Europerfil   Eurodesign is a system of trays with standing seams for roofs and claddings. Completely watertight,  it can be manufactured in a very broad range of materials and adapted to projects of different scale.

Wutopia Lab   China   The Chinese firm Wutopia Lab, founded by Yu Ting, has transformed an industrial yard in Shanghai’s Pudong District into a mixed-use cultural space characterized by wave-shaped roofs of blue aluminum and translucent plastic. Named Klein Blue Hills and

System Arquitectura   Spain   The new logistical center of Mayoral, a children’s clothing brand, rises on its corporate campus, on the site of the old company Interhorce (Industrial Textiles del Guadalhorce) in the city of Málaga, beside the listed building by Ramón Vázquez Molez

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Switzerland   The organization that operates the world’s largest particle physics laboratory has opened a facility for scientific education and outreach, composed of several blocks pierced by a raised walkway.

Neri & Hu Design and Research Office   China   The transformation of a residential tower into a hotel has been completed with a metal skin wrapping the structure of exposed concrete, thus adding a new layer to the building’s history. While the entrance tries not to stand out amid alleys, the vert

Wutopia Lab   China   The Chinese architecture and design practice Wutopia Lab has raised this copper-clad cultural center in Shanghai’s Pudong district as a venue for exhibitions, conferences, and other events. The original vaulted construction, from which the project to

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Switzerland   As part of its mission to engage the public in science, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known by its French acronym, CERN) is launching the Science Gateway, a new facility for scientific education and outreach. The purpose of the proj

Herzog & de Meuron   Greece   The metal roof, a reinterpretation of the Greek agora, presides the garden and marks the start of the stoa, which functions as an axis through the park, the existing building, the historic courtyards, and the exhibition spaces...

Hsü Rudolphy   Chile   This residential building made of shipping containers, meant for young users, is a 1,400-square-meter, 4-floor construction raised with 6 prefabricated blocks of stairs and 70 recycled containers, which dynamically alternate to form little balconies.

Rojo Fernández-Shaw   Spain   The Julia Powell Hall is a sports and multipurpose space on the campus of Runnymede College in Alcobendas, a municipality of the Madrid metropolitan area. The starting point of the project was taking advantage of the existing foundation: the basement

AMM - Adelino Magalhaes Amann Cánovas & Maruri - Temperaturas Extremas   Luxembourg   - Two Madrid practices – the studio of Atxu Amann, Andrés Cánovas, and Nicolás Maruri on the one hand, and AMM-Adelino Magalhaes on the other – have in collaboration with João Nunes and Carlos Ribas of the Lisbon-based landscape architecture firm PRO

COBE Architects BRUT   Belgium   The plaza is designed as a series of concentric circles which, inspired by the European Parliament’s Hemicycle, continue in the surrounding paving. The iconic roof structure of the central pavilion reflects the square and the people below...  

Vaillo + Irigaray    Spain   The firm Vaillo+Irigaray Architects has won the competition to give the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) a new building in San Sebastián. The research center wants a unique, immediately recognizable image that will also serve to organize

Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos   Spain   This compact volume of 38 square meters contains a room whose single-slope roof incorporates a skylight. Next to a food garden, it is annexed to a 17th-century house which is listed as a piece of heritage, with a porch in between, saving the vegetati

Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos   Spain   The CEU campus Moncloa includes several university buildings raised at different times for education and research. The new Faculty of Humanities and Communication Sciences is located on a triangular site in Madrid’s Colonia Metropolitana. The plot’s

Barceló Balanzó Arquitectes Sulkin Marchissio   Spain   At the boundary between the residential and industrial areas of Vilablareix, a municipality in the eastern Catalonian comarca of Girónés, stands this educational center. A compact volume aligned with the street Marie Curie optimizes the orientation o

Snøhetta   United States   In 1995, with the opening of the new Mario Botta-designed building of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the museum led a profound transformation of the South of Market disctrict, a neighborhood which soon became the cultural hub of the

Meritxell Inaraja   Spain   Standing through a key moment in history, the building of the Unió de Cooperadors came to being in 1934 with the initiative of workers in factories and different industries, which joined the cooperative movement and decided to hire Josep Lluís Sert a

Paredes Pedrosa Arquitectos   Spain   The library is conceived as a gate of access to the Jardines de la Agricultura (Agriculture Gardens), which it joins and becomes part of. In order to adapt to the historic layout of the 18th century gardens and to respect the existing trees, the buil

Scapelab   Slovenia   Buildings can have many lives: someone builds them with a purpose, but time eventually imposes others, even though the forms stubbornly tend to persist. This is the case of an old construction in Ljubljana, which was a sugar refinery before a devasta

Tadao Ando   United States   The Upper East Side in Manhattan is known since the early 20th century as the luxury residential area of culture. The project, located on the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue with Gramercy Park, remodels a penthouse gallery on the top floor of a

Mert Uslu Architecture   Turkey   Farming tasks are interwoven with educational initiatives and research projects in a facility that focuses on the challenges that agriculture has to confront in the face of climate change. The different programs are arranged in a linear scheme along

Bailorull +ADD Arquitectura   Spain   This office block was designed by the practice of Manuel Bailo and Rosa Rull, with the advice of the project management consulting firm H.A.U.S. Healthy Buildings. Containing an area of 15,411 square meters and taking up the entire length of the site

Christian Kerez   United Arab Emirates   A bundle of slender metal diagonals breaks the traditional hierarchy of pillars and beams, altogether altering the Cartesian space inside the prism by offering fragmented views...

