Ytong España / Xella Group   The Ytong solution of tongue-ingroove panels is made of cellular concrete, which weighs much less and insulates better than conventional concrete. It is obtained in an autoclave on a base of sand, silica, and lime.

Zaha Hadid Architects   Saudi Arabia   The King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD), designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, is a centerpiece of Riyadh’s ambitious metropolitan railway system, which inaugurates its first lines on 1 December 2024. Able to accommodate 3.6 million commuters daily,

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

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   Although Portugal is mainly a maritime country, its inland is traversed by mighty mountains, largely unknown of but whose beauty will not be unfamiliar to those who have read authors like Eça de Queirós or Miguel Torga. In one of those ranges, on a m

Martin Duplantier Architectes   France   Built in line with the 2024 Olympic Games held in Paris, this seven-story garage in L'Île-Saint-Denis freed up the neighborhood of vehicles. The structural bracing system was included in the design of the facade and the whole building serves as a la

TAO | Trace Architecture Office   China   In 2021, the company Librairie Avant-Garde commissioned the Beijing-based firm TAO | Trace Architecture Office to build a series of bookstores, including that of the Academia Chongzheng in Weishan and the recently completed one in Yangpo. Atop the Ga

Álvaro Siza Carlos Castanheira   Taiwan   This pavilion is part of an overall redevelopment of the Taifong Golf Course in Changhua County, Taiwan, which includes several projects by Álvaro Siza and Carlos Castanheira. Close to Casa Siza, the first construction completed within the operation,

Molestina Architekten   Spain   Placed on an axis running parallel to the coastline, the linear house is closed to the street but opens up gradually to the landscape towards the west. The long piece culminates in a tall, open porch that offers views of the Mediterranean Sea. The ki

Manuel Cervantes Estudio   Mexico   Designed in collaboration with the client, the designer James Perse, this house is located in the Mexican state of Nayarit, on the Pacific coast. Independent low pavilions – containing nine rooms, communal spaces, swimming pools, and a spa – are dist

Studio Moto   Belgium   The Ghent-based practice Studio Moto has completed this viewpoint on a beach in De Panne, alongside the promenade that connects the Belgian municipality to Dunkirk (France), beside the North Sea. The structure offers a dynamic stop along the beackwal

Efrén Munarriz   Spain   With a built area of 140 square meters, this house of exposed concrete – poured into a formwork of wooden planks – stands at the extreme point of a simple town-block of doubly open-ended plots, in a neighborhood of dwellings raised by the Housing Min

Beaudouin Architectes Ivry Serres   France   On a difficult plot in the historic quarter of the city of Grasse in southern France, the Charles Nègre media library absorbs some preexisting dwellings and an old water reservoir. The 3,600-square-meter building is inserted into the urban fabric of

Angelo Candalepas and Associates   Australia   A small lot in Punchbowl, a residential neighborhood in Sydney, is the site of the new home of the Australian Islamic Mission, a complex of buildings whose purpose is to facilitate learning and religious worship for local Muslims. The completed first

Andrea Dragoni   Italy   In the countryside of the central Italian region of Umbria lies Valfabbrica, a village of medieval origin. The municipal cemetery outside the historic center was recently enlarged by Andrea Dragoni. It closes towards the new high-traffic road from wh

IXA   Czech Republic   The Prague-based firm IXA has turned a farm in Lošany into a monument commemorating three resistance periods of modern Czechoslovakian history. The circumstances around the formation of these movements are recounted through the story of several gener

Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra   Spain   Phase one of the University of Alicante’s Business Creation Center, involving half the building, has been completed. Phase two has yet to be assigned a starting date. Presenting a huge pleated cantilever on the main facade, it is located within the u

Castroferro Arquitectos   Spain   The Vigo practice of Jordi Castro and María G. Ferro was commissioned for this dwelling with views over the estuary of Pontevedra, in the Galician municipality of Bueu. The site was chosen by the client, who wanted a place in which to retire, a house

Mestres Wåge Arquitectes Mendoza Partida BAX studio   Norway   The Kunstsilo Art Gallery has opened in what was a grain silo raised in the 1930s, in the Norwegian city of Kristiansand. The transformation of the huge agricultural facility built with reinforced concrete to harbor a collection of over 5,500 Nordic

Mensing Timofticiuc   Germany   A couple bought an old building that stood on a small plot of land in Berlin’s Heiligensee neighborhood, close to the lake of the same name. Combining artificial stone and concrete colored with anthracite pigments, the cubic volume that resulted from

Hiroyuki Ito    Japan   The Japanese firm Hiroyuki Ito Architects was commissioned to build this apartment building in the Tokyo ward ot Bunkyo. The zone of its location has undergone significant change in recent years, with hotels replaced by residential complexes. The pro

Fernanda Canales   Mexico   As part of a program to improve the capital’s most disadvantaged areas, a small facility provides training and meeting spaces close to what is one of the largest penitenciaries in the country. Without shutting out the street, with which it engages th

