Mesh Wi-Fi or a range extender? Here’s how to know which one you actually need
Wi-Fi extenders are cheap, but come with distinct drawbacks.
How a Soccer Stance Solved One of Furniture’s Oldest Problems
If you’ve ever hosted a dinner party and counted chairs two hours before guests arrived, you know the panic. Do you have enough? Do you have too many? Will you end up dragging that awkward stool from the kitchen that nobody actually wants to sit on? It’s a problem so mundane that most designers don’t even try to solve it elegantly anymore. German industrial designer Peter Otto Vosding did.
His concept, Spielbein, is a chair that quietly rethinks how seating works in small and midsize rooms. Named after the German word for the free, relaxed leg in soccer (as opposed to the Standbein, the weight-bearing leg), the chair’s whole identity lives in asymmetry. One side has two vertical legs. The other has two legs angled outward. At first glance, it reads like a design quirk. Once you understand why, it reads like a small act of genius.
Designer: Peter Otto Vosding
The tilted legs aren’t just aesthetic. They’re the mechanism. When you place two Spielbein chairs side by side, those angled legs slide right between the vertical ones of the next chair, locking them into a seamless row. What started as individual seats begins to look and function like a bench, with no connectors, no hardware, no fuss. Separate them again, and you’re back to individual chairs. The flexibility is baked into the form itself, which is exactly how good design is supposed to work.
Vosding describes the shape as being reminiscent of someone standing in a relaxed posture, one leg planted, the other loosely angled out. When chairs are linked in a row, the visual effect is of people sitting cross-legged, the kind of casual, easy body language you’d see at a café or a gallery opening. I find that detail genuinely poetic. The chair isn’t just furniture. It carries the posture of human comfort right there in its silhouette.
The soccer reference also holds up conceptually. In football, the Spielbein is the leg with all the flair, the one doing the work that creates something unexpected. The Standbein is steady, structural, dependable. Vosding essentially built both into a single object: one side stable, one side dynamic. That kind of layered thinking, where the name, the metaphor, and the function all align, is rarer than it should be in industrial design.
Now, Spielbein is still a concept. It’s been looking for a producer since 2015, which is a little heartbreaking when you look at it, because the furniture market is flooded with chairs that are beautiful but solve absolutely nothing new. This one solves a real problem: flexible capacity seating for rooms that shift between different uses and different numbers of people. Offices, waiting rooms, gallery spaces, small event venues, even a well-appointed home. The use case writes itself, which makes it more puzzling that it hasn’t found a manufacturer yet.
I’ll be honest: the asymmetrical leg design might be a harder sell to consumers who prioritize visual symmetry. We’ve been conditioned to expect furniture that looks balanced in the traditional sense, four legs, all equal. Spielbein asks you to let that go. It asks you to trust that balance can be dynamic, that it can live in the relationship between one object and another, rather than within a single form. Some people will love that immediately. Others will need to see it as a linked row first, before the logic clicks into place.
But that’s also exactly what makes it interesting. It’s a piece that teaches you something the moment you understand it. You see the legs, you learn the word, you picture the footballer shifting weight on a pitch, and suddenly a chair becomes a small lesson in how borrowed language from completely unrelated disciplines can unlock something genuinely fresh in design. Spielbein may still be waiting for its moment in production, but as a concept, it already does what the best design does: it makes you feel like the solution was obvious all along, even though nobody thought of it quite like this before.
The post How a Soccer Stance Solved One of Furniture’s Oldest Problems first appeared on Yanko Design.
ELEGOO Centauri 2 Series Makes Multicolor 3D Printing Easier
ELEGOO's new Centauri 2 Series brings fast CoreXY performance, intelligent automation, and affordable multicolor 3D printing to makers of all skill levels.
Flock cameras track more than your license plate, and they’re spreading fast
Mounting privacy and security issues have residents and activists concerned.
MVRDV Planted a Secret Valley in the Middle of a Housing Block
Most apartment buildings do their best work from the outside. A striking facade, a bold roofline, some smart use of glass and steel, and the job is considered done. La Vallée Verte, MVRDV’s recently completed residential project in Bordeaux, operates on a completely different logic. From the street, it is almost deliberately restrained. The real show is what you find when you step inside.
