With a cornucopia of credits to his name-having designed some of Asia's hottest new hotels including the Waldorf Astoria Osaka, Capella Taipei, and Upper House Hong Kong; restaurants like Duddell's and Estro in Hong Kong; and even furniture for Louis Vuitton-Fu needs as much artistic inspiration as he can get to fuel his work. Fortunately, he doesn't have to go far in this dynamic city: "There's the ultramodern and chic, yes, but the city's spirit is rooted in places that are grounded and authentic," he says.
We're drawn to beauty in many forms-through art and architecture, sweeping mountain views, layered history, and the everyday culture of city life. And while you can find that beauty anywhere you look, some places make the search a little easier than others. This list of the most stunning cities in the world spans continents and centuries, but the entires are all united by one common thread: the ability to make you fall in love at first sight.
Monia Ben Hamouda's work weaves calligraphy, material transformation and ancestral memory into sculptures and installations that oscillate between language and form. In conversation, we traced the conceptual and sensory threads of her practice, unfolding through key works that reflect on heritage, embodiment and translation. Using materials such as iron, stone and pigment, her installations become sites where history is not only referenced but physically felt.
Fundamental to her work is an exploration, as a queer woman and as a documentarian photographer, of the nuanced, multifarious nature of identity, most prominently in LGBTQ+ communities, but also far beyond them. She has committed from her earliest mature images to the idea that, as she has phrased it, "Without representation, there is no visibility"-a belief that remains more vital than ever in the US and across the world in the 2020s.
Drawing Architecture Studio presents The Clock House No.2 at the 7th Shenzhen Bay Public Art Season in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, on view until April 19th, 2026. Commissioned for the public art program, the Beijing-based practice reinterprets the historical automaton clock as architecture, using low-cost industrial components to construct a structure that chimes and glows every fifteen minutes. Where the clocks once gifted to emperors represented technical virtuosity and expensive craftsmanship, this installation adopts a deliberately rough and economical construction.
The loft, located in Vervoordt's Kanaal complex outside of Antwerp, is currently in contract to close for an undisclosed sum, but it was listed for $825,100. Ye bought the three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in 2021. Spanning 2,260 square feet, the dwelling featured Vervoordt's dreamlike minimalist style as seen in the home that Ye shared with his ex, Kim Kardashian, which was also designed by the Belgian architect.
Postmodernism began as a critique of modernism's exhausted promises. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many designers no longer treated modernism as radical or socially redemptive. Urban renewal projects accelerated the demolition of historic neighborhoods, and landmark preservation battles raised urgent questions about what the United States valued and, ultimately, protected. The loss of major civic icons, including New York's Penn Station, sharpened public awareness that progress often arrives through erasure.
'The challenge of the design was to find a way to allow the architecture to mediate between a charged landscape and the sacred narratives that arose within it. It demanded a building that could work with allegory,' share the architects. 'At the same time, the project needed to use local labor, skills, and resources to achieve something with a sense of social responsibility and low carbon expenditure.'
High above the Naggar valley in Himachal Pradesh, Eila reveals itself slowly. It is not the kind of resort that announces its presence with grand façades or rigid terraces. Instead, it feels as if the architecture has quietly grown out of the mountainside. Soft, organic forms follow the contours of the land, echoing the rhythms of the terrain rather than resisting them.
Rising from the ground as a cultivated landscape of learning, the Uzbekistan Pavilion "Garden of Knowledge" at Expo 2025 Osaka translates national transformation into a spatial and material narrative.
Leaning into the LA love, we took a look through some of our favorite Los Angeles Open Door tours to highlight different neighborhoods, from Ellen Pompeo's midcentury escape on a bluff in Malibu to John Legend and Chrissy Teigen's palatial spread in Beverly Hills. Read on for a set of stunning Los Angeles Open Doors videos that just might have you dreaming of ditching the cold and heading west to the vibrant, resilient City of Angels (and celebrities).
Vanessa Baernthol presented her Fall/Winter 2026 collection, titled SPHERE, during Berlin Fashion Week, showcasing her renowned architectural approach to fashion and a strong commitment to sustainable practices. This latest collection explores layering as both an artistic and functional endeavour, setting the stage for a thought-provoking intersection of fashion and architecture. The runway show took place at the Schinkel Pavillon, an art gallery in Berlin-Mitte, where its architectural clarity and intriguing interplay of structure and transparency provided a fitting backdrop for SPHERE.
For the traveler who finds romance in a curved wall, chases good lighting, and believes a space should quietly seduce, a good design-led vacation rental is the destination as much as the location around it. These are homes chosen for how they look, feel, and linger in our memory-where architecture, interiors, and setting shape the experience of travel itself. Across the sun-washed corners of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and beyond, today's most compelling rentals are as
White villas step down the hills above Marbella, all glass balustrades and flat roofs, watching the Mediterranean below. The view is usually the star while the houses blur together, polite boxes that stay out of the way. PERLA flips that script slightly, treating the house itself as a single breaking wave pulled out of the water and pinned to the slope, a sculptural gesture that refuses to stay neutral or disappear into the hillside.
