Crosby Studios, the creative practice founded by Harry Nuriev, has developed new NikeSKIMS retail environments in Tokyo and Shanghai, extending the partnership between spatial design and performance fashion. The projects include a dedicated café and retail pop-up in Tokyo, alongside a new shopping destination in Shanghai. Working with NikeSKIMS creative teams, Crosby Studios brings the visual identity of the Nike and SKIMS collaboration into physical spaces through sculptural displays, distinctive materials, and carefully organized product presentations.

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The Tokyo project occupies two locations in the Jingumae district of Shibuya. The retail pop-up presents the NikeSKIMS Fall Winter 2026 collection, while a separate café introduces a hospitality element nearby. The spaces create different opportunities to experience the brand, connecting performance apparel with an environment that reflects local culture.

The Tokyo pop-up occupies a building associated with the SKWAT regeneration initiative by DAIKEI MILLS. Its exterior features a black upper volume above a transparent glass frontage and exposed concrete base. Nike and SKIMS branding appears across the dark façade, while interior lighting draws attention to the retail space at street level.

Inside, Crosby Studios uses warm lighting and metallic surfaces to establish the design language. Amber-lit shelving accommodates sculptural figures with different body shapes and poses, extending the presentation beyond conventional merchandise displays. Chrome clothing rails, curved metallic seating, and illuminated ceilings introduce additional architectural details. Wall-mounted torso forms display the collection’s bras, connecting the interior presentation to NikeSKIMS’ focus on the body and fit.

The NikeSKIMS Café occupies the nearby StandBy venue, approximately one minute from the pop-up. Its chocolate-brown exterior features large windows and three-dimensional branding, maintaining a recognizable visual connection to the retail installation.

The café introduces traditional Japanese refreshments through tea-based beverages and wagashi sweets. A glass display presents the confectionery, bringing another carefully arranged element into the customer experience. The concept incorporates Japanese food culture into the brand’s Tokyo presence.

In Shanghai, Crosby Studios contributes to NikeSKIMS’ first physical retail destination in mainland China. Located at HKRI Taikoo Hui, the pop-up opened to the public on September 29 following a preview hosted by Kim Kardashian on September 28.

The Tokyo and Shanghai projects continue Crosby Studios’ work with NikeSKIMS following its earlier Paris pop-up, which Nuriev designed around curved architectural forms and chocolate-toned interiors. Across these projects, the studio explores how color, material, and display structures can communicate a fashion brand’s identity through architecture.

Through these three spaces, Crosby Studios develops distinct approaches to temporary retail and hospitality, using architecture to connect NikeSKIMS’ products with the experience of visiting each location.

View Gallery 19 images

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Pareil, the architecture studio founded by Caroline Weill and Laetitia Paradis, has completed the renovation of Sery, a 110-square-meter house in Marseille’s Belle de Mai neighborhood. Situated on a rocky outcrop overlooking the city, the single-storey residence originally featured an inefficient layout that limited its connection to the surrounding garden and urban views. The architects reorganized the interior to create a functional family home, prioritizing natural light, open spaces, and simple materials within a limited budget.

INTERIOR DESIGN

The project’s central intervention focuses on the main living area, which now accommodates the daily activities of a large family. Pareil reconfigured the floor plan to establish a spacious communal environment connecting the living room, dining area, and kitchen. A large folding glass wall opens directly toward the south-facing terrace and garden, allowing the interior to extend outdoors. When fully open, the glazed structure creates a continuous connection between the living space and the exterior.

The architects also introduced a dual orientation to the main living area. A second outdoor space faces the city, providing views across Marseille and access to the laundry room. This arrangement brings daylight into the residence from different directions and strengthens its relationship with the surrounding environment. The renovation takes advantage of the property’s elevated location, which previously played a limited role in the interior organization.

Pareil approached the private areas with the same focus on spatial efficiency. The revised layout accommodates three bedrooms and a bathroom, while the main bedroom connects directly to the rear terrace. The floor plan also includes an entrance with storage and a restroom, alongside a pantry that supports the kitchen. These changes establish a clearer distribution between communal rooms, private spaces, and service areas.

Material selection responds directly to the project’s financial constraints. The architects chose raw, functional finishes, including varnished anhydrite screed flooring, and kept interior partitions to a minimum. Their approach directs attention toward the proportions of the rooms and the natural light entering through the openings. The renovation also addresses insulation throughout the house, improving comfort while maintaining a restrained architectural language.

Inside, white surfaces establish a consistent visual treatment across the rooms. Built-in shelving accommodates books and everyday objects, while wooden furniture introduces warmer tones against the pale flooring. The living area features a wood-burning stove, and the kitchen incorporates open storage. These elements contribute to the domestic character of the renovated residence.

The project reflects Pareil’s broader approach to working with existing buildings. Founded in 2023, the Paris- and Marseille-based practice concentrates on residential renovation, extensions, and restructuring. Weill and Paradis develop their projects through careful consideration of their environmental and human contexts, placing particular importance on the relationship between architecture, natural elements, and everyday use.

For Sery, the studio uses the house’s existing structure and geographical setting to guide its decisions. The architects establish stronger connections between interior rooms and exterior terraces while preserving the simplicity of the original single-storey arrangement.

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Location: Marseille 03 – France
Floor space: 110m2
Client: privé
Architects: Pareil
Structural engineer: Polystructures
General contractor: APR concept
Roofing: TP construction
Interior joinery: Mohamed Mehawed
Photo credits: Jean-Baptiste Thiriet

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Most interior design and architecture studios have at least one project they would rather photograph than revisit. The handover images are still doing good work in the portfolio: the palette reads exactly as drawn, the seating holds the room together, the fabric looks like a decision rather than a default. Walk back in eighteen months later and the architecture is untouched. The joinery is intact, the lighting still models the space the way it was meant to. What has changed is the surface. Arms have gone grey where hands rest, seat cushions carry the shadow of everyone who has used them, and the pale weave that once made the scheme feel calm now just looks tired.

Nothing failed in any technical sense. The specification held, the warranty was never called on, the client never complained in writing. And yet the room no longer says what the drawings promised. That gap between the designed condition and the lived one tends to open at a single point in the process: the moment materials were chosen.

However, fabrics are an important part of every project – and so is the upholstery maintenance. ARCHISCENE editors investigate: 

Why Material Decisions Rarely Account for Their Own Lifecycle

Material specification carries an enormous amount of a project’s character, and it is usually resolved against two questions: does this serve the concept, and does it fit the procurement budget. Both can be answered on the day, with a sample in hand and a number on a schedule. When it comes to the upholstery maintenance, the maintenance alone cannot. It asks what the material will look like after four winters of sunlight, a thousand sittings and one spilled glass of red, which is a question nobody in the room can answer with any precision while the FF&E package is being closed out.

The technical data that does exist points in a particular direction. Abrasion counts, lightfastness ratings and pilling grades all describe how a textile resists wear. None of them fully explain how it responds to routine care or professional upholstery cleaning, how often that can happen before the hand changes, or what occurs when a facilities contractor applies the wrong method to a solvent-only weave. Performance is measured as endurance, not as serviceability.

There is also a simple structural reason. For most practices the contractual relationship ends somewhere around handover and snagging. The consequences of a material decision arrive two to five years later, in a building the designer no longer visits, and are absorbed by an operator or an owner who was never part of the conversation. Feedback loops that short are not loops at all. This is not carelessness on anyone’s part. It is a gap built into how the process is sequenced.

