This Sharp-Cornered Lithuanian Home Only Exists Because Planning Rules Wrecked the Original Design

Posted on by

Most architects fold when the rules change. The Trim House by Polish firm KWK Promes, completed in 2025 in a forested suburb of Vilnius, Lithuania, is exactly that kind of project. It began in 2016, when KWK Promes, led by Robert Konieczny, won a closed competition to design a luxury single-family home on a wooded plot in suburban Vilnius. The site carried its own quiet history, once dotted with interwar wooden cottages that had long since disappeared, leaving behind open ground and a loose scatter of trees. What followed was a straightforward brief and an optimistic timeline. Then, mid-design, local planning regulations changed everything.

The allowable building footprint was slashed in half. The driveway was also repositioned, now cutting directly through the garden. The client’s instinct was to abandon the site altogether. KWK Promes had a different idea. Rather than retreat, the firm persuaded the client to stay, reduce the total area by 40%, and let the new constraints rewrite the geometry entirely. The result was a triangular floor plan, precise, deliberate, and oddly inevitable once you see it.

Designer: KWK Promes

The name does exactly what it says. The house was trimmed. And in being trimmed, it became something far more interesting than the original design might have been. Spanning 299 square meters, the Trim House is a composition of concrete and glass, its sharpest corner cutting through the landscape like an ocean liner carving through ice. The most dramatic elevation reads almost like a flatiron building scaled down to domestic life, angular, taut, and satisfying in a way that’s hard to place. The surrounding pine trees press close, softening what could have felt severe.

Inside, the two-level plan is organized around a central patio that pulls daylight deep into the heart of the structure. The ground floor holds the living spaces and opens seamlessly into the garden, while the raised first floor contains the private bedrooms, each with access to a terrace that sits above the ground-floor volume. The section plays the two zones off each other, the social, grounded, garden-facing level below, and the quieter, more elevated, view-oriented rooms above. Privacy and nature, held in careful balance.

What makes the Trim House worth paying attention to isn’t just its sculptural confidence. It’s the story behind the form. Constraints aren’t obstacles but essential drivers of innovation, as KWK Promes put it. The Trim House makes that argument with concrete and glass, and it’s hard to argue back.

The post This Sharp-Cornered Lithuanian Home Only Exists Because Planning Rules Wrecked the Original Design first appeared on Yanko Design.

The 40-Year-Old Lamp That Still Looks Like the Future

Posted on by

Some design ideas are so quietly right that they take decades to find their full audience. Oliver Michl’s Architect’s Lamp from the 1980s is exactly that kind of piece. It is a ceiling-mounted light that borrows its entire visual logic from equal space dividers, the spring-loaded drafting tools that architects and engineers use to plot perfectly even intervals across a surface. The concept sounds almost too clever when you say it out loud. And yet, the moment you see it, it just makes sense.

Michl designed the lamp during a very specific cultural pivot. The 1970s had been all about flowing, organic plastic forms. Soft curves, warm earth tones, a kind of material optimism that felt almost comforting. Then the 1980s arrived and jolted design in the opposite direction. Hard lines, industrial materials, a theatrical confidence in structure that felt almost confrontational compared to what came before. Michl, a German lighting designer who would later found Lucelab in Berlin, built the Architect’s Lamp squarely in that spirit. Steel and aluminum, full articulation, no softness anywhere.

Designer: Oliver Michl (Lucelab)

What makes the lamp genuinely interesting, beyond its visual bravado, is how it actually functions. The scissor-like expanding structure allows the piece to adjust both in height, ranging from about 41 to 79 inches, and in width, from 41 to 60 inches. Because it hangs from the ceiling rather than sitting on a desk or floor, the light it casts is ambient rather than task-focused. This was never a reading lamp. It was always a statement, and a rather bold one. Michl made the deliberate choice to take a mechanism that belongs at a drafting table and scale it up for overhead use. That kind of lateral thinking, the willingness to transplant a tool from one context and drop it into a completely different one, is harder than it looks. Most attempts at it feel gimmicky. This one feels inevitable.

