designbriefs
Topic

Cities

The machine most people now live inside.

11
in design
10:01
average
110 min
in total
90
across the network
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All briefs11
10:00

Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Diller Scofidio + Renfro is a New York design studio that works across architecture, the visual arts and the performing arts.
5:38

King Power Mahanakhon

A helix-shaped void that made a building famous—not for what it housed, but for how tall it stood, and how briefly.
10:05

Ole Scheeren

Scheeren’s work is not theory—it is delivery at scale across Asia’s most demanding cities.
9:37

Toyo Ito

Toyo Ito didn’t build cities—he built interfaces between them and their simulations.
10:24

Aldo Rossi

Monuments are not ornaments—they're the city's memory banks, and Rossi designed architecture to last as long as they do.
10:26

Centre Pompidou

Renzo Piano & Richard Rogers · 1977

The Centre Pompidou is a 1977 building in Paris designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers as a publicly accessible cultural 'town'. Its 'inside-out' strategy externalises and colour-codes structural, mechanical, and circulation systems. Green pipes carry water. Blue ducts manage climate. Yellow conduits house electricity. Red elements handle movement and safety. The design emerged from France’s first international architectural competition, judged by Niemeyer, Prouvé, and Johnson, and selected from 681 entries. It was intended for 8,000 daily visitors. In its first two decades, it attracted more than 145 million—over five times the projection. Its exposed systems improved interior space efficiency. Its stated aim was inclusivity: 'a place for all people – for the poor and rich, the young and old'.

9:53

David Adjaye

Adjaye’s architecture doesn’t build objects—it builds conditions for civic belonging.
9:20

Kees Christiaanse

Christiaanse treats urban form as a social contract—walkable, mixed, unstyled—but never proves it works beyond assertion.
9:23

Kunlé Adeyemi

Architecture as fieldwork—not fix—but reading, prototyping, and collapsing.
10:47

Rem Koolhaas

Architectural theory that edits human activity cannot ignore the fact that people need to escape fire.