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One year ago a proposal for 47 lodges carved into the side of a sandstone cliff in Jordan sparked a furious debate about the project’s “ecological” credentials and London designer Dominic Wilcox created a provocative stylus for using a touch-screen phone in the bath. Architecture projects completed this time last year included David Chipperfield’s Turner Contemporary gallery on the seafront of Margate in England, and a shopping centre on the site of a traditional marketplace in Abu Dhabi by Foster + Partners. Meanwhile, a mobile art pavilion by Zaha Hadid was a hit with readers, while the design for a Comic and Animation Museum in China by Dutch studio MVRDV was compare…

This time last year London company Hulger launched the Plumen 001 designer lightbulb, which went on to win this year’s Brit Insurance Design of the Year Award. A culture and leisure centre by Philippe Starck opened inside a former wine cellar in Bilbao as Hungarian architects Plant completed a winery at the foot of a volcanic hill in Hungary. London Fieldworks installed bird and bug boxes around trees across London in clusters inspired by neighbouring housing, Nendo unveiled their acclaimed Thin Black Lines series of furniture and The Waterhouse at South Bund by NHDRO hotel opened in Shanghai. See all our stories from September 2010 » See our review of la…

This time last year architects and designers around the world were rallying to come up with creative ways to raise money for Japan, following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that had just struck Sendai. Designs included a video appeal, a variety of posters and images for sale and instructions for making origami cranes. Elsewhere, industrial designer Yves Behar unveiled a mobile phone with staggered square buttons, while architects BIG won a competition to design some prefabricated wooden housing in Finland and a sculptural low-energy light bulb was named design of the year by the Design Museum in London. We featured some offices inside pulped paper caves, as we…

This time last year French designer Matali Crasset completed a village of quirky hotel rooms in the Tunisian desert and Italian silversmith Gianfranco Pampaloni shocked both Dezeen readers and Florence residents by hanging a pierced animal’s heart in his shop window for Valentine’s Day. We featured more of our favourite projects from Stockholm Furniture Fair, which included chairs with leg warmers, lamps designed to look like stretched rubber bands and a nightlight inside an hourglass. Meanwhile, French artist Gwen van den Eijnde invented fantastical characters by creating a set of sculptural costumes for himself and photographer Fernando Guerra sent us some photograp…

This time last year Chinese architects MAD unveiled plans for a museum shaped like a giant icicle and a mirrored treehouse in Sweden opened up its doors to overnight guests. Japanese designers Nendo presented a collection of furniture comprised entirely of square and cube-shaped parts, while an RCA student came up with a fun way to recycle leftover Christmas trees and we featured a mirrored office with a hidden slide entrance. Readers were impressed with the sensitive detailing of a mountainside tomb but thought a self-assembly chair by designer Max Lamb would only be able to support the super-skinny. Meanwhile we revealed images of a few popular houses, including a…

This time last year Dezeen focussed on car design, filming a movie about the Jaguar C-X75 electric concept car, boosted by jet engines, and rounding up our top ten cars of all time from the pages of Dezeen. (more…) View the full article

This time last year Zaha Hadid won the Stirling Prize for the MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts and David Chipperfield was announced as the recipient of the Royal Gold Medal for architecture. Meanwhile, Yves Béhar designed an office chair inspired by suspension bridges, Patrick Hyland produced a concept phone powered by body heat and IKEA released a cookbook featuring photographs of ingredients laid out in patterns. Sou Fujimoto Architects completed a stacked apartment building in Tokyo, a minimal renovation of a 100-year-old parish impressed our readers and Chyutin Architects won a competition to design a controversial museum in Jerusalem. We featu…

This time last year we featured an array of weird and wonderful houses, including a steel-plated bunker with a drawbridge (above) and a house with wonky legs and a rooftop swimming pool (below). (more…) View the full article

