Peris + Toral arquitectes   Spain   The artisanal bricks baked with biomass provide inertia to the inner void – which acts as a collector or a solar chimney, depending on the season – and are bonded to form lattices airing the dwellings. The ten-meter bay results in a flexible floor pl

Tham & Videgård   Sweden   The site is located on the southwest coast of Sweden, in an old agricultural area gently sloping down towards the sea. In the midst of a vast and open cultivated landscape, this plot constitutes an exception as it is planted with many different trees

Tham & Videgård   Sweden   The most sustainable buildings are those which remain in use the longest. Robustness is crucial to longevity, so solid and reliable construction methods are fundamental for a sustainable architecture. With this in mind, the design seeks to provide dy

Tham & Videgård   Sweden   The old electrical station of Malmö, in the south of Sweden, has been transformed into an art museum with an informal and experimental character that would complement the main museum in Stockholm. The greatest challenge posed by the project, (in addi

Carles Enrich   Spain   This tower recreates extreme building situations for the training of firemen – using double and triple spaces, spiral staircases, cat ladders, wells, doors, windows, etc. Cantilevered balconies are used for rappelling exercises and vertical rescue dr

LUO studio   China   Xiuwu County in Henan province, China, is known for producing medicinal herbs, in particular Rehmannia root. This is the context behind the exhibition hall of Houyanmen Village, in Huanfeng. Through on-site research on the techniques of processing Re

BAAS Arquitectura casa solo arquitectos   Spain   Wrapped in ceramic brick slats and lattices adapted to the different requirements inside, this day center belongs to a network of municipal health facilities that provide long-term treatments, sparing locals the need to commute to the capital. Organi

López+Aroca    Spain   The Murcian firm headed by José María López and Edith Aroca, in collaboration with The Pink Panther Collective, has won the competition to refurbish the civic center of Roldán, a district under the jurisdiction of the municipality of Torre Pacheco. T

A Threshold   India   On land where fruit-bearing plants are grown, arches of different sizes and walls of brick peep through dense vegetation, looking like ruins of an abandoned construction. Outside Kaggalipura, a village some 40 kilometers south of Bangalore, the capit

Neri & Hu Design and Research Office   China   The warehouse of an old cotton textile factory outside the Chinese capital has been refurbished to harbor the main office and the retail concept store of a historical pastry brand. In allusion to their baking-industry uses, the brick buildings were t

Neri & Hu Design and Research Office   China   In what is an emerging industrial area, a top manufacturer of elevators has provided itself with a headquarters of formidable dimensions, yet is able to integrate the human scale. In what is a campus of workshops, showrooms, and storage interspersed

Sergison Bates architects   United Kingdom   On an enclosed site behind rows of terraced Victorian houses, the project involved refurbishing an old sheet-metal workshop that in the 1980s had been turned into offices, and transforming it now into a residential complex. The building has three flo

Mae Architects    United Kingdom   This senior daycare is part of a complex of listed buildings of Morden College, which harbors a community of elderly people. Founded in 1695, Morden College is located in Blackheath Park, in Southeast London. Seeking to address the problem of lonelin

Harquitectes   Spain   Placed behind the main facade, the staircase shaft functions as a patio that favors natural ventilation while protecting the living space from street noise and disturbances and controlling the views from and to the exterior.

Studio di Architettura Zermani Associati   Italy   The decision to maintain and restore the defensive tower determined the layout of the house in an L shape and the composition of the whole as an eminently horizontal volume that accentuates the tower’s height.

Harquitectes   Spain   This 144-square-meter residence is squeezed between party walls, on a plot that stretches in an east-to-west direction. The west facade faces the town’s main street, and the east side is used for wheeled access. The urban regulations allow: a volume

Christian Kerez   Czech Republic   This house, with the appearance of a brick fortress, goes up in a quiet suburb northwest of Prague, within close proximity to Villa Müller by Adolf Loos. The construction – which can be divided into three apartments – is formed by sixteen tangent cyl

Barceló Balanzó Arquitectes   Spain   The complex is located on Carretera de Ribes, on the northeast of Barcelona, very close to the Nus de Trinitat, which connects Ronda de Dalt with Ronda de Litoral – one of the main and busiest road junctions in the city –, and next to Trinitat Vella

Matos Castillo Néstor Montenegro Toni Gelabert   Spain   The project to refurbish and convert the Casa de la Cultura de Boadilla del Monte into a new library and municipal theater involved working on a building completed in the 1980s and which housed two uses, but combined in a slightly confused way. The

Tropical Space   Vietnam   This office building, covered by brick walls with a concrete structure, is located on a quiet street in Ho Chi Minh City. The functional areas are divided by a continuous vertical void, favoring the access of natural light and air circulation. The of

Lina Ghotmeh   France   This facility in Louviers, Normandy, accommodates 260 crafters of artisanal bags, small leather goods, and equestrian items like saddles and harnesses for the luxury brand Hermès. The project of the Lebanese-French architect Lina Ghotmeh is based on

O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects   Ireland   The Matt Talbot, the first of the four buildings included in this municipal commission, is formed by apartments that flow out to private outdoor spaces, and where all the rooms are connected to a shared garden to foster a sense of community...

