Guardian Glass    Thanks, among other things, to Guardian’s SunGuard SN 79/41 low-emission glass product, the renovation of the building at Castellana 77 in Madrid, carried out by Luis Vidal, has obtained Leed Platinum certification.

Tadao Ando   China   The project is an opera house in a cultural complex that is anticipated to shape the core of the cultural zone of Jiading New Town, a suburb which is developing rapidly based on its car industry, and that is 30 km northwest of Shanghai. Owing to the

Tadao Ando   United States   The Upper East Side in Manhattan is known since the early 20th century as the luxury residential area of culture. The project, located on the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue with Gramercy Park, remodels a penthouse gallery on the top floor of a

Tadao Ando   Japan   Ueno Park, a gift from the Imperial family to the city of Tokyo, is a large public space where several cultural institutions are located. One of them, the old Imperial Library, was transformed into a library for children. The old building has a pseud

Tadao Ando   Germany   On an island of a pond outside Düsseldorf, the German art collector Karl-Heinrich Müller founded a museum called Insel Hombroich: a large sculpture park of twenty hectares dotted with several exhibition pavilions designed by sculptor Erwin Heerich. Y

Tadao Ando   United States   The site is located in a quiet residential district close to the center of Chicago. Along this long, narrow north-south oriented site, the objective was to produce a comfortable and private residential space while developing an interaction with the n

Thomas Phifer   United States   The building was originally planned – seventy years ago, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) – as a chapterhouse for the fraternity Pi Lambda Phi, in the Bloomington campus of Indiana University. While respecting the initial concept, the firm Tho

Mathieu Forest Zone Of Utopia   China   Resembling ice cubes stacked on top of one another, this sculptural building clad in frosted glass is the work of the French firms Mathieu Forest Architecte and Zone Of Utopia. It features a restaurant, a café, stores, reading rooms, and spaces inten

Diller Scofidio + Renfro   United States   Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with FXCollaborative, Henry R. Kravis Hall and David Geffen Hall – standing 11 and 8 floors, respectively – are two new facilities in the Manhattanville Campus of Columbia University Business Scho

Studio Muoto   Switzerland   The use of mirrored glass on the facades of the two buildings creates a unified image. The buildings are connected through the basement, a technical floor, and the garden – an enigmatic space covered with a thin layer of water to visually increase d

Studio Muoto Label Architects GRAU   Belgium   The complex includes a programmatic addition of elementary school, high school, and sport center, arranged in an enfilade and connected by footbridges to form a single infrastructure that can evolve and adapt to new activities over time...

Studio Muoto   France   The structural scheme of the building, five supports arranged in a cross plan from which the different levels hang, organizes the interior spaces and frees the ground floor to shape a cubic and glazed volume suspended among the trees...

Barozzi Veiga   Italy   As a complement to the activities of this well-known winery in the municipality of Bardolino, the Guerrieri Rizzardi family commissioned a project to add a small guest house for overnight visitors, along with a space for winetasting. The chosen site

Herzog & de Meuron   United Kingdom   A work of Herzog & de Meuron, the building is a triangular glass disc with edges rounded to follow the shape of the site. The complex is characterized by a sawtooth roof that stretches in an east-to-west...

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

Fenwick Iribarren Architects Serrano Suñer Arquitectura   Spain   In 2012, the project for the Madrid Convention Center, set to become part of the Cuatro Torres Business Area, was put on hold. After three years of construction work, the stalled project left a huge urban void where earthwork, foundation laying, and

Glenn Howells Architects   United Kingdom   In London City Island, a peninsula on the Thames, close to Canning Town Underground Station, the new home of the English National Ballet, whose artistic director is the Spanish ballerina Tamara Rojo, is a large cube whose skin of translucent white gl

SANAA   France   Fifteen years and 280 French companies have taken part in the reconstruction, reshaping, and renovation of La Samaritaine in Paris. The history of this department store dates back to 1870, when Ernest Cognacq opened at the junction of Pont-Neuf and M

AL_A (Amanda Levete Architects)   United Kingdom   Established in 2009 by Amanda Levete, the London firm AL_A has built two new buildings in the heart of the historic British university campus: the William Doo Undergraduate Centre and the Dr Lee Shau Kee Access Centre. The Undergraduate Centre com

Fenwick Iribarren Architects   Spain   Caleido starts out from three premises: to propose a new centrality north of Paseo de la Castellana, to connect the Cuatro Torres Business Area with its environment, and to give the city a large green space – over 33,000 m² – around the complex. The

Dominique Perrault   France   The planning frenzy that Baron Haussman breathed into the Paris of 1850 led to an ambitious succession of urbanistic operations of an imperial grandeur that continued even after the establishment of the Third Republic twenty years later. It was in th

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The expansion of a nineteenth-century townhouse in the heart of Ghent resulted in a second house – a ‘summer house’ marked out by a precise modular frame of steel sections, overgrown with grapevines, that sits in the irregular outdoor space alongside

Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei   Germany   In an artery opened in the 1950s to decongest the historic center, the extension of the local savings bank dialogues with the medieval fabric without sacrificing its contemporary essence. The use of recycled bricks echoes the solid walls of the build

