Journal

Once you get your head around it, Google’s mind-bender of an announcement makes perfect sense.

When a coworker shared the news that Google was creating a new holding company called Alphabet and splitting off all its non-core activities from the Google brand, I reacted in the only rational way: I wondered for a nanosecond if it was a wonderfully wacky hoax. Then I checked the URL on Larry Page’s blog post, in which he explained the rationale and announced that longtime Googler Sundar Pichai would become Google’s CEO. It seemed to be legit.

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Giving and receiving criticism is an uncomfortable but necessary part of career growth. Here are six ways to do it without being mean.

Even when your intentions are good, it can be tough to give constructive criticism. It’s an awkward conversation for the giver, and it can spark a negative reaction in the receiver.

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People may live in very different neighborhoods, but the feelings our streetscapes inspire are often universal.

It sounds like a mundane question: What’s the view from your window? But in a new photo series, looking at the view from someone’s apartment in Lahore or Singapore or Brisbane, it’s possible to glimpse something about life on the other side of the planet that a typical spread in a travel magazine might miss.

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The Danish company Reform asked BIG, Henning Larsen Architects, and Norm to design modified fronts and table tops for Ikea kitchen cabinets.

Reform is a new Danish furniture company with an intriguing business model: By taking Ikea flat-pack kitchen components and modding them into custom units, it aims to give everyone the opportunity for high-end design at a reasonable price. For its current endeavor, the company is outfitting Ikea’s Metod line of kitchen cabinets with customized fronts and table tops designed by three of Denmark’s leading architecture firms—BIG, Henning Larson Architects, and Norm.

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Some aged gracefully. Others not so much.

We owe a handful of some of the most iconic works of architecture to World’s Fairs, like the Eiffel Tower, the Space Needle, and Habitat ’67. Today the structures might be a photo-op for design-savvy tourists, but they’re also relics that reflect aspirations of generations past. After photographer Jade Doskow visited one of the sites on a family vacation, she was hooked on documenting their present-day conditions.

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