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No Solid Ground: Three Approaches to Building Below Sea Level in Rotterdam
Architects carefully calibrate their relationship to the earth, adjusting foundations to soil, groundwater, climate, risk, and culture. Driven timber piles, rammed-earth platforms, and poured concrete slabs are each a response to a specific set of ground conditions, and each shapes the architecture that rises from it. The way a building meets the earth determines its durability and its limits because foundations are among the most consequential design choices an architect makes.
The city of Rotterdam sits approximately one meter below sea level, an organizing condition that shapes daily life in the Netherlands' second-largest city and is a growing preoccupation amid unstable coastal conditions. The city occupies the delta of the Rhine and Maas rivers, a landscape that was never naturally dry but has been kept functional through centuries of hydraulic intervention. The water boards in this region are among the oldest democratic institutions in the world, created in the thirteenth century to manage shared water drainage and still operating today as elected bodies with technical capacity. As sea levels rise and rainfall across Northern Europe grows less predictable and more extreme, Rotterdam faces a significantly increased risk of coastal storm surges and urban flooding driven by overwhelmed drainage infrastructure.
Le Grand Bercail House / L. McComber
- architects: L. McComber
- Location: Cap-à-l'Aigle, Canada
- Project Year: 2023
- Photographs: Ulysse Lemerise / OSA images
- Area: 2800.0 ft2
What to Look Forward to at the Salone del Mobile.Milano 2026: Talks, Installations, and City Interventions
From April 21 to 26, the 64th edition of Salone del Mobile.Milano returns to Rho Fiera Milano, bringing together over 1,900 exhibitors across more than 169,000 square meters of sold-out exhibition space. Yet beyond its scale, the 2026 edition signals a more structural shift through collaborations with figures such as Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten (OMA) and Formafantasma, the Salone continues to reposition itself as an evolving cultural infrastructure rather than a conventional trade fair. This year introduces new curatorial and strategic layers, most notably the preview phase of Salone Contract and the debut of Salone Raritas, alongside immersive installations and exhibitions, while the Salone's footprint across Milan grows further through city-wide interventions during Milan Design Week.
Not a Hotel Setouchi Resort / BIG
- architects: Bjarke Ingels Group
- Location: Sagishima, Setouchi, Japan
- Photographs: Kenta Hasegawa
- Area: 2350.0 m2
From Data to Digital Twins: Japan’s PLATEAU Project Offers Open-Access Models of More Than 250 Cities
"Map the New World" is the motto of Project PLATEAU, led by Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), to develop and expand access to 3D models representing the diversity of cities across the country. Japan comprises a total of 744 cities, including 14 with populations exceeding one million, 190 with between 100,000 and one million inhabitants, and 540 with populations between 10,000 and 100,000. To date, 3D models of more than 250 cities have been made available as open data through the country's public G-Spatial Information Center, and can also be accessed via an online browser viewer. According to public authorities, the project aims to strengthen urban resilience by providing society with new tools to address local challenges. This involves not only urban space modeling but also collaboration with local governments, private companies, and technology communities. The project also includes a digital reconstruction of the recently closed Osaka World Expo site.
“We Live in Toxic Interior Environments”: Interview with Healthy Materials Lab
The well-known phrase "man is what he eats" (Der Mensch ist, was er isst), by Ludwig Feuerbach, asserts that the physical, mental, and even moral constitution of human beings is directly linked to what they consume. Today, this idea is widely internalized, with growing awareness around food, nutrition, and the impact of what we ingest on our bodies. Yet, this same level of awareness doesn't extend to the environments we inhabit, where materials continue to be treated as technical decisions rather than active agents in the relationship between body and space. Considering that a large portion of the global population spends around 90% of their time indoors, it is rarely discussed what actually composes these spaces at their most fundamental level: materials. Walls, floors, and finishes are often approached as technical or aesthetic choices, when in reality they can function as continuous sources of exposure to potentially harmful substances.
Med Uni Campus Graz / Riegler Riewe Architekten
- architects: Riegler Riewe Architekten
- Location: Graz, Austria
- Project Year: 2023
- Photographs: David Schreyer
- Photographs: Paolo Rosselli
- Photographs: Helmut Pierer
- Area: 105.148 m2
No.23 Residence / Tristan Burfield
- architects: Tristan Burfield
- Location: Aireys Inlet, Victoria, Australia
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Tasha Tylee
- Area: 58.0 m2
When Sculpture Becomes Discourse: Reflections on Mujassam Watan
In the city, aesthetics are not measured by the height of towers or the width of roads, but by their ability to evoke meaning within space. From this perspective, the Mujassam Watan initiative emerges as more than a mere artistic endeavor. It involves a deliberate attempt to redefine the relationship between people and place, between material memory and imagined identity. In the city of Khobar, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—where urban modernity intersects with rapid social transformation—this initiative raises the question: How can a sculpture become an open text, one that is both visually read and experientially felt?
