Zaha Hadid Architects   Saudi Arabia   The King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD), designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, is a centerpiece of Riyadh’s ambitious metropolitan railway system, which inaugurates its first lines on 1 December 2024. Able to accommodate 3.6 million commuters daily,

gmp Architekten   China   In the eastern part of the city of Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province, a recently completed station becomes part of the country’s high-speed rail network. With a gross floor area of approximately 100,000 square meters, it provides eight platfo

Kengo Kuma   France   Through a series of stairs and ramps that follow a spiral formation, Saint-Denis Station expands public space and connects with the urban scheme of the Pleyel district in northern Paris. A work of the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, the complex includ

Martin Duplantier Architectes   France   Built in line with the 2024 Olympic Games held in Paris, this seven-story garage in L'Île-Saint-Denis freed up the neighborhood of vehicles. The structural bracing system was included in the design of the facade and the whole building serves as a la

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   Italy   In 2004, the city of Naples invited, under the motto AAA (Architecture, Archaeology, and Art) invited prominent firms to propose designs for the new metropolitan line. The plan, aside from improving the connection between the outskirts and the city c

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   France   The bridge designed by OMA / Rem Koolhaas, connecting the Bégles and Floirac cantons of Bordeaux, has officially opened. It is 548 meters long and 44 meters wide. There are separate lanes for cars, public transport, bicycles, and pedestrians, the one

Barceló Balanzó Arquitectes   Spain   The capital of the island of Menorca, Mahón, boasts the Mediterranean’s largest natural harbor, a dynamic hub that day after day sees the coming and going of passengers and merchandise without ceasing to be a place of remarkable beauty. Antoni Barcel

Foster + Partners   United States   Foster + Partners have unveiled the latest schemes, drawn up in conjunction with Arup, for California High-Speed Rail’s first four stations. These will be in the cities of Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, and Hanford. Located close to the latter, Kings T

Burgos & Garrido Bernabeu Ingenieros   Slovenia   The coachmen of Maribor were much relieved when in 1913 the Austrians inaugurated what is known as the Old Bridge over the Drava, which replaced the timber structure that had been a serious bottleneck…

Níall McLaughlin Architects   United Kingdom   By the side of a picturesque lake in the Hampshire countryside, and bordered on the south by a small stream of pristine water and swift currents, the site of this small shelter is one of the best spots for fly fishing in the British Isles. To ensure

Níall McLaughlin Architects   United Kingdom   In the wake of World War II, King’s Cross became a very degraded industrial zone, but since the early 1990s the district has undergone an incessant urban regeneration process, much of it triggered by the renovation of the historic station and the arr

Arenas & Asociados AM2 Arquitectos NOARQ | José Carlos Nunes de Oliveira   Spain   The elevator tower Halo Vigo is crowned with a ring that can be seen from different parts of Vigo. Located on Calle Serafín Avendaño, the new urban lift connects the Galician city’s intermodal station – a project of the firm Morphosis, led by Thom Ma

Estudio Práctica   Romania   The Spanish firm Práctica – Jaime Daroca, José Mayoral, José Ramón Sierra – was commissioned to regenerate 15 kilometers of the banks of the Sommer River that lie within the Rumanian municipality of Cluj-Napoca. An outcome of a 2017 competition, the

Christian Kerez   Bahrain   Compensating for the lack of parking spots in the former capital is a network of open, flexible constuctions which serve at the same time to give the urban fabric a new character altogether.

MAD Architects   China   Lushui, in the southwest of Zhejiang Province, China, is known for its lush greenery and valleys. Ma Yansong’s firm MAD Architects will be giving it its first airport for a predicted one million passengers a year. Located on hilly ground 15 kilometer

Christian Kerez   Bahrain   At the end of the 19th century, the German mathematician August Möbius discovered his famous strip, a continuous band with only side and one edge. Perhaps influenced by this non-orientable surface, or perhaps fascinated by the infinite folds of Deleu

Ehl & Koumar Architekti   Czech Republic   The 2023 winner of the Czech Architect Award, given by the Czech Chamber of Architects, this 57-meter-long footbridge replaced the original overpass on the site, built in 1981. A work of the Prague-based practice of Lukáš Ehl and Tomáš Koumar, the st

MONO Architekten    Germany   This ensemble of constructions with perforated facades made of sedimentary layers of red-tinted rammed earth is situated in the city of Neuenburg am Rhein, close to the German, French, and Swiss borders. Connecting the urban center to the green zones

Luis Vidal AECOM    United States   The renovation and expansion of the existing terminal is executed in a red facade, in accordance with the tradition and culture of the Massachusetts capital, for which the prismatic paint called Boston Red is used. Created specifically and exclusivel

Henning Larsen   Czech Republic   The Danish firm Henning Larsen Architects, in collaboration with the engineers of the Ramboll group, has won the competition to transform the main railway station of the city of Prague. The project reconnects the historic station with the Vrchlického

Foster + Partners   Saudi Arabia   Foster + Partners has won the competition to design a new terminal for the airport of Abha, the capital of Saudi Arabia’s Asser Region. Taking inspiration from the nearby village of Rijal Almaa, the winning scheme presents a series of interconnected

