‘Moiré’ – referring to a kind of shimmering or rippling visual effect produced by the superposition of two similar patterns – is a technique that has been used in art and design for centuries. In this project, visitors might notice a similar effect produced by the criss-cross of metal mesh in the central stair's railing, which led to the apartment’s name.

Tour Moiré, a Brasília apartment with drama at its heart

The 294 sq m urban apartment was designed to be the main residence in town for a doctor and a lawyer, and their small dog. ‘We sought to enhance the existing space while meeting the specific demands of the clients, who wanted a guest kitchen integrated into the living room, but also a more private kitchen for everyday use,’ explain the architects. ‘Furthermore, the request for three suites, a guest bathroom, a TV room, and an office evidences the concern for creating a functional and integrated space.’

The apartment was designed to accommodate the client's brief, while also leaving the concrete beams and pillars exposed, to infuse a sense of rawness and material honesty into the space. The predominant style is modern and contemporary, with the main staircase (an existing feature, but now with its new metal railing and handrail) at the apartment’s core.

The honeycomb ceiling is a subtle yet intriguing design element. The greys of its metal grid and the surrounding concrete contrast with the warm, darker tones of the staircase and wood. ‘The apartment was based on the desire to create integrated and functional spaces, reflecting the client's needs and preferences. The search for harmony between practicality and sophisticated design was the guiding principle for the firm in conceiving the project,’ say the architects.

Two kitchens were carefully designed to fit their respective purposes: one is more formal, integrated with the living room for entertaining, while the other is fit for daily use. Some spatial swaps were needed as part of the renovation, including moving a powder room. Say the architects: ‘The [latter] kitchen features a large, grooved panel that connects the two spaces, a sculptural countertop, and concealed cabinets. One bathroom was converted into two, and a new powder room was created, which [allowed us to] expand the living room.’

The design's material palette spans from the feature wood panelling in the entertaining area to the dynamic honeycomb ceiling, the sleek metal staircase and the Guatemala marble kitchen countertop.

Each bathroom has a distinct personality – there’s the primary suite, a green suite, and a blue suite. The second-floor balconies connect the main bedroom to an office and a secondary bedroom. The result throughout is a timeless, understated residence that balances bespoke, contemporary living while offering a warm environment for both entertaining and relaxation.

coda.com.br

RIBA House of the Year 2025, RIBA.org

Caochan na Creige by Izat Arundell

The first project to be nominated is a self-build project, built on a remote site in Bay of Harris in the Outer Hebrides by Eilidh Izat and Jack Arundell of Izat Arundell. The duo, partners in work and life, designed and constructed the modest one-bedroom house on a rocky site overlooking the sea to the island of Rùm.

At just 85m2, Caochan na Creige is one of the smallest projects to be nominated for the House of the Year. With a timber structure and local stone cladding, there’s also an exposed concrete ring beam to add additional texture to complement the rocky site. Inside, lime plaster walls and polished concrete floors are paired with Scottish larch ceilings and bespoke beech joinery made by Izat’s furniture maker brother Alastair.

Caochan na Creige (the name means 'little quiet one by the rock') is intensely personal, not just because of the physical labour required to build it but because every nook and cranny has been shaped to cater to the couple’s possessions and artworks, as well as the views across the sea and glen. The constructed process also involved working with many local artisans, helping foster stronger community ties for this small practice.

IzatArundell.com, Izat.Arundell

Hastings House by Hugh Strange Architects

The house, which was also shortlisted for this year RIBA Stirling Prize (losing out to Appleby Blue Almshouse by Witherford Watson Mann) follows on from earlier domestic projects like the house reconfiguration in Peckham, South London.

In Hastings, however, Hugh Strange and his team were tasked with updating a 19th-century detached house in the heart of the town centre, with a precipitous level change across the site. The main house has been retained and restored, with special focus given to original features like mouldings, stained glass, fretted barge boards and decorative clay tiles. The real shifts in perception come at the rear.

An existing extension was replaced with a series of galvanised steel units that step the multi-terraced rear garden. Each of these news rooms is given large timber sliding doors, while the existing retaining wall is paired with a new concrete slab yet retains the scars of use over the centuries. It’s a series of interventions that enhances the original house without scouring the site of its history, with contemporary materials and details providing a strong contrast to what went before.

HughStrange.com, @HughStrangeArchitects

He remembers how much his grandfather enjoyed his work, and wanted to be like him. Leafing through a monograph, he chanced upon Julius Shulman’s 1960 nocturnal photograph of Pierre Koenig’s Stahl House in the Hollywood Hills, depicting two women in white dresses, seemingly suspended in a capsule of steel and glass, floating above a carpet of lights. For Cano-Lasso, it ignited a dream of living in LA and, years later, he moved there, got his master’s degree at SCI-Arc and settled in the city.

