Harquitectes   Spain   The residence presents two central spaces, which receive overhead light in order to curb the excessive shade cast by the trees, and are conceived in bioclimatic terms so that they serve as extensions of the garden. The monolayer solution of the ceram

CSO Arquitectura   Spain   Designed by CSO Arquitectura, headed by Antón Freile, this expansion of the elderly residence which the same Madrid firm built in 2005 in Camarzana de Tera (Zamora), at kilometer 127 of the road linking Benavente to Vigo, has been shortlisted in the

Luis Vidal   Spain   On an elongated plot parallel to the Avenida de las Universidades, in Dos Hermanas, Seville, the new campus is, along with that of Córdoba, the second largest of Loyola University in Seville. Because of very extreme temperatures in the region, the p

Calderon-Folch Arquitectes Pol Sarsanedas   Spain   The project for the CMCiB Building (Comparative Medicine and Bioimage Center) seeks addressing complex technical and functional issues in a way that is sustainable and sensitive to context and achieves high comfort levels (visual, hygrothermal, and a

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

Jean Nouvel   France   A delicate bioclimate filter creates a perimetral communal space and gives a distinct character to a mixed-use tower located in Confluence, a new neighborhood in Lyon.

Vo Trong Nghia Architects   Vietnam   Located just 16 kilometers away from one of the main airports in Vietnam and half-way between Danang city and Hoi An old town, this retreat-resort is a center for the recovery of the body and mind, a getaway where long-stay guests can relax in a peac

Coll-Leclerc   Spain   This residential development is located close to the transportation hub of Les Glòries – currently under construction and set to become a space for people, as well as a large green lung for the city of Barcelona. Coll-Leclerc’s project proposes an in

AAN (Arquitectura Anna Noguera) J2J architects   Spain   Anna Noguera and José Javier Fernández Ponce carried out this project that involved building a new multisport center for Barcelona’s Turó de la Peira neighborhood and fitting out the interior of one of its city blocks. The facilities are housed in a

SUMO arquitectes Yolanda Olmo   Spain   Villa Urania is a small residence from the  late 19th century – home of the astronomer Josep Comas i Solà (1868-1937) –, the last example of the garden-city of El Farró in the Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district. The redensification of the neighborhood left

Harquitectes   Spain   Not so many jobs begin like this one, with an owners’ list of wishes and hopes for their new home. A list much closer to the principles and values architects usually work with, often secretly, than the ordinary expectations of those couples facing th

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Mozambique   Located at the point where the Revuboe and Zambezi rivers converge, the project aims to create a new type of neighborhood to address the increasing demand for housing in Tete, Mozambique. The community will be able to test a new planning method that

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Kenya   Located in the Kenyan village of Kogelo, where Barack Obama’s father was born, the Mama Sarah Obama Legacy Campus will be an educational enclave for a thousand students and preschool-age children in danger of being marginalized. The project presents

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   Situated in the rural countryside of Boulkiemdé province, the Noomdo Orphanage lies approximately 2 kilometers outside Koudougou, and is home to more than fifty children between the ages of six and seventeen. Mimicking the nearby residential compound

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   The success of the primary school in Gando and its positive impact on the community encouraged to build a secondary school to offer opportunities to those students who wanted to continue their studies. Inspired in the distribution of the surrounding

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   The Songtaaba Women’s Association is made up of approximately 300 members from the village of Gando and the surrounding province of Boulgou. The association provides a venue for the local women to form a strong social and economic union, in order to

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   Following the strategies applied at the Primary School in Gando, the main aim of the project was to design a sustainable school that would adapt to the extreme conditions of Burkina Faso. Its construction was carried out with the help of workers who

Harquitectes   Spain   This public facility houses an adult education center, a language standardization consortium, and a hotel on a triangular plot in the Les Corts district. Two of the three sides of the site are defined by the heritage-listed frontage of the former Pla

Diébédo Francis Kéré Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   Located on the outskirts of Koudougou, the third most populated city of Burkina Faso, the new Lycée Schorge building draws inspiration from traditional settlements in this part of West Africa, offering reinterpretations of vernacular building materia

Calderon-Folch Arquitectes Pol Sarsanedas   Spain   The municipality of Begues, in the Garraf Natural Park, is the location for the new mixed-use cultural building that houses El Roure Civic Center and La Ginesta Library, aside from a multipurpose theater for 336 people. The project is the result of t

