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.

Steven Holl   United States   On the banks of the East River, a branch of the Queens Public Library addresses a call for community space in an almost exclusively residential neighborhood. The building, low and compact, takes up little ground, and makes the much used riverside par

b720 Fermín Vázquez   Spain   The Ibermutuamur Integral Service Center is inserted as an efficient, compact, modulated, and consistent health facility. It is designed as a hinge element between the new road grid on the Prado de la Vega housing estate and the green area alongside

Christ & Gantenbein   Switzerland   Apart from harboring new services for the renowned chocolate company, the project seeks to generate an immersive and dynamic spatial experience. The new flagship building is a rectangular brick volume that reformulates the appearance of the chocolati

Christ & Gantenbein   Switzerland   The eclectic amalgam of buildings forming the city’s foremost museum welcomes a fragmented volume that rises on the border of the park and traces the new exhibition route. The new wing attaches itself to the academic composition to close it off, but

b720 Fermín Vázquez   Spain   The remodelling uses only a part of the existing construction. Demolition of the upper volume enabled unrestricted growth starting from the ground floor, which is reconfigured as a large porticoed reception area. This monumental plinth supports five

b720 Fermín Vázquez   Spain   The construction of a large leisure facility like this casino entails the need to distribute – in a single building – the services and uses associated with the gambling areas, restaurant, kitchens, car park, conference hall, and facilities. The proje

b720 Fermín Vázquez   Spain   This excess of formal and volumetric resources of the houses in the area – a luxury housing estate north-west of Madrid – and the owner’s discretion propitiated the proposal of a simple geometry and a limited number of building materials. Only a draw

José María Sánchez García   Spain   Less than an hour’s drive from the Spanish capital, in an area of great historical and natural importance marked by the presence of the Monastery of El Escorial and the landscape protected by the south slope of Mount Abantos, the house complies with

MOS Architects   Mexico   This bush-hammered concrete volume is organized around two spiral staircases ascending in opposite directions, located between two thick walls of services and storage; the rest of the dwelling becomes a flexible space...

KAAN Architecten   Belgium   The building is conceived as an oasis of calm that manifests itself exteriorly through few but sculptural openings striking a contrast with the lines of the surrounding landscape. Affixed to the terrain, the crematorium is an ode to order and peace,

KAAN Architecten   France   Located within a university campus of 600 hectares, the institute building is characterized by the elegant screen of reinforced concrete that forms its facade. The exterior surface of the building presents a grid whose geometry is slightly different

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