Tour Cano House, a colourful Los Angeles hills dwelling

In 2019, he teamed up with SelgasCano, the Madrid firm co-founded by his aunt Lucia and her husband José Selgas, to construct the Second Home Hollywood co-working space (now operating under different owners as The Preserve). They also purchased a steep site on Mount Washington in north-east LA, and each designed a house for themselves, side by side, similar in construction, but radically different in appearance. SelgasCano indulged its love of colour, cladding the exterior in polychromatic recycled aluminium tubes, an echo of the pavilion it designed for the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2015.

Cano-Lasso’s incarnation is a lightweight, two-storey, post-and-beam structure with a narrow garden. The house cantilevers out from the hillside, with decked terraces at both levels offering views of the Elysian Valley and Hollywood Hills. Glass doors pivot open on both sides to capture the California breezes. ‘The idea behind this house was to create an environment conducive to the lifestyle LA offers: abundant natural light, a connection to nature, enchanting city views and tranquillity,’ says Cano-Lasso. ‘I feel most at home in the garden. It’s a sanctuary, looking out to the city through the living room, yet sheltered from it; surrounded by flowers, birds and the soothing sound of a fountain.’

The first structural engineer that the architect approached insisted the design wouldn’t meet the city’s tough building code. The second made adjustments to secure approval, and a team of skilled workers slotted 42ft-long glulam beams into steel tube columns by hand, tying them back to the fully-exposed concrete retaining wall. Meanwhile, lower-level rooms sport ribbed wood ceilings. Cano-Lasso finds a lyrical rhythm in the repetition of the joists and ribs, recalling Goethe’s definition of architecture as ‘frozen music’.

The floors are made of American red oak, while walls are lined in radiata pine plywood. Cano-Lasso had come to appreciate plywood while living in Rudolph Schindler’s Sachs apartments – it was one of the Austrian-born architect’s favourite materials. To block the intense heat of the westerly afternoon sun, louvred redwood planks on the terraces can be turned and wooden Venetian blinds lowered.

The floorplan, drawn up by SelgasCano, features an open-plan living and dining area, which opens onto the garden, and two bedrooms on the upper level, while a spiral staircase descends to another bedroom, an office and recreational areas on the lower level. Cano-Lasso’s brother, Alejandro, who sometimes works under the name Doctor Cato, created a mural of vibrantly coloured zellige tiles, imported from Morocco, to animate a concrete wall in the garden. The pivoting glass doors were brought from Spain, and ceramic downspouts were repurposed as wall lamps.

The house is sparsely furnished with a series of thoughtfully curated, custom-made pieces. Alejandro created several lamps, as well as some chairs inspired by the work of Wright and Schindler. Andrew Riiska, an artist whom Cano-Lasso met at SCI-Arc, contributed a bench and stool enriched with colourful upholstered blobs. Two massive boulders, found on site, were craned into the house before the windows were installed and double as side tables. At the outset, Cano-Lasso, his wife and brother moved things around to achieve a satisfying composition. ‘We were looking for pieces that were individually appealing and had a relationship with each other, but I didn’t want to lose the sense of open space,’ says Cano-Lasso.

Building this house was no picnic. It took seven years from design to completion, including a three-year shutdown during the pandemic, but it validated the skill of a fledgling architect whose website is full of speculative designs for fanciful hillside houses. Even if these go unrealised, Cano-Lasso has demonstrated that he can master the challenge of a difficult site, creating a home that is down-to-earth yet infused with poetry. It should serve as a springboard to many future commissions.

diegocanolasso.com

selgascano.net

This article appears in the December 2025 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 6 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

'For the first time, we found ourselves simultaneously being the clients, the architects, and the contractors,' says Tsergas. 'Balancing all three roles at once was challenging, but also incredibly insightful. It gave us a deeper understanding of every layer of the process.'

Explore Block722's Athens penthouse

The home was the result of an intense and rewarding period of research and exploration by the two founders, who worked with local contractors Thekla Construction on the overall build. This investigation phase was followed by delicate and precise detailing and spatial planning, orchestrating an interior that would 'fit like a glove' to the lifestyle of its inhabitants.

At the same time, the space reflects the studio's ethos and overall approach of 'organic luxury'. This means using natural materials (here, marble, wood, and travertine) and maintaining a strong relationship with the outdoors, emphasising wellness and environmental health. To achieve this, the interiors are highly bespoke, as the architects worked with specialist craftspeople for lots of the fittings, fixtures and furniture, as well as designing a number of the products and built-in elements in-house.

'We don’t regret for a moment the countless hours we spent reflecting on how we live as a family – our needs, our habits, our routines, and our aspirations,' Tsergas explains. 'This type of self-observation proved invaluable, and it’s something we will encourage our clients to engage with more deeply. Understanding who they are inside their home and how they move through their day offers such rich information for the design. The aesthetics and spatial solutions that emerge from this process are inevitably more authentic, personal, and beautiful.'

The penthouse, titled Lumen Residence, was conceived as a duplex, spread across 230 sq m. The first level contains a flowing and carefully composed living area, while bedrooms are located upstairs. On the top level is also an expansive roof terrace, partially planted and partially paved and operating as an outdoor living room for resting and entertaining – as well as sports, as it also contains a half-size basketball pitch and a swimming pool. The Athenian skyline beyond becomes a key part of the experience.

