designboom shop drop: material, craft, and art of making
 
The designboom shop presents its next curated drop for August 2026, celebrating objects that honor raw texture, traditional craft, and material innovation. From century-old ceramic techniques to hand-worked precious metals and twisted hardwoods, the drop brings together a selection of design objects where the art of making takes center stage.
 
discover DESIGNBOOM SHOP drop highlights below:
Iga-Yaki cup by Asemi Co.
 
 
Product: Iga-Yaki cup
Brand: Asemi Co.
Price: from $54
 
Fashioned from a dark, pebble-infused gaerome clay with a 1,200-year heritage in Japan’s Mie prefecture, the Iga-Yaki cup by Asemi Co. embraces the Wabi-Sabi philosophy...

Located in Foz do Iguaçu, within the Atlantic Forest, the Refugio House was born from the search for balance between architecture, nature, and thermal comfort. In a region with a humid subtropical climate—characterized by high humidity year-round, hot summers, and mild winters—the main challenge was to integrate indoor and outdoor spaces without compromising the home's thermal performance. As a result, the residence opens inward toward the lot, wrapping around the garden to create a peaceful retreat.

In response to the housing crisis and the growing vulnerability of people experiencing homelessness, the Old Brewery Mission is building a new permanent supportive housing pavilion directly across from Monk metro station. This project, comprising eighteen studio apartments, is conceived as a place for long-term reintegration, offering stable and dignified housing for a vulnerable population, with on-site professional support.

HOW AND WHY AUSTRALIAN HOMES ARE SOFTENING DENSE URBAN SITES
 
When temperatures reach their peak, urban density intensifies, and harsh environmental conditions call for smarter residential design, Australian architects are having to rethink domestic living – and that’s exactly what they are doing. Bending both rules and walls across suburban and urban landscapes, modern Australian homes are abandoning the rigid, traditional box in favor of climate-responsive design strategies. Rooted in sweeping curves and tactile reclaimed materials, designers treat sculptural forms as high-performance mechanisms for daylight optimization, cross-ventilation, and indoor climate control.  
designboom selects six...

There has never been a more celebrated moment for craftsmanship in architecture. Across magazines, awards, and international exhibitions, handmade brick, lime plaster, carved stone, woven bamboo, and rammed earth have re-emerged as symbols of environmental responsibility, cultural continuity, and architectural authenticity. Beyond these carefully documented projects lies another reality. The overwhelming majority of buildings constructed today, from apartment blocks and office towers to public housing and commercial developments, continue to rely on industrialized systems that leave little room for skilled artisans. Craft has become increasingly visible at the very moment it has become increasingly uncommon....

So Koizumi’s exhibition explores design through scent and space
 
Designer So Koizumi of So Koizumi Design presents his first solo exhibition in South Korea in collaboration with Seoul-based scent brand POINTTWOFIVE·SECOND. The exhibition takes place at 025S SEONGSU HAUS, the brand’s flagship space in Seoul, where Koizumi’s works are distributed throughout the interior as part of a spatial installation.
 
POINTTWOFIVE·SECOND is a scent brand centered on personal experiences of fragrance, memory, and emotion. Its approach extends beyond perfume to include tea, art, and other sensory experiences, creating a setting in which scent is considered alongside different forms of material and spatial...

The renovation on this 1970s apartment in Kifisia, began with subtraction. All internal partitions were removed to reveal the apartment's spatial potential and expose the existing structure.

Canteen No. 11 is located at the eastern edge of Aranya North Shore Art Bay in Qinhuangdao. Surrounded by apartments, ground-floor retail, a children's water park, and community streets, the project occupies a fragmented urban edge. Rather than functioning as a standalone facility, it introduces a bright and welcoming public space, transforming a transitional corner into a place for gathering, interaction, and everyday community life.

architecture decides who gets in
 
Architecture has always made decisions about who gets inside. Walls separate one environment from another, roofs close the gap overhead, and increasingly controlled building envelopes keep the human interior dry and predictable. Birds nesting beneath the eaves or insects finding their way into a cavity tend to enter the conversation later, usually as maintenance.
 
Across a group of projects that designboom has followed over the past decade, architects are beginning with a different premise. Some openings stay open on purpose. At ChartierDalix’s School of Science and Biodiversity in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, completed in 2014, the concrete envelope was formed with...

a potter’s wedging stand transforms into a cat-shaped bench
 
Designed by MACH Architects Beijing for ceramic artists, this bench reimagines the traditional potter’s wedging stand as a compact piece of furniture that combines ergonomic considerations with familiar woodworking techniques. These stands typically feature a forward-leaning slope to ease clay wedging, a silhouette strikingly similar to a stretching cat. The design releases the cat hidden within this functional form.
the bench reinterprets the traditional potter’s wedging stand | all images ©MACH Architects Beijing
 
 
Timber structure and playful mechanisms refine the bench’s form
 
Starting with a conventional bench, the designers at...

