Few artists have shaped the language of the modern music video as profoundly as the US band Ok Go. Long before Tiktok and Instagram, the group’s DIY treadmill routine for “Here It Goes Again” became a defining moment of early internet culture and a viral phenomenon before the word “viral” meant anything beyond an infection.

Now, following frontman Damian Kulash’s acceptance of UKMVA’s Icon Award for music-video innovation, he is reflecting on two decades of creative risks, homemade spectacle, analogue magic and why the band never chased metrics while the platforms around them were changing everything. With two new Grammy nominations for “Love” (video) and And the Adjacent Possible (artwork) and a decade-long gap between albums finally closing, Kulash spoke to Monocle Radio about the past, present and future of visual music-making.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full interview on ‘The Globalist’ from Monocle Radio.

Let’s start at the beginning. What was going through your mind when you created the music video for ‘Here It Goes Again’? What did you want it to be?
When we made the video for ‘Here It Goes Again’ – the treadmill video – we were trying to make something for this nerdy group of fans that we had stumbled upon and connected with. At the end of our concerts, we would do a ridiculous boy-band dance on stage to diffuse the hipster tension that was in indie-rock rooms in the early 2000s, when it was cool to smoke cigarettes and shuffle your feet. We wanted music that felt like Queen or Cheap Trick or Joan Jett. We wanted people to be fist-pumping and have fun. So we came up with a dance for a song called ‘A Million Ways’ and a rehearsal tape of that was uploaded online in the pre-Youtube era. It was then downloaded 300,000 times over a few weeks and we realised that we had accidentally created a music video and made a connection with our fan base. So we thought we should make something else for those people. 

We didn’t think of it as a music video but more as just another ridiculous thing. We recorded a routine on treadmills at my sister’s dance instruction studio. We thought it was a weird, modern way of filming a video but we did not think it would ever be seen by anyone outside those few fans.

You were one of the first bands to break through via Youtube. Now artists are adapting to Tiktok and algorithmic discovery. How has that shift affected you?
Oh, boy, that’s a huge question. If you needed a poster child for Youtube, we were the ones. We were right there. We lucked into being the first wave of truly homemade stuff to take on the giant media machine and win, and that was really liberating and fun.

I’m sure that there are people in their twenties who see the canvas provided by Tiktok, Instagram or whatever, and feel genuine art in their souls. I still think in a slightly different framework. I like working for months on end to come up with a nugget of something that could never have existed otherwise. I put all my effort into two, three, four or five minutes of music or film that feels as though I’ve figured out where the edge of impossible is and tipped my finger over to the other side. That’s what art feels like to me.

But that’s not what succeeds on Tiktok. What succeeds is putting something up every day: a low-quality bar, highly repeatable. And that’s only the beginning of the definition of the new form. The fact that it’s now the arbiter of what you see shows how the algorithm isn’t picking content based on how the viewer feels about it but rather how it thinks the broader masses will react to it. It has completely changed the way things move through culture.

I am not changing what I do in reaction to it. I probably should, if I wanted to maximise success or numbers. But you don’t wind up being in a rock band or being a filmmaker because you’re highly strategic about making money. You wind up here because you want to connect with other human beings. 

Listen to the full conversation with Damian Kulash and Monocle Radio’s Tom Webb on ‘The Globalist’.

In a generically opulent kingdom, an emperor roams the streets wearing nothing but an irksome, complacent smirk. The plot of Don Juan Manuel’s El Conde Lucanor (1335) and, for more contemporary readers, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Emperor’s New Clothes (1837), felt oddly pertinent when the president of Fifa, Gianni Infantino, presented the football association’s inaugural peace prize to US president Donald Trump on Friday. The award – calculated and flagrantly irrelevant – was indicative of an institution that has been consistently obsequious to illiberal powers. Just like the empty looms of Andersen’s swindling tailors, Fifa’s pretences to power confirmed that next summer’s World Cup, held between Canada, Mexico and the US, will serve one man’s vanity in pursuit of his nation’s wealth. 