Real Cost Shows Up After the Project Is Delivered

Many other disciplines on a project routinely account for lifecycle considerations. Facade consultants talk about cleaning cycles and recoating intervals. Services engineers budget for filter changes and plant replacement. Interiors, and upholstery in particular, are still largely procured on capital cost, as though the day of purchase were the only transaction that mattered.

It rarely is. For example, a lounge chair that costs less upfront but needs replacing after four years may have a higher lifetime cost than a more expensive chair that remains in service for nine. Replacement can also bring additional costs, including procurement, specification work, and delivery. Cost of ownership is not an exotic idea in construction; it is simply applied unevenly, and soft furnishings sit at the end of the queue.

What makes this hard to catch is that the decline is gradual and nobody logs it. There is no failure event, no defect report, no moment at which somebody says the material has stopped working. There is only a slow drift in how the space reads, noticed first by the people who use it daily and never traced back to a line on a schedule. Clients experience that drift as disappointment, and disappointment attaches itself to the design rather than to the maintenance regime that was never set up. Replacement then becomes the reflex response, partly because it is the only remedy a client already knows how to buy.

Where This Matters Most: High-Use and High-Visibility Spaces

In a lightly used private study, a forgiving material and an attentive owner will carry a scheme for a decade without anyone thinking about it. The stakes change completely once occupancy and visibility rise together.

Hospitality is the clearest case. A lobby armchair may be occupied for eight or ten hours of a single day by a dozen different people, none of whom have any relationship to the object. A banquette in a restaurant absorbs food oils, hand creams and denim dye on a nightly cycle. Guests read that wear instantly, and they read it as a statement about the operator rather than about the textile. The interior is doing brand work whether or not it was briefed to, and worn upholstery undermines it faster than almost any other visible element.

Workplace interiors have moved the same way. Breakout seating and soft collaboration settings now take the load that task chairs used to carry alone, usually without any of the maintenance planning that was quietly attached to contract furniture.

Residential projects fail differently. The brief says low maintenance, the lifestyle conversation stops at a general nod toward children and a dog, and the specification proceeds on an idealized picture of how the room will be used. Pets bring body oils that bind to fibers and claws that find every loop in a textured weave. Small children bring everything else. None of this is unusual, and almost none of it is interrogated closely enough at the point where a fabric is being chosen.

What It Looks Like to Design With Maintenance in Mind

None of this calls for a different aesthetic. It calls for a few additional questions asked at the stage where they still change the outcome.

The first is to specify against real use rather than the brief’s description of it. How many hours a day will this piece be occupied, by whom, with what in their hands. A sofa in a show apartment and the same sofa in a serviced-residence lounge are not the same product decision, even though they are the same purchase order.

The second when it comes to upholstery maintenance is to treat cleanability as a performance criterion sitting alongside abrasion and lightfastness rather than beneath them. Cleaning codes matter here, and so does fiber behavior. Some performance fabrics are designed to withstand frequent cleaning, but actual cleanability depends on the fiber composition, fabric construction, finish, and manufacturer’s care instructions. Construction matters as much as the cloth. Removable covers, zipped cushions and accessible seams determine whether a piece can be restored or only replaced.

The third is access, which is a spatial decision as much as a material one. A banquette fixed to the floor, a window seat with a stapled cover and a built-in headboard all commit their owner to in-situ methods for the entire life of the installation. That is a perfectly reasonable commitment to make, provided it is made knowingly rather than discovered later.

The fourth is handover. A care label is not a maintenance strategy. A short schedule that names the method, a realistic interval and who performs the work turns an assumption into something the client can actually act on. It is worth being specific about that last part, because this is the point where the design intent passes into other hands. Routine vacuuming and prompt spot treatment belong to the operator, while periodic deep upholstery cleaning is specialist work, and whether it happens on a sensible cycle or only once a scheme already looks defeated is largely decided by whether anyone planned for it at specification stage.

And the last, which matters most for credibility: be honest about the limit. Some materials will not survive their setting no matter how well they are looked after. A delicate chenille may be poorly suited to intensive commercial use, even with a consistent maintenance plan. In such cases, the appropriate response is to plan for replacement in the operator’s budget rather than rely on a maintenance regime to solve a problem it cannot fix. 

Maintenance as Part of the Design Narrative, Not a Compromise

There is a quiet assumption worth dismantling, which is that needing care is a weakness in a material. Nobody reads a facade cleaning schedule as an admission that the stone was a mistake. Nobody treats a recoating interval as evidence that the timber was wrongly chosen. These are understood as the terms on which a good material performs over time, and specifying them is part of the craft.

Interiors deserve the same vocabulary and depend on regular upholstery maintenance. A textile that is cleaned on a sensible cycle and reaches year eight still looking like the decision it was has not been propped up; it has done exactly what it was specified to do. The useful shift is from the material deteriorated to the material lived its cycle the way it was designed to. One of those sentences ends a relationship with a client. The other describes a building being looked after.

A project does not end at handover. Its long-term success also depends on how materials are maintained, how they age, and whether those needs were considered during specification. Designing for the fifth year, not just the first photograph, should be part of the design process from the beginning. 

Find more furniture stories on ARCHISCENE.

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Revery Architecture brings housing, public amenities and an expanded historic church together in The Butterfly + First Baptist Church Complex in Vancouver. Spanning 605,000 square feet, the development combines a 57-storey residential tower, a seven-storey affordable rental building and the renewal of First Baptist Church within one connected urban site.

MIXED USE

The project addresses high-rise living through access to light, air and greenery. Vancouver’s mountains, ocean and forests informed an approach that draws natural elements into everyday residential spaces. Floor-to-ceiling glazing and open interiors connect apartments visually with their surroundings, while the tower introduces communal outdoor areas throughout its height.

Open-air sky gardens replace enclosed corridors on every residential floor. Residents step from elevators directly into naturally ventilated shared gardens with vegetation and views across the city. Deciduous trees rise through the building and change with the seasons, extending greenery far above street level.

These gardens also support the project’s environmental strategy. Natural ventilation, cooling and daylight contribute to an estimated 400,000 kWh in annual energy savings and reduce tower energy use by more than 10 percent compared with conventional corridor layouts. Energy modelling also indicates a 65 percent reduction in periods when suite temperatures exceed comfort thresholds during the warmest months.

Courtyards, green roofs, water features and shared amenity areas extend this approach across the site. A 50-metre lap pool uses natural light and city views as part of its setting.

The complex also combines market housing with affordable homes and social infrastructure. Childcare, counselling, recreation facilities, gathering areas, meal programs and emergency shelter support operate alongside residential spaces. The seven-storey rental building adds rooftop gardens, urban agriculture plots, outdoor kitchens and play areas. More than 25 percent of its homes contain two or more bedrooms, supporting families, seniors and different household types.

First Baptist Church remains a central component of the development. Completed in 1911, the church continues to support worship, outreach, culture and neighbourhood programs. Revery Architecture undertook seismic upgrades, foundation work, window and masonry restoration, accessibility improvements and building-system modernization. The team also rehabilitated major interior areas including the sanctuary and Pinder Hall.

Earlier alterations divided Pinder Hall into two floors. The project restores its original double-height volume and reveals timber columns, beams and trusses. The renewed space can now support performances, weddings, gatherings and cultural programming.

The tower responds directly to the scale of the church. Large openings in its chamfered base match the height of the existing bell tower, creating a physical and visual relationship between the structures. A light-filled transparent galleria connects them and provides access to community spaces.

