A person in a pink coat and green boots stands inside a large, mostly empty glass display fridge with scattered fruits, vegetables, books, and plants on the shelves.
Minimal Studio’s Voramar Store, a eco-minded gourmet supermarket in Majorca, Spain. Photography: Leonardo Cóndor.

May 29, 2026

Words: Lisa Di Venuta, Helene Oberman

Visionary Designs That Capture The Imagination

Permanent or temporary, urban infrastructure or heritage park, the creativity and ingenuity in these global projects and installations can’t be contained.

  • Three colorful abstract paintings, each depicting stylized human figures, are displayed on dark teal walls above a light wooden floor in an art gallery.
  • A patterned chest sits in front of a painting depicting a white, abstract human figure with a red and orange streak across its head on a black background.
  • A colorful abstract painting of a human profile with a large red circle on the head hangs on a white wall in a gallery space.

LIU SHUISHI Isabel Sullivan Gallery in New York presented “Existential, Being” in February, the Chinese-American artist’s solo exhibition featuring 15 new oils on canvas that explored themes of identity and existence, utilizing classical references such as Greek mythology. Photography: Alexa Bendek.

A colorful, abstract installation with geometric and wavy shapes in a gallery space, featuring bold yellow, blue, green, orange, and red patterns.

TOYO ITO At both the Triennale Milano and Fondation Cartier pour l’artcontemporain in Paris through October 4, the retrospective “Andrea Branzi by Toyo Ito. Continuous Present” designed by the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner highlights Branzi’s past as a designer and theoretician, including a reproduction of his and Archizoom’s Superarchitettura. Photography: Andrea Rossetti © Triennale Milano.

Minimalist interior with rows of colorful wooden benches facing a curved white wall lined with evenly spaced candles and gold text.

RADS Venezuelan architect Rodolfo Agrella is leading the creative direction on the global campaign to commemorate María del Monte Carmelo Rendiles, aka Madre Carmen, Venezuela’s first saint, encompassing her official portrait, liturgical objects, and a contemplative space that captures her spirit. Photography: courtesy of RADS.

  • Modern minimalist bedroom with a single bed, small lamp, side tables, abstract wall art, and red rugs, featuring concrete and wood elements against a gray background.
  • Top-down view of a minimalist room layout featuring a bed, sofa, tables, chairs, a bathtub, and various furnishings arranged in a rectangular open space.

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY In collaboration with Cemex Global, researchers from the school’s Matter Design lab have developed the Heirloom House concept, where movable concrete masses can be shifted to reconfigure floor plans as needed, enabling a cost-efficient, sustainable way of living. Photography: courtesy of Matter Design/MIT.

  • A person walks through a bamboo-structured pavilion with a large rock centerpiece and gravel floor, illuminated by natural light through curved openings.
  • A curved, rust-colored metal planter filled with green plants sits on a grassy lawn, surrounded by trees under a partly cloudy sky.

TARA LAL and T_M.SPACE In February at Sunder Nursery, a 90-acre park in New Delhi, the inaugural Aranyani Pavilion public-art and ecology initiative featured Sacred Nature, in bamboo, stone, upcycled invasive Lantana, and 40 other native species, revealing how architecture, when made of earth-born materials, can breathe and restore. Photography: Lokesh Dang/courtesy of Aranyani.

A large metallic abstract sculpture sits on a circular wooden platform beneath a ceiling with wavy wooden panels in a modern interior space.

PS DESIGN Bent plywood and Subodh Gupta’s stainless-steel 27 Light Years transform a 15,000-square-foot, typical tech park lobby into the RTP Experience Centre & Art Gallery in Mumbai, India. Photography: Ashish Sahi.

Two people stand on ladders, working on a large black and white metal structure inside a building with a high, white ceiling and industrial lighting.

PALOMA CAÑIZARES OFFICE Armed Fabrics: 1 Profile–1 Building, in waterproof fiberglass woven with resins and aluminum, at Marc Bibiloni gallery in Madrid last fall, was a result of Cañizares’s ongoing exploration into the architectural possibilities of rigidized textiles. Photography: Asier Rua.

  • Curved bridge with a facade of diamond-shaped cutouts, some filled with colorful panels, spans over an industrial area under a clear blue sky.
  • View from the road inside a modern tunnel with a geometric lattice ceiling and green accent lighting along the concrete walls.
  • A wide, empty tunnel with reflective white walls illuminated by colored lights and three lanes separated by a solid barrier.

WOOD MARSH West Gate Tunnel in Melbourne, Australia, spans nearly 5 miles, its lattice pattern inspired by the fishing nets used by Indigenous communities—the side ramps’ Perspex panels and tunnel’s prismatic lighting representing what’s caught within them. Photography: courtesy of Transurban and West Gate Tunnel.