Arkítera Carlos Sánchez Hernández Enrique Marín   On the boundary between the Tagongers Campus and the urban center of Valencia, the Centre d’Idiomes is a hinge between these two fabrics reserving a large space in the west area of the plot, which functions as an outdoor lobby for the university comp

Harquitectes dataAE Joan Ramon Pascuets Maira González   Spain   Located in the UAB campus in Cerdanyola del Vallès, the ICTA-ICP building is a research center in environmental science and paleontology. In tune with its function, from the beginning the building was designed according to sustainability criteria. Th

Harquitectes   Spain   Flanked by party walls on a lot that stretches deep inward from the front border, this house is composed of a succession of volumes that have been deliberately set back to obtain the best possible light and views, and are arranged amid small courtyar

The list of Madrid works by the British architect Norman Foster – Cepsa Tower, Axis at Plaza Colón, the Hall of Realms at the Prado Museum – will soon be including an office complex for the Spanish sustainable infrastucture and renewable energy cong

Eduardo Prieto   Energy has become one of the big themes of architecture. Not only because laws, directives, and regulations are increasingly demanding in what concerns standards of comfort and reducing consumption, but also because energy has gone from being a matte

It seems natural to associate the term ‘sustainable’ with the image of greenery, although the connection is not at all inevitable. With regard to the links that buildings establish with the environment (evoking the idea of the planet as a vulnerable

Iñaki Ábalos   Harquitectes is a collective that represents well a way of doing in today’s context. A small collective with a clear focus on an issue at once broad and narrow, and that we could sum up in two words: matter and air. Their work includes an interesting

Felipe Fernández-Armesto   Environment always clings to culture, conditioning people’s responses, limiting their potential, stimulating their inventiveness. It seems reasonable to suppose that in the early stages of cultural divergence environment drove innovation, as human co

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Cheap oil is at once temptation and opportunity: the temptation to preserve a land use and technical model that consumes huge amounts of energy, because the incentives associated with scarcity and shortage have vanished; and a historic opportunity to

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Scientific research and critical thought on climate and architecture began with early modernity, and multiplied exponentially under the impact of the oil crises of the 1970s.

Ignacio Paricio   I have no doubt that two substantial vectors of the evolution of 21st-century architecture are sensuality and sustainability. Sustainability is unavoidable for obvious reasons, but architecture is also in debt to comfort. Sensuality, the pleasure of

Energy flows everywhere but is invisible, as generally are the buildings where it is produced. One exception is the power plant of Wedel, near the city of Hamburg, which is soon to undergo transformation in accordance with a project drawn up by the L

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

Reinforced concrete is the most commonly used material in contemporary construction. Its use adds up to 5% of the total emissions of greenhouse gas, so one of the main challenges today when using reinforced concrete is that of improving its environme

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

Ignacio Paricio   In the forties decade of the past century, when I was born, Jean Prouvé was designing a lightweight facade solution that today serves as model for the design of enclosures: the facade of windows. The window, understood as an opening filled by a syste

Alineadas sobre un muelle y orientadas al Sur, las viviendas diseñadas por el parisino Nicolas Michelin para el barrio Grand Large de Dunkerque, en Francia, funcionan con el sol y el viento. De ahí su forma alargada y sus gabletes, en cuyo interior s

Stefan Behling   En el desierto de Abu Dhabi se levanta la primera fase de Masdar, una iniciativa promovida por la compañía estatal de la energía y diseñada por el estudio británico de Norman Foster.

Virgilio Gutiérrez   Al sur de Tenerife, junto a un parque tecnológico donde se investigan las energías renovables, se ha inaugurado una colonia experimental de viviendas adaptadas al entorno. 

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Solar time is not the time of the solar house: it is the time of the slow city. Indeed, solar houses as those gathered in Madrid for the first Solar Decathlon in Europe are useful platforms for innovation, and fertile grounds for technological compet

Margarita de Luxán   A principios de los 90, Peter Cook visitó Madrid y pronunció varias conferencias, una de ellas en la Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura. Al final de la misma se abrió un coloquio y, ante la gran concurrencia de alumnos y profesores que llenaban

Justo Isasi   La ciencia de la construcción, que es la física, y la ciencia del cálculo matemático parecen haber avanzado hasta hacer posibles proyectos que no pasaban de ser utopías sobre el papel en el siglo XX, pero paradójicamente pocos creen hoy que la constr

Luis Fernández-Galiano   The cost of the black fuel boosts the value of the green tag. After two decades of reasonably cheap oil, the spectacular increase of the barrel price in the past years has strongly reactivated the political and professional interest in the energy beh