Philippe Sly is sublime as Messiaen's Saint François D’Assise in Salzburg, though Romeo Castellucci's production could brush up on its catechism.

Summer and the streets are teeming with beautiful young people. In a shop window, I catch my reflection staring at me with contempt. I need a haircut but have no barber to go to. The last one talked too much about his prostate and made me look like the reincarnation of Saddam Hussein. I spot a pretty well-known artist walking towards me. We’ve met and emailed before, but we can’t really be called friends. We exchange side glances and notice each other, but make an unspoken agreement to keep walking anyway. In hindsight, I should've stopped to say hi. But it was a muggy day and it was hard enough to just exist. I put on my dark Ray-Bans to avoid any more awkward encounters. Speaking of Ray-Bans, you...

Renée as Thaïs finding salvation while trudging through the parched Egyptian desert in off-the-shoulder La Croix atelier.

When sculptor Shirley Tse was invited by her former student Anna Hrund Másdóttir to produce an original exhibition at her cooperative gallery Kling and Bang in Reykjavik, her first thought was to invite her friend and former teacher, the film and video maker Dana Berman Duff, to collaborate with her. Geography, landscape, desire and time are some of the interests these two artists shared. The result is an extraordinary manifestation of physical elements — breath, moon and tides — that bind us and the universe. Working under the name “Relational,” Tse and Berman Duff's exhibition The Universe Breathes Us was first staged at Kling and Bang in 2025, and again this summer at Shoshana Wayne Gallery...

“Anas was one of the journalists who ran into the line of fire,” reads a translated eulogy by independent journalist Doaa Shaheen about her late colleague, prominent Al Jazeera reporter Anas al-Sharif, 28, who was killed alongside four other journalists on August 10, 2025, by a targeted Israeli strike on their media tent near al-Shifa Hospital. “He covered events as they unfolded because he believed the Palestinian narrative was worth this effort and exhaustion,” Shaheen's voice note continued. “Our stories are worth all this suffering. They deserve our presence on the front lines, documenting the truth.”Shaheen's oral eulogy is one of several devoted to al-Sharif on a new digital...

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — On the first Friday of each month, a dozen or more exhibitions open across galleries, studios, and temporary spaces in Knoxville. For many people in the small city’s art community, the night is either an overwhelming jumble or a repetitive routine. Artist Lauren Farkas’s maps offer a way through.“If everything is on the map, people get overwhelmed,” Farkas told Hyperallergic. “I put all the things that I would like to go to if I had enough time on the map.”Farkas, a high school art teacher at L&N STEM Academy who has lived in Knoxville for nine years, said that she considers her educational work to be “a long-form performance piece.” She approaches each map as an artwork...

A few weeks shy of his 10th birthday, Anderson Taylor opened a museum in the small town of Cambridge, Illinois, with just one display case. Two years later, after expanding the collection to over a dozen cases of animal fossils, iridescent bones, and rare minerals, Taylor set a Guinness World Record as the world’s youngest museum curator.Announced July 15, the award notes the curator's precise age as nine years and 340 days old when the Cambridge Natural History Museum opened on August 10, 2024.

In the introduction of a new book titled Great Women Photographers, Fiona Rogers writes, “If ‘greatness’ has long been defined by visibility and remembrance, then the continued documentation and celebration of women’s photographic practice is not only relevant but essential.” The forthcoming title spans a multitude of photographic works from 68 countries and covers nearly 200 years of history. It’s the fourth volume in Phaidon’s series of books commemorating influential women in the artistic sphere, with previous installments focusing on distinct creative mediums such as painting and sculpting. Alex Prager, “Eve,” 2008. Image courtesy of the artist, Alex Prager Studio, and Lehmann Maupin, New...

Masanori Ushiki  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Masanori Ushiki’s Website
Masanori Ushiki on Instagram

San Francisco goes baroque with performances of Handel's Alcina, Tolomeo, and Rinaldo.

At Wolf Trap Opera, a season-closing Tosca is weighed down by an incoherent setting during Italy’s Anni di piombo.

What to our wondering ears should appear, but a 40-track Jonas Kaufmann Christmas album?