This time last year we featured projects constructed from all kinds of unusual materials, including a car made of cartilage that generates its own fuel from algae, pencils created from workshop dust and a table made from polystyrene steamed inside fabric moulds. Balsa wood was the material graduate Ki Hyun Kim used to construct a dining chair that weighs just 1.3 kilograms and concrete proved popular as usual in our stories about some very heavy vases and a house that resembles a half-submerged submarine. Meanwhile, toilets became a talking point after we featured some tree-mounted urinals at a music festival, leading us to count down our top ten stories about loos.…

This time last year Dezeen featured a collection of 3D-printed dresses followed by clothing that becomes transparent when approached. The RIBA predicted a gloomy time for UK architects with a double-dip recession on the horizon and the loathed Strata tower was awarded the 2010 Carbuncle Cup for being the ugliest new building in Britain. Daniel Michel marked the phasing out of incandescent light bulbs in Europe by designing a skeletal shade with invisible bulb, Helge Fischer presented a fluffy children’s playsuit that sounds an alarm if the child is touched inappropriately and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami opened an exhibition of his work Château de Versailles…

This time last year Kengo Kuma was announced as the architect of the V&A’s new museum in Dundee and Foster + Partners Corten-clad Faustino winery rose from the earth in Spain. A skyscraper with a zig-zag channel running through it by Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas won a competition for an office building in Shenzhen and a proposal for a dance and music centre in the Netherlands drew praise from our readers for its realistic rainy renders. We launched our online Dezeen Watch Store and rounded up all our stories about bridges, and our top ten crazy cantilevers. We also featured a surreal miniature world featuring a caravan made of bread, a strange range of t-shir…

This time last year Priestmangoode unveiled a conceptual high-speed train for the UK, the Union Street Urban Orchard temporary public garden opened in London and Zaha Hadid curated an exhibition comparing her own work to Russian Suprematism. Meanwhile the V&A museum in London launched a competition for its Exhibition Road extension, later won by AL_A. Dezeen recorded a podcast with industrial designer James Dyson at the launch of his Air Multiplier fans and published a movie interview with James Irvine, the first in our popular series of Dezeentalks at [D3] Design Talents. See all our stories from July 2010 » See our review of last year » </im…

This time last year Christmas cards from architects Zaha Hadid, Threefold, and Coop Himmelb(l)au, as well as designers Tom Dixon, Studio Job and Marcel Wanders were getting everyone into the festive spirit. We took a break from eating mince pies to feature windows that create constantly changing shadows in response to the wintery weather outside, a chair shaped like an oar and a picnic pavilion comprising a giant pillow on stilts. Our most popular stories over the holidays were two concrete houses by Japanese architects Apollo, one that readers thought could do with windows and another that was inspired by a drawer being pulled out of a box. See all our stories from…

This time last year Álvaro Siza completed an L-shaped auditorium clad in grey tiles and white marble and Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka created a boutique interior for Issey Miyake’s collapsible clothing range. The V&A announced the shortlist for their Exhibition Road development, which was eventually awarded to AL_A, and a house in Switzerland featuring a faceted concrete volume placed on top of a traditional stone building was a hit with our readers. Less popular were a complex mountainside house in Patagonia, which was described by one reader as “the worst kind of self-indulgent, egotistical architectural gymnastics,” and a conceptual algae-producing tower …

This time last year Yves Béhar launched a waterproof sex toy and John Pawson had a solo exhibition of his work at the Design Museum in London. Ole Scheeren opened his new studio, having left OMA in March 2010, Pugh + Scarpa announced their decision to split and Alexis Georgacopoulos was appointed director of ECAL. Meanwhile Foreign Office Architects completed their tile-clad Ravensbourne campus and Eastern Design Office completed a house for a dying client. The Hel Yes! temporary Finnish restaurant opened in London, Studio Toogood released a collection of handles modelled on sticks, stones and bones, and Dutch architects Bureau SLA finished the National Gl…

This time last year Dezeen was in Cologne for the annual furniture fair, where we saw a sofa you could wrap around yourself, a chair bent from a single sheet of aluminium and a rocking horse shaped like a vase. We also teamed up with [D3] Design Talents to host a series of talks with 12 designers who launched their careers at the young designers’ showcase, which you can watch over on Dezeen Screen. Meanwhile, a water-tower with a womanly form was compared to computer game heroine Lara Croft, while readers were unanimously wowed by the residential extension to the orangery of an eighteenth century castle and we featured an unusual hair clip that gives you eyes in the bac…

