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.

Sou Fujimoto   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   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

SO-IL FREAKS freearchitects   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

Manuel Herz   Germany   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.

Manuel Herz   Ukraine   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.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro   United States   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

Barkow Leibinger   United States   The vast expanse of land around Bozeman – a city in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, not far 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 crowd and enjoy

Atelier David Telerman   United States   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

Onda Arquitectura Checa Arquitectura    Spain   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

Herzog & de Meuron   South Korea   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

Counterspace Studio   United Kingdom   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

Manuel Herz   Senegal   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

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

Rosa Urbano   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

Florian Idenburg LeeAnn Suen   Humas(s) Work

Bjarne Mastenbroek   Building Bound to the Ground