(Amsterdam, 1975)
The Northern Vosges Regional Natural Park encompasses about a hundred French municipalities and one is Meisenthal, also known for its glassworks. The outcome of a 2015 competition, the project carried out by the New York firm SO-IL and the Paris stud
The Royal College of Art has officially opened its new campus in the Battersea district of southwest London, beside its old premises. The Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron won the 2016 competition through a flexible scheme that would adapt to the constan
Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Heatherwick Studio were commissioned to build a new campus for the technology giant in the northern Californian city of Mountain View. The campus combines two projects, Bay View and Charleston East, conceived as a series
In the absence of a clearly defined typological tradition in relation to synagogues, the project connects with Jewish hermeneutics to exalt the written word as an ornamental element.
In the place that witnessed one of the most ruthless massacres of Jews, now again the scene of bellic insanity, a small house of prayer remembers the dead and calls for reconciliation.
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
The vast expanse of land around Bozeman, Montana – a city in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, not far away from Yellowstone National Park – has been seen by many, and even more so with the pandemic, as an ideal place to escape from the madding c
To the beat of Pink Floyd, Zabriskie Point ends with the leading character getting into his car alone and driving into the Arizona desert, a mythical place with a hostile beauty that Antonioni used as a visual metaphor of the countercultural breakawa
With a total length of 283 meters, the footbridge designed by Onda Arquitectura and Checa Arquitectura presents three 63-meter stretches between supports, and the effect is an unexpected impression of lightness. The wavy form, initially a response t
On a busy thoroughfare in the heart of Gangnam District, a hermetic-looking triangular prism contains eleven floors of office spaces and the headquarters of a cultural foundation. The concrete used on the facade has an organic texture achieved throug
This year’s summer pavilion of the Serpentine, the popular gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens, opens to the public on 11 June, a year after it was supposed to, thanks to the Covid-19 crisis. It was designed by Counterspace, the South African firm
The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation – in partnership with the non-profit organization Le Korsa – has funded the construction of the new maternity and pediatric clinics of the hospital of Tambacounda, Senegal. The scheme by Manuel Herz – a German arc
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
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
On the banks of the East River, a branch of the Queens Public Library addresses a call for community space in an almost exclusively residential neighborhood. The building, low and compact, takes up little ground, and makes the much used riverside par
The only opera that Ludwig van Beethoven wrote, Fidelio, has not ceased to attract music connoisseurs since it premiered in Vienna in 1805. For the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth, the Theater an der Wien has presented – with set designs by
Every year the Serpentine Gallery in London chooses an international architect to build a temporary installation. The pavilion of 2013, designed by Sou Fujimoto, is inspired by the evanescence of clouds, inviting people to explore the place in a new
A home for two plus a dog. The house itself is comprised of three shells of progressive size nested inside one another. The outermost shell covers the entire premises, creating a covered, semi-indoor garden. The second shell encloses a limited area i
A chromatic roof is the highlight in the conversion of a traditional siheyuan courtyard into a preschool center that is remarkable, too, in its openness to daylight and vegetation. The principal strategy of the project involved wrapping the preexisti
The classics believed that places have memory, and that their own character is custodied by a protecting spirit, the ‘genius loci.’ The Vallehermoso Athletics Stadium in Madrid is an example, a place that has gone through many phases. It was here, in
The Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet is located within the famous luxury watch manufacturer’s historical complex of workshops and factories. It reflects the innovative spirit of the firm – which has successfully maintained its autonomy as a family enter
Through a careful restoration, the project transforms the old mill complex into the new headquarters of Bombay Sapphire distillers. Located by the River Test, in Laverstoke, the site had become a cluttered and confused mess, with Grade II listed stru
Under the motto ‘Better City, Better Life,’ the Universal Expo of Shanghai 2010 gathered over 200 countries, inviting them to reflect on issues like urban development, well-being, and sustainable growth. Aside from the usual requisites, one of the br
The McMurtry Building is the home of the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. The form of the building articulates the identity of each program by locating their respective spaces in discrete strands, and is designed to foster a co