This time last year we revealed designs by BarberOsgerby for the London 2012 Olympic Torch, which went on to be named Design of the Year (see our interview with the designers here). Also in the news was a 3D-printed bikini, a house that turns into a fortress and a school that encouraged students to copy famous designs. (more…) View the full article

Architects and designers’ obsessions with concrete were epitomised by the projects we featured this time last year, such as this house that has concrete walls both inside and out (above). (more…) View the full article

A year ago this week the Guangzhou Opera House designed by architect Zaha Hadid opened up in China. The curved timber velodrome was completed in London in preparation for this year’s Olympic Games and Thomas Heatherwick was revealed as designer of the Olympic torch. Industrial designer Marc Newson launched a collection of clothing featuring drawn-on pockets and fake turn-ups, plus Issey Miyake’s creative director Dai Fujiwara announced his decision to stand down. He was later replaced by Yoshiyuki Miyamae. We featured a house with a slide connecting its floors that went on to become one of Dezeen’s most popular stories of all time and we talked to MVRDV architect Win…

One year ago this week we published photos of the completed the Centro Niemeyer by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer in Avilés, Danish architects Bjarke Ingels Group won a competition to masterplan a new gateway to Stockholm at the intersection of two motorways and our most controversial story featured a Russian Orthodox church and cultural centre for a plot beside the Eiffel Tower in Paris. (more…) </img> </img> </img> </img> </img> </img> </img> View the full article

This time last year Ai Weiwei covered the floor of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with porcelain sunflower seeds and graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister talked to us about his work at Vienna Design Week. David Kohn Architects installed an event space called Skyroom on the roof of the Architecture Foundation’s London offices and an underground railway station with criss-crossing concrete beams reminded our readers of a sci-fi computer game. Meanwhile, British car manufacturer Aston Martin announced that they would launch a luxury compact city car and Copenhagen-based KiBiSi designed a furniture range resembling sand bags. Structural engineer Cecil Balmond lef…

Vertical gardens, secret courtyards and mist-spraying pools were in the news this time last year: a forested skyscraper was proposed for Nantes in France (above) and a foliage-clad house was completed in Brussels (below). (more…) View the full article

This time last year MVRDV architect Winy Maas was awarded the highest decoration of honour in France, UNStudio opened a pavilion in New York’s Battery Park and we revealed what it looks like inside Skype’s Stockholm offices. In other news, fuseproject launched a grating tool for making hot cacao that clips onto the side of a mug and West 8 completed a “Garden of 10,000 Bridges” that suspiciously seemed to contain just five. Dezeen readers were busy debating whether a library with shelves for walls would be constantly full of dust and also if its swastika-shaped desks were appropriate. They were also full of praise for a Puma store where sneakers appear to be walking up …

This time last year our most popular story featured electricity pylons shaped like giants striding across the Icelandic landscape. The Mayor of London published a guide containing 90 standards for new housing in London as Rotterdam trends agency Arch-Vision predicted an increase in prefabricated buildings. Other popular stories included a periscope-shaped camera, hard drives that look like cassette tapes and a house on stilts in Ibiza with a jumble of cascading terraces. Bartlett School of Architecture graduate Richard Hardy shared his imaginative short film about an autonomous, artificially intelligent city while six artists unveiled even stranger proposal…

At the start of 2011 two of our most popular stories were about sex toys. New online brand Made to Pleasure invited customers to customise the shape of their toys, while designer Marc Dibeh designed one that discreetly tucks into the side of a bedside lamp. A few designers started to look forward to the imminent wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton by designing unofficial commemorative plates, and a group of students constructed an igloo-shaped pavilion from cardboard hoops. Meanwhile, a wooden house filled with bridges and platforms sparked a debate about safety and we revealed images of a Maggie’s Centre designed by London architects MJP. We featured a fle…