The H-Bus Drops The first hydrogen-fuel-cell public transit bus west of the Mississippi will make its debut this coming spring in beautiful...
Kid Lit Goes Undergound What is a paper engineer? Something like an architect—but for paper. (Think pop-up books and origami, not bridges and skyscrapers.
Make It Right Gets Made The feel-good story: The first six houses funded by Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation have been completed in the Lower Ninth...
Cookin' with IKEA Most appliance-buyers in the U.S. are prisoners of big-box and old-school retailers like Sears, Home Depot, and Best Buy, but...
Titanium Spork When it comes to hard-wearing, utilitarian consumer goods, there are a few acknowledged design classics: Emeco's Navy Chair comes...
Your Design City The 20 finalists in the Your Design City photography competition on flickr have been announced.
The Latest from Michelle Kaufmann Michelle Kaufmann's new mkHearth is a semi-prefab house that evokes old-timey barns and vacation-destination chalets.
Eames Gossip In the wake of InStyle Magazine's feature on the TV show "Gossip Girl" and its modern-mashup Manhattan apartment set (aka the...
Uniformity of Design Where do typography, fashion, and history come together every spring, summer, and fall? On pro baseball uniforms, is where.
Built Like a Concrete House Dorit Mizrahi and Oliviero Godi, working in Bergamo, Italy, as the firm Exposure Architects, have designed a house using...
A Case Study Case Study Meltdown, shmeltdown: If you've got a spare $14 million, you can have a genuine Case Study house, a Pacific Ocean view—and a...
Be Your Own Marimekko Does the lack of Jar Jar Binks pillow shams make you want to design your own Star Wars bedsheets? Do plain ol'...
D.J. Morphosis What does a Pritzker Prize–winning architect have on his iPod? Thanks to Santa Monica, California, public radio station KCRW, we...
From Houseboats to Hummers What recession? Heath Ceramics, the storied Sausalito, California, ceramics studio founded by Bauhaus-trained potter Edith Heath...
Eat Me, I'm Green Michelle Kaufman, the Martha Stewart of sustainable architecture, has unveiled her annual gingerbread version of one of her...
The Mini-E Revealed So I actually got to see (and sit in) the much-hyped, all-electric Mini E at the Los Angeles Auto Show, and there were rumors...
A Bookstore Made from Remainders It's rare to hear about a new bookstore opening anywhere these days, but the Stories Bookstore and Café, in the eclectic Los...
Stop the Presses It's not often that a recycled component makes a product more valuable than if it were made from virgin material alone, but in...
Neil Young and the Linc-Volt Neil Young (yes, that Neil Young) envisions a time when the owners of formerly gas-guzzling land-yachts will be the masters of...
Does That Carbon Fiber Chair Come in Green? You've heard the old adage: Pay a steep price for a high-quality item, and you'll never regret it. This implies that if you buy...
The Modernist's Muscle Car One of the least-hyped (perhaps due to Detroit's doldrums), but most visually exciting cars at the LA Auto Show this year was the...
Pandora's Strong-Box It was only a matter of time before the sea-going shipping containers that have entranced the prefab architecture crowd made it...
Coffee, Tea, or Diesel? At this year's LA Auto Show, the Volkswagen Jetta TDI was crowned "Green Car of the Year." This doesn't mean the Jetta TDI is the...
Paneling is Cool Again Back in the bad old days of design, the unholy trinity of wall coverings were harvest gold paint, flocked wallpaper, and...
No More Bored Meetings "Research shows that nearly 80% of European employees derive their motivation from working together and sharing experiences with...
L.A.'s Newest High School I was serving on jury duty a few months ago, gazing out the window during an interminable discussion about the definition of...
Cyclorama Saved from Destruction (For Now) Remember the Gettysburg Cyclorama?...
Red Hook Is for Bicycle Lovers The winner and finalists of the Red Hook Bicycle Master Plan Competition—the Forum for Urban Design's competition to re-imagine...
Ada Louise Huxtable The New York Times recently featured a refreshing interview with Ada Louise Huxtable, the doyenne of architecture critics, by...
Eco-Conscious, With a Clutch Audi's A4 TDI Concept e looks like a plain ol' A4, yet it gets an impressive 58.95 mpg.
Lifecycle Building Challenge In economic downturns of yore, "reduce, reuse, and recycle" was less a mantra of environmental do-gooders than a financial...
Step into My Office A sign of the times? French designer Paul Coudamy's offices for the advertising firm Beast are made entirely from corrugated...
Toaster Treatise In addition to being an excellent example of necessity as the mother of invention, Polish designer Martin Žampach's TOAST ONE...
TH!NK OX The Th!nk Ox is a five-seat concept car introduced last spring at the Geneva Auto Show.
Modern History on the Block Make of it what you will: Welton Becket's "House of Tomorrow" is in foreclosure.
Five Buck Book Got five dollars lying around? For $5.00 (plus, um, $7.50 shipping), you can snag a copy of George Nelson's 1977 classic How To...