David Chipperfield Arup Associates   Italy   Part of a whole revamp of Santa Giulia – a former industrial zone located a few kilometers from downtown Milan – based on a masterplan drawn up by Foster+Partners, this new stadium for sport and culture events was designed by David Chipperfield Archi

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   Slovakia   In Patrónka, an area in the western part of Bratislava, rises the new ESET campus, all of 55,000 square meters. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, Inflow, Pantograph, BuroHappold, and ARUP, the tech neighborhood replaces an old military hospital. Drawi

Open Architecture   China   Two hours by car from the center of Beijing, this open-air concert hall is a work of the firm OPEN, led by Li Hu and Huang Wenjing. Set amid mountains, the concrete building is an inverted cone, textured like a rock where each striation cantilevers o

Herzog & de Meuron   China   Devoted to contemporary visual culture, the M+ Museum is the flagship of a project that seeks to transform the city into an artistic hub with an international reach. On the banks of Victoria Harbour, the museum is organized in an inverted T, with a s

Diller Scofidio + Renfro   United States   The curving forms stretching from both sides of a railyard in the city of Colorado Springs connect the US Olympic & Paralympic Museum, a work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro that opened in 2020, to America the Beautiful Park. Also designed by DS+R, t

AL_A (Amanda Levete Architects)   United Kingdom   Established in 2009 by Amanda Levete, the London firm AL_A has built two new buildings in the heart of the historic British university campus: the William Doo Undergraduate Centre and the Dr Lee Shau Kee Access Centre. The Undergraduate Centre com

estudioHerreros   Norway   Instead of being simply a facility for the safeguarding, display, and dissemination of the work of Edvard Munch, the building is conceived to be a dynamic hub for contemporary culture and a cohesive element for Oslo and the country at large. Designed

IDOM   France   Southeast of Nantes – in the municipality of Bouguenais, which belongs to the French cantón of Rezé – rises this building by IDOM – Gohar Manrique San Pedro, Inés López Taberna, Iñaki Garai – which ensued from winning a competition to improve the cit

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Netherlands   Upon its completion in 1992, Rijnstraat 8 represented both an innovative office typology – its atriums served as conservatories – and a leading example of sustainability. Over time, the building no longer offered the flexibility required of a contemp

Sou Fujimoto   Hungary   Inspired in the worlds of nature and of music, the Japanese studio won in 2014 the competition to build the House of Hungarian Music, to be built in Budapest’s largest park. An undulated disc, pierced by random openings, is elevated on slender suppor

David Chipperfield   Spain   The archway, bridging the two buildings and added in 1951, makes circulation visible and celebrates the transformation of the bank into a space for exhibitions and events while retaining its urban qualities as a gateway between the city and the sea..

Herzog & de Meuron JV Vogt   Russia   Several historic maps were overlapped to reveal the gradual changes of the site’s identity and geometry. The new park retraces the former shoreline of the Neva River, reorganizes urban flows, integrates into the city, and connects green public spaces

Ryue Nishizawa   Chile   Spreading like a membrane of concrete that evokes the form of a wave, the house seeks to engage in dialogue, through contrast and metaphor, with the powerful context of the location. The residence is part of an initiative taken in the wake of Chile’s

Matthew Barnett Howland CSK   United Kingdom   Resorting to simplicity and sustainability, this residential project is a creative response to the particular complexities and conventions of contemporary housing. Instead of the traditional construction with layers of walls incorporating a variety o

Steven Holl   United States   With new studios and rehearsal spaces on the banks of the Potomac River, the Kennedy Center ensures itself a place at the forefront of the federal capital’s cultural scene. Striking a contrast with the bold building designed by Edward Durell Stone, t

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Sweden   At a height of 125 and 110 meters, respectively, the Innovationen and Helix towers are the highest residential buildings in Stockholm. Located in Hagastaden, a new district in the north of the capital developed around the Karolinska Institute (which

Jørn Utzon   Australia   In 1957, when he was 38 years old, Utzon won the competition to build the Sydney Opera House at Bennelong Point, a small cape located at the center of the Bay, between the interior port and the coast. It was a moment of change in Australia, an optimi

estudioHerreros Bermúdez Arquitectos   Colombia   Located in the urban nucleus of the Colombian capital, the Ágora-Bogotá Convention Center is conceived to be a civic, technological, cultural, and environmental center of attraction for use by the city’s inhabitants.  With this as objective, the proj

Renzo Piano Luis Vidal   Spain   The Botín Centre, a space for art, culture and education, projecting into the Bay of Santander, restores the ties between the historical part of the city and the sea. The freeway separating the park from the sea has now been rung underground through

Kengo Kuma   Escocia   The Victoria & Albert Museum of Design is the first British building by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, and the only museum dedicated exclusively to design in Scotland. On the banks of the Tay River, with a budget of 80 million pounds, it will hos

Herzog & de Meuron   China   M + is a cultural center for 20th and 21st century art, design, architecture, and the moving image. As such, it embraces the entire spectrum of spaces, means of display and activities related to exhibiting and viewing these media. The spaces range fr

COBE Architects MVRDV   Denmark   Located between Roskilde city center and the site where the music festival of the same name takes place yearly, the Rockmagneten is an art and culture center that takes up an old factory. The brief demanded preserving the existing building – already

MVRDV   China   The initiative for a museum especially designed for this relatively recent art form brings the opportunity to create a platform which will unite the worlds of art and entertainment. By using one of the cartoon’s prime characteristics – the speech bal

Everyone knows about the paradoxes inherent in the idea of a glazed skyscraper in the Persian Gulf, so it is not surprising to hear of solutions such as those that have been developed by Aedas, in collaboration with Arup, in the Al Bahar Towers, two

Because they grow quickly, and are evidently sustainable and furthermore easy to cultivate, microalgae are becoming an alternative to the use of fossil fuels in the field of construction (see Arquitectura Viva 140). The upcoming challenge seems to be

Peter Buchanan   From Brutalism to Neo-Rationalism, and passing through High-Tech, Contextualism and Postmodernism, James Stirling’s influence on recent architectural history is an indisputable fact. Peter Buchanan points out these influences to us in a run-through o