tree trunks, which stretch from the ground floor's central atrium up onto the first floor, where they intertwine.

Among the other artwork on show is a delicate vessel by 2022 Craft Prize winner Dahye Jeong, who wove an intricate basket out of wispy strands of horse hair.

According to Loewe, the brand conceived the store as "a place where a blend of fashion, art, craft and design furniture creates the eclectic feel of an art collector's home".

Furniture pieces are finished in a selection of materials ranging from custom felt to black walnut and canvas.

Bespoke Loewe leather benches provide seating for trying on shoes, while black terrazzo and burnt wood were used to create tables and podiums respectively.

Artisanal wool carpets were patterned with abstract interpretations of tapestries by British textile artist John Allen that depict expansive landscapes.

The rest of the interior is defined by swathes of concrete that contrast with the eclectic artworks on display, as well as oak, brass and marble accents.

This May, Mexican ceramicist Andrés Anza was named the seventh winner of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize for her "arresting" human-sized ceramic sculpture. Elsewhere in East Asia, the fashion house recently opened a store in Osaka, Japan, specifically dedicated to the repair and preservation of Loewe leather goods.

The photography is courtesy of Loewe. 

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Glue made from rice, crayons that draw on any surface and a stool that turns into an easel are among the unconventional craft equipment developed by Tokyo children's brand Woset for the next generation of artists and designers.

Woset's stationery and furniture, recently on show as part of a pop-up at the Isetan department store in Shinjuku, is wholly made in Japan with a purposefully minimal "greige" look that diverges from traditional kids' products.

"It's pared back so you don't have to be pared back," explained designer Brad Holdgrafer, who co-founded the company with his wife Jenna. "You can do whatever you want with it: you can colour it, you can break it, you can smash it, you can rip it."

"That sense of responsibility builds creative confidence, which is really what we hope to do as much as possible," he continued.

The Holdgrafers, also known as the husband-and-wife duo behind LA design store Formerly Yes, founded Woset after moving to Tokyo with their children Leo and Georgia in 2022.

While the furniture was designed by prominent studios including Keiji Ashizawa Design, Waka Waka and Torafu Architects, the ideas behind the products are based on the couple's own observations of their children – and how their creative process differs from that of adults.

Woset's giant sketchbook – almost the size of a doorway when unfolded – was informed by how kids will draw over the edges of the page and onto the table if a piece of A4 is too small to hold their ideas.

This is accompanied by a "magic crayon" that can draw on any surface but is easy to wash off, according to Holdgrafer, as it is made from rice bran wax instead of petroleum-derived paraffin.

"If you take the crayon off the pad of paper and put it on glass, they come up with all kinds of new ideas they may have never thought about before," he said.

"So it's about how the product itself can change the environment in which the kids are making art so they really start to think: I never knew I could do this."

To grab children's fickle attention, Woset worked with Shin Okuda of LA studio Waka Waka to create a blocky plywood easel that's eye-catching enough to be a part of the furniture rather than something to be stowed away.

"Kids are so spontaneous," Holdgrafer said. "If they see something they've got to play with it."

"So we thought: could we make an easel that you can't put in a closet? So you physically couldn't put it in a closet because it's pretty big," he continued. "But also you wouldn't want to, hopefully, because it's so interesting and fun."

To quell inevitable fights over who gets to use which marker, Woset created a "snap-and-share" version that can be split into five separate mini-markers with smash-proof rounded felt tips.

Like all Woset products, the marker is associated with one of "13 and a half" different original characters, brought to life by British illustrator Jay Cover, in the hope that children will form an emotional connection to the products.

In this case, each breakaway section of the giant marker is decorated with a different tiny insect to illustrate the value of working together to achieve a larger goal.

"We want to have as much depth as Lord of the Rings almost in how we're building the character lore," Holdgrafer said.

"And once they're interested in the characters and the story, then maybe they'll want to use the products," he added. "Otherwise, it's really hard for a well-designed, smart, thoughtful children's toy to compete with Hello Kitty because Hello Kitty is so compelling."

The brand's recycled paper packaging is completely devoid of colour and instead topped with outlines of the different characters for kids to colour in.

"Even our trash, even our packaging – something we usually throw away – becomes a colouring book," he said.

All of the company's products are made locally, in collaboration with small manufacturers across Japan. The glue, for example, comes from a family-run glue factory that dates back almost 200 years.

Made from tapioca rice starch and packaged in a refillable glass jar, the adhesive is all-natural and technically edible – although Holdgrafer doesn't advise passing this on to the children.

Woset also created a capsule collection in collaboration with furniture workshop Ishinomaki Laboratory, including an adaptation of Torafu Architects' A-frame stool that turns into an easel just by moving a dowel.

The architecture practice also contributed a car-shaped toolbox on wheels to complement a stool by Keiji Ashizawa, which has a crossbar that doubles as a handle so that kids as young as 11 months old can move the piece around without needing help from adults.

"Kids always want to slide your furniture all over the house," Holdgrafer said. "And we thought: what if we can make something that they can just move themselves really easily if they have an idea?"

The company isn't alone in its goal to nurture children's creative independence. Elsewhere, designers have created self-assembly furniture and sew-your-own clothing kits to show kids how they can have a hand in shaping the world around them.

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Artist Tavares Strachan has positioned a large-scale model of a ship in a rooftop pond at London's Hayward Gallery, forming an outdoor installation to accompany his current art exhibition There Is Light Somewhere.

The installation is a replica of SS Yarmouth – the flagship of the former Black Star Line, the first Black-owned shipping company in North America established by the Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey in 1919.

Strachan recreated the seminal vessel using a combination of aluminium, fibreglass and painted wood. The result is a 14-metre-long, ship-like structure installed on a rooftop terrace at the Hayward Gallery on South Bank.

The terrace was filled with 30 cubic metres of water for the project – a feat signed off by local engineering firm Arup, which ensured that the installation was within the weight threshold for its location.

Perched atop the gallery's rooftop pool, the ship replica gives the impression of a vessel at sea.

Garvey originally founded the Black Star Line to facilitate international commerce among Black communities and later hoped to repatriate enslaved African Americans and their descendants by providing a route to Africa.

While the shipping company ceased sailing in 1922, it has remained a powerful symbol of pan-Africanism.

"The Black Star Line was established as a way to connect people from the diaspora to Africa," Strachan told Dezeen.

Although he couldn't currently reveal more information, the artist said he plans to reopen the Black Star Line to support Black-owned businesses worldwide.

The ship replica was positioned to echo the themes of Strachan's exhibition, currently showing inside the gallery.

There Is Light Somewhere is "a multi-sensory exhibition" incorporating a range of sculptures, large-scale collages and other mixed-media installations that explore questions surrounding cultural visibility.