The artist has built a space for quiet contemplation in homage to his roofer father, but the materials seem too clean-cut and corporate to fit the idea. A tolling church bell has joined the summer sounds of birdsong and tinkling fountains in Kensingt
In the village of Rudrapur, located in the Dinajpur Disrtict of northern Bangladesh, the German architect Anna Heringer – in conjunction with Veronika Lang and the non-profit organization Dipshikha – recently completed a therapy center for people wit
One of the recurring motifs in the already very extensive oeuvre of the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels is the spiral. If for architects in past times the spiral was an expression of movement, for Ingels it is also something that has the capacity to g
The idea that architecture is a form of nature has become a maxim that the firm Junya Ishigami + Associates faithfully follows in its work, an oeuvre now enriched by the Botanical Garden Art Biotop: Water Garden in Tochigi, Japan. The singularity of
Located at Hudson Yards in New York, very close to Thomas Heatherwick’s The Vessel (see Arquitectura Viva 213), rises The Shed, another major hybrid of architecture and sculpture, this time by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. While the theme of the ludic mo
After hundreds of trees were removed from a resort in Japan's Tochigi prefecture, the architect set about on a mission to rescue heritage in a new landscape. Relocating the endangered specimens to an adjacent meadow, he set about creating a breathtak
Set amid the tight mass of skyscrapers of Hong Kong, Herzog & de Meuron’s new Tai Kwun Art and Heritage Centre may be modest in size, but certainly not in conceptual aspiration nor in originality. Beyond the talent of its architects, this signals som
It took 18 years to build, has nearly a mile of galleries and is inspired by a desert rose. Hundreds of huge white plates lie scattered along the roadside in the centre of Doha, Qatar, as if someone has had a spectacular accident with a gigantic
Seven years after winning the competition that was held for the purpose, the Chilean trio of architects composed of Smiljan Radic, Eduardo Castillo, and Gabriela Medrano has been able to inaugurate the Biobío Regional Theater in the city of Concepció
Studio Muoto recently completed a multiuse installation for the Université Paris-Saclay campus. Aiming for a combination of rationalization and flexibililty, the Parisian architecture firm has designed a volume characterized by large aluminum sliding
Since 2000 the Serpentine Gallery has been putting up a pavilion on the lawn of Kensington Gardens for the warm months. This temporary structure has become the great summer benchmark of current architecture, biennials aside. At times drawing from con
The petrodollar-funded construction of huge cultural complexes is a strategy used by Gulf countries to craft themselves a recognizable and influential image.
If for the architects of modernity silos were an iconic reference, for architects of today they are a mark of the past, and something to act upon. This is true for the British Thomas Heatherwick, who working on a 1920s grain silo in Cape Town (South
This year’s summer pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery has just opened to the public, to little surprise with respect to the computer rendering that was presented a few months ago by its author, the Burkina Faso-born Berlin-based architect Diébédo Fra
The partners José Selgas and Lucía Cano have committed themselves to an architectural style that is as recognizable as it is risk-laden. Their organic geometry, unrenounceable artistic vocation, and penchant for creating diffuse atmospheres make the
The facade free of structural constraints postulated by Le Corbusier in his five points towards a new architecture was the logical consequence of the open plan. The liberation of the two families of planes – perpendicular or parallel to the ground –
The temples conceived as spaces for rigorous observation of the liturgy have given way to places where collective faith and individual introspection live side by side.
Architecture can build pluralism. In a world shattered by the tension between globalization and nationalism, the built environment can provide stages for this conflict to be choreographed, bridging the gap between the cosmopolitan and the local throu
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
As in drawings by the 16th-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius, with depictions of flayed human bodies flaunting all their inner organs and workings, the recently opened Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center in New York City – Columbia University Med
The Irish firm of Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, operating since 1978 as Grafton Architects, has been much acclaimed for the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan, a half-buried civic box of concrete – completed in the year 2008 – that strikes an i
Conceived as a project that breaks away from the usual residential typology of vertical apartment towers, The Interlace – designed by Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture and built by its partner Büro Ole Scheeren – was recently named
It would not be an exaggeration to classify the architectures of the world in accordance with the manner in which they relate with nature. Some dominate it, as does western architecture; others engage in dialogue with it, as does Asian architecture.
