Tadao Ando   Japan   The island of Naoshima is home since 1992 to the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, turning these 800 hectares of land overlooking Japan’s Inland Sea – southwest of Osaka and only accessible by ferry – into a culture-oriented tourist destination. A re

De Architectengroep   Ethiopia   In the center of Ethiopia, the city of Addis Ababa, with an extension of 21,000 square kilometers, covers a valley south of the Entoto mountain range. At 2,500 meters in height, the capital always enjoys the scent of eucalyptus wood, coming from the

Carme Pinós   Mexico   In an area know as Puerta de Hierro, in the Mexican town of Zapopan (Jalisco), there is an increasing number of corporate and office buildings. This changing environment, with a high risk of earthquakes, was chosen to accommodate a tower for offices

David Chipperfield Architects   United States   The creation of a new home for the Figge Art Museum (formerly the Davenport Museum of Art) in downtown Davenport, is a major catalyst in the urban revitalization of this historic city, which is located on the banks of the Mississippi River on Iowa’s

Diener & Diener Architekten   Switzerland   The company Novartis was founded in Basel in 1996 as the result of the merging of two small local firms dedicated to the production of dyes. Largely extended throughout the world and a leading brand in the field of medicines, the multinational set ou

Fuksas   Italy   The old facilities of the Milan Trade Fair, inaugurated in 1923 and located west of the city, became obsolete in 2002. The foundation that owned the complex decided to organize a competition to raise new ones, which would have to go up in an area clo

Francis Soler   France   In one of the parisian scenarios of the French Revolution, close to Palais Royal and the Louvre, is the block called Bons Enfants, redesigned to house the once scattered premises of the Ministry of Culture and Communication. The historic quarter, com

Staab Architekten   Germany   The city of Munich celebrates its beer festival in a large esplanade known as the Theresienwiese, west of the historic quarter. Every year these grounds, which extend at the feet of the allegorical monument of Bavaria, are filled with carps and welco

Bernard Tschumi   Switzerland   The wolrd’s oldest active watchmaking brand, Vacheron Constantin, organized a competition to build its main headquarters on the outskirts of Geneva, a new building that had to bring together both the production and technical facilities (the firm guar

Anssi Lassila   Finland   The parish of Kärsämäki, a small town in the center of Finland, decided to organize (in collaboration with the University of Oulu), a competition for the construction of its new church. One of the requirements was that the building be raised with tra

marte.marte architects   Austria   In a bucolic landscape, with traditional double-pitched roof houses and thick greenery carpeting the hillside, the association of musicians of Zwisschenwasser decided to build a wood box in which to gather for rehearsal. The commission focussed on th

Amiot-Lombard Architectures   France   In the region of Haute Saône, the buildings follow one another along the road of access: the shops and the majority of the facilities are by the railway tracks. Plancher-Bas, a small town that one reaches after going through the villa of Ronchamp, ho

Machado Silvetti Associates   United States   One Western Avenue crosses Charles River connecting downtown Boston with the Harvard Business School campus. In this area the five-story, brick-clad, U-shaped neo-Georgian courtyard houses and the mid-twentieth-century, twenty-story, concrete paneled

Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra   Spain   An anonymous site of an industrial complex in Toledo, adjacent to the highway of Ocaña and to the railway tracks, accommodates the archive of Castilla-La Mancha. The context, a peripheral area still in process of development, did not offer too many c

FOA | Foreign Office Architects   Japan   The universal Expo Aichi 2005, which was celebrated during the summer months in the Japanese city of the same name (in Nagoya, between Tokyo and Osaka), gave each one of the countries participating in the exhibition a container, which they could use

Kei’ichie Irie & Power Unit Studio   Japan   In contrast with the ordinary suburban environment in which it goes up – on the outskirts of the Chita, on the periphery of Nagoya City – this concrete house for a couple is conceived as a musical instrument, and turns the living space into a soundbo

Atelier Tekuto   Japan   In a calm area of the residential district of Bunkyo, a family decided to raise a three-story building to enlarge their home. The existing volume, with a prismatic shape, is supported by a wood structure, and the extension, which was to accommodate t

Steven Holl   United States   To describe their future guesthouse, an artist couple from Abiquiu, on the frontier with New Mexico, suggested the idea of an Airstream mobile-home, the most popular among American campers. The couple’s house is atop a desert mesa, lashed by strong w

Ecosistema urbano   Spain   A reinterpretation of local architecture has guided the construction on stilts of this house-shelter for a former rugby player in Ranón, 19 kilometers from Avilés, on the coast of Asturias. The essence of the hórreo (the typical granary of the region

Caruso St John Architects   United Kingdom   Trapped amid residential buildings in a busy part of West London, this family house can only be explained by the will of the clients, who were determined to build their new home in a particular part of the city where conventional sites were used up m