AIS BAAS Arquitectura   Spain   The outcome of collaboration between BAAS arquitectura (Jordi Badia and Jero Gutiérrez ) and AIS (Francesc Sandalinas), this health center had to work around a tight budget, so costs were reduced by ruling out prefabricated or modular construction. W

Tadao Ando   Japan   Ueno Park, a gift from the Imperial family to the city of Tokyo, is a large public space where several cultural institutions are located. One of them, the old Imperial Library, was transformed into a library for children. The old building has a pseud

Francisco Cadau    Argentina   This stand-alone, five-story block rises on a base. The main volume is structured by a double bay of apartments that prolong in terrace-like patios, giving the facade a pattern of repeated squares resembling a checkerboard with alternating voids. The

Vector architects   China   The project renovates an old industrial complex, and with the idea of preserving what already exists it organizes the program around two courtyards: a central one dominated by camphor and wood, and a space to the west with a pond and brick finishes..

Domani Architectural Concepts   China   Directed by architect Ann Yu of the firm Domani Architectural Concepts, this building for the company Times China is clad in brick lattices in a reddish tone. Named Times I-City or TIC, the building contains exhibition galleries, selling areas, and o

RAUM   France   The French firm headed by Julien Perraud, Benjamin Boré, and Thomas Durant, RAUM, has built this culture facility on Rue des Pierre Blanches in Saint Jean de Boiseau, a city 13 kilometers from Nantes. Combining terracotta, exposed concrete, and wood,

Localworks   Uganda   This monastery is home to a community of monks of the Cistercan Trappist order who established themselves in Kenya in 1952. Following post-election unrest in the country in 2008, the community moved to Uganda. The project of the firm Kampala Localwor

Barozzi Veiga   Denmark   For several years now, the city of Aalborg is immersed in a transition from an industrial economy to one based on knowledge and culture. As part of that process, the project consists in transforming the Spritfabrikken, an old aquavit factory that ha

Dellekamp Schleich AGENdA Agencia de Arquitectura   Mexico   On 19 September 2017, an earthquake jolted the city of Jojutla in the Mexican state of Morelos, destroying over 2,600 homes and leaving nearly all public infrastructures in ruins. The team formed by AGENdA Agencia de Arquitectura | Camilo Restrepo (C

Kashef Chowdhury - URBANA   Bangladesh   The Friendship Hospital in Bangladesh designed by Kashef Chowdhury/URBANA will be awarded the RIBA International Prize 2021, the global accolade for design excellence and social impact. A project of the NGO Friendship, this hospital complex is locate

TDA   Paraguay   Text by TDA (Miguel Duarte and Larissa Rojas) In these times when information overload and speed affect our capacity to pay attention, we uphold non-protagonist architecture. we call for silence. We understand constructive clarity as something ground

Bast   France   With the idea of enlarging their current residence, a building set between party walls, the clients acquired the property adjacent to their rear patio, and the result is an elongated complex facing two streets, with a central courtyard linking the tw

Herzog & de Meuron   Germany   A new wing has been discreetly added to the complex of brick industrial buildings that were originally transformed by the studio in the 1990s into a museum of contemporary art. Aligned with the rest of the industrial constructions near Duisburg’s Inn

Crossboundaries   China   The new urban space, pervaded by the spirit of the artistic community of Songzhuang, is articulated by a zigzagging linear wall that alternates brick and steel to conceal the parking lot, and that unfolds to house the different playground areas.

GarciaGermanArquitectos   Spain   Located in a development called Somo-Boo, in the Cantabrian capital, this house adopts the classic L arrangement to obtain a protected outdoor space. Rooms interweave under a horizontal lid that acts as a tray for the main volume with its pitched roo

MCL Studio   Argentina   The city of Moreno, in Buenos Aires province, is the location of this residential complex built by MCL Studio, a firm headed by Juan Micieli. With a built area of 7,200 square meters, the building is organized around a central cloister, which, integr

Barozzi Veiga   Belgium   Focused on a broad interpretation of the theme of identity, the project extends and transforms the historically significant complex of Groeninge Abbey into an arts space for site-specific temporary exhibitions and public events. The programmatic aim

Batlle i Roig   Spain   The office building Ó is located in the area of the old factory of Can Batlló, one of the most important focuses of development of the city of Barcelona in relation with the economic district of Hospitalet de Llobregat and important avenues such as G

Forgas Arquitectes AMM Arquitectes   Spain   The versatility of exposed ceramic brick – used on walls, pavings, and enclosures – permits its use in all the different volumes of the ensemble and establishes a dialogue between the historic building and the new extension with the garden...

Manuel Herz   Senegal   The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation – in partnership with the non-profit organization Le Korsa – has funded the construction of the new maternity and pediatric clinics of the hospital of Tambacounda, Senegal. The scheme by Manuel Herz – a German arc

Arquitecturia Emilio Tuñón   Spain   The proposal wishes to blend with the chapel and the Clotet building to create a unitary ensemble, generating with its facade a representative space that shows the activity taking place in the museum and connects it with the plaza and the Meier build

b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos David Chipperfield   Spain   The volumes designed for the museum extension, built with timber structures and facades of local stone, are respectfully integrated into the square, creating new exhibition galleries, and an inner courtyard corridor around the historic apse...

bosch.capdeferro arquitectura Caruso St John Architects   Spain   Through a strategy of constellations and consolidations, the project seeks to integrate the museum in the city with a new set of galleries specific to the collection, complementing the spaces of the existing MACBA building...

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

Recientemente terminado, el centro cívico-cultural proyectado por el estudio madrileño Exit Architects, puede concebirse como una especie de palimpsesto en el que conviven lenguajes arquitectónicos distintos. Surgida de la rehabilitación del edificio

Hacer una casa con jardín en una ciudad jardín es el reto que los barceloneses Manuel Bailo y Rosa Rull han asumido en este proyecto, construido en Igualada (Barcelona), en la que una pérgola estructural resuelve la transición entre el espacio interi