Doha’s World Cup stadium is now a sex toy

A unique honor has just been bestowed on one of the stadium’s designed for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, now underway in Qatar. Rendered in silicone as...

Here’s what it looks like when an office is designed for its remote workers

Before the pandemic, the data integration startup Fivetran did what a lot of its fellow Bay Area startups did to stay competitive in the marketplace...

Comcast’s new remote control was designed for—and with—disabled users

Measuring about the size and weight of a circa 2000 cordless phone, Comcast’s new TV remote control is quite a noticeable deviation from the slim,...

MIT’s new museum demystifies the world’s most complex technologies

Taking a seat at a desk with the American flag draped in the background, President Richard Nixon addresses a television camera. It’s July 1969, and...

This 3D-printed air-conditioning ductwork could solve one of the office’s biggest problems

For all the reasons workers might hate their offices, air-conditioning ranks highly. One study found that 60% of workers reported thermal stress in...

Exclusive: Try on your team’s World Cup jersey with Snap’s new AR filter

It’s got 1.2 million square feet, but most of this giant library has no books at all

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This $5,000 mobile toilet wants to disrupt the porta potty industry

With a reflective mirrored exterior, sharply angled roofline, and an uplit white interior measuring just a few dozen square feet, the Portal is a...

Inside the design of Magic Leap’s new headset

The view from behind the lenses of a Magic Leap 2 is deceptive. What’s seen in this augmented reality headset floats in the middle distance, clear...

6 Strategies for getting affordable housing built

The shortage of affordable housing is an ongoing challenge in the United States. About 20 million households in the U.S. are paying more than a third...

How the turntable outdesigned the iPod

If there were a competition, the turntable would be the champion of audio devices. While the eight-track, tape deck, CD player, and iPod have all...

This museum’s new facade is built from bricks made of city waste

Waste from the city of Ghent, Belgium, is being turned into the literal building blocks of a major cultural institution. For a renovation and...

The Sloomoo Institute is a slime mecca designed for dirtying your hands and soothing your brain

The slime community is big online. That’s slime—as in a glob of goo—and community, as in a group of people with a collective interest. People...

The encyclopedia of design just got a major update

It doesn’t come right out and say it, but 1000 Design Classics is basically a gigantic best-of list. Featuring classic chairs, vehicles, tools, and...

This new Chinese sports stadium looks like an alien landscape

With 30,000 seats, a red ring of running lanes for track events, and a central soccer field, the new stadium in the eastern Chinese city of Quzhou, is...

Here’s why the Baltimore Ravens took Amtrak to their games against New York’s teams

When the Baltimore Ravens football team set out for its October 16 game against the New York Giants in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the team packed up...

Before Bauhaus, the father of modernism wanted to be a cowboy

Walter Gropius, one of the leaders of the early 20th-century modernist movement in architecture and a founder of one of the world’s most important...

This small airport in Italy is now a major concert venue

Like most airports around the world, the Reggio Emilia Airport outside of Bologna, Italy, has a huge footprint, measuring hundreds of acres. Much of...

This pop artist’s new home blurs the line between house and gallery

Canadian pop artist Charles Pachter has just built himself a new home in Toronto. Located a stone’s throw from the city’s eminent art museum, the...

There’s a reason you love Scandinavian design so much

It’s almost taken for granted in the United States that Scandinavian design is just better. Simple, functional, and minimalist, Scandinavian...

6 stunning new buildings that are actually old

When built right, buildings can last for hundreds or even thousands of years. But a building constructed 400 years ago isn’t always going to match...

Expedia’s new HQ is an ambitious vision for the future of corporate campuses

A corporate campus is probably nobody’s idea of a fun place to visit. Often, these are spaces only intended for work and the workers who do it. But...

To reduce air pollution in a park by 50%, just plant some simple hedges

Cars pollute. It’s a well-known reality that, in the abstract, imperils our climate and ravages our atmosphere. But for individual humans down on...

Airbnb just invested $10 million in 100 absurd buildings

A giant fossilized snail. A cheese wedge. A disco ball. A Dutch clog. This list of random objects might seem like some bizarre word association...

There’s a hidden Costco underneath this huge Mexico City park

Like any of the other 800 Costco big-box stores around the world, the new Costco in the Santa Fe district of Mexico City is gigantic. Its...

This coffee robot is a one-touch espresso maker for both snobs and slobs

On a recent Tuesday morning in New York, Sahand Dilmaghani was drinking an iced latte macchiato—foamed milk topped with a double shot of espresso...

