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This week’s biggest architecture and design stories on Dezeen

The cover of David Bowie’s Blackstar album, released just days before his death, was designed to reflect the musician’s mortality, according to his graphic design collaborator Jonathan Barnbrook.
This week on Dezeen: the designer behind David Bowie’s Blackstar album artwork revealed its true meaning in an exclusive interview and we looked ahead to the era of the “megatall” skyscraper.
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Rotterdam-based architecture firm OMA also released images of its renovation plan for Berlin’s KaDeWe department store.
Rotterdam is fast becoming a centre for innovation, according to architects we interviewed this week.

London house extensions awarded by Don’t Move, Improve!

Dezeen promotion: a south London residence updated with new living spaces, custom-built furniture and a two-storey lightwell has been named winner in a competition to find London’s best house extensions (+ slideshow).
Designed by Tsuruta Architects to reveal “memories of place and construction”, House of Trace is a two-storey addition to a Victorian property in south London.
The prize for Best Historic Intervention was scooped by Fitzrovia House, a project by West Architecture that involved inserting a new residence behind the Georgian facade of a bomb-damaged west-London house.
Dezeen’s architecture editor Amy Frearson and RIBA London Director Tamsie Thomson were among the judges, who were chaired by NLA director Peter Murray.
“The standard of Don’t Move Improve continues to rise each year,” commented Murray.

Tesla windscreen factory in Peru features coloured glass fittings

A strip of double insulated U-glass brings natural light into the production hall from the south, while protecting it from summer sun exposure.
Black glass walls enclose a showroom where a movement-activated system plays atmospheric music when someone enters the space.
“The white walls, floor and ceiling polarise the dark entry funnel.”
Tinted and textured glass delineate areas inside this office and factory completed by V.oid Architecture for the Lima-based company that manufactures car windscreens for Tesla (+ slideshow).
The production offices are suspended over the vast machinery hall, giving employees clear views of the production line.

Chicago Architecture Biennial has half a million attendees

Chicago Architecture Biennial 2015: organisers of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial have counted more than 500,000 visitors and the city has renewed its commitment to host another edition in 2017.
“The first-ever Chicago Architecture Biennial was an unequivocal success, exceeding our expectations for attendance and bolstered Chicago’s reputation as the vanguard of architectural thinking on the national and international stage,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
The Chicago totals far exceed those of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, which counted 228,000 visitors.
Writing in Dezeen, Sam Jacob hailed the biennial as being “rooted in the visionary, imaginative tradition (rather than history) of Chicago itself.”
An outgrowth of the city’s Cultural Plan, the city created the biennial to showcase Chicago’s legacy as a birthplace of modern architecture and reassert its centrality to global architectural discourse.

ArandaLasch adds pleated concrete facade to Tom Ford store

US firm Aranda\Lasch has completed a store for fashion designer Tom Ford in the Miami Design District, featuring an angular facade that references bold Art Deco motifs (+ slideshow).
Robins, co-founder of the Design Miami fair, is turning the area into a neighbourhood dedicated to fashion, design, architecture and dining spaces.
Inside the Tom Ford store, menswear and womenswear are split up over the two floors.
The architecture studio – which recently designed looping Railing chairs made of metal pipes for Design Miami – referenced patterns and shapes typical on the Art Deco-period architecture around Miami in its design for building’s facade.
“Inspired by the pleated Art Deco patterns found in architecture and fashion, the facade is given a texture that revives the exuberance and ornament of Miami’s golden era,” the studio told Dezeen.

It Met creates flexible workspace for Buenos Aires ad agency

Argentinian studio It Met used corrugated plastic and sheets of wood to partition the workspaces of this advertising agency in Buenos Aires.
“We are are an architecture and design studio, so the furniture pieces that we develop are always directed to solve or to complement our architecture spaces,” said Ciovich.
“There are 10 different kinds of panels, and all of them were designed under the same concept,” said Ciovich.
Ten types of panel in different materials and coatings were used to designate meeting rooms, desk spaces and recreational areas.
“We believe in the concept of modular architecture that takes shape through the union of different parts.”

Project Orange’s West Stow Lodge has a pared-back interior

West Stow Lodge was designed by London architects Project Orange for a family with three young children in a village near Bury St Edmunds.
To emphasise the sense of visual continuity throughout West Stow Lodge, Project Orange spaced the mullions of all the windows evenly, at 600-millimetre intervals.
Oak joinery, white-painted bricks, and concrete flooring were used to make the interior of this new house in Suffolk, England, more contemporary than its traditional pitched-roof exterior (+ slideshow).
“The interior materials echo the exterior, and are intended very much as an honest expression of the construction,” said Ash.
“Within this setting, the house can be seen as a nuanced, contemporary exploration of the domestic vernacular architecture in Suffolk,” said Ash.

Architects produce “psychotic” movie to promote apartment

“Living inside a building is nothing like looking at a few pictures of one,” Groves Natcheva Architects co-founder Adriana Natcheva told Dezeen.
It is set in Groves Natcheva Architects’ apartment renovation on a South Kensington mews completed in 2010.
London Design Festival 2015: an apartment renovated by Groves Natcheva Architects provides the setting for this short thriller, which the London-based studio created to promote the project using “emotion” (+ movie).
Groves Natcheva Architects wanted to find a more engaging way to showcase their design, rather than simply using the typical set of still photographs showing an empty house.
The new movie, titled Black Ice, is the first in a series that the studio is making for their architecture and interior projects.

Instagram users offer a preview of LA’s Broad Museum

It will house over 200,000 pieces of postwar and contemporary art from the collections of Eli and Edythe Broad, who also backed the Zaha Hadid-designed Edythe and Eli Broad Art Museum in Michigan, which opened in 2012.
Instagram users and officials from the Broad have been posting images of the building, including glimpses of the interior, as it readies to open.
The images offer a preview of the structure designed by the New York architecture firm, well ahead of the publication of official photography.
Frank Gehry’s new headquarters for Facebook debuted on Instagram, with visitors posting images during the building’s preview before pictures were issued for publication.
The building will also become the new home for the Broad Foundation, which is currently based in Santa Monica.

Cameron Sinclair interview about humanitarian architecture

Cameron Sinclair: I’m the co-founder of Architecture for Humanity and I ran that for close to 14 years.
They’ve been snaked there, they’ve had a taste of humanitarian work and they would rather starve than work in an office.
“And I am never going to win the Pritzker Prize, I’m going to die happy knowing that.”
“I will never do a skyscraper in my life ever, I’m going to die happy knowing that,” said Sinclair.
Cameron Sinclair: It makes it hard to critique because I’m doing something similar.