Tucked into the Bastide-Niel district on the right bank of the Garonne River, La Vallée Verte is three angled white buildings arranged on a triangular plot. It sits at the district’s north-western edge, along the Quai des Queyries. MVRDV authored the entire Bastide-Niel masterplan, coordinating 144 different architecture offices to transform a former industrial and military area into a dense, liveable urban district. La Vallée Verte is their own interpretation of the rules they set, which makes it both a residential building and a demonstration project in one.
Designer: MVRDV
The masterplan’s key principle is “suncuts,” a parametric design method where each building’s massing is carved and angled to maximise sunlight access and prevent neighbouring structures from being overshadowed. MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas describes the resulting roofscape as “like icebergs” echoing the geometry of the old city. It’s a compelling visual concept and a genuinely useful one, a combination that doesn’t come around as often as it should.
The suncuts define the exterior. But the interior is the actual idea. The three buildings encircle a circular courtyard that MVRDV calls a “crater,” a lush park-like space with plants covering every level of the inward-facing facades. Terraces cascade downward, each loaded with pots ranging from flowering shrubs to small trees, with evergreen and deciduous species mixed together to replicate a natural valley landscape at a building scale. The varying plant types at different heights support biodiversity, which at this point feels less like a bonus feature and more like a baseline expectation we should be holding all new housing to.
Seventy apartments of varying sizes are spread across the three buildings, intended to attract a genuine mix of residents: single first-time buyers, families, and older people. The idea is a building that ages well with the people inside it. A day-care centre occupies the ground floor of one block, opening directly onto the courtyard. That programming decision alone says something. Shared green space tends to feel incidental in most housing developments, an amenity tacked on after the real decisions are made. Here, it’s genuinely central to how the building functions.
One detail stands out above everything else. Professional gardeners need access to those tiered terraces, so MVRDV cut openings through the structural walls and added steel doors between neighbouring balconies to create a maintenance route. Practical, necessary. What makes it quietly wonderful is that those doorways are shaped like the silhouette of a person wearing a wide-brimmed hat. It’s a small gesture, but it tells you something: the architects were thinking about the gardeners too, not just the residents. The people who will keep that valley alive are written into the architecture itself.
The environmental considerations are thorough throughout. La Vallée Verte sits in the Garonne River floodplain, so ground-floor apartments are raised to allow water to move through the site during flood events. The streetscape is porous to absorb rainwater. Parking is placed in an above-ground structure rather than underground, reducing both flood exposure and embodied carbon. District heating and photovoltaic panels round out the energy strategy. The broader Bastide-Niel district holds France’s EcoQuartier certification, and La Vallée Verte earns its place within it.
The courtyard is the image that will travel, the shot that gets shared, the thing people point to as the concept. But what makes La Vallée Verte worth paying attention to is how methodically everything else was thought through to support it. The suncut geometry, the flood adaptations, the gardener’s route, the mix of apartment sizes. Good design usually has one clear idea at its centre. Great design makes sure everything around that idea is working just as hard.
The post MVRDV Planted a Secret Valley in the Middle of a Housing Block first appeared on Yanko Design.
Vipp’s New Catskills Pavilion Is a Sculpture You Can Sleep In
Not every building earns the word “sculptural” without some heavy editorial lifting, but the Vipp Pavilion in Upstate New York is the rare case where that description actually holds up. Completed earlier this year, the project is Vipp’s first ground-up build in the United States and their fifteenth bookable guesthouse globally. It sits on sixteen acres of meadow in Lumberland, New York, two hours outside of the city, on the edge of a reflective pond. And from the outside, it looks less like a place you’d stay in and more like a deliberate act.
The structure was designed by Johnston Marklee, the Los Angeles-based firm behind some of the more quietly radical architecture of the past two decades. Their work has always been about geometry as experience rather than spectacle, and the Vipp Pavilion is exactly that. The form is based on two tangent ellipses that mirror the curve of the adjacent pond. Built with a combination of smooth and ribbed stucco, it’s rectangular in envelope but sculpted in feeling, with semi-circular cutouts that carve into the exterior and draw the eye inward. Sharon Johnston described the approach as designing something that “masks a sense of scale, form, or function,” which is a beautifully honest way of saying the building refuses to be immediately read.