There is a particular intelligence in designing a lamp that operates like this. Most lighting from that era leaned one way or the other, either purely functional or purely decorative, rarely both at the same time. The Architect’s Lamp refuses that binary entirely. It performs, and it reads as kinetic sculpture. The expanding grid of its structure, when viewed from below, creates a repeating geometric pattern that visibly shifts with every adjustment. You are not moving a lamp. You are editing a composition, and that distinction matters more than it might sound.

Michl has always worked at that intersection of function and spectacle. His FleXXXibile luminaire, also produced under Lucelab, became a cult object among designers for similar reasons. It features a concertina lattice that can be precision-aimed at a specific point, and it has never really left the design conversation. The Architect’s Lamp arrives at the same sensibility from a different angle. Both pieces suggest a designer who finds moving parts not just practical but genuinely compelling. The mechanism, in Michl’s work, is always part of the message.

The lamp currently lives at Blackman Cruz, the Los Angeles gallery that specializes in exactly this kind of historically significant object. It is listed at $5,500, which is real money, but it is also an original piece from Germany, circa 1980, in steel and aluminum. It has survived four decades intact, which tells you something. The pieces that do not hold up tend to disappear. The ones that keep getting rediscovered tend to deserve it.

The reason this lamp keeps resurfacing in design conversations right now is not nostalgia. It is recognition. The industrial-meets-sculptural vocabulary that dominates so many contemporary interiors, the hard edges, the mechanical articulation, the idea that a light fixture can function as architecture, all of it circles back to what Michl was already doing forty years ago. He was early, and the design world was not paying close enough attention. The Architect’s Lamp is a reminder that some of the most interesting ideas do not announce themselves loudly. They just wait.

The post The 40-Year-Old Lamp That Still Looks Like the Future first appeared on Yanko Design.

The NSA is reportedly using Anthropic’s new model Mythos

Posted on by

Despite the months-long feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon, the National Security Agency is using the AI company's new Mythos Preview, according to Axios, which spoke to two sources with knowledge of the matter. Anthropic announced Mythos Preview at the beginning of April, describing it as a general-purpose language model that is "strikingly capable at computer security tasks." But back in February, Trump ordered all government agencies to stop using Anthropic's services after the company refused to budge on certain safeguards for military uses during contract talks. 

The news comes days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and other officials, reportedly to discuss Mythos. The White House later said the meeting on Friday was "productive and constructive," though President Trump said he had "no idea" about it when asked by reporters, Reuters reports. According to Axios' sources, the NSA is one of the roughly 40 organizations Anthropic gave access to Mythos Preview, and one said it's "being used more widely within the department" too. 

The company is still embroiled in a legal battle with the US government. Anthropic filed lawsuits against the Department of Defense in two courts in March after the Trump administration labeled it a "supply chain risk," and the Pentagon filed a response shortly after. While Anthropic was granted a preliminary injunction by one court to temporarily block this designation, federal judges in the other denied its motion to lift the label. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-nsa-is-reportedly-using-anthropics-new-model-mythos-211502787.html?src=rss

Aston Martin Veil Concept Reimagines What Comes After the Valkyrie Hypercar

Posted on by

Aston Martin’s hypercar trajectory over the past decade has followed a clear arc: the Valkyrie brought F1 aerodynamics to road car design, the Valkyrie AMR Pro pushed that concept to track-only extremes, and the Valhalla promised a more accessible (relatively speaking) interpretation of the same philosophy. Hyunwoo Kim’s Veil concept asks a different question entirely. What if you took that same performance intent but wrapped it in surfaces that flow like liquid metal rather than faceted carbon fiber? The result is a hypercar concept that trades the Valkyrie’s angular muscularity for something closer to organic sculpture, where every surface transition happens so smoothly you’d need calipers to find the break points. The teal paint, a near-perfect match for Aston’s current F1 team livery, catches light like water, emphasizing the continuous curves that define the entire form language.

