Mountains of foam, fields of poppies and clouds of fog are among Dezeen design editor Dan Howarth's 10 favourite installations from the past 12 months.
Not to be mistaken for one of the Californian tech giant's retail outlets, this temporary store in London's historic Borough Market featured over 1,000 different types of apple.
Communications agency TinMan and events company Teatime Production turned the market's traditional display into a replica of Apple's trademark store interiors, complete with perspex stands and minimal signage to describe each variety of the fruit.
The shop was created to celebrate the 1000th anniversary of Borough Market and opened to coincide with its annual Apple Day. Find out more about the Real Apple Store »
SQM: The Quantified Home by Joseph Grima and Space Caviar
An abandoned school was the setting for curator Joseph Grima's SQM: The Quantified Home exhibition about changing attitudes towards the role of the home, at this year's Biennale Interieur in Kortrijk.
Grima and his team had free reign with the doomed structure – set for demolition soon after the event ended – so they knocked through walls to create a new route around the different parts of the building.
Elements of the architecture were used to display statistics along the trail, which culminated in the gymnasium where a waltz was performed by robotic vacuum cleaners. Find out more about SQM: The Quantified Home »
Sticks and Stones by David Chipperfield
As its final swan song before closing for renovation work at the end of this year, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin played host to an installation of 144 giant tree trunks called Sticks and Stones.
British architect David Chipperfield, who is overseeing the restoration of the Mies van der Rohe-designed structure, suspended the eight-metre-high logs from the ceiling in a grid pattern the follow the layout of the roof.
Alluding to the adage "sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me," the piece was created to remind visitors of the looming construction work and to reassure them that the iconic building will endure. Find out more about Sticks and Stones »
At another Chipperfield project – the Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate, UK – a terrace was brightened up by Dutch artist Krijn de Koning's Dwelling maze of colourful walls.
Visitors could walk through doorways and clamber through openings in the multi-coloured structures, which were slotted around the building's permanent elements.
Coloured to reference traditional seaside pavilions and beach huts in the area, the open-air labyrinth's atmosphere changed throughout the day as shadows moved around the space. Find out more about Dwelling »
Well known for incorporation nature into his interventions, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson filled an entire wing of Denmark's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art with a rocky landscape.
The pebbles and boulders covering the floor were arranged to look like a dried-up river, with a small trickle of water running through the rooms representing the remaining stream.
Eliasson created Riverbed to test the capacity of the Louisiana building, originally designed in 1958 by architects Jørgen Bo and Wilhlem Wohlert. Find out more about Riverbed »
Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper
Thousands of ceramic poppies were "planted" around the Tower of London to mark the 110th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War.
Ceramic artist Paul Cummins and set designer Tom Piper installed the porcelain flowers to flow out of a window and rise over a bridge, while the remainder of the 888,246 poppies – one for each British life lost in the conflict – were placed around the tower by volunteers.
Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red proved popular with the British public and foreign tourists alike, and was illuminated throughout the night towards the end of its time to allow more visitors the chance to see it. Find out more about Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red »
Another iconic structure to be surrounded by an artificial form of nature this year was Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut.
The transparent 1949 building by the late Postmodern architect was shrouded in dense clouds of mist for 10 minutes every hour by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya.
"Fog responds constantly to its own surroundings, revealing and concealing the features of the environment," said the artist, renowned for her misty installations. "Fog makes visible things become invisible and invisible things, like wind, become visible." Find out more about Veil »
A stand-out project at this year's Milan design week was the collaboration between prolific Japanese design studio Nendo and fashion brand COS.
Minimal shirts by Cos were suspended between geometric brushed-steel frames and painted in sections where they overlapped.
Frames varied in size along a linear route through the white-painted industrial space used to present the clothing by the clothing brand, which also supported an installation of sticky tape tunnels this year. Find out more about COS x Nendo »
A protest in Vienna materialised as an installation earlier this year, when a group wanting to demonstrate against government spending on a bank bailout built a model city that they claimed would cost the equivalent sum to construct in reality.
Installed in a central city square, the Milliardenstadt project showed how much housing and infrastructure could be built with the €19 billion (£15 billion) that the Austrian government is paying to save Hypo Alpe Adria.
Twenty-five tonnes of concrete blocks representing buildings in 1:100-scale Hypotopia city were then transported through the city and dumped outside the parliament building as a final message of disapproval. Find out more about Milliardenstadt »
Artist Kohei Nawa transformed a dark room in Aichi, Japan, by filling the space with piles of foam.
The bubbles were created from a mixture of detergent, glycerin and water, which was pumped up from the floor so it frothed into cloud-like forms.
Visitors could walk through the constantly changing landscape, described by the artist as being "like the landscape of a primordial planet". Find out more about Foam »