Amazing Things Architects Make When They Aren’t Architecting

Video game designers create worlds, which makes the medium a natural for architects. You'll find their work in blockbuster titles like Grand Theft Auto and LA Noire, and a growing number of them are developing their own games. *Block'hood by *Jose Sanchez riffs on Sim City and *Minecraft *to create sustainable cities using ecological designs like windmills, living rooftops, and solar panels.

Debi van Zyl started designing oddly adorable stuffed beasts in 2006. Her hand-knitted wool beasts are all the more lovable because of their incredible strangeness. Are they cuddly aliens? Colorful octopi? Hammerhead sharks? Frogs? Picasso-inspired nightmares? Yes. She’s also created larger beast pillows and, of course, a beast coloring book.

LA architects Ball-Nogues have made their name creating eclectic, sculpturally-complex sculptures and pavilions around the world. Pulp Pavilion, a series of intertwined, tree-like forms made of cured paper pulp, soared over Coachella in 2015.

Architecture and fashion share a focus on structure, proportion, and style, so it's only natural that an architect like Julia Koerner would be a natural at designing clothing. Her 3D-printed clothing and collaborations with haute couture designers weave fabric, plastic, and silicon to create ornate, sexy styles that bring to mind flora and fauna. Several works incorporate scanned natural artifacts, like kelp found on the beach in Malibu for Kelp Jacket.

Natasha Case and Freya Estreller love ice cream as much as they love architecture, and combined the two in Coolhaus. Everything they do combines a delicious flavor with a famous architect to create hilarious puns like Bananas Norman Foster and Frank Behry. They've created an empire of ice cream, with trucks, storefronts, books, merchandising, and nationwide distribution. "Architecture is very much about creativity and almost art---but within constraints; I really believe entrepreneurship and doing business successfully is just like that," says Case.

Anonymous Architects have taken wallpaper to a new level with Peeling, a line that appears to be, yes, peeling but in a digital, artsy way. Anonymous founder Simon Storey likens the paper to an archaeological discovery where layers of history have been carefully removed to discover what lies beneath. "The contrast between the ephemeral nature of trendy decoration and the permanence of the architecture is the lasting memory," he says.

Architects love lamps almost as much as they love chairs, and they're often reimagining the form. Enter the Dragon by the architecture firm Bureau V features riotous white neon wrapped around an angular slab of black marble. Designer Peter Zuspan wanted to humble some common symbols of wealth---marble, chandeliers---by surrounding them with a a prosaic, commercial material.

Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn loves sailing, and saw his passion for the sport as an opportunity to work with composite materials. He designed a 42-foot carbon fiber trimaran, and enjoyed it so much he plans to make a business of it. “I used to think that aerospace was a great place to focus my research, but it became clear that racing boats were more interesting and more affordable,” says Lynn.

After creating stunning clothing, furniture, and accessories, architect Elena Manferdini decided to give carpets a try. Her colorful Urban Fabric rugs, made with hand-woven New Zealand wool, recall subway maps or urban grids. She adapted them from a series of abstract drawings, inspired by the work of famed Modernist architect Mies van der Rohe, she created for her Art Institute of Chicago exhibition Building Portraits.

The New York architecture firm Aranda Lasch worked with Native American artist Terrol Dew Johnson to create *Meeting the Clouds Half Way, *a series of elegant coiled and woven structures that combine traditional materials like straw, grass, steel, copper, and horsehair with contemporary techniques like CNC milling. "This kind of deep and ancient legacy of design seemed like something that could really reinvigorate the discipline of architecture and contemporary design," says Aranda Lasch principal Chris Lasch.