Counterspace Studio   United Kingdom   This year’s summer pavilion of the Serpentine, the popular gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens, opens to the public on 11 June, a year after it was supposed to, thanks to the Covid-19 crisis. It was designed by Counterspace, the South African firm

LLLab   China   The uniformity of globalized China has not altogether marked the region of Guanxi, home to an ethnic group – the Zhuang people – of deep-rooted customs, isolated amid steep karst mountains. Against this imposing backdrop, in 2004 the film director Z

DelaVega-CanoLasso   Spain   Up to 17 May, World Recycling Day, Plaza Juan Goytisolo in Madrid – in front of the Reina Sofía Museum – hosts a pavilion made of prefabricated plastic elements that will later be entirely reused and recycled. A work of the Madrid practice of Ignacio

Rem Koolhaas   Italy   In these times of pandemic and social distancing, technological tools have tried to address the restrictions imposed on in-person activities through digital alternatives that can help prevent our lives from stagnating altogether. In a locked-down Mil

MVRDV   United Kingdom   The Rotterdam firm MVRDV has unveiled images of the hill it will be raising beside Marble Arch in London, to serve as a vantage point overlooking Oxford Street and Hyde Park. A 25-meter-tall metal scaffold will be covered with plywood, soil, and plan

Héctor Fernández Elorza   Spain   “Our Lady of Communications”: that is how Leon Trotsky, when he visited the Spanish capital, christened with irony the monumental building erected by Antonio Palacios and Joaquín Otamendi in the year 1919, and which the people of Madrid have ever sin

Ensamble Studio   United States   Petrified River is a site-specific installation for the garden of the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum in New York during the 2019 Design Triennial exhibition ‘Nature,’ organized with Cube Design Museum in Kerkrade, the Netherlands. The propos

Wutopia Lab   China   Compared with the gray stain that China’s megalopoli have become, dehumanized and tediously uniform, the new entrance to a sales center in Huzhou is a garden of radical imagination, and thus a veritable manifesto against the generic city. A forest of

Italy   Facing the Sicilian coasts and with the imposing presence of Mount Etna in the distance, forty-six freestanding columns stand eight meters tall along the waterfront promenade of Reggio Calabria, forming an orthogonal grid over the sinuous scheme of t

DOSIS   Designed by Dosis, the Madrid practice of Isabel Collado and Ignacio Peydro, the inflatable Pipeline pavilion was on 26 February, in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, the catwalk for fashion house Kenzo’s presentation of its autumn-winter 2020 collect

Barkow Leibinger   Austria   The only opera that Ludwig van Beethoven wrote, Fidelio, has not ceased to attract music connoisseurs since it premiered in Vienna in 1805. For the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth, the Theater an der Wien has presented – with set designs by

Artnet   Taylor Dafoe   Chicago artist Theaster Gates has been tapped to design the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion, making him the first non-architect solely commissioned for the prestigious project. A spokesperson for Serpentine Gallery confirmed Gate’s commission for the pavil

Eduardo Prieto   “May you live in interesting times”: the curse that has fallen upon us resembles the one that befell Europeans in the 1930s. The 1937 Paris International Exposition was the last major cosmopolitan event held in Europe before the apocalypse, and desp

The combination of biomimetics, computer design, and robotic construction continues to bear fruit, waiting for the moment that it becomes a more or less feasible model to apply in everyday architecture. This is demonstrated by the two pavilions that

Two words describe the Serpentine Gallery’s summer pavilion this year, built by the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami: picturesque and polemic. It is picturesque because, of all the Serpentine Pavilions raised in London’s Kensington Gardens to date,

The team formed by Atxu Amann, Andrés Cánovas, and Nicolás Maruri (Temperaturas Extremas Arquitectos) is the winner of the competition for the privilege of building Spain’s pavilion at the Universal Exhibition of 2020, to be held in Dubai. The winnin

Since 2000 the Serpentine Gallery has been putting up a pavilion on the lawn of Kensington Gardens for the warm months. This temporary structure has become the great summer benchmark of current architecture, biennials aside. At times drawing from con

When he was 18, Diébédo Francis Kéré was awarded a scholarship to be a carpentry apprentice in Germany, but the fact that wood is scarce in his country, Burkina Faso, led him to decide to study something more useful: architecture. Now an internationa

Born with the millennium, the Serpentine project was entrusted to a purely artistic view of architecture, a view where use – in this case the questionable use of a small summer pavilion – was understood as a mere trigger of ephemeral buildings, folie

In time for summer every year, the Serpentine Gallery in London has a temporary pavilion designed by a leading architect who has not yet built in the United Kingdom, and raised on its grounds in Kensington Gardens. It recently unveiled the first imag

Ángel Martínez García-Posada   This summer has brought us the much awaited coincidence of temporary constructions by three Spanish architectural practices in prestigious international forums: the Organic Growth Pavilion by Izaskun Chinchilla on Governors Island in New York, one of

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Milan hasn’t reinvented the expos, but has organized one better than many. The visionary original concept of Jacques Herzog – together with Italian architect Stefano Boeri, British urbanist Ricky Burdett, American green architect William McDonough an