Advertise on podcast: Blueprint

Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier are considered titans of the modern movement but in this week's Iconic Designs, Colin Bisset examines the contribution that women made to some of their most famous designs. It’s only been recently acknowledged that Lilly Reich was behind much of Mies’s furniture, and Charlotte Perriand behind all of Le Corbusier’s.  

In this week's Garden Rudimental, Paul and Jonathan stroll through Stonefields, one of Victoria's most beautiful country gardens where exotics and native plants merge to create a definitive style of Australian garden..

Cookbooks aren't just a bunch of recipes. They often contain insights into the political and cultural contexts of their time. Never was there a better example of this than Australia's oldest continuous community cookbook, The Barossa Cookery Book. Initially released in 1917 as a war fundraiser it's now in its 33rd edition. Sheralee Menz and Marieka Ashmore, also known as Those Barossa Girls, have begun a companion venture with The Barossa Cookery Book Project.

Hotel designer Bill Bensley lives by the motto, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. The California-born designer has studios in Bangkok and Bali, and his latest book More Escapism: Hotels, Resorts and Gardens features some of the region’s most extravagant resorts. His inspiration comes from treasures around the globe, including a 1930s Vietnamese bamboo hat, covered in pink polka dots, that provided the design spark for his Hotel de la Coupole in Vietnam. It tells a story of how the local hill tribes influenced the haute couture of Paris and includes some of his more ridiculous design ideas, including the installation of a yellow submarine in a hotel pool in Singapore which was deemed unsafe and soon after removed.

One chef, one cook, one home kitchen. There's nothing that quite beats the decadent crunch and taste of a freshly deep-fried potato cake (or scallop).

How do you design a building to house a nation's cultural and social history? The new home of the Australian National Archives has been purpose built for this extremely demanding role. With enough shelving to stretch from Canberra to Cooma the purpose-built facility is environmentally controlled, environmentally friendly and energy-efficient. Jonathan Green takes a stroll through its corridors with Sean Debenham, Assistant Director Storage and Lending to check out what’s in there.

Nature-based design is becoming imperative as we search for ways to reduce our carbon emissions. Claire Beale, Executive Manager at LCI Melbourne, takes us through the Three Bs of organic design; biomorphic, biomimetic and biophilic.

Toilet, loo, powder room, the toot; no matter what you call it you use it everyday. In this week's Iconic Designs Colin Bisset casts his eye over the design evolution of the public toilet.

Ever traced your family history? Now you can do the same with your home. Dr Christine Whybrew of Heritage NZ has started giving How to Research Your House seminars so folks can uncover the history of their house.

In the fashion industry and the corporate world, you’d be hard-pressed to find as influential a figure as Anna Wintour.Journalist Amy Odell discusses her biography of the fashion industry's most powerful influencer.

Via their Instagram page Design.Emergency Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli have brought designers together to tackle some of the worlds intractable problems.

Imagine the architect of your new house insisting that you build it in a style that was fashionable six hundred years ago. That's precisely what was happening in nineteenth-century Britain in what was called the Battle of the Styles. It's hard to imagine that anyone who walked past Tower House in London's Holland Park ever thought it was entirely normal, even in the 1870s when it was built. It's the work of William Burges, an architect whose output was small but significant, and it represents a high point in the Gothic Revival.