Tag Archives: Architecture

Herzog & de Meuron Just Made a 1980s Antenna Tower the Most Exciting Building in the Alps

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The Titlis Tower was never meant to be beautiful. That’s what makes what Herzog & de Meuron have done with it so compelling — a project that says more with restraint than most buildings say at full volume. The 56-meter-high antenna tower was built in the mid-1980s by the Swiss postal service, originally serving as a functional node in the country’s telecom network.

It sat largely ignored above the resort town of Engelberg, visible but inaccessible, a steel remnant of an analog era. Mount Titlis, the peak it crowns, draws approximately 1.1 million visitors per year — yet the tower itself offered nothing to any of them. That tension between presence and uselessness is what the commission set out to resolve.

Designer: Herzog & de Meuron

In 2017, Herzog & de Meuron was brought in to renew the mountain station and transform the tower into part of the tourist offering — a brief that sat within a broader masterplan for the entire summit, including a redesigned cable car station. Co-founder Pierre de Meuron framed the approach around “resource-conscious development of the existing infrastructure,” which in practice meant keeping what was already there and building only what was necessary. No demolition. No tabula rasa. Just a sharp architectural gesture inserted into a structure that already belonged to the mountain.

The transformation sees two cantilevered glass-and-steel volumes inserted crosswise into the existing antenna mast, creating the tower’s now-iconic cross-shaped silhouette. Four vertical circulation volumes handle movement through the structure. The result is a form that feels both ancient and entirely new — a cross, yes, but also a compass, a landmark, a thing that seems to orient itself against the horizon. Inside, the two horizontal bodies house a restaurant, a bar, and exhibition space, all of it delivered at over 3,000 meters above sea level, with glacier views on every axis.

Completed in 2026, the tower is the first element of the wider TITLIS Project to be realized, and it sets a high bar for everything that follows. What makes it land is the discipline behind the concept. Herzog & de Meuron didn’t try to compete with the Alps — they let the existing structure carry the weight and introduced just enough to make it habitable, legible, and genuinely spectacular. The tower was already a landmark. Now it finally knows it.

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This Hidden London Home Lives Behind a Garden Wall – And It’s Pure Genius

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Just past the southeast corner of Cleaver Square in Kennington, south London, sits a weathered brick wall with a painted timber gate. From the street, it looks like nothing more than a garden boundary — unremarkable, quiet, entirely in keeping with the 18th-century square around it. Step through the gate and the story changes completely.

Behind it is the Walled Courtyard house, a single-storey, two-bedroom home designed by London-based architecture studio Inglis Badrashi Loddo (IBLA). It is the first new house built on Cleaver Square in over 175 years — and it was designed to be invisible.

Designer: IBLA

The site, a modest 63 square metres, was formerly a car park. It once formed part of the walled garden of the Grade-II listed Georgian townhouse that sits adjacent to it. The owners of that townhouse commissioned IBLA to design a separate, accessible dwelling on the land — compact, light-filled, and historically sensitive.

IBLA didn’t fight the enclosure. They embraced it. The boundary walls were reconstructed using a combination of salvaged and new London stock brick, deliberately left without windows so the exterior reads as one continuous garden wall. Inside, those same walls are washed in lime-mortar paint, pulling light inward and immediately shifting the atmosphere. “The site is very compact, completely enclosed and inward-looking — our main goal was to create a bright and light-filled home that felt expansive and generous, despite the constraints,” said IBLA director Kim Loddo.

The layout unfolds around a central courtyard garden, with every main room connected to it through full-height sliding glass doors. The main bedroom and ensuite occupy the western end, with long sightlines running through to the kitchen and dining area at the centre. There, custom plywood cabinetry sits beneath a skylight that keeps the space bathed in natural light through the day. To the east, an adaptable room serves either as a second bedroom or a reading snug. The main bathroom, tucked into the curved corner of the site, is lit from above by a circular skylight.

A neutral palette runs throughout — white walls, whitewashed exposed timber roof joists, and grey porcelain flooring — with pocket doors that slide cleanly into wall recesses to keep sightlines open. The joists, as Loddo notes, do real structural work while lending the ceilings an honest rhythm.

For sustainability, the home relies on an air-source heat pump, underfloor heating, high-performance insulation, and a sedum roof that quietly completes its environmental credentials. What IBLA has built here is a masterclass in restraint. A home that holds its history close, hides from the street entirely, and reveals itself only to those who pass through the gate.

