What’s Happening: More than 50 years after Moshe Safdie unveiled the career-defining Habitat 67 in Montreal, his firm is making major headway on three new residential projects in Asia and Latin America that reiterate and expand upon his ideas on how to improve urban living.

The Download: It should come as no surprise that Moshe Safdie is still riffing on ideas he explored in the design for Habitat 67, a model community and housing complex in Montreal originally built as a pavilion for Expo 67 that commanded attention with its dramatic stepped profile and private landscape terraces. Besides being one of Canada’s most recognizable buildings and Safdie’s masterpiece, the housing model presented a influential vision for nature-infused urban living and a major step forward in the possibilities of prefabrication. Five decades later, Safdie’s firm has made headway on three new residential projects in Asia and Latin America that riff on Habitat’s biggest ideas:

In Their Own Words: “Over the past year, there has been a rediscovery of the interdependence between nature and society,” Safdie said in a statement. “We’ve seen an outcry for our basic human needs to be met—access to daylight, outdoor space, connection to nature, and the ritual of public life at all scales. After a year in relative isolation from one another, and the urban habitat at large, the ideals of Habitat 67 have become ever more relevant as we reimagine the urban landscape.”

“Moshe has held steadfast with his thesis for over 50 years, that designing to improve our quality of life must be a priority for the profession,” says design partner Jaron Lubin. “We’re now seeing many of the ideas, once held as mere utopian dreams, becoming a reality. Habitat 67’s legacy has so much more potential yet to explore.”

Surface Says: To say that Safdie was (and still is) ahead of his time feels like a major understatement.

Have a news story our readers need to see? Submit it here.

For the Miami-based interior designer, cooking is a method to reach a state of zen—and bring people together. As part of our new Kitchen Creative series, produced by Surface in partnership with Gaggenau, Chraibi dishes on her multicultural approach to food and shares her go-to recipe for authentic Berber tagine—a dish rich in aroma and healthy spices such as garlic, ginger, and cumin.

When: Until Sept. 11

Where: Dries Van Noten, Los Angeles

What: With a synesthetic approach, the artists and frequent collaborators Polly Apfelbaum and Madeline Hollander launch a fusion of textile floor works and watercolor paintings that explore the passing of time through the lens of color, materiality, tempo, and movement.

As eclectic as it is wide-ranging, the Surface summer reading list encompasses everything from the history of the humble Polaroid to an unprecedented tome of original patent documents. Wherever your interests lie, we’re sure at least one of these titles will help take the edge off turbulent times. We’ll be featuring one title from the list every morning.

Neri&Hu Design and Research Office: Thresholds: Space, Time, and Practice (Thames and Hudson): Since 2004, the Shanghai-based duo Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu have wowed the public with their spellbinding adaptive reuse projects that ignite a sense of wonder. In their new monograph, the phenomenal hospitality, cultural, and private residential work of the practice Neri&Hu is presented in meticulous detail like never before. Through sketches, before-and-after imagery, and narrative-driven concept descriptions, readers are given an inside look at the painstaking process that goes into their commissions, which often involve unifying heritage buildings with contemporary interventions.

Travel to an inverted fortress hotel, The Sukhothai, in hometown Shanghai; the Fuzhou Teahouse, an incredible melding of an ancient Hui-style residence within a modern shell; the lake-dotted Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat, a vacation getaway inside a reclaimed complex of brick passageways and courtyards; and other destinations where the studio has breathed new life into forgotten structures. Compiled together, Neri & Hu’s body of work proves again Jane Jacobs’s dictum that old spaces are great places for new ideas.

Superblue, the long-awaited experiential art center in Miami founded by Pace Gallery CEO Marc Glimcher and Pace London president Mollie-Dent Brocklehurst, couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time. The creative cognoscenti was long stuck experiencing art through lackluster virtual viewing rooms and again craving sensory escapades after a year of deprivation. The venue’s phantasmagoric environments by James Turrell, Es Devlin, TeamLab, and Drift were met warmly when it opened in May. Now, Superblue will bring a taste of the experience to New York and London in the fall with climate change–themed works by Drift and Studio Swine.

Milanese designer Patricia Urquiola has returned to Lake Como’s Il Sereno hotel, which she designed in 2016, to conceive its newest amenity: the Signature Penthouse, a bookable room that doubles as a design gallery and an e-commerce platform.⁣ Done up in Venetian Terrazzo floors, Canaletto Walnut ceilings, and Ceppo di Gre walls, the one-bedroom suite is inspired by 1950s scarf fashion—a nod to the town’s silk-making heritage—and the landscape of Lake Como, which unfurls outside of the floor-to-ceiling windows.⁣ ⁣

A hand-selected curation by Urquiola includes her own designs such as the ‘Love Me Tender‘ sofa for Moroso and ‘L60’ bed for Cassina, as well as picks from Italian master—Gio Ponti chairs and an ‘Infinito’ bookcase by Franco Albini and Franca Helg, among others. All of the pieces and other standouts adorning the interiors at the resort—accessories by Ginori, Venini, Bitossi, and Salvatori are on offer, as is a collection of custom rugs and blankets—will be available for purchase digitally.

Reach the design world every morning. Find out more about advertising in the Design Dispatch.

Far + Dang is a multidisciplinary design office engaged in the complexities and multiplicities of contemporary life. The firm’s research, strategy, and work focuses on transforming intangible ideas into spatial realities and physical form. Their goal is to heighten the immaterial such as ideas, hopes, and space, by way of the material such as site, structure, and enclosure.

Surface Says: Not beholden to any single style, the burgeoning Dallas firm infuses a variety of homes across the Lone Star State with elements of intrigue.

Droughts are revealing an edenic hidden canyon underneath Lake Powell.

Some enterprising Gen Z-ers are forgoing chores for a ride on the NFT wave...

...while this $18 million mansion has one of the first private NFT art galleries.

Mount Etna grew 100 feet taller over six months thanks to recent eruptions.