"Dedicated to telling 'lost stories', Strachan celebrates unsung explorers and neglected cultural trailblazers, inviting audiences to engage with overlooked characters whose lives illuminate histories hidden by bias," said the Hayward Gallery.

"I love to present ideas around world-making," the artist said of his show.

"The installations in this exhibition pose questions about what happens when a viewer enters a world with their own internal logic," he added.

As well as the ship replica, a vast neon installation displaying the words You belong here has been mounted to one of the gallery's brutalist facades, creating a beacon that reinforces the exhibition's themes.

An oversized bronze head depicting Garvey, entitled Ruin of a Giant, can also be found outside the gallery's main entrance.

"Public artwork is always an opportunity to draw people into conversations via their own curiosity," said Strachan, considering the impact of large-scale sculptures.

"There is no expectation for the public to know what the work 'means'. Instead, it allows everyone to participate in a dialogue about their community."

"I have no specific desire for how folks respond to the show," he added.

"Hopefully, people enjoy the experience and it motivates them to think about the world in a different way."

The Hayward has been home to various installations. In 2015, artist Carsten Höller added a pair of spiral slides to the side of the gallery.

In more recent installation news, architecture studio MAD has recently created Ephemeral Bubble – an installation designed to resemble a bubble being blown by a century-old wooden house, for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Japan.

The photography is by Mark Blower and the video is courtesy of Southbank Centre. 

There is Light Somewhere is showing at the Hayward Gallery from 18 June to 1 September 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Architecture studio MAD has created Ephemeral Bubble, an installation designed to resemble a bubble being blown by a century-old wooden house, for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale in Japan.

Located in the Murono Village in the Japanese countryside, the installation was made of a PVC membrane and forms part of the old house named China House Huayuan, which is used to showcase Chinese art and culture.

MAD designed the Ephemeral Bubble for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale to open "a dialogue with the ancient Japanese countryside", the studio said.

"This design adds a temporary, flexible space that mimics the lightness and translucence of breathing air," it added.

The giant bubble is attached to the house and then rises and expands to form a space that can be used for performances or ceremonies.

Its "biomorphic" design was informed by nature, MAD said, adding that it also hoped the installation would encourage spiritual exploration.

"This concept of bubbles also introduces a playful and interactive space, making the experiential installation ideal for emotive and spiritual exploration," MAD said.

"This approach emphasizes the importance of engagement in design."

Inside the bubble, which is lit up in the evenings to create a lantern-like effect, visitors can see out through blurred walls, through which the colours and shapes of the countryside are only partly visible.

This was done to create an atmosphere of "soft light," according to the studio, which is led by architect Ma Yansong and has previously designed the Tunnel of Light installation for the triennale.

The Ephemeral Bubble was designed to look like it was created by the house itself.

"Picture our century-old house drifting off to sleep, gently blowing bubbles as it dreams," Yansong told Dezeen.

The studio also aimed for the installation to update the historic wooden house.

"This fusion of virtual and tangible elements, combining the old and the new, brings new life into the ancient building," MAD concluded.

Other recent projects by MAD include a "clover-like" conference centre in Beijing that has an undulating roof and the studio's first-ever train station.

The firm has previously worked on a number of art installations, including a maze-like performance space for a Chinese festival and an installation made from multicoloured fishing nets.

The photography is by Zhu Yumeng and Osamu Nakamura. 

Project credits:

Architect: MAD
Design team: Ma Yansong, Yosuke Hayano, Dang Qun, Yu Nagasaki, Rozita Kashirtseva, Valentina Olivieri, Hu Jing-Chang
Contractors: Green Sigma Co Ltd, Adachi Zoukeisha

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Stockholm-based studio Goldin+Senneby has created the Spruce Time installation in Sweden, a climate-controlled chamber that houses a clone of one of the world's oldest trees.

Situated on the grounds of a new hospital campus in Malmö, the installation by Goldin+Senneby was designed as a "living artwork" where visitors can observe and engage with the tree as it grows.

The sapling inside it was cloned from a 9,550-year-old spruce tree named Old Tjikko, located on the Fulufjäll mountain in Sweden, before being planted within the chamber.

To obtain the clone, small twigs cut from the tree's top branches were grafted onto stems of other spruce trees – creating saplings of identical DNA to Old Tjikko, with a survival rate just above 50 per cent.

"Old Tjikko on Fulufjäll mountain has already cloned itself over the course of millennia," studio co-founder Simon Goldin told Dezeen.

"It is the genetic individual – not the tree on the mountain – that is nearly 10,000-years-old, and the small clone now planted at the hospital in Malmö is the same genetic individual," Goldin explained.

"In that sense, it is the oldest spruce in the world at the very beginning of its life."

The clone is held within a cylindrical glass chamber that is five metres wide and 9.2 metres tall.

Conceptualised by the studio as a "customized miniature hospital", the chamber was designed to regulate light, temperature, water, humidity and gas exchange for the tree, and is operated through the hospital's infrastructure.

A wooden bench sits within the chamber to provide a space for "meditation and reflection" for visitors, which can be accessed by appointment.

According to the studio, the artwork will permanently reside on the hospital premises – requiring consistent and long-term maintenance for as long as the tree survives.

"We hope visitors to the hospital will have a chance to follow the tree's development over the course of their lifetimes," Goldin said.

"And from one generation to the next," studio co-founder Jakob Senneby added.

While the tree has already been planted on site, the artwork is set to officially open in autumn 2025, alongside the inauguration of the new hospital.

Goldin+Senneby is an artist studio based in Stockholm established in 2004 by co-founders Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby.

Other installations recently featured on Dezeen include a pavilion at Glastonbury festival that "pushes the boundaries" of bioplastic and an exhibition presenting designs that aim to transform Sydney into a self-sufficient city.

The photography is by Helene Toresdotter.

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Architecture studios such as SO-IL and Studio Jahn/ will collaborate with artists including Torkwase Dyson and Alice Aycock to design 18 pavilions as galleries for Art Omi in Chatham, USA.

Called Art Omi Pavilions at Chatham (AOP), the project will incorporate 18 pavilions placed to house art and amenity spaces for the compound. Each pavilion will be designed in collaboration between an artist or collector and an architect of their choosing.

The AOP campus will be placed in a wooded, rural area with an overall landscape design orchestrated by Brooklyn-based Assemblage Landscape Architects.

It will be completed in multiple phases, and at the end there will be 16 pavilions of roughly similar size. These will stand alongside the Biennial Exhibition Pavilion, which will be designed by Skolnick Architecture + Design for rotating exhibitions, and a series of interconnected Mini Pavilions for "extended viewing experiences" designed by Brooklyn-based SO-IL.

