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.

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

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

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

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

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, intends – the pandemic permitting – to inaugurate its much awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on

Steven Holl   United States   Presenting undulating facades and roofs, the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building adds gallery space for the collection of one of the largest museum institutions in the United States. The building consolidates the campus formed by the original edifice, the

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Netherlands   Upon its completion in 1992, Rijnstraat 8 represented both an innovative office typology – its atriums served as conservatories – and a leading example of sustainability. Over time, the building no longer offered the flexibility required of a contemp

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Canada   The extension of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec sits amid the other three existing institutional buildings creating a complex on the edge of the park. The project tries to establish new relationships between the green areas and the adjac

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Netherlands   The nhow RAI Hotel rises in the rapidly developing Zuidas business district, in the south of Amsterdam. The 91-meter building contains a mixed program with workspaces as well as entertainment. The main part is the hotel, which occupies nineteen of th

Caruso St John Architects   Switzerland   The project to transform these old barracks in Zurich into two new schools offers an opportunity to give the monument, its open spaces, and its rooms a new use, and to see this major building in a different way: as if it were a house within a garden.

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

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 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

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