Studio Gang   United States   The firm headed by Jeanne Gang has completed a 265-room hotel building in downtown Denver. Located at a prominent corner and rising 48 meters, it is inspired by the growth Aspen trees (Populus tremuloides). The geometry of the windows evokes the dark

Open Architecture   China   The design for this 50-meter-tall cultural hub with a cone shape took into account how the sun changes course during the year. Located in China’s northeastern city of Yantai, the Sun Tower was conceived as a giant sundial composed of two connected la

L35 Architects gmp Architekten Ribas & Ribas   Spain   The main objective of the renovation was to give Real Madrid’s stadium more flexible and dynamic, readjusting its massive form to the scale of the city around it. The asymmetrical envelope flows with curved surfaces to reflect the diffused light in a

Foster + Partners   United States   Foster + Partners have unveiled the latest schemes, drawn up in conjunction with Arup, for California High-Speed Rail’s first four stations. These will be in the cities of Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, and Hanford. Located close to the latter, Kings T

Foster + Partners Arup Associates Junquera arquitectos   Spain   This flexible system organizes the ensemble by means of a geometric grid inspired by the current domes. The proposal consists of a modular terminal, a system of raised platforms, and a minimum intervention on the old passenger terminal…

Studio Gang   United States   The 154-year-old American Museum of Natural History across the upper west side of Central Park has a new wing that establishes a fluid connection among the institution’s various buildings. The new educational programs of the AMNH are organized around

Sou Fujimoto Architects   Japan   The Maruhon Makiart Terrace – Ishinomaki Cultural Center seeks to express the recovery of Ishinomaki, a city in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, that was much damaged by the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country in 2011. The different programs – audit

Zaha Hadid Architects   China   The foundations and underground works for this new financial hub of the Taikang Insurance Group in Wuhan have been completed. The circular composition of three interconnected towers rising 52, 50, and 47 floors contains offices, apartments, a hotel,

Rafael Moneo Belén Moneo Jeffrey Brock   United States   The plot on which these laboratories are located was the last one available at Columbia University’s Morningside campus, and therefore the new gateway to the campus from its Manhattanville expansion. From the start it was decided that the new buildin

SANAA   Australia   The Victorian building of one of the country’s principal art institutions has now been enlarged with a cluster of interconnected pavilions that go about adapting to the topography of the site.

Foster + Partners Norman Foster   Qatar   Lusail Stadium, centerpiece of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, officially opened on 9 September with the Lusail Super Cup final between the winners of the professional leagues of Saudi Arabia and Egypt – Al Hilal SFC and Zamalek, respectively. Designed by F

David Chipperfield Architects 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 Architects   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 Architects   Spain   Spain’s leading bank has renovated its headquarters to showcase its rich collection of artworks, and with this it creates a new cultural hub for the city to which it is intimately bound. A gateway between city and sea, the arch that connects the twin

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

After years of research into the qualities and benefits of fibers and other natural materials in the field of construction, the designer Jonas Edvard has taken advantage of the sound-absorbing properties of mushroom mycellium to create the Myx Sail/F

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