Each artist will work on the design with an architect they've chosen from personal experience, or through the reference of an advisory board.

"Each design is a collaboration between the artist or collector and the architect. Each building will be determined by the program and esthetic defined by this collaboration," AOP founder Francis Greenburger told Dezeen.

"However, the Mini Pavilion preliminary design represents a collaboration between the pavilion design committee and SO-IL architects as the building will serve multiple artists."

The first phase of the design will have four structures, including a visitors centre with a cantilevered timber roof by New York City-based studio BKSK Architecture.

Among the pavilion collaborations for phase one will be a metal-and-solar-panel clad building with a slopped roof featuring apertures for trees to grow by American artist Alice Aycock and Chicago-based Studio Jahn/.

Japanese artists Tadaaki Kuwayama and Rakuko Naito have worked with German studio Unit A to design a modernist, metal-clad form with an inset, clad-glad seating area.

The final structure for phase one will be a relatively simple structure with corrugated metal facing punctuated by voids exposing wooden beams designed between collectors Susan and Michael Hort and BKSK Architecture.

Three structures have been announced for the second phase, a sculptural pavilion for American artist Torkwase Dyson designed by Manhattan studio Gluckman Tang and Lee Skolnick's 3D-printed Biennial Pavilion.

Renderings of Skolnick's project show a building with typical 3D-printed cemetious walls conforming to the contours of nearby hills.

The artist pavilions will primarily show the work of the collaborating artist, while the one in collaboration with collectors will show multiple artists from the collections.

According to Greenburger, this model allows the artist's work to be viewed in contexts of their own choosing, creating a more holistic experience for the viewer.

Construction on the first phase will begin in June 2024.

Art Omi is an arts organisation located in Ghent, New York.

Recently, Dezeen produced a short video on the 2024 edition of the Serpentine Pavilion in London, designed by Korean architect Minsuk Cho.

Last year, Torkwase Dyson installed a sound-oriented pavilion made from black-painted wood in St Louis, Missouri, USA.

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Philadelphia-based artist Nick Missel exhibited a series of sculptural seats informed by scrap materials and working class survivalism at Design Miami's 2024 Los Angeles edition.

Created with tactile appeal, Nick Missel's collection of unique furniture objects were designed to explore malleable forms with textured surfacing.

Missel's works were showcased alongside five other artists – Gulla Jónsdóttir, Justin Wesley, Feyza Kemahlioglu, Benjamin Gillespie, Gregory Nangle – at Wexler Gallery's booth in Holmby Hills Estate specially for the inaugural edition of Design Miami.LA.

The artist described his silicone sculptures as a form of "cultural archeology of the working class".

"I think there is a resilience and creativity that comes with the survival lifestyle of the working class, always doing more with less," Missel told Dezeen. "I would collect random objects in the back of my truck, selling them for scrap so I could fund my early sculptures."

"This experience made me curious to find beauty in these things that sit on the periphery of our attention in everyday life, but have some kind of power to them as objects of opportunity," he continued.

His sculptures were produced through a process of layering pigmented silicone on bales of cardboard to create a thin shell.

When peeled off and inverted, "negative space" is revealed where the absence of the original object becomes the form and texture.

Informed by French-American painter Marcel Duchamp, Missel's Infrathin pieces display an array of colourful, hatch pattern cube seating using memory foam and his signature silicone casting technique.

Grayscale varieties were designed to be representative of the negative space concept.

"When I look at a bale of cardboard I don't just see waste, I see compressed moments of human existence that create new narratives," said Missel.

"Boxes for diapers, avocados, appliances and compressed heaps of scrap metal tell a story of our lives, our memories, our hopes. Like photographs of the shadows of humanity."

In addition, Missel's Alumation pieces are sculptural chairs and stools made from aluminium belonging to car radiators and resin fibreglass.

The shiny metal has been cut, deconstructed and reconstructed into twisted forms with similar hatch pattern detailing.

Missel's orange and purple hued REM pieces, titled after the rapid eye movement sleep state where most dreams happen, comprises painted objects made out of mattress egg crates also contorted and frozen with resin.

"I find it interesting to think about the life cycles of material and how they could be a metaphor to our lives, and wonder what narrative someone might have for my works if they were to find them hundreds of years from now," said Missel.

"Ultimately the objects I'm drawn to have some kind of larger global connection and impact, while falling in the category of the common. I don't think I would be interested in something like marble, it's too luxurious in an easy way."

The photography is courtesy of Wexler Gallery.

Design Miami.LA took place from 16-20 May 2024 in Los Angeles, US. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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French artist Daniel Buren has created installations at six Belmond hotels, including a colourful pergola in Mallorca, mirrored totems in Cape Town and a window takeover in Rio de Janeiro.

The Belmond hotel group invited Buren to create site-specific works at some of the most prominent hotels in its portfolio, with other locations including Venice, Tuscany and Florence.

Each design in the Haltes Colorées series is different, but they all feature the stripe patterns and vivid colours that have become Buren's signature.

"There is a lot of specificity each time," explained Buren at an event to mark the opening of the sixth work in the series, at La Residencia in Deià, Mallorca.

"You cannot compare one with another, apart from the fact that each is placed in a magnificent location," he told Dezeen.

"I like having the possibility to do specific work. I call them works in situ, which means playing with a place, and the place means the history. That includes the people working there, the people visiting, the architecture and the function of the place."

In Deià, which Buren described as the most peaceful of the six locations, the artist installed a pergola that frames a terrace and lawn in front of the hotel entrance.

This structure features a frame of slender columns, picked out with black and white stripes, and a translucent roof canopy coloured in bold shades of blue, green, pink, yellow and red.

When the sun is shining, these roof panels cast colourful reflections onto the surrounding groundscape and greenery.

"I have always been interested in the use of colour," Buren said.

"It's the only way for a visual work to speak to people without speech. There are no words to help you understand what a colour is better than the colour itself."

The first work Buren created for the Haltes Colorées series was at Mount Nelson, a hotel at the foot of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa.

Here, eight three-metre-high columns are arranged around a garden fountain. Some surfaces are mirrored, while the others feature vertical stripes, creating a sense of optical illusion.

The largest of the works was created at Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Here, colourful panels create chequered patterns across the windows of the building's grand 1920s facade.

At Villa San Michele, a 15th-century former monastery in the hills overlooking Florence, film applied to the glass roof above the hotel bar washes the interior with multi-coloured light.

The installation at Hotel Cipriani in Venice is a circular pavilion in the garden while Castello di Casole in Tuscany features three monochrome "portals" in different shapes, which frame views of the landscape.