Renovation of DISHUILAKE Subway Station / Shanghai ZF Architectural Design
- architects: Shanghai ZF Architectural Design
- Location: Pudong District, Shanghai, China
- Project Year: 2024
- Photographs: Li Wei
- Area: 79300.0 m2
Moffat Morphing House / Arcke
- architects: Arcke
- Location: Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Christopher Frederick Jones
IKEA Emerges a Cheeky Disruptor in the Collectible Space with GREJSIMOJS
Anchored by the infamous Art Basel, Miami Design Week has long perfected the art of spectacle. It is a place where design and art operate as social currency as much as cultural production—where many collectors, curators, and the merely curious circulate with equal intent: to see and be seen. Booths gleam with pristine finishes and objects, often steeped in other-worldly design theories, carry an undercurrent of polish that signals their place within a rarefied ecosystem. It’s a stage set for cultural capital, where seriousness is often performed as much as it is practiced…Which is precisely what makes IKEA’s return feel so disarming.
With the debut of GREJSIMOJS, the Swedish giant steps into this atmosphere by loosening its collar entirely. Fur spills over familiar forms. Storage grins back with a set of teeth. Lamps take on personalities. In a setting where objects are often meant to be admired at a distance, IKEA invites touch, humor, and—perhaps most subversively—play.
At a fair synonymous with exclusivity, IKEA’s presence reads as an unlikely disruption. Yet GREJSIMOJS—loosely translated as “thingamajig”—doesn’t attempt to mimic the polished restraint of collectible design. It rejects it outright. The collection leans into a childlike logic: objects are not fixed in meaning, but fluid, emotional, and open-ended. A chair grows fur. A pouffe reveals a mouth. A lamp becomes a creature. Function dissolves into narrative.
This ethos is rooted in something deeper than aesthetics. The collection emerges from IKEA’s global Play Report, which reframes play as an essential human behavior rather than leisure. The in-depth research argues for the fostering of creativity, connection, and cognitive development well into adulthood. As collection designer Carl Öjerstam notes, play is not something we outgrow; it evolves with us, shaping how we imagine, compete, create, and ultimately move through the world.
In this context, GREJSIMOJS becomes less a children’s collection and more a manifesto. The objects invite participation rather than observation—a significant departure from the conventions of collectible design, where things are often appreciated from distance or just meant for display. Here, tactility is everything. A furry MAMMUT chair cover transforms a familiar object into something alive––a friendly, fantasy creature––blurring the boundary between furniture and companion. The toothy storage pouffe turns cleanup into performance, its interior “mouth” quite literally consuming clutter with a playful bite.
At Art Basel, this philosophy scaled up. IKEA’s exhibition unfolded as a series of life-sized vignettes—rooms that operated less like staged interiors and more like immersive playgrounds. Visitors didn’t just view the objects; they engaged with them instinctively. Nearly everyone who passed by felt compelled to touch, pat, or interact with the pieces, regardless of age. The result was an environment that dissolved the typical barriers between adult and child, collector and participant.
This blurring is precisely where IKEA’s disruption takes hold. In a space defined by scarcity and authorship, GREJSIMOJS proposes a different kind of value system rooted in emotional resonance and shared experience. It suggests that collectibility need not be tethered to exclusivity, but can instead emerge from objects that invite ongoing interaction and reinterpretation.
Mammut Monster Chair with Faux Fur Cover
Color plays a critical role in this argument. While Pantone’s recent declaration of white as the color of the year gestures toward conceptual minimalism, IKEA moves in the opposite direction. Its own “Rebel Pink” asserts itself as a bold, exciting new neutral, replacing the passivity of white with something subtly expressive and alive. The choice feels intentional—almost cheeky. Where white recedes, pink insists. Where neutrality once meant absence, it now signals personality.
In GREJSIMOJS, color, texture, and form converge to challenge the quiet codes of contemporary design culture. The collection doesn’t whisper; it hums, squeaks, and occasionally roars. And in doing so, it reframes play as a serious design strategy capable of reshaping how we furnish our homes, but how we define value, authorship, and experience within the design world itself.
To shop the collection, visit ikea.com.
Photography courtesy of IKEA.
The Trim House by KWK Promes Splits the Difference
When KWK Promes was invited to submit a concept for a house in Vilnius, Lithuania, the parameters might have sounded like an architect’s dream: Here was a private client selecting a firm via competition to envision a home on a generous suburban footprint.
“This is an area characterized by loose, traditional development, with houses and summer cottages nestled among trees and expansive recreational grounds,” the firm explains. “On the plot included in the competition, as well as in its surroundings, there were once wooden houses from the interwar period, which have not survived to the present day.”
Based in Katowice, Poland, and led by Robert Konieczny, KWK Promes is an innovative firm known internationally for its bold residential and cultural projects. So it comes as no surprise that it was chosen to design the house in Vilnius.
Its idea was simple: By raising part of the house one level up, the patio space is doubled, ushering daylight deep into the spaces within. The living area, with its communal spaces, would be on the ground level and the bedrooms above. A simple, yet effective, plan.
Then, in 2017, the site was halved just before the architects could begin the build: The Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union came to power and reduced the allowable building footprint by 50 percent. Instead of bailing — and following the client’s instinct to start looking for a new site — KWK Promes convinced the owner to stay and reduce the home’s surface area by 40 percent. “As a result, a triangular floor plan emerged.”