The 2026 Fifa World Cup draw ceremony was a gauche affair. Held in Washington, it was a protracted pantomime performed to an audience of one: the US president. Infantino played the hits: he led the crowd in chants of “USA, USA…”; he concocted a garish peace prize, including a trophy, gold medal and certificate; and he booked the Village People to sing Trump’s favourite tune, “YMCA”. The award – the creation of which was announced last month without approval from Fifa’s board – was designed by Infantino to soften the blow of Trump’s failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize. And while the commander in chief’s forces gathered off the coast of Venezuela, attendees to the ceremony nodded along and applauded à la the townsfolk before their imperious leader. The world’s sporting elite were never going to play the role of the truth-telling child in Andersen’s tale. Not when the sport’s governing body, like the fabled weavers, was so shamelessly plying Trump with transparent blandishments. Indeed, the only real difference between Andersen’s fraudsters and today’s obsequious CEOs and world leaders is that the presents and made-up accolades given to Trump are anything but invisible – that Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar in May being a case in point.

Infantino is not the first to resort to tacky or tantalising tactics to get the US president on side. In October, Japan’s newly minted prime minister, Sane Takaichi, showed the world that when it comes to the man who has everything – less is not more. Personalised golden golf balls and the putter used by the late Shinzo Abe when he and Trump golfed together were an ace gift that helped pull Japan out of the rough following severe tariff hikes. But unlike Takaichi, Fifa’s flattery did not show nous nor deft diplomacy – it felt singularly sycophantic. Particularly when the US is not hosting next summer’s tournament alone.

What qualifies football’s governing body to assign a peace prize? Little more than its long history of fawning over money and power. In fact, much like its inaugural peace prize winner, Fifa’s shamelessness is its superpower. Lavishing leaders and propping up states with its soft-power machine (aka the World Cup) has become the institution’s lifeblood and raison d’être. Look back at Infantino’s record of elected host nations: Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022, the US in 2026, Milei’s Argentina hosting with Uruguay in 2030 and, in 2034, Saudi Arabia. It’s an axis not known for its commitment to being welcoming to all, nor for its love of the sport (bar Russia, Argentina and Uruguay). There is, of course, a rationale to hosting World Cups in nations without storied footballing pedigrees; these tournaments help to stretch the frontiers of the sport. However, the blatant and successive rewarding of regimes that operate counter to the more democratic ideals of the sport’s fanbase diminishes the positive impact of the world’s most-watched sporting event.

Infantino’s tenure mirrors much of the World Cup’s past: the tournament is indistinguishable from controversial nation-building. In 1934, the World Cup in Italy provided Benito Mussolini the opportunity to promote Italian craft, design and a dose of right-wing nationalist pomp. In 1978 it was Argentine dictator General Jorge Rafael Videla’s turn to use the games to his advantage. In fact, this political football has been played down the right wing for so long it’s a wonder that Brand World Cup, or Fifa itself, bother purporting a liberal agenda at all. 

And yet in a 2022 speech, the Fifa president declared himself as feeling gay, disabled, like a migrant worker, Arabic, African and others besides. But there will be more to come in the summer. The designated Pride Match at World Cup 2026, held in Seattle, will – thanks to Friday’s draw – feature Egypt and Iran: two nations where homosexuality is illegal and, in the latter country, punishable by death. It could well be a spectacle but don’t expect to see players or Fifa staffers joining in. After all, the football association failed to support players wanting to wear OneLove armbands in support of LGBTQ+ people at the Qatar World Cup by announcing that those individuals would receive yellow cards. 

So, what does summer 2026 have in store? Infantino is keeping many of the tournament’s secrets under wraps (expect naff half-time performances and NFL-style pitch-side interviews). But the real winner of the so-called people’s game will be the continued success of Fifa’s egregious lickspittle tactic. While the losers will be fans at the US legs of the tournament forced to suffer draconian government officials and Trump’s patrolling ICE agents. For Fifa, the US remains the New World and a primed market, especially with the president on board. The previous World Cup in Qatar, and the decision for Saudi Arabia to host in 2034, have already promoted the sport in the Gulf, which is now a burgeoning giant of footballing financial capital. Fifa has clearly decided on its preferred clientele, targeting nations with populations that have vast purchasing power and don’t baulk at ultra-premium ticket prices (tickets for Colombia versus Portugal in Miami have risen 514 per cent since Friday’s draw). Football has never been democratic and Fifa never liberal. The 2026 Fifa World Cup promises to be more nakedly vulgar – and profitable – than ever. Nothing matters more than the bottom line and its showing. 

I found myself in the unusual position of nodding along in enthusiastic agreement with the aesthetic tastes of US president Donald Trump last week. This was unusual. We all have our own personal style but Trump’s insistence on deploying maximum opulence to his interiors does not chime with my more reserved British design sensibilities. 
 
