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.

Matharoo Associates   India   A series of cubic volumes and stairs of concrete gives rise to this house near the beach of Dumas, in the city of Surat, India. On a stone base, the building fuses traditional architectural elements with contemporary ones. Around a central staircase

Pedro Henrique    Portugal   In Esmoriz, a city within the Região de Aveiro, stands this contemporary reinterpretation of the palheiro, the fisherman's house that has marked the Portuguese coastline since the early 19th century. To promote the idea of preserving this vernacular

Studio Gang   United States   The Chicago practice led by Jeanne Gang has overhauled and expanded the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock. A sculpturally folded concrete canopy unites eight existing buildings – of different periods and architectural styles – that had been

Buzzo Spinelli Architecture   France   Nestled in the heart of the citadel of Bonifacio, in the southern French island of Corsica, this daycare is part of the former Montaur military district. Amid stone towers, the educational facilities rise with a concrete material that incorporates ag

Aires Mateus   Portugal   Interior castle and Great Theater of the World, the house has that two-faced character of a secluded place from which to open up to the community; facets that a house atop the ruins of two old warehouses on the banks of the Tagus River expresses thro

Christ & Gantenbein   Switzerland   Crossing a bridge is always an experience, but even more in Switzerland. From the Kappelbrücke in Lucerne with its paintings depicting events of the city’s history to the acrobatic Salginatobel built by Robert Maillart, the country is a fertile field

Pezo von Ellrichshausen   Chile   In a lush estate at the foot of the Andes, a large residence-studio comprises as many as twelve different constructions containing spaces for domestic life, work, and exhibitions.

Dorte Mandrup   Sweden   In Gothenburg’s new quayside district and with more than 37,000 square meters, Kaj16 is one of largest hybrid structures in the world: the modular timber crown rests on a permeable concrete base that becomes an interwoven part of the city…

Harquitectes   Spain   In Gavá, a municipality in Barcelona province, in the comarca of Bajo Llobregat, this residential complex takes the form of three stepped volumes to adapt to the natural slopes of the terrain. With a built area of 16,509 square meters, the project se

Coyote   Mexico   The playful configuration of intertwined volumes in reddish tones poses a pattern of hollows and solids between shadows in the Mexican city of Tulum, in the Yucatan Peninsula. Separated by an elongated garden of native plants, the arrangement of 39 d

Barclay & Crousse Arquitectos   Peru   Developed as a typological variation of the Equis House, the six residences that make up the ensemble form a compact and coherent whole, even though they were not designedat the same time.

Studio Gang   United States   The 154-year-old American Museum of Natural History across the upper west side of Central Park has a new wing that establishes a fluid connection among the institution’s various buildings. The new educational programs of the AMNH are organized around

Behet Bondzio Lin Architects    Taiwan   The cemetery in Hsinchu, known as ‘the wind city’, is located high up on Xiangshan Hill, overlooking the sea and exposed to gusts crossing the Taiwan Strait. Protected by an introspective concrete skin, the main volume harboring the columbarium is fo

Harquitectes   Spain   The Sabadell-based studio Harquitectes has transformed an old industrial building located in Esplugues de Llobregat into the corporate headquarters of the pharmaceutical company Galenicum. With a new envelope that provides better insulation to cool t

Tanghua Architects   China   The Planning Exhibition Center of Liangjiang Collaborative Innovation Zone is located atop a hillock, enveloped in a natural environment. With a gross floor area of 5,190 square meters, the building disperses the different functions to minimize its v

K architectures Sigwalt Herman   France   Villerupt is a small municipality in the Alzette Valley, in France’s Lorraine region, close to the Luxembourg border. It is historically linked to the exploitation of iron ore, in the mining of which many Italians worked. Almost all the industrial fa

Studio RC   Mexico   Combining wood, stone, and concrete, this equestrian complex is located within an 8-hectare site in Huixquilucan, in the State of Mexico. With a contemporary language appropriate to the context of the location, the facilities include a clubhouse and

Sou Fujimoto   Japan   The Maruhon Makiart Terrace – Ishinomaki Cultural Center seeks to express the recovery of Ishinomaki, a city in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan, that was much damaged by the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country in 2011. The different programs – audit

Rozana Montiel | Estudio de Arquitectura   Mexico   As part of a plan instigated by the regional government, a social center serving citizens of limited means and resources has opened in one of the most conflictive areas of the capital…

Open Architecture   China   Combining curved and rectilinear forms, the complex is divided into five concrete blocks separated by gardens themed around the four seasons and connected by raised semi-outdoor corridors. Oriented inward, the project draws inspiration from the nearb

Sukunfuku Studio   Spain   A work of the Asturian firm sukunfuku Studio – Miguel Huelga and Iria de la Peña – this museum stands on the slope of Mount Castillo, surrounded by the winding road that leads to the caves it harbors. Inserted into a complex topography, the C-shaped

ARQBR Arquitetura e Urbanismo   Brazil   This church built in concrete is located on the edge of EPIA (Park Road of Industry and Supply), a major component of the radio-centric thoroughfare system implemented to support the architect Lucio Costa’s Pilot Project. EPIA later became an express

Ignacio Borrego   Spain   Football is the most important of the least important things, and such adoration for the king of sports games has birthed a house located on the sunny side of the Madrid mountains, one which seeks to reconcile the slope with the flatness required by

Bloomberg   Feargus O'Sullivan   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

Scientific American   Mark Fischetti   Nick Bockelman   Wil V. Srubar   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 Economist   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

The Economist   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

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

Peter Chadwick   London  2016  
Phaidon   - 224 Pages 

Adrian Forty   A Material History

Karla Cavarra Britton   Londres  2001  
Phaidon   - 255 Pages