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The Burleigh 9.6 Is the Tiny Home That Proves You Don’t Have to Give Anything Up

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Tiny home living has a reputation it hasn’t quite shaken — that at some point, you’re trading a real life for a smaller one. The Burleigh 9.6 by Removed Tiny Homes isn’t that. Built by the Gold Coast, Australia–based maker as a fully custom project, this 9.6-meter (31.5 ft) home on wheels sits at the intersection of real architecture and everyday livability, and it does it without making you feel like you gave something up to get there.

From the outside, it reads differently from most tiny homes. The angular, stepped roofline and wraparound NewTechWood composite cladding give it a presence — something that looks designed rather than assembled. Double glass doors open onto a living room wrapped in picture windows, where a sofa, swivel-mounted TV, and ceiling fan create a space that genuinely invites you to sit down. The surrounding bush pulls straight through the glass, and because the whole room is bathed in natural light, the sense of space stretches well past the actual square footage.

Designer: Removed Tiny Homes

The kitchen runs galley-style through the center of the home — stone benchtops, a gas cooktop, an oven, a full-height fridge-freezer, and a lineup of SMEG appliances that would feel right at home in a full-sized apartment. A serving window opens to the outside deck, and a drop-down counter extension gives extra prep space when you need it. The interior palette is pure Japandi: light oak cabinetry, white VJ walls, matte-black hardware. Calm, warm, and considered.

The bathroom is where the Burleigh genuinely surprises. Most tiny homes fight to fit a single basin. This one carries a full double vanity — two round vessel sinks side by side on a white stone top, with twin black wall-mounted taps and a backlit mirror. Beside it, a glass-enclosed double shower runs two separate shower heads. A built-in washer-dryer and a louvred window round it out, making the bathroom feel residential rather than a scaled-down afterthought.

Sleep arrangements are split across two levels. The master bedroom sits at the far end of the home, accessed through the bathroom, with a double bed, a ceiling fan, full headroom, and its own separate entrance to the outside. A loft bedroom above the kitchen, reached by a removable ladder, offers a second double bed with the privacy of real separation. Power runs through a roof-mounted solar setup.

The Burleigh 9.6 is a custom build — designed and quoted individually through Removed’s custom program. It’s the kind of home that makes the case not just for living smaller, but for living better.

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A Spiderweb-Shaped Home in Japan Has No Fixed Rooms and Adapts as the Family Grows

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Spiders have been building radial webs for about 100 million years, spinning silk into a geometry that spreads weight around with an efficiency engineers spent centuries trying to copy. The web holds up because every strand pulls toward the center, so stress gets shared across the whole thing instead of piling up in one spot. Architecture has borrowed this trick before, from geodesic domes to tensile fabric roofs, but a regular family home almost never commits to the idea this literally. UID Architects looked at a spiderweb and saw a floor plan. In Fukuyama, Japan, they turned that into a house where a family of four actually lives.

The home is an octagonal timber structure turned 45 degrees across its sloping suburban plot, topped by a roof whose beams all converge on a glazed opening at the center. UID balanced the entire volume on four points and wrapped triangular openings around the edges to pull in light from every direction. Inside, the roughly 828 square feet stays open on purpose, skipping conventional rooms in favor of four rounded plywood boxes that guide you through the space like a corridor. The dining table sits right under the middle of the web, putting the family’s social life at the structural heart of the house. It is a home you read from the ceiling down.

Designer: UID Architects

Eight timber beams run up from the perimeter and meet at a small glazed oculus that drops daylight straight into the middle of the plan. Looking up, the whole thing reads as a literal web frozen in wood, every strand under tension and pulling toward the same hub. From outside it flips into something else entirely, a faceted metal cone that rises over the neighboring rooftops like a spinning top someone left on the street. That shift between the warm wooden interior and the cool metal shell makes the house feel bigger and stranger than its footprint suggests. You read it as a tent from the driveway and a cathedral once you walk in.

A sunken lounge with a round shag rug steps up to the raised dining level, so the open plan never collapses into one undifferentiated room. The four plywood boxes handle the rest of the organizing, standing low enough that the soaring ceiling flows over all of them without interruption. Their corners are rounded rather than sharp, a small move that softens the heavy plywood and keeps the place from feeling like a furniture warehouse. You move between these volumes the way you would wander through a small village, never quite walled in, never fully out in the open. The boxes suggest where to sit, cook, or gather without ever issuing an order.