  • A modern bedroom with a floating bed, blue floor, and a large arched window featuring a nature-themed frosted glass design illuminated with blue light.
  • A white three-story building with brightly colored, illuminated signs and panels attached to its facade at various angles, seen from the street level.
  • A modern bathroom with bold yellow and blue lighting, geometric walls, a sunken bathtub, and a suspended blue illuminated cube ceiling fixture.

PETER BOTTAZZI Debuting last spring, Palazzo Bonadi is a historic three-story residence in Altamura, Italy, that the set designer turned into an opera d’arte totale, or total work of art, where everything has been conceived, designed, furnished, and filled with site-specific contemporary works. Photography: Fréderic Ducout/Living Inside.

A minimalistic blue architectural model features a house, geometric structures, a pool, stairs, and small objects like food items, a notebook, and a cup placed around the model.

SOPHIE COLLÉ Included in last winter’s “Onni,” a group exhibition and Nordic-themed holiday market named after the Finnish word for happiness at Isabel Sullivan Gallery in New York, was the Brooklyn-based furniture designer’s Just for Fun #3 (Blue) in painted plywood. Photography: Elina Saunamäki.

  • Three modern, minimalist cabins with wooden exteriors and large windows sit on a grassy landscape with mountains and a cloudy sky in the background.
  • A person plays a grand piano in a spacious room with curved, padded walls, circular skylights, and minimalist furniture.
  • A modern, futuristic white room with rounded walls and large glass panels, featuring minimalistic lighting and geometric shapes.

SOUR On Cunda Island in Turkey, Pür is a residence and recording studio, the latter featuring rotating and height-adjustable ceiling panels and partitions that allow for real-time acoustic tuning, the exterior timber-slatted gables blending with the surrounding olive groves. Photography: Inanc Eray/Courtesy of Sour.

  • A person in a pink coat and green boots stands inside a large, mostly empty glass display fridge with scattered fruits, vegetables, books, and plants on the shelves.
  • A modern, minimalist store interior with exposed concrete, a long stone table, baskets on the ceiling, and a glass display case with various items inside.
  • Overhead view of a table with various foods including a whole fish, citrus fruits, a wrapped item, drinks, and a person slicing a pineapple.

MINIMAL STUDIO Referred to as Plastic Box, Voramar Store in Majorca, Spain, turns food-shopping into a lesson in circular design, its 2,000 square feet contained in a raw concrete shell with polished-concrete flooring, steel shelving, monolithic checkout counters, and a ceiling of more than 1,000 recycled plastic crates that hide ventilation and LEDs. Photography: Leonardo Cóndor.

  • A modern building with a bright red scalloped roof, glass walls, and visible seating area inside, set against an evening sky with a high-rise building in the background.
  • A modern building with a bright red, scalloped roofline and arched doors and windows, set against a blue sky and skyscrapers in the background.

GH3* In Edmonton, Canada, gravel parking lots turned the nearly 5-acre O-day’min Park by CCxA landscape architecture features a pavilion in fluted weathering steel and stained marine-grade plywood, their color referencing the project’s name, which means strawberry in Anishinaabe, acknowledging the area’s Indigenous history. Photography: Raymond Chow.

Three people wearing black outfits with red netting that holds clear plastic containers, standing in a minimalist, light-colored room.

FFERONE DESIGN During Milan Fashion Week last February, “Surreal Glass” celebrated 25 years of the brand founded in the city by architect and educator Felicia Ferrone with Politecnico di Milano Product Design students modeling accessories formed from her pieces, culminating in cocktails served in the same handcrafted Czech glassware. Photography: Cucu Milano.

A person walks past a building facade with exposed bricks and teal, vertically stacked panels forming an abstract geometric pattern.

WUTOPIA LAB Inspired by 15th-century landscape painter Tang Bohu, the Wutopia founders and architects Erni Min and Ting Yu reimagined the Xinguang Silk Weaving Factory in Suzhou, China, as the Verdant Ridges Theater, its exterior resembling a mountain. Photography: Guowei Liu.

  • A large screen in an industrial room displays a close-up of a woman kissing a man's face. A white bench sits in front of the screen; a door and stairs are in the background.
  • A row of circular screens displays various faces and scenes above a wooden structure in a dimly lit, spacious room with arched windows and decorative walls.

ANDREA FARAGUNA The architect reactivated the Variety Arts Theater in Los Angeles last winter with “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem,” a full-sensory exhibition including Jesper Just’s Something to Love film short (top) and Jordan Wolfson’s Artists Friends Racists LED-embedded fans (bottom). Photography: Joshua White/courtesy of Julia Stoschek Foundation.

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