Journey Through A Memorable Maze Of Visionary Design

Environmentalism, inclusivity, saturated color, sport—all and more made for exceptional art and design in 2024.

Explore Breathtaking Designs From Top Projects

Commissioned for last February’s Desert X AlUla, an outdoor biennial in the Saudi Arabian desert, To Breathe, South Korean artist Kimsooja’s site-responsive spiral, was made of 42 9-foot-tall glass panels coated in iridescent, diffraction-grating film.

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In the family room of a 5,600-square-foot duplex penthouse in New York by NICOLEHOLLIS, a grid of Donald Judd woodcuts oversees a Groundpiece sectional by Antonio Citterio, coffee and side tables by Ini Archibong and Gary Magakis, and a custom oak media console. Read more about this New York penthouse here.

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2030, a nude Venus lost in a sea of detritus, is part of “To Step Beyond” at Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery in New York, a survey of 91-year-old artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s work that includes six decades of sculptures, silkscreens, and paintings, on view through March 29, 2025.

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Last year, for the 100th anniversary of Cini Boeri’s birth, product designer Elena Salmistaro created a 12½-inch-tall enameled statuette of the late architect that combines her physical attributes with signature patterns from her textile designs, part of the Most Illustrious series for Bosa that already includes figurines of other Italian icons: Michele De Lucchi, Achille Castiglioni, Riccardo Dalisi, and Alessandro Mendini. Read more about these stauettes here.

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In the restrooms at Escá Cueva, a restaurant in Cairo designed by Badie Architects, colored LEDs highlight the organic forms made from a steel infrastructure covered in a cement-polymer mix that’s found throughout. Discover more about this fiery restaurant here.

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In Tokyo, at the entrance to the Ginza flagship store of Ya-Man, design studio I IN lined a column with LEDs that mirror the ones found in the Japanese beauty brand’s red light–therapy products.

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Sustainability drove Milan firm Peter Pichler Architecture’s design of the Bologna, Italy, headquarters for Bonfiglioli, a manufacturer of gearmotors, drive systems, and industrial inverters, including the facade clad in pleated aluminum mesh that filters direct sun and the sloping roof that incorporates six south-facing terraces and results in an enlarged north facade for increased indirect daylight to the 67,000-square-foot interiors.

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Sticks of hand-painted driftwood suspended in an aluminum mesh explored the tension between natural and man-made in Roots, part of “The New Transcendence,” a group show including Andrea Branzi at Friedman Benda gallery in New York last January.

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Andrea Pisano, the 14th-century sculptor and architect, was the master builder of the Duomo di Orvieto, its banded white travertine and black basalt facade similar to other Gothic cathedrals built in central Italy around that time (and the inspiration for the interiors of the nearby Palazzo Petrvs, a boutique hotel by Giuliano Andrea dell’Uva Architetti which was featured in our March 2024 issue).

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The 1938 photograph of Austrian-American architect Frederick John Kiesler’s Mobile Home Library Hinge appeared in “Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines” at the Jewish Museum in New York last April.

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Referencing a Marcel Duchamp self-portrait, the graphic designer Milton Glaser’s poster accompanied the 1966 release of “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits” and was featured in “Art of Noise” at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last summer.

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Known for her “art pools,” which feature vibrant murals painted onto a pool’s bottom, Alex Proba elevates her signature style with a puzzlelike arrangement of hand-glazed ceramic tiles from Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico, into an abstraction of coral reefs for a private home in Miami.

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Occupying the four exterior Jewel Box vitrines earlier this winter at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, was “Multifaceted,”  Italian illustrator Olimpia Zagnoli’s site-specific vinyl artworks, all 8½ by 10 feet. Dive into these vinyl artworks here.

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Local artists Adriana Meunié and Jaume Roig crafted a mural of natural materials for the pine-beamed yoga studio at Son Blanc Farmhouse Menorca, a boutique hotel in Spain that had been a dormant, late 1800’s Spanish home and barn until a recent renovation by Atelier du Pont. Read more about the Menorca renovation here.

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The nearly 6-foot-tall Warren by Porky Hefer appeared last summer in “no bats, no chocolate” at Galerie56 in New York, it and the solo show’s eight other sculptures of animals, all representative of “weird talents” that benefit the planet, handmade of locally sourced materials in collaboration with fellow South African studios Ronel Jordaan, Wellington Moyo, and Leather Walls. Play around with these sustainable sculptures here.

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A custom banquette with artfully clashing upholstery patterns distinguishes the lobby of the Wayback, a 134-key boutique hotel, in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, by Nashville architecture and design firm Dryden Studio. Get retro with the Wayback hotel here.

