In Jinxing, in China’s Hebei Province, the French architect Aurelien Chen led the CSCEC’s design team tasked with turning a canteen of coal mine workers into a multipurpose cultural facility. The project adapted the construction to accommodate new us
The Atatürk Cultural Center first opened in Istanbul in 1969 as the Palace of Culture, following a project drawn up by Hayati Tabanlıoğlu (1927-1994). Located on the edge of Taksim Square, the building partly burned down two years after its inaugura
As part of a larger urban plan, the 'Bovenbouwwerkplaats' project turns a 1905 building where large elements of trains were manufactured into a cultural center for the Dutch city of Utrecht. The refurbishment of the warehouse involved preserving and
Like a built palimpsest, a long volume enclosed with imprinted glass is suspended between existing buildings. Behind the facade, different spaces for art open up to life and social interaction, weaving a mesh of connections with the surroundings...
In the heart of Madrid, the Ateneo comprises three buildings: Prado 19, Prado 21, and Santa Catalina 10. Together they form a BIC (Asset of Cultural Interest), in the Monuments category. A work of Enrique Fort and Luis de Landecho, with Arturo Mélida
The project is located in the industrial zone of Little Haiti, a Miami neighborhood which has undergone major transformation in recent years. Oolite Arts is an oganization founded three decades ago by Ellie Schneiderman. It provides the city’s visual
Semillas, a Lima-based firm set up in 2014 by Marta Maccaglia, conceived this multipurpose gathering space as a large covered plaza. Intended for the Ashaninka indigenous community of Otica, it is located on the banks of the Tambo River, in Peru’s ce
The Montes Molina country house in Mérida, capital of the Mexican state of Yucatán, was built in 1906. A century later it opened to the public as a house-museum. In 2015 the firm Materia – founded by Gustavo Carmona and Lisa Beltrán – raised an adjac
The Shanghai firm Wutopia Lab, headed by Yu Ting, recently completed a work of fluid forms in Beidaihe District, in the city of Qinhuangdao. The spaces of this 1,300-square-meter cultural center are organized in a sequence of independent elements con
The tripartite composition of the envelope organizes the distribution of uses within the factory. The two first floors, dedicated to theater-related activities, are integrated into the circulation routes of visitors, who become part of the performanc
The main building is designed as a prefab wood structure that permits opening up to 36 skylights on the saw-tooth roof, making sure that the spaces for theater and for culture are always adequately illuminated throughout the day...
In West London, close to South Park in Fulham, the English firm Mae has completed a building with timber and bricks where 35% of the construction is composed of recycled materials, prioritizing the use of bolts as structural fixing in order to simpli
In the city of Nacajuca, in the Mexican state of Tabasco, stands the House of Music designed by Colectivo 733 (Gabriela Carrillo, Eric Valdez, Israel Espín, José Amozurrutia, Carlos Gacio). The community center reuses the foundations of a previous bu
Rohingya Refugee Site Camp 18 – in Ukhia, in the Bangladeshi region of Chittagong – is the location of a facility in which members of different generations of this predominantly Muslim ethnic group of Myanmar – victims of genocidal violence on the pa
Designed by Santiago Calatrava, L’Àgora reopens in Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences as the ninth CaixaForum in Spain, after an intervention carried out by the Catalan architect Enric Ruiz-Geli (Cloud 9). The ‘living cells’ that give the construct
The firm Zaha Hadid Architects has won the competition to design the Jinghe New City Culture & Art Centre in the Chinese city of Xi’An. Evoking the Jinghe River’s meander through the mountains and landscapes of Shaanxi province, the building will fea
The extension respects and complements the building of 1978, functioning as a single entity without giving up its autonomy. The new structure goes through the perimeter of the original building, creating a courtyard that connects both volumes...
ABLM arquitectos (Arturo Blanco, Laura Martínez) and ATELIER62 (Rodrigo Martínez, Arturo Menduiña H., Juan Pérez, Luis Ruiz) drew up a scheme that placed first in the competition to refurbish the 16th/17th-century Hospital de la Concepción in Burgos
Buildings can have many lives: someone builds them with a purpose, but time eventually imposes others, even though the forms stubbornly tend to persist. This is the case of an old construction in Ljubljana, which was a sugar refinery before a devasta
The Italian-Spanish team formed by FRPO Rodríguez y Oriol Arquitectos (Pablo Oriol, Fernando Rodríguez), Walk Architecture & Landscape (Juan Tur Mc Glone), and SD Partners (Massimo, Giuliani, Alessandro Viganò, Beatrice Meroni) placed first in the Ma
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
The scheme ‘Descriptive Memory: The Eternal Presence of Absence’ by M2R – Carlos Nahuel Recabarren, Manuel Alberto Martínez Catalán, and Franco Morero – won the UNESCO-organized 2014 international competition for a cultural center near the Bamiyan Va
The broad program – museum, cultural center, market, and open-air theater – is addressed through a decentralized scheme, with a promenade linking the buildings and stretching through the entire site, from the square below to the roof garden...
