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.

MAD Architects   China   This seamless-looking white structure molded in concrete contains a sinuous library and a block of mixed amenities – cafés, public restrooms, a nursery room, among others – for the citizens of Haikou, capital of Hainan, China’s southernmost province.

David Chipperfield   China   An outpost of the Centre Pompidou rises on the banks of the Huangpu as part of a project to transform the industrial margin of the riverbed into a new cultural district. The museum takes up three volumes clad in iridescent recycled glass, which stand

studio raro   Italy   On the outskirts of a small municipality in the Trentino region, the ecology farm called La Dolce Mela occupies a property in a picturesque valley known for its cultivation of apples; a place which in the course of time has become a popular destinati

RCR Arquitectes   Portugal   On the premise of fusing architecture with the landscape in the city of Lagos, in Portugal’s Algarve region, RCR arquitectes – Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, Ramon Vilalta – designed this construction for the Palmares golf resort, with the restaurant Al

Adjaye Associates   United States   “The acropolis of consumerism.” This was the media’s pronouncement on opening day, in 1982, of an eight-floor bulk raised on an entire block between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, and which has since provided Angelenos with high-end stores, popula

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Bahrain   Dar Al Jinaa and Dar Al Riffa are two similar buildings, part of an urban renewal project in the historic center of Muharraq in Bahrain. The ambition is to give a public face to the ancient community of pearl divers and their musical and cultural tra

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The center of Brussels has a periphery inside. A piece of landscape, green, open, idyllic, as if it were on the fringes of the city. In order to double the surface of a seemingly freestanding house in this strangely lush environment, it was decided t

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   This project converts a decaying building into a contemporary and durable office space without demolishing its skeleton. The existing building was stripped and then wrapped with an independent facade that serves as both an architectural element and a

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   This building was commissioned by the Provincial Development Company of West Flanders to provide four large rentable working and production spaces for young companies in various professional fields. Raised on an elongated site in the municipality of

Renzo Piano   United States   The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) of the United States, which year after year extols Hollywood movies with its Oscar awards, intends – the pandemic permitting – to inaugurate its much awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on

Carles Enrich   Spain   Since its blasting during the First Carlist War, Jorba Castle has been little more than a hodgepodge of ruins high over a small town of the Catalonian comarca of Anoia. But the earth moving carried out in the course of what was to be a simple adjustm

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 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