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.

Hanghar   Spain   The ground floor of a rural house – in a building once used for sheltering cattle – is transformed with minimal actions into a leisurely space flowing in continuity with a recovered front garden. A sinuous concrete platform is elevated over the groun

BURR   Spain   In an old industrial shed between two rear courtyards, a house is organized around a band that contains utilitarian spaces while separating the private from the more public areas. Attached to the wall of white concrete blocks are different functions

Atienza Maure   Spain   Destroyed in a fire that only spared its stone walls, a large house in the Castilian region has been refurbished through the insertion of a structure that replicates and completes the original. Between new arches of white concrete, skylights seek to

Neri & Hu Design and Research Office   China   The project for the firm Pernod Ricard captures the dichotomy between two opposed but complementary elements, seeking a balance between architecture and landscape, industry and the visitor’s experience. Surrounded by a winding stream and the majestic

Jovino Martínez Sierra Arquitectos   Spain   The industrial complex built in Arrasate Mondragón by Unión Cerrajera, the locksmithing company founded in 1906, consisted initially of three blocks of ground floor plus two levels. The first two blocks went up in 1931, and after 68 years standing th

Rafael de La Hoz   Spain   Guided both by tradition and common sense, over the centuries the people of Los Pedroches Valley – a protected area between Extremadura, Andalucía, and Castille – have cherished the holm oaks that cover the valley’s meadows as if they were sacred tre

Plasencia Arquitectura   Spain   This refurbished building is located in the Mas Xirgu industrial complex, on the outskirts of Girona. The commission consisted in converting an industrial warehouse that was no longer in use into a funeral service building for the city. The original

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   Norway   The Danish architecture office BIG has designed a factory for the furniture manufacturer Vestre, inserted into a forest near the village of Magnor, in eastern Norway. It has a built area of 7,000 square meters, and takes its name, The Plus, from its

Ludwig Godefroy   Mexico   In the historic center of Mérida, capital of the Mexican state of Yucatán, stands this house which is a modern take on elements of vernacular architecture. The proportions of the plot – a rectangle 80 meters long and 8 wide –generate a longitudinal p

SO-IL FREAKS freearchitects   France   The Northern Vosges Regional Natural Park encompasses about a hundred French municipalities and one is Meisenthal, also known for its glassworks. The outcome of a 2015 competition, the project carried out by the New York firm SO-IL and the Paris stud

Tadao Ando   Japan   After a long and fruitful career, Tadao Ando decided that it was time for him to make an altruistic contribution to Osaka, the city where he was raised and developed as an architect. Ando wanted to pay tribute to the children of Osaka, the next gener

Tadao Ando   China   The client – a prominent businessman from Foshan – wished to contribute to the cultural scene of his home city, and decided to promote the construction of a museum for his personal collection, ranging from traditional Oriental art to modern art. Fro

Tadao Ando   Mexico   Located in A natural landscape, with the Pacific Ocean to the south and the mountains to the north, this residence-studio was designed for a Mexican artist who divides his time between New York and his home country. The first project decision was to

Tadao Ando   United States   This is an expansion project for the Clark Art Institute, founded in 1955 by Sterling and Francine Clark. The prominent American art research institute is known for its collection of 19th century impressionist painting. The 57 hectares of hilly prope

Tadao Ando   Italy   This detached dwelling is located amid the rich natural environment on the outskirts of Treviso, Italy. The commission included both site planning and layout, so the project allowed great flexibility and freedom. The only request presented by the cli

Tadao Ando   Germany   Located amid gently rolling hills in western Germany, this is a small museum for exhibiting the work of sculptor Wolfgang Kubach and his wife Anna Maria Kubach-Wilmsen, world-famous for their stone sculptures. A gabled-roof barn, built in the 18th ce

Tadao Ando   Germany   On an island of a pond outside Düsseldorf, the German art collector Karl-Heinrich Müller founded a museum called Insel Hombroich: a large sculpture park of twenty hectares dotted with several exhibition pavilions designed by sculptor Erwin Heerich. Y

Tadao Ando   France   This space was designed as a commemorative project for the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the UNESCO. The brief requested a ‘space of meditation’ for global peace, transcending all religions. The pavilion is located within the complex o

Tadao Ando   United States   The site is located in a quiet residential district close to the center of Chicago. Along this long, narrow north-south oriented site, the objective was to produce a comfortable and private residential space while developing an interaction with the n

Tadao Ando   Japan   The temple of Water, the main one of Ninnaji Shingon, the oldest branch of tantric Buddhism in Japan, rests on a hill with views over Osaka Bay. The project proposes a sensory experience, a shift from the ordinary world to the sacred space. The appro

Tadao Ando   Japan   The regeneration of Naoshima, a small island on Seto Inland Sea, is a cultural project that was launched in the second half of the 1980s. The first building within this initiative was Benesse House Museum, an ‘overnight stay’ museum that includes lod

Tadao Ando   Japan   island of Hokkaido, in northern Japan. On a plain surrounded by mountain ranges and a dense forest of beech trees and shrubs, the building comprises two superposed cubes, a rectangular artificial lake, and a long L-shaped wall enclosing the complex.

Tadao Ando   Japan   The site is located in a quiet residential district in Setagaya ward. It is a three-household residence for the client couple and their respective parents. While ensuring privacy and independence for each family, the housing plan allows the three hou

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

Pascual Bolufer   Ever since the opus caementicium of Roman times, concrete has been in evolution. It is now even possible to elude its opaque and gray state in favor of the ‘translucence’ of concrete products loaded with optic fiber, which lets light go through the s

Guilherme Wisnik   The oeuvre of Paulo Mendes da Rocha can be assessed through three buildings. The projects, separated by a thirty-year interval, all won public competitions. This is the case of the Paulistano Athletic Club Gymnasium (1958), in São Paulo; the Brazilia

Reinforced concrete is the most commonly used material in contemporary construction. Its use adds up to 5% of the total emissions of greenhouse gas, so one of the main challenges today when using reinforced concrete is that of improving its environme

Located in a small town in Palencia, the El Castillo Winery is an unfinished project. It is so, at least, because time has been essential in this case, not only because of the way in which the project intervenes in a centennial winery, but also becau

Peter Chadwick   London  2016  
Phaidon   - 224 Pages 

Adrian Forty   A Material History

Karla Cavarra Britton   Londres  2001  
Phaidon   - 255 Pages