Hasta La Ideas

This week on Dezeen, we unveiled architecture studio Morphogenesis’s Surat Diamond Bourse in India, which has overtaken the Pentagon to become the world’s biggest office building.

Spanning 660,000 square metres, the complex just outside of Surat includes various offices arranged around a central spine.

Designed as a “city within a city”, the workplace for diamond traders has surpassed the size of America’s Pentagon office, which has been the world’s largest office building since it was completed in 1943.

Also in the news this week, US entrepreneur Elon Musk announced that he has renamed the social media platform Twitter as X to “embody the imperfections in us all”.

Musk, who acquired Twitter last year, crowdsourced the imagery for X’s new logo – an art deco-style black-and-white X with a single bar diagonally crossed with a double bar.

“Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine,” said Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino via the online platform.

A symmetrical recycled steel torch with a rippled texture was revealed by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur ahead of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris.

Lehanneur was informed by the appearance of the city’s River Seine when designing the torch, which will represent both tournaments – a decision that was made to promote equality and marks the first time that both games have shared a torch.

In other architecture news, Saudi Arabia has officially denied human rights abuses connected to the country’s Neom mega project after the United Nations Human Rights Council issued a statement voicing its concerns in early May.

Addressed to the UN, a letter from the Permanent Mission of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia rejected that three men were sentenced to death for criticising evictions for the Neom project, which includes megacity The Line, and instead claimed that the men were terrorists linked to organisations Daesh and Al-Qaida.

Also in Saudi Arabia, British architecture studio Foster + Partners released designs for the Equinox Resort Amaala hotel, which is a 128-room luxury accommodation that will feature a “floating” canopy and take cues from traditional Saudi architecture.

Our AItopia series continued with our investigation into one of architecture’s biggest contemporary questions – whether AI will end up taking architects’ jobs.

We also interviewed Sony’s global head of AI ethics, Alice Xiang, who warned that the rise of the technology could result in “a lot of people living as second-class citizens in a society of AI where, systematically, models might not work well for them or might be biased against them”.

Popular projects this week included architect Joanne Koch’s renovation of a 1970s Californian wood cabin that was converted into an Airbnb and a monolithic home near Belfast in Northern Ireland designed by local architecture firm McGonigle McGrath.

Our latest lookbooks featured interiors that take cues from the Japanese design philosophy of wabi-sabi and those that are characterised by a breezy and cooling Mediterranean style.

This week on Dezeen

This week on Dezeen is our regular roundup of the week’s top news stories. Subscribe to our newsletters to be sure you don’t miss anything.

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