Bankston Architectural leverages natural materials to create door hardware

Dezeen Showroom: Australian design brand Bankston Architectural has published a selection of its latest door knobs, pulls and handles on Dezeen Showroom.

Part of Bankston Architectural's wider The Streaks collection, this chunky door pull, named Wide Guy, has a blocky form culminating in a dovetail-shaped bottom.

The range is the result of a collaboration with Australian interior design studio YSG, and is characterised by a trio of colourways comprising bands of naturally colourful timbers.

Wide Guy aims to make a feature of door pulls, which are often overlooked in interiors yet present an opportunity for characterful details...

Aloalto

The challenge was to develop innovative packaging with an unboxing experience that went beyond its protective function. We have created a packaging design inspired by the furoshiki, the traditional Japanese cloth used to wrap and carry objects. The cloth thus becomes a complement in its own right. An illustration of a strawberry, in a casual and expressive style, covers the entire format and evokes the grandeur of Mount Fuji.

Pinzauer transforms historic Hampstead home with concrete-framed pavilion

An exposed concrete-framed extension frames views across a garden and sunken studio at this Victorian townhouse in Hampstead, converted into apartments by local architecture studio Pinzauer.

Named Maresfield Gardens after its address in the Fitzjohns/Netherhall Conservation Area, the 19th-century, red-brick townhouse has been overhauled by Pinzauer after being home to The Anna Freud Centre – a children's mental health charity founded by the daughter of Sigmund Freud.

Pinzauer was tasked with restoring the site's original residential use, creating four individual apartments that look out onto a new standalone studio it has also designed.

It...

Stan Squirewell’s Mixed-Media Collages Imbue Anonymous Historical Photos with Panache

Nothing sparks the imagination quite like coming across a trove of old photographs. We look for writing on the reverse and scan the anonymous faces to read a range of expressions. Where exactly they were at that moment, what brought them together that day, and who took the picture? For Stan Squirewell, the allure of historical portraits is a central tenet of his multimedia practice.

In large-scale, mixed-media collages, the artist begins with black-and-white photographs, typically taken a century ago or longer. He especially emphasizes portraits of Black individuals, whether gathered together as a group or posing independently. Some of these...

BIG to weave tree-like interfaith complex through Albanian hillside

Danish architecture studio BIG has unveiled plans for an interfaith complex on a hillside near Tirana, Albania, which will have a cluster of pavilions that celebrate different religions.

Set to be built in the hills of Petrela, the Faith Park complex will encompass 200,000 square metres of public gardens interspersed with nine pavilions – each dedicated to a different faith – and a rammed-earth Museum of Remembrance.

The park's layout was interpreted by BIG as an "evolutionary tree of faith", with its collection of spiritually-focused spaces branching out from three main paths.

"In the...

"Like fast food and fast fashion, fast architecture is inevitably less fulfilling"

People have long searched for ways to reduce the time it takes to construct buildings but instead we should be trying to slow architecture down, writes Phineas Harper.

Everything is speeding up. Fast food, fast fashion, breaking news at breakneck speed, 3G, 4G, 5G. Instant messages and instant gratification.

We're a culture hooked on quickness. So much of AI's guile, for instance, is not the quality of the material it spits out, but the unbelievably short amount of time in which it is produced.

Does the pursuit of acceleration have us hurtling towards a crash?

Speed sells. In architecture, as in wider culture, pace...

Olivia Gino turns waste cigarette butts into fuzzy hat

In a bid to reimagine "unpleasant and seemingly worthless" waste, Central Saint Martins graduate Olivia Gino has transformed cigarette butts into a shearling-style hat.

Gino made the textile using cellulose acetate, the polymer that is used to produce the filters of cigarettes.

She got the butts themselves from friends who smoke, local recycling centres, or directly off the floor, where they're available in abundance – an estimated 4.5 trillion are discarded every year, making cigarette butts the biggest source of litter worldwide.

"Cigarette butts pose a severe environmental threat," explained Gino,...

Illustration for The New York Times

Emerging Johannesburg designers turn the city's rags to riches in The Price of Gold exhibition

Some of Johannesburg's most promising young designers joined forces for an exhibition at Design Week South Africa, using locally found and discarded materials to rewrite the narrative about their city.

The Price of Gold brought together work by 11 emerging talents inside Victoria Yards – a community space set in a converted steam laundry in the city's Central Business District (CBD).

The innercity area has become notorious for its high crime rates and crumbling infrastructure since it was abandoned by big businesses and politicians following the end of Apartheid.

But The...

Frankfurt Architecture City Guide: 20 Projects Tracing a Skyline Between History and Modernity

Frankfurt. Image © Thomas Wolf via Wikipedia under CC BY 3.0

Frankfurt is often recognised for its distinctive skyline, a rare feature in European cities. Towering glass skyscrapers mark its role as a global financial hub, yet beneath this vertical image lies a city layered with centuries of history, destruction, and reconstruction. From medieval timber-framed houses to post-war modernism and contemporary high-rises, Frankfurt has consistently reinvented itself through architecture, producing a built environment where different periods coexist in dialogue.

The city's transformation accelerated after World War II, when much of its historic...