15 architecture and design books to read this summer
From essays on the body and museum archives to monographs on Martino Gamper, Hella Jongerius and Roberto Burle Marx, here are 15 architecture and design books worth reading this summer.
You can now stay in an Italian utopia: the Eni village in the Dolomites
Designed by Edoardo Gellner between the 1950s and 1960s, the Borca di Cadore complex was one of Italy’s most ambitious experiments of the postwar economic boom. Today, its historic hotel has reopened alongside the church created with Carlo Scarpa.
Inside Venice’s Borges Labyrinth, reopening after a major restoration
Forty years after the death of Jorge Luis Borges, the labyrinth garden designed by Randoll Coate on Venice’s San Giorgio Maggiore Island is reopening following a conservation project promoted by PwC Italia and Fondazione Giorgio Cini.
Avellino like Pripyat: the Italian city that has become an obsession of the post-Soviet aesthetic
Fog, concrete, post-punk music and social media language. With Soviet Avellino, Pietro Pio Ciampa transforms an inland town in Campania into a shared imaginary, between brutalism, liminal spaces and contemporary visual culture.
Ten years after The Floating Piers: what remains of Christo’s artwork that made a million people walk on water
The Floating Piers, the installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude on Lake Iseo, lasted only sixteen days. Although it no longer physically exists, it continues to influence tourism, the perception of the landscape and the identity of the transformed territory.
Alberto Ponis’ Sardinia becomes an ambient album of wind, stone and the sounds of Gallura
Miriorama / Abitare Costa Paradiso is a limited-edition vinyl born from the encounter between Italian DJ and producer FILOQ’s sonic research and Alberto Ponis’ architecture, turning the landscapes of Costa Paradiso into an immersive listening experience.
The disposable camera is more popular than ever. Fujifilm has launched two new QuickSnap models
Forty years after its debut, Fujifilm has revamped the QuickSnap with two new models, tapping into the resurgence of analogue photography among Gen Z, 1990s nostalgia and the desire for imperfect imagery.
Finsta: how secondary Instagram accounts became a new status symbol
From Rachel Sennott to Balenciaga, finstas–secondary Instagram accounts created to share content with a select group of people – have become a new form of aesthetic capital. Here, apparent spontaneity fosters a sense of exclusivity and belonging.
Godox has created a camera with a transparent screen and it looks like science fiction
The new C100 ditches the classic color display and uses a transparent screen to frame the scene: it looks like a futuristic solution, yet it brings photography back to an ancient gesture, that of looking through a frame.
You can now sleep in Carlo Mollino’s Villa K2 on Lake Maggiore
Preserved almost entirely since the 1950s, the house designed by Carlo Mollino for Luigi Cattaneo in Agra is now listed on Airbnb, offering a rare opportunity to temporarily inhabit one of the masterpieces of 20th-century Italian architecture.
Another landmark hospital in northern Italy: Brescia’s new medical campus is designed by Park and Carlo Ratti
Brescia’s new Main and Children’s Hospital joins a growing generation of healthcare projects that are reshaping hospitals as more than places of treatment: civic campuses, inhabitable landscapes and symbolic architectures for the contemporary city.
Silo is back, the series that transforms architecture into a mental prison
The third season of the series based on Hugh Howey’s novels returns to Apple TV+ with ten episodes, new timelines and a central question: what happens when a community survives thanks to a story constructed by power?
Gaudí’s unbuilt New York hotel now exists thanks to AI
In 1908, Antoni Gaudí envisioned the Hotel Attraction for Lower Manhattan—a colossal vertical hotel that was never built and was later all but forgotten. On the centennial of his death, artist Thierry Lechanteur brings it back to life with an AI-generated reconstruction.