Designer: Johnston Marklee
Four years went into getting this right, and you can tell. This isn’t the kind of project that was rushed to fill a destination travel gap or capitalize on a trend cycle. The care shows in the details: the green roof planted by landscape firm Larry Weaner Landscape Associates, which connects the meadow to the architecture itself rather than interrupting it. The interior courtyard slows your arrival down and redirects your gaze upward before you even enter the main space. The floor-to-ceiling window wall lines up perfectly with the water, creating what the architects call a telescopic effect.
Inside, Vipp outfitted the 1,200-square-foot space with their own furniture, and the choices feel considered rather than commercial. There’s a travertine table surrounded by swivel chairs, a sectional sofa in cream positioned to catch the view, and the V3 kitchen, whose polished aluminum ribs subtly echo the ribbed stucco on the exterior walls. It’s the kind of interior that doesn’t announce itself, which is exactly the right call in a space where the architecture is already doing a lot of talking.
The two bedrooms, one bathroom, covered porch, and exterior courtyard layout keeps the program deliberately simple. That restraint reads as confidence, not limitation. When you’re offering sixteen acres of Catskills landscape and a building that looks like a smooth stone half-emerged from a pond, you don’t need to fill every corner. The landscape does what interior design cannot.
I think Vipp has been building something genuinely interesting with this guesthouse series, one that most people overlook precisely because the brand started with trash cans. But this pavilion, maybe more than any of their previous projects, makes the case that design continuity is a real thing. The same rigor that goes into their hardware goes into the architecture they commission. That’s not a given in the design world. A lot of brands treat objects and spaces as separate categories, and the work suffers for it.
The Pavilion is bookable, meaning you can actually stay there, which is one of those pieces of information that shifts the whole conversation. This is not just a concept project or an awards-season submission. It exists, it functions, and it sits two hours from Manhattan in a landscape that will do most of the work of making you feel genuinely away.
Whether or not you ever book a night there, the Vipp Pavilion is worth paying attention to. It’s a well-argued case for how geometry, landscape, and material can coexist without any one of them shouting over the others. And frankly, that kind of restraint is harder to pull off than it looks.
The post Vipp’s New Catskills Pavilion Is a Sculpture You Can Sleep In first appeared on Yanko Design.
Apple September Event: 5 Brand New Devices Confirmed
Apple’s highly anticipated September event remains a cornerstone for tech enthusiasts worldwide, and 2026 is no different. This year, Apple has unveiled a range of products that aim to redefine how you interact with technology. From the innovative iPhone 18 Pro to the debut of the foldable iPhone Ultra, smarter wearables, and advanced home solutions, […]
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GeekCube DIY Steam Machine : Custom SFF SteamOS 3.8 Gaming Console
The GeekCube, a compact DIY Steam Machine created by Reddit user TheGeekno72, merges retro-inspired design with modern gaming capabilities. Built over six months with significant input from online communities, this cube-shaped system runs on SteamOS, a Linux-based operating system optimized for gaming. Notable features include a 10.5-inch built-in display with a 1920×1280 resolution, 32GB of […]
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What Apple Just Revealed About the Upcoming iPhone 20
Apple is set to celebrate two decades of innovation with the release of the iPhone 20, a device that promises to redefine the smartphone experience. This landmark product is expected to introduce innovative technology and an innovative design, further solidifying Apple’s reputation as a leader in the tech industry. However, alongside these advancements come challenges, […]
The post What Apple Just Revealed About the Upcoming iPhone 20 appeared first on Geeky Gadgets.
OpenAI Introduces ChatGPT 5.6 Soul, Terra and Luna Models
OpenAI has introduced GPT 5.6, a release featuring three specialized models, Soul, Terra and Luna, tailored for different use cases. Soul uses its “Soul Ultra” mode to handle complex reasoning tasks, Terra offers a versatile option for general-purpose applications and Luna is optimized for high-speed, large-scale operations. According to AI Grid, these models not only […]
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