The winners of the 5th annual UK and International Restaurant and Bar Design Awards were announced during the London awards ceremony on Sept. 12. Every year, the competition receives entries from the best architects, designers and hospitality operators in the UK and worldwide. The judges also usually consist of several influential figures including designers, creative and hotel directors, editors, and food critics. — bustler.net

This is a story about a desk — not any desk, mind you, but a startling, Frank Gehry-designed security desk in the lobby of the Inland Steel Building, one of Chicago's great mid-20th century high-rises.

The U-shaped desk is best described as a piece of furniture that's been elevated to the level of art, or is simply an emblem of excess. — articles.chicagotribune.com

NL Architects recently completed the project NS Station, a major office interior revamp over 9 stories right on top of Central Station in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The project resulted from a 2011 competition win where NL Architects made the Thick Walls™ system the conceptual core: big shelves absorb the clutter that normally spreads trough the office - wardrobes, bookshelves, flip boards, archive, bulletin boards. And sometimes even the stairs. — bustler.net

She has become a global brand so desirable that her buildings in China are now being pirated – before they are even finished. So what territory is left to conquer?

The answer might be found by peering through the windows of an innocuous looking building on Clerkenwell Road in east London, which opened this week as the Zaha Hadid Design Gallery, part of Clerkenwell Design Week. — guardian.co.uk

Los Angeles-based architect and product designer Carlo Aiello has shared with us his Parabola Chair design which recently won him the prestigious International Contemporary Furniture Fair Studio Award. The chair will be exhibited during the upcoming ICFF, May 18-21 in New York, and is currently on display at Bergdorf Goodman windows. — bustler.net

“brave new color, for a brave new world.” — The LACMA Blog

The staging was called the Ideal House, and it was a fully furnished modern home, but one with an audience, a runway wrapped around it, and “windows” projected on the walls with scenes of the outside world. It was the latest in many intricate and avant-garde pairings between Prada and OMA...

The 12-piece furniture collection, designed by OMA for Knoll, will debut at the Salon Internazionale del Mobile in Milan in April. — blogs.artinfo.com

In the lecture series “Context and Collaboration” given by Paul Makovsky of Metropolis Magazine, Pullman and architect Jane Thompson of the Thompson Design Group, Nelson was described as rejecting the Howard Roark paradigm of the “hero architect” due to his socially conscious approach and his choice to work on interiors during the mid-20th century when furniture design was considered “feminine.” — yaledailynews.com

The unveiling, which will take place November 13 through 15 in New York, has been years in the making. “I’ve been doodling ideas for buildings and furniture since the early 1990s, when I first discovered [Charles Rennie] Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright,” says Pitt. “Actually, I found Wright in college, when looking for a lazy two-point credit to get out of French. It forever changed my life.” — architecturaldigest.com

I asked a dozen contemporary furniture experts for their opinions on which objects produced in the last decade or so would occupy the design-conscious home of 2050, just as, say, the Eames lounge chair, a mid-20th-century creation, resides in ours. The result is a showroom’s worth of potential design classics, against which I offer my own list of five.

But first, what makes a classic? — nytimes.com

Ikea has opened a pop-up lounge at Paris's Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport for passengers to relax in between flights during the busy summer travel season.

The lounge, situated in the airport's terminal 3, is open from July 13 to August 5, and includes various spaces laid out like bedrooms, a living room and a play area for children.

Covering a total of 220 square meters, the Ikea space is open to all passengers. — nydailynews.com

Remember Jimenez Lai's recent Kickstarter project, trying to turn his conceptual project Hefner/Beuys House into a reality at the Architecture Foundation in London? Well, it certainly worked out for him and his Chicago-based architecture practice Bureau Spectacular: the project got funded and the installation Three Little Worlds opened this week, just right on time for the London Festival of Architecture. — bustler.net