desymbol: This week, we looked back on 2019 and forward to 2020

This week on Dezeen, we looked back at the biggest architecture and design stories of 2019, and looked forward to the upcoming projects of the new year.

To bring 2019 to a close, Dezeen editor Tom Ravenscroft rounded up the most popular stories of the past 12 months, which included architects and designers' alternative proposals for rebuilding the Notre-Dame Cathedral after the fire in April.

The list also included Elon Musk's Neuralink project, which saw the entrepreneur reveal plans to build implants that connect the brain with computer interfaces, and a drone video revealing a development of hundreds of abandoned chateaux in Turkey.

Remembering the great architects and designers we lost in 2019

Dezeen also paid tribute to the architects and designers we lost in 2019, including fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, German lighting designer Ingo Maurer, and Pritzker Prize-winning architect IM Pei.

American artist Syd Mead, who created visual concept or numerous sci-fi films including Blade Runner and Tron, also passed away this week.

Looking ahead to the new year, Dezeen's Lizzie Crook selected 12 of the most exciting new buildings opening in 2020, including the Datong Art Museum in China by Foster + Partners and the Zaha Hadid-designed Bee'ah Headquarters in the UAE.

In an opinion piece Aaron Betsky pondered what the next decade will hold for architecture. The 2020s "will see the return of the real", he argued.

Also announced this week was the news that Zaha Hadid Architects won planning permission for the world's first all-timber football stadium, after the original proposal was blocked by Stroud's local council in June 2019.

The 5,000-seat stadium will be built in Gloucestershire, England, for Forest Green Rovers football club.

Elsewhere in design, Superflux studio created a vision of what a typical Singapore home would look like in 2219 due to the effects of climate change.

The fictional home features homemade hunting tools, snorkelling equipment and a mini hydroponic farm to allow inhabitants to deal with extreme weather conditions and food shortages.

Lucy McRae offers an escape from the digital with Future Survival Kit

Lucy McRae's survival kit for a post-apocalyptic future was also popular with readers this week.

McRae imagines her Future Survival Kit would help future people adjust to life after the "age of the algorithm", when people have rejected digital devices and social media platforms.

Virgil Abloh created a capsule collection in collaboration with Paris's Musée du Louvre, which combines signature markings from the fashion designer's Off-White brand with some of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous paintings.

Designed to celebrate the 500th anniversary of da Vinci's death, the collection includes tee-shirts and hoodies decorated with graphic branding, four-way arrows and monochrome representations of the artist's anatomical sketches.

Apple, Google, Amazon and the Zigbee Alliance also joined forces this week to develop a standardised smart-home system that would allow new devices to be compatible with any of their hubs and voice assistants.

The aim of this Project Connected Home Over IP initiative is to form a unified connectivity protocol that is open-source and royalty-free, to make it easier for consumers to build their smart-home environment and for manufacturers to develop new products.