Prodema   To its Prodex panels of natural wood the firm Prodema adds a film of PVDF (polyvinylidene fluoride), thus improving their capacity to protect against external agents, and with this, reducing the need for maintenance.

Madergia   With plenty of experience in Passivhaus certification, the company Madergia specializes in designing and raising buildings with CLT (cross-laminated timber) panels and other complementary systems.

Lunawood   Luna Triple Thermowood es un producto de madera termotratada fabricado de manera sostenible, que puede utilizarse tanto en interiores como exteriores, ya que es dimensionalmente estable, resistente y fácil de mecanizar.

Audiotec   The catalog of the firm Audiotec offers solutions for acoustic comfort, from acoustic islands to sound-absorbing panels, speakers, and grooved wooden boards, with personalizable colors, finishes, and forms.

HOK BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   Switzerland   The Raumfachwerk `proposal, where timber plays a central role, has won the bid to renovate Dock A and adjacent buildings at Zurich’s airport. The scheme drawn up by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), HOK, 10:8, and Buro Happold carried the day over those sub

MGM Arquitectos José Morales Sara de Giles Rocío Casado   Spain   Located within the complex of the Colegio Bienaventurada Virgen María de las Irlandesas – designed in 1964 by the Sevillian brothers Fernando and Joaquín Barquín y Barón –, the project foresaw the construction of a kindergarten, as well as solving

BIG Bjarke Ingels Group   Norway   The Danish architecture office BIG has designed a factory for the furniture manufacturer Vestre, inserted into a forest near the village of Magnor, in eastern Norway. It has a built area of 7,000 square meters, and takes its name, The Plus, from its

Isla architects   Switzerland   The Mallorca firm isla architects (Marta Colón de Carvajal & Juan Palencia de Sarriá) won the bid to build the Basel Pavilion in the inaugural edition of Architekturwoche Basel, held from 9 to 15 May. It is located in the old Dreispitz industrial

Tadao Ando   Spain   Following the theme of the 1992 Expo in Seville, ‘The Age of Discovery,’ the pavilion was conceived as a highly refined place that had to unify the traditional culture of Japan and advanced technology and, furthermore, enhance interactions that excee

MACH IDEA   Czech Republic   The Spanish firms MACH (Laia Gelonch Llongarrium, Marc Subirana Ribera) + IDEA (Carlos Maristany Ortiz, Luis Bellera Fernández de la Cruz, Eduardo Palao Valverde) have placed first in the competition for new sport facilities in Žatec, a town in the L

MVRDV   Germany   At the center of the observance of the 500th anniversary of the Fuggerei social housing complex in Augsburg rises this pavilion built with cross-laminated timber (CLT), a work of MVRDV. It harbors the exhibition ‘Fuggerei of the Future,’ which propos

kurosawa kawaraten   Japan   On a small budget the Japanese firm kurosawa kawaraten has transformed a house in Ichihara, in Chiba Prefecture, into an office. The traditional timber construction has been given new life. Non-structural partitions that fragmented the interior space

haz arquitectura   Spain   The Trinitat Vella Communithy Life Center in Barcelona is a multipurpose complex and the first completed building among several public facilities programmed to go up in the next few years in the Sant Andreu and Nou Barris districts, including housing

José María Sáez Vaquero Taller General    Ecuador   Situated some 80 kilometers from Quito, the town of Mindo is part of the Chocó Andino Biosphere Reserve, in Ecuador’s province of Pichincha. Amid lush flora and rich fauna, this dwelling pursues varying degrees of connection with all the nature aroun

Dhooge & Meganck   Belgium   What Prussian howitzers did not manage to do has been achieved by fallow land. If the Great War temporarily deprived Lampernisse of its church, today’s exodus from the countryside has emptied the temple – reconstructed in the 1920s com’era – of faith

La Shed Architecture   Canada   Critical of intensive practices, a family long engaged in raising livestock makes organic cheese in an environment that improves the quality of life of the animals and blends into the landscape. Deviating from the picture of an opaque industrial

Kengo Kuma   Denmark   The H.C. Andersen Hus museum in Odense had a preliminary presentation in June 2021 and has now officially opened. The new facilities – all of 5,600 square meters – rise beside the house where Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), the Danish author of

TAKK Architecture   Spain   A reduced budget warranted rethinking the residence as a succession of concentric spaces that harness passive strategies to bring consumption of energy down to a minimum. Instead of the usual arrangement of rooms and hallways, the layout follows a th

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.

Iván Bravo   Chile   Beguiled by the natural endowments of the southern region of Los Lagos, the government of the then still young Chile, in the mid-19th century, drew up a colonization plan with the aim of consolidating its sovereignty, and in the endeavor was helped b

Grand Huit   France   A work of Grand Huit – a cooperative of architects led by Julia Turpin, Marine Kerboua, and Clara Simay –in collaboration with the landscaper Melanie Drevet, this project is part of an effort to mobilize residents and neighborhood associations in the

Os 3 arkitektura   Spain   The extension is a volume with a frame of cross-laminated timber panels, clad in larchwood louvers and held up by the loadbearing walls of a 19th-century villa beside it, in the Basque town of Usurbil, Gipuzkoa province. The intervention stretches on

LIN Architects   China   Based on prior theoretical research, this prototype experiments with space in terms of the small scale and of patterns of human behavior, such as how people use space in interacting with one another. On the street Gouyuan – in the Chinese city of Zhe

Anna Heringer   Austria   Light, smells, colors, temperature, textures, sounds… It must be overwhelming to leave a mother’s womb and get born into this world. What should the very first space we ever experience be like? What kind of material should it be made of to make newbo

LUO studio   China   In Jiangmen, a city of Guangdong Province in southern China, the Gulou tourist resort recreates a village splashed with ponds and canals to showcase traditional activities related to fishing and husbandry. The resulting eco-cultural theme park thus f

Tomohiro Hata Misato Takagi    Japan   The house, inspired by the townscape of overlapping roofs that blend into the mountain landscape, is blurred in several stacked volumes, pursuing an architecture of ‘small roofs’ to create terraces and different experiences of space.

