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.

MAD Architects   China   Lushui, in the southwest of Zhejiang Province, China, is known for its lush greenery and valleys. Ma Yansong’s firm MAD Architects will be giving it its first airport for a predicted one million passengers a year. Located on hilly ground 15 kilometer

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

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

MONO Architekten    Germany   This ensemble of constructions with perforated facades made of sedimentary layers of red-tinted rammed earth is situated in the city of Neuenburg am Rhein, close to the German, French, and Swiss borders. Connecting the urban center to the green zones

Luis Vidal AECOM    United States   The renovation and expansion of the existing terminal is executed in a red facade, in accordance with the tradition and culture of the Massachusetts capital, for which the prismatic paint called Boston Red is used. Created specifically and exclusivel

Henning Larsen   Czech Republic   The Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects, in collaboration with the engineers of the Ramboll group, has won the competition to transform the main railway station of the city of Prague. The project reconnects the historic station with the Vrchlického

Foster + Partners   Saudi Arabia   Foster + Partners has won the competition to design a new terminal for the airport of Abha, the capital of Saudi Arabia’s Asser Region. Taking inspiration from the nearby village of Rijal Almaa, the winning scheme presents a series of interconnected

Atelier Bridge Structures Blank architekti   Czech Republic   Walking on the Charles Bridge, amid so many baroque saints and the breathtaking views of Prague, one easily forgets about the basic purpose of its construction in the year 1357: to connect the castle to the town core on the opposite bank. It was the

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   China   Developed from a afar due to the pandemic, the project reinterprets elements from Chinese tradition, such as the ceramic pieces of the facade which, arranged in the production warehouse, evoke the Terracotta Army of Xian. Located at the foot of Mount

Ecoproyecta   Spain   Like firewood and pasture, snow and ice have since time immemorial been economic resources of humankind, whether for the conservation of food and medicines or for the luxury of making sherbets and ice-creams. Pliny the Elder mentioned an active trade

Christ & Gantenbein   Switzerland   Crossing a bridge is always an experience, but even more in Switzerland. From the Kappelbrücke in Lucerne with its paintings depicting events of the city’s history to the acrobatic Salginatobel built by Robert Maillart, the country is a fertile field

Dorte Mandrup   Sweden   The station has been renovated several times on the basis of the same element: the vault. The new design respects this geometry and is inspired by the city’s yellow brick facades to rebuild a large double-height hall in the three-story building…

IND [Inter.National.Design] Powerhouse Company   Turkey   The outcome of an international competition, this telecommunications tower in the city of Çanakkale includes a public space with viewing platforms, a visitor center, an área for exhibitions…

Barclay & Crousse Arquitectos   France   Aside from renewing the captaincy and the services of the marina, the project recovers the continuity of the old customs officers’ trail, which had been interrupted by the construction of the port infrastructure.

Barclay & Crousse Arquitectos   Peru   Conceived as an autonomous and habitable water infrastructure, the center is organized in a longitudinal plan along the ridge of the hill following the ancestral techniques used by the Incas.

Barclay & Crousse Arquitectos   Peru   Resulting from a two-phase competition, the commission calls for the reconstruction of the school in multiple phases and on the same plot occupied by the old and now obsolete building, dating from the 1950s.

FRPO   Spain   A work of the Madrid practice led by Fernando Rodríguez and Pablo Oriol, FRPO, this thermal power plant supplies hot water to thousands of homes in the city of Palencia. It uses no fossil fuels, only locally-sourced forest biomass, as its main raw ma

Herzog & de Meuron   Switzerland   The start of construction work on the Titlis Project in Engelberg, scheduled for completion in 2029, has been announced. In 2017, the firm Herzog & de Meuron was commissioned to renovate the Alpine resort of Titlis, located 3,000 meters above sea lev

Foster + Partners   United Arab Emirates   Foster + Partners had designed a vertiport to be built beside Dubai International Airport (DXB). Developed in collaboration with Skyports Intfrastructure, the terminal will be on a raised roof to facilitate take-off and landing for electric aircraft.