There are almost no permanent interior walls, which means the family can reassign space as their lives shift instead of calling a contractor. A corner that works as a play area now can quietly become a study, then a home office, all inside the same shell. Most homes get designed for one stage of family life and then fight the people living in them for the next thirty years. UID dodged that trap by building rooms that are really just zones, defined by furniture and habit rather than drywall. It is a smart, patient way to think about a house someone plans to keep for decades.

Plywood usually gets buried under veneer the moment a budget allows, treated as the cheap stuff you hide. UID does the opposite, letting warm plywood climb from the floor all the way up into the ceiling so the wood becomes both the structure and the finish. The one exception is the kitchen, where a darker, redder cabinetry tone marks it as its own little district within the larger space. That single shift in wood gives the cooking zone an identity without breaking the calm consistency holding the rest of the home together. Everywhere else, the material repeats until the house feels carved from a single block.

Building a giant timber web in a neighborhood of beige boxes takes real nerve, and the renderings could easily have collapsed into a gimmick once construction started. They did not, mostly because the geometry earns its keep, handling light, ventilation, privacy, and circulation in one gesture rather than decorating over them. Japan has a long history of small homes that punch far above their square footage, from the metabolist experiments of the sixties to the tight urban houses we cover constantly, and this one sits comfortably in that lineage. UID built a house that should still make sense long after the kids have grown and moved out. I keep thinking about who gets to redraw their own floor plan just by moving the furniture.

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This Japanese-Style Pancake Shop Turns Melted Butter Into an Entire Design Language

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Walk into Fuwa Fuwa Golden Square and your stomach reacts before your brain does. The ceiling curves overhead in a deep, glossy yellow that fades downward into cream, and the effect is unmistakably appetizing. You have seen this color before, in a warm pan, sliding off the edge of something soft. The room does not represent butter so much as it behaves like it. The longer you stand there, the more your appetite gets ahead of your eyes.

That is the trick Studio Yimu pulled off in this cafe. The yellow sits richest at the crown of the curve, then thins as it falls, mimicking the way melted fat rides above the milk solids that settle below. The pale lower walls finish the thought. It is abstraction with an appetite, a minimalist gesture that happens to make you very, very hungry the longer you stand inside it. The shop sells Japanese soufflé pancakes, and the architecture has already started selling them for you.

Designer: Studio Yimu

Melt a pat of butter and it separates within seconds, the golden fat lifting while the white milk solids sink to the bottom of the pan. Studio Yimu translated that split into a ceiling, saturating the crown of a sweeping curve in deep yellow before dissolving it into pale cream along the lower walls. The vertical order matters more than it first appears. Flip it, run white overhead fading down to yellow, and the whole room would feel subtly upside down, like butter defying gravity. Every corner rounds over with a soft fillet rather than meeting at a hard edge, so the color reads as poured rather than painted, pooling into the low points the way a liquid actually would.

The pancakes on the menu carry the same two tones, golden brown where the batter kisses the pan and pale along the tall fluffy rim that steams itself before it ever sears. Fuwa Fuwa’s logo splits the difference, a stack of soufflé pancakes with a pat of butter sliding down the seam in matching gold and cream. Studio Yimu took that little mark and scaled it up until it became the architecture you stand inside. The same story now plays at three sizes, the butter in the pan, the pancake on the plate, and the room itself. One ingredient, understood deeply enough to repeat across every scale without announcing itself, anchors the entire identity.

Beneath the color, the plan does real work splitting the cafe into two moods. One side runs wall-mounted tables and stools facing the service counter, built for a quick stop and a clear view of the pancake theatre behind the glass. The other side tucks long banquette seating into a wood-lined alcove, warmer and enclosed, sized for people who want to linger over a plate and a coffee. Studio Yimu concealed every light source behind signage, above the counter, and along the wall bases, so the glow spreads evenly and the architecture never competes with a visible fixture. Concrete floors and oak millwork ground all that sweetness, keeping the butter metaphor from tipping into a theme-park cartoon of itself.

Temple is the word the project keeps getting tagged with, borrowed from the shrine-like volume framing the central counter, and it undersells what makes the space land. Reverence does not sell breakfast. Appetite does, and Studio Yimu engineered appetite straight into the walls with two colors and a single curve. The restraint is the achievement, a piece of retail design confident enough to abstract one ingredient into a full spatial language and trust diners to feel it before they can name it. I walked away convinced more brands should study their own logo this closely, because Fuwa Fuwa found an entire building hiding inside a drawing of a pancake.

