The Little Car Company makes scaled-down replicas of Ferraris and Bentleys that retail for six figures. But their target audience is larger than you’d think

By Jonathan Margolis

If you are looking to buy a ride-on, electric-powered car for a lucky small person in your life, there are plenty of pretty fancy options for under $300. Less than $200 will buy a drivable mini Maserati GranCabrio with working lights, gears, and a horn.

Go upmarket to really spoil a child, and Bloomingdale’s will speed over a Freddo Lamborghini Aventador for around $2,300.

But if you want to go full indulgent parent, why not shift up a gear—or several—and order a two-thirds-size replica Ferrari Testa Rossa, licensed by the Italian car-maker and hand-built near Oxford, England, for $156,000?

The Little Car Company, a start-up that builds the ultimate READ ON

Vishaan Chakrabarti’s reimagining of the old Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn is the building New York didn’t know it needed

By Paul Goldberger

By some measures, the reconstruction of the old Domino Sugar refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront makes no sense at all. It was expensive to build. It contains not a single apartment, let alone anything affordable that might ameliorate New York City’s housing crisis. And it is not a cultural facility, which is what so many enormous and obsolete industrial structures of landmark quality end up becoming these days, in the manner of the Tate Modern, in London, or Dia Beacon, upstate, or Mass MoCA, in the Berkshires. The just completed Refinery at Domino is now, of all things, an office building, which you would think is the last thing the city needs today, considering that around 20 percent of its office space is currently vacant. READ ON

Melbourne-based filmmaker and artist Daniel Agdag’s medium of choice is cardboard, and his sculptures are sure to shock and delight

By Elena Clavarino

Daniel Agdag creates worlds out of cardboard. Using glue and a scalpel, the filmmaker and artist from Melbourne, Australia, fashions intricate miniatures of amusement parks, houses, hot-air balloons, and public buildings.

“Cardboard gave me means to realize ideas I had only imagined previously,” Agdag told The Guardian. “The pieces are like mathematical problems, which I work through as I create them, decoding the world around me.”

Agdag recalls his first sculpture, a life-size spaceship, which he began building as a teenager in the 90s. The project took him a total of eight years, and he took a break from all sculpture during university, receiving a fine-arts degree at the Victoria College of the Arts. READ ON

In a world where internal-combustion engines are becoming untenable, and battery electric vehicles are not yet entirely practical, makers such as Toyota, Volvo, and BMW are embracing a hybrid approach

By Jamie Kitman

Buying a car was hard enough when you only had to choose between compact, intermediate, and full-size models. Today’s shoppers have to select from a shrinking assortment of passenger cars and a surging tide of S.U.V.’s in sizes large, extra-large, and whatever’s bigger than that—now they’re also confronted with a confounding additional question: What sort of motor (or motors) do they want hauling them and their loved ones around?

And the nominees are: gas (or I.C.E., as we say in the trade, for internal-combustion engine); hybrid (two motors—one I.C.E., one electric—working in tandem); or B.E.V., for battery electric vehicle, READ ON

The sixth-generation heir to Vienna’s last remaining silver manufacturer is innovating and sticking to tradition in equal measure

By Madeline Weinfield

It was winter when I first met Jean-Paul Vaugoin, and Vienna was glistening in its pearly gray beauty, a light that had the same silver shimmer as the pieces lining his shop, Jarosinski & Vaugoin.

In the hip neighborhood of Neubau, surrounded by modern boutiques, galleries, and wine bars, the shop, with its early-20th-century storefront and curling typography, stands as a testament to the city’s enduring love affair with hand-rendered beauty. It opened in 1847 and has been on the same street—Zieglergasse—since 1903, when the Vaugoin family merged its business with that of the Jarosinski family. Today, the shop is as recognizable a landmark in the seventh district as the Staatsoper is in the first. READ ON

At 87, the architect Norman Foster has survived cancer and a heart attack. Now he is being honored with a new retrospective and is planning homes in outer space

By Deyan Sudjic

Norman Foster has nothing left to prove. He has designed every conceivable type of building, from the glass pyramid that houses Kazakhstan’s Palace of Peace and Reconciliation to a winsome dome of a dog kennel made of cherry wood. His skyscrapers tower over Shenzhen. He is building in Mumbai and Seoul — and sleek Apple stores adorn city centers across the globe.

