2020-2025
Public Space Got Political (Again)
When the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic upended daily life, cities around the world faced a surreal emptiness, their whisper-quiet streets animated only by the haunting blare of ambulance sirens. Then, when cities gradually allowed entry to parks and public spaces, restrictions and limitations on access brought civic inequities to the fore: As the world reopened, the policing and enforcement of public space took on new and greater scrutiny. While images of white circles painted on grass lawns remain an enduring icon of the COVID-19 era, a very different relic spans two city blocks in Minneapolis: Now officially known as George Floyd Square, a stretch of Chicago Avenue has been remade as a grassroots memorial, growing out of the public occupation that followed Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police. Five years later, it is an enduring embodiment of our right to move freely in the city, and a reminder that justice and injustice alike are expressed through the urban fabric.
The Revaluated Office
While the dark days of the shutdowns left countless businesses and employees in a perilous state of limbo as stay-at-home regulations and social distancing mandates emptied offices in droves, the ensuing years have seen a number of positive effects rise from the uncertainty. With an accelerated — and, one could argue, long overdue — focus on employee well-being and safety, and the acknowledgement that hybrid scenarios can actually bolster productivity, the reimagined workspace is one designed to support creativity and collaboration in a truly human-centred way. It incorporates such aspects as softer colours, agile furniture, biophilic and sustainable elements — and even wellness and relaxation rooms. Now that office designs — like the ESW office in Munich by Kinzo — are more attuned to the diverse needs of those who use them, employees have been more apt to return.
Sidewalk Dance
As soon as data began to show that congregating outside was safer than gathering indoors, the rules were loosened around that one mainstay of civic life: dining out. Drawing inspiration from the sidewalk cafés of European cities, many North American downtowns transformed the curb — and a vehicular traffic lane or two — with tables and banquettes. New York firm WXY quickly brainstormed an array of imaginative evolutions for various restaurant typologies (“the block,” “the strip,” “the island”) in its Keeping the Tables Turning study; Rockwell Group, a firm better known for its luxe hospitality projects and set designs for the Oscars, began by helping small Harlem outfits maintain their clientele with outdoor extensions of their eateries. In Bogotá, meanwhile, TALLER Architects transformed La Perseverancia market with scaffolding that reanimated the dining-out experience (shown). Proving that necessity is still the mother of invention, some of these quick fixes became permanent fixtures: Toronto’s initiative, CaféTO, has been serving up a sidewalk ballet ever since, and NYC’s efforts evolved into the nascent Dining Out NYC program.
Lee Broom’s Mystical Comeback
After a four-year hiatus, British designer Lee Broom captivated attendees of 2022’s Milan Design Week with the unveiling of his Divine Inspiration collection. The awe-evoking six-part lighting series was the culmination of Broom’s manifold exploration of brutalism, religious architecture across Europe, and the connection between the spiritual and physical realms. Distilling the magic of iconic places of worship like the Pantheon in Rome and Switzerland’s Saint-Nicolas Church, the more than 100 fixtures that were spread across multiple rooms of the Blindarte gallery presented visitors with a truly mesmerizing display of “stillness, reverence and contemplation.” At the risk of sounding worshipful, it was heavenly.
Decolonizing Venice
Shining the spotlight on Africa and the African Diaspora, Lesley Lokko’s Venice Biennale felt like the apotheosis of the post-starchitecture moment. A reckoning with decolonization and decarbonization on the world’s most prestigious architecture stage, it managed to accomplish two feats at once: bringing the past’s erasure of Indigenous knowledge and subjugated communities into sharp relief and demonstrating that the ingenuity of practitioners from those same communities hold the answers to new ways forward. Cue the naysayers. Patrik Schumacher, the anti-woke mansplainer of Architecture with a capital A, claimed there was no architecture at all at the Biennale — dismissing wholesale the impressive works of hundreds of architects from around the world, including Francis Kéré, Mariam Issoufou, Walter Hood, and Flores & Prats. Lokko’s curatorial vision, no matter the backlash, was indelible.
Fashion x Design
Fashion labels have been in the home furnishings game for decades now (Fendi Casa introduced its version of “Italian luxury living” in 1989, and Versace Home has been gilding tableware since 1992). While these marquee clothing brands were often relegated to the sidelines, they have recently catwalked into the modern-contemporary fold. At last year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, Bottega Veneta paired with Cassina and Fondation Le Corbusier for an installation inspired by a wooden whiskey box; Loewe staged a one-of-a-kind lighting installation; and Gucci (shown) poured the wine-red hue it had first paraded down its runway onto five classic Italian silhouettes. We’re also seeing more collaborations between couture labels and industrial designers: At last year’s Paris Fashion Week, Issey Miyake and French designer Ronan Bouroullec took centre stage with their line of pleated coats, some of which converted into cushions, and at Copenhagen’s 3daysofdesign, Hay and Asics co-branded a pair of sneakers — taking trade show design merch to the next level. Now, even hardware brands are jumping into the mix. At New York Fashion Week, luxury designer Christian Siriano is unveiling his collection with bathroom solutions and kitchen fittings expert Grohe: five fluid dresses inspired by the power of water — and the brand’s sculptural faucets.