Suzuko Yamada Architects   Japan   The project is designed to be easily extended, refurbished, and altered. With blurred contours, the steel bars serve as a prelude to the complex forest of timber beams and columns that fills the interiors, where these elements are mixed with books an

MIT   Nancy W. Stauffer   Caitlin Mueller, an associate professor of architecture and of civil and environmental engineering in the Building Technology Program at MIT, and her team focus on tree forks — that is, spots where the trunk or branch of a tree divides in two, formin

With materials sourced from the depths of Lake Pieman in Tasmania, and inspired by its home in a Bondi Beach office space, the Intersection Worktable merges a conventional worktable with material exploration and sculptural furniture. Reaching almost

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   Skellefteå has wooden schools, bridges, even car parks. And now it has one of the world’s tallest wooden buildings. We visit Sweden to see what a climate-conscious future looks like. Skellefteå runs on 100% renewable energy from hydropower and wind,

According to statistics gathered by the World Health Organization, as much as 93% of the children of the world are constantly breathing in polluted air. Airbubble is a project developed by the London firm ecologicStudio that endeavors to address this

The firm Reiulf Ramstad has won the invitation-only contest to expand the museum that harbors Fram (Framtid, meaning future in Norwegian), the ship that Fridtjof Nansen, Otto Svedrup, and Roald Amundsen used in their famed expeditions. As part of a s

The bold presence of this work by OLI architecture, which at first glance looks like a warehouse in the middle of private property in New York state – clad in a charred accoya timber rainscreen meant to naturally patina over time – evokes the Serra s

Headquartered in Lithuania and with 30 years of experience to show for,  Maestro Casas - fabrica de casas de madera, is an enterprise specialized in building prefabricated timber dwellings in a wide range of designs. Each house can be custom-designe

The Economist   The AAAS heard how cities with lower carbon emissions could be built. More than half the world’s population dwell in cities, and by 2050 the un expects that proportion to reach 68%. This means more homes, roads and other infrastructure. In India alon

A barn in the German municipality of Kressbronn, near Lake Constance, has been turned by Thomas and Christine Steimle into a library and community center. In deference to the building’s history, the project balances past and present. The renovation i

On a plateau close to the Jostedal Glacier, overlooking it, stand these wooden cabins for use by hikers, designed by the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta to withstand the harsh climate conditions, including strong winds, of this mountainous zone.

The firms headed by the Italian architects Andrea Botter and Emanuele Bressan worked together in designing a congress and exhibition center located in Agordo, a municipality in the province of Belluno, in the Veneto region. For the project they drew

It was to highlight the eroded footprint of a 12th-century castle that the Catalan architect Carles Enrich set about restoring the Merola Tower in Puigreig, a municipality of Barcelona province. The project was urgent, following the 2016 collapse of

Timber is perhaps the oldest building material. It was the protagonist of mythical tales about the ‘primitive hut,’ and its widespread use since then, in both popular and cultured architecture, can be attributed to reasons having to do with plain co

The huge technological multinationals wield power of the soft kind, not with violence but through a silent, albeit extremely profitable wheeling and dealing with our digital footprints. This power for the time being meets with little resistance, prot

Libraries have been one of the symbols of bourgeois society. Originally confined to monasterios and palaces, distant havens of elitist knowledge, libraries eventually became quintessential public spaces in the capitalist and increasingly democratic c

The Economist   Buildings can become greener. They can use more recycled steel and can be prefabricated in off-site factories, greatly reducing lorry journeys. But no other building material has environmental credentials as exciting and overlooked as wood. The energ

Buildings can become missiles. An example is St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, which Luther turned into a symbol of the degradation of the Catholic Church. So is the new seat of the European Council in Brussels. David Cameron came to express “imme

Miguel Nevado   A good part of multistoried residential construction was executed, from the start, in wood. This was how it was until the time between the early 19th century and the early 20th, when things changed. Its availability, its versatility, and the favorabl

Francisco Arriaga   Timber and wood-based products are used in the structures of buildings in several formats, from the simplest, such as the round and sawn timber, to the most elaborate, such as micro-laminates or prefabricated composite panels. In between are products

Tim Coleridge   Recently launched conceptual designs for 360-meter-tall bamboo skyscrapers from a team of Paul Runaghan of Farrells and Jim Fleming of Buro Happold offer an exciting new use of a traditional material hailed as a ‘green steel.’ However, a simplistic r

Eduardo Prieto   In the olden days, wood was not only a common building material, but the material par excellence. The etymology of madera (wood) reminds us of this, the word coming from materia (matter), and this in turn from mater, which for the Romans was not only

Building with wood has become an alternative to using conventional materials like concrete and steel. Nevertheless, its range of applications has up to now been limited to low-rise structures, generally houses, where the pieces are subjected to minim

The completion in London in 2008 of an eight-floor block using cross laminated timber pieces represented a milestone in the gradual comeback of wood as a widely used architectural material. Other such projects were quick to follow suit, setting in mo

Arthur Lochmann   La carpintería como ética del hacer