| Hello and welcome to Bloomberg’s weekly design digest. I’m Feargus O’Sullivan, a London-based writer and editor at CityLab, filling in for Kriston Capps. Sign up to keep up: Subscribe to get the Design Edition newsletter every Sunday.  The glammed-up Oval Office of the White House in 2025. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg I got a little frustrated reading about Trump’s recent renovation of the White House’s Oval Office this year – not because of the renovation itself (I am not American, after all), but because of a word repeatedly used across media to describe the shiny, gold-heavy revamp: Rococo. While this 18th century successor style to the High Baroque certainly tends towards the elaborate and luxurious-looking, the term Rococo should not simply be used as a byword for anything flashy and vaguely historic-looking. The original Rococo was often less bombastic than the baroque that preceded it. It was inventive in its use of space in ways that, looking back, could reasonably be called avant-garde. It’s hard to see much of this playful, experimental spirit in the new White House. I wanted to defend Rococo because the style is one of my favorites – not just in architecture and interiors, but also in music and painting, where it has a depth and melancholy that is sometimes overlooked. It strikes me as remarkable that a style so full of sophisticated, elegant charm evolved during a period when life, even for the rich patrons of the Rococo, could be brief and sordid. This charm is perhaps lost on many today because of the strong streak of puritanism across many western cultures, which tend to mistake decorative abundance for poor taste.  An icon of the European Rococo: the ballroom of the Museum Schaezlerpalais in Augsburg, Germany. Photographer: Gisela Schober/German Select In researching the piece I wrote on the subject, I also learned a lot more about the most likely inspiration for the lavish décor Trump has favored across his life: the neo-baroque of America’s late 19th- and early 20th-century Gilded Age. It’s really the eclectic style of this period – which saw the birth of the lavish grand hotels that have shaped our contemporary view of luxury – that’s echoed in the president’s Trump Tower apartment and Mar-a-Lago. Diving into that period offered another surprise: America’s Gilded Age architecture could be gaudy (if no more so than contemporary European equivalents), but it was also part of a culture of scholarship, and could itself be highly inventive and experimental. — Feargus O’Sullivan Design stories we’re reading | A ‘floating university’ and a pink mosque: How Dhaka is building for a wetter future (Guardian) Interview: Norman Foster on what good design really means when reinventing cities (Monocle) Philip Kennicott reviews a new book on the history of presidential memorialization in the US (Washington Post) A new generation of designers in the Global South are reimagining abandoned buildings for climate adaptation (Atmos) Oliver Wainwright reviews the More than Human exhibit at the Design Museum in London: a utopia of self-weaving grass and psychedelic dolphins (Guardian) | 
