Luis Fernández-Galiano   Is there a future for the high-fashion house? The announced retirement of Yves Saint Laurent marks a symbolic milestone in the decline of textile high-fashion; and the heteroclite dispersion of the houses gathered here eloquently illustrates the curr

Cristina Díaz Moreno, Efrén García Grinda   This chronicle is a quick walk through the production and contemporary representation of domestic space. Unlike other periods of the past century, the current scene is characterized by an ever growing heterogeneity of interests and procedures. Our ai

Adjaye Associates   United Kingdom   Located in London’s East End, the house was designed for an artist couple who wanted to transform the old belt factory they used as a studio into a container which could serve at once as family dwelling and workplace. The house was conceived as a lar

RCR Arquitectes   Spain   Without attempting to resemble the architecture of basic materials and explicitly domestic shapes common to the region, the Roser house goes up in Gerona as an abstract volume that asserts its formal autonomy with respect to the landscape and the con

Hiroyuki Arima   Japan   At approximately thirty kilometers to the south of Fukoaka – the main urban center of the Japanese island of Kyushu – lies the national park of Genkai, a wooded terrain with a precipitous topography which extends between the mountains and the ocean.

Felipe Assadi   Chile   Unlike what usually occurs in urban centers, few times does a construction in the country encounter any geometrical references whatsoever, but in this case the house that a childless married couple wanted as permanent residence could not ignore the g

Stephen Atkinson   United States   Zachary is a locality in the State of Louisiana lying between the oil refineries north of Baton Rouge and St. Francisville, an area of great ornithological interest. In this rural land of farms and small residential areas, a couple decided to build

Shigeru Ban   Japan   On the outskirts of Tokyo, where the hustle of city life gives way to an orderly landscape of rice fields and greenhouses, a family has made true a dream unattainable for many compatriots: to enjoy a house of more than one hundred square meters. Per

Benson & Forsyth   United Kingdom   The story of this house goes back to the seventies, when Islington was a quarter where the Georgian plazas coexisted side by side with industrial constructions, long before it became the well-to-do neighborhood where Tony Blair and family resided unt

Roberto Briccola   Switzerland   Forty-eight square meters are enough to enjoy nature, and this weekend shelter is the built evidence of this. Located in Campo Vallemaggia – an enclave in the Ticino canton –this minimal retreat was designed with the objective of not disturbing the l

Alberto Campo Baeza   Spain   The golf courses opened during the last years in the province of Cádiz, have boosted the construction of a large number of houses, semi-detached dwellings and apartment blocks which are only used during the holiday periods, leaving a landscape of des

drewes+strenge architekten   Germany   Sometimes urban planning regulations, instead of restricting creative initiatives, force to restate typological solutions so played out as the residential ones. This is precisely the case of Opus City, a new neighborhood in the German locality of Her

Carlos Ferrater, Joan Guibernau   Spain   Far from the hustle that has made of Ibiza a ’must’ place of pilgrimage for every night bird, a lot on the northest coast of this Balearic island – facing the island of Tagomago – was chosen by a large family to build a house where they could spend t

Fink+Jocher   Germany   Before being used as the site for villas and retreats, the shore of the Starnberger See was sprinkled with varied constructions: the houses of fishermen and farmers that far from opening to the spectacular views of this lake to the southwest of Munic

Rick Joy Architects   United States   The construction of a house begins with the selection of the site, and Rose and Warren Tyler decided that the best place was many kilometers to the south of Columbus (Ohio), where they had lived until then. The couple – great art enthusiasts who had

Alberto Kalach   Mexico   A plot next to a golf course located seven kilometers from Mexico City was chosen by a show businessman to build his family residence. The environment of the housing development – marked by the neocolonial style of the neighboring constructions – was

Henning Larsen   Denmark   A plot on the north coast of Seeland, the Danish island where Copenhagen lies, was chosen to build a holiday residence. Immerse in a forest of birch trees, the terrain in question – a hill with a slight slope towards the south – lies 55 meters above

Toshiko Mori   United States   The Florida heys – those narrow tongues of land which run parallel to the coast – are an exceptional site and a favorite location of the well-to-do class to build their houses. Scenarios par excellence of a life of luxury which reached its greatest s

Glenn Murcutt   Australia   Three hundred kilometers to the south of Sydney, the plot remaining from the partial subdivision of a large agricultural property was purchased by a couple of intellectuals to build a house for the holidays which has gradually become a more frequent

MVRDV   Holanda   Beyond the surprises which canals always have in store, Amsterdam’s courtyards conceal buildings as secrets. Duiker’s open air school in Amsterdam Zuid is one of them, and now the house-studio for a couple of graphic designers joins this tradition wi

Satoshi Okada   Japan   The snow capped and perfectly conic top of Mount Fuji – so many times represented in paintings, calendars and tourist brochures – identifies the veneration of the Japanese towards nature, a complicated relationship within the dense chaos to which lar

Rudy Ricciotti   France   In a well-to-do neighborhood on the outskirts of Marseilles – where the French coast starts to resemble Italy – a contemporary art collector wanted to raise a shelter to display his paintings and furniture. The steep slope of the plot descends toward

Kazuyo Sejima & Associates   Japan   In the dense and indifferent fabric of the center of Tokyo the price of land is so high that building costs are not as significant in comparison. This situation has a clear influence on the built landscape, which changes at a speed that would be unth

Jukka Siren   Finland   A stream divides into two almost equal halves the plot in the outskirts of Vammala where a Finnish couple decided to build their home. Since the owners – a language teacher and an expert in marine biology – found that either of the two shores of the

Werner Sobek   Germany   During a trip to north Yemen, the German couple which owns this house had the chance to stay overnight in one of the typical tower-houses of the region. This awakened their interest in building a house overlooking the landscape in all directions, as

Simon Ungers   United States   In the state of New York, at approximately three hundred kilometers to the north of the city of skyscrapers, a plot of 140 hectares was chosen to build a dwelling with no further pretense than to become a weekend retreat. Located almost at the edge o

Koen Van Velsen   Holanda   In the Eastern area of Amsterdam, next to the old harbor which has recently been recovered as a residential area, a new construction leans over the water making of formal refrain its main reason of being. As it could not be done in any other way in t