Buren has previously created artworks on important works of architecture such as the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse in Marseille.

The artist doesn't like his works to be called "installations" as he believes the word doesn't place enough emphasis on the site-specific nature of each piece.

"It's a very mediocre way to speak about the presentation," he said. "Installation suggests you can take a piece somewhere else."

"I always say my work is a work in situ because it is there for a certain period and after that, it is nowhere."

Haltes Colorée is the third edition of MITICO, an annual art programme run by Belmond in partnership with gallery Galleria Continua. But it is the first instalment where one artist produced every piece.

The works will remain in place for up to a year, depending on the location.

The photography is courtesy of Belmond.

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New York architecture studios SO-IL and Office of Strategy + Design have announced plans for the adaptive reuse of a series of warehouse buildings at a marina on the Detroit River as part of the Little Village development.

The project includes the conversion of four warehouses into an integrated "arts campus". It is part of the Stanton Yard development led by New York architecture studio Office of Strategy + Design (OSD), which will convert the area in between the buildings – currently serving as dry dockage – into a landscaped outdoor area.

OSD will also convert the waterfront of the marina into green public space and has designed a new waterfront building for the site.

SO-IL will provide critical restorations of the structures and unify the campus through a courtyard area that will connect to the buildings as well as to the street and adjacent marina.

Multiple entrance points from the street will be lined with sloped meshed canopies and a series of perforated barriers will be erected around the campus.

"With interior spaces ready to be tailored to any number of art-making, workshop, educational, performance, gallery, and recreational possibilities, our intervention creates a porous space in which programs exist in dialogue with the city and one another," said SO-IL.

The forms of the existing structures will remain generally as is. But renderings from SO-IL show the introduction of new architectural roofs, the most stand-out being a white sawtooth roof to be added to the entrance building.

Metal siding will replaced at certain junctures by polycarbonate panels to bring in diffuse light to the flexible art spaces within.

"We wanted to celebrate the site's industrial character, while clearly demonstrating its renewed purpose and identity," said SO-IL principal Florian Idenburg.

The studio said that other interventions into the current structures will include "polished metal, hammered concrete, and layered brick" but did not elaborate on the interiors or layouts of the buildings themselves or the specific uses of these materials.

According to SO-IL, these interventions will "reclaim the industrial locale, restoring its natural beauty". The adjacent marina will remain functioning.

Stanton Yards is one of many interventions developed by the local arts institution Library Street Collective to rejuvenate disused aspects of Detroit.

"As Detroit undergoes a waterfront renaissance, Stanton Yards shows the importance of designing from the outside-in, giving priority to people and the land as a means to creating a thriving new community destination for the city," said OSD principal Simon David.

It is part of a neighbourhood that the developers call Little Village, which includes a church converted into an art gallery by Peterson Rich Office and an in-progress conversion of a bakery into artist studios by OMA.

Elsewhere in the city, New York architecture studio ODA renovated the historic Book Tower skyscraper, adding restaurants and a hotel.

The images are by Bloomimages. 

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Electronics brand LG OLED is exhibiting works by the late Korean artist Kim Whanki at Frieze art fair in New York, as captured in this exclusive video produced for the brand by Dezeen.

Called We Meet Again in New York, the installation features five animated versions of original works by Whanki, a pioneer of 20th-century Korean abstract art.

LG OLED is exhibiting digitally reimagined works at this year's Frieze New York

LG OLED Art translated Whanki's work into digital form, aiming to accurately reproduce details and colours in the original work by harnessing LG's self-lit OLED technology.

The brand designed the exhibition to showcase the level of detail Whanki put into his work, which involved hand-painting mosaic-like dots on canvas with a thin inkbrush.

The five works shown at Frieze were originally created by Whanki during his time in New York between 1963 and 1974.

Whanki referenced memories of his homeland of Korea in the pieces, as well as the New York art scene that he was surrounded by at the time.

During his stay in New York, Whanki experimented with different materials and techniques, including his signature "all-over dot" style, which can be seen in the works on display at Frieze.

While in New York, Whanki hosted a total of six solo exhibitions, with the last one being presented the year before his passing in 1974.

Exhibited works include a digitally reimagined version of Whanki's final painting, which is composed of hundreds of thousands of blue-black dots.

A separate concurrent exhibition called Whanki in New York is being held at the Korean Cultural Center in New York.

The exhibition will feature the five digital versions of Whanki's work shown at Frieze, alongside twenty-seven original works by the artist on loan from the Whanki Museum in Seoul.

Frieze New York takes place from 1 to 5 May 2024 at The Shed. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

Partnership content

This article was written by Dezeen as part of a partnership with LG OLED. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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Artist Patrick Carroll has used recycled yarn to create hand-knitted painting-style pieces for the Days textile exhibition at JW Anderson's Milan store during Milan design week.

Carroll presented translucent artworks that look "as if they are paintings", which were made using a 1970s flatbed domestic knitting machine and displayed on wooden stretcher bars – the skeleton of a traditional art canvas – in the store.

"My stuff is a little bit transparent – you can see the architecture of it all," Carroll told Dezeen at the JW Anderson flagship store in Milan, where the work is exhibited in a show called Days.

"I was making clothing initially," he explained, donning one of his own pink creations.

Carroll decided to apply his practice to artworks, designing pieces made from yarn salvaged from remainder shops that liquidate the fashion industry's leftover textiles rather than sourcing new materials.

Recycled wool, linen, mohair, silk and cashmere all feature in the rectilinear works, which are finished in colours ranging from coral to aqua to ochre.

Like Carroll's clothing, each piece was characterised by one or a handful of words lifted from sources including literature, existing artworks or the artist's own writing.

The smallest pieces in the collection were displayed on gridded shelving while larger pieces can be found on various walls throughout the store.

When viewed together, the works were positioned to create a "modular chorus", explained the artist, who encouraged viewers to form their own relationships with the words weaved into the textiles.

Days follows Carroll's first collaboration with JW Anderson in 2022 when the artist designed seven knitted outfits for the brand. The clothes were worn by models posing on chunky blue plinths positioned outside the venue of JW Anderson's Spring Summer 2023 menswear show in Milan.

"I think what makes the works a little bit unique is that they have legs in all these disciplines – fashion, design and art," added Carroll.

Founded by Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson, JW Anderson previously created hoodies and tailored shorts moulded from plasticine for its Spring Summer 2024 womenswear show at London Fashion Week.

Various other fashion brands have a presence at this year's Milan design week. Hermès has created an installation that uses reclaimed bricks, slate, marble and terracotta to draw attention to the brand's artisan roots while Marimekko has transformed a traditional Milanese bar into a flower-clad day-to-night cafe.