'Designing a home so high above the city gave us a rare opportunity to work with natural light in a completely different way. With almost nothing obstructing our views, we were able to bring abundant daylight into every space – even those oriented northwards – and then soften and filter it through sheer fabrics, wooden jalousies, and the timber grille that channels light into the master bathroom through a skylight,' says Tsergas.

'We also knew from the beginning the type of qualities we wanted for our new home: a sense of seclusion and privacy, and a calm, grounding energy that would contrast with the vibrant pulse of Athens below. Although we didn’t intentionally set out to create a “resort-like” home within the city, that is exactly the atmosphere that emerged. The water element on the rooftop and the extensive planting across both floors contributed significantly to this feeling.

'Ultimately, what thrilled us most was achieving all the qualities you would expect from a single-family home – comfort, openness, connection to nature – but experiencing them in the sky, with a panoramic relationship to the city, the sunset, the stars, Mount Hymettus, and the entire Athenian landscape. That feeling is truly indescribable.'

The pair have been living in their tailor-made home for a few months already, but they say that it feels like they've always been there. Two comments keep coming up when friends and collaborators visit their new home, the couple add: 'This is so you!' and 'It’s clearly a Block722 home – but in a way that feels different and unexpected.' No doubt, the type of feedback that subtly signals a resounding success.

block722.com

Located in Chennevières-sur-Marne, roughly 15km outside the capital, the single-storey property exemplifies the modernist architecture ideal of harmonising the built environment with nature. Set on a 220 sq m footprint, the house sits within a tranquil, green environment, withdrawn from the main road and approached via a private lane. Chennevières-sur-Marne itself offers a leafy escape from the city, close to the banks of the Marne.

Shaped in an L-plan, the house clearly delineates day and night spaces. The living wing consists of a generous living room with an alcove, a kitchen with a pantry, and a bathroom – all opening directly onto terraces and a landscaped garden. A hallway distinguished by built-in storage and its original wooden ceiling leads to the sleeping wing, which includes a master suite with a private bathroom and two further bedrooms, each with its own bath or shower room. This area also features a dressing room and an additional bathroom.

The home is an instructive case study in both the Wogenscky’s style and the modernist movement at large. The movement champions functionality, material honesty and integration with the landscape, and this home checks all the boxes. Materially, the structure blends textured concrete, brick, glass and wood, creating the modernist interplay of geometric rigour and warmth. Here Wogenscky’s personal sensibility shines through, with interior spaces shaped by subtle variations in colour, texture and atmosphere – always anchored by functional intent.

In terms of environmental integration, the property features a green roof terrace and expansive bay windows, its western exposure further amplifying natural light. The layout physically and visually binds the interior to the outdoors, with many of the spaces enjoying direct access to the terrace and garden.

Wogenscky (1916-2004), a long-time collaborator of Le Corbusier and his chief assistant from the post-war years until Le Corbusier’s death (in 1965), played a key role in France’s post-war reconstruction. Wogenscky’s body of work – spanning industrial and administrative complexes, schools, hospitals and transport infrastructure as well as private residences – combined technological innovation with site sensitivity. His career was defined by a quest for harmony between architecture and nature, guided by humanist values and a commitment to social progress.

A modernist architect to the core, Wogenscky carried forward Le Corbusier’s legacy with conviction, and this house stands as a testament to that lineage.

The André Wogenscky home is on the market for €880,000 with Architecture de Collection

Retrofit House is an initiative set in Birmingham's Ladywood and part of a nationwide programme promoting imaginative yet thoroughly accessible redesign solutions to 21st-century architecture problems – climate change's rising temperatures and waters, and declining biodiversity, coupled with the UK's urgent need to update and increase housing stock. Its aim? To invite everyone on board the architectural journey of home-building and future-proofing.

Explore Retrofit House and be inspired

The powerhouses behind Retrofit House are a trio of design, architecture and urban planning practices: Civic Square, Dark Matter Labs and Material Cultures. The project is the real, bricks-and-mortar result of the efforts of Immy Kaur, the founder and co-director of Civic Square, and her project partners, over the better part of a decade. It forms part of the UK-wide collective movement, Retrofit Reimagined.

So, what does it look like? The initiative takes over an entire Victorian terraced house in Ladywood, on a suburban, residential street. Using the building's fabric, the architects from the three organisations proceeded to dissect it, boring holes in walls, removing plaster and revealing the structure's bones, using the house as a showcase of what homes of that era –which are typical not only across Birmingham but throughout the UK – are made of.

At the same time, displays of an array of biomaterials in the home offer options for anyone interested in repairing, adapting and improving their own home using sustainable architecture methods and resources. Biomaterials are known for their kinder impact on the environment (when responsibly sourced), as well as on our health.