Under Trump, the Oval Office has been transformed from an elegant space into an Aladdin’s cave: golden eagles and urns have been unearthed from the White House collection; golden cherubs were shipped in from Mar-a-Lago; the TV remote control has been wrapped in gilt – you get the picture.
 
Trump’s architectural tastes veer in a similar direction. He has issued an executive order stating that classical architecture serve as the preferred architectural style for all applicable federal public buildings, while criticising the “exposed poured concrete” of brutalist and modernist buildings. So it was strange to hear Trump praising the visionary Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen and his mid-century modern masterpiece that is Washington’s Dulles International Airport.

Its sweeping concrete roof, which evokes the wing of a plane or perhaps the elegance of flight, hovers over the large glass frontage held up by slanted concrete pillars. There is no hint of the Greek or Roman classical styles that Trump admires. But speaking in a cabinet meeting earlier this month, he called Saarinen “one of the greatest architects in the world”. Though he went on to say that while Dulles was a “great building”, it was “a bad airport” and promised to rebuild it. 
 
Again, he was right. While the main terminal is a triumph, everything else at Dulles is a disaster. Behind the airy and inviting main terminal are two separate concourse buildings. They are long and claustrophobic – and no matter how many times you traipse up and down them, it is impossible to find anything worth eating or buying. There is no stylistic continuity between any of the gates, just different levels of confusion, discomfort and overcrowding. 
 
Shuttling people between these terminals is one of Saarinen’s less-enduring designs: the mobile lounge, a lumbering, 35-tonne, bus-like vehicle that raises and lowers to let passengers on and off. When Dulles opened in 1962, these mobile lounges might have seemed like the cutting edge of airport design. Today, they are hot, smelly, overcrowded cattle wagons that I dread boarding. One crashed in November, with 18 people left needing hospital treatment. 
 
But what does Trump have in mind when he promises an “amazing plan” to Make Dulles Great Again? The airport is already being overhauled, with a new concourse opening next year. Since 2010, a rail transit operates between most of the terminals and this will expand. 
 
Maybe Trump wants to put his stylistic stamp on Dulles. Given his executive order suggests that classical architecture is the way forward, can we expect some Greco-Roman flourishes? Perhaps some colonnades slapped in front of the windows and a portico or two over the entrance doors? Trump loves marble – he recently decked out the White House’s Lincoln Bathroom in it – so maybe the toilets will take a more luxurious turn. The tips of the iconic sloping roof would be an ideal place to perch some golden birds or maybe even a floating cherub, if Mar-a-Lago can spare any more.
 
A call for proposals went out on 2 December, so time will tell whether Trump has a Midas touch with airports. As for me, I’d just be happy with a decent café. 

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson is a journalist based in Washington. Further reading? Here we take a look at the Trump family’s plans for a redevelopment in Belgrade.

With 12 palace-level hotels and a reputation for the refined, Paris has long been a global benchmark for luxury stays. Among the most storied of its offerings is the Intercontinental Paris Le Grand, a landmark facing the Opéra Garnier. Behind its baroque façade, travellers with taste and locals looking for a well-appointed dining experience head to its Winter Garden and Café de la Paix. 

For the past 15 years the hotel was managed by Christophe Laure, now newly appointed to lead all of Intercontinental Hotels Group’s (IHG) luxury and lifestyle properties. His promotion comes at a time when the sector is both fiercely competitive and continuing to see growth and expansion in the City of Light and beyond.

With an estimated value of $154.32bn (€132.5bn) in 2024, projections suggest the value of the global luxury hospitality sector will exceed $166bn (€142bn) before the end of 2025 and surpass $218bn (€187bn) by 2029. France is very much a key player in this growth. The French luxury-hospitality market was valued at approximately $12.16bn (€10.43bn) in 2024 and it is anticipated to grow at an average annual rate of 2.74 per cent through 2029.

So how does one ensure that their property sees a decent chunk of change from this rise in luxury-hospitality stays? At a time when hotels are branching into experiences, sustainability initiatives, merchandise, fashion collaborations, wellness and heritage storytelling, there’s a lot for any hotelier to consider when trying to keep their establishment booked, profitable and relevant. As Laure tells Monocle, hotels such as the Intercontinental are refining their approaches to hospitality to mark themselves clearly as luxury players as opposed to the many high-end options. 

