Sterling Ruby is a one-man Bauhaus. Based in Los Angeles, he maintains an artistic practice in a range of media: from painting and sculpture to collage, from photography and cera­mics to, most recently, clothing and interior design. From his studio – one of the city’s largest – emerge objects that seem to be fragmented ruins of the future, extracted from another world. more – ‘2Traps Supermax’

He is the last Parisian supermodernist. He built floors as ramps and supermarkets that look like cliffs. He was celebrated for his domestic landscapes and hated for his nuclear power plants. It's time to rediscover Claude Parent. more – ‘The Supermodernist. Architect CLAUDE PARENT’

An accidental expert on oil and immigration, our Iranian, Texas-born, Moscow-based contributing editor discusses the saving graces of the Lone Star State. more – ‘Texas: It’s bigger than France’

How a failed, technologically unsavvy illustrator from Philly built the world’s only Expressionist outhouse and became America’s most inconspicuous “architect’s architect.” more – ‘Pennsylvania Modern’

The artist Francesco Vezzoli ­recently had an epiphany. It was not the result of a ­spiritual journey or the discovery of a new author – Vezzoli had his revelation at PLASTIC, a disco heaven in Milan where the rules of club culture are upended and renewed. When he told us that the legendary institution was on the verge of closing, we knew what needed to be done: a series of ­embroidered record covers, dedicated to the Plastic Playlist, by Vezzoli for 032c. In addition, Carlo Antonelli – Editor-in-Chief at Rolling Stone Italy and film producer – sits down with the artist for a conversation that reveals the alchemical function of the nightclub: a place for dancing and ­discourse, now as much as ever. more – ‘FRANCESCO VEZZOLI: Plastic, Saturday Night, Milan’

Brazil's Megalopolis makes Old World urbanism, nightlife and runways look ... small. more – ‘The New Paulista Movement’

They are the editors of a very different city guide. They write about cityness, about ­Africanness, future, and about an Afro­politan nation. They see a very different map, ­­they tell you very different things. Things you never heard about Africa. Things you never heard about the US or Brazil either. Now they research the traces of the poor through the city. Through Johannesburg. Through the Elusive Metropolis. This is the title of their book. They are the It Couple of ­postcolonial thinking. They are SARAH NUTTALL and ACHILLE MBEMBE. more – ‘Welcome to Futureburg’

RAY KURZWEIL is an American scientist, health guru and futurologist. He is known for his invention of the flatbed scanner, for the 200 pills he eats every day to prolong his life, and above all for “The Singularity is Near,” a bold and controversial prediction of a not-too-distant future in which artificial intelligence will overtake the human brain in processing power, leading to a merging of man and machine, and an irreversible transformation of our being in the world. BJARKE INGELS is a precocious Danish architect. Six years ago, aged 30, he won the Golden Lion in Venice with his then partner Julien de Smedt. Shortly after, he opened his own office, BIG, in Copenhagen, and more recently in New York, and published his architectural manifesto “Yes is More” in comic book form. Ingels has since taught at Harvard and Columbia, and is currently working on buildings in Mexico, Azerbaijan and China, where BIG was responsible for the Danish Pavilion in Shanghai’s EXPO 2010. The building does justice to the mantra “Better city – better life” in the form of a giant bicycle loop, at the heart of which the little Mermaid of Copenhagen presides over a pool of water taken from the Danish capital’s harbor. Ingels founds his work on a utopian spirit not seen since the decades immediately following the last world war. Yet he is determined not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors. One of the strategies of his “pragmatic utopian architecture” is not to rely on ideologies, but simply on the best available research. Frustrated with the timid and backward-facing spirit of contemporary architecture and urbanism, Ingels turns outside of his own field for hints of what the future – as it is being built today – might look like. Nobody offered a vision as simultaneously daring, methodical and researched as Ray Kurzweil. more – ‘Singularity is plural: The Optimism of BJARKE INGELS and RAY KURZWEIL’

David Simon (b. 1960) accomplished the unlikely feat of captivating both West ­Baltimore bruisers and The New Yorker subscribers for an hour a week, over the course of six years. Simon created, wrote, and produce The Wire, which aired on HBO from 2002–2008, and whose acclaim has garnered the former police reporter a repu­tation uncommon among even the most lauded of screenwriters. What starts out feeling like a cop show (and not a particularly stirring one) along the lines of ­Simon’s previous small-screen gig, NYPD Blue, pans out into a captivating social ­re­­­­alist panorama of metropolitan Balti­more, an experiment in unhurried story­telling narrated through the interwoven lives and deaths of the city’s most powerful and most inured citizens. Television, according to Simon, is a platform for discourse. more – ‘Salty, Litigious, Iconoclastic: DAVID SIMON on TV as discourse’

France’s MICHEL SERRES is, true to French form, a philosopher as ­influential as he is controversial. Here the originality of his thought shines through our conversation on parallel ruptures in science and philosophy, and the conceptual ­geographies of Berlin. more – ‘The Neolithic Age is over!’

"While the architectural field has changed more in the last 30 years than in the previous 3,000 - thanks to the rapid acceleration of globalization and the convulsions of the market economy - architectural education has mostly failed to keep pace. The Strelka Institute proposes a different way of looking at architecture: not only for the general improvement of design, but with the intention of introducing research as the most essential basis of architectural education." (From the program description of the Strelka Institute). This conversation traces the movements of this project from Rem Koolhaas's (b. 1944) own education at the Architectural Association in London in the late 1960s to his Office for Metropolitan Architecture OMA and its counterpart AMO, which developed Strelka as a non-profit, independent, experimental space for new ways of learning. more – ‘Consistent Modesty. REM KOOLHAAS on the new Strelka Institute in Moscow’

Covered in mould. On alternative forms of freedom and five years of household possessions in China’s #3 more – ‘A Postcard From Guangzhou’

In 20 years, ARC'TERYX took outdoor clothing to an extreme level of perfection, setting the golden standard for an entire industry. With VEILANCE, a fashion-oriented line created in 2009, the company from Vancouver is bringing its advanced brand of performance to the city. Is menswear ready? Designer CONROY NACHTIGALL is in charge of the task. more – ‘Archetype’

When science fiction writers Ann and John VanderMeer in The New Weird Anthology declared the New Weird dead – “Long live the Next Weird!” – they effectively lynched their own genus. They also failed to explain how the incoming branch of genre fiction would be distinguishable from its predecessors. Two years on and still no answer. The New Weird in literary terms combines classic science-fiction, fantasy, and horror pulp, projected onto a banal everyday setting. This fictional environment felt simultaneously recognisable and deeply unfamiliar. The fictive vacuum of the Next Weird is now occupied by designers and thinkers whose work adopts the same ethos. Their practice is rooted in the crosshatching of mundanity with macabre exaggeration. The New Weird may have died between the covers, but the genre lives on in a world that it unwittingly inspired. more – ‘The Next Weird’