Kim developed the concept through an unusual process that started with paper mock-ups, physically exploring three-dimensional forms before committing to digital modeling. The approach paid off in ways that pure CAD work rarely does, producing proportions and surface relationships that feel discovered rather than designed. From above, the Veil reads like a manta ray or a fighter jet, with massive rear fender volumes extending from a central spine that bisects the cockpit. The track photography showing the concept alongside Aston Martin F1 team members suggests this caught someone’s attention at Gaydon, which makes sense. This is the kind of design exploration that belongs in a manufacturer’s advanced studio, where production constraints can be temporarily suspended in service of pushing the brand’s visual language into new territory.

Designer: Hyunwoo Kim

The cockpit architecture is pure Le Mans Hypercar, with a central spine running the length of the cabin that appears to house structural elements while creating a visual separation between driver and passenger space. The canopy looks like a single piece of formed glass, which would be a nightmare to federalize but makes perfect sense for a track-focused prototype where visibility and weight reduction matter more than crash regulations. That spine continues rearward past the cabin, creating a vertical stabilizer element that would provide high-speed stability without the drag penalty of a traditional rear wing. It’s smart aero thinking disguised as sculptural drama.

The rear fender volumes are doing the heavy lifting here, both literally and aerodynamically. They’re not just aesthetic flourishes but functional channels that guide air along the body sides and over the rear diffuser, creating the kind of ground-effect downforce that current regulations are pushing Le Mans prototypes toward. The negative space carved between those fenders and the central body creates tunnels that would accelerate airflow underneath the car, feeding the diffuser with high-velocity air for maximum suction. You can see diffuser strakes underneath, multiple elements suggesting active management of that airflow to prevent stall at different speeds and ride heights.

From above, the silhouette becomes even more dramatic. A central spine runs from the nose through the cockpit and terminates at the rear, bisecting the car into two distinct halves. This isn’t purely stylistic theater. That spine likely houses a vertical stabilizer fin, the kind of element you’d find on the Valkyrie AMR Pro or the Mercedes-AMG One, designed to provide high-speed stability without the drag penalty of a massive fixed rear wing.

The front end is deliberately minimal, almost to the point of being featureless. There’s no traditional grille, because there’s likely no traditional front-mounted radiator. Cooling has been pushed to the side intakes, which are substantial enough to handle serious heat rejection from what would presumably be a mid-mounted hybrid powertrain. The headlights are slim horizontal elements that emphasize width rather than aggression, a departure from the angry-eye aesthetic that dominates the current hypercar segment. It’s a more mature approach, one that prioritizes visual cleanliness over intimidation.

The diffuser dominates the rear view, with multiple vertical strakes channeling air from underneath the car. This suggests the Veil relies heavily on ground effect for downforce, using the floor as a giant wing to generate vertical load without the drag penalty of traditional aero elements. It’s the same philosophy underpinning the current generation of F1 cars and Le Mans prototypes, where managing airflow underneath the car has become more critical than what happens above it. The exhaust outlets are integrated into the diffuser structure, which is both aesthetically cleaner and functionally smarter than the typical quad-pipe arrangements you’d find on a Lamborghini or Pagani.

What makes the Veil genuinely compelling is how it navigates the tension between heritage and innovation. Aston Martin’s design language has always leaned heavily on elegance, even when building something as unhinged as the Valkyrie. The Veil preserves that elegance while acknowledging that the next generation of hypercars will be shaped more by aerodynamics and electrification than by nostalgic callbacks to DB5s and vintage racers. The form is contemporary without being aggressively futuristic, a balance that’s harder to strike than it looks. If Aston’s internal advanced design studio isn’t already exploring something similar, they should be.

The post Aston Martin Veil Concept Reimagines What Comes After the Valkyrie Hypercar first appeared on Yanko Design.

