Ytong España / Xella Group   The Ytong solution of tongue-ingroove panels is made of cellular concrete, which weighs much less and insulates better than conventional concrete. It is obtained in an autoclave on a base of sand, silica, and lime.

Nikken Sekkei   Japan   On the campus of Waseda University in Honio, a city in Japan’s Saitama Prefecture, this three-story building contains facilities for sport training and meetings. The gym had to have natural indirect lighting, ideal for physical exercises done indoors

O Arquitectura   Spain   In the 1950s, in the Navarrese town of Lododa, a new neighborhood went up consisting of simple one-level dwellings with backyards. Casa O reformulates this typology with a contemporary language. Its facade preserves the existing composition. The ridg

Christian Kerez   Bahrain   Compensating for the lack of parking spots in the former capital is a network of open, flexible constuctions which serve at the same time to give the urban fabric a new character altogether.

Zaha Hadid Architects Block Research Group   Italy   El prototipo de pasarela se construye con piezas de hormigón impreso en 3D sin armar, lo que asemeja su comportamiento a las estructuras tradicionales de piedra, resolviendo los esfuerzos a través de la geometría y no con la acumulación de materiales

Christian Kerez   Bahrain   At the end of the 19th century, the German mathematician August Möbius discovered his famous strip, a continuous band with only side and one edge. Perhaps influenced by this non-orientable surface, or perhaps fascinated by the infinite folds of Deleu

Lucio Muniain   Mexico   Next to La Loma Country Club, in the Mexican city of San Luis Potosí, stands this two-floor house sculpted in exposed concrete. With an area of 800-square-meters, the composition of volumes generates a play of lights and shadows at different heights

Ehl & Koumar Architekti   Czech Republic   The 2023 winner of the Czech Architect Award, given by the Czech Chamber of Architects, this 57-meter-long footbridge replaced the original overpass on the site, built in 1981. A work of the Prague-based practice of Lukáš Ehl and Tomáš Koumar, the st

Herzog & de Meuron   Qatar   Three intersecting spheres form and carve the building, breaking it up into two parts: one is like a full moon and other like a crescent moon wrapped around it. That is the art museum that Herzog & de Meuron designed for the art and culture insti

Zooco Estudio   Spain   The Cantabrian Maritime Museum (MMC) in Santander was built between 1975 and 1978, following a design by Vicente Roig Forner and Ángel Hernández Morales. The interior is distributed in three floors around a central patio crowned with a vault of concr

Elisa Valero   Spain   Located on the outskirts of Granada, in the Almanjáyar neighborhood, this church presents a jagged profile with seven skylights on a sawtooth roof projecting a play of lights and colors inside. Developed over a span of fourteen years, the project aim

NOARQ | José Carlos Nunes de Oliveira   Portugal   The project involved renovating a two-story house that had been abandoned for twenty years. The solid concrete construction showed many signs of having been vandalized. A surgery-like material and aesthetic reconstruction was performed by means of ap

KPMB Architects   Canada   The Harrison McCain Pavilion is part of a general expansion of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, which was founded in 1969 at the behest of its patron, Lord Beaverbrook, who funded the original building and donated his art collection to the community. Mad

Comamala Ismail   Switzerland   The Swiss studio led by Diego Comamala and Toufiq Ismail-Meyer designed this preschool in the small village of Ried-Brig, on the road that connects Switzerland’s Canton of Valais to Italy. The project is part of a plan to remodel the entrance to the

Pezo von Ellrichshausen   Chile   The village of Santa Lucía Alto, in the region of Yungay, is surrounded by fertile plains and high peaks. One of its lush forests in the foothills of the Andes Mountains becomes the site for his house-studio, an ambitious project of over 2,400m² that

KAAN Architecten   Netherlands   KAAN Architecten was commissioned to design a visitor center for the Netherlands American Cemetery (NEAC), the only World War II U.S. graveyard on Dutch soil. The new building blends respectfully into the premises, partly sunken into the sloping hill

Jesús Donaire   Spain   The concrete volume with a rectangular base is perforated by voids on the facade in checkboard fashion, and also three-dimensionally, inside, through a double-height in the main space. On the ground floor, the four large windows at the angles become

Tadao Ando   Australia   Visitable until 28 March 2024 at the Queen Victoria Gardens is the tenth MPavilion, designed by Tadao Ando. Every year since 2014 the Naomi Milgrom Foundation has commissioned the building of a structure that is eventually transferred to a permanent

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   Germany   The idea of combining the terms ‘archive’ and ‘avant-garde’ holds within itself a contradiction. The fusion of these two concepts may seem paradoxical at first glance, as an archive is created to safeguard the documentary legacy of the past, while th

Verne arquitectura   Spain   The firm Verne arquitectura – Víctor Larripa Artieda, Javier Martínez Labeaga, Daniel Ruiz de Gordejuela Tellechea – built this house in Munguía, a municipality in the Basque province of Biscay. The strategy adopted for the project came from a desir

Agustín Berzero Manuel González Veglia (TECTUM)   Argentina   Anchored to a very steep slope, the house is built with rough-hewn concrete and presents an interplay of complementary opposites. Raised over the natural topography on columns, the heavy volume is crowned with an open deck, a lookout-roof that serves

