What’s Happening: Marlon Blackwell reveals an air traffic control tower likened to a “hibernating Transformer” that perfectly suits the star-studded modernist design heritage of Columbus, Indiana.

The Download: Air traffic control towers are typically glimpsed from afar, utilitarian oddities protruding from frenzied terminals and sprawling tarmacs. When designing a replacement for the 80-year-old tower at Indiana’s Columbus Municipal Airport, which operates a flight school and services the town’s international businessmen, Marlon Blackwell Architects sought to defy expectations for how these structures look and feel. As opposed to the slender, needle-like forms with control rooms in a disc-like upper section, the Arkansas firm opted for what one critic described as “a hibernating Transformer that might at any moment convert into a spacecraft.”

Renderings depict a 128-foot-tall steel-and-aluminum tower whose accordion-like profile disrupts the surrounding prairie. Vertical fins rise from the ground up on the tower’s glazed east and west sides, acting as ribs that filter natural light inside. “What emerged from the design process was this idea of a kind of shifting, silhouetted figure,” says Marlon Blackwell, the firm’s founder and a recipient of the Cooper Hewitt’s National Design Award. “The inspiration was aerodynamics but without literally looking like a plane—something that shifted and undulated and spoke to mobility.” Unlike most air traffic control towers, the public will be allowed inside thanks to a designated event space, and it even features an educational room where students can simulate working in one.

Blackwell’s leftfield proposal befits one of the Midwest’s unlikely modernist hubs. Home to buildings by Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei (who also knew a thing or two about air traffic control towers), the town’s architectural heritage inspired a 2017 film directed by Kogonada, a recent citywide festival, and an upcoming book. Thanks to one the country’s most forward-thinking firms, Columbus’s landscape is about to become even bolder when the project wraps in 2026.

In Their Own Words: “More than a piece of infrastructure,” Blackwell says, “our hope is that the new [tower] will become a beacon of Columbus’s architectural and design heritage, that will mark a key gateway into the city.”

Surface Says: Blackwell has said “most architecture is good enough for most days, but there’s some architecture which should rise above the everyday.” With this project, he’s sending all the right signals.

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Tubular steel likely comes to mind first when thinking of the Bauhaus furniture made by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer. When the era-defining pieces were first made by German workshops, though, their frames were painted. In honor of that heritage, Knoll is making the MR Chair and Table, Wassily Chair, Cesca Chairs and Stools, and Laccio Tables available in three new ultra-matte finishes: white, black, and an archival dark red.

The new colors may present these classics in a previously unseen light, but each has roots in the institution. The dark red finish was inspired by a Bauhaus color originally offered on the MR Chair while the white and black were valued by Bauhaus designers for how they reflected or absorbed light, enhanced geometric forms, and defined edges. “The way these colors interact with the seats and backrests completely changes our perception of the work,” says Jonathan Olivares, Knoll’s SVP of Design, “and allows us to see them with fresh eyes.”

Boston runs deep in the veins of Hacin, a South End–based design studio whose name has become synonymous with architectural preservation and some of Boston’s most celebrated new residences and restaurants. This made the firm, helmed by longtime Bostonian David Hacin, a natural fit to help potential buyers visualize their lives in one of five dwellings in Mooreland House, Back Bay’s boutique condo development.

The team, whose scope of work ranged from crafting a brand identity and marketing plan to interior renderings, found themselves particularly inspired by the property’s raucous 1920s roots as a fraternity house. They channeled that history into a vision that blends the heritage of its Commonwealth Avenue location with Back Bay traditionalism and a dash of youthful daring.

This year’s edition of the Venice Biennale features the largest contingent of participating African nations. Coinciding with this milestone and debuting today is “Everything is Connected, The Venice Biennale Edition,” a new podcast from Light Work and the Africa Institute, Global Studies University Sharjah. Over six episodes, the artist, writer, and host Folasade Ologundudu converses with curators and artists who orchestrated Nigeria, Benin, Egypt, Angola, and more African countries’ showcases at this year’s biennale. Ologundudu’s conversations with interviewees, who include Nigerian pavilion curator Aindrea Emelife, South African artist collection MadeYouLook, explore the commonalities between how each nation in turn shapes its artists’ practices.

When: Until July 20

Where: TIWA Gallery, New York

What: To celebrate the summer solstice and reverence for his Welsh heritage, gallerist Alex Tieghi-Walker gathers works by 20 artists—wood furniture from felled trees by Vince Skelly, Jim McDowell’s ceramic masks evoking ancestral forest spirits, vessels made of repurposed mudlark scraps by Emily Frances Barrett—that pay tribute to the majesty of woodlands.

Earlier this summer, the Brooklyn-based wallcovering studio took to the Upper West Side of Manhattan for an installation and party in celebration of Colin King’s two latest wallpaper collections. Titled “Nuance” and “Perception,” which we named one of Milan Design Week’s most notable product debuts, the paper murals were installed as an artful backdrop at a 20,000-square-foot townhouse near Central Park. King was joined by Calico Wallpaper founders Rachel and Nick Cope, and members of New York’s design community for the evening.

Untitled is an innovative and inclusive platform for discovering contemporary art. It balances intellectual integrity with cutting-edge experimentation, refreshing the standard fair model by embracing a one-of-a-kind curatorial approach.

Surface Says: Through its relationship with curators, embrace of innovation, and collaborative artist-run platform, Untitled is paving a new way for independent fairs.

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Thanks to architect Tim Bushe, north London has its own hedge menagerie.