Car design trends: Frankfurt Motor Show 2011

We are at the start of the second life of the automobile. Up until recently, cars were more of less about individual mobility, personal space, about ownership. It has been about creating beautiful or quirky sculpture. With our diminishing fossil fuel reserves, concerns for the environment and world economic recession, the closeted, cosy world of the automobile has had to shift. I recall going to see controversial ex-BMW design boss Chris Bangle... Read More

Stirling Prize winner: Zaha Hadid’s Evelyn Grace

This year’s RIBA Stirling Prize winner Evelyn Grace Academy in London’s Brixon carries all the hallmarks of a Zaha Hadid designed building – strong outlines, futuristic curves, slants, jaunty angles and impressive dimensions. The exterior is an amalgamation of sheer metallic facades and sculpted reflective surfaces, making it appear from the outside a dynamic, streamlined, high performance building. #gallery-2 { margin:... Read More

London Design Festival 2011 higlights

At the Grand Entrance to the Victoria & Albert Museum sits a giant installation cascading down the steps – the dramatic and soaring Timber Wave responding to the museum’s vast, ornamental and multilayered façade. This is the work of London firm Amanda Levete Architects who, with the help of structural engineer Arup, has created this complex three-dimensional latticework spiral from American red oak, using lamination techniques normally... Read More

Dixon, Hadid, Béhar, Baccarat, Aston Martin at Milan

The global design community descended on Milan last month to celebrate creativity as established and new voices presented their latest innovations at the coveted Salone Internazionale del Mobile, the international furniture fair. We have reported on some of the highlights including Zaha Hadid and Mini in Mutant Architecture & Design, Royal College of Art’s Intent and BMW, Flos and Paul Cocksedge’s Sestoseno. Here are some... Read More

Milan Show: Mutant Architecture & Design

Installations by Zaha Hadid Architects, Ingo Maurer, Mini and other world architects and designers decorate the gardens of the Università degli Studi di Milano. On this dazzling spring day their presence visually contrasting with the crumbling beauty of this magnificent sixteenth-century state university building in Milan. Initiated by design magazine Interni, Mutant Architecture & Design proposes an exploration of the notion of mutant in... Read More

Maxxi: Hadid’s Stirling Prize winner

These are images of the RIBA Stirling Prize 2010 winning design by architect Zaha Hadid. Described as ‘a building for the staging of art’, her striking new Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome is the first Italian public museum devoted entirely to contemporary art and architecture. Maxxi sits on the outskirts of the city, locally juxtaposed with army barracks and industrial warehouses, overlooking central Rome. Its structurally... Read More