Dezeen promotion:glass bricks designed by Seves animate the pared-back exterior of the Comedor Restaurant, which US architecture studio Olson Kundig has completed in Austin, Texas.
Located in the city's business district, the contemporary Mexican eatery is designed by Olson Kundig to disguise its interiors and create a sense of intrigue.
Olson Kundig has used glass bricks by Seves at the Comedor Restaurant in Austin
The utilitarian exterior features black brickwork and doors, broken up by a wall of Vetropieno Solid Glass Bricks that were produced by the glass block manufacturer Seves.
This glass brickwork provides distorted views of movements and colours inside the Comedor Restaurant without revealing its interior, which is intended to entice passersby.
The Vetropieno Solid Glass Bricks feature on the restaurant's facade
Seves' Vetropieno Solid Glass Bricks were chosen for the project by Olson Kundig in collaboration with the on-site architect called Mckinney York Architects.
Navvab Taylor, an architect at Mckinney York Architects, said the glass bricks help create "a process of discovery upon entering the building".
The bricks were chosen to create a sense of intrigue
"It was important to the owner to create a sense of mystery and not give away the view of the interior," Taylor added.
While creating this sense of intrigue, the Vetropieno Solid Glass Bricks ensure the building meets building regulations in Austin that require a certain percentage of transparency on exterior facades.
The glass bricks conceal the industrial interior of the restaurant
The design of the glass bricks also allowed them to be toothed and coursed together in continuous rows with the black bricks on the rest of the restaurant's facade.
The mystery created by the glass brickwork is matched by brass lettering outside the restaurant, which is designed to be obscure.
Inside, visitors are welcomed by an industrial bar and dining area. It features unexpectedly tall ceilings and large hand-cranked glass doors, which lead out to a brick-walled courtyard containing trees and a fountain.
To find out more about Seves products visit its website.
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Located in the small hamlet of Fungarth, Dunkeld, the home and office sit alongside a former ploughman's cottage and steadings.
Fungarth Cottage is a home and office in rural Scotland that was designed by Mary Arnold-Forster Architects
Rather than filling the site with a single building, the development was split into several buildings that loosely enclose a courtyard. They have been gradually completed since 2017 and include a greenhouse and wooden kayak store as well as the home and office.
"The site of the former ploughman's cottage was bought with an existing planning application for a square house sat in the centre of the plot," explained Mary Arnold-Forster Architects.
"The project was redesigned to create a south-facing 'walled garden', with the new larch house to the north, a corrugated office to the east, a lean-to greenhouse to the west and to the south a screen beyond which the steading can be seen."
The buildings were designed to look like existing barns
The two-storey home and single-storey office buildings were designed with barn-like forms that reference the area's traditional structures.
"The buildings sit in their context and are traditional in scale, siting and massing, but detailed in a contemporary way," said the studio.
The dwelling, which was clad entirely in horizontal larch planks, has a ground-floor kitchen and sitting area that surround a wood-burning stove and opens onto the central garden through sliding glass doors.
A staircase with a thick, exposed concrete balustrade leads up to the first floor, where a skylit living room, study, bedroom and bathroom sit beneath a gabled ceiling.
The buildings surround a wildflower garden
The ground floor is finished in a terrazzo-style aggregate concrete from a local quarry, with waxed pine floorboards used on the first floor, complemented by birch plywood joinery.
The nextdoor office volume is clad entirely in corrugated fibre cement panels, and a gabled ceiling creates a high and bright studio space filled with desks.
The structures reference the local traditional buildings
Turning away from the larch-clad dwelling, the office looks out through windows in one corner to the south and towards the original farmhouse building.
The kayak store opposite the dwelling acts as a wooden screen that helps to minimise overlooking, while to the north the site boundary is defined by a simple metal mesh fence.
