making of

Interzum in Cologne rounds up all the big names from the furniture making and interior fittings industry, making the trade fair a treasure trove for all those in the fields of design, planning and building.

In revamping 250-year-old Haus Thuneke, architect Peter Grundmann concentrated on making just few specific changes – albeit to great effect. Now the stodgy farmhouse structure proudly boasts a delicate extension.

Berlin architects Augustin + Frank have built a kind of ur-house: Marvelously positioned on the shore of Scharmützelsee and surrounded by pines – it’s as though the countryside glides through the concrete structure.

The former worsted yarn spinning mill in Brandenburg an der Havel is in for a makeover – the brick building is going to be home to studios, office space, a children’s daycare center, and some unusual apartments.

At this year’s BAU in Munich manufacturers didn’t really seem to have that much thirst for the future. The industry is stuck between pragmatism and risk minimization, which impacts on architecture for sure.

Claudia Kleine and Jörg Kürschner together constitute “Formstelle”. At the Thonet booth at the imm cologne the designer duo presented a much-discussed lounge chair. Thomas Wagner spoke to them both about the “808”, the design process and the issue of how one can cocoon and nevertheless remain open-minded.

The documentary on the Böhm family is a masterpiece on the psychology of a family in which more or less everything revolves around architecture.

Once a year the “Burning Man Festival” transforms Nevada’s Black Rock Desert into a temporary city teeming with audacious buildings, fantastic sculptures, and out-of-this-world conveyances.

It is an ambitious idea to focus an exhibition purely on the aesthetic of objects in their emergent state, but this has been beautifully accomplished by the Design Museum London: Barber Osgerby’s “In the Making”.

Imm cologne attract creative minds from all over the world – this time they included Marc Bailly, interior architect straight from New York. He joined Robert Volhard, Stylepark MD, for a tour of the Cologne interiors fair to find out all about innovative design this side of the Great Pond.

In Tokyo “urban manufacturing” is not just some post-economic crisis slogan, but lived practice day in day out. In Taitō, one of the oldest districts, furniture, bags, paper lanterns and silver tea-ceremony vessels are being made in tiny workshops – and often by craftsmen seated on the floor in the traditional Japanese style.

Neat glossy pictures of gorgeous buildings and smart interiors shape the face of architecture in today’s media age. But if you take the plunge and treat your house or apartment to a makeover, you will soon find yourself confronted with noise, dust, dirt – and those who cause it.

On a rocky outcrop of Newfoundland, where there’s nothing between you and the Artic, the Fogo Island Inn has since May of this year proved that good design can foster tourism and thus create jobs.

The small village of Krumbach in Austria’s Vorarlberg region provides the stage for seven of architecture’s biggest names, including Wang Shu und Sou Fujimoto, to put their ideas of what goes to make a perfect bus shelter into practice. The first “Wartehüsle”, as the Austrians call it, has already been put up.

At long last there’s a bit of life in the “Sanaa Cube” in Essen. In the fall, the newly established course offered by Folkwang University will start - there. Entitled “Heterotopia – Summer Workshop 2013”, the designers and students have developed prototypes for the interior – and the results are astonishing.

A special kind of summit: Wolf D. Prix from Coop Himmelb(l)au and several of his colleagues lead a tour of the European Central Bank construction site in Frankfurt/Main.