In the calm of the grand glasshouse, Laure confides his plans for 2026, discusses the state of the luxury hospitality market and how the Intercontinental is matching evolved guest expectations. 

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With the competition in the upper-luxury segment so tough in Paris at the moment, how does Intercontinental stand out?
Our history is rooted in international travel and that remains our strength to this day. When Pan American World Airways was opening routes between North and South America in 1946, the CEO of Pan-Am told the president that [new hotels at the airline’s destinations] would live up to the standards of Pan-Am’s glorious cabins, and so the first Intercontinental hotel was born to provide quality and safe accommodation to the traveller crossing continents for business.

How do you meet the specific needs of the clientele of upper-luxury travellers who are constantly on the move?
This might seem obvious but the first thing that you need when you travel abroad is to feel safe and we take that very seriously. Then the key is attention to detail. When our customers walk into their room, we want them to feel that they are the first to ever stay there, that it’s brand new. Our clientele also cares about attentive service: always being there without seeming to, being present but discreet, along with high-quality cuisine, of course.

Are there markets where you find this is in especially high demand?
Asia and the Middle East. The Middle East is a more mature market now; we have been there for about 30 years. But Asia – even though China is in the midst of a slowdown – is a market where there is a lot of interest in what we do. There is an eagerness there to discover and reproduce what we offer in France. I have a client who sent me some photos of a hotel where he was staying in Hanoi recently and the layout is remarkably similar to Le Grand Hotel’s. It’s flattering. 

For a hotel group, what do you think is key to a successful international expansion?When you want to grow roots in a new market, you need to respect what the people there are used to consuming. But at the same time, put forward your own expertise and offer something new. 

For example, IHG was one of the first groups to invest in China. Today we have 800 hotels there. There are properties from our global brands, such as Intercontinental, Kimpton and Crowne Plaza. But we also created a completely new brand, Hualuxe, which is a Chinese label dedicated to the Chinese market. This way everyone gets what they want. International travellers can rely on brands that they already know and love, and we show the domestic clientele that we are also attuned to their expectations. 

Looking ahead, what are the heavy trends that you see shaping hospitality?
In short, the human side of it. Customers want to be recognised: they crave that empathy, that sense that we know who they are and what they need – how they like their breakfast, for instance – because they have stayed with us in the past and that’s how we keep them coming back. That’s not to say there isn’t a technological aspect to this human touch. We have the longest-running loyalty programme in the business and that has served us well. We also want to provide customers with the convenience of getting updates on their booking and their stay through an app. For our staff as well, we are investing heavily in technology to provide new tools that allow them to spend as much time as possible on personal interactions that really make the biggest difference in our business.

It’s possible that Europe narrowly missed its 21st-century Archduke Franz Ferdinand moment last week. As Ukraine’s official Airbus ACJ319 approached Dublin Airport, the crew aboard the Irish Naval Service craft LÉ William Butler Yeats spotted several drones aloft in the no-fly zone protecting president Volodymyr Zelensky’s flight path. It is unclear as of this writing who launched the drones or from where or what their intentions were. However, Zelensky’s aircraft arrived earlier than scheduled, possibly forestalling any further mischief.
    
Interference with Zelensky’s jet would obviously have been serious but the location might have made it more so – indeed, the location might have encouraged it. The Republic of Ireland, though a member of the EU, is not a member of Nato and therefore not protected by Article 5 of the Nato treaty, making it an obvious vulnerability for any adversary of Europe and/or the wider Western alliance to test – not least because it is barely defended at all.
     
Ireland’s reluctance to apply for Nato membership is borne of a long tradition of neutrality. Ireland sat out the Second World War, though many Irish people did not: at least 80,000 joined the British military to do what Ireland’s government would not. Ireland has also been reluctant to enter into any formal military alliance with the UK – historically regarded as a colonial overlord.

The ridiculous irony into which Ireland has painted itself is that it is now almost entirely reliant for protection from external threats on the UK’s Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. Ireland’s own military is pitiful. It has an army of perhaps 6,000 full-time troops. Its air-combat capacity amounts to eight Pilatus PC-9M trainers, which have propellers on the front. It has no military radar system. Both these derelictions are allegedly being addressed but the fact that they need to be addressed reflects decades of astonishing complacency.
    