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5 EV Charging Designs So Beautiful You’d Actually Want to Stop There

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EV charging infrastructure has grown considerably in recent years, but the experience of actually using it rarely gives people much to think about. Most stations are indistinguishable from the utilities they resemble, built for function with little thought for the space they occupy. That’s a missed opportunity in a technology that already asks drivers to rethink a habit as ingrained as stopping for gas.

A series of five conceptual EV charging station designs takes a different view of what that infrastructure could look like. Rather than treating the wait as dead time to get through, they propose something closer to a destination, structures that generate solar and wind energy while also giving people a reason to look twice, and maybe start a conversation about why they’re there.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The Silver Solar Charging Station rises as a steel structure with a large photovoltaic panel angled overhead on a tall vertical arm. Drivers pull inside to access the charging connections, sheltered from the weather while the panel converts sunlight into electricity stored directly in connected batteries. The charging bay is practical, though the frame around it looks nothing like anything built with that purpose in mind.

The Black Waves Solar Charging Station shares the drive-in shelter principle but trades angular geometry for something far more fluid. Ribbon-like steel sections curve and undulate overhead, each covered in photovoltaic panels. The design functions exactly like the others, but the wave-like form overhead gives drivers something to look at while they wait, the kind of structure that prompts questions before it answers them.

The Red Solar Charging Station doesn’t try to blend in. Its vivid color marks it on the horizon well before you reach it, and the zig-zag arrangement of solar panels on top gives the structure a jagged, almost aggressive silhouette that contrasts with the smooth drive-through tunnel below. The photovoltaic cells are fully functional, drawing power from sunlight to feed the charging points inside.

The Yellow Solar Charging Station takes a completely different approach to form. An arched dome made from eco-friendly concrete composite curves over the charging bay, painted in the kind of yellow that reads clearly from across an open field. Circular disc-shaped photovoltaic panels are mounted in a ring around the crown of the dome, turning the roof into something that looks as deliberate as the structure below.

The Solar Wind Charging Station breaks from the others in one important way: it isn’t designed to be driven into. Cars pull alongside it to access the charging points while the station itself stands as a tall sculptural object, a curved photovoltaic panel at its base and a vertical-axis wind turbine rising above. It draws from both sun and wind, storing electricity in batteries for continuous output.

All five sit somewhere between infrastructure concept and large-scale sculpture. The thinking behind them is that a charging station people actually stop to look at can do something a plain utility box never could. It places the shift from gasoline to electric into visible, physical form, turning an ordinarily forgettable errand into a small but deliberate presence in public space.

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Most Homes Are Built to Last 10 Years. These 5 Designs Are Built for 100

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Slow architecture asks a simple but powerful question: should buildings be designed for short-term trends or for the next hundred years?
At a time when much of construction is driven by speed, cost-cutting, and fast-changing aesthetics, this approach brings the focus back to durability, function, and long-term value. True luxury today is not excess, but the ability of a space to remain useful, relevant, and well-crafted over time.

Designing for a 100-year lifespan means making smarter choices from the start, from honest materials and adaptable layouts to lower environmental impact and easier maintenance. It turns architecture into a lasting asset and not just a temporary product. The five principles ahead explore how thoughtful, future-ready design can create buildings that perform better, age beautifully, and continue to support everyday life for generations.

1. Build with Materials That Last

A long-lasting building starts with materials that can handle time, weather, and daily use without losing their value. Stone, solid wood, brick, and other durable natural materials often perform better over decades than finishes chosen only for appearance. They need fewer replacements, age more gracefully, and usually reduce long-term maintenance costs. Instead of designing for quick upgrades, this approach creates a stronger, more reliable building envelope that can stay relevant for generations.

These materials also improve how a space feels in everyday life. The texture of timber, the weight of stone, and the character that develops over time add warmth and authenticity that synthetic finishes often cannot match. They create interiors that feel grounded, calm, and connected to nature. Choosing fewer artificial materials can also lower environmental impact while helping the building remain practical, beautiful, and honest for years to come.

Spanish studio Agora Arquitectura redesigned a neglected agricultural site on the outskirts of Barcelona by transforming a ruined red-brick structure into the foundation for a contemporary raised home. Named House on a Brick Base, the project preserves the character of the original building while introducing a new layer of living above it. Instead of demolishing what was already there, the architects restored the old brick shell and extended its presence across the site, turning a forgotten structure into a meaningful architectural anchor.

