Designing private residences has its own very special challenges and nuances for the architect. The scale may be more modest than public projects, the technical fittings less complex than an industrial site, but the preferences, requirements and vision...

Not so very long ago, some might have considered wood a material of the past, long since replaced by more modern components such as concrete and steel. The truth is radically different. Bolstered by new manufacturing techniques and ecological benefits,...

The history of photography began nearly 200 years ago, but only relatively recently has it been fully recognized as a medium in its own right. Cologne's Museum Ludwig was the first museum of contemporary art to devote a substantial section to...

Over the course of the twentieth century, travel experienced an unprecedented boom. As ocean liners broke speed records, aerodynamic trains roared down tracks, and stylish boat-plane clippers evolved into jumbo jets, travel transformed from a cushioned...

George Eastman's career developed in a particularly American way. The founder of Kodak progressed from a delivery boy to one of the most important industrialists in American history, and a crucial innovator in photographic history. Eastman died in 1932,...

Alex Steinweiss (1917-2011) invented the album cover as we know it. In 1940, as Columbia Records' young new art director, he pitched an idea: why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance,...

In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which...

It was the Belle Epoque, a time before air travel or radio, at the brink of a revolution in photography and filmmaking, when Burton Holmes (1870-1958) began a lifelong journey to bring the world home. From the grand boulevards of Paris to China's Great...

Ever since Henry David Thoreau's described his two years, two months, and two days of cabin existence at Walden Pond, Massachusetts in Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854), the idea of a refuge dwelling has seduced the modern psyche. In the past decade,...

Concrete? That characterless stuff of parking lots or Communist tower blocks, right? Well, yes. And no. Concrete is actually a name applied to a remarkably wide range of building substances, and, when properly handled, is one of the noble materials of...

Antiquarian, archaeologist, vulcanologist, and envoy to the British Embassy in Naples, Sir William Hamilton (1731-1803) was a leading European figure of his time. Though the romance between his wife Lady Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson tends to eclipse...

First advertised as a "mind-stretching experience," Nicolas Roeg's 1976 The Man Who Fell to Earth stunned the cinema world. A tour-de-force of science fiction as art form, the movie brought not only hallucinatory visuals and a haunting exploration of...

Published annually from 1906 until 1980, Decorative Art, The Studio Yearbook was dedicated to the latest currents in architecture, interiors, furniture, lighting, glassware, textiles, metalware, and ceramics. Since the publications went out of print, the...

Poised at the start of the 21st century, we can see clearly that the previous century was marked by momentous changes in the field of design. Aesthetics entered into everyday life with often staggering results. Our homes and workplaces turned into...

From the eccentric museum La Specola in Florence comes this amazing collection of waxworks depicting human anatomy in all its dazzling complexity. A selection of wax bodies and body part and organ studies from the museum's collection is presented here;...

From the dawn of time, ever since Adam and Eve, all artists of every age-whether the Egyptian, Greek, or Roman artists of Antiquity, or more recent famous names such as Rembrandt, Courbet, Degas, or Picasso-have succumbed to their fantasies, obsessions,...