With a cartoonish, youthful and playful aesthetic, big buttoned Boop furniture has really made its mark on modern home furnishing and interior design. Designed by Note Design Studio, the Boop collection combines a simple and minimalist style with bold, solid colours, rounded silhouettes and big buttons that oozes an ambience of comfort and fun.

The collection includes a swivel chair, armchair and settee and is not only the perfect décor for the light summer months but could also be a fantastic way to brighten up those long and dark winter evenings.

Note Design Studio is a Swedish design company who first designed the Boop furniture as part of the company’s Margin Notes collection. The Boop family was developed further by Note Design Studio which dressed the furniture in monochrome suits and synchronised the colour of the upholstery so that it would brighten even the dingiest of living rooms.

The Boop collection is the latest of a string of ‘fun and playful’ furniture to arriving on the design scene.

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Modern architecture is increasingly pushing technological and design boundaries with some truly tremendous and remarkable buildings being erected around the world.

Here are three of the most extraordinary and spectacular modern architectural constructions from around the globe.

Toren, Brooklyn, New York

A feature about the world’s most stunning architecture could not be complete without including a building in New York. Representing a giant Cubist structure, Toren comprises of a mass of irregular aluminium striping alternating with light and dark toned pieces of glass. According to architect Peter Fajak who designed Toren alongside Skidmore, Ownings & Merril partner Rodger Duffy, the building’s dimpled glass panels that are made up of more than 200 different shapes, was inspired by myrtle trees.

Guangzhou Opera House, Guangdong, China

Resembling – according to its architect Zaha Hadid – “pebbles in a stream smoothed by erosion”, the Guangzhou Opera House will take some beating when it comes to unique and breath-taking architectural design.

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Cory Arcangel is a leading digital artist who lives and works in New York. The American artist’s work uniquely encapsulates the relationship between culture and technology by using various artistic forms including sculpture, drawing, photographs and video.

Arcangel became best-known was for his video game ROM hacks, the process of modifying a video game ROM image to alter the game’s graphics, dialogue and levels in order that new life is breathed into old games.

Arcangel’s fascinating depictions of the modern digital era has seen his work appear in many museums exhibitions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Whitney Museum in New York, as well as the New Museum also in New York.

The digital artist’s latest exhibition titled “Pro Tools” is being held at the Whitney Museum.

Pro Tools is aimed at exploring the idea of “product demonstrations”, of which all the work featured in the exhibition have been created by Arcangel using technological tools with a specific emphasis on mixing and matching both amateur and professional technological tools.

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San Francisco’s Pier 70 has for decades been lined with derelict and rundown warehouses, a blatant reminder of the city’s industrial past and a makeover is well overdue.

In light of the much-needed reconstruction of Pier 70, earlier this year, the port of San Francisco announced that it has selected developers, Forest City Enterprises, to embark on designing and re-constructing the former shipbuilding site.

Four different companies, including the architectural resources Group, Evan Rose, the California subsidiary of Cleveland-based Forest City and Forest City Enterprises, competed to be given the opportunity to redesign a site that is brimming with potential to be something outstanding.

Talking about the 25-acre former shipbuilding facility, Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of SPUR, an urban think-tank in San Francisco said:

“It’s a really extraordinary site but also an incredibly difficult site. It’s very exciting to have a serious proposal, developer, and process moving forward on this one.”

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Tax invoices have long been the bane of employers’ lives, with a tendency for throwing them in the shredder being preferable to letting the dreaded tax receipts clog up your desk’s drawers.

Well flinch no more at the arrival of the stomach-lurching tax invoice arriving on your doorstep, as artist Nava Lubelski has created a method of transforming what has to be one of the most despised correspondence into a piece of art.

In tearing these rampantly feared pieces of paper into thin strips, Nava Lubelski then rolls the defaced official letters very tightly into tiny coils, before cluing literally hundreds of them into intricate arrangements.

The end result of the artist’s creative vision to what has long been one of the most dreaded arrivals of the business year is simply fantastic.

Although it is not only tax invoices that are used to make up Nava Lubelski’s remarkable cellular sculptures, as other ‘unfavourable’ postal correspondence, such as rejection letters and tax files are shredded and coiled to create the artist’s unique organic paper structures.

The sculptures are reminiscent of tree cross-sections and, as the cellular coils spiral outward, it mimics biological matter and growth, and as they are glued together into flat rounds, the sculpture suggests disease and lichen – a stark reminder of manmade corruption on the environment.

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