Foster + Partners   China   This recently opened Apple store is in the heart of Shanghai’s Jing’an District. Generating a public space for encounters, a new circular plaza connects different walkways through several curving levels featuring vegetation and tiered seating from wh

TEST Guillermo Santomà   Spain   From tapestry to wall. In essence, this was the Copernican turn Semper took with his principle of cladding, whereby structure gave up its protagonism in architecture in favor of Bekleidung: though humans learned to use durable materials, he held that

Arquitectura-G   Netherlands   Leaving aside the by now mythical incident of employees in the area running into Tilted Arc, claiming the installation was an eyesore that blocked their way to work, and succeeding in getting it removed, it is unanimously considered a powerful experi

Neri & Hu Design and Research Office   China   The warehouse of an old cotton textile factory outside the Chinese capital has been refurbished to harbor the main office and the retail concept store of a historical pastry brand. In allusion to their baking-industry uses, the brick buildings were t

Estudio Além   Portugal   Portugal was born in Guimarães. At least that is what the – modern – inscription on one of its walls says, in allusion to the fact that the first independent Portuguese king, Afonso Henriques, established his court in this town, after defeating the a

Dellekamp Schleich   Mexico   In the courtyard of a large old house in the Polanco neighborhood rises a slender mixed-use building that is considered the first ever to incorporate a high-rise timber structure. The framework of the upper levels rests on the party wall and a single

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   United States   The flagship store of Tiffany & Co., the luxury jewelry and specialty design house, has reopened on Fifth Avenue in New York City, after completion of its first holistic renovation since opening in 1940. Shohei Shigematsu of OMA did the revamp an

Barozzi Veiga   Spain   At Consell de Cent 349, in the Eixample, the first Barcelona store of the Australian cosmetic firm Aesop, founded in Melbourne in 1987, has opened. The firm of the Italian Fabricio Barozzi and the Galician Alberto Veiga did the interiors. A large hig

OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture   France   As Loos would say, you can’t build a house with carpets alone. He was talking about the architect’s task having to start out with a skeleton for the enclosure, a conviction which a very young fashion house has now playfully set out to refute in one o

Renesa Architecture   India   There is no doubt that we live surrounded by what Debord acidly called the marchandise vedette, articles that compete to be displayed in the most irresistible way possible, appealing to our senses and our wallets. In architecture, this dictate of pub

estudiHac   Spain   The Valencia-based studio has a space in which to display the broad range of creative possibilities that this brand specialized in claddings offers, presented through the superposition of materials, plans, textures, and colors...

P-M-A-A    Spain   The new circular skylight is a unique addition that transforms an old and dark space into an atmosphere filled with natural light. Concentrating the program at the corners generates an open-plan space of squared proportions and symmetrical in section

Evvo Retail   Spain   ‘Layers’ of industrial materials – aluminum and concrete – are added to the space that preserves the original walls, in contrast with the elegant and theatrical textures in an atmosphere of pastel colors that uses the curve as a sculptural element...

querkraft   Austria   With facades resembling a set of shelves bearing plants, IKEA Wien Westbahnhof opens its doors in the Austrian capital. A work of the local firm Querkraft, the 26,200-square-meter building rises seven floors, and on top is the Jo&Joe Hostel – tak

Happenstance Collective [HaCo] Javier Villar Ruiz   Japan   This shop for UPI, a company that specializes in equipment and paraphernalia for mountaineering, hiking, and camping, is a work of Javier Villar Ruiz and Tomoki Yamasaki of Happenstance Collective [HaCo]. Blurring the limits between interior and exte

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 Architecture   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 Studio Animal   Spain   The design of this tent-like shop combines emphatic geometries in bright colors with a humorous language, a strategy that is also used in the rest of their collaborations, and that aims to create an aesthetic image distinctive of the brand.

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

Andrés Trapiello   Stores in 50 Spanish provinces are used to paint a graphic and literary portrait of an urban landscape of traditional charm that deserves to be saved from oblivion.

This photographic and literary journey through shops of the fifty Spanish provinces recovers the languages of popular architecture in the signs and facades of old establishments, and travels along the country’s sidewalks in search of ‘the common beau

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