Lincoln Center revamps a concert hall—and its mission—from the inside out

In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, New York’s Lincoln Center is trying to stretch outside its snooty, high society foundations. With a $550 million...

Fortune 500 companies are are wasting millions on unused office space

The once forlorn office is coming back to life. Companies from Uber to LinkedIn to Apple are asking— or requiring—that workers come back at least...

Video games dreamed up other worlds. Now they’re coming for real architecture

Video games and architectural models are about to form a long overdue union. Epic Games and design software maker Autodesk are joining forces to help...

How disability is informing better products—and better organizations

It wasn’t so long ago that businesses were operating in what Jenny Lay-Flurrie calls the “dark ages.” As Microsoft’s chief accessibility...

This tree owns itself—and is fighting for its own survival

On a few square feet of land on the campus of the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, a black gum tree has been planted that could...

These three unconventional leaders are reinventing the food industry

From ingredients and the curation of meals to the ways food gets distributed, the food industry is undergoing rapid change. And as three food industry...

Is gaming ready for its Netflix moment? Logitech is betting on it

Logitech, the $5 billion company best known for its workaday keyboards and mice, has a bold new product that’s worlds away from its basic computer...

A new museum dedicated to sports legend Jackie Robinson goes beyond the familiar story

The one-sentence story of Jackie Robinson’s life is well known. As a baseball player in 1947, he was the first Black person to play in Major League...

How Alfred Hitchcock turned buildings into characters

Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock is regarded as one of the most influential directors in movie history, defining the genres of horror and suspense with...

Moshe Safdie’s unrealized dream for Habitat 67 may finally be coming true

From a university design project that became one of the most recognizable apartment complexes in the world to major urban developments in Asia that...

With 15,000 homes in the pipeline, Google and Lendlease want to reinvent Silicon Valley housing

A huge infusion of housing is coming to one of America’s tightest housing markets. Google, in partnership with global development giant Lendlease,...

Thanks to an innovative new paint, this school’s playground just got 12 degrees cooler

One 75-degree day last month, the playground of the SAE School outside of Atlanta underwent a dramatic transformation. Students and volunteers...

AI tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are helping architects—and their clients—design new buildings

With just a few words, stunning visual worlds can be conjured from the ether. Through an emerging and fast evolving genre of artificial intelligence...

The Queen’s secret death alarm has been mistakenly going off for years

If protocols were all in order, a mysterious alarm went off Thursday in the newsrooms of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). It should have...

Can this $34,500 display help digital art go mainstream?

At this year’s edition of The Armory Show, a major annual international art fair opening in New York on September 9, the big ticket paintings of...

LinkedIn’s new ‘postures matrix’ is shaping how its new headquarters handles hybrid work

The era of hybrid work came at an awkward time for LinkedIn. The professional networking company was deep in the midst of a design for its new...

5 prototype homes show that houses can be ‘sustainable and attainable’

Housing is both an intimate part of the human experience and also a consumer product. A new exhibition at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art...

650,000 efficient houses and 7.2 million free heat pumps: How the Inflation Reduction Act will impact U.S. homes

The Biden Administration’s recently passed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) hits a lot of varied targets, from lowering prescription drug costs to...

A beautiful zigzagging walkway gives this once-polluted river curb appeal

Climbing 28 feet above the banks of the South Platte River in Denver, a bold new walkway has given residents the chance to interact with a waterway...

Black architects are rare. This program plans to change that

There should be many more Black architects in the U.S. Based solely on Census figures, about 14% of the U.S. population identifies as Black, but in a...

‘Bioconstruction’ will build homes out of flowering, 3D-printed dirt

The walls of your home usually need to be spruced up with paint or some art, but one day they may be teeming with life instead. Through a new approach...

This sphere of 300 speakers blasts out an AI-created ‘soundtrack for the world’

A distorted kazoo from Belarus. A gentle three-chord keyboard progression from France. A throaty growl from Brazil. These disparate sounds from far...

These look like novelty Pringles-theme lights, but they’ll actually keep your office quiet

Offices are notoriously loud and distracting places, and the noise of others has long been a chief complaint among employees. The key to a quieter...

These sensors know when your office is underutilized—and when your grandma takes a fall

Knowing where people are in a building at any moment is valuable information, and a variety of technologies now exist to make it easy to turn a home...