Hasta La Ideas

Perforated metal sheets form the facade of this renovated bookshop in Shanghai, China, which local studio Wutopia Lab has filled with 10,000 metres of shelving.

Named Shanghai Book City, the 12,000-square-metre building has been overhauled to transform it from a traditional bookstore into a cultural hub and public landmark.

According to Wutopia Lab, it is hoped to reinvigorate the surrounding streets and encourage visitors to spend more time reading and less time on electronic devices.

Shanghai Book City is now distinguished by its facade, which is covered in perforated aluminium panels positioned in a sawtooth arrangement. This design is intended to resemble books lined up spine-side out.

A lighting system behind the facade’s aluminium panels also creates a twinkling effect as the light passes through the holes.

This aims to set the store apart from neighbouring buildings on Shanghai’s Fuzhou Road while evoking a bird’s eye view of the city.

“The perforated aluminium facade pattern is based on a bird’s eye view of Shanghai at night, including the Huangpu district, the Bund, the Huangpu River and the Pudong district,” project architect Chen Lin told Dezeen.

“The stars and dots are abstract pixels representing the lights in each household.”

Harnessing the vast scale of the existing building, the bookstore’s interior is designed as a “city within a city” with bookshelf-lined “streets” and 16 commercial areas.

These commercial zones include an art gallery, a theatre and a cafe, as well as writer’s studios, wellness classrooms and offices, and aim to diversify the store’s offerings and clientele without compromising the atmosphere inside.

“The Book City is a translation of urban space from indoors to outdoors,” said Lin.

“We strive to create a vertical city with squares, streets and ‘book houses’ of different sizes. Readers can stroll through the streets and ‘houses within houses’, where books serve as the facades of these houses, forming a sea of books.”

Shanghai Book City’s entrance area blends into the street, creating a covered zone that functions as a public square to attract visitors to the store.

A stepped volume, named Book Mountain, sits just inside the doors and combines a platform, shelving and seating for events including book launches as well as casual perusing.

Three double-height atriums stacked one on top of the other define the core of the building, all of which are lined with oversized shelving stretching from floor to ceiling.

The atriums have glass floors that allow natural light to reach as far inside the spaces as possible, while interior windows are cut into the bookcases to help illuminate the surrounding rooms.

The seven-storey Shanghai Book City was originally built in 1998 and reopened in October 2023 after a two-year closure.

Wutopia Lab was founded in 2013 by Ting Yu and Erni Min. Previous projects by the firm include a subterranean museum with an undulating roof and a museum encased in an arch-shaped shell made from copper.

The photography is by CreatAR Images.

Project credits:

Architect: Wutopia Lab
Chief architect: Ting Yu
Project managers: Shengrui Pu and Hao Li
Project architects: Jie Lv and Chen Lin
Design team: Peng Li, Zixiang Feng, Haoran Zhang, Qiuyan Wang, Yanyan Feng, Danman Zhang, Lei Wang and Zijie Xu
Construction drawing design firm: Shanghai Sanyi Architectural Design Co., Ltd
Construction firm: Shanghai Xinhua Media Co., Ltd.

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Japanese architect Tadao Ando has unveiled plans for Armani Beach Residences at Palm Jumeirah, a luxury residential complex on the oceanfront in Dubai.

Designed in collaboration with Sharjah developer Arada and luxury company
The Armani Group, the 8,361-square-metre building will host 53 homes.

Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning architect Ando’s proposal features a glass and concrete facade, punctured by a semicircular opening. It will also be lined with curved terraces that overlook a ground-floor pool and adjacent private beach.

It is set to be complete by the end of 2026.

Armani Beach Residences at Palm Jumeirah will include homes ranging from two to five bedrooms, along with penthouses and two presidential suites.

To help establish a connection with the ocean, all of the homes will include large glazed areas offering expansive outward views.

Residents will have access to a spa, multi-purpose function room, cigar lounge, movie theatre and children’s playroom, along with a landscaped deck area.

“The architecture at this wonderful location is designed to pursue a visual and experiential continuity between the interior and the seascape that surrounds the project, with the interplay of light and shadow helping to create a dynamic sequence from arrival through to the public areas and finally to each impeccable residence,” said Ando.

The interiors will be designed by The Armani Group, which will allow residents to choose between a dark or light interior palette for their home.

Ando said the project marks the continuation of his long-term collaboration with luxury fashion house Armani, which began in 2001 with his design for the Armani headquarters, Teatro Armani, in Milan.