At street level, new gardens, seating, a café and accessible public areas expand the site’s civic role. The project also provides 465 bicycle parking stalls, public car-share vehicles and resident bike- and vehicle-sharing programs.

Environmental measures extend across the complex. The project targets LEED Gold, with projected operational carbon reductions of 68 percent, rising to 85 percent with renewable energy from the onsite district energy plant. It also targets a 45 percent reduction in energy use, a 25 percent reduction in energy costs, 50 percent lower potable water use and 35 percent lower domestic water use.

Through housing, public space, environmental systems and community services, The Butterfly + First Baptist Church Complex proposes a denser form of Vancouver living built around daily access to nature and shared urban life.

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Name: The Butterfly + First Baptist Church Complex
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Certifications pursued: LEED Gold
Key Feature: A mixed-use development combining a 57-storey residential tower, affordable rental housing, community services, and the restoration and expansion of a historic church.
Project size: 605,000 square feet
Total Floors: 57
Overall height: 556 feet
Key Project Consultants:
Architecture/Interiors: Revery Architecture Inc.
Structural: Glotman Simpson
Landscape: SWA Group (Design) w/ Cornelia Oberlander & G|ALA – Gauthier & Associates Landscape Architecture, Inc. (LA of Record)
Mechanical/ Plumbing: Introba
Electrical: Nemetz & Associates, Inc.
Lighting: ARUP (Design) / Nemetz (Engineer of Record)
Sustainability & Energy Modeling: Introba
Building envelope: RDH Building Science, Inc.
Heritage Conservation: Donald Luxton & Associates, Inc.
Acoustics: BKL Consultants Ltd.
Code: LMDG Building Code Consultants Ltd.
Traffic: Bunt & Associates, Inc.
Pool: Rockingham Pool Consulting, Inc.
Wind: Gradient Wind Engineering, Inc.
Kitchen: Nella Cutlery
Door Hardware: Tillicum Agencies, Inc.
Waste Consultant: Target Zero Waste Consulting, Inc.
Construction Managers/General Contractors:
New Construction: Icon West Construction
Heritage: The Haebler Group

The post The Butterfly Creates a New Model for Vertical Living in Vancouver appeared first on Archiscene - Your Daily Architecture & Design Update.

Z8 Tower by Zaha Hadid Architects is set to move toward construction in the centre of Beijing’s Central Business District, where the project occupies a prominent site at the intersection of Jianguo Road and Jinhe East Road.

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Facing the district’s central park, the 140-metre tower responds to the alignment and urban structure of Chang’an Avenue while introducing a mixed-use programme organised as a vertical city.

Designed for Beijing Kuntai Holding Group Co., Ltd., the project brings office floors together with shopping, dining, cultural and leisure facilities within a single building. Connections to the local subway and national rail network place the tower within Beijing’s wider transport system and strengthen its role as a new commercial and civic destination.

The internal organisation combines open office floors with shared atria and public amenities. Zaha Hadid Architects developed the building around a flexible spatial framework intended to support changing workplace requirements over time. Large floorplates and communal spaces allow the programme to adapt to different enterprise needs while keeping circulation and shared facilities integrated throughout the tower.

A sequence of verandas and atria defines the western façade. These spaces draw the adjacent central park into the building and create a vertical series of planted terraces that continues through the full height of the tower. The terraces connect visually and spatially with a sunken courtyard at the base, extending the relationship between interior spaces and the surrounding public landscape.

The project uses this connection to the park as a central part of its architectural organisation. Public galleries, planted areas and shared atria establish a continuous link between the tower and the district around it. The design opens the building toward the city and gives the public programme a visible presence within Beijing’s CBD.

Environmental performance also shapes the façade. Vertical external fins extend from the mullions of the unitised glazed system to provide solar shading during Beijing’s hot summer months. During winter, the tower’s optimized thermal enclosure reduces heat loss as average temperatures fall below freezing.

Natural daylight and ventilation play a further role in the environmental strategy. Extensive galleries and atria bring light deeper into the building and support air movement through shared spaces. These elements aim to improve occupant comfort while reducing the environmental demands of the tower.

Z8 Tower covers 170,300 square metres and remains in the design development phase. Its programme combines workplace, retail, dining, culture and leisure within a single high-rise structure shaped around flexibility, public access and landscape.

Through its layered terraces, glazed façade and vertically connected public spaces, the project responds to the scale and intensity of Beijing’s business district while maintaining a direct relationship with the central park beside it. Zaha Hadid Architects positions the tower as a mixed-use civic and commercial structure shaped by the density, mobility and changing demands of the Chinese capital.

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Architect: ZHA
ZHA Principal: Patrik Schumacher
ZHA Project Directors: Satoshi Ohashi, Paulo Flores, Yang Jingwen
ZHA Project Associates: Xuexin Duan, Martin Pfleger
ZHA Project Architects: Lida Zhang, Bo Zhang
ZHA Project Team: Xuan Zhao, Xinyue Cao , Junxue Piao, Xiangfan Chen, Berkin Islam, Ding Kuai, Jiamin Lu, Junfei Chen, Junya Huang, Rui Zhao, Sven Torres, Weimeng Zhang, Wenbo Yao
ZHA Competition Project Directors: Satoshi Ohashi, Paulo Flores, Yang Jingwen
ZHA Competition Associate: Xuexin Duan
ZHA Competition Project Architect: Lida Zhang, Martin Gsandtner
ZHA Competition Project Lead: Bo Zhang
ZHA Competition Team: Berkin Islam, Ding Kuai, Hamze Machmouchi, Huiyuan Li, Junxue  Piao, Junya Huang, Keyur Mistry, Liyuan Gao, Wenbo Yao, Xinyue Cao, Yuling Ma, Yushan Chen, Shang Li, Lianyuan Ye, Xu Zheng, Yuchao Zhang, Alex Nap, Veronica Chen, Ceren Tekin, Niran Buyukkoz, Karina Linnsen
ZHA Environmental & Sustainability Team: Carlos Bausa Martinez, Shibani Choudhury
ZHA+I: Uli Blum, Danial Haziq Hamdan

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Long Island City has spent the past two decades accumulating residential towers with impressive efficiency and minimal imagination. Glass facades stacked on glass facades, their anonymity interrupted only by slight variations in mullion spacing. The neighborhood’s rapid development has generated housing, jobs, and tax revenue, but it has also produced a landscape of generic vertical stacking—buildings designed to maximize floor plates and minimize cost, with architecture treated as an afterthought to be resolved in the final rendering pass.

Against this backdrop, ODA founder Eran Chen‘s Radiant LIC reads as an act of small defiance. The building’s undulating facade of corrugated aluminum and curved balconies, located in the Queens Plaza area, refuses the orthogonal logic that has come to dominate the neighborhood. It does not stack. It flows. It transforms with the light. In a district where most buildings appear identical by evening, Radiant LIC becomes a landmark almost by accident, simply by being willing to be different.

But the project is more than a gesture of visual distinction. It represents a fundamentally different approach to how residential architecture can engage with its urban context and contribute to the lives of the people inhabiting it.

Design as Community-Building

The philosophical foundation of Radiant LIC begins with a simple premise: architecture should create a sense of belonging. This is not a fashionable sentiment in contemporary real estate development, where buildings are typically conceived as financial instruments first and habitable spaces second. Yet for Chen and ODA, the relationship is inverted. Community comes first. Everything else follows.

The facade’s horizontal banding is a direct response to this philosophy. Inspired by the path of the elevated subway train that runs adjacent to the site, the building’s corrugated panels wrap continuously from the north to the east facade, their linear movement echoing the fluidity of the train’s passage. This is not coincidental ornamentation. It is a deliberate act of contextual reading, one that translates the neighborhood’s circulatory logic into architectural expression.

