Wonder Book by IFDM is a publication – print & digital – published four times a year, a retrospective of interior design and architecture projects from around the world. In this new issue, we chronicle spaces and buildings from Norway, China, Sweden, Spain, Italy, France, the U.S. (and the list goes on) for 192 pages, chronicling the evolution of creative thinking and taste through images, text and interviews. With a focus on the relationship between art and decoration, supported by three important voices.
Architecture as storytelling
by Ruben Modigliani – Editor-in-Chief
Those who design a building – in terms of both structure and furnishings – do more than arrange volumes and materials in space. Designing a space for human activity also means thinking about what will happen inside and outside of it. In other words, designing a place presupposes imagining how it will be used from the outset.
This applies to all places, especially public ones, where providing explicit or subliminal guidelines to frequenters is a necessity. In recent years, this aspect of design has changed significantly, especially in areas where the emotional component matters. The collective obsession with social media led to a focus on the photogenicity of spaces (the Instagram effect), resulting in the creation of spaces that are divorced from context or function. Today, however, there is a growing interest in creating multifaceted experiences where each element complements the others. These are meaningful worlds that induce users to identify with the places where they are. This is where the role of the designer expands, as their scope broadens to encompass an entire lifestyle.
Any architecture has the potential to influence the behavior of those who use it. For example, it comes naturally to lower one’s tone of voice in a religious building. As Alessandra Bergamini notes in her editorial, some of the spaces presented in this issue of Wonder resemble movie sets. In a movie, one acts according to a script. Designing an environment means constructing a story and connecting with those who will experience it – one of the most profound and fascinating aspects of the architectural profession.
Carnet de voyages
by Alessandra Bergamini – Deputy Editor of .Wonder Book
The collection of projects proposed in this Wonder Book Summer 2025 forms an imaginary cultural puzzle spread across Europe and the Middle East, a dynamic, three-dimensional journey: through diverse geographies from the city to the desert, in space, encompassing living, work, culture, and hospitality, and also in time, understood as a past that is still current and updated, as a present that dialogues with history and memory.
For example, in Philippe Starck‘s project for the Brach Madrid, the inspiration is the Spain of the 1920s, or in that of the Finnish firms Arkkitehdit NRT and Fyra for the ‘contemporary’ version of Finlandia Hall, Alvar Aalto‘s masterpiece from the late 1960s, which has been carefully restored, in its architectural structure and furnishings. Or again, in the regeneration of the nineteenth-century Passage du Nord in Brussels, which has become a modern place of ‘co-living’, and in the restoration of the Roman Palazzo Talìa, a building originally erected in the sixteenth century that has recently been transformed into a refined Small Luxury Hotels of The World.
A Wonder Book like a travel journal among architectures that span different eras and settings, where every material and every object means something, as in the experimental Golden Box house by the AMAA studio, which references masters such as Prouvé, Le Corbusier, Perriand, and Michelucci, or again in the retreat on the Chiemsee designed by Thun & Partners, whose starting point is the traditional typology of the Bavarian court farmhouse. The journey becomes real with the ‘resurrected’ Orient Express La Dolce Vita, the 5-star train that offers luxury and slowness in Italy with a setting that in my imagination immediately becomes a cinematic ‘set’. A travel journal that is a written record of a journey, in this case design-related and designed, but also a play of the imagination in a series of almost filmic settings. Furthermore, the architect of the Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab in Dubai, Shaun Killa, would see his hotel as the perfect set for another episode of the James Bond series.
