Serpentine Pavilion by Sou Fujimoto

This is the latest Serpentine Gallery Pavilion designed by Sou Fujimoto and unveiled yesterday. At 41, the Japanese architect is the youngest creative to participate in the design of this temporary structure that resides in London’s Kensington Garden for four months. His creation is a delicate, three-dimensional latticed structure made of 20mm fine steel poles that... Read More

Memory Marathon at the Serpentine

‘We move so fast that memory is something we can only try to grasp,’ says Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. The annual Serpentine Gallery Pavilion – this year created by Ai in collaboration with architects Herzog & de Meuron - inspires Memory Marathon. The three-day event sees leading artists, writers, filmmakers, scientists, architects, musicians and theorists... Read More

London Design Festival 2012

The London Design Festival opened yesterday at its main hub, the V&A. The festival sees a host of designers, showrooms, design organisations and retailers participating in over 200 events across the city. For a dramatic entrance to the V&A, designer Dominic Harris of Cinimod Studio has collaborated with lighting specialist Philips to create a temporary lighting installation... Read More

Book review: London Portrait of the City

‘When a man is tired of London,’ English author Samuel Johnson famously said in 1777, ‘he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’ And so begins London Portrait of the City preparing the reader for what is a sensory feast celebrating this city. It is easy to mock London. This giant metropolis can seem unruly at times – the transport system... Read More

Olympic Velodrome in action

The Velodrome by London practice Hopkins Architects combines clean lines with ecological thinking. This elegant building, created to house one of the fastest bike tracks for the 2012 London Olympics, forms one of the ‘big five’ projects in the Olympic Park – the main hub of the Games. The building was designed to be simple to construct using lightweight material. Sustainable... Read More

Audi’s cyberstore concept

Chris Cunningham opened the first Audi City cyberstore in the heart of London today with the premier of his latest work Jaqapparatus 1. Here the London-based artist and filmmaker fuses live performance, robotics, sculpture and music – his two industrial machine creations use powerful lasers to attack, repel, communicate and dance with each other in a surreal mating display.... Read More

Home in the Arab world

The private space is seldom a major topic for an international exhibition, especially one that focuses on the Arab world. ‘Home: Contemporary Architectural Interpretations of the Home in the Arab World’ has set out to do just this. This intriguing exhibition, intimately curated at the Mosaic Rooms in London, explores the domestic architectural space in the context of the... Read More

BMW electric i store

The world’s population is moving to cities on a scale never seen before and the burgeoning megacities simply demands a new approach to mobility. Admittedly it has been revealing witnessing how carmakers have reacted to this. Some have put their hearts and souls into it; others have sat quietly on the fence waiting to see how the story unfolds. BMW is amongst the former... Read More

Serpentine Pavilion by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei

There is something quite enchanting, and perhaps a little sad, about a structure designed by some of the leading creative minds of our time that is commissioned to be temporary, there only for a brief few months. This has been the premise behind the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions, which sees buildings erected in the heart of London, in Kensington Gardens, each year from June through... Read More

Exhibitions: Bauhaus Art as Life

It is near impossible to be a designer in this day and age and not have been in one way or another influenced by the Bauhaus. The modern world’s most famous art school operated relatively briefly – between 1919 and 1933 – yet it changed the way we see, think and create. Bauhaus united art and technology, its utopian vision sought to change society in the aftermath... Read More