Bart Lens Maat-Ontwerpers   Belgium   Miraculously unscathed by the industrialization that the Belgian province of Limburg underwent after coal was discovered there early in the 20th century, Hoge Kempen is an extensive land of forests and heaths that in 2006 became the country’s first –

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz Atelier L+    China   The creation of this park – 24,353 square meters of green spaces – completes the first phase of the scheme that won an international competition, drawn up by Ábalos + Sentkiewicz AS+ in collaboration with AtelierL+ and the engineering firm TJAD. The

Sauerbruch Hutton   Germany   The new station housing the police and fire departments for the government district of Berlin is an extension to a now free-standing 19th-century structure, located on the edge of a former goods yard close to the River Spree. To preserve the represen

The 14th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design has been awarded to the Grand Paris Express, a large-scale transit project currently being built in and around the Paris metropolitan area. With 68 new stations and 200 kilometers of additional trac

Neither the dictator Primo de Rivera nor the Republic saw the materialization of the dream of a hub in the north of the capital that would untangle the city’s rail network. This was not achieved until the years of Francoist developmentalism, when Cor

CNN   Tamara Hardingham-Gill   Paris is already home to some of the most popular attractions in the world, and the French capital could be about to get its very first urban cable car. Proposed plans for a brand new 4.5 kilometer-long aerial tramway connecting various suburbs in th

estudioHerreros   According to the dictionary, an infrastructure is the set of elements, facilities, or ser-vices required for an organization to operate efficiently. The act of delving beyond the architectural concept of infrastructure as something having to do with

GCR   The pedestrian bridge, which was first announced in 2015 (see further reading), was printed by Dutch additive construction specialist MX3D over the Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal in the city’s Red Light District. According to Imperial, it will be a “l

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has signed an agreement with Hyperloop Italia to jointly design its next phase of works that marks a turning point for the future of transport Hyperloop transports passengers at very high speed safely, economically and sus

The Economist   Since the Romans began doing it with great panache more than 2,000 years ago, road-building has been a sweaty, grubby business, involving heaving great quantities of rocks and stones into place and, in more recent times, covering the surface with asp

The "Ruyi Bridge" in the Shenxianju Scenic Area in Eastern China's Taizhou city has recently become an internet hit. Spanning 100 meters across the Shenxianju valley, the bridge is more than 140 meters high and is shaped like a jade Ruyi, an ornament

The firm led by the British architect Norman Foster has been selected to design Guangming Hub, a high-density urban development linked to the railway that runs through Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. Following the model known as TOD (transit-orie

The Economist   Every country wants to build more bridges, roads and renewable-power grids. It won’t be easy. In 1916 cincinnati decided to construct a magnificent new subway system. After decades of cock-ups it was abandoned in 1948, and today there are two miles o

Adif has publicly named the teams selected to go on to phase two of the competition to transform the Madrid–Chamartín station: UNStudio with b720; RSHP with Luis Vidal; Souto de Moura with Francisco Mangado and José María Ezquiaga; Grimshaw with Carl

The tragedy of 14 August 2018, when 43 people were killed by the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, was a heavy blow to the city, to Italy, and to the prestige of Italian engineering. So the recent inauguration of the rebuilt infrastructure – t

youtube.com   On 3 August, the city of Genoa inaugurated its new bridge, designed by Renzo Piano to reconstruct the Polcevera Viaduct, also known as the Morandi Bridge, which collapsed on 14 August 2018, killing 43.

On view through 13 September at the Matadero Madrid Design Center is an exhibition showing twenty footbridges and bridges built in the past twenty years by the Spanish firm Fhecor Ingenieros Consultores, which in 2019 received a Special Mention in th

Chinese president Xi Jinping a few years ago lambasted the ‘weird architecture’ that international stars were building in his country (see Arquitectura Viva 169), but his denouncement does not seem to have been much heeded. Otherwise there would be n

The Guardian   Rowan Moore   From Beijing to Istanbul, exotic new airports are symbols of prestige for strongman leaders. But the environmental cost is massive… We have the confidence and ambition,” announced China’s president, Xi Jinping, to a rapt audience last September, “to

The first gates of cities were the triumphal arches through which enlightened governments sought to imitate ancient Rome; later, the grand foyers of train stations, true monuments of the industrial city. Today we have the airports, symbols of global

Zaha Hadid's Beijing Airport

Headed by Jeanne Gang (one of this year’s 100 most influential people in the world, according to Time magazine), Studio Gang – in collaboration with three other architecture and engineering companies – has won the competition to carry out the renovat

From the great greenhouses of the 19th century to the ‘climatops’ proposed by Richard Buckminster Fuller in the mid-20th century, taming nature to reproduce it in artificial environments has been one of the major impulses of modernity. So has it been

The collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa killed 43 people and exposed deficiencies in both its design and its maintenance. It was a big blow to Italian politics and engineering, and there has been a clear endeavor to make amends through a fast-tra

Many predicted that the death of Zaha Hadid – quintessential example of signature architecture – would compromise the future of her studio.They were wrong: almost three years after the British-Iraqi succumbed to a heart attack, Zaha Hadid Architects

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has blasted Mexico City’s new airport, and with it the signature project of his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto. After winning a much disputed competition through his solid experience in infrastructures of this k

Javier Manterola   Madrid  2017  
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