Electric vehicles were a hot topic this year amid growing concern about the climate impact of petrol and diesel engines. For our review of 2021 Dezeen rounds up 10 non-fossil-fueled vehicles, including a coupe designed by Virgil Abloh and an electric car by Heatherwick Studio.
German carmaker Mercedes-Benz unveiled Project Maybach, a solar-cell-powered electric show car developed in partnership with Virgil Abloh, shortly after the American fashion designer's death.
The off-road coupe is nearly six metres long and has a transparent front bonnet housing solar cells that would be used to charge the battery.
The Heritage Series Grandeur is a modernised, all-electric concept version of the 1980s Hyundai Grandeur saloon car.
It retains the original car's boxy shape and single-spoke steering wheel while introducing 2021-ready updates, such as LED headlights and an ultra-wide touch screen dashboard display.
Another example of a classic car given an electrified makeover, the Renault 4L Suite No.4 has the same lines and exterior dimensions as the 1960s original but features new panoramic windows across much of its back, sides and roof. The roof also contains transparent solar panels.
It was dreamed up by French designer Mathieu Lehanneur, who said the Suite No.4 "isn't a car, it's travel architecture".
British designer Thomas Heatherwick's studio this year unveiled its prototype of Airo, an electric car created for Chinese brand IM Motors that is set to go into production in 2023.
Heatherwick has promised Airo will "vacuum up pollutants from other cars" as it drives, by virtue of it being fitted with a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filtering system.
Chinese manufacturer XPeng plans to mass-release this electric flying car as soon as 2024.
The design is unusual among urban air motility vehicle concepts in that it would be capable of driving on the road as well as functioning in the air, with a foldable dual rotor mechanism converting it from a car to a flying machine.
This off-road buggy is not electric but instead runs an internal combustion engine that uses hydrogen in place of fossil fuel.
Lexus, which developed the concept, said the vehicle generates "near-zero emissions" while retaining the rumbling engine tone and instant responsiveness beloved by petrol heads.
The New Car for London is a driverless, electric ride-hailing vehicle concept designed by PriestmanGoode.
It is intended to be specific to London to combat the global domination of major ride-sharing apps, with the car's angular profile informed by the British capital's brutalist buildings and its interiors reminiscent of the Tube's distinctive upholstery.
BMW's i Vision Circular concept car is electric, but what sets it apart from other battery-powered vehicles is its ability to disassemble at the touch of a button.
Designed to demonstrate how the automobile industry could embrace circular economic principles, it is made from recycled and recyclable materials and held together by detachable connections, rather than permanent adhesives, so the parts can be separated and reused.
This 16-tonne electric lorry, developed by Swedish startup Volta Trucks in collaboration with Warwick-based consultancy Astheimer, was named product design of the year at the 2021 Dezeen Awards.
By placing the batteries in the chassis, the designers were able to free up space in the driver's cab, with the low, central sitting position and panoramic windows intended to be safer for pedestrians and other road users than standard heavy goods vehicles.
British designer Es Devlin and sustainable clothing brand Pangaia have teamed up to create a collection of vibrant loungewear, understatedly printed with nature-related poetry excerpts.
The Pangaia x Es Devlin capsule collection comprises four clothing designs: the 365 hoodie, 365 trackpant, 365 t-shirt and 365 shorts.
Each garment is made in a fiery orange hue often seen in Devlin's work, which the designer describes as a "powerful" colour that "serves as a sensory reminder to take action now" to help reverse the effects of climate change.
Es Devlin has created four orange garments for Pangaia
"The colour sparks a bold emotion that both invigorates and energises individuals – driving for action with relation to the environment," explained Pangaia.
Each piece is also printed with a snippet of the poetry Devlin wrote for her Forest of Us installation, which saw the designer erect a mirrored maze at Superblue Miami gallery earlier this year.
The chosen citation reads: "A forest of us, a symbiotic symmetry, a branching geometry that flows within us and around us but do you see it, can you feel it, do you breath it can you find it – go and find it".
