CoBe Architecture & Paysage WEEK   France   The Laherrère Center is part of an urban renewal program for the Saragosse district of Pau, the capital of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department of France’s Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. It rises on the site of an old hospice that was unoccupied and in ve

NP2F   France   Located at the entrance to the Brazza area of Bordeaux, this sports center has built area exceeding 15,700 square meters and rises 20 meters. The exterior spaces are superimposed like urban squares and streets protected against wind. The building’s m

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

Barclay & Crousse Arquitectos   France   Aside from renewing the captaincy and the services of the marina, the project recovers the continuity of the old customs officers’ trail, which had been interrupted by the construction of the port infrastructure.

Snøhetta   France   Drawing inspiration from the continuous elliptical movement of the stars, the new cultural sight of the city of Douai, in northern France, is located between the river Scarpe and the Arkéos archaeological museum. The composition of curved lines envel

GRAAM architecture   France   The offices of a regional savings bank have been transferred to a building with a half-timbering structure that is a reinterpretation of the vernacular system of exoskeletons.

Lina Ghotmeh   France   This facility in Louviers, Normandy, accommodates 260 crafters of artisanal bags, small leather goods, and equestrian items like saddles and harnesses for the luxury brand Hermès. The project of the Lebanese-French architect Lina Ghotmeh is based on

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

Grafton Architects   France   The masterplan for this plateau proposed boulevards, streets, and squares with the poetic integration of landscape and ecology. It referred to the legacy of the great tradition of institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard, which were reinte

Régis Roudil    France   Commissioned by the Présidence de la République, this daycare for 24 children is located at the heart of the Palais de l’Alma in Paris, within the monumental complex. Built with timber and rammed earth, it stands in the garden behind the 19th-century

MARS Architectes   France   The block, separated from the street by an eleven-story building, faces the restrictions of the site and addresses the environmental commitments of cities today with a wooden structure that reconciles technological innovation and aesthetics. Behind t

Lina Ghotmeh   France   The precision needed for traditional hand-crafted leather goods is reflected in the building’s making. Large brick arches shape both the outer perimeter and the facade onto the courtyard, creating generous windows that fill workshops with sunlight...

Lina Ghotmeh   France   The former Masséna Station and the area surrounding it will form a complex governed by a circular economy and a sustainable food system. Residents and visitors can participate in all the cycles, from planting to producing and composting. The ramps we

Lina Ghotmeh   France   The design of the winery emerges as an expression of an attachment to the dark Anjou stone of the site’s ground; to the fragility of the Bel Argus butterfly, a species native to the area; and to the immersive emotional experience of visiting the site

Chartier Dalix Architectes   France   This project brings together the offices of AP-HP (Assitance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris), previously split in two locations in the French capital. On the grounds of Saint-Antoine Hospital, which can be considered a city within a city and counts 3,400

Snøhetta   France   The Norwegian firm Snøhetta has been chosen to refurbish and enlarge the Natural History Museum of Lille in northern France, close to the Belgian border. The idea is to revitalize the 19th-century building through sustainable solutions while preservi

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   France   As Loos would say, you can’t build a house with carpets alone. He was talking about the architect’s task having to start out with a skeleton for the enclosure, a conviction which a very young fashion house has now playfully set out to refute in one o

Christ & Gantenbein   France   More than a hundred social housing units rest on a refurbished base with technical workshops of the RATP (Parisian transport office). The overlapping functions determine the position of the entrances, the vertical circulations, and the resulting urba

IDOM   France   In Tarbes, a commune in the Occitanie region of France’s Hautes-Pyrénées department, the firm IDOM – directed by Inés López Taberna, Iñaki Garai and Gohar Manrique San Pedro – transformed a building used in the early 20th century for the military ind

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   France   In dialogue with the grand courthouse building next to it, the new seat of the law bar association completes the judicial complex that has activated the peripheral Batignolles district. A metro station under the site made it necessary to dispense wit

Snøhetta   France   Surrounded by the Arkéos museum, the river Scarpe, a major road axis, and a small residential area, the new Planetarium and Observatory of Douaisis is designed to be a visual signal while keeping the natural aspect of the site. The dome of the planet

Buzzo Spinelli Architecture Antoine Dufour   France   If stones could talk, those of the Citadel of Bastia could be chroniclers of the city, given that the Corsican commune arose in the wing of this Genoese bastiglia atop a promontory and eventually took its name. Witnesses of thriving trade in periods

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   France   The compact campus envisioned to go up over an old Citroën factory will seal the merger of two hospitals in the suburbs of Paris, and serve as a center for medical university practicums. Conceived as a superposition of neutral trays that are easily a

Lorenzo Ciccarelli   The more famous a building is, the more it is wrapped in myths and clichés, and the more we gain from those who take pains to delve into its history. The Centre Pompidou (1971-1977) is one of the iconic constructions of the 20th century. It helped re

Deyan Sudjic   On view through 7 August at the Pompidou is the most complete exhibition ever put together on Norman Foster’s work and visionary attitude.

