The light bulb was once perceived as too bright by many. Today, the purportedly unseemly compact fluorescent lamp tends likewise to be hidden beneath most luminaire designs. With "Koi", Naoto Fukasawa has been the first designer to create an office luminaire series that emphasizes the unpopular lamp's intrinsic and aesthetic beauty.

In the works by Swedish design group "Front" the divides are blurred. After all, what you see is not always what you feel. During the Cologne furniture fair the magazine Architektur&Wohnen and Audi awarded the "A&W Designer of the Year" prize. Nancy Jehmlich talked to the designers about animals as designers, good design, and working as a threesome.

In recent years, Paris-based fair Maison & Objet has grown, to the detriment of other fairs. But now it appears that this trend is being reversed.

For the construction of the Paris Philharmonic Georg Ackermann, a company of carpenters, built an acoustic model on a scale of 1:10. In order to be able to simulate what the situation in the concert hall would later be as exactly as possible, it even has a large number of little puppets sitting in the audience wearing noise-absorbing clothing and little caps instead of hair.

No festival of innovations such as is Milan, but then no one would have expected that. All the same, the imm cologne seems to have steadied up despite the crisis. A tour with some of the most interesting company presentations and products.

Even though overall there was a lack of intellectual sparkle and aesthetic flair, the atmosphere in Cologne was astonishingly upbeat. So is imm cologne in the process of consolidating? What are its prospects for the future?

Despite the difficult economic situation, the world's leading textiles trade fair, the Heimtextil in Frankfurt, held steady this year. The focus was less on spectacular innovations and more on strengthening the core business, with a few exceptions, of course.

For Vorwerk Carpets the architect Hadi Teherani creates the new design tile collection „Scale" with visitors to the Passagen program accompanying Cologne furniture fair invited to try out the tiles.

A great many trade fairs and design events await us in the next four months. Stylepark proudly presents the most important among them.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Italian oil company Agip came up with the idea of linking gas station architecture to the company's corporate identity. An exhibition at Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt presents Italy's gas station architecture during the economic recovery of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The imm cologne is held at the beginning of each year. Below you will find a list of the most interesting exhibitors in Cologne.

It is January again and so the venue is Cologne for "imm cologne" and "Passagen". The aim behind the slogan "Creating Spaces" is to breathe new life into a trade fair that in the last few years has become somewhat sluggish and, with the presence of "manufacturers with an affinity for design", to demonstrate a clear market focus. Will this work?

Textiles, and that includes high-tech membranes and foils, have been increasingly gaining significance in contemporary architecture. In "Textile Architecture" Sylvie Krüger presents the most important applications.

In the form of the "Fortune Factory" in Erbach in the Odenwald forest, Koziol recently opened a corporate museum that outlines the company's 80-year-plus history, from its origins as ivory carvers through to the design-keen manufacturer of plastic products.

Many things are different in America. Design, for example. Which is supposed to be good, cheap and something for John Doe. As can be seen from the New York exhibition "Design USA. Contemporary Innovation" that presents the winners of the National Design Award.

In Miami's Viceroy Hotel Philippe Starck has created a spa that flummoxed anyone expecting the reduced Zen aesthetics of many wellness interiors.

TEN! That would be more fitting for the decade and the coming new year. And back with Jim Henson's great numbers films. In our case the special focus is on the number TEN.

The Boston City Hall is one of the most controversial examples of American Brutalism. Once celebrated as avant-garde, today it gets greeted only with scorn - and is gradually falling apart.

Driven by creativity and shaken by diamond fever, Spanish designer Jaime Hayon created the concept for the Kuwait store for the jewelry label "Octium".

Experiments with materials, poetry and diversity are typical for the work of Atelier Oï. Projects for all over the world evolve at their new base, a former motel in La Neuveville.

Ströhmann Steinkult, a company based in Central Germany, devotes itself to experimenting with stone, especially with stone surfaces. What they achieve by combining the effects of materials, shapes and light is quite astonishing.

The world is so full of useful things that they easily escape our notice. Konstantin Grcic's current exhibition "Design Real" at London's Serpentine Gallery directs our attention in innovative and insightful fashion at a particularly intriguing corner of the vast realm of the useful, one where technical innovation and iconic power are held in artful balance.

The current Stylepark Magazine for Product Culture is devoted to the topic of color and how color is used in the fields of design, architecture and material.

A visit to Tecta in Lauenförde is like an excursion into a different, better world. There, managing director Axel Bruchhäuser has created a cosmos where the Bauhaus and international post-war architects and artists enter into a fantastic symbiosis.

Shop window decoration by artists and designers have a long-standing tradition. Now Tokujin Yoshioka has created an installation for Maison Hermès in Tokyo that plays superbly with the power of images.

In Dallas, too, business yearns for culture. A theater designed by Rem Kohlhaas and an opera house created by Norman Foster are supposed to help give the city of oil a makeover.

The company Wogg focuses consistently on continuity and new technologies. Sandra Hofmeister talks to Mark Werder, manager of the Swiss furniture company, about roll-front systems, precision perfection and the playful use with unusual materials.

Hansandfranz is a young Munich design company which first took the international limelight when it participated in the Milan Furniture Fair in 2007. The names of the two designers who founded the studio, however, are neither Hans nor Franz.

Detroit, the very name stands for cutting-edge industrial architecture. America's very first car factory was built her, a concrete frame structure, and it was here that Albert Kahn, the "builder of Detroit", created the Highland Park factory for the Ford "Model T", which first rolled off the production line in 1908. In a city whose future seems to be behind it, what is happening to the built monuments of the industrial revolution fuelled by automobile construction?

Now that both Chrysler and General Motors have hit the wall America's auto industry seeks to reinvent itself. In Detroit, which is still a great if increasingly pale showroom of what was once world-famous auto-architecture, no one has stopped believing in the future of the US automobile.

There's no escaping the impression that designers, engineers and ad men like to be seen as artists. Yet experience shows that art does not sit easy with the advertising world, which rarely produces anything other than bland me-too's.

Taken by surprise in the current crisis, the automobile industry now seems to be rushing towards an ecological future wearing seven league boots. But where is this future to be found? Does part of it perhaps not lie in the simplicity of its European past?

Will the good old gas station soon become extinct?