Concrete

After purchasing a thin, L-shaped lot in Tokyo, Tamotsu Nakada asked architect and friend Koji Tsutsui to create an open-plan concrete home to fit the site. Photo by Iwan Baan.

The living room is further lit by three protruding skylights angled to catch morning and afternoon light.

Another sculptural design is the KME188earring set.

A minimalist approach to design can make spaces feel thoughtful, bright, and more spacious than they really are—qualities that are paramount to a recent project in Poznań by Polish architecture firm mode:lina. The architects employed several tricks to make the home feel more spacious. Among them, mirrors were installed to visually enlarge the room, and smart storage spaces—even a recessed dog house—were built directly into the home’s walls. “The less visible [storage is], the better,” they say.

Sofia von Ellrichshausen and Mauricio Pezo’s reinforced concrete home in Chile stacks rooms for working in a vertical column atop horizontally-oriented spaces for living.

Turning aggression into art, Israeli designer Itay Ohaly's Fracture Bench explores the effects of smashing materials.