This week, BIG created a spiral-shaped museum and Dezeen released its latest podcast

This week, BIG completed a spiral-shaped museum in the Swiss mountains and John Pawson discussed the reasoning behind his characteristic minimalism in Dezeen's latest podcast.

Designed to house a collection of watchmaker Audemars Piguet's timepieces, the curved-glass museum by BIG features a grass-covered roof to offer a lawn in summer and a snowy scene in winter.

Dezeen also released its seventh Face-to-Face podcast this week, in which architectural designer John Pawson tells Dezeen's editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs how his minimalist approach to design has helped him find balance.

The designer discusses his time travelling in India, Australia and Japan, where he tried to become a Zen Buddhist monk, and the start of his career in New York.

In architecture news, a shipping container intensive care pod designed by Italo Rota and Carlo Ratti has been built at a hospital in Turin, Italy, and is being used to treat patients fighting the coronavirus.

Dezeen also spoke to a senior US doctor who claimed that hospitals "desperately need designers" to improve healthcare, from the layout of operating theatres to the design of medical charts.

Research and design platform Livable took a more conceptual approach to helping the pandemic by designing a wearable rattan cage that encourages social distancing.

Jessica Walsh's creative agency &Walsh also aimed to offer "comic relief" during isolation with a series of coronavirus-themed emojis from hand sanitiser and golden toilet paper to healthcare workers dressed as superheroes.

Meanwhile, quarantined Graffiti artist Banksy moved his art from the streets to the walls of his own home, to create a rodent-themed installation inside his bathroom.

Trouble-making rats swing from the towel holders and squeeze toothpaste over the walls. The installation was posted to the artist's Instagram with the caption: "My wife hates it when I work from home".

Elsewhere in the design world, Japanese art graduate Rie Sakamoto knitted together rubber bands to make an elastic fashion collection.

Comprising a dress and a jacket, the collection hopes to showcase the versatility of the disregarded stationary item, and reestablish the items as contemporary art.

Tiles were popular this week in interior design projects, as Stu.dere covered the walls of a laundrette in northern Portugal in forest-green tiles, complemented by white marble surfaces.

Mexico City's AG Studio transformed a colonial house in San Miguel De Allende into a boutique hotel that features corn cob-coloured walls and archways lined in black- and peach-coloured tiles.

The second week of Virtual Design Festival (VDF) saw collaborations with MAAT museum, architecture photography festival Zoomed In, The World Around, Ron Arad and Beatie Wolfe.

The collaboration with The World Around saw Beatrice Galilee of  take over VDF for Earth Day with a series of talks, interviews, short films and essays from visionaries at the forefront of ecological design.

Other projects that grabbed readers attention this week included a translucent half-timbered tennis pavilion by Lemoal Lemoal Architectes, a stretchy cabinet that forms breast-like shapes when pulled open, and a charred wood extension in London that has been modelled on a Japanese tea house.

The post This week, BIG created a spiral-shaped museum and Dezeen released its latest podcast appeared first on Dezeen.