The lower brick volume is organized by two perpendicular walls that divide the interior and structurally support the timber addition above. A perforated brick boundary wall, outdoor staircases, and a sloped access route create a carefully choreographed arrival, leading visitors past a century-old olive tree before entering the home. Above, the new volume is built from prefabricated cross-laminated timber and clad in whitewashed cork, combining warmth with sustainability. Large windows, a steel spiral staircase, and a generous skylight bring daylight deep into both levels, creating a strong visual dialogue between old masonry and new timber.

2. Design Spaces That Can Change Over Time

A home built to last 100 years should not be locked into one lifestyle or one stage of life. Flexible planning makes it easier for spaces to adapt as needs change, whether that means creating a home office, adding privacy for older family members, or reworking rooms for future use. Features like non-load-bearing walls, practical room sizes, and good ceiling heights make these changes easier without major structural work. This keeps the home useful and relevant for much longer.

Adaptable design also improves everyday comfort. When the layout is planned well, rooms can shift in function without feeling awkward or disconnected. Good natural light, smart circulation, and strong core services like plumbing and electrical systems help the home work smoothly even as it evolves. Instead of becoming outdated, the house stays functional, resilient, and ready to support different ways of living over time.

GM House by Frederico Bicalho Arquitetura shows how a flexible layout can be naturally shaped by the land itself. Set on a steep site in Minas Gerais, the home follows a long, linear plan that allows each zone to respond differently to views, sunlight, privacy, and circulation. Instead of forcing the house into a fixed or compact arrangement, the architects used the slope to create a more open and adaptable sequence of spaces that feels practical, balanced, and deeply connected to the site.

This adaptability is reflected in how the home organizes everyday living. The social areas open directly onto the veranda and pool, creating a seamless indoor-outdoor environment that can support different activities with ease. On the upper level, the bedrooms are divided into two separate volumes connected by a walkway, allowing for both privacy and connection within the same home. This thoughtful spatial arrangement gives the residence a more dynamic rhythm and shows how flexible layout planning can make architecture feel both highly functional and effortlessly livable.

3. Prioritize Comfort Through Passive Design

A home designed for the long term should stay comfortable without depending too heavily on mechanical systems. Passive design helps achieve this through better orientation, cross ventilation, shading, insulation, and materials that can naturally regulate indoor temperature. These decisions reduce energy use, lower utility costs, and make the home more resilient in the face of rising energy prices or unreliable power supply. Over time, this creates a building that performs better with less effort and fewer resources.

Passive resilience also improves the daily experience of living in a space. Rooms feel cooler in summer, warmer in winter, and more stable throughout the day without constant adjustments. Good airflow, balanced daylight, and thermal comfort create interiors that feel calm and easy to live in.

Long Grass House in New Zealand shows how a flexible layout and passive design can come together in a home that feels both practical and uplifting. Recognized by the New Zealand Institute of Architects, the house balances affordability, sustainability, and everyday comfort without sacrificing character. Its compact form helps reduce energy demand, while the angled rooflines and carefully placed overhangs improve shading and thermal performance. Designed to feel relaxed and open, the home creates a holiday-like atmosphere while still functioning as a durable, year-round family residence.

Inside, the layout is simple yet highly efficient, with spaces arranged to support changing needs over time. The bathroom, laundry, entrance, and loft are organized in a way that makes the plan feel dynamic without becoming complicated. A long skylight and vertical window bring daylight deep into the interior, while plywood finishes add warmth and visual continuity. Combined with durable steel cladding outside, the material palette keeps the house low-maintenance, cost-effective, and built to adapt gracefully to family life over the years.

4. Create a Design That Will Not Date Quickly

A 100-year home should not be built around short-lived trends that feel outdated within a decade. Lasting design comes from strong proportions, balanced layouts, quality finishes, and details that remain relevant over time. Instead of chasing what is popular for the moment, the focus should be on choices that continue to look good and function well across changing tastes. This helps protect the long-term value of the property and reduces the need for frequent cosmetic updates or renovations.

Timeless spaces also feel more comfortable to live in every day. Natural light, simple forms, and carefully chosen materials create interiors that stay calm, elegant, and adaptable rather than overly styled or visually exhausting. When a home is designed with restraint and clarity, it remains easier to maintain, update subtly, and is far more likely to be appreciated by future generations without needing to be completely redesigned.