In London he reshaped Wembley Stadium, the British Museum and Trafalgar Square. He built the Gherkin and City Hall and even came up with an affordable transparent pop-up parliament to be used while the Palace of Westminster is being fixed — although he has yet to convince the government that it will work. READ ON

Even after an explosion destroyed their Beirut studio, the young design duo is building bespoke furniture that’s captured the art world’s attention

By Elena Clavarino

Designers David Raffoul and Nicolas Moussallem first met in 2006, at the McDonald’s across the street from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, in Beirut, where they were design students. At the time, they couldn’t have imagined that by their early 30s they would redesign the Casa di Fantasia, the Surrealist Milanese apartment that famed architect Gio Ponti created for the Lucano family in 1951.

Since the duo started their design studio, David/Nicolas, in 2011, they’ve been busy. In 2014, when they were just 26, The New York Times named them Milan Design Week’s breakout stars. Today, at 35, they’re represented by the cutting-edge Carpenters Workshop Gallery. They’ve also exhibited furniture at the Park Avenue Armory and designed Moooi carpets, plasterwork for CC-Tapis, and dinnerware for Vista Alegre. READ ON

A new coffee-table book celebrates 50 years of Pentagram, the world’s largest independent design consultancy

By Jim Kelly

There are design studios, and then there is Pentagram. It’s nearly impossible to believe that the firm was created just over 50 years ago, partly because design firms usually do not outlast their founders (there were five of them, and it started in London) but mostly because its ongoing work remains so fresh and innovative.

There are now more than 20 partners in four cities (London, New York, Berlin, and Austin), but there is no president and no demand from on high to do something no one wants to do. From company logos to magazine READ ON

When it comes to Ferraris, the best time to buy is always now

By Jamie Kitman

Italy’s Ferrari has been synonymous with speed, beauty, luxury, and punishing expense for so long that it’s hard to believe that when former race-car driver Enzo Ferrari founded the company (and named it after himself), in 1947, the cars wouldn’t be taken seriously as collectibles for decades. Indeed, the very first book on Ferrari’s glorious mechanical legacy, detailing what was already a fast-moving parade of jaw-dropping offerings, wouldn’t be written until 1968. And even then, rare, exotic Ferraris—machines that now sell for tens of millions of dollars—sold secondhand in the low, single-digit thousands.

But classic-car values have climbed to READ ON

Thierry Barbier-Mueller’s collection of more than 650 chairs, by designers including Ron Arad and André Dubreuil, is celebrated in a dazzling coffee-table book

By Elena Clavarino

When the curator Clarisse Colliard asked the Swiss collector Thierry Barbier-Mueller, “Do you even know how many chairs you have?,” he didn’t have an answer. When she told him he had more than 300, Barbier-Mueller was stunned. He had never counted his chairs—because he hadn’t set out to build a collection.

Barbier-Mueller died of a heart attack on January 24, at age 62. His chair collection, which now comprises more than 650 pieces, is one of the world’s largest.

Collecting ran in Barbier-Mueller’s blood. In 1908, his great-aunt Gertrud Müller was still a minor when she acquired Vincent van Gogh’s controversial READ ON

Over the course of the 20th century, the Italian designer and architect Aldo Rossi left his mark on everything from coffeepots to Venice’s La Fenice opera house. His catalogue raisonné pays homage to a postmodern visionary

By Elena Clavarino

During the 1980 Venice Biennale, a cuboid building topped with an octagonal tower sat ominously on the water in front of the Punta della Dogana. The wooden structure, called Teatro del Mondo (Theater of the World), had been positioned on a barge by cranes. Two hundred and fifty people could fit into the interior of the floating theater, which drifted past the city’s monuments. READ ON