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Design

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Design

A Flat Painted Wall Cannot Meet Dubai's West Facing Numbers. A Shading Layer With Depth Can

Al Sa'fat caps glazing at a solar heat gain coefficient of 0.25 and a U-value of 2.0. Those two figures quietly rule out the all-glass tower that defined the region's skyline, and they are why shading is coming back.

Aug 19, 2026/3 min read

A deep perforated shading screen across the sunlit elevation of a modern building

Design

Award Winning Buildings Were Using Twice the Energy They Promised, and Almost Nobody Went Back to Check

New homes emit around 2.5 times their design estimates on average. Non-domestic buildings run to 3.8 times. The studies that established this looked at buildings that had been published as exemplars.

Aug 19, 2026/3 min read

A control panel and a bank of gauges in a building services plant room

Design

The Greenest Building Is Usually the One Already Standing, and the Arithmetic Is Not Close

Building a new home of the same size can produce up to thirteen times the embodied carbon of refurbishing the old one. That number has started appearing in planning decisions, which is how a technical argument becomes a policy.

Aug 18, 2026/3 min read

Scaffolding against the retained facade of an older building under refurbishment

Design

Thirty Eight States Now Let You Build a Tall Building Out of Wood, and the Fire Argument Went the Other Way

Mass timber spent a decade as an architectural curiosity because codes did not have a category for it. Three new construction types changed that, and the fire testing that was supposed to kill the idea is what made the case.

Aug 18, 2026/4 min read

Exposed cross laminated timber columns and floor slabs in a building under construction

Design

Designing From an Archive Is Harder Than Designing From a Mood Board

A twenty-three piece collection drawn from research into the Barbican's original interiors arrives this month. Working from a real archive imposes constraints that a reference image never does.

Aug 17, 2026/3 min read

A board-marked concrete interior with stairs and warm light

Design

A Pavilion Built From Police Riot Shields Asks What a Material Remembers

The Pangolin Shield goes up on the Strand next month, assembled from Indian police shields and rain shields over bamboo. Reuse in architecture usually argues about carbon. This one argues about meaning.

Aug 17, 2026/3 min read

A bamboo pavilion structure seen against the sky

Design

Designers Went From Trying AI to Using It Every Week

Weekly use jumped from just over half of designers to nine in ten in a single year. The number that has not moved is the one everyone expected to: almost nobody is hiring fewer designers.

Aug 16, 2026/3 min read

Design

Big 5 Global Is Where Next Year's Buildings Get Specified

Twenty-seven hundred exhibitors at the Dubai World Trade Centre from 23 November, and three co-located shows that have quietly turned a construction fair into an urban development event.

Aug 14, 2026/3 min read

A construction industry exhibition hall with materials and equipment stands

Design

The Most Overlooked Thing in Your Home Is How It Sounds

Hard floors, glass walls and open plans photograph beautifully and sound terrible. Acoustic comfort is the last unfashionable part of interior design, and the cheapest to fix.

Aug 8, 2026/4 min read

A living room with a large rug, heavy curtains and a full bookshelf

Design

Designing for 45C: What Gulf Architecture Knew Before Air Conditioning

Thick walls, small openings, shaded courtyards and wind towers were not decorative. They were a cooling system, and a glass tower in the desert is a decision to pay for that work with electricity instead.

Aug 7, 2026/4 min read

A traditional Gulf wind tower against a deep blue sky

Design

Slow Design Is Killing the Flat Pack Refresh Cycle

Handmade ceramics, woven blinds and vintage frames are displacing furniture bought to last three years. Designers say the grey rental box interior is finally over.

Aug 4, 2026/3 min read

Handmade ceramic vessels arranged on a wooden shelf