Charting Design Fairs by Global Influence
Who’s up and who’s down when it comes to the industry’s festival lineup
HOLDING STEADY / Salone del Mobile & Fuorisalone, Milan (April): There’s no doubt that it’s the industry’s main event. But with longer lineups and more fashion brands crashing the party, the fear now is that maybe it’s getting too big for its own good.
GROWING ITS PROFILE / 3daysfdesign, Copenhagen (June): The intimacy of this off-site-only festival has quickly made it the place to be for major launches from Scandi brands — and, lately, international visitors that match their calm, minimalist spirit.
CONNECTING INDIE TO INDUSTRY / ICFF & NYCxDesign, New York (May): The ultimate evidence of ICFF’s success? A student design shown in the Wanted Launch Pad section in 2022 was back at the fair the next year, launching as an official Heller product.
RETURNING TO WORK / NeoCon & Design Days, Chicago (June): While it’s still business as usual at The Mart (meaning plenty of crisp suits), MillerKnoll has led other brands to decamp to Fulton Market, where a looser, more start-up-like office culture awaits.
MAKING A BIGGER SPLASH / Miami Art Week (December): Art Basel may be busy catering to billionaires, but counter-programming like Alcova Miami is placing refreshing focus on sustainable materials — think bioplastics in bright colours.
WARMING UP WINTER / IDS Toronto & DesignTO (January): IDS has developed a knack for inspiring feature exhibitions like this year’s hospitality-themed “Night and Day,” while DesignTO just marked its 15th anniversary with its best group shows yet.
LOSING STEAM / Stockholm Design Week (February): Some of the Nordic brands that once headlined Sweden’s fair have since shifted their attention to Copenhagen, but local players like Form Us With Love still bring plenty of charm. (See page 31).
HOPE TO MEET AGAIN / IMM Cologne (January): The German fair took the year off in 2025 after struggling to rebound from the pandemic. It’s set to return in 2026 — but what impact it will have remains to be seen.
NEOM Breaks Ground
A linear city in the desert outlined by two horizontal skyscrapers with mirrored facades: What seemed like the stuff of sci-fi when it was announced in 2017 is now underway in Saudi Arabia. As with any city-from- scratch development, this one — where “people’s health and well-being will be prioritized over transportation and infrastructure” — has involved displacing locals. Three activists who protested The Line have reportedly been sentenced to death. Cognitive dissonance be damned: Digging began in 2022 for the Morphosis-masterplanned project. But while NEOM states that billions of dollars have been raised to build a green hydrogen plant (the world’s largest, naturally) and 10 residential communities, the company’s leaders have also conceded that the entire scheme will take a century to complete. Is NEOM merely a mirage? Time (a hundred years or so) will tell.
Exit David Lynch
The red velvet curtain may have closed forever on David Lynch the man. But his essence is forever captured on celluloid. The artist–filmmaker was the best at interpreting the dream that turns into a nightmare in works including Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive — surreal, non-linear stories that sampled gritty Americana lore, as well as motifs from Old Hollywood films like Sunset Boulevard and The Wizard of Oz. His world-making conjured eeriness from both image and sound (his collaborations with Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise still send chills up the spine) yet made space for wonder, weirdness and a capacious spirit of bonhomie. Translated into real-world places like the spellbinding Silencio bars of Paris (designed by Lynch himself) and New York (by Crosby Studios), his sets were as transcendental as the daily meditation sessions that Lynch swore by. That the director died from complications of emphysema during the wildfires that swept Los Angeles at the beginning of 2025, days before Trump’s second inauguration, feels like tragedy heaped on tragedy. But the outpouring of love for his genius showed the importance of making art as a balm for devastating reality. To paraphrase his Special Agent Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks, “Fix your hearts or die.”
Kéré Wins the Pritzker
It took 43 long years for the Pritzker jury to finally recognize a Black architect with the industry’s top prize. In 2022, Diébédo Francis Kéré changed the game once and for all. A dual citizen of Germany and Burkina Faso (where he was born), Kéré is best known for educational buildings like the Gando Primary School and the Burkina Institute of Technology, both of which make thoughtful use of local materials and building techniques — all while staying mindful of the climate, in terms of personal comfort and sustainability. A big milestone for a long-deserving candidate, Kéré’s Pritzker win marked a turning point for a field that has often struggled to celebrate diversity.
Andrés Jaque Dreams Big
Back in 2015, we described the assembly of hoops, pipes and hoses in architect Andrés Jaque’s water-purifying art installation at MoMA PS1 as “wacky” — and in a world full of playing-it-safe design, we meant that as the ultimate compliment. While the projects that Jaque has completed with his firm, Office for Political Innovation, have grown bigger in the years since, the designer’s sense of wackiness and deep regard for the environment have, thankfully, remained the same. Colegio Reggio, a six-storey elementary school in Madrid, looks like a full-blown fun factory, complete with porthole windows, a zigzagging roofline, and a cork coating designed to support lichen and fungi. The project represents Jaque’s belief in the beauty that emerges from the expanding fissures of our world: “In the cracks of this,” he recently told Azure, “are posthumanism, queer culture, transness, radical forms of ecology, the circularity of the body with the landscape: transscalarities.”