'People don't often understand [retrofitting],' says Kaur. 'And, over the last five years, we have had a number of government schemes that have done poor work, eroded trust, wasted money.' As a neighbourhood-based initiative, Civic Square, through Retrofit House, aims to inspire 'an uptake for better quality housing on streets that are cleaner, where communities are at the forefront of that work'.

'But it is really important to unlock all of the capacity that exists in neighbourhoods, and in civil society and all these community organisations that have huge amounts of social capital, to understand their places and make the story of retrofit less about just understanding the deep technical things that you need to do, but more about the fact that we've all got something to bring to this. Because it is about better quality homes that are better for your health, that are cheaper to run, that are better for your children, that create better health outcomes.'

The residence's rooms will be used for workshops – both hands-on labs, and idea discussions and debate panels – aimed at helping the local community, and others beyond, feel confident about the methods and skills needed. This includes not only the homeowners themselves – to whom the project presents agency and choice – but also architects, tradespeople and contractors who wish to enrich their skillset by working with biomaterials, as part of Re:Builders, a six-month learning programme for workers in the built environment.

The result? A boost to ecological and social architecture infrastructure as Retrofit House itself slowly gets retrofitted and used to show how it's done.

'It is important to see this as a space of imagination and possibility, not just for decarbonising, which is super important, but for something far greater, which is the revitalisation of our democracy, of our communities and of our neighbourhoods,' Kaur continues.

'For Civic Square, Retrofit House is connected to a larger plan. What is the infrastructure needed to put communities at the forefront of their climate transition, of their recovery? [We aim to show that] it's not a big, scary thing that they don't understand, but in fact, something that they feel liberated and excited by. And everyone's got something to share, and everyone's got something to learn.'

Retrofit House launched with an Open House week in November 2025 and will remain accessible to all via appointment and through its learning programme, serving as an important beacon for sustainable architecture action. It is one of three Retrofit Reimagined demonstrator projects currently in effect – the others are We Can Make in Bristol and Retrofit Balsall Heath in south Birmingham.

For more information, visit:

civicsquare.cc

darkmatterlabs.org

materialcultures.org

Retrofit Reimagined

Explore the new Border Outlook in Naco, Mexico

‘Naco exemplifies the abandonment and scarcity of border towns in Mexico, which are considered mainly as spaces to transit, to cross to “the other side”,’ she says. ‘It is the place where drug dealer El Chapo Guzmán built the first tunnels from Mexico to the United States, and it is a place characterised by violence. It lacks public space and has had, until now, no civic spaces or cultural services. Naco is a place fragmented by two main elements: the border wall and the highway that runs parallel to the wall, making the city two strips defined by these strong physical and conceptual divisions.’

After winning a competition in 2020 to design low-income houses in Chiapas for the government, the Mexico City-based Canales was invited to help transform Naco ‘from a place of transition into a place of belonging’ by Mexico’s Secretaría de Desarrollo Agrario, Territorial y Urbano (SEDATU, the country’s ministry for urban development). Some of Mexico’s best contemporary architects, such as Gabriela Carrillo, Rozana Montiel and Estudio MMX, have worked on similar programmes.

The brief initially outlined a market for local craftspeople selling their wares, but this soon expanded to become a multipurpose social-activity structure, offering a platform for anything from graduations and concerts to community events. The design comprises a 4,000 sq m grid-based structure, composed of interconnected vaulted roofs and terraces, left open to the elements and free from furniture or spatial dividers, ‘so anyone can make use of it and everything is always visible’, notes Canales. A three-level tower on one end confidently marks its presence. Made of terracotta brick and exposed concrete, it is robust, almost brutalist; at the same time, its resulting earthy tones nod to the local soil colouring and the area’s architectural vernacular, both important references to Canales. This construction method also meant it could be easily built without the need for specialist skilled labour or expensive future maintenance, perfectly suited to a funds-strapped local municipality.

Beyond navigating difficulties arising from the scheme’s limited budget and resources, the architect also had to tackle travel obstacles as the development of the design took place during the height of the pandemic. ‘It was almost impossible to travel there and visit the sites, and throughout the building process, there was still a huge problem regarding safe working conditions and availability of materials,’ she says. ‘There were more problems than the usual scarcity issues in these very remote and marginal areas. Additionally, these are places that have never been safe for women, so that did not help either.’

The Border Outlook is part of a bigger architectural family, including four other projects designed by Canales for Naco (a sports facility, housing for older people, a community centre and a plaza), and two more for the nearby town of Agua Prieta (a sports and civic centre, and a public library with a park). All were commissioned through a SEDATU scheme addressing the need for safe public spaces and civic services in some of the most deprived areas in the country.

Within this context, the Border Outlook is a flagship feature, thanks to its textured minimalism, size (it is the only building in town with more than two floors) and location at the entrance to the city (visible to everyone driving towards the US, and to returning locals, signalling their arrival home). ‘It plays an important role in providing a sense of identity and pride for Naco residents,’ says Canales. ‘At night, it becomes a lantern for the city and a symbol of new public pedestrian space.’ As a bonus, its presence inspires passing cars to lower their driving speed, allowing for a pedestrian crossing, connecting the town to a baseball field that was previously hard to access.