“I am proud to renew our longstanding partnership with Giorgio Armani to deliver a project that brings nature and architecture together, producing a spectacular space in which to live,” Ando said.

According to the vice chairman of Arada Khaled bin Alwaleed Al Saud, the proposal will aim to present “a new standard for the high-end Dubai real estate market”.

Other upcoming projects in Dubai include Mercedes-Benz’s first branded residential skyscraper and a sweeping vertiport terminal for “air taxi services”.

The images are courtesy of Arada.

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Interior design must begin facing up to uncomfortable truths about our planet and health in 2024, Michelle Ogundehin writes in her annual trends report.

This must be the year of truth. It’s no time to be distracted by talk of trends, new or latest looks. The tactic of holding facts at arm’s length has only enabled denial, obfuscation, and fakery, as well as cauterising our moral obligation to change. Mark Twain aptly summarises our current malaise with the pithy: “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Thankfully, the zeitgeist is shifting. We see it in current TV programming, ever a prescient reflection of public mood. Consider Channel 4’s punchy The Great Climate Fight, which volubly charges the British government with incompetence, to ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, dramatising the scandalous lies behind a huge miscarriage of justice.

It’s no time to be distracted by talk of trends, new or latest looks

The desire for unvarnished veracity is there in Netflix’s new tranche of documentaries. Think Robbie Williams: Behind the Scenes and its Jeffrey Epstein exposé. Even Disney’s Wagatha Christie vehicle was about truth-telling.

It reflects the shattering of any persistent facade that everything’s just fine. In the face of extreme weather patterns – from tornados in Manchester in the north of England to record-breaking monsoons in Pakistan – and the escalating rates of chronic disease, anxiety, depression, loneliness epidemics, and other mental-health disorders seen worldwide, surely, finally, our eyes are opening?

In case not, here are a couple of truths that we may need to be reminded of.

One: the perpetual quest for economic growth is unsustainable on a finite planet, yet it prevails because we’ve been hoodwinked into believing that better always means newer, faster, or more. We are entreated to consume for the good of the economy – the work-to-spend cycle. The implication being that if we don’t, we’re responsible for mass unemployment and the failure of honest businesses.

Ergo, consumer-driven economies are routinely prioritised over basic citizen welfare, and material goods have become proxies for our dreams and aspirations, even our expressions of love.

Two: the environments in which we live are increasingly toxic – physically, socially, and mentally. Yet we’re reneging on personal responsibility for our wellbeing with the misguided assumption that big industry would never create products dangerous to human health, and that our healthcare providers are there to patch us up if they do. We need to focus on causes and prevention instead of lucrative (but futile) searches for cures for diseases like cancer.

It wasn’t so long ago that the desire to exercise, seek wellbeing, or be social were reasons to leave the home

What’s tricky is that potential solutions to the above don’t wash well with legislators or many politicians because they appear slow, unduly restrictive, difficult, or inconvenient. Immediate results (i.e. within a single term of office) are seldom forthcoming, thus a stance of head-in-the-sand, or a default to fast fixes, becomes entrenched as the go-to action.

And yet, research suggests that we, the people, feel differently. According to the 10th annual Life at Home report produced this year by IKEA (one of the world’s largest home surveys, encompassing the views of 37,428 people aged 18-plus across 38 countries), searches for “slow living” have doubled since 2015.

So where does this leave us?

We’re being pushed and pulled in many contradictory directions. It wasn’t so long ago that the desire to exercise, seek wellbeing, or be social were reasons to leave the home. Now these activities all happen within the same four walls.

This creates many tensions. Should our domestic caves be linked to the world via the latest high-tech gizmos, or be our deliberate respite from the techno-frazzle? How do we square a wish for personal privacy with the sensation of living in more open spaces? Can we work from home without feeling like we live at work?

It was no surprise to me that Squishmallows were the hit toy of 2023. These soft, malleable cute-character cushions are acutely comforting to hold. Even the revered investor Warren Buffet now has the company in his portfolio. They are a potent symbol of a need.

In response, the popular press touts voluminous La-Z-Boy-style recliners as the next big thing, but is an inducement to lounge ever further into denial really what’s called for?

Our ability to thrive must become the guiding principle for all design

Humans are the ultimate adaptors, but we require stimulus to learn and grow, if not an element of discomfort. While your genes may load the gun, your environment pulls the trigger. Currently, for many, that’s somewhere hyperconnected yet also physically disconnected, temperature-controlled and sedentary.