AKAI MPC for Nintendo Switch? This concept turns a gaming console into a live production rig

Posted on by

If you can emulate Nintendo devices on laptops, why can’t you emulate laptop software on a Switch? That’s pretty much Alquemy’s train of thought when it came to this concept which merges the worlds of gaming and music in a way that would make Guitar Hero look like child’s play. The Akai MPC Switch are two controller units designed to snap onto the sides of a Switch console, turning your gaming rig into a live music production factory. Unlike your average Guitar Hero controller, this thing is as serious as it gets. MIDI inputs and outputs, a fairly detailed DAW running on the Switch’s screen, and a myriad of controls that let you deejay or produce music on the fly.

To be honest, this concept does give you pause for thought. Why can’t a capable gaming rig also handle other high-intensity software? Music production, 3D modeling, video editing, everything you’d otherwise do on a studio-grade machine. Sure, the Switch isn’t as powerful as an iMac, but that doesn’t mean it can’t handle anything a MacBook Air can. The MPC Switch (albeit conceptual) are a pretty brilliant idea if you think about it – imagine being able to game when you’re bored and produce/perform music when you need to, all on the same machine. Just swap out the Joy-Cons for this MIDI setup and you’re good to go!

Designer: Alquemy

The AKAI MPC, for those who don’t know, holds a special place in the music hall of fame, with artists from Dr. Dre to John Mayer to Mark Ronson to even Kanye West using the hardware to create some of their most legendary work. The MPC (or MIDI Production Center) is, simply put, a sampler and sequencer, allowing you to load audio banks, record music samples/loops, and play them back in a sequence. Think of it as a device that lets you build your track together, brick by brick.

It’s no different from how you’d play games like Street Fighter, mashing together buttons in a variety of combinations to make up your routine. The only difference is here, you record tracks/sounds/effects, and mash buttons to create drum loops, synth patterns, leads, and choruses. Individual sounds can be tweaked too, with the ability to adjust EQ, apply effects, or even modulate live music, thanks to the MIDI inputs and outputs on the device.

This basically means your Switch isn’t just a gaming console anymore, it’s also a live music console. USB-C and SD Card slots on the Switch let you load tracks, sound banks, etc… and the MPC Switch’s hardware give you even more ports, letting you connect your Switch to a more professional setup with anything from electronic instruments to a turntable to even a mixing deck for live recording.

Now this isn’t the kind of idea that would come to your average Nintendo or AKAI exec… you’d need to be slightly eccentric to draw such a brilliant parallel, which designer Phil Rose (who goes by Alquemy online) definitely did. The MPC Switch is incredibly detailed, even down to the software running on the Switch’s display. The only problem is that it’s entirely conceptual, which breaks my heart a bit. If anyone from Nintendo or AKAI is seeing this, you guys are sitting on an absolute goldmine that would not only break the music industry but might also end up creating a new handheld gaming hardware category!

The post AKAI MPC for Nintendo Switch? This concept turns a gaming console into a live production rig first appeared on Yanko Design.

Beijing’s robot half-marathon is back for its second year with far less embarassing results

Posted on by

To make up for an incredibly laughable inaugural event, Beijing is running back its humanoid robot half-marathon. Fortunately, the event that pits humanoid robots made by Chinese companies against each other across 13 miles went a lot smoother this year.

This year's half-marathon hosted more than 100 competitors, with first place going to Honor, better known for its smartphones, and its red-clad robot named Lightning. Living up to the name, the gold medalist finished the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. That's several minutes faster than the human record that was recently set by Uganda's Jacob Kiplimo last month.

Honor swept the other podium spots, with the important caveat that they all navigated the course autonomously, according to the state-sponsored television news agency CCTV. That's a massive improvement over last year, where the fastest time among 21 robots was achieved by Tiangong Ultra with a record of two hours and 40 minutes. Last year's event saw many of the bipedal robots receiving assistance from human operators who ran alongside them, as well as some comical mishaps, like falling at the starting line.

