Henning Larsen Espen Surnevik   Denmark   In Denmark, where more and more temples are closing down, the new Højvangen Church is a notable exception. Located in a forest on the outskirts of Skanderborg, it is the first to go up in the area in over 500 years. The 1,500-square-meter complex is

Alventosa Morell Arquitectes   Spain   In Matadepera, a municipality in the comarca of Vallès Occidental, in Barcelona province, a young couple built their first home on a 600-square-meter plot that was part of a larger property of the family. Located at the foot of the majestic massif of

TEd’A arquitectes   Spain   Located on the seafront on the cliffs of the Majorcan municipality of Calvià, the single-family house Ca na Birgit is an example of architecture sensitized to the environment and local climate. Encompassing a built area of 194 square meters, the proj

Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   In Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, the mausoleum for Thomas Sankara has been inaugurated. It pays tribute to the country’s revolutionary former president and twelve officials close to him, all assassinated in 1987 during a coup d’êtat. The

Estudio APLG   Colombia   Located in the rocky formations called Farallones de Cali, within the territorial subdivision or corregimiento of Pichindé, the Guanes House is a work of the firm APLG (Arquitectura para la Gente), led by Diego Guzmán and Álvaro Avendaño. Encompassin

Atelier Brückner   Japan   From the roof’s intricate structure to the signage, the building is based on the geometrical patterns of a technique of scratching plaster – ganch carving – used in Central Asia to decorate palaces and temples...

Colectivo C733    Mexico   Xpujil market is part of an urban strategy that includes five key projects: bus stop, market, library, center for community development, and municipal presidency. To optimize resources and create a greater impact, some programs were integrated in one

Colectivo C733    Mexico   Mercatram Balancán combines key functions for community well-being: a traditional market, a bus stop, a center for community development, and a space for waste treatment. The scheme seeks to favor a more conscious relationship with the environment an

Estudio Montevideo    Argentina   With a built area of 693 square meters, the Valpo residential development sought to be a redesign of the classic loft concept, offering a new way to live on the outskirts of the Argentinian city of Córdoba. The scheme generated flexible, fluid spaces

Liu Jiakun   China   The paving stones that were used in the Forbidden City in Beijing came from a manufacturing plant whose centenary history is presented by premises that explore the poetics of baked brick. The museum features a marshy park, fenced in like traditional

Liu Jiakun   China   The facilities of the oldest Chinese distillery still in operation are surrounded by new production buildings with pitched roofs, where traditional fermenting and liquor-making practices are perpetuated. A courtyard connects the various volumes, whos

Liu Jiakun   China   New additions to the Jianchuan museums, which house the country’s largest private collection, are three interconnected pavilions harboring the memory of the Cultural Revolution. Like temples in bustling areas, the galleries showing historical items a

Zarcola Architetti   Italy   Rustic but refined like the pastoral characters of the eclogues, a small dwelling nestled into a village in the Lessini Mountains emerges from what was an old barn, between the stone walls of which a structure of fine wooden laths, set three centimet

Déchelette Architecture   France   A building intended for social housing presents toward the street an innovative self-supporting screen of tamped earth, in contrast with the wooden facade behind. Like the wooden structure, the blocks of earth came prefabricated and were simply stack

Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra   Spain   Built in the 13th century, the listed ensemble of the Reales Atarazanas (Royal Shipyards) is in a privileged spot in the center of Seville: the Arenal quarter, halfway between the Guadalquivir and the monumental complex of the Cathedral, between the

Tuñón y Albornoz Arquitectos   Spain   The new classroom and library building is organized as a compact structure, with a perimeter bay of classrooms that braces, in its interior, three large voids placed diagonally along the section that harbors two multipurpose rooms and a canteen. The

One Plus Partnership   China   Just as Chillida paid tribute to the sea with geometrical shapes carved in alabaster, a moviehouse in Haikou alludes to the island’s coastal nature with similar abstraction and a heavy material presence: ceramic waves that form floors and ceiling vau

Stanton Williams   United Kingdom   The firm Stanton Williams has completed new social and residential facilities for Emmanuel College in Cambridge. The project include refurbishing the existing construction, integrating them with the recent builds and into a setting of university prem

Alventosa Morell Arquitectes   Spain   With a simple design and a bioclimatic focus, the LA House is laid out around a central fireplace, surrounded by four brick volumes. These four solid-looking ceramic boxes are placed at the ends of the house and contain the rooms. In contrast with th

Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra   Spain   The Royal Shipyards of Seville are the city’s most impressive civil construction. They are located in a privileged spot: in the Arenal neighborhood, midway between the river and the monumental site of the Cathedral, the Archive of the Indies, and the

Tropical Space   Vietnam   Next to the Terra Cotta Studio in Dien Phong, another work of the Vietnamese firm Tropical Space, this workshop uses its folds to embrace a preexisting kiln for ceramic bricks. Two walls rising 5.4 meters divide the main parts of the new construction

Vector Architects   China   In the heart of the city of Jingdezhen, known for its porcelain production, stands this hotel designed with the idea of preserving the constructions of an old industrial complex, including the existing camphor trees. The entire program is organized a

Martens Willems & Humblé Architecten   Netherlands   This project by Martens Willems & Humblé Architecten – with Maikel Willems and Rik Martens at the helm – is a residential building located at the boundary between an old working-class neighborhood and De Groene Loper (The Green Carpet), a new bou

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

Wienerberger AG   Outstanding International Brick Architecture

Studio KO   Marrakech