WEEK IN REVIEW

‘OF COURSE IT’S POLITICAL’ – INTERVIEW WITH AI WEIWEI

designboom meets Ai Weiwei in Berlin on occasion of Five Working Spaces, his recently opened exhibition at Aedes Architecture Forum. The exhibition traces the Chinese artist's life through the lens of architecture, offering a glimpse into his five studios: two in Beijing, followed by ones in Shanghai, Berlin, and, most recently, Montemor-o-Novo, a rural town in southern Portugal. Designed, commissioned, and inhabited by Ai Weiwei himself, each workspace mirrors shifting personal and political realities, documented through architectural models, photographs, drawings, and personal texts. ‘My studio is an extension of my body and mental state,’ Ai Weiwei tells us. ‘Of course it’s political. Anyone who sees the exhibition can understand — it’s not that I want it to be political. It just is political.’ Read our conversation in full here, and discover more recent interviews here.

MARBLE DUST TRANSFORMS INTO 3D PRINTED STONE INSTALLATION

Anti-Ruin, an installation developed by London-based studio OZRUH and ETH Zurich, reframes material byproducts not as waste, but as endlessly reusable matter. On view at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the project transforms marble dust waste from the Lasa Marmo quarry into a 3D printed stone installation that embodies the studio's research into a material system for circular building. The process extends beyond recycling marble to other byproducts, such as construction waste and brick dust, to develop adaptive, modular, and resilient architecture. See more submissions by our readers here, and find out how to upload your own project here.

The weekly is an inside review curated by Sofia Lekka Angelopoulou.