However, the BBC reported that around 40 percent of the robots competed autonomously this year, while the rest were remote-controlled. Despite the rapid improvements, this year's event still had its fair share of crashes, even from Honor's robots.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/beijings-robot-half-marathon-is-back-for-its-second-year-with-far-less-embarassing-results-191308396.html?src=rss

Palantir posted a manifesto that reads like the ramblings of a comic book villain

Posted on by

In case you haven't gotten around to reading Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska's 2025 book, The Technological Republic, (because why would you do that to yourself?), the company best known for supplying AI-driven defense and surveillance software to the likes of the US Army, ICE and NYPD shared a 1,000-word X post this weekend covering its main points. The entire thing is both bizarre and deeply concerning. "The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal,” one of the 22 points states. "It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software."

The book is billed as "a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality," and other excerpts in the social media post include assertions such as: "Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public"; "National service should be a universal duty"; "The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone"; and "Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive."

The statement criticizes the West’s resistance to "defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity," as well as the treatment of billionaires and the "ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures." It's a lot to take in, and it should make crystal clear what Palantir stands for to anyone who somehow didn't already know. Here's the post, in full:

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/palantir-posted-a-manifesto-that-reads-like-the-ramblings-of-a-comic-book-villain-181947361.html?src=rss

The next Mac Studio and MacBook Pro releases could be postponed by several months

Posted on by

Anyone looking to upgrade to the next Mac Studio or MacBook Pro might have to wait a little longer, thanks to the ongoing global memory shortage. As reported by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, "at least two of the company's upcoming machines ... could debut a little later than the company initially planned," referencing the refreshes to Apple's desktop and its laptop that's expected to get a touchscreen.

Bloomberg reported that the upcoming Mac Studio, which follows up the current lineup in the M4 Max and M3 Ultra configurations, was first expected to release in the middle of the year. However, Apple is already dealing with shortages of its existing Mac Studio stock, likely due to the device being a popular choice for anyone running local AI models. With no stop to the shortage in sight, Gurman predicted that the refreshed Mac Studio's release could be postponed to around October instead.

It's not just Apple's desktop offerings being affected. Gurman also reported that the release of the next MacBook Pro could be delayed. While Gurman said the release timeline of the touchscreen MacBook Pro could be between the end of 2026 to early 2027, he's now predicting that it would arrive toward the later end of that timeline. Of course, Apple isn't the only consumer tech company heavily affected by the RAM shortage. However, Apple can at least take advantage of its successful MacBook Neo release amidst the memory shortage crisis affecting all laptop makers.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/the-next-mac-studio-and-macbook-pro-releases-could-be-postponed-by-several-months-173120187.html?src=rss

A Gaming Executive Said “Build Me a Crystal House.” This Is What 7,300 sq. ft. of Pure Glass Looks Like

Posted on by

Glass is the most psychologically loaded material in architecture. It promises transparency and delivers ambiguity, reads as weightless while demanding extraordinary structural engineering, and has the strange property of making a building simultaneously present and absent depending on where you stand and what the light is doing. Architects have been exploiting these contradictions since Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in 1851, and the conversation has never really stopped. F-House, a private residence on Lake Washington in Kirkland, Washington, designed by Goble Berriman Design with facade specialist Pulp Studio, pushes that conversation to a place most residential architects would consider genuinely unreasonable.

The brief, issued by a client working in the computer gaming industry, was a single directive: build a crystal house. What followed was years of design development, engineering collaboration, and custom fabrication to produce a home with zero conventional exterior cladding. Every surface is glass, cut into angular, irregular panels that assemble into a faceted form inspired by shattered ice erupting through terrain. The steel structure supporting all of it is hidden. The fixings are concealed. Even drainage details disappear behind custom direct-to-glass printed borders, because Goble Berriman understood that one visible downspout would break the entire illusion.

Designer: Goble Berriman Design & Pulp Studio

The pedigree behind this project deserves context. Stuart Berriman spent years at The Jerde Partnership working on large-scale mixed-use developments across Asia before co-founding Goble Berriman. Partner Angus Goble was a founding member of Front Inc., a leading facade consultancy whose client list included Frank Gehry, OMA, Herzog and de Meuron, and SANAA. That lineage matters here, because F-House reads less like an ambitious residential project and more like a commercial-grade facade engineering exercise that happens to contain bedrooms. The crystalline exterior geometry, which shifts from mirror-flat reflectivity to deep angular shadow depending on the hour, is the kind of work you expect from firms operating at institutional scale, not on a private lakeside lot in Kirkland.