The project is now fully operational and thriving, but its significance goes beyond its practical use. Canales says, ‘I have been told it’s the “tower of hope”, where people can look from above and gain a different perspective that was not available before – not only can they see “the other side”, but they also see their own side, and become more aware of their home.’

fernandacanales.com

Maggie’s: a brief history

That such a centre now exists within over 27 major hospital sites across the UK and abroad is the legacy of writer, gardener and designer Maggie Keswick Jencks. Diagnosed with breast cancer at 47, and having experienced firsthand the complexities of cancer care, Maggie felt that more support could be offered, beyond medical treatment, to those living with cancer – a place in contrast to the often windowless sterility of a hospital consultancy room or corridor.

Before she died in 1995, Maggie, together with her husband, the landscape designer Charles Jencks, and her oncology nurse Dame Laura Lee LBE (who would become the charity’s Chief Executive), conceived the template for a different kind of healthcare premises, and the first Maggie’s opened its doors just a year later at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh.

The Maggie's centres and their architecture

‘In essence, Maggie’s is somewhere you can go as soon as you leave the consultant’s office’, explains Director of Properties, Siobhan Wyatt. ‘Our centres are run by oncology professionals and we provide practical, social and emotional support – we have benefits advisers, clinical psychologists and cancer support specialists, but also run things like art classes, relax and breathe sessions and offer nutritional support; it can be as little or as much as the visitor needs’.

Architecturally, Maggie’s buildings are atypical in their design, with leading architects such as Norman Foster, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid conceiving mixed-use spaces that promote human connectedness and wellbeing, where patients, carers and healthcare professionals can intermingle in buildings emanating a sense of sanctuary. The enveloping gardens at Maggie’s sites are every bit as integral to this outcome.

Maggie's gardens

‘When you are in a Maggie’s, and when you’re digesting information, the view beyond the window to the outside world is really important’, says Wyatt, emphasising the significance of seasonality that gardens impart. ‘If you’re sat in an environment where you are surrounded by seasons it can help you psychologically adjust: you see the beauty in a shrub coming to a natural end in autumn and then the regrowth in spring, for example. All of that, without saying anything out loud, supports the process of you accommodating this new world that you’re living in’.

Initially, interest in designing Maggie’s gardens came from Maggie and Charles’ circle of friends, Wyatt explains, which included landscape architects who offered their services. ‘But it soon became more structured. We’re very invested in matching the architect and landscape designer for each project, making sure the fit is right.

Maggie's gardens: key examples

At Maggie’s Southampton, for example, the architect was Amanda Levete and Sarah Price was the landscape designer, and there was 'a really beautiful relationship in their sharing of space,’ says Wyatt. The centre, which occupies a former car park within University Hospital Southampton, was designed to reflect the surrounding New Forest landscape. Wyatt continues: ‘Amanda Lavette was completely generous: the concept was a glazed box with little architectural definition, just surrounded by a slice of the New Forest. The landscape then banks up all the way around on all four sides, so you are nestled in.'

Wyatt gives the example, too, of how Marie-Louise Agius worked with Thomas Heatherwick on a ‘planters’-theme for Maggie’s Yorkshire, with raised roofs of verdant greenery; and of Maggie’s Northampton – a more recent project – where garden designer Arne Maynard has continued the indoor-outdoor architecture of Stephen Marshall’s ‘umbrella’ building with linear hedges that form outside rooms. Undoubtedly, the collaborative process yields hugely creative results. ‘Every time you do one of these projects, you learn that the relationship between architect and landscape architect is really important,’ says Wyatt.

By its nature, the space made available on hospital grounds for Maggie’s centres often tends to be awkward: a former carpark, a space between existing buildings, an inclined landscape, etc. Nonetheless, over the years, designers have risen to such challenges with remarkable ingenuity and beauty. At the Royal Marsden hospital in London, renowned Dutch designer Piet Oudolf envisioned four zones of differing plant communities to make productive use of varying light levels, its 12,000 plants selected for year-round seasonality.

At the Royal Oldham Hospital, garden designer Rupert Muldoon employed airy white birch trees to draw light into a garden space below dRMM’s column-raised Maggie’s building. ‘Designing a healing garden, for me, meant embracing as much nature as possible,’ Muldoon reflects. ‘I imagined a woodland garden of suggestive routes, inviting exploration. Working with Maggie’s is liberating – there is freedom to create what you are most passionate about.’

Wyatt remarks on a favourite space within the garden at Maggie’s Manchester, designed by Dan Pearson, which features raised beds for vegetable cultivation. ‘There’s a lot of activity – people having conversations over doing something practical with their hands, like shelling peas; that’s always magical to see. There’s a covered veranda, and you see people asleep in chairs with a sheepskin blanket over them – it might be raining, but they can still be outside’. Vital to all Maggie’s gardens is a carefully selected, highly skilled gardener, who continues the designer’s vision but also develops its unique character, often leading a regular group of volunteers in practical, accessible gardening activities.

