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The design of the Barbican Estates, London's residential Brutalist masterpiece, was finalized in 1959. Many of the apartments had bathrooms where the toilet was in its own little room, separated from the sink and bathtub. (This is an arrangement you often see in Japan.) But in the 1960s, as construction began, the housing codes changed. Any room that contained a toilet now had to have its own sink. As-designed, there was simply no room to add a conventional sink to the separate toilet rooms. It fell to German architect Michael Hohmann to solve the problem.Hohmann collaborated with Twyfords, a British sink manufacturer, and their in-house designer Munroe Blair on a radical design that would fit within th

Daniel Hubert, a 3D designer who posts his .stl files on Printables, may be a genius. At a hardware store, he encountered sets of security bits (for driving tamper-proof fasteners) in both black and silver. Where we see specialty bits, Hubert saw chess pieces:

Butterfly effect: Among the things that currently aren't getting shipped through the Strait of Hormuz is naphtha, a crude oil derivative that's used in colored inks. As a result Calbee, the Frito-Lay of Japan, has announced they're switching their chip packaging to black and white. "This measure is intended to help maintain a stable supply of products," the company writes, noting that the color change "will not affect product quality." (Which means, I guess, that they don't actually use the colored ink in the chips themselves.)Tragically, the change also means t

There's something really charming about these chunky, sort of art-totem Miorita furniture pieces. It's also shocking that they're made out of gigantic pieces of old-growth Oak, which are scarce in America; but DEOS Architecture, the firm that created the pieces, is based in Moldova. Romania still has large tracts of old-growth forest, with some stands reportedly being 300-400 years old. So these pieces appeal to me partially for the primitive, designer-as-child form, and primarily out of raw material envy.

For the last thirty years, venture capital has largely been shaped by a software worldview. The model was simple enough: write a check, help a company scale fast, chase the hockey stick, and win through speed. That framework made sense in a world where software was supposed to eat everything.But that is not the world we are entering now.What's emerging instead is a much more complex and consequential arena: the infusion of intelligence into the physical world. Manufacturing. Healthcare. Energy. Robotics. Supply chains. Industrial systems. Real infrastructure. This is where some of the biggest opportunities now sit. And this is also where the traditional venture model starts to show its limits.

This June bench, by street furniture brand Vestre, takes minimalist production seriously. It consists of just two steel end pieces that define the overall form, while pre-cut lumber does most of the heavy lifting. There's also an ar

How rich are you, really, if you're still hanging your bath towels on metal rods? Like some plebe. Fear not: Soon you'll be able to hang them on Murano glass towel rods, handcrafted in Venice, no two alike. "Each glass cane in the series is unique," writes 6:AM Glassworks, the Milan-based design brand.The raw, hard-edged stainless steel brackets seem totally out of place to me, but the company says they're "merging industrial elements with traditional Murano glass to create contemporary,

Each year for one week in May New York becomes one of the most design-saturated cities on earth. NYCxDESIGN Festival runs May 14–20, and whether you're a trade professional, a design tourist, or just someone who likes to wander into interesting spaces, there's no shortage of reasons to leave the house.Dozens of events are spread out across Manhattan and Brooklyn, with programming ranging from major trade fairs to intimate gallery exhibitions, talks, tours and workshops. We're looking forward to the SHINE exhibition, NYCxDESIGN's official festival exhibition, running the full week at The Seaport. Curated and designed by Harry Allen, SHINE brings together 70 designer

This clever little gizmo is an add-on spout, for camping vessels that lack one. It's made out of lacquered Beech, and was created by Taiwanese craftsman Child Wood Lee.

When it comes to high-end bathtubs, you've got your enamel-coated steel or cast iron, or stone. Wood is reserved for Japanese-style soaking tubs. But now David Chipperfield Design, the industrial design arm of the UK's David Chipperfield Architects, has created this Tambre tub out of Okumè plywood. (Okumè is an African hardwood used to make high-end marine-grade plywood.)