The home spans 7,300 square feet and sits surrounded by natural rock formations and dense Pacific Northwest greenery, with Mount Rainier visible across the water. That landscape pairing is doing real compositional work. The hard, faceted glass skin reads against the softness of the firs and boulders as a deliberate counterpoint, the same logic that makes mineral specimens so visually arresting when you set them against organic matter. The building doesn’t try to blend into its site. It announces itself as something foreign to the natural order, which, given the crystal brief, is precisely correct.

The thermal and privacy engineering required to make a fully glazed house actually livable is where the project earns its most serious design credibility. Double silver-coated glass handles the main residence, while solar-protected glass was selected for the winter garden. Low-emissivity coatings regulate temperature across the envelope, and custom dot-pattern shading improves energy performance without introducing visible blinds or screens that would compromise the exterior reading. Each glass unit is a layered assembly with an air gap and Saflex interlayers that can shift from clear to opaque, giving occupants control over privacy without resorting to curtains. Insulated spandrel panels handle transitions where solid construction was unavoidable. The result is a house that performs like a thermally responsible building while looking like it was assembled from a single continuous material.

The interior layout is organized around a winter garden that acts as a central divider, separating the main residence from the studio and garage, the latter featuring a glazed hangar door. A continuous skylight stretches from the entry through to the dining area and garden terraces, and a glass bridge connects to the master bedroom, turning what would ordinarily be a corridor into a suspended, luminous passage. Goble Berriman ran the entire project through a shared 3D model across every consultant and contractor, and the homeowner navigated the design in VR goggles long before construction began. By the time the building was finished, it felt entirely familiar to the client, confirmation that years of immersive pre-visualization had done their job in a way that no flat drawing ever could.

F-House sits in a tradition of glass architecture that runs from Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House through Philip Johnson’s New Canaan Glass House and into the parametric facade work of the last two decades. What separates it from most of that lineage is the refusal of orthogonal geometry. There are no flat planes meeting at right angles here, no clean curtain wall logic. Every panel is its own negotiated shape, and the whole facade behaves more like a cut gemstone than a building skin. Whether that reads as the most literal client brief ever executed, or as a genuinely new formal proposition for residential glass architecture, probably depends on where you’re standing and what the light is doing. On the shores of Lake Washington with Mount Rainier in the background, I’d argue it’s both.

The post A Gaming Executive Said “Build Me a Crystal House.” This Is What 7,300 sq. ft. of Pure Glass Looks Like first appeared on Yanko Design.

Tesla is rolling out its Robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston

Posted on by

Tesla is expanding its Robotaxi footprint across Texas by introducing availability in both Dallas and Houston. As announced in a post on X, the EV maker is rolling out its Robotaxis to small sections of the Texas cities, as detailed by two maps of its new service areas. 

The first Robotaxi rides started in Austin, Texas where Tesla is headquartered, but the service's launch was paired with a "Tesla Safety Monitor," or a supervising human in the passenger seat. Earlier this year, Tesla began to transition away from including safety monitors, leaving its Robotaxis to operate unsupervised and fully autonomous. In the latest announcement on X, Tesla also showed off a 360-degree panning shot with no safety monitor, but the company hasn't stated if its Dallas and Houston service will have in-car human supervision. It's worth nothing that Tesla previously admitted that some of its Robotaxis are sometimes driven remotely by human operators.

With the Robotaxi expansion into Dallas and Houston, Tesla is encroaching on Waymo's autonomous ride-hailing service that entered the same markets in February of this year. Looking ahead, Tesla is also targeting the Bay Area market in California for its Robotaxi expansion. While the company has received approvals to operate a ride-hailing service in California, it still doesn't have authorization for autonomous taxis in the state yet.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/tesla-is-rolling-out-its-robotaxi-service-to-dallas-and-houston-160742941.html?src=rss