The terraced balconies serve a similar purpose. By stepping the facade outward at regular intervals, ODA creates exposures that reduce wind velocity and break up the building’s mass into more human scale. But they also create visual interest at street level, generating the kind of textured, porous surface that invites human engagement rather than discouraging it. A pedestrian moving through the plaza does not simply pass the building; they experience it, register its surfaces, feel the weight of intentional design.

This is the operating principle that underpins all of ODA’s work: neighborhoods improve when architecture opens itself to its environment rather than sealing itself off from it. Porosity, in this sense, becomes a measure of responsibility. A porous building returns value to everyone around it. It creates focal points, establishes rhythm, generates the kind of visual complexity that makes neighborhoods feel lived in rather than newly minted.

Material Honesty and Temporal Depth

The choice of corrugated aluminum as the primary facade material is equally deliberate. The panels catch and refract light in ways that glass and smooth metal cannot. They create shadow and texture at every hour of the day. Critically, they age visibly. Unlike the glossy surfaces that dominate Long Island City‘s newer construction and the rest of New York, the facade’s material will develop patina over time, accumulating dust, weathering into deeper tones.

This is intentional. ODA selected a dynamic facade color that transforms throughout the day, appearing light brown in morning light and deepening into warm golden tones by evening. This interplay of changing color and corrugated texture allows the facade to reinvent itself with every passing hour and season. The building does not present itself as a finished product frozen at the moment of completion. It presents itself as a living thing, one that will accumulate history visibly, the way older neighborhoods do.

In the context of Long Island City, this represents a subtle but significant philosophical statement. Most development in the neighborhood is conceived as permanent and immutable. Once built, these towers are meant to remain unchanged, monuments to a particular moment’s assumptions about what real estate should be. Radiant LIC suggests an alternative: that buildings can be designed to age gracefully, to develop character through time rather than despite it.

Landmark Emerges

There is a particular irony in Radiant LIC becoming a landmark in Long Island City. The building was not designed to stand apart. It was designed to engage with its specific context: the train line below, the neighborhood’s emerging street life, the particular light conditions of the waterfront. The fact that it has become visually distinctive is a consequence of the intentionality embedded in every design decision, not its goal.

Yet landmark status brings its own responsibilities. Other developers will look at this building. They will see its success and be tempted to imitate its formal moves without understanding their underlying logic. The danger is that Radiant LIC‘s visual distinctiveness becomes a stylistic template rather than a model for thinking differently about architecture’s relationship to community.

Chen has articulated a hope that Radiant LIC will inspire other developers to pursue similar commitments to context-driven design. More importantly, he envisions a neighborhood where porosity becomes the norm rather than the exception, where architectural intention is understood as a requirement rather than an optional luxury. This is not a naive vision. It requires developers willing to invest additional resources in design, to resist the pressure to maximize floor plates, and to believe that community value translates eventually into financial return.

The Larger Argument

Radiant LIC makes an argument that extends far beyond the specific site it occupies. It argues that the architectural mediocrity currently dominating Long Island City is not inevitable. It is a choice. Developers choose to commission generic designs. They choose to treat facades as cost centers rather than opportunities for meaningful engagement with place. They choose to see neighborhoods as collections of isolated parcels rather than integrated ecosystems that rise or fall together.

ODA’s project suggests that different choices are possible. A building can be both financially successful and architecturally ambitious. It can respect its context while refusing anonymity. It can prioritize human experience without sacrificing market viability. These are not contradictions. They are complementary objectives.

The neighborhood that emerges from this philosophy will look and feel fundamentally different from the one currently under construction. It will have texture and character. It will invite lingering rather than discourage it. It will create the kind of visual richness that makes neighborhoods into places people choose to inhabit rather than locations they tolerate.

Discover more in our gallery: 

View Gallery 31 images

For now, Radiant LIC stands as a solitary example of what that neighborhood might become. It is a landmark not because it was designed to be, but because everything around it chose to be less. The real measure of its success will not be the attention it receives from architects or the accolades it earns. It will be whether other developers recognize in it a model worth following, and whether Long Island City gradually begins to believe that it deserves better than vertical stacking and generic glass.

The post Radiant LIC: How Intentional Design Can Transform a Neighborhood’s Visual Language appeared first on Archiscene - Your Daily Architecture & Design Update.

In 1946, Philip Johnson designed a small residential commission in Bedford, New York. The Booth House, built three years before his iconic Glass House, introduced the architectural vocabulary that would define his career: restraint, transparency, material honesty, and a fundamental respect for landscape. Nearly 80 years later, that house is being restored by architect Drew Lang and builder Ravi Arps, who acquired it as the inaugural project of their new firm, RnD. The work ahead is both straightforward and impossibly complex: fix what time has broken, preserve what makes the house architecturally vital, and carry a canonical work of American modernism into another chapter of living.

RESIDENTIAL PROJECTS ON ARCHISCENE

The tension is immediate. Restoration projects are always bound by a paradox: they must honor the past while serving the present. But restoring a Philip Johnson house raises the stakes considerably. Johnson‘s work is not merely historical; it remains intellectually alive, studied in architecture schools, referenced constantly in contemporary design discourse. His residential projects, in particular, are intimate laboratories where his ideas about the relationship between domestic space and landscape were tested at their most vulnerable scale. To restore such a house is to work under an unflinching gaze, not just from preservationists and historians, but from the architectural community itself.

For Lang and Arps, this weight is neither avoided nor diminished. It is, instead, built into the project’s philosophical foundation. RnD was conceived explicitly to bring design and construction under a single accountable standard, collapsing the distance between vision and delivery. In theory, this should allow for precision and intentionality. In practice, restoring Booth House reveals how complex that accountability becomes when the client is not a person but a building whose original intentions have been clouded by decades of use, neglect, and accumulated change.

The House That Time Forgot

Booth House spent the first phase of its life as a weekend retreat for Richard and Olga Booth, the clients for whom Johnson designed it. That role lasted until 1955, when architect Sirkka Damora and photographer Robert Damora acquired the property. The Damoras‘ tenure was transformative in ways both visible and invisible. Robert Damora‘s photographs of the house became canonical images in the documentation of American modernist architecture; Sirkka‘s care extended the building’s life through thoughtful stewardship. For decades, the house was both a lived home and a meaningful artifact of the modern architectural legacy.

The original images pre-renovation: 

View Gallery 57 images

That dual role, however, left its own kind of damage. A house that is simultaneously a home and a monument occupies an unstable position. It cannot simply be inhabited; it must be performed. The careful attention that made Booth House legible as architecture also froze it in time, resistant to the small modifications that domestic life requires. When the Damoras eventually departed, the house entered a long period of decline, less through dramatic trauma than through the patient entropy of deferred maintenance, system failures, and the particular damage that comes from a building no longer being actively lived in.

The photographs reveal this plainly. The interiors Lang and Arps inherited show a house in advanced stages of deterioration: ceilings collapsed, surfaces peeling, systems failed. The architectural clarity that Johnson had achieved through material restraint remained visible beneath the decay, like a palimpsest. The brick chimneys still stood. The proportions still read. But the building had crossed a threshold where restoration could no longer be routine preservation work. It had become rescue archaeology.

Ethics of Intervention

This is where the philosophical commitment of RnD becomes consequential. The firm’s stated approach is to preserve architectural clarity while adapting for contemporary living. That formulation sounds reasonable in a press release. In practice, it requires hundreds of decisions, each one a negotiation between historical integrity and functional necessity.