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Multidisciplinary artist Orsi Orban and Christopher Duffy collaborated on Spirits, a limited-edition sculpture series inspired by bone formations, coral, and animal scales that combines Orban’s surface-design creation methods with Duffy’s work with CAD and AI, with the former ultimately constructing the works from hundreds of pieces of laser-cut cherry laminate paired with polyester foil. Catch this biomorphic sculpture series here.

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The 1971 image by Ghanaian photographer James Barnor of a shop assistant posing in front of the United Trading Company headquarters in Accra was included in “Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence” at London’s V&A South Kensington last summer.

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For accounting-software company Tipalti, abacus-inspired installations by M Moser Associates, including these 1-foot-tall ceramic beads by TAV Ceramics, in corporate branding colors, inform its 24,000-square-foot office in Vancouver, Canada. Tour around this Vancouver office here.

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Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum feted its 30th anniversary last year with “KAWS + Warhol,” which featured the painted bronze, nearly 6-foot-tall GONE from 2018 by Brian Donnelly, aka KAWS.

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Last July at Tokyo’s Roppongi Museum, “Miss Dior: Stories of a Miss” was a 9,150-square-foot exhibition by OMA that surveyed the 77-year history of the House of Dior scent, the dominant color derived from the pinks found in iterations of the perfume’s tinted formula and bottle designs. Capture the essence of Miss Dior here.

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Also last July, Unreal, the Argentine artist Andrés Reisinger’s three-day pop-up installation in New York, cloaked a NoLIta storefront in 850 yards of polyester to celebrate the launch of a liquid blush product of the same name by cosmetics brand Hourglass. Explore this dreamy installation in New York here.

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29-year-old Lithuanian Barbora Žilinskaite’s anthropomorphic, 10-piece solo exhibition “Chairs Don’t Cry” at Friedman Benda Los Angeles last winter included the 6-foot-long Sunbather bench and 3-foot-tall Mr. Judgy mirror, both in pigmented reclaimed sawdust.

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Whimsical apertures, butter-yellow tile, and graphic accents welcome spontaneity at Lanwuu Imagine, a studio designed by Aurora Design in Kunming, China, that specializes in wedding and portrait photography through a surrealistic lens. Discover this photo studio capturing the imagination.

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Occupying the 9,000-square-foot mezzanine level at The National Gallery Prague is ATLAS—the acronym for Creative Studio and Laboratory of Associative Dreaming in Czech—a public art gallery by No Architects absconding with traditional museum bounds in favor of a reductive Mondrian palette, yoga platforms, movable seating, and touchable art. Pique curiosity at ATLAS inside the National Gallery Prague.

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Toasting its 20th anniversary, Toronto’s famed Lee Restaurant redesigned by Bent Gable Design and Future Studio relocated to the city’s 1932 art deco Waterworks building, where its 6,000 square feet feature walnut walls bisected by velvet patchwork banners in retro hues.

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Paying homage to Yeun Long, Hong Kong’s agricultural roots, Shun Fook Barn by ARK reimagines the humble farmhouse as a 30,000-square-foot shopping mall with indoor/outdoor appeal, from living green walls, earthy hues, and a massive woodlike tree sculpture in the atrium.

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Celebrating the Carpathian landscape, Hay Boutique and Spa by Edem Family in Polyanytsya, Ukraine, and designed by YOD Group, has dried grapevines appointed to thermos-spruce paneled walls in its Vinotheque restaurant, where local industrial designer Andrey Galushka’s pressed-hay pendant fixtures illuminate rustic tables and Emilio Nanni’s Croissant chairs. Find solace in this tranquil mountain escape.

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The first solo show since Fernando Campana’s untimely passing in 2022, and the first with older brother Humberto as sole principal designer, “On the Road,” by Estúdio Campana last spring at Friedman Benda in New York, included their 2017 cast-bronze Branches sofa.

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Celebrating late Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, Brazilian studio Pascali Semerdjian Arquitetos curated “Chromatic Inductions” last fall at Simões de Assis gallery in São Paulo, where large PVC sheets hung from the ceiling creating an interactive mazelike experience.

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The 47th iteration of architect Emmanuelle Moreaux’s 100 Colors series, Timeline is also her first permanent one in Paris, occupying the eight-story atrium of Le Lumière office complex, with 3,200 steel, color-graded numbers suspended in rows, each denoting a year. Unlock the magic of numbers in this captivating installation.

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Debuted during Art Basel Miami Beach, the city’s first-ever floating and transportable padel ball court by Yntegra Group, moored just off Fisher Island in Biscayne Bay, was constructed of recycled steel sourced from old shipyard materials, surrounded by glass walls, and clocked in at 84 tons.