Ireland’s navy has not much improved since The Dubliners mocked it in song in 1968 (“When the captain he blows on his whistle/All the sailors go home for their tea” etc). It is certainly woefully under-equipped for a country that presides over a maritime exclusive economic zone nearly 10 times Ireland’s size, through which pass about 75 per cent of all the northern hemisphere’s data cables. LÉ William Butler Yeats is one of only four offshore patrol vessels, all quaintly named after famous Irish writers (we can assume that the crew of LÉ James Joyce has heard all the jokes about interminable and convoluted journeys that everybody only pretends to understand). 
     
Ireland has a population roughly the same size as that of Norway or Finland and a GDP bigger than either. Granted, Norway and Finland both have land borders with Russia but the differences in how seriously Ireland takes its – and Europe’s – defence are stark. Earlier this year, Norway took delivery of the final pair of its order of 52 F-35 fighter jets, while Lockheed Martin finished work on the first of 64 F-35s for Finland. Not counting upgrades or ongoing operational expenses, each of those aircraft cost about €160m. 
    
Ireland recently announced a 2026 defence budget – army, navy and air force – of €1.49bn, or equivalent to about nine F-35s, and grandly proclaimed this as a record. It is nowhere near enough to pay for an answer to the question: if you were Vladimir Putin, which weak spot would you poke?
 
Andrew Mueller is the host of ‘The Foreign Desk’ on Monocle Radio and a regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Every March about 20,000 people head to the French Riviera for the world’s leading property and real-estate trade show, Mipim. But this week, a smaller contingent of 400 or so attendees made its way to Hong Kong for the fair’s offshoot, Mipim Asia. This year’s edition began on the final day of national mourning following the city’s deadliest fire in nearly 80 years – a devastating blaze in a Tai Po housing complex, which claimed the lives of 159 people. “We are shocked,” says the managing director and deputy chairman of Hong Kong’s Urban Renewal Authority, Donald Choi Wun-hing. “This tragedy is something we cannot see a repeat of, so on top of supporting all those affected, the city is already looking into the future to see how this type of tragedy can be prevented.” 

For Mipim Asia’s organising team, it was clear that facing the tragedy head-on was an opportunity for the sector to come together and think about how our cities are being built. “We’re shining a light on the responsibility of all the stakeholders of the real-estate and urban-development sector because, in the end, we are the ones building these urban developments,” says the director of Mipim, Nicolas Boffi. For Boffi, this week is also about taking lessons back home and setting the tone for some of the conversations to be had in Cannes next March. “Looking east is very important,” says Boffi. “When you consider the way that modular construction has developed in Asia, it’s really interesting for most European countries looking for solutions to housing crises.”

With an estimated 45 per cent of the global population now living in cities and nine Asian metropolises in the top 10 of the world’s megacities (places with 10 million or more inhabitants), the lessons from this region are not to be taken for granted. Nations are building at pace to face the demands of rapid urbanisation but as Choi explains, it’s not just about out with the old and in with the new. “In around two decades, one in every two buildings will be aged 50 or above, so we need a lot of refurbishment, maintenance and preventative repair to ensure that the city can continue to be functional,” he says.

This is where platforms such as Mipim Asia play a pivotal role in getting the right partners around the same table. “It cannot be done by the government alone. We need to attract private-sector involvement, especially public capital, to actively participate in city renewal and provide a better living environment,” says Choi. 

There’s a reason why cities continue to grow – they’re magnetic and each have a specific rhythm. It’s only through frank conversations, shared lessons and sustainable growth that we can ensure they remain the best places to call home. In the wake of the deadly fire, Mipim Asia has delivered on that.

Carlota Rebelo is Monocle’s senior foreign correspondent. For more from Mipim Asia, listen to the latest episode of ‘The Urbanist’.

Read next: Mipim, the property industry’s annual meet-up, is finally breaking new ground

Let’s start this Sunday with a thank you, merci and arigatō gozaimasu to all those readers who took up the call to subscribe to Monocle over the past few days, the many more who popped along to our Zürich Christmas Market last weekend and all those who were first through the doors at our markets in Paris, Tokyo and Toronto from early yesterday. Up next is our big number in London and a more bijou twirl from the team at our Wan Chai outpost in Hong Kong. If you happen to be in Paris today, please swing by 16 rue Bachaumont to say hello as I’ll be on hand to sign books and assist with any lingering 2025 marketing budgets that need to be spent over the coming weeks. Now, let’s dial back the clock and take stock of the week that was.

