Inside Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence. Pinned and labeled like butterflies in a wall-mounted shadow box, 4,213 cigarette butts welcome visitors to the Museum of Innocence, writer Orhan Pamuk's present-day Wunderkammer in Istanbul. The stubbed-out specimens were smoked by a woman named Füsun, the wall text tells us. And like the other objects in the museum, they were collected by her former lover, Kemal. Rejected by her, a heartsick and obsessive Kemal began pilfering everyday objects connected to Füsun, amassing this beautifully melancholy collection. Painted an aching blood red, the Museum of Innocence stands out in its gentrified but still

nARCHITECTS's winning design for a micro-unit apartment building in Manhattan's Kips Bay neighborhood. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that a team that includes local firm nARCHITECTS has won a competition to design a micro-unit apartment building for a publicly owned lot in Manhattan. The city launched the competition in July to spur the development of small residential spaces tailored to the financial needs of young professionals. "Three quarters of Manhattan is one- or two-person households," said the Mayor at a press conference this morning. "But we just don't have enough apartments that are the appropriate size for

The BMW Guggenheim Lab hosted a competition to redesign one of the city's most viscid intersections. Sweta Parab and Hrishikesh More (winner in the professional category): View the full proposal “The traffic in Mumbai is immensely congested and chaotic,” says the Guggenheim Museum’s David van der Leer. “Many people commute for four hours every day, and I have had my fair share of endless travel times.” The curator heads up the museum’s BMW Guggenheim Lab, a traveling pop-up event and exhibition space that has been docked in the city of 18 million people for the last six weeks. Van der

A stripped-down design in Water Mill, New York, illuminates painting and place.

Douglas Burnham wants to quietly rewire your experiences. He cites perception-teasing installations by artists such as James Turrell, Robert Smithson, and Michael Heizer as major influences, and early in his career he created similarly destabilizing work with San Francisco Bay Area design provocateurs the Interim Office of Architecture (IOOA).

Golkin Hall, the latest addition to the University of Pennsylvania's law school, announces itself with a contradiction.

Mumbai firm CRIT’s proposal looks beyond their city’s existing infrastructure. The Urban Future Award finalists go on view today in Istanbul. The winner of the €100,000 prize will be announced on October 18. At least since Jane Jacobs took on Robert Moses’s plan for a freeway through Greenwich Village, the car has played the villain in urbanist narratives. But German automaker Audi hopes to change the role of its product in the next chapter of the story. Next week, it will present the second Audi Urban Future Award, the culmination of a biennial competition to reimagine the city beginning with

The recession decimated the architecture profession, with firms closing or laying off large numbers of employees, architects left jobless for months or years, and many leaving the profession entirely. But a survey recently conducted by McGraw-Hill Construction (Record’s parent company) came to the counterintuitive conclusion that some U.S. firms expect a shortage of qualified designers to meet their workloads by 2014. The survey of 1,007 U.S. designers found that nearly one-quarter of respondents anticipated a shortage of architects resulting from a combination of designers exiting the profession, baby boomers retiring, a lack of skills among architects looking for work, and

In an episode of the television show Portlandia, a sketch comedy that lovingly skewers the lifestyle quirks of the young and creative, a woman (played by indie rock star Carrie Brownstein) arrives on her first day at the Portland, Oregon, offices of advertising powerhouse Wieden+Kennedy.