Align this with the current cult of convenience – that which enhances personal comfort or advantage over everything else, and therein lies the downward spiral.

We must abandon the ordered, rational, learned good taste and comfort that we’ve become used to in favour of something more instinctive and rugged. Less a singular design aesthetic than a profoundly sensory desire to touch, smell and feel intensely. It is the personal over the predictable. The umami in the dish. The idea that owes its genus to a singular moment of unique creative vision, or innovation.

We must aim for a societal stability that does not rely on the continuous fetishisation of “novelty” to drive ever-increasing consumption for economic activity if we are to have a hope of remaining within ecological scale. Our ability to thrive must become the guiding principle for all design, if not perceptions of success.

Most importantly, we can no longer be afraid to speak or hear these truths, starting at home – the environment over which we have the most agency.

Here, then, are some final “home” truths that bear repeating.

Most homes are more polluted on the inside than a busy street corner outside due to the build-up of invisible toxins therein, yet we spend 90 per cent of our time indoors. Some examples: gas hobs leak benzene, a known carcinogen, even when they’re off – this has been linked to one in eight cases of childhood asthma.

We have been living in a time of fantastical storytelling

Microplastics have been found in the placentas of unborn babies. Chemicals in everyday personal care products can cause chronic hormonal disruption that leads to breast cancer. Chemical flame retardants legally mandated for use on your upholstery increase smoke toxicity more than they reduce fire growth.

And Wi-Fi may not be as benign as you think. The World Health Organisation, in association with the International Agency on Cancer, formally classified electromagnetic field radiation (as emitted by Wi-Fi connected devices) as a Class 2B human carcinogen (potentially harmful to health) over a decade ago.

In summary, we have been living in a time of fantastical storytelling, fictions of delusional positivity that obscure the truth. Plato considered that truth is a correspondence between belief and reality. Time to wake up then if we are to stand a chance of survival, as our current reality almost beggars belief.

Michelle Ogundehin is a thought leader on interiors, trends, style and wellbeing. Originally trained as an architect and the former editor-in-chief of ELLE Decoration UK, she is the head judge on the BBC’s Interior Design Masters, and the author of Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness, a guide to living well. She is also a regular contributor to publications including Vogue Living, FT How to Spend It magazine and Dezeen.

The photo, of a Kyiv apartment designed by Olga Fradina, is by Yevhenii Avramenko.

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US start-up Rabbit and tech company Teenage Engineering have designed the R1, a “pocket companion” that aims to upturn the dominance of smartphones in our lives by using artificial intelligence to complete tasks.

Revealed at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the Rabbit R1 is a palm-sized, bright orange AI assistant that is designed to take actions on behalf of its user, even where those actions involve multiple or complex steps.

The device, which the company described as a “pocket companion”, could be used to book flights, stream music or edit Photoshop images, among other uses.

Users push and hold a button on the right-hand side of the device to talk to their R1 as they would a walkie-talkie, issuing commands in natural language and viewing a simplified visual interface that represents their assistant as a pixel art-styled bunny.

Rabbit is asking consumers to rethink many of their digital habits with the pared-back invention, including how they interact with apps, what security norms they accept, and how their devices can look.

At a CES keynote address, Rabbit founder and CEO Jesse Lyu said that the company had aimed to create “the simplest computer” and a “delightful” user experience — “something so intuitive that you don’t need to learn how to use it”.

“The best way to achieve this is to break away from the app-based operating system currently used by smartphones,” he said. “Instead, we envision a natural language-centred approach.”

The R1 hosts Rabbit’s custom AI, a type of Large Action Model (LAM). LAMs represent an evolution of the Large Language Models (LLMs) that have become well-known from chatbots like ChatGPT.

Whereas those merely generate text in response to human input, Lyu explained, Rabbit’s AI also generates actions on behalf of users — activities like buying groceries online or booking taxis or tickets.

These sorts of personal AI “agents” have been increasingly hyped online, but Rabbit claims theirs is the first operating system built with such a LAM.

The LAM works by first learning to understand people’s intentions and behaviours on specific apps, then mimicking those actions. There is no need for custom integrations like Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for each app, as the model is universal and functions across all mobile and desktop environments.

