BIG Bjarke Ingels Group IDOM AREP   Spain   The roof of solar panels will protect both travelers waiting in the station itself and the terraces of the blocks of offices, and adopts the form of a series of catenary arches that evoke that profile of the city with the sierra of Madrid in the back

Zaha Hadid Architects Ayesa arquitectura Italferr   Spain   The north terminal, inspired by the mountains in the backdrop of the station, is a geometric response to the vaulted system of the south terminal. In both cases, the double-height floors offer visual and spatial continuity with the exterior…

Foster + Partners Arup Associates Junquera arquitectos   Spain   This flexible system organizes the ensemble by means of a geometric grid inspired by the current domes. The proposal consists of a modular terminal, a system of raised platforms, and a minimum intervention on the old passenger terminal…

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture Porras Guadiana Arquitectos Nexo arquitectura   Spain   The perimeter blocks enclose the central space, in a manner similar to that of the typical plazas of the historic centers in Spanish cities. In contrast, a technological aesthetic prevails in the metallic forest of canopies that protects the platform

Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) Luis Vidal Meta Engineering Carlos González Casado Fhecor   Spain   The solar roof, formed by a simple structure of individual pitched modules, protects more than 130,000 square meters of station, and adopts a dynamic parallelogram shape that softens its encounter with the city along its four orientations…

AECOM    Spain   The station, covered by a textile canopy, constitutes two referential urban spaces: the platforms and the inner streets. The perimeter paths connect the four sides of the complex and generate different atmospheres for public use…

Grimshaw Architects TYPSA Rubio Arquitectura   Spain   The proposal’s main aim is to improve the connection between Chamartín and the city, turning the plaza into a destination in its own right. Modular and prefabricated construction is used both on the roof and on the short-distance train platforms…

Eduardo Souto de Moura Francisco Mangado Ezquiaga Arquitectura Saitec Engineering WSP Spain   Spain   A series of large chimneys designed to bring in light and ventilation gather the structural elements of the urban park planned to cover the platforms of the intermodal station, and whose distribution is inspired by the form of the tracks themselves…

b720 Fermín Vázquez Arquitectos ESTEYCO UNStudio   Spain   The railway complex is transformed into a large courtyard that generates several internal itineraries around the platforms and the tracks, guaranteeing connectivity and improving pedestrian circulation between the accesses from each side. The archite

Flores & Prats   Sweden   Beyond the construction of the first residential buildings on the site, the commission involves establishing, together with a multidisciplinary team, the criteria to build a new community as part of the expansion plans for Råängen, an agricultural ar

Flores & Prats   Spain   With reuse urbanism as starting point, the proposal deepens in the sparse memories and traces of a neighborhood that the new developments were erasing, to establish in this way coherent strategies to help recover the ‘good life of the place’...

Kengo Kuma   Denmark   More than a building, the project is an urban proposal, and is devised as an element capable of stitching two areas – the historic core to the east and the new city to the west – now divided by a transportation barrier and creating a civic center...

NLÉ Zoohaus Inteligencias colectivas   Nigeria   The lack of detail maps of the most populous city of Nigeria and the second in Africa, being as it is under constant transformation, prompted to develop a map reflecting the relationship between the local conditions and the specific urban context.&nb

Ábalos + Sentkiewicz   Spain   The competition for the construction of Logroño’s new Transportation Hub was called in 2006, a scheme comprised within a larger urban plan to bury the railway tracks as they go through the capital of La Rioja, and that also includes the construction

Herzog & de Meuron   Spain   Located on the main pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela –‘El Camino de Santiago’ –, Burgos is part of the plan to connect Bilbao and Madrid with high-speed trains. Because of this, the city decided to transfer the train station from the center

Junquera arquitectos   Spain   Green platforms, shaped as folded planes, build an artificial landscape which allows free-flowing itineraries, therefore erasing the original barrier between the north and south areas of Gijón…

NO.MAD   France   This project for Saint Denis, on Réunion Island, is based on an interpretation of city structures as living textures able to recombine and mutate their codes through procedures analogous to those of molecular biology. To address the cultural multipli

Rob Krier   Germany   Berlín tiene dos centros: uno es el enjambre de hoteles caros, bares, cines y tiendas que se agrupan alrededor de la Iglesia del Emperador Guillermo, chispeando de luz como un diamante falso en la penumbra incierta de la ciudad. El otro es ese estudi

The Economist   The legacy of Joko Widodo (or Jokowi) was meant to be graft-free politics and an infrastructure revolution in Indonesia. On the face of it, the outgoing president has partially succeeded on the latter. During his decade in power, Jokowi’s government