The photography is courtesy of Patrick Carroll and JW Anderson. 

Days is on display from 17 to 21 April 2024 at the JW Anderson store, Via Sant'Andrea 16, Milan. See our Milan design week 2024 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama collaborated with hundreds of craftspeople to create Purple Hibiscus, a handsewn installation of bespoke pink cloth covering the brutalist lakeside terrace of London's Barbican Centre.

Purple Hibiscus is Mahama's first bright-coloured installation, finished in pink to contrast with London's "grey weather".

"Why not pink?" he told Dezeen at the Barbican. "The building itself is grey and the Barbican is quite grey. And I have never made a work with this kind of colour before, so I thought why not use something quite strong."

"I've never had the courage to use colours like this in public on a large-scale work, but I've been collecting these materials for quite a long time," he added.

Purple Hibiscus, which opens today, is named after Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2003 debut novel of the same name, set in postcolonial Nigeria.

The site-specific installation consists of around 2,000 square metres of bespoke woven cloth, which was hand-stitched together by hundreds of local craftspeople – including students – across the pitch of the Alui Mahama Sports Stadium in Tamale, Ghana.

Mahama and his team then transported the textiles to London, where they currently wrap the facade of the Barbican Centre's lakeside terrace.

"The basic idea was to see what happens when this soft material envelopes the Barbican," said the artist.

Embroidered into the cloth are around 130 colourful batakaris – traditional Northern Ghanaian robes worn by people ranging from royals to ordinary communities, passed down by families over generations.

The striking batakaris were sewn across the textiles like decorative polka dots, embellishing the work with "traditional materials that have histories," explained Mahama.

The artist acquired the robes over time from various people across Northern Ghana, through exchanges or bartering.

"Collecting the individual smocks from communities can be quite challenging, but also opens up a portal of new formal aesthetics," said Mahama.

Mahama's work is often compared to the late artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, known for their site-specific installations sheathed in industrially produced fabrics.

While the duo has been a significant influence on Mahama for "the quality and the courage that they brought to art forms," the artist's key focus is the historical memories embedded in textiles, he explained.

"I'm more interested in the material history – I'm not interested in industrial machines. Everything is done by hand," said Mahama.

The Purple Hibiscus installation forms part of the Barbican Art Gallery's current exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art.

Last month, a group of artists and collectors pulled their work from the show following the Barbican's decision not to host a lecture series that would have included a talk about the Israel-Hamas conflict by the Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra, criticising the Barbican for "censorship".

Explaining the decision to go ahead with Purple Hibiscus, Mahama said, "I wasn't making the work for myself. It was being produced for the building."

"A lot of labour went into it," he continued, referencing the many weavers and makers in Ghana and the UK who collaborated on the project. "The work was made by a lot of hands."

"I'm coming from a place where we have nothing, and I have always relied on the residual capital of my work to be able to exercise justice in the spaces that I come from," he continued.

Rather than excluding himself from the conversation, Mahama said his interest lies in the contradictions found within art.

"For me, it's not that simple. I'm very interested in the continuation of art and the contradictions that are embedded within it and what it produces," he said.

"I've never really thought to exclude myself from something in order to make a statement. I've always thought to bury myself within it, and then through the contradictions, we can make further statements," the artist added.

"But certainly, I think that freedom of all kinds should be guaranteed everywhere across the world, whether you're from Ghana in a rural area where you don't have access to clean drinking water, or you're in a war-torn zone, where acts of genocide are committed."

Mahama was one of 16 artists who contributed an installation to the Force Majeure exhibition at last year's Venice Architecture Biennale. He was also a part of the Waste Age show at London's Design Museum, which explored how design has contributed to the rise of throwaway culture.

The photography is courtesy of the Barbican.

Purple Hibiscus will be installed at the Barbican from 10 April to 18 August 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Electronics brand LG OLED has collaborated with American street artist Shepard Fairey to exhibit digital versions of his artworks in this exclusive video produced by Dezeen.

Called Peace and Justice, the installation is being presented at Frieze art fair in Los Angeles and features select works by Fairey that address global issues while advocating for positive change.

 

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Fairey was directly involved in the design of the installation space, which features a reimagined version of his 2018 piece Damaged Wrong Path Mural.

Other works presented at the exhibition include Fairey's 2023 Swan Song print, a reflection on the state of the environment, as well as a piece titled Make Art Not War, echoing the 1960s anti-war slogan "make love, not war."

Fairey is the founder of OBEY Clothing and is widely known for his Hope portrait of Barack Obama – which was widely circulated during the 2008 US presidential election campaign – as well as a series of posters called We the People that were released the day before the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017.

The LG OLED Art initiative invites artists to exhibit digital versions of their works using LG OLED TVs.

Each pixel in the OLED TVs emits its own light and can be controlled individually, creating an emissive display that was designed to produce accurate colour reproduction.

The LG OLED TVs currently on show at Frieze Los Angeles aim to accurately express the prominent red tones in Fairey's artwork.

LG OLED Art has collaborated with over 27 artists from around the world, including Anish Kapoor, Barry X Ball, Damien Hirst, the late Kim Whanki and Kevin McCoy.

The photography is by LG Electronics.

Frieze Los Angeles takes place from 29 February to 3 March 2024 at Santa Monica Airport. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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This article was written by Dezeen as part of a partnership with LG OLED. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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Creative team Luna Luna has re-installed a "forgotten" art theme park in a Los Angeles production studio that includes a Ferris wheel by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a carousel by Keith Haring and work by artists David Hockney, Kenny Scharf and more.

Created by artist André Heller, the original fair took place in 1987 in a Hamburg park. Today's Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy iteration displays the rides and attractions as an exhibit, with some interactive elements and performers dispersed throughout.

Located at production studio Ace Mission Studios, today's Luna Luna adopts the moniker of its successor and is organized by a collective of the same name.

To enter the exhibition, guests pass by a recreation of a spikey red inflatable dome by Heller – which previously housed a cafe – into a corridor that displays the original fair on video.

Visitors then pass into two large warehouse spaces divided by an archway by artist Sonia Delaunay that reads "Luna Luna" in lights.

"The team's concept for the exhibition layout was to reference and celebrate the key characteristics, dynamic atmosphere, and formal relationships, between the artworks within Luna Luna's 1987 debut in Hamburg, while acknowledging that its new home within a Los Angeles soundstage is starkly different from the grass and mud of a tree-lined German park," director of spatial design Charles Dorrance-King told Dezeen.

"[The exhibition] required a modified approach that still spoke to the spirit of '87, such as utilizing Sonia Delaunay's archway not as an entrance to the park, but instead as a gateway between two adjacent warehouses. The first space highlights the spectacle, and the second focuses on the story of Luna Luna."

