In collaboration with Cadillac, we travel to Istanbul to speak with Alex Varlik, founder of Georges, a boutique hotel housed in the city’s most historic building in the Galata district.

An elegant black ‘K’ marks the entrance to the small Beirut-based office of product design company Kashida. Set up by Lebanese graphic design graduates Mirna Hamady and Elie Abou Jamra, their modest office in the center of Hamra is the headquarters for a product design and furniture line that ships all across the region

Seated around one big desk in her modest office studio in Madinat Al Sultan Qaboos in Muscat, Nadia Maqbool and her staff of nine animatedly bounce off ideas for future designs among each other.

A little known law that requires all newly built museums in Italy to allocate a percentage of their budget to a public sculpture led to the construction of a remarkable building in Port Sudan two years ago. Visual artist Massimo Grimaldi entered a sculpture competition for the newly built National Museum of the 21st Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome with a novel concept. In a break from tradition, he suggested that the prize money be used to build a clinic in Sudan and its progress screened onto the exterior walls of the museum.

In collaboration with Cadillac, we travel to Cairo to speak with the founders of Studio Zafir.

Right in the heart of Riyadh, a small group of fashionable young Saudis, laden with shopping bags, quickly glance up with intrigue at the striking black and white Arabic letters that spell ‘alāan’ (‘now’) above the entrance of a sleek yet beautifully crafted ultra-modern building. They hurriedly walk on by towards more designer stores before disappearing into the city’s bright lights; the opportunity to experience something new at this cultural addition to the staunchly conservative capital has passed them by.

When Fariborz Mohebati left his native Tehran on a leisure trip to Europe, he could not imagine the path his life would take. But in 1980, when he and his family were in Germany, the Iran-Iraq war broke out at home and they were left stranded on the continent. Unable to return, his family went to England, where a young Mohebati went to school and fostered dreams of travelling the world

In his landmark work, A Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander spells out a vision for the future of architecture. In it, he states, there is a DNA to all buildings that can be identified and recreated in a new form by simply following their mathematical dimensions.

Although most awards and prizes bestowed upon artists in the creative world focus on financial benefits, one unique accolade is still committed to the present – 30 years after inception. The Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year award selects, recognises and lends support to upcoming, promising, international talent every year

Oddly reminiscent of the skyline of Dubai, the peaks and troughs of the red block shapes on the bar graph are punctuated in the centre by one spike, soaring and towering above the rest. Except unlike the Burj Khalifa, which is a celebration of engineering accomplishments and a symbol of national pride, this soaring statistic represents violence and pain – the over 1300 Palestinians who died between December 2008 and February 2009. The surge is sharply contrasted with a mirror graph running beneath to illustrate the number of Israelis killed during the same time