9 essays tagged “design”.
Berlin, Germany
Berlin is the only major European capital that has been multiple cities within a single lifetime — divided, reunited, gentrified, bohemian, exhausted, reborn — and that experience of being remade is still, somehow, the city's most reliable trait.
November 8, 2024
Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo is large in a way that defeats the standard travel rhythm. It is not one city; it is twenty-three wards, each a small city, each with its own grammar. The right pace is to do less, daily, and to do it more carefully.
August 19, 2024
Copenhagen, Denmark
Copenhagen doesn't try to impress you. The city's pleasures are small and structural — a bike lane that works, a harbour you can swim in, a city built at human scale and against the temptation to grow taller. Most great visits start by hiring a bike on day one.
June 17, 2024
Singapore, Singapore
Singapore has, for two generations, been written off by travel writers as too clean, too efficient, too engineered. They were almost always passing through. Stay a week and you discover a small, dense, multi-ethnic city of profound urban design intelligence and one of the best hawker-food cultures on earth.
April 29, 2024
Seoul, South Korea
Seoul is most itself between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The bbq restaurants are at full smoke. The streets in Hongdae and Itaewon are full of office workers on a third bottle of soju. The 24-hour everything is open. The city that took ten years to be discovered by Western tourists became, almost overnight, the most influential cultural city in East Asia.
March 12, 2024
Amsterdam, Netherlands
The Amsterdam tourists see is roughly a triangle: Dam Square, the Red Light District, the Anne Frank House. The Amsterdam the Dutch see is a calm, low-rise, water-laced city of seventy-five distinct neighbourhoods, half of them on islands, almost none of them on the postcard.
November 19, 2023
Melbourne, Australia
Melbourne is the second-largest Australian city and, by most metrics that matter to a traveller, the more rewarding one. The laneway coffee culture, the food, the small-bar scene, and the Australian Open in January make for a city that punches well above its harbour-less weight.
November 12, 2023
San Francisco, United States
San Francisco is geographically tiny — 7 miles by 7 miles — and topographically intense. The city's gift is that almost every walk involves climbing a hill, and almost every hill ends at a view.
April 20, 2023
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Dubai is the most engineered city of the modern era — built almost entirely since the 1990s, from a small Trucial Coast pearl-trading port into a 3-million-person globally connected emirate. The city is best read as the architectural laboratory it is.
March 24, 2023