From the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, which features a wealth of artwork and artifacts related to social justice and community organizing, a new exhibition highlights American democracy and freedom of speech through the lens of art as an agent of change. Turn the volume up! includes works by a diverse group of contemporary artists and photographers, from Spider Martin’s dramatic documentation of Freedom Marches during the Civil Rights Movement to Kara Walker’s multimedia interrogations of U.S. history and racial stereotypes. Visitors will also encounter works by the Guerilla Girls, Carrie Mae Weems, Kiki Smith, Bruce Davidson, and many more. Kara Walker, “Confederate...

Our oceans are places of mystery and biological wonders as much as they are essential to communities’ livelihoods. We tap these expansive bodies of water for recreation, food, transportation. From the Atlantic to the Arctic, oceans cover around 70 percent of the earth’s surface, and there is an incredible wealth of life yet to be discovered. As the continuing climate crisis melts ice caps and raises sea levels, and industrial fishing and waste threatens endangered marine animals and habitats, reminders of the oceans’ irreplaceable value and power are ever more critical. That’s where Oceanographic magazine and Blancpain’s annual Ocean Photographer of the Year contest comes in as a catalyst for...

“The wind is my nemesis!” says Jennifer Latour, and rightly so. In her sculptural assemblages, single flowers or small clusters of blooms sprout from tree branches or thick stems, appearing like otherworldly forms standing in the landscape. A soft breeze could topple the Vancouver-based artist’s ephemeral works, scattering their delicate petals and spindly shoots before she has the chance to snap a photo. These fleeting moments are preserved in Latour’s Bound Species series, which she began during lockdown by piecing together objects found around her home into unconventional, ikebana-style compositions. “During this time, I started having a recurring dream of giant flowers growing around me with...

From materials we normally discard like padded packaging or the mesh sleeves that protect fruit from bruising, Suzanne Jongmans summons elegant and dreamlike Renaissance portraits. The artist drapes models in lush velvet fabrics and typically positions them against deep backgrounds in the vein of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” (1489-91) or Antonello da Messina’s “Portrait of a Young Man” (c. 1470). The settings and the addition of fine garments contrast found plastic detritus with hints of refinement and the figures’ dignified postures, mirroring the solemn, pious expressions of individuals in Renaissance portraiture. Recently, she has also incorporated copper coils extracted from the...

Caleb Stein  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Caleb Stein’s Website
Caleb Stein on Instagram

Le sculture di Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, 1942) si accumulano. Si ammucchiano per ripetizione e sono costruite da gesti infiniti e dal tatto. Ma questi piccoli gesti quotidiani non sono solamente pratica artistica: visualizzano come la vulnerabilità e la sensibilità, il tatto e la cura, possono essere un atto di resistenza. La Galleria Ovale del Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) di Lisbona, Portogallo, racchiude queste sculture create con modalità ripetitiva. La mostra si intitola Poetic Earth. Alcune delle opere sono state realizzate decenni fa, altre sono state create in situ, proprio in questo spazio a forma di foglia.
View of the exhibition “Anna Maria Maiolino. Poetic Earth”,...

Ci sono artisti la cui carriera coincide con una lunga ricerca e altri che, raggiunta una determinata soglia, sembrano aver trovato una lingua tanto riconoscibile da poter attraversare qualsiasi soggetto senza modificarne realmente la struttura. È una condizione rara, che appartiene a quei pochi autori il cui immaginario ha ormai assunto la forma di un universo autonomo, capace di assorbire temi, epoche e narrazioni mantenendo pressoché intatta la propria grammatica. Osservando Le Alchimiste, il mastodontico progetto concepito da Anselm Kiefer per la Sala delle Cariatidi di Palazzo Reale, a Milano, a cura di Gabriella Belli, la sensazione è proprio questa: non quella di assistere a una svolta, quanto...

Leonie Bo  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Leonie Bos’s Website
Leonie Bos on Instagram

La pittura contemporanea ha spesso trasformato il ritorno in una narrazione di recupero: un’interruzione superata, una perdita convertita in nuova possibilità. When the Sun Shines Again, la prima grande personale newyorkese di Guimi You presso Lehmann Maupin, usa questa struttura per metterla in crisi. La mostra osserva ciò che accade quando il gesto artistico emerge da periodi di sospensione, quando il fare pittura si intreccia con la cura, l’attesa e forme di vita che tradizionalmente rimangono fuori dalla storia della produzione.
Guimi You, “When the Sun Shines Again”, installation view at Lehmann Maupin New York. Photography by Studio Kukla, courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul...