While most architects will tell you that they need constraints in order to conceptualize, this was going above and beyond. The firm effectively sliced the home in half — its diagram shows how the final form emerged — and made it better. The tighter geometries created dynamic, idiosyncratic conditions in a house that now measures 3,230 square feet.
Instead of a double patio, the house now wraps its two levels around an interior courtyard. The building is a composition of concrete and glass, its sharp angles — the most dramatic being a flat-iron elevation — complemented by the curved curtain wall of the atrial volume. The interior (by Yes. Design Architecture) features a sculptural spiral staircase as a focal point against minimal furnishings and neutral finishes — save for the ostentatiously veined marble of the kitchen island.
Completed in 2025, Trim House shows how innovative thinking can overcome the steepest obstacles and that smaller is sometimes better.
To see this and other works by the firm, visit kwkpromes.pl.
Photos by Jakub Certowicz and Juliusz Sokołowski.
Lakeside Farms Coqueiros Beach / Estúdio Vinicius Macêdo + Novais Arquitetura
- architects: Estúdio Vinicius Macêdo
- architects: Novais Arquitetura
- Location: Aquiraz, Brasil
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Felipe Petrovsky
- Area: 1185.0 m2
The Settecento Chair by Leonardo Liendo Brings New Depth To Stability
Stability – what a novel concept in this day and age. We search, create, and yearn for the balance of life to “just slow down a bit,” unwilling to admit that is in fact true of all moments in time, and probably those in the future. A wide stance is needed to maintain sustained strength, consistency one of our most silent but deadly weapons. The Settecento Chair by Leonardo Liendo creates space to sit among what could be considered chaos, a sign of welcome in the eye of the storm.
Taking inspiration from Gio Ponti’s 699 Superleggera, these familiar typologies are translated through the lens of steel rather than wood, creating unique vertices all their own. Two continuous curved tubes form both the legs and backrest, reducing the structure to its most essential gesture while maintaining a clear and recognizable silhouette. A perforated, CNC laser-cut seat lessens overall weight, yet adds a charming transparency as well—its openings offering ventilation and drainage, making the chair equally at home indoors or out.
Multiple powder-coated colors make this project modern and virtually indestructible. The four colors are as follows: Caffè, a deep brown; Terracotta, a warm brown; Pistacchio, a yellow-leaning green; and Metallo, a clear gloss lacquer that preserves the integrity of the steel while revealing its material honesty.
Double bars on the back distribute weight more evenly than a singular bar, a subtle nod to Ponti’s iconic design language. Placed closer together, they offer a more controlled leverage when handling the chair, allowing for greater ease and accessibility in use. The result is an object that feels intuitive in the hand as much as it does stable beneath the body—where interaction becomes second nature rather than effort.
Designed and produced entirely in Argentina, the chair balances industrial precision with a hands-on sensibility. Each component is bent, welded, and assembled with care, reinforcing a dialogue between machine process and human touch.
Leonardo Liendo, based in Córdoba, Argentina, balances a highly experimental process with meticulous sensitivity to form and function. Clear logic follows his work, pieces immediately expressing their purpose with distinction. The Settecento Chair platforms familiar shapes that bridge a warmth of tradition and the freshness of modernity—an object that feels both remembered and newly resolved.
To learn more about the Settocento Chair by Leonardo Liendo, visit leonardoliendo.com.
Photography by Sofia Quiroga.
Extension of a Primary School - New School Pavilion and Multipurpose Hall / Bakyta architekti
- architects: Bakyta architekti
- Location: Bernolákovo, Slovakia
- Project Year: 2024
- Photographs: Matej Hakár
- Area: 3986.0 m2
House Meriportti / LUO Architects
What Is the Technosphere and Why Does It Redefine Architecture?
At a time when satellites orbit the planet, submarine cables sustain the global flow of data, and algorithms organize everyday life, a question emerges within architecture: at what scale are we actually designing today?
While design was once primarily shaped by local or regional conditions, it is now entangled in chains that begin with resource extraction, pass through industrial systems, and extend across planetary infrastructures that are often invisible, yet operate continuously and interdependently.
Within this shift, architecture begins to act as a mediator of a much larger field: the technosphere.
The German Pavilion at the Kerala Literature Festival 2026 / The Purple Ink Studio
- architects: The Purple Ink Studio
- Location: Bengaluru, India
- Project Year: 2026
- Photographs: Saurabh Suryan
- Photographs: Stories of Kunju, Advait Vinod
- Area: 11000.0 m2
How Terraco Enhances Thermal Efficiency and Facade Longevity in Prefabricated Buildings
The global offsite construction market—encompassing modular, precast concrete, and hybrid prefabricated systems—was valued at USD 172 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 225.7 billion by 2030 (CAGR 4.9–8%). In the UAE, government targets call for 25–30% offsite content in public projects by 2030; the UK currently leads globally, with 15–20% of housing using offsite solutions. Offsite manufacturing is increasingly promoted as the sustainable future of construction, with benefits including reduced waste, accelerated delivery, and improved quality control. Sustainability is not defined by how quickly a building is assembled. It is defined by how long it performs.