Brooks + Scarpa Architects   United States   The Los Angeles-based practice of Angela Brooks and Lawrence Scarpa was commissioned to build a pavilion within the Youth Sports Complex, a park with facilities for football and lacrosse, for the City of Pompano Beach. Containing office space, restro

EST arquitectura   Paraguay   The Paraguayan firm EST arquitectura, led by Carlos A. Jiménez, built this slender residential tower which rises 140 meters and 37 floors and whose large red planes have become a landmark in the city of Asunción. The prism takes on a lighter image th

Bruno Dias Arquitectura   Portugal   On a slightly sloping plot of land in the historic quarter of Ansião, in the District of Leiria, the building is organized in an orthogonal arrangement, striking a contrast with the curves of the courtyards and the slabs of concrete. The Portuguese w

Bloomberg   Feargus O'Sullivan   British schools are crumbling due to an aerated material that was popular after World War II. The issue centers around “reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete,” a material known more widely as RAAC, which can become dangerous if exposed to water. The

Scientific American   Mark Fischetti   Nick Bockelman   Wil V. Srubar   New techniques and novel ingredients can greatly reduce the immense carbon emissions from cement and concrete production. We make more concrete than we do any other material on Earth. Cement is one of the most energy-intensive products on the planet.

The Economist   The concrete used was self-healing and anachronistically green The romans were master builders. Many of their works, from the Pantheon (pictured above) and the Colosseum in Rome itself, to the Pont du Gard in southern Gaul and the equally impressive

The Economist   They offer ways to produce cement without releasing carbon dioxide. Concrete is one of the world’s most important materials. But making the cement that binds it generates about 8% of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions. This is not just because of

The Economist   It is a big source of emissions, but might one day be the reverse. The romans perfected concrete, and their legacy still stands in the form of the magnificent roof of the Pantheon, the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. Since it was complete

Scientific American   Sophie Bushwick   But for now, a square meter of the building material holds roughly the energy of two AA batteries. Concrete, after water, is the world's most used material. Because it already surrounds us in the built environment, researchers have been exploring the

The residential building that the Madrid-based trio Arenas Basabe Palacios has raised in the Spanish capital’s Salamanca neighborhood has two different faces: towards the street it presents a classical tripartite composition soberly regulated by pref

Brutalism with a friendly countenance: this is how one might venture to describe the architecture that Grafton Architects – Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara – have been carrying out for the past twenty years in Ireland, Europe, and America, from t

Students of the Master of Advanced Studies in Digital Fabrication and Architecture program at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich have built ‘Concrete Choreoraphy,’ an installation of columns made of special concrete with the assistanc

dbt   From ancient civilisations to the present day, columns have served as elements of architecture particularly tied to the harmony, balance and proportion of architectural orders – so much so that they have come to be recognised as works of art in their

The rise of a renewed interest in Brutalism seventy years after its birth is reflected both in the growing defense of heritage ascribed to this architectural current – arising from the Modern Movement with Le Corbusier and the use of béton brut (raw

Libraries have been one of the symbols of bourgeois society. Originally confined to monasterios and palaces, distant havens of elitist knowledge, libraries eventually became quintessential public spaces in the capitalist and increasingly democratic c

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   After a generation in the doghouse, concrete is more fashionable than ever. So why don’t we take better care of our brutalist architecture? Concrete is everywhere. It is not only under our feet and above our heads, forming the background infrastructu

Empty the building, leave its sculptural brick enclosure exactly the way it is, and implant in it a massive heart of concrete. This was the strategy followed by Tadao Ando when he transformed an old residential block in the city of Chicago into the n

It has been announced by the College of Architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago that the winner of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) – awarded every two years to the finest works of architecture carried out in t

Kurt W. Forster   Though partly discredited and forgotten, Rudolphs buildings continue to be considered a powerful body of work in American architecture. 

After a protracted process, a period of eight years, that has not been spared its dose of controversy (in 2015 it was announced that the building’s real cost would exceed the initially budgeted amount of 50 million euros by a good 70%), Scotland’s ow

Ignacio Serna   Since early in the 20th century, when August Perret referred to it as “the stone that we craft,” reinforced concrete and the industry associated with it have evolved to the point that we can raise buildings entirely with this material. Perret – who w

The Irish firm of Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, operating since 1978 as Grafton Architects, has been much acclaimed for the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan, a half-buried civic box of concrete – completed in the year 2008 – that strikes an i

Pepa Cassinello   It was she herself, Mother Nature, who first fabricated concrete, and the Stone Age man was first to imitate it. Not in vain. In the beginning it was a material formed simply by mixing natural abiotic elements, small dry stones, conglomerate dust (p

Eduardo Prieto   Since its very beginnings, the concrete industry has always gone hand in hand with the production of chemical agents that have the potential to improve the properties of the material. At first, the focus of these chemical products was on reducing the

The most unique characteristic of this residential complex comprising twelve social housing units in La Alberca de la Záncara (Cuenca) is its low-cost – but very efficient – building system. These dwellings combine concrete blocks forming three-meter

Among the products of translucent concrete currently on the market, the Lucem Lichtbeton system, developed by the German firm of the same name, stands out for its technical caliber, and especially for its competitive selling price, which is not much

Peter Chadwick   London  2016  
Phaidon   - 224 Pages 

Adrian Forty   A Material History

Karla Cavarra Britton   Londres  2001  
Phaidon   - 255 Pages