Branching out: The growing possibilities of taller wood structures for next-generation communities | Lexan Polycarbonate Embossed Sheet

Imagine you are looking through a sequence of photographs. One image after another, all of empty rooms. On superficial inspection, they all look the same. And they seem to show the same thing: nothing. No furniture, no people. Just empty rooms inside empty apartments. The rooms are clean and white. They look new. The light is diffuse, northern. Even the shadows it throws are soft. In one room is a floor of polished concrete, in another, wooden parquet. Sometimes there is a window visible, a patch of sky, a branch of a tree in leaf, hinting at summer, but not enough information to work out what city it is in. The walls sometimes seem to converge, or fall away from the lens. You look at the photographs a little more carefully. You are used to seeing 90° corners splayed out by wide angle lenses, but these odd angles are no artefact of perspective: these are spaces that are no longer exclusively defined by right angles, and abandoning that assumption leaves you a little displaced. The emptiness of the room is not the “subject” of these photographs, exactly. These are not studies of the geometry of empty spaces, because the images don’t encompass the whole room, but only reveal one corner at a time. Rather than on the void, the emphasis seems to be on thresholds, on openings. There’s often a doorway in front of you, and it’s usually slightly ajar. Cumulatively, the photographs convey the feeling of being in a labyrinth, or a first-person shooter for existentialists. As you flick, or scroll, through the pictures, you move from room to room in your imagination, but you never leave the building. You become disoriented.

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Personally, that situation is begging for a projector on the ceiling and a DIY multitouch for the surface. (Four or more webcams for resolution, and QR Code-embossed bottoms on items to identify them to the system. Yes, it would be a *lot* more complicated to build, but oh, so cool!)

X-Wood is described by Freefoam as a PVC-U exterior cladding that looks and handles like wood but without all the usual maintenance issues associated with timber. The company has used its manufacturing expertise to design and produce a 16mm, high-performance cladding board, comprised of three different layers – a heavy-duty, through coloured plastic foam core, covered with a durable plastic skin and then coated with Renolit film which creates a hard wearing, stable material with a subtle woodgrain effect finish.

Ive went off to make some calls, and André described his own routine: he tends to arrive at five or six in the morning, and often then designs geometrically complex objects that he asks the machinists to mill. He called it a hobby, but, as Akana explained, “We’ll have a meeting about a speaker-hole pattern, or something, and Jony will say, ‘Bart, can you get your box of patterns?’ ”

Just two years ago, Michael Meyers was standing in a near-stranger’s back yard in Glen Gardner, New Jersey, contemplating the meaning of a chopped-down apple orchard stuffed in a chicken coop.

Private museums are mostly vanity projects. Few invent social spaces. It may be the ultimate tribute to Mr. Koolhaas and OMA to say that the Prada campus works. The plazas are poetic. The galleries are practical and varied.

“More and more homeowners are looking for that extra coziness and personality that the look of hardwood can provide. Now there’s a permanent, durable answer for situations where severe conditions like coastal humidity and salt spray take their toll on natural wood.”

But until now the project was missing its cornerstone where the 200-foot-high, 22,000-square-foot tower, or Torre, was meant to rise. Delays in construction stretched three years. They ended up allowing time to refine the design.

The Air Jacket is a bad case, plain and simple. It’s not protective at all, it’s slippery, and the buttons are awful. On top of that, it’s a whopping $34.95 on the Google Store. I’d hesitate to pay $5 for this case, and that’s not an exaggeration. Please don’t buy this thing.

Since joining Apple, Ive has occasionally taken on outside projects. In 2001, he created a white polystyrene box to house a book by Paul Smith. In 2013, an aluminum desk that Ive and Newson designed for the Project Red auction sold for $1.7 million. And Ive once sat next to J. J. Abrams at a boozy dinner party in New York, and made what Abrams recalled as “very specific” suggestions about the design of lightsabres. Abrams told me that “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” would reflect those thoughts, but he wouldn’t say how. After the release of the film’s first trailer—which featured a fiery new lightsabre, with a cross guard, and a resemblance to a burning crucifix—I asked Ive about his contribution. “It was just a conversation,” he said, then explained that, although he’d said nothing about cross guards, he had made a case for unevenness: “I thought it would be interesting if it were less precise, and just a little bit more spitty.” A redesigned weapon could be “more analog and more primitive, and I think, in that way, somehow more ominous.”

Installation view of Svizzera 240: House Tour at the Swiss Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo: Wilson Wootton.