Studio Job's Art Defender, pictured at the Gerrit Rietveld-designed Weaving Mill De Ploeg in Bergeijk, The Netherlands. The Antwerp-based practice has always taken a subversive approach to design. Creating furniture and objects for brands like Moooi, Bisazza and Carpenters Workshop Gallery, it brings a witty, highly decorative sensibility to industrial design and limited-edition works, pushing ornamentation and craftsmanship to the extreme. [...]

Situated inside an abandoned toluene tank, The Intervention presents a complex kinetic sound sculpture, with 329 DC-motors arranged throughout the space. Bern-based Studio Zimoun has sent designboom images of their first permanent installation - a large, towering mechanical sound installation situated inside an abandoned Toluene tank from 1951 in Dottikon, Switzerland. working closely with architect Hannes Zweifel, The Intervention presents a complex kinetic sound sculpture, with 329 DC-motors arranged meticulously throughout the interior fabric of the space. In an obsessive display of simple and functional materials, the installation articulates a tension between the orderly patterns of modernism and the chaotic forces of life; revealing an intricate series of relationships, similar to those found within the artificial and the organic. [...]

When I wrote about the figure of the knitting architect in February, inspired by Maria Semple's novel Where'd You Go, Bernadette, little did I know that a panoply of knitted, woven and recycled work would soon be on display in New York ... all under the rubric of art, but definitely spatial and challenging. El Anatsui's sinuous works at the Brooklyn Museum, which play with one's sense of weight and material, Orly Genger's Red, Yellow and Blue in Madison Square park, walls of crocheted rope that snake through the park, and, most modest in scale, the first New York show in 50 years of the work of midcentury sculptor Ruth Asawa, who wove forests, anemones and orbs out of metal wire. One of Asawa's largest works, known as Untitled (S.108, hanging, six lobed, multi-layered continuous form within a form), was auctioned by Christie's, the organizers of the exhibition "Ruth Asawa: Objects & Apparitions", on May 15 for $1.4 million, four times its low estimate. [...]

Industrial facility's 'Locale' living office furniture system for Herman Miller creates a dynamic high-performance work space. At NEOCON 2013--the international event for the contract furniture industry--a common theme which resurfaced was the ability for office products to seamlessly shift from functioning as individual work spaces to open-plan environments. industrial facility's (Sam Hecht and Kim Colin) 'Locale Office' for Herman Miller is evidence of this, a system formed by a number of elements which encourages unexpected interactions, allowing employees to freely transition between private and collaborative activities. [...]

What do you do next when you are Zaha Hadid? Twice winner of the Stirling prize and the first woman to win the Pritzker prize, the 62-year-old architect has been celebrated by both Forbes and Time magazine in their lists of the world's 100 most influential people – and she was recently named businesswoman of the year. [...]

Lady Gaga famously refers to her followers as “little monsters”, presumably hoping by this to encourage them to reclaim the darker elements of their psyches and feel more comfortable in themselves. [...]

As a child, the clink of Legos knocking around a big bin stirred Nathan Sawaya’s creativity. Not much has changed. The 39-year-old Manhattan artist stores more than 1.5 million Legos in his Lexington Ave. studio, organized in clear plastic containers by shape and color and stacked neatly onto shelves that reach well past his head. The studio is filled with Lego artwork that has been featured in galleries around the world — garish skulls, leaping human figures, a pacing, caramel-colored dog, the goggling, pixelated head of Homer Simpson. [...]

Charles Wright Architects' new eco-home in the Australian rainforest harnesses the power of the elements -- while protecting itself from the worst nature can throw at it [...]