Consider a degraded ceiling. Restoration could mean carefully patching and repainting, retaining evidence of the house’s age and the particular way time has marked it. Restoration could also mean complete replacement with materials that match the original specification exactly, erasing the visible history of decay. Both are defensible choices. Neither is neutral. The first preserves authenticity through weathering; the second pursues authenticity through materials and intention. Which one honors Johnson‘s work?

These questions multiply across every surface, every system, every material junction in the house. They are not merely technical problems to be solved. They are interpretive problems that require a particular kind of architectural thinking: the ability to read a building not just as a finished object but as a record of decisions, constraints, aspirations, and accidents. It requires humility about what can be known and what remains speculative.

Lang and Arps have signaled their awareness of this burden by committing to document the restoration process. This is not a typical preservation gesture. Most restoration work is invisible once complete; the house presents itself as it always was, healed of its trauma. By making the process visible, RnD is acknowledging that restoration is itself a form of authorship. The choices made during this project will shape what Booth House becomes. Transparency about those choices is a way of taking responsibility for that authorship rather than pretending to be mere custodians.

The Second Life

There is another layer to this complexity. Booth House is not being restored to become a museum or a study center. It will be returned to the market as a residential property. Someone will live there. This is where the tension between preservation and adaptation becomes not theoretical but practical and immediate.

A contemporary resident will need climate control systems that Johnson did not anticipate. They will want kitchens and bathrooms that function according to current standards. They will expect connectivity, thermal efficiency, acoustic performance. They may want to change how the spaces are used, how light enters rooms, what activities occur in what areas. The house’s original program (a weekend retreat for a specific couple in 1946) does not align with how domestic life is actually lived in 2026.

This problem is not unique to Booth House. Every adaptive reuse project faces it. But it is sharpened here by the particular authority of Johnson‘s design. His spaces were conceived with precision. The relationship between interior and exterior, the way materials meet and transition, the proportion of openings to walls, the path through the house from entry to living spaces—these were not afterthoughts. They were the point. To alter them is to diminish what makes the house architecturally significant.

Yet to preserve them exactly is to create a house that cannot be lived in comfortably by anyone but a Johnson scholar willing to accept discomfort as the price of historical fidelity. This is the real bind. And it is not solved by clever compromises or technical sophistication. It is solved by accepting that some tension is irreducible, that the best outcome is not perfect harmony but rather a careful calibration of what is essential to preserve and what can be thoughtfully adapted.

The render images offer a preview of RnD‘s approach. The restored interior spaces maintain Johnson‘s spatial and material logic: clean lines, honest materials, a strong relationship between inside and outside. The courtyard design shows how contemporary landscaping can reinforce rather than contradict the modernist clarity of the house. These are not radical reimaginings. They are conservative in the best sense: preserving the generative principles that made the house work while updating the specific means by which those principles are expressed.

What It Means to Care

At the center of this project is a question that goes beyond architecture: What does it mean to care for something you did not create and cannot fully understand? The Damoras knew. For decades, they lived with Booth House, attended to it, documented it, and through that long attention, became part of its history. Their stewardship is visible in the fact that the house, despite decades of decline, remains legible as a Johnson work. Neglect did not erase his intention.

Lang and Arps inherit this responsibility. They did not design Booth House, and they will not live in it after restoration. Their relationship to the building is professional and limited in time. Yet they have taken on the burden of its future, committing resources and attention to a project that will generate no personal reward beyond the satisfactions of craftsmanship and the knowledge that something important has been preserved.

This is the work that rarely gets celebrated in architecture. It is not the design of new buildings but the careful maintenance of existing ones. It is not innovation but stewardship. It does not result in bylines or commissions or the kind of cultural visibility that accrues to architects who build new landmarks. Yet without this work, the architectural legacy becomes a museum, a set of historical artifacts rather than a living tradition.

Booth House‘s restoration, then, is more than the repair of a specific building. It is a statement about what architects believe architecture is for, and what they believe they owe to the work that came before them.RnD‘s commitment to making the process visible suggests they understand this. They are not restoring Booth House in secret, presenting it afterward as if it had always been this way. They are inviting scrutiny, documentation, and accountability. In doing so, they are modeling a different kind of architectural practice, one where stewardship is as valued as innovation, and where respect for the past is understood not as nostalgia but as an ethical obligation to the future.

Final design of the renovated project: 

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Booth House will eventually open to a new resident, carrying forward eighty years of architectural intention, photographic documentation, and careful care. When that happens, the project will have succeeded not by erasing time but by acknowledging it, not by trying to return the house to some imagined original state but by understanding that restoration is itself a creative act, one that requires both technical precision and philosophical clarity about what matters most.

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Casa Akina does not announce itself. Situated in Villa de Álvarez, Colima (Mexico), the residence designed by Di Frenna Arquitectos reveals itself gradually, almost reluctantly, as if the architecture itself understands that restraint is more compelling than gesture. The house emerges not as a singular form demanding attention, but as a sequence of encounters, each one calibrated to deepen the inhabitant’s awareness of light, material, and the passage of time.

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This quality of gradual disclosure is fundamental to the project’s conceptual foundation. Before the house fully exposes its form, before its volumes and spatial relationships become legible, the architecture invites a slower mode of engagement. Vegetation appears first, tentative and alive. Light enters and transforms. A central void, the organizing principle of the entire composition, can be sensed before it is seen. The house proposes, in its very structure, a different tempo of inhabitation, one where movement matters as much as arrival and where time becomes not merely something to fill but something to experience.

Material as Time Keeper

The architectural language of Casa Akina rests on a deliberately constrained material palette: concrete, stone, and breeze blocks, each chosen for their capacity to register the passage of light rather than resist it. The board-formed concrete that wraps the primary volumes, the stone flooring that anchors interior spaces, the breeze blocks that establish rhythm and filter sunlight into moving patterns,  these materials do not differentiate zones through color or texture contrast. Instead, they create continuity through shared tonal range and a collective responsiveness to changing light.

This is architecture that understands materiality not as static surface but as temporal register. Gray concrete at dawn reads warm, almost amber. By midday, it becomes pale and austere. As afternoon light angles lower, the same surfaces take on golden qualities, becoming almost luminous. The house itself remains constant; its perception, its very presence in the inhabitant’s daily experience, transforms continuously. To live in Casa Akina is to inhabit a space that makes visible the invisible fact of time’s passage.

Matia Di Frenna Müller and Omar Anguiano de la Rosa, the architects behind this project, have conceived every element, stone flooring, board-formed façades, breeze blocks, built-in counters, shelving, display surfaces,  as components of a single architectural body. Nothing feels added or imposed. Everything belongs, which is to say everything is essential. The material language does not simply define the architecture; it actively supports the quotidian rhythms of inhabitation with a sense of such naturalness that the distinction between building and living becomes permeable.

Layered Thresholds and the Courtyard as Mediator

The organization of Casa Akina turns on a series of transitional spaces, each designed to complicate and deepen the relationship between interior and exterior. The first courtyard reveals itself not suddenly but through layers. The living and dining areas open gradually toward this outdoor room, their apertures calculated to frame rather than expose, to suggest rather than declare. As these interior volumes unfold, vegetation emerges as a tactile, almost intimate presence, no longer backdrop but participant in the spatial experience.

This is where the house, to use the architects’ own language, begins to breathe. Interior and exterior spaces recognize one another across a threshold that feels less like a boundary than a point of acknowledgment. The courtyard becomes a space where competing spatial logics acknowledge each other’s presence without collapsing into a single unified field.

