Kengo Kuma   France   The final prototypes have been approved to begin the prefabrication of the 660 pieces that will form the future gallery. Each concrete element, made of white cement, sand, and aggregates from the Loire basin, will be cast and polished. The project ca

David Kohn Architects noAarchitecten Asli Çiçek   Belgium   The British firm David Kohn Architects has won the competition to redesign SMAK, the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, in collaboration with the Belgian practices no Aarchitecten and Asli Cicek. The objective is to redefine the museum’s

Francisco Mangado   Spain   The Government of Extremadura has announced that a scheme titled ‘Music and the Earth,’ submitted by the architecture firm Mangado y Asociados, has won the ideas competition for the construction, in the historical quarter of Cáceres, of a museum to h

MAD Architects   Netherlands   The Beijing-based firm led by Ma Yansong, MAD Architects, has been contracted to transform the San Francisco warehouse in the port of Rotterdam into a museum on global migration. On the south bank of the River Maas, the 16,000-square-meter building w

b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos ESTEYCO UNStudio   Spain   The railway complex is transformed into a large courtyard that generates several internal itineraries around the platforms and the tracks, guaranteeing connectivity and improving pedestrian circulation between the accesses from each side. The archite

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   United States   The Madrid practice Nieto Sobejano has won the Reimagining the Dallas Museum of Art International Design Competition, carrying the day over five other finalists: David Chipperfield Architects (London); Diller Scofidio + Renfro (New York); Johnston Ma

ENORME Studio Smart and Green Design Extudio   Japan   Besides an easterly route from the Philippines to Acapulco, the Augustinian friar Andrés de Urdaneta discovered a north-flowing current towards the Japan Sea. Both phenomena helped Spain create an enriching commercial and cultural channel in the Paci

David Chipperfield Architects   Greece   David Chipperfield Architects Berlin has won the contest to revamp and enlarge the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, located in the capital's Exarcheia neighborhood, which possesses one of the world's major collections of prehistoric and anci

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   Spain   Taking as reference the Sevillian system of pergolas, a cloud of solar canopies held by a forest of slender columns will protect the research building, the garden, and the plaza, creating a variety of public spaces underneath it... 

MRM arquitectos Javier Larraz Ignacio Olite   Spain   Based on strategies of functional organization and optimization of economic and energy resources, this project for Nordex, a manufacturer of technologies for obtaining energy from renewable sources, is located in the Sarriguren Innovation Park, in Na

FRPO Walk Architecture & Landscape SD Partners Architettura e Ingegneria   Italy   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

Mendoza Partida BAX studio SPRB Arquitectos   Mexico   In 2015, the joint proposal presented under the choral signature MXSI – the Barcelona studio of Mara Partida and Héctor Mendoza (Mendoza Partida), and Boris Bezan (BAX Studio) – and the local office SPRB Arquitectos, led by Carlos Rodríguez and Laura

José María Sánchez García Krausbeck Santagostino Margarido   Switzerland   ‘Pivot’ is the motto that ties the proposal together, from the urban concept – the plaza becomes the new city center –, to the architectural concept – the tower will turn the two museums into one complex – or the refurbishment – the pavement unifies

Kengo Kuma   France   The building rises from the ground as a continuation of the metropolitan park, creating an observation platform over the garden and the road. Inside it will house a conference center and two hotels that aim to connect people and revitalize the new di

Barozzi Veiga   Spain   The Barcelona Ciutadella del Coneixement initiative aims to transform the area around Ciutadella Park into a southern European hub for innovation in biomedicine, biodiversity, and planetary well-being. The BIST, which will be the first piece in the d

Sou Fujimoto Architects Donghua Chen Studio   China   The Japanese practice of Sou Fujimoto, in collaboration with the Chinese firm Donghua Chen Studio, has won the international competition for the Shenzhen Reform and Opening-up Exhibition Hall. Encompassing 90,000 square meters, the building will rise

Harquitectes Christ & Gantenbein   Spain   The new volume is placed opposite the current venue, the Meier building, with the purpose of including the convent and chapel on Plaça dels Angels, which will become the MACBA’s new center of gravity and a symbolic axis connecting the whole public s

Dominique Perrault Architecture   China   The French firm headed by Dominique Perrault, in collaboration with the Chinese office Zhubo Design, has won the competition to build a new campus – accommodating 4,000 students – for the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in She

SANAA   China   The Japanese firm SANAA, founded by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, has won the competition to build the Maritime Museum in the Dapeng area of the city of Shenzhen. Its scheme, titled ‘The Cloud on the Ocean,’ was one of 88 entries that came from 2

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   China   The firm headed by Benedetta Tagliabue has placed first in the competition to build the Conservatory of Music on the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) campus, in the Longgang District of Shenzhen. With a built area of 129,700 square meters, the

Ayllón Paradela De Andrés   Spain   With their ‘Three Strategies’ scheme Javier Alejo Hernández Ayllón, Verónica Paradela Pernas, and Javier de Andrés de Vicente have won the ideas competition called by the Consell de Mallorca’s Sustainability and Environment Department, in collaborati

Jean Nouvel   China   The sinuous forms of the four auditoriums establish a connection with the sea, evoking the history of the city as a fishing village. Inside, the use of a pearlescent material generates reflections as a symbolic fusion of water, music, and light. 

