Martillo Neumático   In June in Bilbao, the Gau Zuria (White Night) festival featured 28 art installations that transformed the landscape of the Basque city. One was Cuerpo Gris (Gray Body), which took up the central garden of the Sacred Art Museum. The monumental site-s

Rizvi Hassan   Bangladesh   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

Izaskun Chinchilla   Italy   Anyone going to a house party knows that the interesting things often happen in the kitchen, not in the living room. This can easily be extrapolated to large events like the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, around which other events have ar

Anna & Eugeni Bach   The Catalan firm led by Anna Bach and Eugeni Bach was commissioned to design a stand for the EINA University School of Design and Art in the 31st Saló de l’Ensenyament – which promotes vocational training centers and services – at Fira de Barcelona.

Isla architects   Switzerland   The Mallorca firm isla architects (Marta Colón de Carvajal & Juan Palencia de Sarriá) won the bid to build the Basel Pavilion in the inaugural edition of Architekturwoche Basel, held from 9 to 15 May. It is located in the old Dreispitz industrial are

Adjaye Associates   Escocia   The aptly named Specere – ‘I am looking’, in Latin –, was promoted by the Forestry Commission and the Kielder Partnership as part of an ongoing Art & Architecture programme. It was created as a shelter for cyclists and as a superb viewpoint for visit

Atelier Daniel Flórez   Brazil   Paradise has taken many forms over the course of time, but of late tends to be associated with the picture of white-sand beaches and lush forests that look like they have never been stepped on. This is a cliché exploited by the hotel industry, and al

Tadao Ando   Spain   Following the theme of the 1992 Expo in Seville, ‘The Age of Discovery,’ the pavilion was conceived as a highly refined place that had to unify the traditional culture of Japan and advanced technology and, furthermore, enhance interactions that excee

MVRDV   Germany   At the center of the observance of the 500th anniversary of the Fuggerei social housing complex in Augsburg rises this pavilion built with cross-laminated timber (CLT), a work of MVRDV. It harbors the exhibition ‘Fuggerei of the Future,’ which propos

Manuel Bouzas Santiago del Águila   Spain   As part of the 2021 celebration of A Cel Obert, a festival of ephemeral architecture held in Tortosa (Tarragona), this monumental-scale, over 6-meter-high lamp is the work of the architects Manuel Bouzas and Santiago del Águila, in collaboration with

MAIO   Italy   The intervention carried out in the Spanish Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale plays upon an error, and the result is an installation of minimalist roots, on a 1:1 scale. The error is that the pavilion was built slightly out of line with respect to

Pedro Pitarch   For the this year’s ARCO contemporary art fair at Madrid’s IFEMA premises, Pedro Pitarch designed ARCO 40+1, a section conceived as an imaginary museum, to mark the event’s 40th anniversary. Inverting the spatial logic of art fairs, it is presented a

LIN Architects   China   Based on prior theoretical research, this prototype experiments with space in terms of the small scale and of patterns of human behavior, such as how people use space in interacting with one another. On the street Gouyuan – in the Chinese city of Zhe

Carmody Groarke   United Kingdom   In 1902, in Helensburgh, 30 kilometers west of Glasgow and facing the River Clyde estuary, the Swedish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh built the Hill House as a residence fot the publisher Walter Blackie. As part of a process to preserve the buil

Flores & Prats   Italy   The installation for the 2018 Biennale worked with the idea of liquid light to reproduce, on a 1:1 scale, a skylight from Sala Beckett in Barcelona (an old co-op building converted into a theater), and to recreate the air of the original space with l

Christian Kerez   United Arab Emirates   A bundle of slender metal diagonals breaks the traditional hierarchy of pillars and beams, altogether altering the Cartesian space inside the prism by offering fragmented views...

Santiago Calatrava   United Arab Emirates   A series of mobile wings makes the huge host pavilion look like a bird in flight, a reference to the important role played by falconry in uniting the various tribes that formed the country.