Poems taken from an installation by the designer are printed on the clothes
Adopting the same theme as Devlin's Forest of Us work, the four-piece capsule collection considers the similarities between the inner workings of human bodies and the biosphere.
"Forest of Us takes as its starting point the striking visual symmetries between the structures within us that allow us to breathe and the structures around us that make breathing possible," explained Devlin.
"The bronchial trees that exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide within our lungs and the trees which exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen within our environment," the designer continued.
The quote featured on the clothing more specifically highlights humanity's reliance on trees for breathable air, and the effects of deforestation.
The collection is designed to highlight the need for climate action
All proceeds generated from sales of the collection will be donated to Instituto Terra, a non-profit organisation committed to environmental restoration and sustainable rural development in the Rio Doce Valley in Brazil.
Known for its use of bio-engineered materials, Pangaia recently launched a cruelty-free puffer coat stuffed with a thermal filling made from a combination of wildflowers, an aerogel and a biopolymer.
Unlike the fossil fuel-based substitutes like polyester and rayon that are typically opted for in other vegan winter jackets, the Flower Down jacket is also biodegradable.
Dutch architecture office Mecanoo collaborated with New Orleans studio OTJ Architects for the project, which involved a three-year-long renovation of the library that is named after the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Mecanoo and OTJ Architects have renovated the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Library
The rectilinear black glass and steel building was the last building designed by renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe before his death and his only library.
According to Mecanoo and OTJ Architects, the renovation intended to balance preserving the original building, which opened in 1972, with creating more open, active spaces.
A 1968 painted mural was preserved in the Great Hall
"Mies designed a passive library to sit and read in, but the reborn library is designed to be active, a place for doing and meeting," said the studios.
"It now embodies the spirit of advancement, inclusivity and hope that Dr King brought to the nation. The introduction of organic surfaces and softer lines is a strong contrast to Mies' strict hard-surfaced rectilinearity, but it creates synergy, not opposition, with the original building."
The ceiling was raised in the Grand Reading Room. Photo is by Robert Benson
In the main entrance lobby, named the Great Hall, the studios added vertical wooden slats to a recessed wall that is positioned underneath a mural painted by artist Don Miller that pays homage to the life of Martin Luther King Jr.
In front of it is a set of bench steps that invite people to sit and which "highlight the library's social gathering purpose", according to the Mecanoo's principal Francine Houben.
The architects added two statement staircases to the library
From the Great Hall the library's three storeys of reading rooms on its upper floors are accessed by a pair of wood-lined sculptural staircases featuring terrazzo steps.
A cafe was also added on the ground floor that opens out onto the street.
The first floor contains a colourful children's library
Mecanoo and OTJ Architects aimed to increase the amount of light and feeling of space in the reading rooms.
In the Grand Reading Room on the building's second floor the central area of ceiling was removed to create a double-height space and visually connect the room to the floor above.
The studios also removed bookshelves that were previously placed against windows on all of the upper floors.
Below the main reading room, on the first floor, a colourful children's library was created complete with a slide that was inserted to add a sense of fun.
Above, on the third floor, an auditorium with curved wood-lined walls that can accommodate 291 people, was added.
Wood clads the walls of the new auditorium
On the building's roof a glass-walled pavilion, which houses conference rooms, was added. It was designed not to be visible from the street and is surrounded by a rooftop garden complete with geometric planters, benches and garden tables.
"Set back from the edges, the pavilion is not visible from the street, from where the building’s profile and geometry look exactly as Mies designed it," explained Mecanoo and OTJ Architects.
A partially sheltered rooftop garden was added to to roof. Photo is by Robert Benson
Opened to library users for the first time, the lower ground floor holds areas called the Fabrication Lab and the Studio Lab, which host noisy, hands-on workshops and activities including dance and yoga respectively.
Mecanoo was founded in the Netherlands in 1984, while US-based OTJ Architects was established in 2011.