The first space contains a colourful swing ride by Kenny Scharf, which is spray-painted with cartoon figures, patterns and shapes reminiscent of the television the artist watched as a child.

Surrounding works also include a carousel by Keith Haring, painted with the artist's characteristic line drawings, including a self-portrait.

Seats made of the dancing figures were created for visitors to ride during the 1987 fair. Today, the rides operate and run during the exhibit, but are not ride-able for visitors.

Another carousel by artist Arik Brauer sits nearby, which features seats of fantastical creatures "straight out of one his mystical dreams", including a butterfly, a wolf, a mermaid and an anthropomorphic hand. A song written, produced and performed by Brauer's daughter, Timna was also integrated into the ride.

David Hockney's Enchanted Tree was also installed in the space, a circular pavilion with geometric trees painted on its exterior panels.

Visitors then pass into the next room, which contains a painted Ferris wheel by Jean-Michael Basquiat, accompanied by a custom music composition by musician Miles Davis, called Tutu, a pavilion by Salvador Dalí, and a glass labyrinth covered in Roy Lichtenstein-painted panels.

"We took into account the reflection of the Lichtenstein facade and glowing wheel of the illuminated Basquiat arrayed along the mirrored facade of the Dali, and the placement of the GilSing flags, which were wrapped around the perimeter of the exhibition as in the original park," said Dorrance-King.

Basquiat's Ferris wheel was painted in a cream colour and adorned with his recurrent illustrations and writing that speak to race, music and anatomy.

A wedding chapel by André Heller is also included nearby. Created by two abstract figures holding a heart between them, the chapel was a place where visitors of today's exhibition and the 1987 fair can marry "whatever or whomever" they please.

"Heller imagined Luna Luna as a 'total artwork' that combined visual art, music, theatre, design, circus arts and performance, and explained that the park aimed to recover public space for art and imagination," said the team.

Following its successful 1987 debut in Germany, the fair and its subsequent works fell into legal battles and were stored away in shipping containers in Texas.

In 2022, reports broke that Drake and his creative business venture DreamCrew invested an estimated $100 million for the entire fair, with plans to restore the rides for access to the public.

Today's Luna Luna exhibition took over a year to restore and reassemble.

"They've spent over a year caring for these works, rebuilding each ride and attraction bolt by bolt after they came out of the shipping containers in pieces – they know every inch of these works,"  said curatorial director Lumi Tan of the assembly team.

"Each attraction takes a small army to install: because of this, the installation and placement of the works were not just a curatorial choice, but one made in close collaboration with our spatial design and studio team. There is no such thing as a small tweak with works at this scale!"

Other recent design-related exhibitions throughout the US include an Alcova show displayed in a Miami motel and an exploration of Es Devlin's career in New York.

The photography is by Jeff McLane and Joshua and Charles White.

Luna Luna: A Forgotton Fantasy will take place at Ace Mission Studios in Los Angeles through Spring 2024.  See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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A Cesca Chair decked out with hundreds of air fresheners and Spoleto Chair adorned with speakers are among American artist Noel Mercado's modification of classic Knoll chairs using salvaged chair parts.

The Chicago-based artist was commissioned by Pennsylvania furniture company Knoll to modify three classic chairs using found objects.

Mercado visited Chicago junkyards, car washes and body shops to collect objects used to modify the chairs, a method Mercado has used before and at times with Knoll chairs specifically.

"I've watched and read a lot on the history of these designs and have done many deep dives on the brand and their designers," Mercado told Dezeen.

"When it came time to work on the chair frames it helped that I had experience with Knoll furniture from past work so I was prepared when I took them to my studio."

The decision to use car parts came from Mercado's ongoing fascination with automobiles as objects that lend themselves to self-expression. After Knoll gifted the designer three chairs for the works, he formulated new ideas based on this aspect of cars and drew from his past work and notebooks for ideas.

"The story I wanted to tell here was the mundane process of getting in your car, putting on your seatbelt, turning on your music, and adjusting your rearview before shifting into drive," said the artist.

"Highlighting these aspects of a car that can often go unnoticed, the things we might look past due to repetition."

The first of the works is called Junkyard Dogs and uses a Wassily Chair, created by Hungarian-American designer Marcel Breuer in the 1920s.

Mercado deconstructed the classic metal-and-leather chair, reupholstering it with seat belts garnered from a junkyard in Chicago.

"[It is] supposed to be a bit more chaotic and layered while still retaining its function," said Mercado of the work.

Next Mercado took a Cesca Chair, also designed by Breuer, and created Little Trees.

Using hundreds of tree-shaped air fresheners bought from a local car wash, Mercado filled see-through boxes placed where the cushion should be on the chair to reference the collection of used air fresheners that accumulate on the rearview mirrors of his friends' cars.

"The attendant pulling them was definitely curious why I was buying these by the hundreds," said Mercado, who noted that being "intentionally playful" is a component of his work.

"You could say it's a bit tongue-in-cheek, playful in delivery but very intentional in craft and process."

For the third and final work, Mercado used a Spoleto Chair – a version of the cantilever chair type, a popular and widely used modern chair design.

Called Noise Violation, the work features speakers placed in the seat and backrest of the chair, laid in grey upholstery used in many older vehicles. The speakers were hooked up to a radio that sits alongside the chair.

"In the Noise Violation Spoleto chair the goal was to show the speakers in action when usually they are hidden as much as possible inside our car doors, it was important to me that the speakers were salvaged from cars and were still able to play music," explained the artist.

Knoll was founded in New York in 1938 and in 2021 merged with other American furniture giant Herman Miller, creating a joint company called MillerKnoll.

The photography is by Adam Jason Cohen.

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Promotion: French Impressionism meets the artificial intelligence age in Jardins d'Été, a new series of works by artist Quayola that is being presented in collaboration with electronics brand LG OLED at London's Frieze art fair.

The Jardins d'Été series explores the tension between the real and the artificial with its algorithmically generated videos and prints of flowers, rendered in a style that references the loose, painterly style of the French Impressionists, including Claude Monet.

The dataset for the works is based on a real-life French garden, the garden of the Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire, heightening the connection to the 19th-century art movement.

Like the eyes of those artists, as they observed these botanical settings and began to innovate towards total abstraction as a way of communicating colour and light, in Quayola's work, the eye of the machine – its ultra-high-definition cameras and custom software – is given the same starting point.

In particular, the datasets focused on images of the flowers as they moved in the wind at night, with Quayola interested in exploring the similarities between the generative process in both nature and algorithms, as well as their differences.