The upper terraces continue this philosophy of graduated revelation. Rather than exposing bedrooms and the study directly to expansive views, the design pulls back, recessing volumes to create smaller terraces that bring each private space into closer, more intimate relationship with the surrounding vegetation. Privacy here is not isolation; it is proximity to the living landscape. The house moves beyond the conventional notion of shelter as protection from the exterior and instead positions itself as an extension of its surroundings, a built form that participates in rather than dominates the site.

The Terrace as Threshold

The central terrace functions as Casa Akina’s pivotal gesture. Here, volumes open entirely through expanses of glass and steel structures that deliberately dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior. The terrace becomes a plane suspended between architecture and landscape, an almost uninterrupted horizontal surface where the distinction between building and site becomes deliberately ambiguous. Vegetation is no longer simply a visual element framing the architecture; it becomes part of the lived experience, something to move through, to touch, to exist alongside.

This dissolution of boundaries is achieved through what appears as simplicity but is actually considerable restraint. Steel and glass structures do not call attention to themselves through form or expression. They simply allow the space to function as an extension, a continuation. The material palette remains consistent. The spatial logic remains coherent. What changes is the quality of habitation: more open, more permeable, more directly responsive to climate and the natural cycles occurring outside.

Wood as Warmth and Counterpoint

The introduction of wood represents a deliberate tonal shift within the project’s material narrative. Used selectively in doors, furniture, and textiles, wood introduces an intimacy that the mineral character of exposed concrete and stone cannot provide alone. It softens without sentimentalizing, adding warmth without resorting to decoration or applied comfort.

This restraint in the use of warmer materials is itself an act of strategic discipline. A lesser architecture might introduce wood more liberally, might use it to create visual contrast or to break the severity of the concrete shell. Casa Akina understands that judicious application of warm materials within a predominantly mineral environment creates more psychological depth than would a more eclectic approach. The wood does not compete with the concrete; it envelops and balances it, allowing the inhabitant to move between registers of experience without a jarring transition.

Light Fractured and Revealed

The breeze blocks, those humble perforated concrete units, perform work that goes far beyond their conventional role as infill or non-structural partition. At Casa Akina, they establish the rhythm of the day itself. As sunlight passes through their perforations, it fragments into patterns of shadow that travel slowly across walls and floors, creating a visual register of time’s movement that is subtle but undeniable. At certain hours, the house becomes defined by these moving silhouettes, temporary and ephemeral yet undeniably present.

This use of breeze blocks reflects a design sensibility rooted in material honesty and phenomenological attention. The blocks are not hidden or apologized for; they are celebrated as agents of transformation, as participants in the spatial experience rather than merely functional elements. This approach echoes the material philosophy that runs through the entire project: materiality is not decoration; it is the primary means through which the architecture communicates with inhabitants over time.

The Stance of the Building Itself

What distinguishes Casa Akina most fundamentally is its refusal to impose itself on the site. This is not a architecture of dominance or statement. Rather, the house allows itself to be shaped by light, time, and the vegetation that grows around it. The building functions not as an isolated sculptural object placed on a property, but as a sequence of pauses, a series of moments where inhabiting becomes synonymous with observing and experiencing.

This philosophical stance reflects a maturation within contemporary Mexican residential architecture, one that moves beyond the spectacular gestures that have defined much recent work in the region. Di Frenna Arquitectos, based in Mexico, has crafted a project that demonstrates that restraint, material consistency, and phenomenological depth can produce architecture of considerable power precisely because it makes no demand for attention. It simply exists, quietly, allowing the inhabitants to discover its intelligence through living within it.

Building as Temporal Instrument

To describe Casa Akina as a residential project is technically accurate but experientially incomplete. The house functions, fundamentally, as an instrument for the perception of time. Its material palette transforms according to light. Its breeze blocks fragment sunlight into moving shadows. Its courtyards and terraces establish rhythms of movement and pause. Its relationship between interior and exterior shifts according to the angle of approach and the season of year.

This understanding of architecture as a vehicle for temporal awareness is increasingly rare in contemporary practice, particularly within residential design, where commercial pressures often push toward visual spectacle or programmatic novelty. Casa Akina resists both. It proposes instead that a house, at its most essential, is a space where daily life becomes legible, where the invisible fact of time’s passage becomes visible, and where the relationship between inhabitant and material becomes something to contemplate rather than simply to use.

Discover more of the project in ARCHISCENE Magazine’s gallery: 

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The completion of this project in July 2025, after a construction period beginning in November 2023, marks the arrival of a work of considerable restraint and considerable depth. In an architectural moment often dominated by gesture and formal innovation, Casa Akina offers something more essential: the quiet confidence of a building that understands its own purpose and pursues it with discipline and precision.

Project type: Residential
Location: Fraccionamiento Las Parotas, Villa de Álvarez, Colima, Mexico
Built area: 497.50 m²
Start of construction: November 15, 2023
Completion: July 30, 2025
Architectural design: Di Frenna Arquitectos – official page. 
Design team: Arq. Matia Di Frenna Müller; Arq. Omar Anguiano de la Rosa
Photography: Lorena Darquea

Materials and finishes:
Exposed board-formed concrete, natural stone, breeze blocks, wood, glass, and steel.

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Pierattelli Architetture has renovated a 1950s villa on the Argentario coast in southern Tuscany, preserving the character of the original residence while strengthening its relationship with the Mediterranean. Set into a rocky promontory with direct access to the water, the 450-square-meter house occupies three levels, with terraces extending toward the sea at each floor.

HOUSING

The existing architecture provided the starting point for the intervention. Pierattelli Architetture retained the villa’s primary forms and volumes while reorganizing its interiors and introducing larger openings toward the coast. The architects expanded and partially redesigned the terraces, creating exterior spaces that extend the rooms toward the horizon.

Andrea Pierattelli describes the experience through a nautical reference, explaining that the studio wanted residents to feel as though they were aboard a yacht. Several viewpoints remove almost everything except the sea from sight, giving parts of the house a sense of suspension above the water. Glass surfaces reinforce this relationship by bringing daylight into the interiors and maintaining long views across the coastline.

The façade retains its original stone surfaces, complemented by horizontal bands in soft tones that continue along the terraces and roofline. New vegetation enters the terraced areas, reducing the visual weight of the building against its rocky surroundings.

The upper terrace provides the main entrance and leads to the sleeping quarters. Bedrooms and a master suite occupy this level, with the latter including a walk-in closet and bathroom. A new exterior staircase connects the upper floor with terraces below.

The lower level contains the primary living spaces, including the living room, kitchen and dining area. Neutral tones dominate the interiors, with occasional red and blue accents. Wood and travertine establish the main material vocabulary, while Fiemme 3000 developed the flooring in collaboration with the studio. Raised timber decking covers the terraces. Brushed steel and Corten steel frame windows and doors, with a C5 protective coating addressing exposure to salt spray.

Pierattelli Architetture also designed numerous custom elements, including the kitchen, connecting doorways and selected beds. Furnishings from Arflex, Lema, Molteni, B&B Italia, Flexform, Gervasoni and other manufacturers sit alongside lighting by Flos, Louis Poulsen, FontanaArte and Luceplan.

The renovation extends across approximately 1,800 square meters of exterior space. An infinity pool occupies the existing terrace system overlooking the Mediterranean. Planting gradually covers retaining walls that reach up to five meters in height, reducing their visual presence as vegetation develops.