Renzo Piano   United States   The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) of the United States, which year after year extols Hollywood movies with its Oscar awards, inaugurates its much awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on 30 September. The institution will in

Heretofore Arles was known for its Roman amphitheater, the same one that Aldo Rossi mentioned as an example of urban permanence. Henceforth – and as a symbol of there really being nothing permanent – the historical and rather depressed city of Arles

Facing the arcaded gallery at Nuevos Ministerios on Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid, the firms totem arquitectos and BETA.Ø have together come up with an efficient alternative to the conventional office building. The faceted volume has been expressl

The practice headed by the architect Enrique Álvarez-Sala recently completed the renovation of the General Insurance Directorate headquarters, an intervention which has involved consolidating the administrative building’s structure of post-tensioned

The Spaces   Emma Tucker   A series of stepped glass volumes form the roof of Louis Vuitton’s new flagship store in Seoul, designed by Frank Gehry as a miniature take on his Fondation Louis Vuitton. According to the architect, the stacked design is inspired by both the Paris m

From the great greenhouses of the 19th century to the ‘climatops’ proposed by Richard Buckminster Fuller in the mid-20th century, taming nature to reproduce it in artificial environments has been one of the major impulses of modernity. So has it been

Libraries have been one of the symbols of bourgeois society. Originally confined to monasterios and palaces, distant havens of elitist knowledge, libraries eventually became quintessential public spaces in the capitalist and increasingly democratic c

François Chaslin   The Cité Judiciaire serves to centralize a vast network of courthouses in a tiered tower that rises a hundred and sixty meters, and is already an icon of the new neighborhoods of Paris. 

The Roman practice Labics is the author of the Città del Sole urban regeneration project, which emptied some old bus depots next to Rome’s Tiburtina railway station and raised beside them a new building for mixed uses: offices, commercial spaces, res

On 1 June Madrid’s Royal Theater was the venue of ‘Future is Now,’ a forum that brought together leading personalities from the economic, technological, and artistic fields, from the former mayor of New York City and owner of the world’s largest fin

The Chinese boom has made many an architectural dream come true: what in Europe was improbable and in the United States impossible is, in China, simply feasible. This situation has been skillfully capitalized on by the large architectural firms, from

Buildings can become missiles. An example is St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, which Luther turned into a symbol of the degradation of the Catholic Church. So is the new seat of the European Council in Brussels. David Cameron came to express “imme

The expressionist dream of the glass pavilion drawn by figures like Bruno Taut, Wenzel Hablik, or the Luckhardt brothers has had to wait a hundred years to come true, but at least it has come true in Germany, and big time. After a decade of construct

Rosa Urbano   The evolution of the glass envelope goes along with the evolution of architecture as one of the most representative components of contemporaneity, and is the architectural element that most significantly expresses the cultural values of society, and

Ignacio Paricio   Glass was the material of the 20th century and will probably also be that of the 21st. The success of glass is said to lie in its transparency and consequent immateriality, but I would say it is gloss, the shine, that captivates us. A glass building

In 2009 the Swabian studio Wittfoht Architekten won the international competition for the extension of the William Rappard Center in Geneva. Located across from Lake Leman, the building, which has just been inaugurated, addresses its environment by o

Norman Foster ha ganado el concurso para construir un nuevo rascacielos en el corazón de Manhattan, con una propuesta que se ha impuesto finalmente a las de los otros tres finalistas: Richard Rogers, Rem Koolhaas y Zaha Hadid, en una convocatoria a l

Cristina Pardal   Ignacio Paricio   Con este texto, cuyo tema es el uso del vidrio en las envolventes, comienza una serie de seis artículos bajo el epígrafe ‘Arquitectos e industria en la innovación de la fachada ligera’.

Joan Sabaté   A skyscraper is always singular. It does not matter if it stands alone, in a numerous group, or in pairs, like New York’s disappeared Twin Towers; this essential piece of contemporary culture still aims to become an urban landmark and symbol of techn

Hubertus Adam   Located on top of the Girtannersberg, a hill overlooking the Swiss town of St. Gallen, the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences is among the most significant examples of the architecture of the sixties in the country. The exposed concrete constru

Ferrán Figuerola   A lo largo del siglo XX, el vidrio se ha ido convirtiendo en un elemento más y más activo de la arquitectura. Se han buscado soluciones para dotarlo de unas cualidades físicas que lo adaptaran a las exigencias arquitectónicas, entre las cuales los tr

Ignacio Paricio   Nicholas Grimshaw brilliantly won the Mies van der Rohe Prize in 1995 with his famous London Waterloo terminal for the train of the tunnel under the Channel. As everybody knows, the essential element of the building is a roof that shelters the platfo

Jorge Sainz   El vidrio es un material mítico para la arquitectura. Precisamente por tener unas cualidades físicas tan características, su uso como componente de las superficies que separan el interior y el exterior siempre le ha dotado de un carácter singular, ge

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Mute glass gave voice to the 20th century; in the current one, glass shouts out to make itself heard. The two souls of glass gave life to the avant-gardes: the carved facets of crystalline glass served as a symbol of a luminous regeneration, and the