In many cases, the gardens play a crucial role in softening the passage between the hospital consultancy room and the Maggie’s premises, particularly for patients immediately after diagnosis, Wyatt explains – something Maggie felt keenly. ‘As soon as you get out, the way-finding and the time it takes to get to the centre is really important. That’s why we insist on being as near to oncology as we can, and we insist on influencing as much of that surrounding landscape as we can’.

A good example can be seen in the extended garden at Maggie’s West London, where Dan Pearson conceived an intimate pathway weaving below the hospital’s large London plane trees, leading through lush seasonal planting – including scented sweet box, soft hellebores and Japanese anemones – to the centre itself. ‘Those meandering spaces give a person time to pause, time to digest; spaces where you can sit down, where you feel comforted and secure, before you get to the front door. That’s why the garden is so important – it’s that transition from the medical to the Maggie’s environment.’

Recommended: The Garden Design Confessional podcast. Presented by garden designer Darren Hawkes, the podcast features interviews with many of the garden designers behind Maggie’s gardens.

maggies.org

Favouring reuse over starting from scratch and working with natural materials - often predominantly wood - Oza Sabbeth Architects (and now, Oza Studio) has been carving its own, distinct niche within architecture and in its part of the world; which is also where its newest project, a bespoke haven for a couple who own a car repair outfit in the Bronx, is located.

Tour this Montauk house on Hither Hills

'The clients of Hither Hill are some of the most genuine and down-to-earth folks we've ever had, and one of our favourite clients ever. They own and operate an auto body paint shop in the Bronx. And they LOVE the house. It is a coming-of-age for them, a celebration of their lives so far... It is their lair,' Oza explains.

The couple approached him with a commission for a holiday home on Hither Hills, a stretch of sand with a long, southerly view of the Atlantic Ocean. Set on elevated ground, the site captures wide Atlantic views at both sunrise and sunset.

Right from the start of the project, Oza spotted an opportunity to bring his approach of radically reimagining existing building fabric for 21st-century needs to good use. He says: 'The clients wanted to tear down the house and start from scratch. There was no ambition to make it grand. The ambition was to make it theirs – more open, more light, yet still humble.'

However, the architect quickly established that the cost to demolish and start from scratch would be twice as much as that of a reuse. Additionally, ironically, by demolishing, 'less would have been possible – both in terms of size and proximity to the side lot lines.'

The tired, existing structure on site felt mundane and uninspiring, yet held lots of potential. Oza and his team reorientated the house to look out towards the water, ensuring there is expansive glazing in nearly every interior space. A new top roof deck and a terrace spilling out from the living spaces accentuate this connection between indoors and outdoors.

'The large ocean-facing deck anchors the home to its site, while the street-facing side is kept more reserved with screened windows that filter sunlight and shield the interiors from exposure,' says Oza. 'The result is a home that balances openness and retreat, transforming a once-static shell into a coastal dwelling that serves as both sanctuary and outlook, as well as refuge and prospect.'

The Montauk house on Hither Hills spans some 3,250 Sq Ft. The top level features the roof deck, which contains a viewing lounge, green roof, a powder room and kitchenette. Just below is the home's piano nobile, featuring the main entrance, and living spaces (sitting, kitchen and dining areas inside and out on the second deck), but also the primary bedroom. A lower level offers space for three guestrooms, a gym, a lounge, a secondary entrance and the garage.

'The design process felt like chiselling out a noisy form to excavate a quiet interior,' Oza explains. 'The constraints were many – structural limits, tight site slope, zoning, and budget. But we found answers by stripping back 'noise': we simplified the plan for better flow, we extended the roof deck to pull the horizon in, we used vertical siding to create rhythm and calm, and we carved in light, shielded privacy made the house breathe.'

Meanwhile, wrapping the structure with a single material - vertical wood planks - produced a visually consistent and bold overall volume. This timber skin goes around all facades and the entire body of the house, creating a gently dramatic, sculptural impression. 'The wood planks extend from the siding to the roof, visually simplifying and connecting the entire shell of the house,' Oza notes.

oza-studio.com

The listing recognises Southwark station’s architectural and historical significance, highlighting it as a striking example of late 20th-century design. Architect MacCormac Jamieson Prichard along with engineers Babtie and LG Mouchel & Partners designed the station, which was built between 1994 and 1999. Its dramatic appearance sets it apart from the other five Jubilee line stations built at the same time, despite using the same stainless steel and polished concrete material palette.

Inside, the station plays with natural and artificial light, creating what lead architect Sir Richard MacCormac described as ‘alternating experiences of confinement and spatial expansion’.

Key architectural features that contributed to Southwark station’s Grade II designation include the circular ticket hall, a drum-shaped entrance recalling the classic art deco stations of Charles Holden, such as Southgate and Arnos Grove. Notable interior elements include the 630-panel blue glass screen by British artist Alexander Beleschenko, inspired by Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s set design for Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and the distinctive steel-panelled tunnel at the lower concourse.