The project succeeds through restraint. Instead of transforming the 1950s villa beyond recognition, Pierattelli Architetture uses terraces, glazing, materials and landscape design to clarify its strongest existing asset: an unusually direct relationship with the Tuscan coast.

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The Hive Architects approaches the Cycladic landscape through subtraction with VELUM, a complex of four cave dwellings planned for completion in 2028. Set across 360 square meters, the project uses the existing slope to determine the architecture, placing much of the residential program below ground while maintaining direct connections to the Aegean horizon.

RESIDENTIAL

The natural relief provides the project’s primary organizational structure. Four independent residences follow the contours of the site, giving every unit privacy while maintaining a coherent relationship across the complex. Their subterranean placement reduces the amount of built volume visible from a distance. Planted roofs continue the terrain above the interiors, with Mediterranean vegetation covering much of the architecture and reconnecting the roofs with the surrounding ground.

This approach gives VELUM an intentionally low profile. From farther away, openings in the terrain appear almost like fissures cut into the slope. The architecture becomes clearer at closer range, where curved walls, terraces, pools and glazed façades reveal the residential program embedded beneath the surface.

The Hive Architects uses a continuous sculptural language to define roofs, boundaries and exterior areas. Smooth beige plaster follows the curves of the architecture and picks up tones found in the surrounding Cycladic terrain. Natural stone provides additional texture, while glass opens the inhabited spaces toward the landscape. Under strong Aegean light, shadows sharpen the geometry of these surfaces throughout the day.

Each residence centers on an open living area containing the kitchen, dining and seating spaces. The architects orient this shared volume toward the horizon and use large glazed openings to bring daylight deep into the interior. The private section contains a master suite with an en-suite bathroom, alongside two additional bedrooms that share a bathroom.

Exterior areas operate as extensions of the main living spaces. Every residence includes a private lounge, an open-air dining area with a barbecue and its own swimming pool. Broad openings connect these spaces directly with the interiors, allowing views, natural light and air to define how residents experience the plan. Pools run along the exposed edge of the architecture, adding another horizontal surface between the building and distant horizon.

A restrained material palette supports the project’s relationship with the site. Beige plaster, natural stone, glass, water and Mediterranean planting recur throughout the four residences. Instead of introducing a separate architectural vocabulary above the terrain, The Hive Architects concentrates attention on excavation, surface, curvature and openings.

VELUM depends on how convincingly architecture can occupy a sensitive landscape while limiting its physical presence. The project does not attempt to compete with the scale of the Cycladic setting. Its strongest idea comes from using the terrain itself to determine massing, circulation, privacy and views. By placing the residences within the slope and returning planted surfaces above them, The Hive Architects proposes a form of holiday housing defined by the ground it occupies.

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In San Juan, Metro Manila, The Corner House by Bangkok-based Department of ARCHITECTURE Co. challenges the enclosed model that defines much of commercial architecture in tropical cities. Completed in 2023, the 16,100-square-metre project replaces the sealed shopping environment with a porous structure shaped by ventilation, movement and changing weather conditions.

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The building’s envelope responds directly to Manila’s heat, humidity and monsoon rains. Operable aluminum louvers and motorized roller blinds work independently according to sunlight, wind and rainfall. During favorable conditions, the perimeter can open almost entirely to allow air through the building. When storms arrive, exposed façades close while protected sides remain open. This system gives the architecture an adjustable boundary rather than a permanent division between interior and exterior.

A four-story open-air atrium organizes the project. Around it, a gently sloping 500-metre ramp connects every level while doubling as a jogging track, viewing promenade and elevated public street. The ramp changes the experience of moving through a commercial building. Daylight, fresh air and views of San Juan remain present as visitors move between floors, while people using the ramp become visible from the surrounding streets.

The generous circulation also gives The Corner House uses beyond conventional retail. Its communal areas accommodate remote work, informal meetings, exercise and children’s workshops. On weekends, markets bring independent food vendors, crafts, books, fashion and design products across multiple floors. Festivals, performances and seasonal events add another layer to the program.

This approach carries an economic argument. Rather than maximizing enclosed rentable floor area, the project allocates 2,670 square metres to communal space and circulation. These areas can host exhibitions, markets and events that generate revenue while increasing traffic for permanent tenants. Retail and food spaces occupy 3,120 square metres, alongside an 870-square-metre supermarket, a 1,030-square-metre jogging track and a 1,280-square-metre event roof deck.

Environmental performance relies largely on architectural decisions. More than half of the building operates without air-conditioning, using natural ventilation supported by ceiling fans. Existing mature trees were preserved during construction, while planted rooftop berms provide insulation and screen surrounding urban clutter from rooftop events.

The Corner House works because these environmental, commercial and social considerations influence the architecture together. The atrium creates ventilation and communal space, while the ramp connects circulation with exercise and city views. Its responsive perimeter allows the building to engage with Manila’s climate without surrendering protection when conditions become severe.

Department of ARCHITECTURE Co. ultimately presents a convincing alternative to the inward-facing tropical shopping mall. The project suggests that commercial architecture can accommodate climate rather than continuously shutting it out, while giving retail space a broader role within everyday urban life.

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Williamson Williamson looks to a 19th-century American housing type for DogTrot, a 1,500-square-foot country house in Magnetawan, Ontario. Rather than reproduce the historic model literally, the Toronto practice uses its central spatial principle to organize a compact contemporary residence shaped by climate, prefabrication and the difficult terrain of its lakeside site.

HOUSING

The traditional dogtrot house consists of two enclosed volumes connected by a covered open passage. That breezeway provides circulation while creating a shaded communal room between the two sides. At Magnetawan, two gabled volumes sit beneath a continuous roof, with an open passage separating their primary functions. Eating, sleeping and living spaces occupy the enclosed portions, while a loft crosses above the central opening.

The house occupies a small plateau above a southern Ontario lake before the ground drops steeply toward the water. Williamson Williamson avoids extensively excavating this slope. Instead, the foundation responds to the changing ground level and allows the building to project outward, directing rooms toward views of the lake and surrounding forest.

This approach gives the relatively simple gabled structure a more complex relationship with its site. The house reads as a linear object across the terrain, while the breezeway interrupts that volume and keeps an immediate connection between both sides of the building and the outdoors.

The passage also plays an environmental role. During summer, it functions as a shaded outdoor room for gathering and dining. During colder months, occupants can close the primary suite and concentrate daily activity within the larger section of the house, where a wood stove provides heat. The plan therefore changes with seasonal patterns rather than maintaining the same configuration throughout the year.

Prefabrication shaped both the construction process and the architectural language. Local fabricators produced the wall and roof panels before delivering them to the site, where cranes positioned them into place. This method shortened work on the property, reduced construction waste and limited disturbance to the surrounding terrain.

It also allowed Williamson Williamson to develop a high degree of continuity between exterior and interior surfaces. Eastern white cedar covers the exterior, while white-painted pine siding runs through the interior and curves from the walls into the roof.

Timber gable walls interrupt this pale continuous surface. Painted in shades of blue and green, they provide structural support while giving individual rooms their own visual identity. The architects use these elements to articulate the internal sequence without introducing an extensive material palette. Large windows along the long façades correspond dimensionally with the central breezeway, repeating its proportions through the enclosed sections of the house.

The architects adapt the open dogtrot type to a much colder environment through a high-performance envelope built to Passive House standards. Double-stud walls filled with dense-pack cellulose achieve insulation values above R-40, while the roof reaches R-60. High-performance air and vapour barriers further control the building envelope.