Skinny Is In (and Up)
If the Ozempic era has taught us anything, it’s that our society will go to extremes in pursuit of thinness. The trend has even extended to the realm of architecture, as towers grow increasingly slender with each passing year. Holding pride of place at 111 West 57th Street, Manhattan’s Steinway Tower currently owns the title of world’s skinniest skyscraper, with an astonishing width-to-height ratio of 1:24. Though lauded for its record-breaking design, the project has also garnered its fair share of criticism: Edwin Heathcote, for his part, described it as the “purest illustration of architecture as an expression of surplus capital” in the Financial Times (an apt descriptor, given that the building’s 667-square-metre penthouse went for a whopping US$58 million). It’s a sentiment echoed in Matthew Soules’s 2021 book Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, which takes aim at the pencil tower typology as a hotbed for real estate speculation and unpacks how the commodification of housing has shaped the built environment. Here’s hoping for a return to body positivity — and more mindful real estate development — in the years to come.
Multiform Enters the Lexicon
Eclectic. Variegated. Colourful. There’s only so much the general design vocabulary can do to capture what was emerging as a major trend: the kind of colour-, pattern- and form-blocking that became a hallmark of interiors over the past decade. Then Owen Hopkins coined a term for this seeming postmodernist revival: multiform. In his 2021 book Multiform: Architecture in an Age of Transition, he describes the trend as a reaction to the dizzying economic, social and political flux of our times and names Porto’s Fala Atelier a prominent “multiformer” for its elegant mash-ups. (In a sample project, wooden knobs meet black-and-white striped cabinetry and curved glass brick walls reflect angular kitchen mirrors.) But the idiom has its fair share of critics, some of whom call it superficial and reductive — an umbrella term that erases complex differences between individual architects and designers. Still, just like the Memphis movement that informs it, we see the trend — if not the label — sticking around.
Toronto’s Major Developments
Since the turn of the millennium, Toronto has built more towers than just about anywhere else on the planet. Alongside much-needed housing and density, the boom made Canada’s largest city the world capital of mullions, window walls and back-painted spandrel glass. But if the past two decades were defined by slender blue glass condo towers, the 2020s are poised to introduce a new architectural language — and scale — to the urban fabric. The opening gambit? The Well, a 7.7-hectare downtown marvel anchored by a strikingly futuristic retail galleria paired with a red brick public realm. And there’s plenty more to come. From the nearly completed Mirvish Village and 88 Queen to future mega-projects like Quayside, Beltline Yards and 2150 Lake Shore, entire new neighbourhoods are taking shape, with walls of glass giving way to more varied textures of brick, terracotta and precast concrete.
Architectural Workers Unite
More than any defining design trend, the past five years marked a major attitudinal shift in the profession of architecture. When the pandemic forced employees out of the office and into their homes, the relentless nature of studio culture could no longer be ignored. In December 2021, employees of SHoP Architects announced their intention to unionize, making waves on social media — even drawing mainstream media attention from the New York Times. This kind of public dialogue about labour issues in architecture was unprecedented, and with the promise of progress, industry morale was at a high — until SHoP’s petition was called off less than two months later in response to a powerful anti-union campaign from ownership. Bernheimer Architecture, a boutique Brooklyn-based practice, picked up where SHoP left off, organizing the first private-sector architecture union in decades; the firm ratified its collective bargaining agreement in July 2024 and has since shared a blueprint for what is possible on the @architectural.workers.united Instagram page. Widespread unionization still remains an unlikely solution to the labour issues so deeply entrenched in architecture, but the next generation has made it clear that good design need not come at the expense of work–life balance. In other words, hustle culture is on its way out.
Detroit’s Design-led Rebirth
On June 6, 2024, Michigan Central Station was reborn. It had been built over a century earlier as a grand railway hub for the Midwest but became an unmistakable symbol of the city’s long decline. Like many of Detroit’s once-majestic towers, the shuttered structure was eventually stripped to its concrete shell: You could see daylight through the other side. Over the past decade, however, the city’s fortunes have started to turn. Downtown, the mixed-use Hudson’s Detroit is rising into the skyline, capping off a neighbourhood revitalized by the destination Shinola Hotel and the elegantly restored Book Tower. Meanwhile, the nascent Little Village arts campus — anchored by a church turned gallery (shown) — was recently named one of Time Magazine’s World’s Greatest Places of 2025, and another architectural renaissance is underway in Core City. As for Michigan Central? Restored to its original lustre by the Ford Motor Company, it’s now the centrepiece of an emerging 12-hectare tech campus, signalling Motor City’s new momentum.