Atelier Bridge Structures Blank architekti   Czech Republic   Walking on the Charles Bridge, amid so many baroque saints and the breathtaking views of Prague, one easily forgets about the basic purpose of its construction in the year 1357: to connect the castle to the town core on the opposite bank. It was the

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   China   Developed from a afar due to the pandemic, the project reinterprets elements from Chinese tradition, such as the ceramic pieces of the facade which, arranged in the production warehouse, evoke the Terracotta Army of Xian. Located at the foot of Mount

The Elizabeth Line in London, designed by Grimshaw, Maynard, Equation, and AtkinsRéalis, has been named the 2024 winner of the Stirling Prize, which the Royal Institute of British Architects gives for best building completed in the United Kingdom. Pr

In the year 1965 the port authority of the state of Oregon’s leading city commissioned the local practice ZGF Architects to draw up a masterplan for the expansion of its flight terminal, which is a strategic point in connecting with Alaska up north a

Tras casi treinta años de trámites burocráticos, falta de fondos, un terremoto e incluso la sombra alargada de la camorra, la línea 1 del metro de Nápoles abrió en 1993 conectando con modernos apeaderos las colinas y el borde del casco. En sus sucesi

The relationship between cars and buildings is manifested in at least three ways. The first, metaphorical, is part of architecture’s broader link with machines, and holds that buildings should draw from the same principles of rational efficiency whic

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

Neither the dictator Primo de Rivera nor the Republic saw the materialization of the dream of a hub in the north of the capital that would untangle the city’s rail network. This was not achieved until the years of Francoist developmentalism, when Cor

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

estudioHerreros   According to the dictionary, an infrastructure is the set of elements, facilities, or ser-vices required for an organization to operate efficiently. The act of delving beyond the architectural concept of infrastructure as something having to do with

GCR   The pedestrian bridge, which was first announced in 2015 (see further reading), was printed by Dutch additive construction specialist MX3D over the Oudezijds Achterburgwal canal in the city’s Red Light District. According to Imperial, it will be a “l

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has signed an agreement with Hyperloop Italia to jointly design its next phase of works that marks a turning point for the future of transport Hyperloop transports passengers at very high speed safely, economically and sus

The Economist   Since the Romans began doing it with great panache more than 2,000 years ago, road-building has been a sweaty, grubby business, involving heaving great quantities of rocks and stones into place and, in more recent times, covering the surface with asp

The "Ruyi Bridge" in the Shenxianju Scenic Area in Eastern China's Taizhou city has recently become an internet hit. Spanning 100 meters across the Shenxianju valley, the bridge is more than 140 meters high and is shaped like a jade Ruyi, an ornament

The firm led by the British architect Norman Foster has been selected to design Guangming Hub, a high-density urban development linked to the railway that runs through Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. Following the model known as TOD (transit-orie

The Economist   Every country wants to build more bridges, roads and renewable-power grids. It won’t be easy. In 1916 cincinnati decided to construct a magnificent new subway system. After decades of cock-ups it was abandoned in 1948, and today there are two miles o

Adif has publicly named the teams selected to go on to phase two of the competition to transform the Madrid–Chamartín station: UNStudio with b720; RSHP with Luis Vidal; Souto de Moura with Francisco Mangado and José María Ezquiaga; Grimshaw with Carl

The tragedy of 14 August 2018, when 43 people were killed by the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa, was a heavy blow to the city, to Italy, and to the prestige of Italian engineering. So the recent inauguration of the rebuilt infrastructure – t

youtube.com   On 3 August, the city of Genoa inaugurated its new bridge, designed by Renzo Piano to reconstruct the Polcevera Viaduct, also known as the Morandi Bridge, which collapsed on 14 August 2018, killing 43.

On view through 13 September at the Matadero Madrid Design Center is an exhibition showing twenty footbridges and bridges built in the past twenty years by the Spanish firm Fhecor Ingenieros Consultores, which in 2019 received a Special Mention in th

Chinese president Xi Jinping a few years ago lambasted the ‘weird architecture’ that international stars were building in his country (see Arquitectura Viva 169), but his denouncement does not seem to have been much heeded. Otherwise there would be n

The Guardian   Rowan Moore   From Beijing to Istanbul, exotic new airports are symbols of prestige for strongman leaders. But the environmental cost is massive… We have the confidence and ambition,” announced China’s president, Xi Jinping, to a rapt audience last September, “to

The first gates of cities were the triumphal arches through which enlightened governments sought to imitate ancient Rome; later, the grand foyers of train stations, true monuments of the industrial city. Today we have the airports, symbols of global

Zaha Hadid's Beijing Airport

Headed by Jeanne Gang (one of this year’s 100 most influential people in the world, according to Time magazine), Studio Gang – in collaboration with three other architecture and engineering companies – has won the competition to carry out the renovat

Javier Manterola   Madrid  2017  
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Fernando Casqueiro Barreiro Javier Salcedo   Madrid  2013  
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