Heritage Minister Baroness Twycross has said that she is ‘thrilled’ that the station will now be protected, describing it as a ‘great reminder of the extraordinary breadth of our country’s architectural heritage’. Historic England’s co-chief executives hailed it as ‘a high point in a long tradition of excellent design and engineering throughout the Underground network’, while conservation groups including Save Britain’s Heritage and The Twentieth Century Society have also welcomed the news.

The Grade II-status protects the station from redevelopment. That said, Southwark council has granted planning permission for two high-rise blocks to be built above and alongside the station; TFL has promised that these will ‘sensitively’ complete MacCormac Jamieson Prichard’s original vision.

The building, a dress rehearsal for Harrison’s design for the Metropolitan Opera house in New York, reads as a theatre from the front but conceals 175,000 sq ft, making it one of the largest collegiate arts facilities in the USA at the time.

The main theatre, foyer and attendant spaces were superb, but much of the remainder was a confusing labyrinth. Dartmouth wished to preserve the former and tweak the latter and for this task turned to Snøhetta, a firm with more than a little experience in injecting light and clarity in woodsy and wintry locales. The project, which opened in late October 2025, was an expansion, although the added square footage totals a modest 15,000 sq ft. Snøhetta aimed to bring ample sense to the classroom jumble and inject multiple new performance spaces.

In its day, the Hopkins Center was an experiment that anticipated the Metropolitan Opera’s form, which Harrison was working out simultaneously. Harrison could build in highly modern forms – see his Brutalist Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York – but he did not shrink from traditionalist nods. In her monograph on Harrison, historian Victoria Newhouse wrote that the Hopkins Center ‘combined structural innovation with historic precedent in its allusion to the form of Florence's 14th-century Loggia dei Lanzi’.

The building has become treasured. Mary Lou Aleskie, executive director of the Hopkins Center, explained the college’s quest for an architect who would respect the original, while acknowledging that the arts have changed. ‘In the mid-20th century, art spaces were built for two kinds of people: makers and consumers,’ Aleskie says. ‘But in the 21st century, we know that our experience of art can be much more expansive than that. It can't really be contained in a room.’

Craig Dykers, co-founder of Snøhetta, admires the diffuse inspirations of Harrison’s original structure and compares it to choreographer George Balanchine, who mixed classical with contemporary forms. ‘It’s very heroic but it’s also very delicate,’ the architect says. ‘His work is filled with a range of architectural thinking and we try to work that way too.

‘I think if you're too monolithic with your architectural conceptualisation it becomes alien to most people and only comfortable to architects who are often in airplanes,' he adds.

Dykers stressed how slender the structural columns are in Harrison’s facade – ’you could put your hand around them’ – and sought to do something similar in their most visible addition to the centre, a recital hall.

The Snøhetta team designed a façade system resembling an array of divining rods. This woven mullion system is structural, holding up not just irregularly shaped floor-to-ceiling windows but the roof itself. The addition is canted, a measure of deference to the original, but also intended to channel pedestrian energy to a new main centre lobby. Aleskie compares the arrangement to ‘a set of open arms rather than a hard entryway.’

Circulation was the bane of the original building; Snøhetta addressed this with several interventions, the most prominent of which was a new skylit, oak-lined main lobby. ‘When you move inside, you're seeing wood that is welcoming and warm and delightful, but also reminds you of the natural conditions nearby,’ Dykers says.

Snøhetta punctuated the main corridors with clearer features and seating clusters, providing guidance through the building. Its largest additions aren’t very visible: there’s a new experimental theatre at the rear of the building. ‘It’s not a black box; we don’t design black boxes – they feel like you got locked in someone’s broom closet,’ Dykers jokes. It is, he stresses, an experimental room and is, in fact, a deep forest green. The architects also converted another lower-level room into a theatre, doubling the number of performance spaces in the building.

Their interventions within the original Spaulding Auditorium volume were limited. A terrazzo stairway leading from the foyer to an upper social space, The Top of the Hop, was removed for the sake of improved visibility and reducing acoustical bleeding. Dykers attested to hesitation: ‘It was absolutely gorgeous, and I was torn personally throughout the process.’

The Top of the Hop space, visible from its exterior, was repainted and its lighting improved, but interventions were minimal. A striking original terracotta fireplace remains (Dykers resisted the urge ‘to take it home in my luggage’) and Snøhetta incorporated green furniture and a bar near to the main windows. There's more lounge space outside via seating chiselled from boulders. The aim, per Dykers, was to fit into Dartmouth’s character, while having some fun doing it. The architect likens it to a night out at a fancy restaurant: ‘It's not a folded napkin at a dinner table. It's just a teacloth, but it has all of these features that help to tie into the surroundings in a very sophisticated way.’