House Hökarn by Per Bornstein is a strong example of timeless design, where simplicity, proportion, and material honesty take priority over visual trends. Set within a meadow in Floda, the home feels calm, restrained, and deeply connected to its landscape. Its minimalist expression does not aim to impress through excess, but through balance and permanence. By avoiding unnecessary gestures and focusing on enduring architectural fundamentals, the house achieves a quiet character that is more likely to remain relevant and beautiful over time.

This sense of longevity is reinforced through a carefully considered material palette and clear spatial planning. Lime-plastered walls, pine timber interiors, and precisely integrated concrete and steel create a home that feels contemporary and lasting. Natural light, framed forest views, and seamless room transitions further support an atmosphere that is serene rather than overstated. Together, these elements show how timeless design can create architecture that feels deeply livable today while still holding its value and appeal well into the future.

5. Plan the Landscape to Mature with the Home

A home designed for 100 years should include a landscape strategy that improves with time, not just at handover. Trees, native planting, shaded outdoor areas, water-sensitive planning, and healthy soil can all strengthen the long-term performance of the property. As the landscape matures, it can provide natural cooling, privacy, wind protection, and better biodiversity. This makes the site more resilient while also increasing the everyday usability and long-term value of the home.

A well-planned landscape also changes how the home is experienced. Views from inside become more meaningful, outdoor spaces feel more comfortable, and the property develops character year after year. Instead of treating the garden as decoration, this approach sees it as part of the architecture itself. When the built form and landscape are planned together, the result is a home that feels more grounded, more livable, and more connected to its environment over time.

Set along the winding edge of Poland’s Vistula River, 77 Studio’s House in the Slope feels less like a building and more like part of a living garden. Embedded into the riverside embankment, the home is surrounded by layered greenery, wild grasses, native planting, and a restored meadow that softens its presence. A planted green roof helps the house disappear into the landscape, while preserving the site’s natural contours and strengthening its bond with the riverbank ecosystem. The design allows vegetation, open views, and quiet privacy to define the experience.

The home’s orientation was carefully shaped around its most beautiful outlooks, where garden-like riverside planting unfolds toward the water and distant skyline. Terraces, courtyards, and recessed outdoor spaces extend the feeling of living within greenery, while a rooftop meadow adds another immersive layer of nature. Every move in the design celebrates the surrounding landscape, turning the house into a calm architectural frame for the site’s abundant natural beauty.

Slow Architecture offers a more lasting kind of luxury, rooted in the confidence that a home is built to endure. Through durable materials, adaptable planning, and passive performance, it creates spaces that remain resilient, comfortable, and valuable while continuing to serve present needs and future generations.

The post Most Homes Are Built to Last 10 Years. These 5 Designs Are Built for 100 first appeared on Yanko Design.

MVRDV Planted a Secret Valley in the Middle of a Housing Block

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Most apartment buildings do their best work from the outside. A striking facade, a bold roofline, some smart use of glass and steel, and the job is considered done. La Vallée Verte, MVRDV’s recently completed residential project in Bordeaux, operates on a completely different logic. From the street, it is almost deliberately restrained. The real show is what you find when you step inside.

Tucked into the Bastide-Niel district on the right bank of the Garonne River, La Vallée Verte is three angled white buildings arranged on a triangular plot. It sits at the district’s north-western edge, along the Quai des Queyries. MVRDV authored the entire Bastide-Niel masterplan, coordinating 144 different architecture offices to transform a former industrial and military area into a dense, liveable urban district. La Vallée Verte is their own interpretation of the rules they set, which makes it both a residential building and a demonstration project in one.

Designer: MVRDV

The masterplan’s key principle is “suncuts,” a parametric design method where each building’s massing is carved and angled to maximise sunlight access and prevent neighbouring structures from being overshadowed. MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas describes the resulting roofscape as “like icebergs” echoing the geometry of the old city. It’s a compelling visual concept and a genuinely useful one, a combination that doesn’t come around as often as it should.

The suncuts define the exterior. But the interior is the actual idea. The three buildings encircle a circular courtyard that MVRDV calls a “crater,” a lush park-like space with plants covering every level of the inward-facing facades. Terraces cascade downward, each loaded with pots ranging from flowering shrubs to small trees, with evergreen and deciduous species mixed together to replicate a natural valley landscape at a building scale. The varying plant types at different heights support biodiversity, which at this point feels less like a bonus feature and more like a baseline expectation we should be holding all new housing to.

