What is it that gives places their individual qualities and defines the life of a city? Architects and urbanists are accustomed to describing and creating the organizational structures, the layouts and physical attributes of our cities. But what are...

From 2008 to 2010, the architects Luis M. Mansilla and Emilio Tunon held the Jean Labatut Visiting Professorship at the Princeton School of Architecture. Examining both student and also Mansilla + Tunon's own design work, From Rules to Constraints pr...

What feeds the inspiration of the designer? Observation. In Jasper Morrison's collection of pictures, icons of design history meet up with the unassuming objects of everyday life, and curious findings with the archetypes of modernism. Every picture t...

Since it was set up in 1989 the office of Gigon/Guyer architects has conceived an impressive series of projects. The most important designs arried out include museums, housing projects, and office buildings. The recently completed Prime Tower and its...

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture was established by His Highness the Aga Khan in 1977 to identify and encourage excellence in architecture and other forms of intervention in the built environment of societies with Muslim presence. The award is giv...

Like few others, Louis Kahn cultivated the craft of drawing as a means to architecture. His personal design drawings – seen either as a method of discovery or for themselves – are unique in the twentieth century. Over two hundred – mostly unpublished...

In 1957, Swiss typographer Max Miedinger came up with "Haas Grotesk". Renamed Helvetica after 1960, this typeface went on to become one of the world's most used typefaces ever. It embodies the myth of Sachlichkeit, propagated at the time by Swiss Typ...

Designed in 1957, the Helvetica font is an icon of swiss graphic design, which was a model of sober, functional communication throughout the world in the 1950s and 60s. The balanced and neutral appearance of Helvetica forgoes a high degree of express...