OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   Germany   Berlin’s historic Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) department store has opened phase 1 of its OMA-designed renovation. A concentric void that spans six floors features a battery of wood-clad escalators. At the base, a large retail space also serves as a

Estudio DIIR   Spain   Vienna’s walls came down to the rhythm of Strauss waltzes. Valencia’s, to the beat of taurine fiestas. And like the Ringstrasse, even without its grandeur, the paseo de ronda that replaced the ramparts of the Mediterranean city became a vibrant trade

Jean Nouvel   China   Split up by a covered central passageway connecting two streets – Ma Dang and Dan Shui – in Shanghai’s Huangpu district, this complex contains 25,000 square meters of office space and 15,000 of commercial units. The location is in what was part of th

Dominique Perrault   France   The planning frenzy that Baron Haussman breathed into the Paris of 1850 led to an ambitious succession of urbanistic operations of an imperial grandeur that continued even after the establishment of the Third Republic twenty years later. It was in th

OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen   Belgium   The small town of Tielt, in the province of West Flanders, is the home of this electronic components shop built on an an elongated, irregular site. The first design decision was to raise the brick party walls to their maximum height. On the side towa

Adjaye Associates   United States   “The acropolis of consumerism.” This was the media’s pronouncement on opening day, in 1982, of an eight-floor bulk raised on an entire block between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, and which has since provided Angelenos with high-end stores, popula

Studio Animal   Spain   Working from offices in Barcelona and Madrid, Studio Animal – with Javier Jiménez Iniesta at the helm – has designed this project for the Spanish shoe brand Munich. It is named ‘Tent,’ playing with the Spanish word tienda and its two meanings: store

Arquitectura-G   Sweden   A former banking office in the Swedish capital – an anonymous institutional building located in the city center – became world-famous in 1973 thanks to an armed heist and hostage crisis that triggered in the victims a psychological reaction later cal

gmp Architekten   China   In the Chinese province of Jiangsu, in the eastern part of the country, Changzhou is a 2,500 year old city with a dense network of rivers that is becoming the new industrial and technological hub in the prosperous Yangtze River delta area. There in C

Nendo   China   Shanghai Times Square within the Pudong district is the result of working on a nine-floor commercial building containing over 53,000 square meters of space. The objective was to accommodate 170 establishments, mostly fashion and lifestyle stores but

Herzog & de Meuron   Japan   The fire that in 1872 devastated an area of the city recently renamed Tokyo was seized by the Meiji government as an opportunity to implant on its streets the European-style model of modernization that it was trying to institute in the country. This

Foster + Partners   Apple Aventura embodies Miami’s spirit of openness and generosity, bringing people together under an undulating vaulted roof that is reminiscent of the city’s nautical and architectural roots. The materiality and flowing spaces are inspired by the re

Using architecture as an emblem, sometimes as a technological lure, is nothing new. Suffice it to remember the recurring association of avant-garde buildings with automobiles, a link forged in times of Le Corbusier and continuing to this day. But aft

Joan Ockman   El consumo somos nosotros. Eso sostiene la Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, un libro de 800 páginas recién publicado por Taschen. Se trata del resultado de una serie de seminarios de investigación conocidos como Project on the City e impartid