Month: November 2025

When we think about winter entertaining, we often focus on the big holidays. But we host plenty of other gatherings this time of year — cookie-baking and football-watching parties, casual dinners, chats over a cup of coffee. Here’s how to make your ho…

Studio VAARO’s Rathnelly House is a comprehensive and formally expressive renovation of an Edwardian-era semi-detached house in midtown Toronto. The project not only enhances functionality and spatial fluidity but also expands the home significantly from within while respecting its existing footprint. The clients, a professional couple with a young child, sought both a pragmatic and aesthetic transformation: to increase usable floor area, raise ceiling heights, and expand storage, all within a welcoming and distinctive design mediating between openness and seclusion. Extensive structural interventions enabled a fundamental reordering of space. The result is an expansive plan that adds 140 m² (1,500 ft²), increasing the functional area of the home by almost 60%.

There is growing awareness around sustainability—and the environmental cost of prematurely demolishing safe, structurally sound buildings only to replace them with new construction. In the broader race to reduce carbon emissions, corporations and institutions are placing greater emphasis on ESG performance (environmental impact, social responsibility, and governance). Many now require carbon accounting, set “carbon-neutral” targets, or purchase carbon credits to offset footprints.

RSHP has announced the completion of the Barangaroo South Masterplan in Sydney, marking the realization of a 15-year redevelopment that has reconnected the city’s north-western harbour edge to its urban core. Once a disused container port, the 22-hectare site has been transformed into a mixed-use, carbon-neutral precinct, integrating commercial, residential, and public spaces along the waterfront. Developed in collaboration with Lendlease following an international design competition, the masterplan is organized into three zones: Barangaroo South, a high-density extension of the Central Business District; Barangaroo Reserve, a reconstructed natural headland that reintroduces native landscapes to the harbour; and Barangaroo Central, a low-density residential area linking the northern and southern ends of the development.

the resulting composition reveals a dynamic interplay of voids and solids within a prismatic shell.

The post vertical cuts split monolithic ‘cube within a cube’ suburban residence in cyprus appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

With just a few days left before the six-and-a-half-month 19th Venice Architecture Biennale comes to an end, it is possible to look back on some of the most notable contributions within its thematic framework. Marked by the largest call for participants to date, the Biennale’s diversity of topics and the range of installations on display go beyond easy recapitulation. As part of that reflection, several initiatives can be highlighted as illustrative of the principles reflected in the curatorial theme, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” The concepts interwoven in Carlo Ratti’s title form a call to address the urgent need for substantial solutions amid the accelerating climate crisis, positioning the Biennale as a platform for diverse design proposals and experiments organized around three forms of intelligence: natural, artificial, and collective. Beyond the national pavilions and numerous collateral events held throughout Venice over the past six months, among the more than 700 participants are projects that, through practice, embody four shared intentions: opening conversations about the future, proposing systemic responses to local realities, placing technology at the center of design innovation, and pursuing material research rooted in local sensitivity.