designboom

architects imagine temporary homes for writers in switzerland At the foot of Switzerland’s Jura Mountains, the Jan Michalski Foundation assembles an unusual small neighborhood for writers and translators arriving for residencies lasting from two weeks to three months. The creatives are given a place not only to work but to temporarily call home.

CHANGING EXPECTATIONS IN INTERIOR DESIGN Shifting daily routines, remote work, and changing social habits are reshaping how we experience interior architecture. Traditional boundaries across homes, hotels, hospitals, offices and schools are dissolving to support multifaceted lives.

rodolphe parente and marion mailaender reimagine ken club Rodolphe Parente and Marion Mailaender reimagine Paris’ Ken Club as an architecture in motion, bringing the 1985 identity of the fitness and social club into a contemporary setting opposite the Eiffel Tower. The architects approach the past as an architectural remix, shaping a place where the visual language and atmosphere of the 1980s are sampled, reworked, and given a new rhythm.

cave structures merge architecture with play and exploration The Playscape Garden reimagines the community cultural center as a cultivated civic landscape where architecture, play, learning, and collective life grow together. Conceived in response to the social fragmentation intensified by COVID-19, the project transforms an abandoned canal-edge site in Hackney, London, into a new cultural hub, reconnecting the community with Kingsland Basin while extending the energy of Kingsland’s main street.

Stepped Platform composes a Collective Viewpoint on Othoni Developed during the Ionian Lab 2026 residency on Othoni, at the western edge of Greece, Dimitris Kontodimos’ West/End (For those who made it this far) takes the form of a four-level white platform positioned toward the open western horizon.

learning to live with fire In the days after the Palisades and Eaton fires swept through Los Angeles in January 2025, some of the strangest photographs were of the houses still standing. A home built by Chansen Architecture in 2024 sat almost untouched beside burned lots in Pacific Palisades. In Malibu, a concrete beachfront house remained above a field of debris. Together, the two fires destroyed more than 16,000 structures, which made these isolated survivors look almost impossible.

Eccentric Lenses Turns Bali’s Landscape into a Kinetic Optical Field With Eccentric Lenses, Vincent Leroy transforms the Balinese landscape into a shifting optical field. Composed of a constellation of Fresnel lenses, the kinetic sculpture responds to the wind, continuously reframing, fragmenting, and displacing its surroundings. Set against Bali’s lush vegetation and distant mountains, the lenses introduce a new layer of movement into the landscape.

50 chairs arrive at christie’s beverly hills Christie’s Beverly Hills will fill with chairs later this month, though very few of them resemble the kind you would casually pull up to a table. Basic.Space has assembled 50 pieces for 50 Chairs at Christie’s, bringing together familiar names from 20th-century design with contemporary furniture that stretches the category into stranger territory.

Zehua Zhang Rethinks the Civic Destination on Roosevelt Island At the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, between Manhattan and Queens and overlooking the East River, New York-licensed architect Zehua Zhang proposes a different model for the civic destination with Roosevelt Island Cultural Plaza. Conceived as an inhabitable landscape rather than an isolated architectural object, the project brings architecture, public space, landscape, culture, and everyday life into a continuous urban experience.

BIG’s Hanna Johansson on the future for housing in Athens Set within the vast transformation of Athens’ former international airport, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG)’s Park Rise is conceived as a residential landmark for The Ellinikon (find designboom’s previous coverage here).