They say that trends follow our direction of thought, expressing the mood of the present and the style of the future. Interior design like all other creative fields is sensitive to a world undergoing a huge transformation and realignment under a recessionary economy; during this global change a new trend...

Wine is associated with gastronomy, history, local identity and spirituality. With its rich past of sensory delight dating back thousands of years, wine has long since established itself as a lasting cultural symbol of a healthy and harmonious lifestyle. Throughout history, the role of wine has seen various phases, changing...

Today I want to tell two stories, this time not of constructing new exciting architecture but instead of demolition!

Demolition, on the one hand, seems like an essential part of a building's life cycle, but when it comes to important architecture milestones, it makes you wonder why these buildings...

For architects, Christmas is that special time of the year when even they can afford to stop being rational for a while and indulge into some festive sentimentality. Clearly, the design and creation of man-made Christmas trees started long before the more versatile and multi disciplinary minded architects of recent...

Adaptive reuse is used to describe the process of reusing an old site or building for a purpose other than that which it was built or designed. For me, adaptive reuse is admirable for so many reasons: it is sustainable, it creates original and surprising architecture and it echoes a...

Notable for the visually shallow ambiguous space it creates, Cubism—the 20th century avant-garde art movement in painting and sculpture, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque&mdashadopts an approach in which objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form. Instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint,...

In a previous article for the Huffington Post I shared my amazement at women's underrepresentation in the architectural industry: in the western world, women constitute no more than 20% of the licensed practicing professionals, an astonishing drop from the 50/50 split of men to women at architectural school....

ICON magazine's quote echoed in many architecture websites and blogs after the launch of the 2008 April issue:

For the first time, "young" actually means young, but "architect" may no longer mean architect.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a most galvanizing article by Niklas Maak - a writer and arts editor for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The text entitled 'Goodbye Retro-Futurism' read beautifully about the topic - the trend in the creative arts showing the influence...

A few weeks ago ICOMOS' recommendation against the registering of 19 buildings designed by Le Corbusier in the World Heritage List provoked heated discussion in the architecture world. ICOMOS, an influential advisory body of UNESCO, claimed that the 19 nominated buildings do not clearly 'demonstrate remarkable...

As I set about writing on "interactive architecture" this week, I was struck by the semantic challenges and numerous connotations of "interactivity." Nowadays we have grown accustomed to commonly using 'Interactive Architecture' to denote "the convergence of embedded computation and kinetics in architectural form with the intention to...

This week I am writing my article in a hotel that shall remain nameless -- it is 40-plus floors high, with a complete glass façade, lights on wherever you walk and air conditioning blowing in each room. This building is LEED certified. For those of you unfamiliar with the LEED...

Making my selection of buildings this week led me to a surprising discovery about the representation of women in architecture. I started with a simple enough premise to select ten buildings by female architects off the top of my head. I was immediately picking out Zaha Hadid, Kazuyo Sejima and...

Some accept that Adolf Loos, with his publication of "Ornament and Crime" in 1908, put an end to ornament. Others argue that the real reason for the death of ornament was actually WWI and WW2 where the lack of resources and urgent need for construction meant that fast architecture, modernism...