This issue showcases the projects included in this year’s AR House shortlist, from modular furniture for Hong Kong’s super-small flats, housing for Mexican rubber workers and vertical living in London, to three examples of retrofitted homes in Kyoto, São Paulo and Copenhagen. In the rest of the issue, we turn to the artist’s house – a type of home with a unique set of functions and associations. It can form a Gesamtkunstwerk – a large‑scale spatial representation of an entire creative world. It is also often fetishised and painstakingly preserved, and turned, eventually, into a tourist attraction after the inhabitant’s death. In the six revisits of artists’ homes featured in this issue, the myth of the artist – the aspirational figure of an autonomous and creatively fulfilled individual – lingers on long after they are gone.
