Explore - Essay

William McDonough + Partners’ design for a small village in northeastern China was meant to stand as a model for sustainable development. Instead, it proves that the pursuit of better design...

So this is what city life boils down to: flat roofs, right angles, and steel-mesh awnings for industrial spice.  

In the late winter of 2003, I watched out my window as a fuel truck idled below, belching black smoke. A hose, snaking through the frozen grass, stretched from the back of the truck to the side of...

Davy Rothbart is the editor of Found magazine, a frequent contributor to public radio’s This American Life, and author of the story collection The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. His...

If a movement can be defined as a moment when people across time zones and borders act simultaneously on the same idea, then the design week movement is verifiable. In the last three years, design...

I am looking at my favorite photograph of my summer house in Nantucket. It is not a particularly pretty picture. It was taken on a cloudy and gray day. You cannot see the beach, or the moors, or...

As the war-torn city of Kabul, Afghanistan, is transformed into a maze of blast walls, military checkpoints, and foreign bases, how might security architecture be changed to foster psychological...

Many architects and designers, when talked down from the theoretical towers of “sculptural forms” and “floating volumes” and made to speak of their craft in humbler terms,...

The cathedrals, mosques, and synagogues of the Old World still occupy the most hallowed ground of ecclesiastical architecture, but a rather unorthodox American sect can lay claim to the best in...

The world’s most popular doll, dressed in architect’s garb: friend or foe to a profession already suffering from a pronounced gender gap?