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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Compensating for the lack of parking spots in the former capital is a network of open, flexible constuctions which serve at the same time to give the urban fabric a new character altogether.
At the end of the 19th century, the German mathematician August Möbius discovered his famous strip, a continuous band with only side and one edge. Perhaps influenced by this non-orientable surface, or perhaps fascinated by the infinite folds of Deleu
Next to La Loma Country Club, in the Mexican city of San Luis Potosí, stands this two-floor house sculpted in exposed concrete. With an area of 800-square-meters, the composition of volumes generates a play of lights and shadows at different heights
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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