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A gazetteer of contemporary videogame architecture, a walk through the arcades of yesteryear and the story of how a humble 8-bit computer helped change the computing landscape of a whole country are the subjects of these three new books.

Videogame Architecture

Back in 2024, Thames & Hudson published the Videogame Atlas, one of the first monographs to explore the new digital realms of gaming in a more in-depth, scholarly fashion. Now the company is publishing Videogame Architecture, a new tome from the same team that wants to do the same for the genre’s more fantastical cities and structures.

Arranged as a series of chapters covering some of the key video game releases of the past two decades, including Bioshock, Half-Life 2 and Disco Elysium and many more. To the initiated, these are games characterised by their environments – towering future cities, run-down dystopias or cyberpunk visions.

Videogame Architecture traces the origins and reference material used for all these titles and more, exploring the ways in which architectural form and detail is used to build atmosphere and place, as well as a sense of solidity and realism.

Videogame Architecture: Building Virtual Spaces, Luke Caspar Pearson, Sandra Youkhana, $65, Thames & Hudson, ThamesandHudsonUSA.com, @ThamesandHudson

The Arcade 1971–1999

Subtitled The Stories Behind Classic Coin-Ops, Told by Their Creators, Paul Drury’s new monograph delves into the industry’s rich history and even richer mythology, back when arcade games could still be the creation of a single person not a vast team, and art direction relied on graph paper and felt tip pens.

Published by Bitmap Books, which has made itself a key player in the niche world of video game history and art, The Arcade looks at the first three decades of digital game design, starting with the realm of the arcade and finishing up with the home computer, covering 120 titles in all. With over 400 pages of imagery, interviews and insights, it’s a dive back into a world when pixels could still be trusted.

The Arcade 1971-1999, Paul Drury, £34.99 / $48.00 / €41.95, Bitmap Books, BitmapBooks.com, @BitmapBooks

The Rubber-Keyed Wonder

Another exercise in 8-bit nostalgia, The Rubber-Keyed Wonder tells the story of one very specific early home computer, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Currently in the planning stage and seeking nostalgia-filled gamers to help Kickstart the project, the plan is for this 200+ page history of Sir Clive Sinclair’s influential machine to appear next year in time for its 45th anniversary.

The computer itself birthed a thriving scene of gaming and programming, with aficionados still creating content for it right up to the present day. Sold around the world, illegally cloned behind the Iron Curtain, and many people’s first encounter with any kind of computer, the Spectrum was a cultural phenomenon. It’s even being re-booted as the ZX Spectrum Next.

The Rubber-Keyed Wonder: The Sinclair ZX Spectrum Story Official Companion Book, support at Kickstarter.com, Golden-Slumbers.co.uk

During their tenure at Loewe so far, the American designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez have favoured minimal, gallery-like runway sets enlivened by moments of colour and play.

Their debut, in October of last year, featured Ellsworth Kelly’s 1989 abstract masterpiece Yellow Panel with Red Curve in its entranceway (‘in [the painting] lies an optimism and spirit that we deeply identify with,’ the pair said at the time), while for their A/W 2026 show in January, a series of plushie animals sat around the yellow-floored showspace like impromptu guests. These included octopi, dogs and clams, each a work by German contemporary artist Cosima von Bonin.

This morning in Paris (2 October 2026), McCollough and Hernandez will show their latest collection within a showspace conceived by London- and Berlin-based architectural practice Casper Mueller Kneer. The runway set, which sits inside a specially constructed white box in the grounds of the medieval fortress and former royal palace Château de Vincennes, comprises a double-height circular ‘arena’ around which models will circulate and guests will sit.

The set marks the first major architectural project from the house under McCollough and Hernandez, who drafted Casper Mueller Kneer to create a ‘three-dimensional space’ somewhere between ‘an arena, a theatre and a gallery’. Entered on two levels, the minimal, all-white design features a circular outer wall, an upper gallery and a scaffold-like construction, as well as circles of cuboid seating on the central ‘stage’.

Inspirations include the Anatomical Theatre in Padua, the Globe in London, and La Scala Opera House in Milan, as well as Detroit’s gasometer. ‘It evokes spectator sports, ritual dramas, and performance, centring the unique energy of a shared, lived human experience,’ describes the house.