"The human, emotional outlook on the natural world is replaced by the more rigorous and objective scan of the machine, that 'sees' and 'recognises' nature through software specially programmed to decompose and analyse its components," said Quayola. "Analysis and debugging visualisations are juxtaposed to videos of a pictorial nature generated by computational algorithms."

"Painting becomes analytic," Quayola continued. "The natural world and its impressions are not reproduced but re-elaborated, re-codified."

Quayola blends computer programming and classical art, using technology to explore pictorial and sculptural traditions. In his work, the machine's "thinking" or "forma mentis" – known as form of mind – becomes a painting, explained the artist.

"The composition's dynamics, brushstrokes, rhythms and movements are the expression of the software's architecture programmed by the artist," said Quayola. "The algorithms generate organic processes in a fascinating similarity between the natural and computational worlds."

At Frieze, Jardins d'Été is being presented on LG OLED's 4K "digital canvases", a style of screen specially made for digital art, with Quayola explaining that their brilliance and perfect blacks served to bring the work to life.

The South Korean company has an art division titled LG OLED Art that focuses on collaborations with artists and supporting boundary-pushing artworks that blend tradition with technology.

"We are pleased to engage in a captivating collaboration with a talented artist like Quayola," said LG Home Entertainment Company Brand Communication Division vice president Kate Oh. "Together, we aim to redefine artistic boundaries, blending art and technology in ways that captivate and inspire audiences, as showcased in our exhibitions and collaborative efforts."

"LG OLED will uphold the motto, 'We Inspire Art' supporting artists in unlocking their creative potential and giving inspiration for the evolution of digital art," she continued.

The Jardins d'Été digital artworks are being presented at Frieze within a display decorated with real plants and flowers, creating an immersive environment that further provokes visitors to consider the boundaries between what's real and what's artificial.

To learn more about the collaboration, visit the LG OLED Art website.

Frieze London takes place from 11 to 15 October 2023 in London. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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This article was written by Dezeen as part of a partnership with LG OLED. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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The diversity of nature informed the latest exhibition at London's Kew Gardens, which features a garden designed to "break the binary" and a "deeply queer" textile pattern by designer Adam Nathaniel Furman.

Queer Nature, which is on show inside the botanical garden's Victorian glasshouse Temperate House, is comprised of four different installations.

At the centre of the building, American artist Jeffrey Gibson presented his largest UK commission to date, called House of Spirits, which was hung from the glass ceiling and designed to catch the light.

The colourful fabric features botanical illustrations as well as writing informed by "Gibson's own perspectives on queerness and nature", according to Kew.

Gibson drew on New York's ballroom scene as well as the work and life of artist and gay rights activist Derek Jarman when creating the installation.

In an adjacent room, garden designer Patrick Featherstone installed Breaking the Binary, a temporary garden display created together with the Kew Youth Forum.

The installation saw the designer change the layout of the room to accommodate curving flowerbeds, in which he planted a collection of species that reproduce in ways that challenge the traditional way of categorising plants as male and female.

"There's lots of variety in the way that plants reproduce and their gender is also quite complicated," Featherstone told Dezeen.

"So if nature is going to be used in this human metaphor, then it's worth scrutinising further and seeing the diversity there is."

"What's natural and what's scientific are both phrases that can be questionable and have been weaponised against queer communities," he added.

"By debunking that sort of attitude, by looking at what nature and science really are, you realise that's not an argument against something."

Featherstone also commissioned transgender illustrators to create information boards as part of the installation, which he believes is extra relevant at a time when trans people are often discriminated against.

"Queer people have often been told that they are unnatural, but I think that gender nonconforming people are often told that it's unscientific to say that you're one thing or that you're self-identifying," Featherstone said.

"And I think that's where we need to look at what science is. It's not just facts, it's politics, too. And I think that it's really helpful for trans people to have some symbolism and metaphors in their life."

Queer Nature also features Queer Voices, an installation by London-based designer Furman, who created an "immersive space" inside two octangular greenhouses in Temperate House.

The structure was made by hanging five-metre-long fabric pieces from the ceiling. These were printed with a pattern that features multiple plants, including ones that reference queer history such as the green carnation worn by writer Oscar Wilde.

Other plants include lavender, pansies, violets and carnations.

"I wanted the pattern to be deeply British and deeply queer all at once," Furman said. "Queer life has always been present in design history, but sometimes it has had to lurk beneath the surface. There's a radicality in that."

The installation also featured video interviews with LGBTQ+ scientists and horticulturists, historians, artists, writers and more.

Kew Gardens also commissioned artists LiLi K Bright and Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone to create Reverberations, two spoken word pieces that are played throughout Temperate House.

The exhibition, which is on show throughout October, will also feature events including cabaret, drag performances and talks.

"I think it's really nice to draw attention to nature because it's a very forgiving, interesting and diverse thing that we can take inspiration from, rather than being focused on what society wants us to do," Featherstone concluded.

"I think there's a lot of strengths to be taken from looking at nature."

Other recent projects that focus on the LGBTQ+ community include a "queer monument" designed by Furman to celebrate the Commonwealth Games and an atlas of 90 LGBTQ+ spaces from around the world.

The photography is courtesy of Kew Gardens unless otherwise stated.

Queer Nature is on show at Kew Gardens from 30 September to 29 October 2023. For more exhibitions, events and talks in architecture and design, visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude's last work, is being recycled by Parley for the Oceans, which will turn it into tents and sun shades for use during the 2024 Olympics and other events in Paris.

In 2021, L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped saw the monument on Paris's Champs-Élysées shrouded in 25,000 square metres of silvery fabric tied in place with 7,000 metres of red rope.

Both fabric and rope were made of woven polypropylene, a type of thermoplastic, and intended to be recycled — a vision that is now being realised by the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation in collaboration with environmental organisation Parley for the Oceans.

The organisation has already processed the materials and is now in the design and production phase.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo has confirmed the tents and shade structures created will be used in major events including the Olympic and Paralympic Games, which the city is hosting next year.

"A constant commitment of Christo and Jeanne-Claude was to reuse, upcycle and recycle all materials used in their projects," said L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped project director Vladimir Yavachev.

"I can think of nothing more fitting than recycling this artwork for future use in Paris, a city so influential on the lives and work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude," he added.

Parley for the Oceans founder and CEO Cyrill Gutsch said it was meaningful to be giving a second life to an installation that he had seen as "a flag of rebellion" and "an encouragement that seemingly impossible ideas can become a reality".

"The ropes, the fabric of the artwork are testament of the true superpower we humans possess: imagination," said Gutsch.

"We will create tent structures that are designed to protect human life against dangerous heat waves," he added. "And to supercharge our hearts and our minds for the epic challenge ahead of us."

