This week on Dezeen, ahead of his 90th birthday on Sunday, we explored how Norman Foster became the world’s most successful architect.
Dezeen’s features editor Nat Barker spoke to the British architect’s colleagues and friends, as well as to the man himself, to find out how Foster, who has won every major architecture award, reached the pinnacle of his profession.
Among those giving their input were Ken Shuttleworth, founder of Make Architects, architecture historian Owen Hopkins and Su Rogers, the only other surviving partner of Foster’s first studio, Team 4.
Another well-known British practice, Heatherwick Studio, unveiled its new headquarters exclusively on Dezeen this week. The studio turned a 1950s industrial building in King’s Cross into “a temple of values”.
Also in the UK, American studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro transformed a London hangar into the V&A East Storehouse. The publicly accessible working storage facility of the Victoria and Albert Museum houses 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives.
American architecture studio Populous was named the primary architect of a plan to redevelop a portion of Oklahoma City into an entertainment district.
The studio will be working with NBA player Russell Westbrook, who will serve as creative director, on the district, which will feature a new stadium designed by Populous at its centre.
Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum discussed how the ever-shifting landscape of her home country shaped her concept for this year’s Serpentine Pavilion in a video for Dezeen.
“Bangladesh is constantly shaping and reshaping itself,” Tabassum said. “That ephemerality or temporality is also an important phenomena in our architecture.”
In design news, technology company Google released the fourth update to its Material Design system, Material 3 Expressive.
The brand found that people have an appetite for “wild and way-too-playful” interfaces, Google Design vice-president Vanessa Cho told Dezeen.
As the yearly NYCxDesign showcase came to an end, we rounded up fourteen of the best furniture designs seen during the week.
Among the standout designs on show were classic chairs by architect Antoni Gaudí and an MSCHF lamp made with a Mercedes seatbelt and a reimagined folding chair.
Popular projects this week included a black Ontario cabin with viewfinder windows, a quartet of houses on a Mexican hilltop and a post office in Brest that was turned into flats.
Our latest lookbook featured seven minimalist bedrooms where wood adds visual interest.
This week on Dezeen
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