Seventy apartments of varying sizes are spread across the three buildings, intended to attract a genuine mix of residents: single first-time buyers, families, and older people. The idea is a building that ages well with the people inside it. A day-care centre occupies the ground floor of one block, opening directly onto the courtyard. That programming decision alone says something. Shared green space tends to feel incidental in most housing developments, an amenity tacked on after the real decisions are made. Here, it’s genuinely central to how the building functions.

One detail stands out above everything else. Professional gardeners need access to those tiered terraces, so MVRDV cut openings through the structural walls and added steel doors between neighbouring balconies to create a maintenance route. Practical, necessary. What makes it quietly wonderful is that those doorways are shaped like the silhouette of a person wearing a wide-brimmed hat. It’s a small gesture, but it tells you something: the architects were thinking about the gardeners too, not just the residents. The people who will keep that valley alive are written into the architecture itself.

The environmental considerations are thorough throughout. La Vallée Verte sits in the Garonne River floodplain, so ground-floor apartments are raised to allow water to move through the site during flood events. The streetscape is porous to absorb rainwater. Parking is placed in an above-ground structure rather than underground, reducing both flood exposure and embodied carbon. District heating and photovoltaic panels round out the energy strategy. The broader Bastide-Niel district holds France’s EcoQuartier certification, and La Vallée Verte earns its place within it.

The courtyard is the image that will travel, the shot that gets shared, the thing people point to as the concept. But what makes La Vallée Verte worth paying attention to is how methodically everything else was thought through to support it. The suncut geometry, the flood adaptations, the gardener’s route, the mix of apartment sizes. Good design usually has one clear idea at its centre. Great design makes sure everything around that idea is working just as hard.

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Vipp’s New Catskills Pavilion Is a Sculpture You Can Sleep In

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Not every building earns the word “sculptural” without some heavy editorial lifting, but the Vipp Pavilion in Upstate New York is the rare case where that description actually holds up. Completed earlier this year, the project is Vipp’s first ground-up build in the United States and their fifteenth bookable guesthouse globally. It sits on sixteen acres of meadow in Lumberland, New York, two hours outside of the city, on the edge of a reflective pond. And from the outside, it looks less like a place you’d stay in and more like a deliberate act.

The structure was designed by Johnston Marklee, the Los Angeles-based firm behind some of the more quietly radical architecture of the past two decades. Their work has always been about geometry as experience rather than spectacle, and the Vipp Pavilion is exactly that. The form is based on two tangent ellipses that mirror the curve of the adjacent pond. Built with a combination of smooth and ribbed stucco, it’s rectangular in envelope but sculpted in feeling, with semi-circular cutouts that carve into the exterior and draw the eye inward. Sharon Johnston described the approach as designing something that “masks a sense of scale, form, or function,” which is a beautifully honest way of saying the building refuses to be immediately read.

Designer: Johnston Marklee

Four years went into getting this right, and you can tell. This isn’t the kind of project that was rushed to fill a destination travel gap or capitalize on a trend cycle. The care shows in the details: the green roof planted by landscape firm Larry Weaner Landscape Associates, which connects the meadow to the architecture itself rather than interrupting it. The interior courtyard slows your arrival down and redirects your gaze upward before you even enter the main space. The floor-to-ceiling window wall lines up perfectly with the water, creating what the architects call a telescopic effect.

Inside, Vipp outfitted the 1,200-square-foot space with their own furniture, and the choices feel considered rather than commercial. There’s a travertine table surrounded by swivel chairs, a sectional sofa in cream positioned to catch the view, and the V3 kitchen, whose polished aluminum ribs subtly echo the ribbed stucco on the exterior walls. It’s the kind of interior that doesn’t announce itself, which is exactly the right call in a space where the architecture is already doing a lot of talking.

The two bedrooms, one bathroom, covered porch, and exterior courtyard layout keeps the program deliberately simple. That restraint reads as confidence, not limitation. When you’re offering sixteen acres of Catskills landscape and a building that looks like a smooth stone half-emerged from a pond, you don’t need to fill every corner. The landscape does what interior design cannot.