The Centre's staff are stewards of the objects, and the architecture becomes an extension of that stewardship. Within this layered ecology of care, the object is framed not as an isolated artefact but as an embodiment of life-worlds and landscapes that nourish reciprocal relationships,
The project was originally intended to be much less, simply a garage for the owners' current beloved collection of five Porsches-two convertibles, a coupe, an SUV, and an electric sedan. But as they started talking, says lead architect Carl Baker, the mission crept to include "the ability to indulge all of their hobbies."
Few cities in the world exude as much elegance as Paris, where every boulevard seems to have a story and every building appears a work of art. The City of Light has a way of capturing the imagination of even the most seasoned traveler-its allure magnified by its architectural beauty, from the symmetry of its avenues flanked by Haussmannian buildings to the wrought-iron flourishes of Belle Époque balconies.
Once a Najdi settlement defined by mudbrick walls and courtyard houses, Riyadh has undergone one of the most radical urban transformations of the 20th and 21st centuries. The discovery of oil reserves, the consolidation of political power, and the rapid expansion of infrastructure reshaped the city from a regional capital into a sprawling metropolis almost within a single generation. As a result, Riyadh's urban fabric is marked by discontinuities, fragments of vernacular architecture coexist with mid-century institutional modernism, and a rapidly evolving contemporary skyline.
The Nobel Foundation has revealed the first design proposal for the new Nobel Center, a public cultural and educational institution dedicated to science, literature, and peace. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects Berlin, the project will be constructed along Stadsgårdskajen at Slussen in Stockholm, with construction scheduled to begin in 2027 and completion planned for 2031. Conceived as a permanent home for the activities surrounding the Nobel Prize, the building aims to make the work of Nobel Prize laureates accessible to a broad public
Some seem to defy gravity, rise to unimaginable heights, and traverse difficult terrains. These iconic bridges are engineering marvels that offer tourists immense exploration opportunities. While they were built to serve as links between two points and enhance transportation, adventurers cannot help but admire the technical prowess involved in their construction and the scenery these bridges create. From being considered impossible to construct
Beneath the visible surface of cities lies an invisible architecture. Subways, tunnels, water systems, data cables, and bunkers form a dense network that sustains urban life while remaining largely unseen. The ground beneath our feet is not a void but a complex territory that holds the infrastructures, memories, and anxieties of our age. In recent years, as land becomes scarce and climate pressures intensify, architects and urbanists have turned their gaze downward, rediscovering the subterranean as both a physical and conceptual frontier.
WooJung Park + 22 Category: Churches, Memorial Center Architects: Woojin Lim, Yunseok Kwak (AEV Architectures) + Jungim Yoo + Yunhee Lee (TONN Architect) Participating Artists: Andrea Roggi, Ignazio Campagna, Jeeyean Shim, Soon-phil Maeng More SpecsLess Specs WooJung Park Text description provided by the architects. A Place of Memory and Reconciliation Created by Light In the tranquil village of Mangyeong, located three hours south of Seoul, a deeply meaningful commemorative space has been established.
The Museum of Craft and Design is proud to present Pecha Kucha: Architecture and Manufacturing in the Bay Area. Translating to 'chit-chat' in Japanese, Pecha Kucha is a fast-paced presentation format in which each speaker shows 20 slides for 20 seconds each. Pecha Kucha Wednesday, January 21, 2025 | 5-7p Museum of Craft and Design, 2569 Third St., SF General Admission |$45 MCD Member Tickets (fees included)
React Native's JavaScript bridge was a well-known performance bottleneck for years. Under heavy UI pressure (fast scrolling, frequent re-renders), teams could hit dropped frames and visible "blank" rendering while work moved across threads and through serialization. Meta's New Architecture (JSI, Fabric, TurboModules) changes that baseline. By replacing the legacy bridge with direct, C++-backed interop and a new renderer, React Native closes much of the historical performance gap for many real-world apps.
Now Eber, as executive director of what's formally called the Empire State Plaza Performing Arts Center, is finishing up a $19.5 million renovation - the first major overhaul since the Egg opened in 1978. She hopes the glow-up will change the Egg from a place to sit and watch shows to a forum for immersive works - or just a quirky place for people in Albany and around the state and region to enjoy. The unique space itself should become a touchstone for performances.
Conceived as a small contemporary temple dedicated to body care, the project by Kresta Design by Lucas and Hernández-Gil frames wellness as a civilizing gesture: beautifying, protecting, and ritualizing everyday practices. The space subtly nods to the classical world, with a soft vertical light and a dense, calm ambience evoking the serenity of Roman thermal baths, interpreted through a modern lens. Metal and wooden niches introduce an almost liturgical rhythm, their measured repetition recalling the minimalist discipline of Donald Judd.
Spanning expansive volumes and standalone series, artists offered compelling glimpses of the world, from Christopher Herwig's vibrant documentation of South Asia's trucks and tuk-tuks to Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze's daring portraits of bamboo scaffolding workers navigating the heights of Hong Kong. The year also brought haunting aerial compositions by Reuben Wu, who combined drones, lasers, and long exposures to mesmerizing effect, alongside a collection of unusual houses around the world, documented in a book published by Hoxton Mini Press.