Knokke Art Fair è una delle fiere d’arte più antiche al mondo e la più longeva tradizione internazionale sulla costa belga, un luogo speciale dove l’arte emoziona, giovani e anziani, curiosi ed esperti. Che sia ammirata tra le solenni mura di un luogo deputato o all’aria aperta (con una scultura site-specific), l’arte suscita emozioni, stimola la riflessione e invita al dialogo.
Vista esterna della location di Knokke Art Fair, edizione 2026
Knokke Art Fair è un evento del tutto indipendente, incentrato sulla qualità basata su un’accurata selezione che si svolge prima dell’apertura della fiera, ed è organizzata da Alexander Tuteleers. In questo luogo, il tempo sembra essersi fermato in...

Fino al 30 novembre 2026 il Parco Archeologico di Pompei ospita la mostra Philip Colbert in Pompeii: Pop Mythology. La mostra, curata da Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, espone oltre trenta sculture monumentali dell’artista britannico tra le quali protagonista assoluto è l’astice antropomorfo, alter ego dell’artista e ormai suo marchio riconoscibile.
Philip Colbert, ph. courtesy of the artist studio
Le opere di Colbert sono progettate per risultare subito leggibili e perfettamente compatibili con le aspettative della comunicazione social. Molti lavori si distinguono per l’uso di colori saturi, monumentalità, ironia pop e kitsch con citazioni della classicità ridotte a segni facilmente riconoscibili e nel...

By Betty Ann Brown "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."—Sol LeWitt Dean De Cocker creates richly conceived, exquisitely crafted, and visually delightful artworks that shuttle between abstraction and conceptual representation. He has long been drawn to machines, from bicycles to motorcycles, cars to airplanes, and formal echoes of these devices appear in his current body of work, exhibited at the Visual Arts Center in the small Central California town of Visalia. Welcome to the...

Xiao Hua Yang  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Xiao Hua Yang’s Website
Xiao Hua Yang on Instagram

Alina Bobrova  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
Alina Bobrova’s Website
Alina Bobrova on Instagram

By Victoria Thomas Photographer and ceramic artist Catherine (Cathy) Opie first shocked and rocked the fine art world with her self-portraits during the late 1990s. Today, her decades of work — often termed confessional — now serve as context for the far more enigmatic Holding Blue installation, on view at Regen Projects through July 3. The Los Angeles-based artist identifies as a leather dyke, lesbian cowboy, an elder, and as "Mama Cathy," with a mustachioed male alter-ego named Bo. Opie is...

By Betty Ann Brown "Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation — I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances."—Henri Matisse Jill sykes by Eric Minh Swenson Jill Sykes creates beautiful paintings of botanical phenomena. Like Matisse, she translates three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images, occupying the territory between abstraction and representation to achieve balance and equilibrium. From a very early age,...

By Victoria Thomas There's something about a hanging. Whether legal or not, the visual experience seems mythic, supernatural, theatrical, and ritualistic, versus the efficiency of a swift kill. If local authorities greenlight the killing, it's called a hanging. If they don't, the hanging is extrajudicial, and it's called a lynching. Anyone with even the scantiest grasp of American history will know that our country has a sordid romance with lynching — a romance which persists. And unless...

By Betty Ann Brown Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, February 22–June 28, 2026 Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.—Dolores Huerta The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF, originally the Rebel Chicano Art Front) was an art collective founded in Sacramento in the early 1970s. The visual art members, who focused on printmaking and murals, collaborated with writers, musicians, performers, and teachers. Together, they...

It is credited with ‘democratising photography’ on a global level – and now Shutter Hub is making its most democratic move yet. As of this month, the organisation will pass into the control of the community it was built for, in what founder Karen Harvey MBE describes as ‘a logical next step: to make things more equitable we need multiple perspectives.’ The announcement follows Karen’s decision to remove paid memberships last year, making Shutter Hub ‘fully open-access and available at no cost to all’. It’s a typically altruistic move from the social entrepreneur: also the founder of Toiletries Amnesty, the award-winning NGO. She was made an MBE in 2024 for services to people living in hygiene...

The City Series by Shutter Hub is an ongoing publishing project exploring the people, places, cultures, and contradictions that shape cities around the world. Rather than documenting a location as a fixed subject, the series invites photographers to respond to a city as an idea: something experienced, observed, imagined, and interpreted through the photographic eye.
For its second edition, we turn our attention to London in partnership with Battersea Power Supplies, a new museum and gift shop celebrating Battersea Power Station. We invite photographers from across the globe to contribute to a major publication celebrating one of the world’s most photographed, complex, and ever-changing cities. We want to see...

