Magazine

Five essential questions to ask before you decide. Wood deepens in color, and stone reacts to water—five ways to embrace these changes as inherent character rather than defects. By Seojin Park, Saeun Jung

How to spot the hidden "lines." Lack of visual order is often a matter of lines, not color — four ways to erase the seams.

Planning, imagery, development — he is already working with AI across them all. After more than 20 years shaping the faces of brands, how does a designer approach AI, and what is the one thing he still finds missing?

From components to control to smart cities — how SHC Corporations is preparing for the future of lighting.

Weaving saekdong, stitching pattern with thread, translating dancheong into print, embroidering obangsaek, stitching images onto sheer nobang silk — five brands starting from thread and carrying it into today's home.

Work alone, and you get exactly the result you'd already imagined. Producing something beyond that is what real collaboration means, says architect Han Seung-jae of Hoo-ha-ha Friends. His reason for choosing people over AI as a collaborator turns out to be surprisingly simple.

Some remember her as the daughter of the master Itami Jun (Yoo Dong-ryong). Some remember her as the principal of ITM Yooihwa Architects, the firm behind Sihojae, ITAMI JUN MUSEUM, FEZH, and Haneulsori. Others remember her as chair of the Itami Jun Architectural Culture Foundation, which runs a children's architecture school. Architect Yoo Yi-hwa carries all three roles at once — steward of an inheritance, builder of her own era's architecture, and someone opening a path for the next generation.

Reference images and hand sketches are disappearing from studio walls. In their place: scenes of startling polish, finished with a single prompt. Now that AI has changed the speed of the image itself, Kim Seok-hoon, principal of Studio Eccentric, asks: what are we actually losing — time, or judgment?

Shigeru Ban runs two practices. One is Shigeru Ban Architects (SBA); the other is the Voluntary Architects' Network (VAN), a nonprofit devoted to disaster and refugee relief. What looks at first like a contradiction is, in fact, two organizations that hold each other up in his hands — a single method engineered so that its two halves support one another. This August in Seoul, we hear how that thread has been woven together.