“In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.” What the young Jean Cocteau wrote in relation to Les Six may well also apply to Norman Foster: after six decades of raising buildings all over the world, numerous master

60 Years of Invention

On view through 7 August at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is a journey through the six-decade career of Norman Foster. Taking up almost 2,200 square meters of floor space, the exhibition presents 130 projects of his through an unprecedented selection

The 14th Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design has been awarded to the Grand Paris Express, a large-scale transit project currently being built in and around the Paris metropolitan area. With 68 new stations and 200 kilometers of additional trac

CNN   Tamara Hardingham-Gill   Paris is already home to some of the most popular attractions in the world, and the French capital could be about to get its very first urban cable car. Proposed plans for a brand new 4.5 kilometer-long aerial tramway connecting various suburbs in th

As it was for the likes of Gertrude Stein or Sidney Bechet, France was the main scene of the life of Paul Nelson. Attracted to the artistic circles that made Paris a party in the 1920s, the young man born in Chicago moved to the French capital to com

The latest film of Wes Anderson (Houston, 1969) pays a unique tribute to the golden years of independent journalism, and in particular to The New Yorker, of which the Anderson is a self-declared fan since his teens. Set in the newsroom of an American

Libération   Construction of Herzog & de Meuron’s ‘Triangle’ is to begin in Paris at the end of the year, after 15 of legal battles. The tower will be the tallest to go up in Paris since 1973. Building work is programmed for completion in 2026... Libération:

On view through 22 February at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is an exhibition that delves into the refreshingly refined graphic humor of Saul Steinberg, the brilliant Romanian American cartoonist who gave a new twist to illustration and the journalist

Exactly sixty years after their first installation in Paris – a barricade of barrels denouncing the then recently erected Berlin Wall – Christo and Jeanne-Claude return, albeit posthumously, to the city where they first met. The object this time is t

The Guardian   Kim Willsher   Operation combining art and engineering on a massive scale fulfils dream of late artist couple. Shortly after the sun rose over central Paris, the first of the orange-clad rope technicians hopped over the top of the Arc de Triomphe and began to absei

Isabelle Regnier   In 1997, Frank Gehry opened with his Guggenheim of Bilbao a new chapter of the history of architecture and city-building: the irruption of spectacular buildings designed by star architects to harbor private institutions, with which municipal councils

The Guardian   Kim Willsher   The Arc de Triomphe in Paris will be swathed in silvery blue fabric and red rope as a posthumous project planned by the artist Christo since the early 1960s finally becomes reality. Work will begin next month on L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, a €14m ins

One of the features of the modern legacy – the legacy that nourishes our architecture and which we have yet to regard with the necessary impartiality – was the vituperation of rhetoric. In other words: the search for a ‘minor’ tone to apply to the so

1923-2020 The Hungarian-born French architect and urban planner Yona Friedman – perhaps the last of the great utopian masters of the 20th century – passed away in Paris on 21 February 2020 at the age of 96. After World War II, when being Jewish almos

Enrique Sobejano   I. A light volume of metal panels supported by thin columns rises in the middle of a dense forest facing the sea, allowing large pine trees to pass through the structure and continue to grow, in an unusual inversion of the image of the cabin suspende

The Art Newspaper   Gareth Harris   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

François Chaslin   There are moments when it feels like we are at a turning point. Moments in which the insight and ingenuity of certain architects, their perseverance, the determination of a few builders, and certain changes in the collective imagination open up other

The Hyatt Foundation has selected Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal as the 2021 winners of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the accolade it has been giving every year since 1979, coming with an award of US$100,000 (84,000 euros). Chaired by Ale

The Guardian   Kim Willsher   The Pompidou Centre, one of Paris’s top cultural attractions and home to Europe’s biggest modern art collection, is to close from 2023 for four years of renovations, France’s culture minister has said. Designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard R

Boris Hamzeian   From Pompidou to Beaubourg

Philippe Rahm   Comment le climat, les épidémies et l'énergie ont façonné la ville et les bâtiments

Renzo Piano Richard Rogers   Genoa  2017  
Fondazione Renzo Piano   - 248 Pages 

Francesco Dal Co   Renzo Piano, Rchard Rogers and the Makin of a Modern Monument

Walter Benjamin   Madrid  2013  
Abada Editores   - 1666 Pages 

José Ramón Alonso Pereira   Barcelona  2015  
Reverté   - 320 Pages 

Lia Piano   Génova  2014  
Fondazione Renzo Piano   - 196 Pages 

RCR Arquitectes   Rodez  2014  
RCR Bunka   - 110 Pages 

2009

Larry Busbea   The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970

Walter Benjamin   Cambridge (Mass)  1999  
Harvard University Press   - 1074 Pages 

Jean-Louis Cohen Monique Eleb Antonio Martinelli   París  2000  
Norma Editorial   - 288 Pages