WOHA Architects   United Arab Emirates   An exuberant jungle shows how it is possible for architecture to embrace nature in combating the effects of climate change in cities and creating pleasurable ecosystems. The pavilion is powered by solar energy alone, and the dense vegetation lining t

Yuko Nagayama & Associates   United Arab Emirates   With simultaneous references to Japanese Asanoha and Islamic arabesque patterns, a three-dimensional openwork represents the meeting of two ancient decorative traditions.

MMBB Ben-Avid JPG.ARQ   United Arab Emirates   A basin of water and a membrane of stretched textile in a powerful metal framework manage to create an atmosphere that draws attention to the Amazon jungle’s water resources.

JKMM   United Arab Emirates   A snow-white prism contains a curved cavity lined in wood and bathed in brightness by a generous skylight, in an abstract echo of the lush landscapes that abound in the Nordic country...

OOS Architekten   United Arab Emirates   Behind a mirror facade that has the effect of magnifying Switzerland’s national flag is. an immersive installation that transports the visitor to a sea of fog high up in the Alpine mountains...

Es Devlin Studio Veretec UK   United Arab Emirates   A sheaf of stalks of cross-laminated timber forms the scenographic screen on which to project a sampling of cyberpoetry that results from online interactions of users.

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   The artist has built a space for quiet contemplation in homage to his roofer father, but the materials seem too clean-cut and corporate to fit the idea. A tolling church bell has joined the summer sounds of birdsong and tinkling fountains in Kensingt

Fed up perhaps with all the artsy airs that architects sometimes take on, the Serpentine Gallery in London has this year decided to assign its summer pavilion directly to a conceptual artist. Eclectically trained in urban planning and ceramics throug

Desert Sun   Brian Blueskye   Six artists have waited two years to feature their work at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and the installations feature themes of gathering, the local environment, immigration and a nod to historic design. This year's mix of artists a

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   Inspired by the kilns of Stoke-on-Trent, the Chicago artist’s Black Chapel will host bands, including his own, and also provide ‘a place of quietude’ where even the British weather is welcome. The Serpentine Gallery’s annual summer pavilion will take

The Economist   The 25m-high artificial hill at one end of Oxford Street dubbed the Marble Arch Mound opened in July. It was supposed to help lure shoppers freed from lockdown away from internet stores and back to Britain’s best-known shopping thoroughfare. But once

Expo 2020

The World Expo of 2020 has opened its doors. Already the web is flooded with night views of pavilions silhouetted against the excessive backdrop of Dubai. And proliferating alongside the myriad images are the words of a rhetoric which, while continui

Themed ‘Connecting Minds, Creating the Future,’ the first major international event ever to be held in the Middle East will until 31 March 2022 exhibit proposals for development that the participating nations have set up on the premises, in the spiri

A work of Brut Deluxe / Ben Busche + Miguel de Guzmán, Ring is a light installation created for Lichtfest Leipzig 21 and has been set up in the heart of the German city, at Burgplatz. The Leipzig Festival of Lights commemorates the demonstrations tha

AD   Pratyush Sarup   Alexander McQueen creative director Sarah Burton’s vision of the McQueen SS22 woman as a storm chaser required a lofty stage and with the show signalling the iconic British brand’s homecoming that was two decades in the making, the stakes were even h

The Economist   There are no politics at the Middle East’s first world’s fair. The setting is dramatic. Visitors passing from the harsh midday sun to the dim interior are met with slogans. “We believe that every human is part of the collective conscience,” reads a m

Expo 2020 officially opened in Dubai on 1 October. Like so many other premium celebrations, it is being held a year later than it was supposed to be, delayed by Covid-19. Themed ‘Connecting Minds, Creating the Future,’ the first major international e

The Expo in Dubai kicked off on 30 September with a ceremony, and welcomes the public from 1 October to 31 March 2022. The event is expected to bring in some 25 million visitors. Video Map

The London firm Carmody Groarke has created a single-story 1,700-seat temporary theater and ticket office close to the Großmarkthalle, a landmark concrete construction of the German architect Bernhard Hermkes which is now an event and hospitality spa

The Italian fashion house Prada presented its SS 2022 Menswear collection in a show with a catwalk designed by OMA / AMO. An imagined summer escape ended in an open-air space where nature and artifact interact, with a meandering red tunnel that model

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