Skylights support passive ventilation and reduce reliance on mechanical cooling. The building services remain deliberately compact: an electric furnace, wood stove, heat recovery unit and on-demand hot-water system operate without conventional ductwork.

DogTrot derives much of its architectural strength from the directness of its organizing idea. Williamson Williamson retains the breezeway that defined the historic dogtrot while changing the construction, envelope and seasonal operation around it. Prefabrication addresses the constraints of building on a sensitive site, while the projecting structure minimizes intervention in the steep terrain.

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Void Building Design has completed Panorama House, a multi-generational residence at Sunshine Beach designed around expansive views of the Pacific Ocean and the environmental demands of its coastal setting. The project occupies a long, elevated dune site, using changes in level to separate different areas of the house while maintaining connections to the surrounding landscape.

HOUSING

The architects positioned the principal living spaces at the far end of the site, raising them above the existing treetops to take advantage of the ocean outlook. A secondary dwelling occupies the lower western section of the property and faces the swimming pool. This arrangement distributes the program across the length of the block and provides distinct spaces for different generations of the family.

Movement through the property gradually reveals its setting. From the gatehouse, a winding path passes beneath timber arbours and through dense planting before reaching the pool courtyard. Curved walls finished in Venetian render direct visitors toward the foyer, where a two-storey circulation space marks the transition into the main house. The sequence culminates in the primary living area as the vegetation gives way to open views across the Pacific.

The architecture responds closely to Sunshine Beach’s exposed coastal conditions. Spotted gum hardwood, standing-seam metal and fibre-cement weatherboards were selected for their ability to withstand salt-laden air and prevailing south-easterly winds. Their use also draws from materials familiar to Queensland’s coastal architecture, translated here through a contemporary composition.

A large hardwood brise-soleil defines the street elevation. Measuring 10 metres wide and 4.8 metres high, the screen protects the interior from strong western sunlight while creating changing patterns of light across the façade and internal spaces. Its scale gives the house a clear street presence, while the timber construction connects it materially to the arbours and other exterior elements encountered along the entrance route.

Environmental performance informed several of these architectural decisions. The brise-soleil controls solar exposure, while the organization of the house responds to prevailing winds and the particular orientation of the dune site. Sheltered courtyards and planted areas provide more protected exterior spaces when conditions closer to the ocean become exposed.

Panorama House uses its elongated site to create a sequence of contrasting spatial conditions, moving from enclosed garden areas toward increasingly open views. The secondary dwelling, pool courtyard and elevated principal residence work as related parts of the same property while allowing the multi-generational program to retain a degree of independence.

Through its careful positioning, robust coastal materials and extensive timber screening, Void Building Design creates a residence that responds directly to Sunshine Beach. The architecture frames the ocean as a constant presence while providing the family with sheltered spaces designed for the realities of living beside it.

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Estudio Montevideo has transformed two industrial buildings in Córdoba, Argentina, into Andén Central, an office complex that retains the site’s exposed brick and steel structures while introducing four new volumes and a shared outdoor space. Designed in 2023 and constructed between 2024 and 2026, the project covers 75,347 square feet (approximately 7,000 square meters).

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The architects began with a former railway warehouse and a former pasta factory, two structures that record the productive history of the site through their construction. Rather than treating the existing buildings as shells for an entirely new interior language, the project uses their material and structural qualities to guide the intervention. Brick walls and exposed steel remain visible throughout the complex, establishing continuity between the previous industrial use and the new workplace program.

New interventions use black metal to distinguish them from the original construction. This approach makes the chronology of the complex legible, allowing visitors to identify restored elements and later additions. Four new volumes increase the available floor area, while restoration work returns the two existing buildings closer to their original condition. Glass and concrete complete the material palette, alongside black and gray finishes that remain secondary to the existing brick and steel.

The site plan gives the exterior spaces an important role in the workplace. Estudio Montevideo moved vehicular access toward the sides of the property, leaving the center available for a common-use park. The resulting plaza connects the different buildings and provides outdoor areas for office users while remaining accessible to the wider community. Smaller outdoor work areas extend the office program into the park, allowing employees to move between enclosed rooms and open-air settings during the day.

Each historic structure accommodates a different type of workplace. Inside the former railway warehouse, the architects introduced an open-plan office system that takes advantage of the larger industrial volume. The second building retains a more conventional organization in response to its existing structure. Both contain areas for concentrated work alongside informal spaces for rest and interaction.

This range of environments reflects the project’s broader approach to contemporary office design. Instead of imposing a single workplace model across the entire complex, Estudio Montevideo uses the characteristics of each existing building to determine its organization. The new additions provide additional capacity without disguising where the historic architecture ends.

Andén Central ultimately relies on this distinction between existing fabric and contemporary intervention. Restored brick and steel retain the industrial identity of the site, while black metal additions introduce a clearly identifiable new architectural layer. At the center, the park turns previously separated structures into a connected complex and gives the project a shared civic space within Córdoba.

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Frigerio introduces the Linda Small Armchair, a new design developed by R&D Frigerio for 2026 as part of the brand’s Metamorphosis collection. Conceived as a compact lounge chair, Linda centres on curved wood and a continuous silhouette that brings the seat, backrest and extended lower section into a single visual composition.

CHAIRS

The new model arrives as Frigerio continues to expand its living and dining offer beyond larger upholstered pieces. Following recent introductions including the Felix sofa by Calvi Brambilla, the Phil sofa by R&D Frigerio and Gordon Guillaumier’s Dao Soft, the company is developing a broader family of armchairs, lounge seating, tables, chairs and complementary furniture.

Linda stands apart through the directness of its construction. Two curved wooden shells define the chair, creating an enveloping profile while keeping the structure visually light. Their organic contours form the back and seat before extending forward into a lower support that gives the chair an unusually fluid outline.

Rather than concealing its construction beneath upholstery, the design allows the wooden structure to remain one of its main visual features. Ash veneer options place greater emphasis on grain and material character, while glossy lacquered versions shift the chair toward a more graphic reading. The finishes include Burgundy, Lino, Curry, Corallo, Oliva, Oceano, Salvia, Cipria, Tortora and Nero, alongside Wengé, Tobacco and Greige ashwood. Additional ash finishes in Liquorice, Sand, Bordeaux and Forest Green are available on request.

Metal details introduce another layer to the composition. Grey metal feet support the curved body with minimal visual interruption, while a small Frigerio medal positioned on the rear identifies the piece without dominating its form.

Comfort comes through a padded seat made from non-deformable polyurethane foam with synthetic fibre. Fabric upholstery can be removed, while leather versions use a fixed cover. Frigerio also offers Linda with armrests, increasing its width from 80 to 98 centimetres while retaining the same 93-centimetre depth and 71-centimetre height.

The contrast between the rigid outer shell and the upholstered seat gives Linda much of its character. The wood establishes a precise perimeter around the body, while the cushioning softens the point of contact. This relationship allows the chair to function as a distinctive object without becoming detached from its practical role within a living space.

Within the wider Metamorphosis collection, Frigerio explores domestic furniture through references to memory, historical forms and contemporary interpretation. Linda approaches that theme through shape rather than direct quotation. Its curved profile carries traces of mid-century furniture design, yet the proportions, lacquered finishes and extended seat give it a distinctly current presence.

The result is a compact armchair that relies on geometry, surface and material rather than decorative excess. Linda can work as an individual accent piece or as part of a larger seating arrangement, offering Frigerio a more expressive counterpart to the sofas and upholstered systems already present within its collection.

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