Fields of floating paper hiraganas hang to create colorful screens and passageways in this spectacular work of installation art. Designed by Emmanuelle Moureaux, it is part of a larger 100 Colors series exploring a whole spectrum of intimate and thoughtful spaces.

The opening of the exhibit coincided with Tanabata Day, a Japanese star festival during which people traditionally write down their hopes and dreams on pieces of paper then suspend these from bamboo branches.

The result is a peaceful place made up over of 140,00 paper cutouts, draped from the ceiling to create rainbow passages and aligned to create opportunities for connection as well as isolation throughout the artwork. From some perspectives, the entire spectrum is visible, while in other places, a single color dominates.

Modernism sought to bring a healthy uniformity to architectural design, in part through with clean lines and material minimalism. New technologies like air conditioning also allowed for an unprecedented level of global standardization in terms of temperature-controlled spaces. Of course, this often meant disregarding local traditions that had been successful for centuries (or longer). Among the regional strategies that got lost along the way was a seemingly small but critical factor: the variable heights of rooms humans build and occupy.

As a vernacular design critic who goes by Wrath of Gnon explains, “Before the International Style (modernism) in architecture, our ancestors knew how to adapt the room heights according to the climate, achieving maximum effect (comfort) for the least effort (energy). Today we trust in the grid and so build 8-9 ft rooms from Bermuda to Reykjavik.”

Ideally, the, in warm climates you want higher ceilings because “as hot air rises the difference in temperature at floor level and ceiling level in a tall room can be as much as 4 degrees [celcius] all other things being equal. Here, a comfortable looking gentleman in an 1817 room in Rome,” height around 15 feet. In Brazil, 15-foot homes were typical historically.

Conversely, in colder climates, lower ceilings meant higher temperatures. “Here are log houses from Russia and Sweden. The efficiently constructed fireplace created an interior draught that sucked fresh air in and expelled smoke, dust. Fans or mechanical ventilation not needed.”

In Japan, “with hot summers and relatively cold winters, a different technique was called for. Wooden houses allowed for perfect fine tunings of openings depending on exact climate and orientation. This traditional room built to maximize airflow, livable in summers without AC.”

In short: choosing the right materials, heights and orientations for a climate makes a big difference. “By building with nature and climate instead or regardless of it, by adapting our waking hours to the rhythm of the sun we can achieve remarkable levels of comfort—even superior—compared to what we have today in our modern homes built to international, industrial standards.”

Driven by an artificially intelligent butler, this smart furniture system promises to free up valuable floor space by lifting and lowering modular interior design elements as needed, putting them into play or pulling them up to the ceiling on demand.

Bumblee Spaces has designed their bot to learn and adapt, anticipating needs in addition to responding to specific requests — it even scans items in storage then tracks their location for retrieval, helping you find stuff like lost keys faster. And if it’s raining, the roombot can also call down your umbrella in case you forget.

For some, it may sound at first like an overly high-tech solution without a problem, but anyone living in old city apartments knows that desire to turn slightly higher ceilings into something more useful, like raised shelving or other storage, at least (but even that only occupies the periphery). When things can be lifted out of the way entirely, even large beds are on the table (and tables, for that matter).

In the Bay Area, for instance, where the startup is based, the cost of additional square feet can be a lot higher than something like this making extant space usage more efficient. It also addresses the persistent San Francisco and Oakland challenge of moving from a smaller, rent-controlled unit to a larger, market-rate one, which can involve paying far more than the size differential alone would suggest.

“When I moved here I was overwhelmed by how much we were paying for so little space,” says the founder. “I come from a product background so I understood a lot about how we could densely pack objects really well. In the iPhone or Apple Watch we do such a good job of finding every micrometer of space to package all the features in so the user only sees the screen.”

Murthy applied this logic to furniture with Bumblebee Spaces. With modular furniture units installed in the ceiling a single-room studio can become a multifunctional area serving as bedroom, living room, study or wardrobe depending on the time of day. And the space given over to a retrofit can be small — as little as a foot of vertical in a room (with additional variability for taller items).

Bumblebee Spaces has also created a software library of their modules for architects, so they can fit them into reflected ceiling plans for future buildings. They aim to deploy a combination of ready-built furniture as well as custom-made items, all worked into a larger modular system. In the long term, they also aim to set up exchanges so people can buy, sell, lend and trade units to customize and redesign their interiors.

Unlike other arts, architecture is generally limited by practical matters, including what materials can do, how things stand up, and in most cases (but not so much this one) an array of challenging local building codes.

A firm in Mumbai, India called sP+a developed this vaulted brick library roof with a playful purpose in mind, allowing people to walk up and over it like a bridge to cross the school grounds it sits in the middle of — on a cool evening, the heat-absorbing bricks also create a cozy open-air reading area.

The idea is conceptually simple: the ground simply extends up and over the top. In most places, a railing would be required, if the steepness didn’t stop the design in its tracks, but not here.

“On our first visit to the site it was interesting to see geodesic structures built by an engineer for a few of the school buildings, we were somewhat encouraged by this to pursue a project that followed from a construction intelligence,” explains sP+a. “We hence parsed through several possible material configurations ranging from concrete shells to brick vaults for building this ‘architectural landscape’.”

“The design team became interested in the material efficiencies of the Catalan tile vault from the 16th century, its use by Spanish architect Guastavino in the early 19th century, and the details used in the work of uruguayan engineer and architect Eladio Dieste. to articulate a pure compression form for the library, sP+a used rhinoVAULT — a form-finding plug-in developed by the block research group at ETH zürich. consequently, the Maya Somaiya Library is the result of lessons learned from different time periods as well as geographic locations.”

Above and beyond your typical five-star hotel, this open-air room sits at nearly 6,500 feet in the mountains of Switzerland with panoramic views of the Alps.

A bed, side tables and lamps are not quite all visitors need to enjoy their stay at Null Stern (translated: Zero Star), but bathrooms are just a few minutes down the slope and meals are delivered by a butler. The name is a little misleading, since in most hotels one would have greatly reduced access to the infinite stars in the night sky.

At around $250 per night, the space and its amenities are a steal and reservations are refunded in case of inclement weather. The wall-and-ceiling-free room is available in spring and fall but closed during the winter.

The Null Stern is part art experiment and part boutique hotel, using the sky as a ceiling and mountains as walls.

“Even though this version is radically different from the first one in the nuclear bunker,” a previous project by the same creators, “the essence and the spirit of the concept remains the same,” said one of the artists behind Null Stern “To put the guest at the centre of the experience and to focus on the intangible by reducing everything else to the minimum.”