Vidres Berni   Founded in 1964 and based in Barcelona, Vidres Berni is a family-run company dedicated to providing technical solutions in glass. It specialises in unique projects whose complexity requires both extensive experience and the ability to adapt to new m

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.

CEBRA architecture   Albania   The impressive mountains that surround the capital of Albania inspire the design of this mixed-use skyscraper set to be the country’s tallest, and houses apartments, shops, boutique hotel, business area, offices, and parking as well as restaurants an

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   France   Since the Middle Ages, Parisian justice has been dispensed from the famous building that surrounds the Sainte-Chapelle on the Île de la Cité, but due to an increasing shortage of space its offices were scattered across the city. The new law courts, b

Sou Fujimoto Architects   France   This welcoming center is part of the metamorphosis of the Ruinart champagne house in Reims. Sou Fujimoto’s design draws inspiration from the sparkling bubbles of champagne. Built with stone and wood, the pavilion presents gentle curves in the walls a

Renzo Piano Building Workshop Adamson Associates Architects   United Kingdom   Next to busy Paddington Square in London, this mixed-use building contains offices, shops, and a variety of bars and cafés, all of it crowned with a terrace and a restaurant commanding views of the city. A 50x50x50-meters cube raised on a podium of p

Foster + Partners   United States   Foster + Partners’ third office tower in Park Avenue will stand at number 350, halfway between the recently completed one at 425 and the current headquarters of JPMorgan Chase at 270. Counting 139,354 square meters, the new skyscraper takes a stepped

Nikken Sekkei   United Arab Emirates   Stretching 67.5 meters, what is now the longest cantilever in the world cuts a figure between two skyscrapers of the One Za’abeel mixed-use development in Dubai. This horizontal structure weighing approximately 9,580 tons floats 100 meters above grou

Max Hacke Gustav Düsing   Germany   The organizational principle behind this project was based on the idea of a superstructure allowing for constant reconfiguration of the floor plan. The two-level, glass-clad building raised for the Technical University of Braunschweig, in the German

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   United States   On West 34th Street, between Hudson Boulevard and 10th Avenue, the office tower called The Spiral stands 314 meters tall and is a vertical prolongation of High Line Park nearby, in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards neighborhood. The Spiral gradually tapers of

Neri & Hu Design and Research Office   China   In what is an emerging industrial area, a top manufacturer of elevators has provided itself with a headquarters of formidable dimensions, yet is able to integrate the human scale. In what is a campus of workshops, showrooms, and storage interspersed

Dorte Mandrup   United States   The new Fay Jones School subdivision embodies the woodworking tradition of the city. A subtle glass covering that is superimposed to the wood structure lets passers-by see the laboratories, the exhibitions, or the workspaces from the street…

fala   Portugal   Two curved walls run smoothly through both levels, gently dissociating private and public. A longitudinal axis is highlighted by two metallic masks. Users become actors and spectators...

Sou Fujimoto Architects   Switzerland   A rigorously orthogonal grid is used as a composition tool in working out a flexible arrangement of the different programs housed within a center for university-level business studies. The regular scheme generates cubic modules stacked in a stepped f

OODA architecture   Albania   The Portuguese firm OODA has won the international competition to build the new headquarters of the Albanian television network Klan TV in Tirana. Carried out in collaboration with the local office Artech, the winning scheme draws inspiration from ve

Sauerbruch Hutton   United Kingdom   This building, housing three faculties of the University of Sheffield, responds to its heterogeneous situation between a highly frequented road and a quieter campus area. The project adapts to the masterplan, also by the studio, for the Modern Langua

Sauerbruch Hutton   Germany   The new station housing the police and fire departments for the government district of Berlin is an extension to a now free-standing 19th-century structure, located on the edge of a former goods yard close to the River Spree. To preserve the represen

Rafael Moneo   United States   Located on the historic College Hill, the RISD campus is scattered, which underscores the quality of the buildings while boosting urban life. The plot for Chace Center was located in the area around Memorial Hall, where the domestic character of Bene

Vaillo + Irigaray    Spain   The firm Vaillo+Irigaray Architects has won the competition to give the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) a new building in San Sebastián. The research center wants a unique, immediately recognizable image that will also serve to organize

SANAA   Australia   The Victorian building of one of the country’s principal art institutions has now been enlarged with a cluster of interconnected pavilions that go about adapting to the topography of the site.

E2A   Switzerland   In recent years, technological innovation has changed the relationship between living and working substantially: people work where they live and live where they work. This shift from a clear separation of living and working spaces to the most diverse

E2A   Switzerland   The Obstgarten school complex is a typical ensemble from the 1970s, and consists of raw concrete cubes that are integrated into their surroundings on different levels. While the brief included a renovation of the classroom tracts – their interiors re

E2A   Germany   The Heinrich Böll Foundation is closely linked to the political party Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and is committed to promoting democratic decision-making, socio-political engagement, and international understanding around the globe. The Foundation headqua

Lina Ghotmeh   Canada   Like a built palimpsest, a long volume enclosed with imprinted glass is suspended between existing buildings. Behind the facade, different spaces for art open up to life and social interaction, weaving a mesh of connections with the surroundings...

Foster + Partners   United States   The 308-meter-tall office tower 50 Hudson Yards officially opened in Manhattan. The carefully planning of the minimized core and the section gives the flexibility needed to create new reconfigurations, with spaces free for columns and generous ceilin

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