Design and Architecture

Everyone is Californian now, says the co-curator of California: Designing Freedom, a show on display in London. We look at how West Coast design dominates the world. And as cities around the country remove Confederate statues, there's a debate over whether they should be torn down in the name of today's social values, or maintained as teachable moments.

Developers have big plans to make over older waterfronts in San Pedro, San Diego and Santa Barbara. It’s the next step in the urbanization of these cities. Old world-style fishing villages are out. In are coming designers Bjarke Ingels, James Corner and bigger commercial attractions. Their designs vary and so does public response. How will they affect the character and life of these coastal destinations?

From the drug-fueled 1960s style of the hippies to the tech-utopian visions of Silicon Valley's founders, California's design sensibilities have had a global reach. The exhibition California: Designing Freedom at the Design Museum in London looks at how the Golden State came to have such a powerful influence on contemporary design.

A Syrian boy hand-built a model of what his hometown might look like after the country's civil war, and now Future Aleppo is on display in Los Angeles. Also, do you think driverless cars are a new idea? Just wait 'til you hear about Norman Bel Geddes, an industrial designer decades ahead of his time.

The Los Angeles-based painter David Hockney turned 80 last month and his birthday is being marked with shows from London to LA's Getty Museum. Critics and Hockney talk to DnA about his enduring appeal. And the movie Columbus is set in the small town of Columbus, Ind., a mecca of modernist architecture. The filmmaker, Kogonada, explains why he placed buildings at the center of his directorial debut.

Home prices keep hitting record highs in Southern California. What’s the solution? Some say Santa Monica – with its recent downtown development and light rail extension – is the model. But a split vote by that city’s lawmakers suggests otherwise.

Pack your bags, we're off to summer camp! But forget lanyards and campfire singalongs. We visit a boutique camp for teen designers. Los Angeles architects take "The Architectural Imagination" to Detroit. Do their dreams offer more hope than grassroots solutions? Louis Kahn's floating concert hall has sent up an SOS. Can a Hudson Valley town save it from the scrapyard?

President Trump's border wall project appears to have ground to a halt. Will it ever materialize? And David Adjaye, the designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, reflects on the museum's significance, emerging African architecture, and improving social housing.