Central to the design was the idea of ‘intensity and proximity’, say the architects, who conceived the ‘arena’ in such a way that it could bring the most guests together in a ‘relatively contained’ space. Its design, with models circulating the arena’s two floors, also allows attendees to view McCollough and Hernandez’s collection up close.

‘We’re trying to create a space that has a definite three-dimensional quality. Both in terms of the design, but also in terms of the viewing experience,’ say the architects. ‘You’re very close to one another. You’re very close to the collection.’

‘We wanted to build a show space that explored the unique energy of a stadium, arena, or theatre,’ add McCollough and Hernandez. ‘The anticipation, the focus, the shared emotion – that electric charge in the air that everyone can feel. There’s something so real and immediate in those spaces, a sense of presence and proximity that felt very right for this collection.’

Stay tuned to wallpaper.com for more from Paris Fashion Week S/S 2027.

It is, concedes Francis Lapp, founder of Gdańsk-based Sunreef Yachts, a very James Bond kind of boat. Sunreef, better known as a maker of twin-hulled sailing yachts, has teamed up with Brabus to create a special edition of its 55-foot Ultima 55 boat, filtered through the German coachbuilder’s extreme automotive lens.

The result – the first collaboration between the two brands, with others under discussion – is very sleek, very black, with a carbon fibre exterior that’s part exposed just like a supercar. It’s a suitably gadget-laden vessel too, with platforms that extend out of the side of the boat while it’s at rest, enhancing its beam by two metres to create a beach club area, and a hidden gangway that also extends automatically at the touch of a button.

Inside there’s more of the same: an extendable and retractable carbon fibre table; sun loungers that convert into settees; a 43-inch TV that rises out of a countertop and floors accented in aluminium with illuminated Brabus logos.

‘We wanted to collaborate with a brand that has a very specific design approach and implement that right across the boat,’ says Lapp, ‘The appeal comes from the resulting look but also the engineering.’

The engineer and entrepreneur founded Sunreef in 2022 as a catamaran specialist, with shipyards in Gdańsk and the UAE, where the Ultima 55 is built. One has been sold to date with two more sales on the cards. ‘The Brabus look also fits well with what is a particularly fast boat,’ Lapp continues.

Indeed, the Brabus Ultima 55 is capable of 40 knots – unusually fast for a boat of this size - in part due to Sunreef’s advanced foiling system which lifts the vessel higher out of the water to reduce hydrodynamic drag, provide a smoother, quieter ride and improve stability. ‘It means the boat is more stable at speed, and speed is a large part of the appeal,’ Lapp continues.

Power comes from twin 725hp, six-cylinder marine engines that have modified by Brabus, renowned for their ability to upgrade and enhance high-end cars, particularly those from Mercedes-Benz.

Stability is also a key reason why clients might choose a catamaran over a mono-hulled boat, since it allows for something closer to a ‘house on the sea,’ as Lapp describes it. ‘People who want to spend a lot of time at sea want their vessel to be especially steady’.

The Brabus Ultima 55 will, it’s hoped, also extend both brands’ reach. For Brabus, it’s a gateway into the as-yet-untapped high-performance multihull category, following the smaller Shadow line that it co-developed with Axopar Boats and revealed earlier this year. For Sunreef, the venture takes the shipyard into the heart of yachting’s more luxury-forward, brand-conscious market.

‘Sunreef is known among its customers for its sustainability, those who love a sailing vessel with hybrid or electric engines,’ says Lapp. ‘But the Brabus boat is aimed at a different customer who is perhaps more passionate about cars and a certain kind of style’.

Sunreef-Yachts-Ultimate.com, @SunreefYachts, Brabus.com

The late American architect Rick Mather (1937-2013) called London home for many decades. This new monograph about his life and work charts his path towards designing some of the UK’s most significant cultural projects, although since his death his profile has remained determinedly more low-key than many of his surviving contemporaries.

Born in Portland, Mather came to the UK in 1963, working first at the firm of Lyons Israel Ellis. One of the more successful exponents of Brutalism, LIE had an impressive roster of alumni, including James Stirling, James Gowan, Alan Colquhoun, John Miller; Neave Brown and Richard MacCormac, all of whom, like Mather, went on to set up era-defining modernist-infused practices.

