Luis Fernández-Galiano   Small details are big. Far from being negligible, they are often the true seeds of the project, the axis of its internal logic and the resilient support of its aesthetic projection. The profane tend to think that buildings are conceived in sequential

Santiago Calatrava   United States   Joseph Giovannini With its two angled masts suspending a monumental glass dome and bridge from fanning webs of cable, the entrance pavilion to the new Milwaukee Art Museum seems spectacular enough. But at the push of a button, a pair of huge sunscree

Frank Gehry   Germany   Francesco Dal Co Berlin played host to a gigantic monster, born of the history of Europe. It took form in 1961 and survived for twenty-eight years. Then, with apparent haste, it was gone. Every moment of its demise was recorded and broadcast live. Th

Grimshaw Architects   United Kingdom   Colin Davies Honeycomb, flie s’ eyes, frogspawn, cuckoospit — choose your organic simile. Built to contain biological specimens, the biomes o f the Eden Project look like giant biological specimens themselves, some kind o ffungusfrom outer space, per

Hubertus Adam   Located on top of the Girtannersberg, a hill overlooking the Swiss town of St. Gallen, the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences is among the most significant examples of the architecture of the sixties in the country. The exposed concrete constru

Daniel Libeskind   United Kingdom   Deyan Sudjic Manchester is a big, confident city, but an oddly shapeless one. It was the city in which Engels documented the living conditions of the world’s first industrial proletariat, the British working class, forged in Manchester’s explosive tr

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   Netherlands   Peter Blundell Jones Look at a couple of photos, or worse the plan, and the cacophony of forms seems to suggest that in this final work Miralles really went over the top.With scant respect for a fine Neoclassical work, he seems to have produced a bui

Dominique Perrault Architecture   Austria   Kieran Long Innsbruck would look more at home on the front of a chocolate box than in the pages of an architecture magazine. But this Austrian city, capital of the Tyrol region, is building a range of mini grands projets to add to its rich architectu

Richard Ingersoll   On April 21, the legendary date of the founding of Rome, two of the three theaters in Rome’s new Auditorium complex, or Parco della Musica, were inaugurated, inspiring intense feelings of wonder. The uncanny scarab-shaped hoods of the three halls pro

FOA | Foreign Office Architects   Japan   Wilhelm Klauser The city of Yokohama has opened to its waterfront. The past ten years have witnessed the development by the sea of a new district with a congress center, office buildings, hotels and museums which have multiplied at a vertiginous spee