Open Architecture   China   The design for this 50-meter-tall cultural hub with a cone shape took into account how the sun changes course during the year. Located in China’s northeastern city of Yantai, the Sun Tower was conceived as a giant sundial composed of two connected la

MAD Architects   United States   A crack carves through the glass facade of One River North, a new mixed-use development near the center of the River North Art District of Denver, Colorado. The building contains 187 rental apartments on fifteen stories, plus retail spaces at the bot

Herzog & de Meuron   Israel   The design for the National Library of Israel juxtaposes the desire to react to the architectural traditions of the place with the ambition to make a building that is appropriate for our contemporary time – a library that is welcoming, accessible to

Selgascano Diego Cano-Lasso   United States   In Mount Washington, a suburb in the hills of northeast Los Angeles, this house with impressive views of downtown LA adapts to the very steep lot it sits on, which faces southwest, making it necessary to shield the house against strong sunlight. Tube

Lina Ghotmeh   Lebanon   Lording over the rooftops of the Lebanese capital is a residential tower, a stony presence which is a high-rise interpretation of the city’s complex history and chaotic allure. An unscathed survivor of the devastating explosion that befell the nearby

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

Selgascano   Spain   The architecture firm led by José Selgas and Lucía Cano, in collaboration with the designer Andreu Carulla, has transformed an industrial space built in the early 1950s into a restaurant. The building previously harbored a repairs garage and the bar

Herzog & de Meuron   France   Combining spaces for production and promotional activities, the viticulture facilities of a historic estate seek to formally and conceptually blend into a World Heritage Site. Much like the product embodies the vineyards’ mineral and climatic charact

Heneghan Peng Architects   Palestine   A faceted building in the middle of a landscape of terraces has the mission of preserving the memory of a people currently displaced and dispersed, but strongly united in identity.

Studio Gang   United States   The Chicago practice led by Jeanne Gang has overhauled and expanded the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock. A sculpturally folded concrete canopy unites eight existing buildings – of different periods and architectural styles – that had been

Studio Gang   United States   The 154-year-old American Museum of Natural History across the upper west side of Central Park has a new wing that establishes a fluid connection among the institution’s various buildings. The new educational programs of the AMNH are organized around

Lina Ghotmeh   France   This facility in Louviers, Normandy, accommodates 260 crafters of artisanal bags, small leather goods, and equestrian items like saddles and harnesses for the luxury brand Hermès. The project of the Lebanese-French architect Lina Ghotmeh is based on

Lina Ghotmeh   United Kingdom   Open to the public from 9 June to 29 October is the temporary pavilion of the popular Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London. For this summer the commission went to the Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh (Beirut, 1980), who designed a round

Herzog & de Meuron   United States   The Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron was commissioned to restore the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Power Station, built in 1904, and transform it into an art manufacturing hub. In the 1950s, half the original structure – the Boiler House – was demolished. The

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

Sou Fujimoto Architects   Hungary   A sinuous roof that merges with the lush vegetation of the historic Városliget crowns an exhibition center devoted to the rich musical tradition – cultivated and popular – of the Magyar country. The undulating disk of the roof, perforated in an irreg

Kéré Architecture   Uganda   The kamwokya informal settlement, located among the hills of Kampala’s central district, is one of the most indigent areas of the capital, with a high dwelling density, scarce infrastructures, and poor health conditions. Surprisingly, it hides the on

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.

Selgascano   United Kingdom   Located at the heart of a new real-estate development on Greenwich Peninsula, London’s Design District features 16 buildings. Each is assigned to a different architecture practice, and the invited teams drew up their respective projects knowing nothi

Diller Scofidio + Renfro   United States   This performing arts center in the city of Worcester, 66 kilometers west of Boston, is named in honor of Cornelius B. Prior, an alumnus of the College of the Holy Cross, a private institution on whose campus it stands, and lead donor for its construc

Kleihues + Kleihues Klaus Schuwerk    Norway   With 54,600 square meters of floor space and a collection of over 400,000 works, this is the largest art museum in the Nordic region. Officially named National Museum of Art, Design and Architecture, the building is a fruit of the fusion, in 2003, of

FREAKS freearchitects SO-IL   France   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

Herzog & de Meuron   United Kingdom   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

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group Heatherwick Studio   United States   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

On view through 8 September at the ICO Foundation museum is the first major retrospective on the work of Iwan Baan, one of the world’s leading photographers of architecture. ‘Moments in Architecture’ is a traveling show curated by Mea Hoffmann and pr

Iñaki Bergera   On view this summer of 2024 at Museo ICO is ‘Moments in Architecture,’ an exhibition originally set up at the Vitra Design Museum. It comes to Madrid as part of the PhotoEspaña festival, but this is not the first time for the spectacular photography

The winners of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award for 2024 have been announced in Brussels. The Study Pavilion on the campus of the Technical University of Braunschweig (Germany), by Gustav Düsing and Max

At the base of the residential high-rise at 56 Leonard Street in New York, a work of Herzog & de Meuron, is this permanent sculpture of stainless steel by the artist Anish Kapoor. Seemingly squashed by a 250-meter-tall building, the 15-meter-long, 6-

While architectural photography is typically known to showcase isolated buildings and pristine environments, the work of Iwan Baan (Alkmaar, Netherlands, 1975) goes beyond this approach of reproducing artificially perfected environments. The book Mom

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   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

Architectural Digest   Samuel Cochran   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

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   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

Ángel Martínez García-Posada   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. 

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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

Florian Idenburg LeeAnn Suen   Humas(s) Work

Bjarne Mastenbroek   Building Bound to the Ground