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Monocle on Design
Your essential guide to design, covering furniture, craft, and architecture. Discover fresh stories, rising talents, and the latest from top studios.
Latest Episodes
Unbuilt architecture
We pay homage to the buildings that never were and the grand designs that didn’t make it off the drawing board.
On Design 21: What is mafia baroque architecture?
After Bulgaria’s first elections were held in 1990, the free market rushed in to fill the economic vacuum left by the fall of communism. On one side there arose a new class of oligarchs and on the other, against a backdrop of economic failure, the notorious organised crime sector of…
Design Miami 2016
In a design calendar saturated with stuffy halls and sad sandwiches, Design Miami – an offshoot of the Art Basel fair held in Miami each December – is a sunny and salubrious affair. Monocle’s New York deputy bureau chief Megan Billings reports from the show. Plus: a round-up of the…
On Design 20: How has Vienna benchmarked public seating?
This week Monocle’s man in Vienna Alexei Korolyov tells the story of a piece of street furniture that’s become a contemporary design symbol of the Austrian capital.
White elephants
Today we’re on safari for the architectural outliers known as white elephants: those buildings built with the best of intentions that – through poor conception, spiralling costs or unforeseen circumstances – have fallen from favour and out of use. We also talk to Richard Rogers and the Riba International Prize…
On Design 19: How do you brand a political party?
Trying to articulate a political vision through visual branding is fiendishly difficult. Luckily for those design-challenged prospective parliamentarians out there, Monocle’s Andrew Mueller has a few sage words on the matter.
Hong Kong design survey
Hong Kong started out as a city that made things and later became a trading hub for buying and selling. Now it has its sights set on becoming a regional centre of creativity, innovation and design. In this episode we take a look at what progress is being made, checking…
On Design 18: Why redesign Belgrade?
The Serbian capital’s street-level design is a cacophony of clashing elements but one man is waging war against this discord, vowing to bring aesthetic harmony to the city. Will he succeed?
Design greats: meeting Moshe Safdie
We share a few tall tales with one of the last great modernist architects, Moshe Safdie. Meanwhile, we consider the legacy of seminal UK typographers Edward Johnston and Eric Gill and talk to the architect who has achieved that rarest of things: a well-designed trade-show booth.
On Design 17: What can Singapore learn from the Golden Mile Complex?
The shabby brutalism of Singapore’s Golden Mile Complex and adjoining Golden Mile Tower doesn’t fit with the city’s squeaky-clean, glass-and-steel vernacular. We ask how the pair have survived in a place that’s famously unsentimental about demolishing the old to make way for the new.
