M.C. Escher’s dream jungle gym just landed on the Tate Modern’s front lawn as part of this year’s London Design Festival.

A rendering of the QueensWay, a 3.5-mile segment of track in Queens, New York, to be transformed into a landscaped greenway and cultural hub. The High Line, Manhattan’s elevated rail line-turned-catwalk, gets all the attention, but rails-to-trails projects have been cropping up across the country for decades, and New York City could welcome another soon in Queens. After two years of grassroots organizing, a new phase for a forgotten branch of the Long Island Railroad may lie around the bend. In August, the Trust for Public Land (TPL) and Friends of the QueensWay announced that WXY Architecture + Urban Design

By Raymund Ryan with contributions by Brian O’Doherty and Marc Treib and photographs by Iwan Baan. University of California Press, 2012, 120 pages, $40. In recent decades, hundreds of new museums have sprung up in emerging art markets across the globe. In most of them, art remains confined to sterile, “white cube” galleries, while architecture and nature remain, quite literally, outside. A very different model, though, was pioneered more than 50 years ago by projects such as the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, which showed how art, architecture, and landscape could be brought together. In White Cube, Green

Screen Play, a proposal by Collective-LOK—a team comprised of Jon Lott, William O’Brien Jr., and Michael Kubo—experiments with transparent partitions to create a variety of interior spaces and to expand the storefront into the street. In time for its 120-year anniversary in 2014, the Van Alen Institute (VAI) is getting a facelift. Today, the New York City architecture and urbanism nonprofit revealed images of the three finalists in a competition to redesign its storefront. The winning proposal will replace the Institute's current LOT-EK-designed storefront on 22nd Street, which houses a combination bookstore and events area, with a larger space that

This evening, the Danish organization INDEX: Design to Improve Life revealed the five winners of its biennial award program at a ceremony in Elsinore. Under the patronage of Denmark's crown prince, the competition grants €500,000 in prize money to jumpstart creative, sustainable design projects that better everyday life. This year, an international jury selected 59 finalists, which included designs for a tumbleweed-like mine detector, a swimming pool in New York City’s East River, and an appliance for breeding (and eating) grasshoppers.Click the image below to view the five winners. Smart HighwayDutch artist and designer Daan Roosegaarde designed a high tech

A minimalist structure with maximum impact, Foster + Partners' Ombrière at Marseille Vieux Port marries the World Heritage Site's ancient past with the French city's new status as a European Capital of Culture.

Image via fosterandpartners.com A rendering of Foster + Partners' scrapped plan for the park that was part of its greater master plan for the West Kowloon Cultural District. It’s back to the drawing board for a major park design in Hong Kong’s nascent West Kowloon Cultural District, and for Foster + Partners, maybe third time’s the charm. The District’s authority announced plans to scrap a Foster + Partners-designed park at the western edge of the development. It’s a familiar story: this is the second time in 14 years that plans for the cultural district have been dropped.“The park competition has

Head in the CloudsStudio Klimoski Chang ArchitectsNew York City, New York Part Anish Kapoor, part meteorological boon, Brooklyn-based Studio Klimoski Chang Architects (STUDIOKCA) created an 800-square-foot cloud to grace Governor’s Island as FIGMENT’s third annual City of Dreams Pavilion. The Head in the Clouds Pavilion, funded in part through Kickstarter, beat out 200 other design proposals to generate a “place to dream in the city of dreams.” To create the seemingly cotton-soft, billowing form, volunteers and the architects at STUDIOKCA clustered 53,780 recycled milk jugs and water bottles (the amount discarded in New York City in just one hour) in mesh.