This week on Dezeen, the Salone del Mobile fair in Milan was postponed until June as events across Europe were disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak.

The world's most significant furniture fair, Salone del Mobile, has been delayed until June because of an outbreak of the Covid-19 strain of coronavirus in northern Italy.

The decision to reschedule the event was supported by a slew of leading designers including Ross Lovegrove, who told Dezeen "it's better to postpone [the fair] and guarantee its cultural and commercial success later".

Other events including the Geneva Motor Show and Frankfurt's Light + Building have also been cancelled in an attempt to prevent the virus further spreading. However, organisers of the MIPIM property fair – announced that it will still be going ahead in March.

The alarming rise of coronavirus also prompted Chinese architect Sun Dayong to design a wearable shield that could protect people from getting infected.

While the shield is just a concept for now, it would be embedded with wires that heat up and kill close-proximity pathogens.

Elsewhere in the realm of design, London College of Fashion graduate Harikrishnan created a range of inflatable trousers that are able to give the body "anatomically impossible" proportions.

Up to 30 individual panels of latex are used to produce the trousers, which sit tight around the wearer's waist before ballooning out around the thighs and tapering again at the ankle. Models presented them on the runway with matching-colour tailored jackets.

In architecture news, OMA unveiled plans to renovate three former railway buildings in Brussels to form offices for Belgian train operator SNCB.

The project will also see the erection of an 11-storey glass extension that will feature a "sheer, cliff-like facade" punctuated by porthole windows.

BIG similarly revealed visuals for a 10,000-square-metre office in Newcastle, UK.

The building will have a "serpentine silhouette" that mimics the curved form of bridges that span the city's River Tyne.

Popular projects this week included a brick villa by Studio Okami Architecten that sits snug against a Belgian hillside and a concrete home in Slovenia that Arhitektura d.o.o designed to accommodate the owner's ceramics studio.

Readers also debated Studio Vural's renderings of Dune House – an imagined holiday home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts that would be carved into a sand dune.