Downtown Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, now the tallest building in the world, briefly opened in January with a stunning celebration. In photographs, the building’s inauguration, replete with fireworks and video projections (more…)

Frank Gehry is known for his easily identifiable style: big, swooping titanium and glass forms that seem to float like sails on the wind or the skirts of a dancer. Some compare his architecture to Disneyland, larger than life and a bit too whimsical (more…)

In the vernacular of furniture, the chair is the apparatus that forms the intimate bond between the individual and the room, as the great architect and designer Eero Saarinen no doubt observed. A chair may only be empty space until someone sits in it (more…)

Thousands of years ago, in a fertile plain somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the descendants of an ark builder looked into each other’s eyes and then up towards the heavens. (more…)

This year, the hottest toy isn’t a string rag doll like those that ancient Egyptian kids played with or a button-collecting game popular with kids of the Middle Ages. This Christmas, the hottest toy on every kid’s list is a robotic hamster. (more…)

If you could design a car right now from scratch, that could look any way you wanted, any shape or design, what would it look like? No matter what crazy ideas you started out with, chances are (more…)

Music is defined as the art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. Noise, however, is (more…)

Design is not merely about changing our objects, but about changing our lives. It is not merely about improving the appearance or utility of our surroundings (more…)

Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road House once stood out because, in an era that prized prominence, it settled unpretentiously into the landscape. Now, the house stands out precisely because it doesn’t stand out. (more…)

In 1971, Reyner Banham’s well-known book, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, offered an inspired version of what the city had to offer. Rather than deride the sprawling, car-crazy metropolis, Banham embraced the place, dividing it into four zones (more…)