"I know it for sure, together we can create a new economy where harmful, toxic and exploitative business practices are a relic of the past."

The wood and steel from the substructure of L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped have already been reused by the organisation Les Charpentiers de Paris and the companies ArcelorMittal and Derichebourg Environnement.

It is two years since the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation unveiled L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped, a posthumous work for both artists.

Christo passed away in 2020 and Jeanne-Claude in 2009, but the pair had conceptualised the project together in 1961. The artists and their foundation consider all of their public projects and indoor installations as collaborative works by both Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

L'Arc de Triomphe Wrapped had been scheduled to go ahead in 2020, but was postponed to 2021 after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

After Christo's death, the project was finalised by his team along with the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, Centre Pompidou and the City of Paris.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are most well-known for "wrapping" famous buildings and landscapes in their massive-scale artworks.

While some critics have attacked the waste or environmental interference of their projects, the artists' foundation maintains that they recycled most materials and left sites in the state they found them in, or better.

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For our latest lookbook, we have gathered eight examples of serene living rooms where well-curated artworks add a touch of creativity.

Paintings, sculptures and other art pieces can add a more personal feel to interiors, as seen in these eight art-filled living rooms.

While some have gone all in on the art, others chose just one or two signature pieces to create a creative atmosphere.

Either way, smartly placed artworks can enhance an interior and give homes a more personal feel.

This is the latest in our lookbooks series, which provides visual inspiration from Dezeen's archive. For more inspiration see previous lookbooks featuring living rooms with cowhide rugs, monochrome interiors and basement apartments.

Amagansett house, US, by Athena Calderone

Plaster walls, marble details and linen fabric were used to decorate this renovated mid-century home in Long Island, New York.

Owner and designer Athena Calderone also added plenty of sculptures and paintings to the interior, including in the living room where white artworks with playful textures and shapes add interest to the pale walls.

Find out more about the Amangansett house ›

Gale Apartment, Brazil, by Memola Estudio

Brazilian studio Memola Estudio aimed to balance natural and industrial materials in this apartment in São Paulo, which has a double-height living room.

The owners took advantage of the height to create a gallery wall on one side of the living room. Artworks also decorate an adjacent mosaic wall, giving the whole room a gallery-like feel.

Find out more about Gale Apartment ›

Casa Vasto, Spain, by Mesura

Designed to be both an apartment and an art gallery, this home in a former factory in Barcelona features an exquisitely curated living and exhibition space.

A large abstract blue-and-beige painting sits on top of a low bookshelf, which also displays a sculpture and multiple smaller paintings.

Find out more about Casa Vasto ›

Kew Residence, Australia, by John Wardle Architects

A large contemporary painting in a bright green hue decorates the living room of this house in Melbourne, the home of architect John Wardle.

Other artful details include playful side tables held up by mannequins, a sculptural wooden coffee table and numerous small vases and sculptures.

Find out more about Kew Residence ›

Riverside Tower, Belgium, by Studio Okami Architecten

Located inside the brutalist Riverside Tower in Antwerp, this pared-back apartment has made a feature out of its original concrete structure.

In the living room, the material is juxtaposed with a dark blue wall and a large painting in green and blue hues. Cosy leather sofas and green plants add a homely feel.

Find out more about Riverside Tower ›

Log cabin, Ukraine, by Balbek Bureau

This house in Ukraine, a modern interpretation of a log cabin, features a number of striking and strategically placed artworks in the open-plan living room and dining room.

Above the dining table hangs a large painting in a neo-expressionist style, integrating turquoise, white and pink to create an eye-catching focal point among the room's more neutral colours.

Find out more about the log cabin ›

Malibu Surf Shack, USA, by Kelly Wearstler 

Designer Kelly Wearstler created Malibu Surf Shack, a renovated 1950s beachfront cottage, as a bohemian retreat for herself and her family.

Its wood-clad living room has been enhanced by artworks in tonal colours that match the warm panelling, as well as tactile timber sculptures and geometric stone tables.

Find out more about Malibu Surf Shack ›

Paris apartment, France, by Rodolphe Parente

This apartment in a Haussmann-era building in Paris was given a makeover by interior designer Rodolphe Parente.

Parente played with contrasting materials and colour palettes in the apartment, which was designed around the owner's "radical" art collection. In the living room, a framed photo print hangs on an otherwise empty wall overlooking two sculptural coffee tables.

Find out more about the Paris apartment ›

This is the latest in our lookbooks series, which provides visual inspiration from Dezeen's archive. For more inspiration see previous lookbooks featuring living rooms with cowhide rugs, monochrome interiors and basement apartments.

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Artist Abid Javed will present Soma, an exhibition of amorphous sculptures and furniture informed by molecular biology, at independent gallery Select-Works during the London Design Festival.

Soma: Design Abstractions from Within the Cell will be the debut exhibition from Javed, whose work merges ceramics with biology.

The show, which opens on Thursday, brings together sculptures, furniture and lighting designed by the Hackney-based scientist and artist.

Javed created his pieces using neutrally hued stoneware, which he handcrafted to produce asymmetrical objects that take their cues from the appearance of microscopic cells.

The designer used a combination of pinch, slab and coil techniques to create the ceramics, which were then fired in a kiln.

"My ceramic work is somehow interconnected in such a way that the more my scientific understanding develops, I think that also informs the development of my work in ceramics as well, which is really interesting," said Javed, who divides his time between designing and scientific research.

For Soma, Javed created two collections titled the Cellular Compartment and Genetic Pleomorph, respectively.

This most recent work includes blobby vases and sculptures as well as scone lights, table and floor lamps, sculptural stools and tables, mirrors and hanging mobiles.

The designer was particularly influenced by the forms of nucleosomes – protein clusters wrapped in threads of DNA.

"Much like the fluid body of a cell, the space becomes host to a microcosm of cellular and molecular networks, demonstrated as sculptural ceramic bodies existing together as one," said Select-Works.

Selected vases also feature a removable beeswax component, which houses a metal kenzan, or 'flower frog', commonly used for Ikebana flower arranging.

Abid created the component to explore the water-repellant properties of wax by using the material as a vessel to hold water, according to the gallery.

"The exhibition is both visual, textural and conceptual. I would like people to come with open minds in terms of thinking what design objects can be, and how biology can redefine design," concluded the designer.

Other projects currently on display as part of London Design Festival include a prototype modular furniture system by Zaha Hadid Design that was informed by the natural shapes made by erosion and furniture by Andu Masebo, which was crafted from a scrapped car.

The photography is courtesy of Select-Works.

Soma is on show at Select-Works as part of London Design Festival 2023 from 21 to 24 September 2023. See our London Design Festival 2023 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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