Photographer Chester Higgins has spent more than six decades creating images that honor the presence, history, and achievements of people of African descent. Raised in rural southern Alabama during the height of the Civil Rights movement, he discovered photography as a student at Tuskegee University, a path that would eventually lead to a nearly forty-year career as a photographer for The New York Times. Chester Higgins: Shared Memories, an exhibition spanning six decades of his work, is on view at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York through June 20, 2026. We spoke with him about what it means to respect your subject and tell their story in a way that is ‘unique, embracing, and nonjudgmental.’ Do you...

Jain Temple in cave 32 at Ellora, 9th century CE Dr. David S. Efurd, a two-time Fulbright recipient, associate professor, and chair of art and art history, has spent decades documenting the Buddhist cave sites of western India. Armed with a notebook and a handheld camera, he has visited more than 80 caves and captured over 10,000 photographs, which are now available through Artstor. This extraordinary archive reveals remarkably preserved monasteries carved directly into volcanic basalt cliff faces, along with religious art, monuments, architectural details, and sacred spaces dating back to the second century BC. Efurd’s work is grounded in the practice of “slow looking,” in which he spends days closely...

 
Join us on Sunday 07 June from 1.30pm to celebrate the launch of INTO THE TREES by photographer Jo Stapleton, curated by Karen Harvey and published by Shutter Hub Editions.
INTO THE TREES is an expressionist photographic account of Jo’s interactions with trees and woodland, later remembered and reimagined in the darkroom using a range of alternative processes and techniques.
Drinks and canapés will be served from 1.30pm before the formal launch event at 2pm, including a book signing and interview discussion between Karen and Jo about the making of the book and the role photography has to play in helping to protect our wildlife and green spaces.
To celebrate the launch of the book, Jo has produced a...

Harry Adams, Protest Car, 1962, inkjet print, Courtesy of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge. © Harry Adams. All rights reserved and protected. Ray Francis, Genie, 1971, gelatin silver print, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2023.91.3 Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985,’ currently on view at the Getty in Los Angeles, is a seriously powerful collection of work. Curated by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, it brings together “150 examples tracing the Black Arts Movement from its roots to its lingering impacts, from 1955 to 1985.” We spoke with Mazie Harris, assistant curator at the Getty, about how this exhibition came to be and why...

©Jon McCormack ©Jon McCormack Patterns: Art of the Natural World, published by Damiani and released to coincide with Earth Day (April 22, 2026), is a striking photobook by Australian photographer and conservationist Jon McCormack. The project emerged from a pivotal shift in McCormack’s practice during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel restrictions confined him to a single location and, in turn, fostered a slower, more attentive way of seeing. “Repetition removed distraction. Because I wasn’t constantly moving on to a new destination, I could no longer rely on the excitement of elsewhere. I had to let the subject reveal itself more slowly,” he reflects. The result is a body of work unified by...

Filipino fishermen unload catches of Yellowfin tuna, Bigeye tuna, and Blue Marlin, after being at sea for approximately one month, at General Santos fish port, the Philippines, on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. General Santos is known as the Philippines’ tuna capital and hub for tuna fishing and exports of the products. The city hosts numberous processing facilities where the fish, primarily tun, is packaged or canned for sale ot the Filipino market and for export worldwide. ©Nicole Tung for Fondation Carmignac Overfishing in Southeast Asia, on view until April 26, 2026, at the Bronx Documentary Center, is a powerful and layered exhibition by photojournalist Nicole Tung, laureate of the 15th Carmignac...

In the forest nothing stands still. Time layered through thoughts and feelings, leaves kicked and crunched as we walk. The trees talk to each other, sending mycelium messages, carbon gifts, and warnings of drought or illness. From ancient wisdom to popular culture, it’s all here.
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s nobody there to hear it, did it make a sound? Of course it did. And if Jo Stapleton was there to capture the moment, there would be a visual symphony of light, shape and form to follow.
Published by Shutter Hub Editions, this beautiful collection of 100 images by Jo Stapleton is an expressionist photographic account of her interactions with trees, forest and woodland, later remembered and...

 
There’s just two weeks left to submit your work for The City Series: Cambridge!
An ongoing series of publications, The City Series sets out to explore the people, places, and cultures that shape cities around the world, showcasing images that respond to a place not as a fixed subject, but as an idea shaped by experience, observation, and interpretation.
The inaugural volume explores a city that has welcomed us, and been home to nearly a dozen Shutter Hub exhibitions – Cambridge.
Rather than defining Cambridge by landmarks or narratives, we invite photographers to approach the city openly, perhaps through people, atmosphere, details, routines, abstractions, or moments that feel personal or unexpected....