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.

Bojaus   Spain   Each of the three living units forming a stack takes up a full floor of the building that rises on an 800-square-meter plot in Madrid’s Aravaca ward. The composition resulted from shifting and twisting each level with respect to the one below, genera

Atelier David Telerman   United States   To the beat of Pink Floyd, Zabriskie Point ends with the leading character getting into his car alone and driving into the Arizona desert, a mythical place with a hostile beauty that Antonioni used as a visual metaphor of the countercultural breakawa

René Pérez Gómez Arquitectura    Mexico   Located in a forest close to the Mexican city of Guadalajara, the two-level house descends on a very rugged topography. The geometrical composition seeks to reduce the impact of the construction on the existing terrain, and strike a dialogue with the

Snøhetta   Norway   Inspirado en la instalación portuaria construida en 1937 por el arquitecto Ketil Ugland para la ciudad noruega de Arendal, cerrada diez años después y posteriormente demolida, el proyecto de la firma Snøhetta es una reinterpretación de la antigua zon

Adjaye Associates   United Arab Emirates   Designed by the firm of David Adjaye, the scheme for the campus of The Africa Institute in the city of Sharjah presents five wings between four and seven stories, clad in reddish concrete. Featuring large courtyards, the center dedicated to the advan

Alberto Campo Baeza   Spain   The brief was to build a house on a hilltop outside the city of Toledo. The hill faces southwest and offers views of the distant horizon, reaching the Gredos Mountains to the northeast. The 60x40-meter site has a 10-meter drop. At the highest point w

Alberto Campo Baeza   United States   For an impressive spot along the Hudson River we established a plane, a platform facing the landscape spread out before us which would have the effect of enhancing it. A large box – 122 feet long, 54 wide, 12 high – was built with sturdy concrete wal

Alberto Campo Baeza   Italy   Heaven on Earth. That is how I have more than once described my intention when designing the houses I have built, every single one of them. This is the latest. All the more reason to make it a piece of Heaven on Earth. In Venice. It is an honor for a

Herzog & de Meuron   South Korea   Herzog & de Meuron’s first Korean project will be inaugurated in Seoul in September 2021. Located in the heart of Cheongdam Dong, a ward of Gangnam District, the triangular concrete volume harbors offices for ST International and exhibition galleries

Bevk Perović arhitekti   Slovenia   Besides a new place of worship, an ensemble of buildings provides a Sunni community with spaces for leisure and gathering, and seeks to trigger an entire regeneration of the zone. The language used avoids historicism and reinterprets traditional icon

ArchStudio    China   A sanctuary is buried under a mound, preserving the beautiful riverside scenery around it and creating an intimate atmosphere conducive to meditating in harmony with nature. With the objective of not felling any of the trees on the site, the project

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

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

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

Peter Chadwick   London  2016  
Phaidon   - 224 Pages 

Adrian Forty   A Material History