The Lamp That Nine Artisans Built by Hand

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Most lamps disappear into a room. They’re functional, fine, forgettable. The new collection from Taiwan-Lantern, shown this week at ICFF during NYCxDESIGN in New York, does the opposite. These are lamps you stop in front of. Lamps you study. Objects that reward attention the longer you give them.

The Amsterdam-based studio, founded by Pei-Ching Hsiao and Jean-Marc Daniëls, brought a floor and table lantern collection to Booth 843 at the Javits Center, and the visual logic of each piece is genuinely worth unpacking. The forms pull directly from the traditional East Asian paper lantern, that familiar oval body stretched over a bamboo frame, but what the studio has done with that starting point is where it gets interesting.

Designer: Taiwan-Lantern

The lantern bodies themselves are pleated fabric pulled taut over a ribbed structure, with vertical seams running from crown to base like meridian lines on a globe. Unlit, the forms are sculptural and matte, almost ceramic in feeling, which is part of what makes them so surprising when the light comes on. The fabric glows from within, casting a warm amber that bleeds between each rib and throws thin lines of shadow onto the floor below. It’s the kind of light that changes a room’s entire temperature without a dimmer switch.

The floor lamps take this further by stacking two of these oval forms vertically, separated by a collar of small hand-strung beads, pale or dark depending on the colorway. The overall silhouette is monumental and a little totemic, tall enough to feel architectural, grounded enough to feel domestic. A round marble disc sits at the very base, and a dark wooden platform separates the stone from the lantern body above it. At the top, a small ceramic collar and a brass arch handle, finished with a hand-knotted rope loop, completes the form. Each of those transitions between materials is considered. Nothing gaps. Nothing looks like an afterthought.

The table lamps are a single lantern body on the same layered base construction: marble cylinder, wooden disc, ceramic ring, all stacked in sequence before the lantern begins. Seen in the cooler, dark photography with light on, the table lamp version becomes something else entirely. The fabric blazes orange-amber, the ribs define themselves sharply, and the base grounds it with the coolness of stone and lacquered wood. The contrast between the glowing body and the inert base is the design’s central tension, and it holds.

The color palette is restrained and precise. Pale pink Huo and terra cotta Tu are the named hues for the Lotus Charm floor lantern, but the full collection also includes a deep chocolate brown and an off-white cream that reads almost bone in natural light. These aren’t trendy colors. They’re earth tones in the truest sense, rooted in the Wu Xing framework of the five elements that informs the studio’s design philosophy. The naming isn’t decorative. It’s structural.

The pendant lamp is worth separate attention because it behaves differently from everything else in the collection. Rather than the soft oval, it takes a compressed diamond shape, wider at the middle and tapering to neat points at top and bottom. The fabric is a much darker, denser weave, almost charcoal, so the light it produces is intimate and filtered rather than openly warm. A brass U-shaped arch suspends it with a clean, modern hardware logic that sits at an interesting remove from the more ornate treatment of the floor lamps. It’s the cooler, quieter cousin in the room, and it earns its place.

Nine artisans contribute to each piece, working across bamboo, lacquer, natural dyeing, stone, porcelain, and Chinese knotting. That number shows. Not in any busy or demonstrative way, but in the specific quality of objects where every transition between materials is resolved and every surface has been touched with purpose. In a design market that rewards speed and volume, that level of attention to a single object is increasingly rare, and immediately perceptible. Taiwan-Lantern’s collection isn’t trying to reinvent the lamp. It’s trying to make one that’s worth keeping.

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An Iranian Villa Built Around Architecture’s Oldest Shape

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The gabled roof is one of the oldest tricks in architecture’s playbook. Pitched, familiar, and about as dramatic as a grammar school diagram, it’s the shape children draw when they first sketch a house. But Alireza Taghaboni of Tehran-based Next Office has done something rare with it: he made it interesting again.

The Gable Villa, completed in 2025 in Royan, a coastal city in northern Iran, is the kind of project that looks obvious at first glance and quietly revelatory the longer you sit with it. Royan sits near the Caspian Sea, and like much of Iran’s northern region, its traditional architecture has always leaned into the pitched roof as a direct response to heavy seasonal rainfall. This isn’t a decorative choice or a nostalgic one. It’s climate-driven, practical, and centuries old. What Taghaboni does is take that deeply familiar slope and push it into conversation with the hard orthogonal language of contemporary architecture, and the result is genuinely compelling.