Monday, Cannes 
This year’s ILTM gathering on the Med drew a record crowd. Monocle was on hand with a full radio team and I was on stage talking to leaders from the cruise and longevity sectors about where their businesses are heading. The biggest winner must be Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri. As one CEO told me, “You can’t get a slot until 2035 if you want to build a vessel.” I was hoping that we might be able to secure a spot for the construction of the SS Monocle. Or perhaps we can overhaul a more classic and compact liner from the 1970s? I’m serious. It could be a whole new way to report, distribute and broadcast.

Tuesday, Frankfurt 
It was a civilised start from Nice up to Frankfurt and an absolute delight to connect onto a Lufthansa 747-8 to Tokyo Haneda Airport. The aircraft features Lufthansa’s old-school First Class and, in a world of boxed-in premium cubicles, the open-plan configuration feels airy and modern. As this will be up for retirement soon, perhaps we can also secure a few for the extension of our airline business.

Wednesday, Tokyo 
Christmas is not complete without a visit to Tokyo, especially when the sky is clear, the air crisp and the city lit up for the season. Ginza’s Wako department store gets top marks for the best windows and Ginza Six the best one-stop shopping destination for anyone who still has gifts to tick off their list. The best part of this little retail safari was having Tokyo virgins Luke and Max in tow. A small team dinner at Cignale Enoteca later that evening rounded off a perfect welcome; an elegant season starter for our Tokyo and Bangkok bureau chiefs, along with special advisor Brock-san.

Thursday, Tokyo 
Our Switzerland: The Monocle Handbook had its official launch at the Swiss ambassador’s residence and what a chic setup and great crowd. The boys and girls from kimono maker Yamato were looking splendid in their winter ensembles, Ryutaro Makino and his jazzy quartet were sounding hot with the Christmas carols and the ambassador did a fine pitch for a bit more Japan in Switzerland. Kanpai to that!

Friday, Munich 
At nearly 14 and a half hours, it was a seriously long haul from Haneda to Munich on a Lufthansa A350 fitted with its new Allegris product. While they get full credit for privacy up front, it’s a very dark and walled-in configuration that feels like no one gave it final sign-off. As for the big, polyester “cosy blanket”, it’s best if such details are not left to procurement.

Saturday, Paris 
Just touched down at CDG and will catch this fine city just as the lights go on and our Christmas Market kicks into cheery evening mode. Bon weekend!

Enjoying life in ‘The Faster Lane’? Click here to browse all of Tyler’s past columns. 

Born in Toronto in 1929, Frank Gehry moved to Los Angeles as a teenager – the city where he established his namesake architecture practice in 1962, after studying at the University of Southern California, Harvard Graduate School of Design and a brief stint in Paris. The architect, who passed away yesterday following a respiratory illness, was famed for his sculptural, curvilinear designs that appear to defy conventional geometry. In 1989, he was awarded architecture’s highest honour, The Pritzker Architecture Prize, for a body of work that was visually and materially unexpected, and respected for its ability to transform entire cities, uplift the spirits of citizens, prompt regeneration projects, and entice visitors from near and far. However, it was his Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, completed in 1997, that made Gehry a household name across the globe. Few architects can boast careers as varied, far-reaching and original – here are three projects that evidence Gehry’s lifetime of achievement. 

Luma Arles, France
Gehry’s work in the small city of Arles in the south of France cements his legacy of city-shaping cultural buildings. Here, the Canadian-American architect designed Luma, an interdisciplinary art complex that pays homage to Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night”, mirroring shades of the Provençal sky overhead. Opened in 2021, the tower’s twisted façade captures the ever-changing colour variations in both the sky and the rocky landscape of the nearby Alpilles mountain range. At the foot of the structure sits a glass rotunda inspired by Arles’ Roman amphitheatre, which serves as a reception area for visitors.

The result is a creative campus where artists, researchers and scientists can work together to deepen the understanding of issues related to the environment, education, human rights and culture. “We are expanding the definition of what a cultural institution can be,” Mustapha Bouhayati, CEO of Luma Arles, told Monocle at its opening. “The building has become a contemporary beacon of the Mediterranean, imbuing the city and the people of Arles with a transformative energy.”

Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, Australia
Gehry’s first and only building in Australia was for the University of Technology Sydney. The university had a long history of commissioning unremarkable (or plain ugly) structures but this work from Gehry bucked that trend. Completed in late 2014, its bold, undulating façades of folds and creases saw Sydneysiders affectionately dub the building the “squashed brown paper bag”. Such a comment, from Australians, is praise of the highest order.