Harquitectes   Spain   So exacerbated by the romantic imagination of modernisme, the medieval character of Barcelona’s old quarter is less attributable to ogee arches and flamboyant traceries than to the relationship between the alleys within the confines of the old walls

Nikken Sekkei   Japan   On the campus of Waseda University in Honio, a city in Japan’s Saitama Prefecture, this three-story building contains facilities for sport training and meetings. The gym had to have natural indirect lighting, ideal for physical exercises done indoors

O Arquitectura   Spain   In the 1950s, in the Navarrese town of Lododa, a new neighborhood went up consisting of simple one-level dwellings with backyards. Casa O reformulates this typology with a contemporary language. Its facade preserves the existing composition. The ridg

Bloomberg   Feargus O'Sullivan   British schools are crumbling due to an aerated material that was popular after World War II. The issue centers around “reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete,” a material known more widely as RAAC, which can become dangerous if exposed to water. The

Scientific American   Mark Fischetti   Nick Bockelman   Wil V. Srubar   New techniques and novel ingredients can greatly reduce the immense carbon emissions from cement and concrete production. We make more concrete than we do any other material on Earth. Cement is one of the most energy-intensive products on the planet.

The Economist   The concrete used was self-healing and anachronistically green The romans were master builders. Many of their works, from the Pantheon (pictured above) and the Colosseum in Rome itself, to the Pont du Gard in southern Gaul and the equally impressive

The Economist   They offer ways to produce cement without releasing carbon dioxide. Concrete is one of the world’s most important materials. But making the cement that binds it generates about 8% of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions. This is not just because of

The Economist   It is a big source of emissions, but might one day be the reverse. The romans perfected concrete, and their legacy still stands in the form of the magnificent roof of the Pantheon, the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. Since it was complete

Scientific American   Sophie Bushwick   But for now, a square meter of the building material holds roughly the energy of two AA batteries. Concrete, after water, is the world's most used material. Because it already surrounds us in the built environment, researchers have been exploring the

The residential building that the Madrid-based trio Arenas Basabe Palacios has raised in the Spanish capital’s Salamanca neighborhood has two different faces: towards the street it presents a classical tripartite composition soberly regulated by pref

Brutalism with a friendly countenance: this is how one might venture to describe the architecture that Grafton Architects – Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara – have been carrying out for the past twenty years in Ireland, Europe, and America, from t

Students of the Master of Advanced Studies in Digital Fabrication and Architecture program at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich have built ‘Concrete Choreoraphy,’ an installation of columns made of special concrete with the assistanc

dbt   From ancient civilisations to the present day, columns have served as elements of architecture particularly tied to the harmony, balance and proportion of architectural orders – so much so that they have come to be recognised as works of art in their

The rise of a renewed interest in Brutalism seventy years after its birth is reflected both in the growing defense of heritage ascribed to this architectural current – arising from the Modern Movement with Le Corbusier and the use of béton brut (raw

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

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   After a generation in the doghouse, concrete is more fashionable than ever. So why don’t we take better care of our brutalist architecture? Concrete is everywhere. It is not only under our feet and above our heads, forming the background infrastructu

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

It has been announced by the College of Architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago that the winner of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) – awarded every two years to the finest works of architecture carried out in t

Kurt W. Forster   Though partly discredited and forgotten, Rudolphs buildings continue to be considered a powerful body of work in American architecture. 

After a protracted process, a period of eight years, that has not been spared its dose of controversy (in 2015 it was announced that the building’s real cost would exceed the initially budgeted amount of 50 million euros by a good 70%), Scotland’s ow

Ignacio Serna   Since early in the 20th century, when August Perret referred to it as “the stone that we craft,” reinforced concrete and the industry associated with it have evolved to the point that we can raise buildings entirely with this material. Perret – who w

The Irish firm of Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, operating since 1978 as Grafton Architects, has been much acclaimed for the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan, a half-buried civic box of concrete – completed in the year 2008 – that strikes an i

Pepa Cassinello   It was she herself, Mother Nature, who first fabricated concrete, and the Stone Age man was first to imitate it. Not in vain. In the beginning it was a material formed simply by mixing natural abiotic elements, small dry stones, conglomerate dust (p

Eduardo Prieto   Since its very beginnings, the concrete industry has always gone hand in hand with the production of chemical agents that have the potential to improve the properties of the material. At first, the focus of these chemical products was on reducing the

The most unique characteristic of this residential complex comprising twelve social housing units in La Alberca de la Záncara (Cuenca) is its low-cost – but very efficient – building system. These dwellings combine concrete blocks forming three-meter

Among the products of translucent concrete currently on the market, the Lucem Lichtbeton system, developed by the German firm of the same name, stands out for its technical caliber, and especially for its competitive selling price, which is not much

Peter Chadwick   London  2016  
Phaidon   - 224 Pages 

Adrian Forty   A Material History

Karla Cavarra Britton   Londres  2001  
Phaidon   - 255 Pages