Designer: Next Office–Alireza Taghaboni (photos by Ehsan Ahani)

The design concept is built around hybridization: an inclined structure, reminiscent of the region’s vernacular buildings, fused with a right-angled framework. On paper, that might sound like an architectural compromise, the kind of thing that slides into awkward pastiche. It doesn’t. The collision of the two forms creates interior spaces that feel both grounded and unexpected. The inclined volume doesn’t just define the exterior silhouette; it reshapes the interior experience entirely. Rooms feel taller where the ridge runs and more intimate where the slope pulls low, creating a natural hierarchy of space without needing extra walls to do the organizing. The geometry does the emotional heavy lifting.

Next Office, which Taghaboni founded in 2009, has built its reputation on exactly this kind of thinking. The studio’s work consistently returns to one core tension: how do you build something deeply contemporary in a country with one of the most layered architectural traditions on the planet? The Sharifi-ha House, perhaps the firm’s most internationally recognized project, explored flexibility and movement through rotating rooms that could open or close depending on the season. The Gable Villa is quieter than that, less theatrical, but no less considered. It’s a more mature move, one that doesn’t need to show its mechanism to make its point.

What strikes me about the Gable Villa is how unapologetically local it is. At a time when globalized architecture tends to iron out regional character in favor of a universally recognizable aesthetic, this project leans hard into where it is. Royan’s vernacular DNA isn’t applied as surface decoration; it’s baked into the structural logic of the building itself. That’s a meaningful distinction. Taghaboni isn’t borrowing visual language from tradition, he’s inheriting the reasoning behind it and rewriting it in a contemporary register.

The photography by Ehsan Ahani captures the project with a stillness that suits it. The villa simply isn’t competing for attention. It sits in its landscape with a kind of confidence that comes from knowing exactly what it is and what it’s trying to do. The light plays differently across the gabled form than it would over a flat roof, and you feel that in the images even before you fully process why.

For anyone who follows contemporary architecture, the Gable Villa is a reminder of why regional architecture, done with intelligence and rigor, still carries a weight that purely international work sometimes loses. Architecture has spent decades flattening itself into a single global style, and you can feel the cost of that. It’s also a reminder that the most familiar forms, the gable, the pitched roof, the shape of the house your four-year-old self drew with a crayon, still hold enormous untapped potential in the right hands.

Taghaboni and Next Office are clearly worth watching. Not because they’re doing the loudest work, but because they’re doing work that rewards attention. The Gable Villa is exactly that kind of building: patient, purposeful, and quietly smarter than it looks.

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RedMagic’s Power Bank Has a ‘Flight Mode’ Button To Meet New Airlines Regulations

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Aviation rules around lithium batteries are a moving target, and the power bank seems to be the latest casualty. 10 years ago, power banks weren’t a problem on flights but now suddenly they’re a hazard everywhere, whether it’s your check-in luggage or your hand-carry. Most power bank manufacturers have treated this as someone else’s problem. RedMagic apparently decided it was worth a dedicated hardware button, and the Deuterium Power Card Pro is the result.

Built around a 25W wireless charging pad and a 45W wired output in a slim metal alloy chassis, the Power Card Pro also carries an H21 honeycomb-engraved aluminum body, a rectangular status display, and AI-assisted thermal management that RedMagic claims keeps surface temperatures in check during wireless charging. The one-touch flight mode cuts wireless transmission instantly, a feature small enough to overlook in a spec sheet and practical enough to matter the moment you actually need it at gate 34B with a boarding group breathing down your neck.

Designer: RedMagic

The design language here is unmistakably RedMagic. The H21 honeycomb pattern engraved into the anodized aerospace aluminum gives it a texture that reads as premium without trying too hard, and the chamfered 60-degree edges make it comfortable to actually hold rather than just nice to photograph. The Chinese character for deuterium stamped across the back ties it visually to the broader Deuterium accessory line, which RedMagic has been building out alongside its gaming phones and tablets. This isn’t a standalone product thrown together for a product launch cycle. It’s a piece of a larger ecosystem, and the design reflects that coherence.