The French architect Dominique Perrault drew up the masterplan for the complex where the athletes competing in the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games will be billeted. Located in Seine-Saint-Denis, north of the center of Paris, it provides 2,400 lodgi

One of the first decisions taken by the new Federal Republic of Germany on June 20, 1991, after reunification, was the re-establishment of Berlin as the capital of the entire nation, which implied the relocation of all central government offices from

Scientific American   Allison Parshall   Hotspots beneath cities deform the ground, causing important infrastructure to crack under stress The streets, sidewalks and roofs of cities all absorb heat during the day, making some urban areas up to six degrees Fahrenheit hotter than rural ones d

The New York Times   Erin Griffith   Conor Dougherty   A former Goldman Sachs trader moved to the Bay Area to make it in tech. He ended up buying rural land with money from some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest people.  What if you built a new city from the ground up? The idea has tantalized urban pla

Norman Foster   In October 2020, as UN Patron for Cities, I launched the Forum of Mayors in Geneva. Nineteen months later, the world’s population has increased by 151 million. Most have ended up in cities. Why? Because cities offer more opportunities, wealth, libera

Norman Foster   From 6 to 8 October the Palais des Nations in Geneva was the venue of a meeting of ministers from states belonging to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). The member states agreed to endorse Regional Action Plan 2030, which seek

John Puttick Associates was awarded the 2021 World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize, recognizing its thoughtful and detailed conservation of Preston Bus Station, located in Preston, UK, a civic monument of central importance that serves as a hub

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

The Norman Foster Foundation  presents the ‘On Cities’ Masterclass Series, a series of thirty-minute-long masterclasses which explores the most pressing and compelling topics related to contemporary cities. Given by twenty leading experts in the fiel

Forbes   David Nikel   Sweden’s northernmost town is on the move, building by building. Because of the risk posed by expanding mining operations, the entire town center of Kiruna is being relocated approximately two miles to the east. More than 20 buildings of historical v

The Guardian   Amanda Sturgeon   Buildings covered in plants do more than just make the cityscape attractive – they contribute to human wellbeing and action on climate change. Our cities are dominated by glass-faced edifices that overheat like greenhouses then guzzle energy to cool

The Paseo de la Castellana reflects both the fortes and the flaws of Madrid. The strengths of an urban axis that has efficiently provided a backbone for the growth of the city, prioritizing the pragmatic over the iconic and infrastructures over build

Norman Foster   Speaking before a gathering of mayors from 41 cities, Norman Foster shared his optimistic view of the pandemic as an uplifting opportunity.

Samir Younés   This book is dedicated to the art of building cities – an art that has been in retreat for several decades but one that is enjoying a vital rebirth since the rise of Modern Traditional Architec-ture more than forty years ago. Nir Buras’s massive and

David Chipperfield   Finn Williams   Among the recently announced big government plans in the United Kingdom, the pronouncement that may well leave a more permanent mark on the post-Covid-19 landscape was Boris Johnson’s promise to “build build build”. The prime minister’s supposed ‘new

Richard Florida    The New Urban Crisis is a historical watershed. How we respond to it will determine whether our cities, suburbs, and nation will successfully forge a new era of sustainable and inclusive prosperity, or fall victim to our growing inequities and divide

unvollendete-metropole.de   La exposición que se muestra en el Kronprinzenpalais de la capital alemana incluye las propuestas ganadoras del concurso Berlín-Brandenburgo 2070, entre las que se incluye el proyecto ‘Archipelago Lab’ de Pedro Pitarch.

The Guardian   Chris Michael   Lydia McMullan   Frank Hulley-Jones   As the pandemic wreaks havoc on existing structures, we look at some visions for post-Covid cities – and how they hold up. There is a huge, looming, unanswerable question that overshadows our cities, like an elephant squatting in the central square.

Ginés Garrido   Francisco Burgos   Burying the most urban stretch of Madrid’s A5 motorway – 3.5 kilometers from the exit of the Avenida de Portugal tunnel to the intersection with Avenida de Los Poblados – is an old demand of locals. Even back in 2007, at the time of the undergroundin

José María Ezquiaga   Over the past years, reminding each other that the decisive battle against climate change would be waged in cities, little did we know that these were in for another battle, an insidious, cruel, invisible one. The great epidemics of the past have lef

The Economist   Cities that can shrug off a disaster can still fade if their economic base—and with it their tax revenues—suffers a structural shift. Again, New York has the history to prove it...

Miguel Aguiló   La creación de la capital nacional

Benno Albrecht Jacopo Galli   A Design Strategy for Urban Reconstruction