Mather’s own firm was started in 1973, after a hitherto little-known spell toiling in Southwark's architecture department, back in the days when councils had such a thing in house. He also worked for the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, becoming close with the organisation’s radical and influential coterie of young architects. Early projects included bookshops, homes and refurbishment works to the AA itself, along with unpublished schemes for Heaven nightclub in Charing Cross.

Mather’s commitment to modernist aesthetics was rarely tempered, but his projects were never oversized and grandiose. Instead, he worked on a succession of discretely luxurious private houses, including his own reworked Georgian townhouse in Camden with its spectacular roof garden (a lifelong passion) and the multiple award-winning Priory in Hampstead, a grand modern dwelling in the spirit of the area’s 1930s modernist villas.

In some respects, Mather’s white-walled ascetism seemed to align perfectly with the vogue for minimalism that permeated the retail and residential heart of upscale 80s and 90s London. His love of Le Corbusier’s sculptural idiosyncrasies was always in play, as were experiments in structural glass, but it was the careful and bravura fusion of the old and the new that gave his studio its most significant commissions.

Three major London works – the glass courtyards in the Wallace Collection and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, and the new quadrangle at Dulwich Picture Gallery – were all completed between 1999 and 2000, cementing a well-deserved reputation for sympathetic but dynamic updates.

Other major projects include the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, the updated Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Now and Zen, a cultish Covent Garden restaurant with a ‘dragon’ waterfall made from a cascade of glass bowls – somewhere that would have been perfectly at home in the Instagram era.

Written by the experienced architectural journalist and critic Kester Rattenbury, Rick Mather: The Complete Works is richly illustrated – Mather loved architectural draughtsmanship - and also evokes the spirit and atmosphere of 80s and 90s UK architecture culture.

Rick Mather: The Complete Works, Kester Rattenbury, Lund Humphries, £60, LundHumphries.com, RickMather.com

Spanish-Equatoguinean ceramicist Bisila Noha has been named the recipient of the Tacchini Prize, an award from the Italian furniture brand in partnership with Fondazione Officine Saffi, a non-profit dedicated to contemporary ceramics. The newly established prize celebrates the intersection of contemporary artistic research and design culture, focusing on materials as a field of research and expression.

With the prize comes an exhibition dedicated to Noha at Casa Tacchini, the brand’s apartment-turned-showroom in Milan. The show, ‘A Tactile Story’ (on until 13 November 2026), presents Noha’s sculptural, expressive ceramics among a selection of Tacchini furniture. Vessels that appear cracked and disintegrating hang from a rope attached to the ceiling; two-legged sculptures stand in an illuminated corner; a giant pot with gradated colours sits in the window.

Bisila Noha and the culture of ceramics

Born in Spain in 1988 and based in London, Noha’s star has been rising since she turned away from a career in advertising towards exploring pottery in 2016. ‘I just fell in love with it,’ she tells Wallpaper*. Since then, she has enjoyed multiple international residencies and solo exhibitions, and her work has been acquired by the V&A Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and several other cultural institutions.

She is currently an artist-in-residence at the Sarabande Foundation in London, and has work on show at the Venice Biennale and Princeton University Art Museum. In March 2026, she staged a solo show with Thrown Contemporary at OmVed Gardens in London, ‘Ile Ọkàn (House of the Soul)’.

Noha’s approach to ceramics is underpinned by deep historical and cultural research, which she has pursued at residencies in Nigeria and Senegal, in particular. ‘I thought, if I want to be fluent in clay, I need to go to the places where people have been doing this for generation after generation,’ she says, adding that she is ‘really interested’ in the history of women’s labour in relation to pottery. For Noha, the craft of ceramics is about much more than simply making beautiful objects, and is deeply connected to notions of community and feminism.

Past projects include ‘Baney Clay’, in which Noha used clay sourced from her father’s village in Equatorial Guinea, mixing it with other ingredients such as porcelain to make vessels that explored her dual identity as Spanish and Equatoguinean. ‘I wanted to develop this body of work looking at my own heritage’, she explains. The pots take on different appearances, hues and textures depending on the clay mixes chosen for each work.