In spite of the exceptional reception the public has always given him, Santiago Calatrava’s L’Àgora is regarded with suspicion by critics. Not only because of the visual populism the construction flaunts, but also, and above all, because this skeleto
Caixaforum Valencia
The architect Frank Gehry will unveil his latest blockbuster building—a soaring twisting geometric tower covered with 11,000 stainless steel panels—at Luma Arles this summer, the 27-acre cultural campus in the southern French town of Arles spearheade
Located at Hudson Yards in New York, very close to Thomas Heatherwick’s The Vessel (see Arquitectura Viva 213), rises The Shed, another major hybrid of architecture and sculpture, this time by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. While the theme of the ludic mo
The firm Mecanoo, based in Delft but also working from London and New York, has completed a cultural complex in the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung. The National Center for the Arts is a huge complex that attests as much to Taiwan’s economic power as to
The Tokyo firm founded and headed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, SANAA, recently opened the City of Culture of Tsuruoka, a small city on the northwest coast of Japan’s Honshu Island. Located close to an old samurai school, it is surrounded by g
The firm Kengo Kuma Associates has within the grounds of the Portland Japanese Gardens, opened in 1967, inaugurated a Cultural Village composed of four buildings of modest scale with tiered green roofs recalling pagodas. The design, which presents a
Time is the thread of this essay by Emilio Tuñón which traces the historical footprint of the Royal Palace, explains the concept of the new museum, and remembers his partner Luis Mansilla.
The results of the competition for the chance to refurbish the main shed of the old Clesa dairy factory, built in the year 1961 by the master Alejandro de la Sota in Madrid’s Fuencarral-El Pardo district, were announced on 27 November 2015. Promoted
It would not be an exaggeration to classify the architectures of the world in accordance with the manner in which they relate with nature. Some dominate it, as does western architecture; others engage in dialogue with it, as does Asian architecture.
The Argentina-based team M2R – Carlos Nahuel Recabarren, Manuel Alberto Martínez Catalán, and Franco Morero – was announced the winner of an international competition organized by UNESCO and the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture to bui
Working in historical environments can be a poisoned gift. Since the year 2007, when he won the major competition for the extension of the Asturias Museum of Fine Arts in Oviedo, the Pamplona-based Francisco Mangado has had to deal with problems of e
In the local imagination, the modernization of Azerbaijan and its opening to the West is associated with three milestones: in 1996, after independence, the TV tower of Baku, an icon 310 meters tall, was completed; in 2001, the Azerbaijani abandoned t
Salpicado de bloques residenciales a medio habitar y paralizado por la crisis, el ensanche de Móstoles tiene un nuevo y singular vecino: el centro de servicios sociales construido por el estudio madrileño Dosmasuno (Ignacio Borrego, Néstor Montenegro
Acaba de presentarse el edificio que Renzo Piano construirá para la Fundación Botín en la bahía santanderina, un centro dedicado al arte y la cultura que será, una vez inaugurado en 2014, la primera obra del genovés en España. El Centro de Arte Botín
En pleno centro de Ceuta y lindante con el Paseo del Revellín (que toma su nombre de una de las fortificaciones de la ciudad), un nuevo complejo cultural, blanco y lacónico, diseñado por Álvaro Siza, brilla ya bajo el sol africano. Situado en una ext
Situado frente a la ría de El Burgo, cerca de La Coruña, el edificio de la fábrica Cros —antigua manufactura de tostado de piritas para la producción de ácido sulfúrico construida en los años 1940— será rehabilitado para acoger un auditorio, una bibl
El vallisoletano Primitivo González ha sido el adjudicatario del concurso para la rehabilitación del antiguo depósito del locomotoras de la Estación Campo Grande de la capital castellana y su dotación con nuevos usos culturales: una ‘casa del ciudada
Fundado en Rotterdam y con oficina en Madrid, el estudio fündc (fün design consultancy) —de los madrileños César García-Guerra, Paz Martín y Juanjo Unceta— ha finalizado la construcción de la nueva plaza Padre Vallet y la ampliación y rehabilitación
El estudio madrileño Cano Lasso ha resultado ganador del concurso para un centro cultural y la ordenación urbana de su entorno, en el núcleo de Nuestra Señora de Jesús, en Ibiza. Concebido como un volumen de formas orgánicas, la propuesta dialoga for
¿Se trata de una gran casa o de un pequeño pueblo? El estudio madrileño ZooCo ha jugado con este equívoco en su propuesta ganadora para el Centro Municipal de las Artes de Verín, en Orense. Inspirándose en la volumetría azarosa de las manzanas típica
Fruto de la colaboración entre cuatro estudios de Ljubljana —Bevk Perovic, OFIS, Sadar Vuga y Dekleva Gregoric—, el nuevo Centro Cultural de Tecnologías Espaciales Europeas (KSEVT) en la localidad eslovena de Vitnaje está formado por una serie de ani
El MUCAB es un nuevo centro cultural y de servicios para la localidad murciana de Blanca, diseñado por el estudio de Martín Lejarraga. Situado frente al río Segura, el MUCAB actuará como un nuevo núcleo urbano que potenciará la actividad en sus riber