Caruso St John Architects   Germany   The research campus is made up of three structures that will replace the existing hangars adjacent to the company’s historic factory building. At the heart of the project is the new ‘garden building’ that will provide flexible spaces for different u

The firm Reiulf Ramstad has won the invitation-only contest to expand the museum that harbors Fram (Framtid, meaning future in Norwegian), the ship that Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Svedrup, and Roald Amundsen used in their famed expeditions. As part of a s

The Barcelona practice led by Benedetta Tagliabue has placed first in the international competition to redevelop Century Square on East Nanjing Road in the city of Shanghai, strategically located between People’s Square and The Bund.The scheme submit

Albeit decimated during the Shoah and attacked on several occasions in recent times, the Jewish community of Belgium asserts its presence and importance in the country’s history by means of a small museum which in the wake of an international competi

For a city planned ex novo as a paradigm of radical speculation, the firm AZPML has won the competition for the Korean Museum of Urbanism and Architecture (KMUA). Its scheme seeks to rethink the role of the discipline in this day and age, in the proc

The Navarre architects Antonio Vaillo and Juan Luis Irigaray have won the competition organized by the Basque Museum in Bilbao, through a proposal that acts upon the institution’s historical buildings and reinstates the large cloister as the heart o

The Madrid partners Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano, in collaboration with the Parisian firm Marin+Trottin, finished first in the bid to design the Cité du Théâtre in Paris, carrying the day over the other two finalists, Foster+Partners and Fabr

The practice of Héctor Mendoza and Mara Partida has won the ideas competition for the Museum of Prehistory and Archaeology of Cantabria in the city of Santander. The jury, which included Fuensanta Nieto of the firm Nieto Sobejano, appreciated the uni

The British partnership of Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke – in collaboration with the Belgian firm TRANS Architectuur and RE-ST – has won the bid to build an extension to Design Museum Gent (see AV Proyectos 99) that will improve circulation and the

The dynamism that is associated with the use of horizontal bands in buildings, as well as with skating as a sport, is the gist of the scheme that has made Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano the winners of the competition to enlarge a high-performan

The Barcelona practice headed by Boris Bežan and Mónica Juvera, Bax studio, won the invitational competition that was organized for the creation of the Dimnikcobau office complex in the industrial zone of Moste, located in the east-central part of th

Directed by Miguel Martínez and Pau Batalla, the firm Emac – an acronym for Mediterranean space for contemporary architecture – carried the day in the ideas competition for a preschool and primary school situated in La Pobla Llarga, a municipality in

The franchise model has reached museums, and with energy, at least for the Carmen Thyssen Collection, whose homes in Madrid, Barcelona, and Málaga will soon be joined by a fourth one in Girona, thanks to a competition where the Madrid firm Nieto Sobe

A screen-like building, seemingly trivial but with a scale and urban position that make it a monument, has given OMA / Reiner de Graaf the victory in the contest for the new headquarters of the National Railway Company of Belgium (SNCB), beside the B

In the context of its internationalization process the Norwegian firm Snøhetta recently won the competition for a theater building in Xingtai, one of China’s oldest but also fastest growing cities. The project is organized around a large reflective p

Stretching a total of 1,776 kilometers, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal is one of the most impressive constructions on the planet and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2014, hence the Chinese government’s interest in presenting the histor

After the enormously successful architectural and corporate adventure that Apple was, the British firm Foster + Partners has won the bid to raise headquarters for another giant of our globalized world, Alibaba, a China-based leader in online retail a

If we were to pinpoint an emblem for Spain’s successful public healthcare system, one sure candidate would be La Paz Hospital in Madrid. At least that is the opinion of the institution’s authorities, who, faced with a dire need for more space, found

A proposal by the British architect David Chipperfield has won for him the competition to erect a high-rise replacing a building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street in New York City, a site that has been the US headquarters of the Swiss lux

The firm of Rem Koolhaas, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, will be building a Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) department store, cum hotel, in Vienna’s historic center, right in the Museumsquartier. The project – OMA’s first in the Austrian capital

Shortly after being hired by the Art Institute of Chicago to enlarge its campus and give it a major makeover, the Barcelona-based firm Barozzi Veiga has won the competition to build the mountain sports brand Dynafit’s new managerial and administravi

With their proven grasp of the contexts of places, the husband-and-wife architecture team of Ignacio Pedrosa and Ángela García de Paredes has won the ideas competition for the refurbishment of Praza do Mar in Sanxenxo (Pontevedra) and its immediate s

As regards Spanish architects succeeding internationally, the firm of Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano boasts an already long list of projects located in Germany, Austria, and Estonia (see Arquitectura Viva 209), the most recent addition to which

The British architect Norman Foster and the local office of Luis María Uriarte are the winners of the competition to renovate and enlarge the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao, lately one of the most coveted projects in the context of cultural buildings