‘Searching for Kouame Kakahá’ involved tracking down a potter in Ivory Coast whose work from the 1960s had inspired Noha’s own practice, as a way to counter the traditional erasure and devaluing of female potters. The vessels and sculptures Noha made in the process feature gestural scratches, openings and holes; ‘It’s the idea of unearthing myself,’ says Noha.

The exhibition ‘Ile Ọkàn (House of the Soul)’ brought together four years of work, reflecting on West African culture, ritual practices and communal making. As well as clay vessels, some of which seemed to break open and unfurl, there were stools and bronze sculptures.

‘I’ve always loved stools,’ Noha says. Those she made are small and very low to the ground, reflective of the type Noha has seen used by many women in kitchens and pottery studios, to stay close to work on the floor. Making the stools combined throwing, sculpting, hand building, and joinery; while Noha approached it through a sculptural lens, she ensured the stools were also functional. Noha, who uses some of the stools she made in her own home, is considering the possibility of getting them manufactured one day.

Her exploration of bronze began in 2022, at a residency in Benin City, where Noha discovered the importance of wax, and clay, in enabling bronze sculptures. The work she made there reflected on Benin’s rich history of lost-wax bronze casting, in which wax models encased in moulds melt away to be replaced by molten metal. Noha saw the method as a metaphor for the hidden labour of women, particularly women of colour, in society. Her new project, ‘The Lost Bronze’ – which is due to be exhibited at the 1-54 art fair in London this October – expands upon this work, exhibiting a series of vessels in unfired clay and wax.

Noha’s Sarabande residency will conclude in November, as will her Casa Tacchini show, prompting a new chapter. She plans to move to a new studio in Dalston, east London, and has an upcoming project with the Museum of Romanticism in Madrid. What drives her forward, she says, is the exploration of history, and place, through the act of making.

Casa Tacchini hosts 'A Tactile Story by Bisila Noha', on view until 13 November 2026

Casa Tacchini
Largo Treves 5,
20121 Milan

At the turn of the century, an ultra-violent Japanese film about a class of students forced to fight to the death launched teenage actor Tatsuya Fujiwara to national stardom. Today, he’s still known to many by his Battle Royale character’s name – Boy #15: Shuya Nanahara – and his face can be found in everything from gangster video games and billboard advertisements to heads of lettuce in Japanese supermarkets.

But his latest venture to London marks a return to dystopian storytelling of a decidedly different nature. On the weekend of 8-11 October 2026, he’ll play the lead in the first-ever stage adaptation of a surreal 1985 ‘cyberpunk’ novel by Norwegian Wood writer Haruki Murakami at the Barbican. End of the World and the Hard-Boiled Wonderland offers a tale of cyborgs, unicorns, and sewer monsters between a Kafkaesque Tokyo underworld and a strange, walled-off town.

And while a Fujiwara-introduced screening of Battle Royale also takes place at the venue the same weekend, the programming marks a nostalgic head-trip in more ways than one: this was the same stage on which the actor made his theatre debut 29 years ago, when he was just 15 years old. 'I’d never been abroad. I knew nothing of the world. I didn’t even have a passport,' he tells Wallpaper*. 'I didn’t really appreciate the scale of it, and how impressive it was to take a title role on stage at the Barbican – but that’s how my theatre life began.'

That 1997 Yukio Ninagawa stage production of Shintokumaru predated even his star turn in Japan’s notorious Y2K Lord of the Flies, but was no less impressive a feat. The revered theatre director, known for work of 'astonishing visual bravura' and for harmonising eastern and western traditions, said The Guardian in 2016, had plucked Fujiwara from auditions of over 5,000 hopeful youngsters to offer him the title role; a casting process that legendary crime film auteur Kinji Fukasaku would echo three years later in Battle Royale.

In Shintokumaru, Fujiwara would play an isolated youth grieving his dead mother while wrestling with a turbulent, confused attraction to his stepmother. For Battle Royale, Fujiwara cohabited with his young co-stars on the remote island where the film’s deadly school games were staged. 'These were two very different worlds,' the actor recalls, 'but the two great maestros [behind them] were similar, in a way. They’d really drive us as actors towards emotional extremes, and push you harder to give something extra. The difference was that one was in front of a camera, and the other was in front of an audience.'