The structure honours Australian-Chinese businessman and philanthropist Dr Chau Chak Wing, who put AU$20m (€11.4m) towards the AU$180m (€102.5m) project. It comprises 320,000 custom-made bricks and, in characteristic Gehry style, internal finishes include stacked timber and plenty of mirrors. The structure also interfaces beautifully with the city thanks to an entrance from The Goods Line pedestrianised walkway and a streetfront café.

Walt Disney Concert Hall, USA
This structure is a shimmering, deliberately disjointed statement in the architect’s adopted hometown. While unquestionably impressive inside – watching the resident LA Philharmonic in the modular 360-degree space is epic – the real marvel is the external façade of steel curves, akin to an LA take on the Sydney Opera House.

The project began in the late 1980s after a $50m endowment from Lillian Disney to honour her late husband. Ten years later, the building still wasn’t complete and costs had blown out to more than $265m. Happily, private donations rolled in and the concert hall (which Gehry described as a “living room for the city”) finally opened in 2003. It complements Gehry’s outstanding body of work in southern California, which includes his 1980 Spiller House in Venice and the 1978 Gehry Residence in Santa Monica.

There are a few moments in my life that I can call cultural resets. One of the most memorable was when, on a hot summer morning in May 2023, I encountered Egyptian artist Maha Maamoun’s work for the first time. Fresh out of a gruelling degree in Toronto, I had fled to Manhattan to visit the museums. At The Met, tucked into gallery 914, was Maamoun’s eight-minute video “2026” (2010), alongside her photographic series “Domestic Tourism I” (2005). It dawned on me that Egypt is a tourist spectacle, even for those of us who grew up there.
 
In the video, Maamoun recreates a scenario from Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée, a story about a man journeying back in time in post-apocalyptic Paris. In Maamoun’s version, an actor delivers an excerpt from Mahmoud Osman’s science-fiction novel, The Revolution of 2053: The Beginning (2007). The text describes a night by the pyramids on a sanitised Giza Plateau with nothing in sight but the Grand Egyptian Museum (Gem). Initially proposed in 1992 and later formalised through an international design competition in 2002, the Gem was still under construction when Maamoun conceived “2026”. In the piece, the actor describes scenes of great wealth and food alongside images of superbly dressed expats and tourists dining leisurely. The scene is abruptly juxtaposed with deprivation, as starving children receive aid from an armoured car. I remember feeling uneasy after those eight minutes; I felt the hollowness of the museum’s spectacle on a visceral level.
 
In 2018, Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism launched Egypt – Experience & Invest: an initiative promoting culture as a tool for attracting visitors and investment. The campaign arrived two years before the closure of Townhouse Gallery, a vital independent contemporary-art space founded in 1998 by Canadian expat and long-time Cairo resident William Wells, who was expelled from Egypt in 2020. From a modest alleyway in downtown Cairo, Townhouse nurtured a generation of artists including Wael Shawky, now artistic director of Art Basel Qatar, and Maamoun herself.
 
Experience Egypt champions initiatives such as Art Cairo, Cairo Photo Week and Art d’Égypte, a cultural firm that seeks to connect Egyptian art with the world. The firm touts “a three-billion global reach, three-million exhibition views and more than 10,000 cultural conversations”. Those figures are unsurprisingly unsubstantiated. But it’s also unclear what they mean. What is a cultural conversation, exactly?

At its 2025 edition, Art d’Égypte staged a monumental show by the pyramids. The only Egyptian artist featured was ceramicist Salha El Masry, whose work, the firm says, draws from the country’s pre-dynastic past – a dazzling display, yet hardly a speck of Cairo’s dust in sight.
 
Art d’Égypte’s downtown satellite, the Cairo International Art District (CIAD), is in the same quarter that was once home to Townhouse. Al Ismaelia for Real Estate Development owns the spaces, whose CEO declared at CIAD’s press launch that “art has the power to transform how people see heritage.” The restored El Shorbagy building, where the selected works align perfectly with the branded wallpaper, is a remarkable example of Welsh-inspired medieval architecture. On the rooftop, visitors are invited to pose before a billboard that shouts, “AN ARTIST LIVES IN EVERYONE”.
 
