"They are fairly boring corporate buildings, and it’s our job to make them look pretty,” says Universal Design Studio’s Hannah Carter Owers, describing the practice’s ongoing project with fashion chain H&M. The latest store, in Seoul,…

Autarky is a series of vessels and lampshades made using the simplest of materials and techniques. It’s the latest project from Formafantasma, a studio of two Italian designers based in Eindhoven, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin. The pair…

A quilted cube inspired by jellyfish has been erected in Barcelona’s 22@ science and technology district. Designed by Catalan architect Enric Ruiz-Geli of Barcelona practice Cloud 9, the Media-TIC building has two facades that inflate or deflate…

The museum building, an offshoot of Paris’ Centre Pompidou, is an unconventional combination of organic high-tech structure with the traditional glass and steel variety. The 8,000sq m roof, inspired by the form of a traditional Chinese straw hat…

The interior is lined with golden, anodised aluminium that has been lasercut with various symbols, including Louis Vuitton branding. “God is dead, according to Nietzsche, and we have a new kind of religion now,” says Schmidt. “In the past, you…

This photographic series by American artist Amir Zaki depicts the lifeguard towers that dot the beaches of Southern California. His particular effects are achieved through two main techniques: a contextless vantagempoint from below, starkly…

Two large pyramid-shaped structures of equal size, one housing the bookshop and the other a cafe, tower over an assembly of volumes of differing heights. The two-storey, 3,000sq m building has a tall central section housing the 180sq m temporary…

The simple act of walking up and down the vast nave of Paris’ Grand Palais was how American artist Richard Serra found inspiration for his latest work, Promenade. The resulting piece is a series of immense steel slabs that dwarf those walking…

In the cavernous space of P3 – a bunker formerly used for stress-testing concrete – industrial sounds clunk, twang, shudder and thud. A pair of black-clad stagehands carefully move pieces of black piping into the edges of three green-tinged grid…

What could you get from seeing a David Shrigley exhibition in the flesh that you couldn’t get from flicking through one of his many books or weekly cartoons serialised in the Guardian every Saturday? Well the first thing greeting you as you enter…

A woman, naked from the waist down, bends slowly backwards and sprays a perfect arc of piss onto the stage as she does so. A giant woolly creature resembling the Sugar Puffs Honey Monster with depression plays tennis with a small rodent-like…

Articulated, a cross-disciplinary exhibition curated by multimedia arts practice The Light Surgeons and sponsored by Nokia Nseries (more of which later), was a show about that most ubiquitous of contemporary subjects, boundaries and the blurring…

Messages to the dead are inscribed on a glass monument commemorating the victims of the terrorist train bombings in Madrid on 11 March 2004. The 11m-high cylinder, by Spanish architecture practice FAM, stands outside Atocha, the city’s largest…

Hand-knotted fibreglass lights by designers Miriam van der Lubbe and Niels van Eijk have been suspended in a hospital atrium in the Netherlands. The project, commissioned by public arts organisation SKOR, has been installed in the recently…

Japanese design studio Nendo’s two launches in Milan this year have concealed quirks. The products are inspired by nature, and fuse an understated presence with kinetic features.

Part of “bloomroom” – Nendo’s solo exhibition in Zona…

A miniature Japanese garden sitting atop a music box is the first piece to go into production from Lausanne design school ECAL’s Mas Luxe course this year. The piece, by postgraduate student Audrey Temin, was made following a workshop with the…

The exhibition, which ran at the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, Holland, earlier this year, includes three new products by the Dutch designer – a coatstand for van Esch, a chair for Ahrend and an acoustic panel for Offecct. “It sounds quite…

"It’s a bit like a Battenberg cake, in the sense that you get lots of different pieces of timber of varying colours and shapes, glue them all together and then slice them horizontally," says British designer Gareth Neal, describing the internal…