If there's a groovier picture of mid-century modernism I don't know it. This is the living room/indoor pool of the Defoe House Dow designed in Bay City, Michigan in 1941.
Cashmere flat paint by Sherwin-Williams was custom matched to the original chips provided by Breuer’s firm—dark gray for the wood doors and MB Red for accents.
An architect immersed in the history of California modernism restored a nondescript Los Angeles ranch house bordering a celebrated midcentury neighborhood. Midcentury enthusiast Margaret Riley purchased a 1957 ranch with little panache or pedigree, but a plum location just two doors down from Crestwood Hills, the Los Angeles cooperative development revered for its wealth of A. Quincy Jones masterpieces. As the author of Crestwood Hills: The Chronicle of a Modern Utopia, Cory Buckner was the ideal architect for the transformation. The new butterfly roof, redwood tongue-and-groove siding, and vertical louvers help the updates feel original to the period.
Tasked with transforming a 93-square-foot brick boiler room into a guesthouse, architect and metalworker Christi Azevedo flexed her creative muscle. The architect spent a year and a half designing and fabricating nearly everything in the structure save for the original brick walls. "I treated the interior like a custom piece of furniture," she says.
Architect Jim Garrison of Brooklyn-based Garrison Architects was asked to design a retreat for visiting families on an idyllic lakeside expanse of land at a boarding school for troubled teens, Star Commonwealth in Albion, Michigan. To drastically reduce academic interruption and cut site noise, Garrison decided early on to create an 1,100-square-foot modular building dubbed Koby, with two bedrooms on opposite sides of the structure and a common dining area in the middle “as a therapeutic space for families to gather and eat together.”
The horizontal layout of the home allows for easy movement throughout the interior, while the line of the continuous roof seems to extend into the trees. Enlarging the opening of the home allowed for impressive views of the river and surrounding area.
Like the exterior, the open-plan living area combines reclaimed materials, including the pre-existing black walnut floors.
Originally designed by locally renowned architect Arthur Dallas Stenger, this 1960s home featured an unusual awning that was maintained during a 21st-century upgrade by architects Rick and Cindy Black. The architects partially reconfigured the interior layout, updated the kitchen, and added new doors to the porch, all the while making sure the adjustments to the house honored its midcentury provenance while still avoiding creating a time capsule.
In the house that Richard Williams designed for David Frum and Danielle Crittenden Frum on Lake Ontario, floor-to-ceiling windows from Oldcastle offer views through the house to the lake beyond.
Marleen Kaptein looked to dragonfly wings for inspiration behind her lightweight carbon fiber chair.
Photo: LABADIE / VANTOUR
With porcelain pieces like "Shaping Space III" Claire Verkoyen remarks on the history of global trade by embellishing imported Chinese bowls with utopian drawings she created using special 3D software. Photo: Jan van Esch, Amsterdam
Industrial waste is the starting material for the mirrors in Studio Drift's Obsidian Project. Photo: Erik & Petra Hesmerg
Helmut Smits turns a critical eye to consumer culture and the ubiquity of Coca-Cola in "The Real Thing," a distilling installation that turns Coca-Cola back into clean drinking water. Made possible by Synthetic Organic Chemistry Group, University of Amsterdam and TU/e. Photo by Ronald Smits
Pavel van Houten's "Wallpaper Artis," 2014, was inspired by an expression translating to “nature is the teacher of art and science.” To create the patterns the artist's team studied plants and animals in an Amsterdam park then translated the data into infographics recalling botanical forms. Photo: Pavel van Houten
Marjan van Aubel's solar-powered charging tables and windows earned the designer a spot on our 2016 Young Guns list. The dye-sensitized solar cells that power the creations are made using organic pigments. Photo: Mathijs Labadie
Traditional electronics require soldering whereas littleBits’s modules snap together with magnets to create things like a doorbell that sends text notification.
Austere is a retailer of Teenage Engineering's recently-reintroduced OD-11 speaker. First introduced in 1974, the OD-11 retains its minimalist styling but is updated to play cloud-based music.
Op1 by Teenage Engineering
After an unprecedented year of earthquakes, hurricanes, and fires, a bright light has been shed on the benefits of building with concrete.
This boutique hotel on Norway's Manshausen Island is made up of four sea cabins—one of which juts out from a natural ledge. Each of them fit two to four travelers or a family of five.
In this Bratislava apartment an Eames bird keeps watch over the record collection.
Printed on a traditional letterpress (with no emboss) using a magnesium plate and printed on Cranes Paper (600 gsm). Illustration by Michael Nÿkamp of mkn design.
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