The Gem, which finally opened on 1 November, is a colossal undertaking. After more than 20 years of planning, the mammoth institution designed by Irish firm Heneghan Peng Architects, contains more than 50,000 artefacts spanning 5,000 years of civilisation and markets itself as the largest museum in the world dedicated to ancient Egypt. Upon entry, you’re greeted by an 83-tonne sculpture of the pharaoh Ramses II that once stood in Cairo’s Ramses Square, in front of the central railway station. The Ministry of Tourism insists that the Gem will offer a wholly new experience of Egyptian heritage. During the Gem’s opening week, my social-media feeds were saturated with AI-generated content from its official accounts.
 
Coinciding with the Gem’s opening is the announcement of the Alexandria Biennale’s return in 2026 after a 12-year hiatus. Its wistful theme, This Too Shall Pass, focuses on environmental issues, with the entire city set to become an open exhibition space. Egypt’s culture minister has stressed that art is integral to Alexandria’s identity, and that reinstating the biennial will have a significant impact on instilling aesthetic ideals in its youth. Yet, meaningful cultural institutions in Alexandria have long struggled to stay afloat. Among them, Mass Alexandria, founded by Wael Shawky and curator Sarah Rifky, offered seminars in art history, criticism and contemporary practice from 2010 to 2012, modestly addressing Egypt’s art-education gap. Briefly revived in 2016, Mass graduated a cohort that included Marianne Fahmy and Yasmine El Meleegy, who exhibited with Cairo’s Gypsum Gallery at this year’s Frieze London.
 
For the past decade, state-led initiatives have been funnelling money into rebranding the nation as a global art destination – a process that often smooths over its artistic and social realities. Egypt’s most vital institutions still lie beneath the surface.

1.
The dog now sounds like she smokes 20 a day. Perhaps she does. Maybe she has a secret stash of Lucky Strike under the blanket in her bed. Or is she secreting the odd cheroot in her toy basket when I am not looking? Who knows. But the cancer that we have kept at bay for well over a year has found its way back and this time, well, it’s going to be just that – a matter of time. Still some months we think but that clock is ticking a little louder. 

It means that when I pretend that Macy is speaking – a common occurrence in our house, especially when I need the other half to pay attention or just generally agree with my plan of action – I am going to have to start sounding a little less Kylie and a bit more gravelly, like Morgan Freeman. I’m up for that.

Anyway, she’s going to get very little sympathy from my family as it turns out my brother-in-law not only has cancer but is on a similar flight plan for departure. Bloody cheek of it. We had lunch with him the other day and he placed a bet with Macy that he would outlive her. I watched as she cocked her head with a look that said, “We’ll see about that.” She then got out her purse and threw down a £10 note. So now it seems that she’s gambling too. Where will her vices lead her next?

2.
There’s been a lot of medical chat this week. Brian Sommerlad, my neighbour, is one of the world’s leading cleft lip and palate surgeons. On Tuesday, he invited me and the other half to a sort of retirement party that he was having at The Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury. Not only would there be wine and mince pies but he was also going to give a talk titled, “Hanging up the Scalpel: A Lifetime in Surgery”. 

Brian is now in his eighties, was operating a week ago and defies any categorisation by age. Just that morning I had seen him at the gym pounding away at speed on the running machine. And it feels like most weeks I bump into him returning from a surgical trip to Iraq or Italy. He’s at the top of his game but that’s a long career and, as he clicked through a presentation covering his life’s trajectory, it was amazing to see him in Vietnam during the war, working in Syria. I have spoken to Brian a hundred times but there’s something wonderful about hearing someone just tell their story, trace their path through life.

The event was packed and after his talk people started asking questions. It was moving when they would begin by saying, “Brian, thank you, you operated on me when I was a child,” or, “I came to see you when I discovered my child was going to be born with a cleft palate”. I would have shed a tear if I wasn’t still trying to recover from all the pictures of operations (put me right off my mince pie).
Whatever happens next – few in the room seemed to believe that this was really the end of him being a surgeon – Brian will continue delivering care to people in low-income countries through the charity that he helped found, Cleft. There, I have done my bit.

3.
And to wrap up charity corner this week, how about you come along to The Monocle Christmas Market next weekend at Midori House in London. We’ll be collecting money on the door for Reporters Without Borders but, once you’ve snuck past the tin rattlers, I can promise you a world of reindeer, mulled wine, stalls packed with desirable gifts and even a portly Santa. I might even drag the dog along but just don’t let her persuade you into having a ciggie behind Santa Claus’s hut. Or to go down the bookies. That girl is losing her way.

To read more columns by Andrew Tuck, click here.