This article forms part of the Decorative and Applied Arts Encyclopedia, a master reference hub providing a structured overview of design history, materials, movements, and practitioners.
This week’s design news moves between the theatrical scale of Freddie Mercury’s stage costumes and the quiet precision of a chair made from standard pine. It also brings renewed attention to architect Paul R. Williams, artist Do Ho Suh and a Norwegian cabin that combines digital fabrication with centuries-old boatbuilding knowledge.
Together, these stories reveal an important theme. Contemporary design increasingly draws its strength from memory, established craft and existing materials. Rather than treating history as a collection of styles to imitate, designers and curators are using it as an active resource for addressing identity, housing, material use and cultural preservation.
Freddie Mercury’s Stage Costumes Enter the V&A
The Victoria and Albert Museum has announced Freddie Mercury | Splendid Things, a free display opening at V&A South Kensington on 24 October 2026. Developed with Mercury’s close friend and former fiancée Mary Austin, the trail will present eight looks from his career across six locations within the museum.
The selection spans Queen’s early performances, the theatrical imagery of the 1970s and Mercury’s solo career in the 1980s. It includes the monochrome ensemble associated with Queen’s debut album, the “Mercury Wing” catsuit designed by Wendy de Smet and the crown and cloak created by costume designer Diana Moseley for Queen’s 1986 Magic Tour.
The announcement matters because it positions popular-music costume as a serious form of design. Mercury’s clothes were not simply decorative additions to a performance. Their silhouettes, materials and movement helped project his presence across increasingly large venues. Costume became a form of spatial communication, allowing the performer to reach an audience well beyond the physical limits of the body.
The display itself will extend this principle. Exhibition designer Tom Piper is creating distinct settings that place the costumes in conversation with the V&A’s collections and architecture. Specially made mannequins will evoke Mercury’s dynamic stage poses, while selected installations will incorporate sound and light.
This approach turns the museum trail into more than a presentation of celebrity memorabilia. It will examine how garments, bodies, music and architectural space worked together to produce Mercury’s public identity.
Read the original V&A article →
Paul R. Williams and the Design of Dignified Housing
At the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, Paul R. Williams: An Architect Considered has opened with a particular focus on the architect’s contributions to multifamily and affordable housing. Williams is widely associated with elegant private houses, yet this exhibition redirects attention towards a less familiar part of his career.
The presentation brings together more than 60 archival drawings, photographs and plans from the Paul R. Williams archive, jointly acquired by the Getty Research Institute and the USC School of Architecture. Material relating to more than 30 housing projects appears alongside new work by contemporary artists, architects and filmmakers.
Williams worked during periods of rapid urban growth, racial segregation and profound housing inequality. His projects ranged from modest apartment buildings to public housing and larger community plans. Although the social and political circumstances differed across these commissions, his work consistently argued that economical construction did not require the abandonment of dignity, proportion or architectural character.
The exhibition also corrects an incomplete historical narrative. Williams was the first known Black member of the American Institute of Architects, joining in 1923, and became its first Black Fellow in 1957. In 2017, he posthumously received the AIA Gold Medal.
By placing archival evidence beside contemporary responses, the exhibition treats architectural history as an unfinished conversation. Williams’s housing work speaks directly to current debates about affordability, collective living and equitable access to good design.
Read the original USC Fisher Museum article →
Do Ho Suh Reconstructs Home and Memory in Seoul
A large-scale Do Ho Suh exhibition opened at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul on 27 August. Spanning approximately four decades, it brings together early works, major installations and continuing projects concerned with home, migration and personal identity.
Suh is especially recognised for fabric reconstructions of architectural interiors. Corridors, staircases, rooms and doorways become translucent structures that can be folded, transported and installed in new locations. These works preserve the measurements and details of specific buildings while removing their mass and permanence.
For design history, Suh’s work offers a compelling way to reconsider architecture. Buildings are usually described through plans, materials and formal composition. Suh instead asks how rooms survive through memory, touch and repeated movement. Architecture becomes both physical evidence and an emotional record.
This concern has particular relevance in an era shaped by migration and increasingly temporary forms of residence. Suh’s installations suggest that home is neither entirely fixed nor entirely portable. It is reconstructed through fragments: the width of a passage, the position of a switch, the outline of a staircase or the remembered texture of a wall.
Read the original MMCA exhibition listing →
Cabin Sande Joins Digital Fabrication with Norwegian Craft
Norwegian architecture practice Helen & Hard has returned to an ancient construction principle for Cabin Sande, a coastal retreat in Randaberg. The building’s structure incorporates 18 spruce trees excavated with significant parts of their root systems intact.
The concept draws on Norwegian boatbuilding traditions in which naturally branching timber strengthened structural connections. At Cabin Sande, the transition between trunk and roots helps form the relationship between columns and roof beams.
This is not, however, a rejection of contemporary technology. Each irregular tree was dried and digitally scanned before robotic milling created individually fitted joints. Digital fabrication therefore accommodates natural variation rather than forcing the material into a standard industrial profile.
The result challenges the conventional separation between structure, furniture and interior architecture. Branching columns help define places for sitting and working, while built-in elements connect the frame to shelves, benches, stairs and room divisions.
Cabin Sande demonstrates how traditional knowledge can inform computational construction. Its broader value lies in treating irregularity as useful information. Instead of removing the tree’s distinctive geometry, the design makes that geometry central to the building’s structural and sensory character.
Read the original Wallpaper* article →
A Screw-Free Pine Chair Makes Joinery Visible
At a much smaller scale, Stockholm-based architect and designer Martin Labbé has produced a chair from standard 45 × 95 millimetre pine sections. Created for a compact gelato shop, the chair contains no screws or metal fittings. Mortise-and-tenon joints and wooden dowels provide its structural connections.
The material is familiar construction timber rather than a rare hardwood or highly engineered composite. Extensive sanding and a linseed-oil finish retain the grain, tonal variation and tactile quality of the pine. Exposed joints make the assembly process legible instead of concealing it beneath upholstery or hardware.
The chair belongs to a long tradition in which furniture communicates through construction. Its significance does not depend on formal novelty alone. Instead, it demonstrates how careful proportion and workmanship can transform an ordinary building material into a durable object.
The absence of metal hardware may also assist repair and eventual disassembly, although the chair has been presented primarily as an exploration of material and joinery rather than as a formal circular-design system. That distinction is important: environmental claims should follow demonstrated performance, not merely an appearance of simplicity.
Read the original Designboom article →
What This Week’s Design News Tells Us
Across these five stories, design acts as a method of carrying knowledge forward. Freddie Mercury’s costumes preserve the relationship between clothing and performance. The Paul R. Williams exhibition recovers an important history of dignified collective housing. Do Ho Suh reconstructs architecture through memory, while Helen & Hard and Martin Labbé place traditional timber knowledge within contemporary practice.
The common thread is not nostalgia. Each project uses the past selectively and critically. Historical garments become evidence of collaborative performance design. Archival drawings enter current discussions about housing equity. Boatbuilding techniques meet robotic fabrication, while established furniture joints give ordinary timber a new architectural presence.
For museums, designers and historians, the lesson is clear: innovation often begins with a more attentive reading of what already exists.
Sources and Further Reading
- V&A: Freddie Mercury | Splendid Things
- V&A: Staging Freddie
- USC Fisher Museum: Paul R. Williams — An Architect Considered
- MMCA Korea: Do Ho Suh
- Wallpaper*: Cabin Sande by Helen & Hard
- Designboom: Martin Labbé’s screw-free pine chair
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