Photo Essay: 47 of the Year’s Most Jaw-Dropping Moments

Contemplate the past year's architecture, interiors, fashion, and art.

Liz West.  Our Colour, gelled fluorescents from "Your Colour Perception" at the U.K.'s Bristol Biennial. Photography by Macarena Costan.

Atelier 37.2. A live performer with pine slats in Graft #1 for "Schneidig#1. Passformen im Abseits" at Vienna's Take Festival. Photography by Nicolas Guiraud.

Yod Studio of Commercial Design. Timber veneer strips suspended at Shade Burger in Poltava, Ukraine. Photography by Andrey Avdeenko.

Gehry Partners and Daniel Buren. The Fondation Louis Vuitton transformed by colored filteres applied to 3,600 glass panels for L'Observatoire de la Lumière. Photography by Iwan Baan/Fondation Louis Vuitton.

Noon Furniture. Dichroic film surfacing acrylic on a powder-coated steel frame for the Prismania chair. Photography by Lisa Klappe.

Wagner Murray Architects. At the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, school colors painted on the concrete ceiling panels of a pedestrian tunnel. Photography by Sonya Allen.

Elyse Graham. Oculus sconces in hand-cast plaster, resin, and custom-mixed pigments. Photography by Peter Bohler.

Minas Kosmidis Architecture in Concept. Backlit foam-board sculptures for the Fish Market restaurent in Limassol, Cyprus. Photography by Studio Vavdinoudis-Dimitriou.

Risk.  What Goes Around Comes Around, a Keith Haring-inspired mural commisioned for "OutsideIn" at the ArtCenter College of __design in Pasadena, California. Photography by Art Gray.

Theunseen. Bird's wind-reactive ink featured in "Techstyle" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photography courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Toyin Loye.  Mobile-Shop in aluminum and rope, seen in "Seeking Africa: Design/Art Across a Continent" at the London gallery Themes & Variations. Photography courtesy of Themes & Variations.

Universität Stuttgart. Elytra Filament Pavilion, a robotics project by the school's institute for computational design, modules in glass and carbon fiber installed at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. Photography courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Chiharu Shiota. At BlainSouthern, Berlin,  Uncertain Journey's iron frames and acrylic yarn. Photography by Christian Glaeser.

Gaetano Pesce. His polyurethane resin  Cara Madre in "Gaetano Pesce: Molds [Gelati Misti]" at the Pacific Design Center annex of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photography courtesy of Gaetano Pesce, New York.

Elena Manferdini.  Shapes and Ground-I, an archival ink print from "Building Portraits" at Industry Gallery, Los Angeles. Photography courtesy of Atelier Manferdini.

Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec. At the Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain Bretagne in Rennes, France,  17 Screens in ceramic, glass, aluminum, chestnut wood, or textile.

Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle. In plaster and scrap iron, Le Cyclop-La Tête in "Machine Spectacle" at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photography by Christian Baur/Pictoright Amsterdam.

Patricia Urquiola. Room Mate Giulia, a Milan hotel. Photography by Ricardo Labougle.

Marc Fornes/TheVeryMany.  Spineway, a laser-cut painted aluminum structure in a San Antonio park. Photography courtesy of Marc Fornes/TheVeryMany.

Alexander Calder.  Two Discs, in painted steel, at Tippet Rise near Fishtail, Montana. Photography courtesy of the Calder Foundation and the Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Jaime Hayon. For the High Museum of Art, Atlanta,  Tiovivo : Whimsical Sculptures by Jaime Hayon in painted marine-grade plywood strips. Photography by Jonathan Hillyer.

Comme des Garçons. A dress in wool gabardine and PVC from the spring-summer 2017 collection. Photography by IMAXTree.

Maya Hayuk. A painted mural in "City Lights" at the MIMA in Brussels. Photography by Pickles/MIMA.

Anne Patterson and Kina Park.  Graced With Light-The Ribbon Project's 20 miles of satin ribbon installed at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Photography by Fiestaban Photography.

Anne Patterson and Kina Park.  Graced With Light-The Ribbon Project 's 20 miles of satin ribbon installed at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. Photography by Fiestaban Photography.

Stonehill & Taylor Architects and First Amendment. A painted mural in San Francisco's Axiom Hotel. Photography by Calvin Jung.

Jaume Plensa. The sculptor with his bronze  Heart of Trees in "Human Landscape" at Ohio's Toledo Museum of Art. Photography by Andrew Weber.

Gocstudio. The floating  WA_Sauna in plywood and aluminum. Photography by Kevin Scott.

Iris van Herpen. A nylon-cotton dress with laser-cut plastic, part of "Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, New York. Photography by Nicholas Alan Cope.

Junya.Ishigami + Associates. At Amyu Atsugi, a day-care center in Japan, partitions surfaced in lime mortar. Photography by Edmund Sumner.

Daniel Arsham.  The Future Was Then in a carved drywall composite, installed at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia. Photography by Daniel Arsham.

Patrick Tighe Architecture.  L'Apertura Seven Windows for Venice, ink drawings on aluminum embedded in milled, plaster-finished reliefs for "La Biennale di Venezia." Photography by Paolo Luca.

Thom Browne. His nickel-plated wingtips with laser-engraved holographic foil and antique mirrors in "Thom Browne Selects" at New York's Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photography by Matt Flynn/Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Zaha Hadid. Her painting in acrylic on cartridge paper of a New York apartment building. Photography courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects.

Kengo Kuma and Associates. Powder-coated aluminum louvers in the lobby of a mixed-use building, Honkou Soho. Photography by Jerry Yin.

Tobias Rehberger. Paint, vinyl, and wallpaper transforming a 1970's cottage into a café for the Setouchi Triennale in Teshima, Japan. Photography by Osamu Nakamura.

Polly Apfelbaum. Handwoven wool rugs and ceramic and wooden sculptures in "Face (Geometry) (Naked) Eyes" at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Photography courtesy of Ben Maltz Gallery.

Yayoi Kusama. "In Infinity," a traveling retrospective of the artist's work. Photography courtesy of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

Yayoi Kusama. "In Infinity," a traveling retrospective of the artist's work. Photography courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.

Borgman Lenk.  Mos, a permanent installation in ceramic tile, at Lillebælt Academy in Odense, Denmark. Photography courtesy of Borgman Lenk.

Borgman Lenk.  Mos, a permanent  installation in ceramic tile, at Lillebælt Academy in Odense, Denmark. Photography courtesy of Borgman Lenk.

Innocad Architektur and 13&9 Design. A 3-D knitted wrap in metallic yard for the Architecktur Galerie Berlin. Photography by Markus Mansi.

Amanda Browder. Donated fabric draped on a Buffalo church as part of  Spectral Locus commissioned by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Photography by Tom Loonan/Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Georges Rousse. His latex installation at a Starbucks in the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. Photography courtesy of the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.

Sarah Sze.  Timekeeper, a mixed-media installation at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. Photography by Mike Barnett/Sarah Sze.

Adkeys. A Claude Monet work printed on 3M vinyl film to reinvent a train car belonging to the French SNCF. Photography by Maxime Huriez.

TeamLab.  Wander Through the Crystal Universe, an interactive digital light installation in "DMM.Planets" in Odaiba, Tokyo. Photography courtesy of TeamLab.

> See more from the January 2017 issue of Interior Design