He became a major screen star following Battle Royale’s release. (Manga adaptation Death Note – reimagined as a musical at the Barbican earlier this summer, and returning for another season in 2027 – was another Fujiwara-led screen smash in 2006.) And he would also return several times to the Barbican with Ninagawa in the years that followed – including for a production of Yukio Mishima’s Yorobashi in 2001, and to perform Shakespeare in 2015. The latter was a source of personal anxiety:

'To bring Hamlet from an Asian country to the homeland of Shakespeare was nerve-wracking,' he recalls. 'It’s like a British company creating a kabuki play and then bringing it to Japan.

'We’d heard scary stories about UK audiences ever since we were young,' he continues. 'That if it wasn’t good, people would stand up and leave in the middle of it… The director drove the cast really hard to be able to respond to such critical eyes on that production. We rehearsed and rehearsed to build our confidence.'

In time, the theatre would even reunite Fujiwara with his Battle Royale co-lead, Aki Maeda: she played his disillusioned schoolteacher’s long-suffering wife in a Japanese production of Chekhov’s Platonov in 2019.

With so much experience working with storytelling trailblazers, it might seem inevitable that an opportunity to engage with 'Japan’s greatest living novelist', as Barbican head of Theatre & Dance Toni Racklin puts it, would one day arise. But even so, Murakami’s cryptic 1985 dual-narrative novel seems a challenging choice.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, as it is titled in Murakami’s original novel, is the story of a human data processor who encrypts information within his own brain, and eventually finds himself at the centre of a mysterious conspiracy. As he tries to make sense of the chaos around him, he also develops a deep connection to an alternate, superficially peaceful world where his memories and individuality are gradually stripped away. Though complex, the 41-year-old text feels keenly relevant today, with themes of data-mining, surveillance, and fast-developing technologies arguably even more potent now than at the dawn of Tokyo’s technology-fuelled bubble-economy years when it was first published. But either way, most would surely agree, beneath Murakami’s intricate narratives are always much deeper and more profound preoccupations at play.

'He’s a wonderful writer and artist,' says Fujiwara. 'I’ve read his works since I was young, and there has always been something very heartwarming about them.' Part of that appeal is Murakami’s unique ability to conjure up liminality, longing, or nostalgia for 'things that were almost lost', he continues. And that effect is seemingly just as potent on the author himself: 'Murakami told me that he wrote Hard-Boiled Wonderland… so many years ago that he had forgotten about it himself,' says Fujiwara. 'And yet he came to visit the rehearsal and the show several times.'

Produced by the same entertainment company behind Fujiwara’s Ninagawa plays – as well as the theatre director’s 2015 production of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (which did not involve Fujiwara) – the Horipro stage production End of the World and the Hard-Boiled Wonderland is directed by Philippe Decouflé, a choreographer and mime artist perhaps best known for his music videos for New Order and Fine Young Cannibals. 'To adapt Murakami for the stage must have been a huge pressure for Philippe,' says Fujiwara. 'In fact, whenever Murakami came to the rehearsal, he’d say that “God is descending on us”, and we’d all get very nervous.'

Just as with his collaborations with Ninagawa, this 2026 production has been defined by long rehearsals and hard work – with the reimagining of such a rich and complex world necessitating strict discipline among the dancers and performers, says Fujiwara. But the results have already been rapturously received in Japan and in Singapore: 'Unabashedly graceful beauty… [and] surreal magic infiltrates all parts, and the result – dare this reviewer say – trumps the novel,' said The Straits Times in April. With the story’s distinct worlds depicted in black-and-white and colour, and incorporating dance choreography, shadow work, and even treadmills, the Barbican’s Toni Racklin now hails it as a 'true spectacle' on the eve of its European premiere.

But for Fujiwara, this headline event within the Barbican’s two-month ‘Haruki Murakami season’ – comprising film screenings, jazz music performances, and even an 'in conversation' event with the author himself – also offers pause for reflection. 'The biggest factor in my own growth and development, in terms of the ways I express things as an actor, was the birth of my child ten years ago,' he says. 'And she is now nearing the age that I was when I made my debut here.' It is, perhaps, the latest cyclical motion in a career that seems to derive strength from folding back upon itself, bringing Fujiwara back to the same stages and themes, but never quite as the same actor.

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland will be performed at the Barbican Theatre from Thursday 8 – Sunday 11 Oct 2026