The rectangular status display is a small but meaningful upgrade over the single LED dot indicators that most power banks still ship with in 2026, telling you exactly how much battery your power bank has left. Paired with the AI thermal monitoring, which RedMagic says manages a five-layer heat dissipation system in real time, the Power Card Pro is positioning itself as a power bank you can actually trust to make decisions intelligently rather than one that just dumps watts into your device and hopes for the best.

The 5,000 and 10,000 mAh capacity options keep the form factor choices honest. The 5,000 mAh variant will top up most modern smartphones once with room to spare, while the 10,000 mAh version is the one frequent travelers will actually want. Pricing and a firm release date for China are still pending, so how aggressively RedMagic intends to compete in what is already a crowded premium power bank segment remains to be seen. The feature set suggests they’re serious. The honeycomb aluminum suggests they want you to leave it on your desk even when you’re not traveling.

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BMW’s Vision K18 Concept Turns Long-Distance Touring Into a Jet-Inspired Luxury Experience on Two Wheels

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BMW Motorrad has built some wildly expressive motorcycles over the years, but the new Vision K18 concept feels like the brand finally gave its designers permission to stop thinking like engineers for a moment and dream like sculptors. Unveiled at the 2026 Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, the concept motorcycle takes BMW’s familiar six-cylinder touring DNA and stretches it into something that looks part luxury cruiser, part jet aircraft, and part rolling design experiment.

The Vision K18 is built around a newly developed 1,800cc inline-six engine, a layout that has long been associated with BMW’s flagship touring motorcycles. Instead of hiding the powertrain beneath layers of bodywork, BMW turned the engine into the centerpiece of the design. The entire motorcycle visually revolves around the six-cylinder architecture, with six air intakes, six exhaust outlets, and even six LED headlight elements reinforcing the theme throughout the machine.

Designer: BMW Motorrad

Despite its futuristic appearance, the Vision K18 still carries cues from classic bagger and grand touring motorcycles. The low-slung body, stretched proportions, and wide seating area suggest long-distance comfort, although BMW intentionally stripped away conventional touring elements such as large panniers or windshields. Some publications have even described it as a “bagger without bags,” emphasizing how the concept focuses more on visual drama and emotional appeal than practicality.

BMW says the motorcycle was designed to embody “full force forward,” a philosophy visible in nearly every detail. The exhaust outlets angle sharply rearward, the nose tapers like a jet fuselage, and the entire machine appears to lean into motion even while standing still. According to BMW Motorrad, the goal was to create a bike that communicates speed and power before the engine is even started. Forged carbon fiber components help offset some visual bulk while introducing texture and contrast against the polished metallic surfaces.

Even though the Vision K18 leans heavily into futuristic styling, it still borrows proportions from classic American-style baggers and luxury touring bikes. The low seat, stretched profile, and relaxed ergonomics hint at long-distance comfort, although BMW intentionally stripped away practical touring elements like saddlebags and oversized windscreens. What remains is essentially the emotional core of a grand tourer distilled into a more dramatic, design-first machine.

BMW describes the concept with the phrase “full force forward,” and it honestly fits. Every detail pushes the eye toward the horizon. The exhaust outlets angle sharply rearward like afterburners, the nose slices through the air like an aircraft fuselage, and the entire motorcycle feels tense even while standing still. It’s the kind of concept that communicates speed without relying on wings, spoilers, or exaggerated race-bike aggression.

The inline-six engine itself promises a completely different experience from BMW’s boxer-powered cruisers. According to the company, the setup delivers smooth, turbine-like acceleration paired with a deeply layered exhaust note flowing through all six tailpipes. That combination of refinement and mechanical drama seems to be exactly what BMW wanted the Vision K18 to embody.

Although the Vision K18 is currently a one-off concept with no confirmed production plans, BMW executives have hinted that some of its ideas could influence future motorcycles. The company appears especially committed to evolving the six-cylinder platform further, potentially using it as the foundation for a new generation of high-end luxury touring machines.

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