The Economist   The past and present of an unfairly ignored building material.  Down the deep lanes that lead to Dartmoor’s granite uplands, in England's West Country, a weather-beaten gap has grown in the hedge marking a Saxon field boundary. One day this winter a

The New York Times   Michael Gold   Visitors to the structure, located in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards complex, will no longer be able to enter alone, but its protective barriers will not be raised. The Vessel, the labyrinth of staircases at Hudson Yards that closed four months ago after s

The Art Newspaper   Gareth Harris   The architect Frank Gehry will unveil his latest blockbuster building—a soaring twisting geometric tower covered with 11,000 stainless steel panels—at Luma Arles this summer, the 27-acre cultural campus in the southern French town of Arles spearheade

Aluminum is a complex material whose many virtues do not quite compensate for all its defects. Among its strengths is the capacity to take on a wide diversity of forms, colors, and finishes, and the fact that it lends itself to mechanization in nearl

Based in Palma de Mallorca, the young studio TEd’A arquitectes – headed by Jaume Mayol and Irene Pérez, recent recipient of the FAD Award for Interiors – has finished a school in the small Swiss locality of Orsonnens, fifty kilometers from Bern. The

Raúl González Bravo   If there is a material that clearly illustrates how technological progress is applied to architecture, it is aluminum. Despite this metal’s presence in numerous areas of everyday life, it is, from a historical perspective, very recent. Not until the

David Mencías   Ever since human beings began to handle metals around 6,000 B.C., the development of metallurgy has been associated with humanity’s revolutions – not only the technological, but also the economic, social, and cultural ones.

Raúl González Bravo   The use of thin sheets of malleable metals to solve the problem of waterproofing roofs is a deep-rooted, centuries-old practice in western construction, especially in countries of plenty of rain. Because they are so easy to bend and fold, building tr

Pepa Cassinello   Maybe it was chance, not the consequence of a premeditated search, but over 3,000 years ago, man found a way to make iron more resistant: by mixing it with carbon. Thus was born the alloy that metallurgical engineering calls steel. The oldest known a

José Jurado   To build is to choose. Architectural design is a crucible of objectives, data, and criteria, all merging in a single proposal. The step toward materialization, always implicit, is just one more turn of the screw in the routine of rejection and select

Although its walls have yet to be decked with drawings, oil paintings, engravings, and other works of art, one can already get a good idea of the spaces contained in the newly completed Soulages Museum, designed by the firm RCR and built in collabora

Raúl González Bravo   Since 7,000 years ago, when man managed to smelt and shape it into a wide range of utensils, tools, and weapons, putting an end to the Stone Age, and into the Industrial Revolution, when its fine threads made transmission of electric currents and tel

Norman Foster   There was a time in our evolving society when the making of things was considered not only honourable but was inextricably linked to their aesthetics. Perhaps, in retrospect, that is why we see integrity and consistency in the work of those individua

Franz Graf   Jean Prouvé drew, shaped, manufactured and built a lot but, as is common in the world of builders, left few writings. In the few that exist, often transcribed conversations, Prouvé recurrently spoke of the material-transformation relation; that is, o

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Initial Workshops: from Apprentice to Master  Jean Prouvé was born in Paris in 1901, son of a painter and a pianist, but his creative life is tied to the craft tradition of Nancy, centered on wrought ironwork, furniture and glass. The École de Nancy

Peter Sulzer   Jean Prouvé was not the first to construct buildings entirely of metal (he was preceded by Eiffel, Gropius/Hirsch, Fillod…); but he was perhaps one of the first (with Hausermann) to produce movable sheet metal partitioning, and one of the first (with

En 2002 cayó, víctima de aluminosis, el teatro Atlántida de Vic; ocho años después, Josep Llinás, Josep Llobet, Pedro Ayesta y Laia Vives han terminado el nuevo conjunto que lo sustituye, bautizado como Centro de Artes Escénicas de Osona, la comarca

Después de una década dedicados a la experimentación y al desarrollo de nuevos mecanismos de diseño, Cristina Díaz Moreno y Efrén García Grinda han construido, desde su estudio madrileño AMID [cero9] un edificio de programa híbrido para una empresa d

Un revestimiento de planchas de acero cortén perforadas con láser distingue el primer hotel de cinco estrellas de la ciudad califal, firmado por el equipo de Alfonso Casares en colaboración con el estudio Isasi y Pieltain, sobre el solar del antiguo

En el municipio madrileño de Rivas Vaciamadrid se ha consagrado el centro parroquial de Santa Mónica, obra de Ignacio Vicens y José Antonio Ramos cuyo volumen expresionista en acero cortén contrasta subversivamente con el continuo de unifamiliares qu

Sebastian Redecke   Placing the starting point of Dominique Perrault’s architecture in the concern for materiality seems obvious. The architect has clear preferences: the list of materials used can be reduced to metal, in all its forms, and, of course, glass. There is n

Richard Ingersoll   On April 21, the legendary date of the founding of Rome, two of the three theaters in Rome’s new Auditorium complex, or Parco della Musica, were inaugurated, inspiring intense feelings of wonder. The uncanny scarab-shaped hoods of the three halls pro

Justo Isasi   Metal is the material of industry. Smelted, rolled, hardened, and polished, metal is like a parallel of glass and like its antimatter: resistent and opaque, but sensitive to water and air. As if to please a postmodernity interested in superficial att