O’Donnell + Tuomey Architects   United Kingdom   The character of the new center is in keeping with the industrial past of the site: walls and roofs are clad in brick and big tiles made of clay in the same tone. The steps and chamfers form the entrances and articulate the building...

With its 130 million inhabitants, Mexico is the tenth most populated nation in the world, and among Spanish-speaking countries the one with most demographic weight. Add to this its strategic position, its important economy, and its powerful culture,

Nothing is timeless, still less in architecture, but if one had to look for a material to represent the notion of permanence, it would be brick. Wood was perhaps the first ever to be used by humans, and will perhaps continue to be the one most widely

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   One hundred years after Anni and Josef Albers met, their work, philosophy and funding clout have made possible a stunning hospital that is saving lives in one of the hottest places on Earth. When Anni Albers began weaving at the Bauhaus in the 1920s,

The Economist   Peter Barber’s work offers a chance for a meeting of minds. On mcgrath road, a side street in Stratford, east London, a 26-dwelling modernist terrace in mustard-coloured brick surrounds a square. The development (pictured) is hard to pigeonhole. Pete

In the capital of the Indian state of Odisha, the New Delhi-based firm Studio Lotus has built new offices for the Department of Agriculture. As a government building it was conceived at the outset strictly for official use, but the architects propose

On marshland where lotus plants abound, a pair of mid-20th-century granaries that were in disuse have been brought back to life as a 2,448-square-meter art exhibition gallery, thanks to a project carried out by the Shanghai-based firm Roarc Renew, wh

The Beijing studio Zhu-Pei has built a museum adjacent to what is left of the thousand-year-old imperial pottery-making complex of the prefectural city of Jingdezhen, a porcelain capital of the world, China’s Sevrès. The building is composed of a ser

Brick Award   In 2020, six winners were awarded in five categories: Sharing Public Spaces (University of Silesia, Faculty of Radio and Television, by BAAS Arquitectura), Feeling at Home (Can Jaime I nIsabelle, by TEdA arquitectes), Living Together..

Libraries have been one of the symbols of bourgeois society. Originally confined to monasterios and palaces, distant havens of elitist knowledge, libraries eventually became quintessential public spaces in the capitalist and increasingly democratic c

Empty the building, leave its sculptural brick enclosure exactly the way it is, and implant in it a massive heart of concrete. This was the strategy followed by Tadao Ando when he transformed an old residential block in the city of Chicago into the n

Joaquín Medina Warmburg   In the work of Eladio Dieste, whose birth has been one hundred years, technical ingenuity was placed at the service of the social program and Catholic fervor.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Architecture is moving from bling to bareness. The economic devastation left by the crisis and the symbolic decay of emblematic works have favored the rise of a new attitude. In contrast to the dazzling glare of the architectures of social-opulence –

The firm Paredes Pedrosa – founded and headed by Ángela García de Paredes and Ignacio Pedrosa and based in Madrid – was announced the winner of the contest to build The Spanish Institute in the campus of Mohammed V University in Rabat. The project, c

Elena Merino   Fernando Moral   In the humble words ‘brick’ and ‘tile’ lies the simplicity, only apparent, of a material that has come down to our days with very specific technological variations. Nevertheless, the modest nature habitually attributed to brick is quickly proven wron

The expressionist dream of the glass pavilion drawn by figures like Bruno Taut, Wenzel Hablik, or the Luckhardt brothers has had to wait a hundred years to come true, but at least it has come true in Germany, and big time. After a decade of construct

The contorted pyramid rose behind the brick cliff and hundreds of people laid siege on the building, eager to contemplate the new spaces and the new collection: the enlarged Tate Modern opened its doors just as the country’s polls were being readied

Fernanda Canales   Gone at 84 years of age, the Mexican architect devoted a lifetime to studying brick as both a structural material and an element of composition.

Fernando Tabuenca   Jesús Leache   A material used in diverse periods and civilizations, modular and warm at the same time, brick has been discredited by modernity but maintains its place in contemporary architecture.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Brick is the Esperanto of construction. While a few cultures may ignore its grammar, those that command its vocabulary are legion, expressing physical needs and immaterial yearnings through the essential language of ceramic prisms. Versatile as no ot

This brick house in Buenos Aires has two theoretical references. On one hand, Kenneth Frampton’s definition of tectonics, which he considers not only a “mere disclosure of the construction technique, but, rather, its expressive potential.” To Frampto

During the late 1980s, the German architect Hans Kollhoff designed and carried out works of great material force, among them Piraeus – a vast flexing brick apartment block located in one of the dockland sites of Amsterdam – and the ascetic mass housi

In the olden days, when bricks were brought out of the kiln where they were baked, the pieces closest to the focus of heat – and therefore overbaked – were discarded on account of their dark burnt tone and their rough volcanic texture. At the start o

Studio KO   Marrakech