I think Vipp has been building something genuinely interesting with this guesthouse series, one that most people overlook precisely because the brand started with trash cans. But this pavilion, maybe more than any of their previous projects, makes the case that design continuity is a real thing. The same rigor that goes into their hardware goes into the architecture they commission. That’s not a given in the design world. A lot of brands treat objects and spaces as separate categories, and the work suffers for it.

The Pavilion is bookable, meaning you can actually stay there, which is one of those pieces of information that shifts the whole conversation. This is not just a concept project or an awards-season submission. It exists, it functions, and it sits two hours from Manhattan in a landscape that will do most of the work of making you feel genuinely away.

Whether or not you ever book a night there, the Vipp Pavilion is worth paying attention to. It’s a well-argued case for how geometry, landscape, and material can coexist without any one of them shouting over the others. And frankly, that kind of restraint is harder to pull off than it looks.

The post Vipp’s New Catskills Pavilion Is a Sculpture You Can Sleep In first appeared on Yanko Design.

India’s Anthill House Has No AC and Stays Cool Anyway

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We’ve been building houses wrong. Not structurally, not legally, and not in any way that’s easy to name. But somewhere along the line, the conversation around home design shifted away from how does this building breathe toward what does this building look like on a feed. That’s why The Anthill, a new brick residence in Ahilyanagar, Maharashtra by Kaushal Tatiya Architects, feels like such a pointed correction. Not a provocation. A correction.

The premise sounds deceptively simple: a house modeled after an ant mound. Not the insect itself, but the engineering intelligence of what it builds. Ants have been solving thermal regulation, cross-ventilation, and spatial hierarchy problems for millions of years, with no blueprint, no software, and no electricity required. Kaushal Tatiya, the firm’s founder, described the anthill not as a literal form but as “an intelligent climatic organism,” one able to “regulate temperature, create ventilation through voids, and function through a network of interconnected chambers without any imposed geometry.” That single observation is what the entire project is built on, and it shows.

Designer: Kaushal Tatiya Architects (Photos by Avesh Gaur)

The house sits low in the landscape, almost terrain-like, its exposed brick facade functioning as much as an environmental filter as it does a structural shell. From the outside, it reads as deliberately introverted: solid walls and perforated surfaces that hold back the glare before it ever reaches the living spaces inside. The real architecture begins once you start moving through it. Rooms branch off from larger communal volumes, ceiling heights shift unexpectedly, and natural light arrives filtered and softened rather than harsh. The passage between spaces becomes the experience, not just a means of getting from one room to another.

This is a design principle modernism largely traded away in favor of open-plan everything and maximum sight lines. The Anthill doesn’t make that trade. Its stepped terraces and alternating balconies recall the traditional Indian rooftop concept of the chhat, creating layered, shaded thresholds that do the cooling work before the sun reaches the interior. A 12-foot cantilevered slab, supported through brick in compression, adds a more deliberate architectural gesture to the otherwise organic composition.

It’s worth pausing on the sustainability side of this project, because it earns more than a passing mention. The Anthill operates entirely on passive systems: cross ventilation, thermal mass, and shaded courtyards. No mechanical ventilation. In a region defined by extreme heat and intense sunlight, that isn’t a compromise. It’s a design strategy that trusts the building’s own intelligence. The idea that architecture should outlast any power grid it’s connected to feels increasingly important, and The Anthill makes that case without saying a word about it.

I think what gets undersold in conversations about sustainable design is how genuinely radical simplicity is. We’ve normalized a model where buildings are essentially sealed boxes, then mechanically conditioned to be habitable. That approach is energy-intensive, expensive, and fragile in ways we rarely acknowledge. The Anthill argues the opposite: that a building designed with enough spatial intelligence doesn’t need to fight its climate. It learns to negotiate with it instead.

The visual language of the project carries all of this without being heavy-handed. The brick is warm and earthy, the curves are organic without being theatrical, and the overall effect is of a building that looks like it belongs to the land rather than placed on top of it. Photography by Avesh Gaur shows a house that reads differently from every angle, which is always a sign that the architecture is meant to be inhabited rather than just photographed.

What The Anthill ultimately puts on the table is a question worth sitting with: what if the most intelligent design move isn’t to add more technology, but to study what natural systems already perfected? The answers, in this case, are sophisticated enough to build a house around. We talk a lot about future-proofing design. The Anthill is a case where the most forward-looking move was to look at something ancient.

The post India’s Anthill House Has No AC and Stays Cool Anyway first appeared on Yanko Design.