At launch, Rabbit says the R1 will already have been trained to work with the most popular apps, and it will continue to roll out more functionalities in the future. It will also add the ability for users to train their own agents — or “rabbits” — on more niche apps.

The device is standalone and does not need to be connected to a smartphone to function.

For the industrial design, Rabbit worked with Teenage Engineering — known for its innovative takes on music gadgets like synthesisers and speakers — to develop an original look with a nostalgic touch.

The company says it took cues from the Tamagotchi – the Japanese digital toy pet – and aimed to make the device “as strikingly beautiful as it is intuitively functional”.

As well as a 2.88-inch touchscreen display and the touch-to-talk button, the physical components include a scroll wheel to navigate the display and the “rabbit eye” — a rotating camera for computer vision. This enables the agents to carry out tasks like “looking” in the fridge and identifying the ingredients there to suggest a recipe.

As an avatar, the operating system is represented on the screen by a bunny head that jumps up and down while processing information and bops along with headphones when playing music.

Rabbit says there are security benefits to many of its design choices. The touch-to-talk button avoids the “always listening mode” of smart speakers, a gadget that Lyu described as “outdated” in his keynote.

Similarly, the rotating capability of the “eye” keeps the camera lens in a position where it is physically blocked until the user requests it, cutting off another avenue for surveillance.

Rabbit also promises a high level of encryption, and says that users will always have awareness and control of the actions delegated to the agents. The device will not store the user’s credentials for third-party services.

All of the processing is done within data centres rather than on the device, which Rabbit says means the device is inexpensive — it retails for US$199 (£159) — and consumes little power.

It does, however, add to the demand on data centres, which require huge amounts of water and electricity.

Lyu said that with the LAM fast evolving, the R1 would eventually help users do things that could never be achieved on an app-based phone, but that the device is not intended as a direct substitute.

“We did not build Rabbit R1 to replace your phone,” he said. “It’s just a different generation of devices. The app-based system was introduced more than 15 years ago, and the new generation of AI-powered devices are just getting started.”

Since CES, Rabbit has since taken pre-orders for more than 30,000 R1 units.

Other devices on show at the trade fair, the largest in the field of consumer gadgets, included a world-first transparent OLED television by LG and a “thermometer of the future” by Withings.

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If you’re hosting an event during Milan design week 2024, get in touch with the Dezeen Events Guide team to be featured in our digital guide to this year’s festival.

Milan design week is the largest annual design event, and the 2024 edition will be no exception. Hosting hundreds of fringe events, known as Fuorisalone, as well as the design fair Salone del Mobile, the festival takes place from 15 to 21 April.

Every year, the festival presents a programme of exhibitions, installations, tours, talks, workshops, open showrooms, conferences and parties.

The fringe events take place across districts in Milan, such as Brera Design District, Isola Design District, Tortona Design Week and 5Vie Design Week.

During the design week, the 62nd edition of Salone del Mobile takes place from 16 to 21 April, hosting the biennial kitchen exhibition titled EuroCucina, alongside thousands of other design products.

This year’s festival guide follows the success of the 2023 edition, which received 100,000 page views. The guide will feature the key information about each event, including dates, times and locations, and will be updated regularly leading up to the festival.

How to get listed in Dezeen’s digital guide to Milan design week

Get in touch with the Dezeen Events Guide team at eventsguide@dezeen.com to book your listing or to discuss a wider partnership with Dezeen. There are three pricing tiers:

Standard listings cost £125 and include the event name, date and location details plus a website link. These listings will also feature up to 50 words of text about the event. Standard listings are included at the discretion of the Dezeen Events Guide team.

Enhanced listings cost £175 and include all of the above plus an image at the top of the listing’s page and a preview image on the Dezeen Events Guide homepage. These listings will also feature up to 100 words of text about the event.

Featured listings cost £350 and would include everything as part of an enhanced listing plus a post on @dezeen Threads channel, inclusion in the featured events carousel on the right hand of the homepage for up to two weeks and 150 words of text about the event. This text can include commercial information such as ticket prices and offers and can feature additional links to website pages such as ticket sales, newsletter signups etc.

About Dezeen Events Guide

Dezeen Events Guide is our guide to the best architecture and design events taking place across the world each year.

The guide is updated weekly and includes virtual events, conferences, trade fairs, major exhibitions and design weeks.

For more details on inclusion in the Dezeen Events Guide, including in our guide to Milan design week, please email eventsguide@dezeen.com.

The illustration is by Justyna Green.

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