Explore Woodstock House, a new, sustainable Belgian vacation home

The house sits beside a river that often floods, within an isolated valley in the Ardennes in southern Belgium. 'Most people wouldn’t build here but there’s something beautiful about a landscape that’s constantly changing,' says BC Architects’ co-founder Wes Degreef.

He designed the project using the practice’s bioregional architecture philosophy: timber, stone and earth were largely sourced within a 30km radius and the project draws on vernacular building methods. 'In every project, we always take cues from local materials and crafts, while showing that you don’t need concrete to build a house.'

BC Architects demolished the existing stone ruins on the site, giving their components – windows, tiles, furniture and roofing – away to local housebuilders, neighbours and building merchants, but they reused some of the stone, crushing it to form gravel. This was compressed into layers on the schist bedrock, using an ancient building technique, to eliminate the need for concrete slab foundations.

Woodstock House’s three vaulted stone towers are built from a hard Belgian sandstone called Grès du Condroz from a local quarry, using a lime and sand mortar. The towers hold functional spaces (such as bathrooms) and spare bedrooms, which are insulated with hemp. Main living areas and family bedrooms are housed on a diaphanous glazed deck that bisects the towers and appears to float above the river.

'You enter on this level from the road behind, so it’s like you’re boarding a ship,' says Degreef. It is built from untreated larch from a local saw mill, which will change colour over time – the supporting pilotis echoing the trunks of the surrounding trees. Steel feet protect them from rising water levels, and the structure has a roof clad in thin stone slabs, recalling the local vernacular.

BC, which stands for Brussels Corporation, is a highly experimental hybrid organisation including BC Studies (a non-profit educational laboratory) and BC Materials, which transforms excavated earth into building materials. It is pushing for systemic change in the construction industry with what it calls ‘acts of building’ – each project being a prototype for challenging norms, reimagining what is possible with local materials and rethinking the architect’s role.

Past projects include Lot 8 at Luma Arles in France – a collaborative renovation of the Magasin Electrique with Atelier Luma and Assemble Studio, using earth and biomaterials from the local Camargue region – and Usquare Feder in Brussels, which used the city as a quarry.

Woodstock House draws on the hybrid practice’s material expertise: walls of the stone towers, for example, are lined with humidity-controlling rammed earth, made by mixing local clay with crushed waste from the quarry where the stone was sourced. ‘The project has given us added conviction in our bioregional approach,’ says Degreef. But the house – which is warmed by a ground source heat pump and will soon be powered by a water turbine – is more than a sustainability prototype: it's a richly textured, inviting and highly liveable one-off.

The high iron content in the local clay gives the rammed earth walls a warm, terracotta tone, and almost all of the furniture and cabinetry was made for the house from local oak – even the slender pendant lights, which were created by Degreef’s father-in-law. Woodstock House is born from the landscape, while being a finely crafted vessel from which to view the ever-changing surrounding scenery.

bc-asm.org

The winners for 2025 have just been revealed at a big bash in central London – and as always, a highlight of the event was the Activism Award, which was this year won by Narrative Practice.

Archiboo Awards 2025: Activism winner

Entries this year came from across the world, from as far as India and Australia. Judges praised Narrative Practice for its ‘bottom-up approach, driven by a personal connection to the cause’, calling its work 'vital if architecture is to achieve its stated goal of becoming more equitable and inclusive'.

The studio focuses on mentoring and research work, with the wider goal of opening up the field and spearheading diversity and equity strategies and representation.

Another highlight this year was the launch of a new category – flagging the use of AI in architecture. Best Use of AI and Immersive Technology was scooped by Foster + Partners.

Amanda Baillieu, founder of the Archiboo Awards, said: 'This year’s winners reflect the wider shift in how every creative business is having to adapt the way they tell their story in the age of AI and algorithmic feeds. This year's winners are those who've successfully navigated this shift, recognising the vital importance of a unique identity that people can truly connect with.'

Archiboo Awards 2025: more winners

Best Podcast: Duro Design Disruptors (Host: Suneet Zishan Langar, Creative Agency: Epistle, Producer: Duroply)

Best User Experience: BDP (Creative agency: Peter & Paul)

Best Brand (1–10): Whaleback (Creative agency: Ana Bea Studio)

Best Brand (11+): SD Engineers (Creative agency: TM Studio)

Best Use of Video (1–10): Intervention Architecture (Videographer: Dion Barrett)

Best Use of Video (11+): Multitude of Sins (Directors: Smita Thomas and Sohaib Ilyas)

Best Visual Design (1–10): Chris Romer-Lee (Creative agency: Linda Byrne)

Best Visual Design (11+): Tuckey Design Studio (Creative agency: A Common Purpose)

Best Written Content: Architextures (Writer: Vanessa Norwood)

archibooawards.com

Nearly 90 years later, the Gropius House continues to attract crowds; It’s been open to the public as a museum since the 1980s and is one of the most popular tourist sites run by Historic New England, the nonprofit that maintains the five-acre property. Tours frequently sell out.

There was, however, one thing that let the modernist icon down: its public toilet.

For years, the only outdoor facility available to guests has been a single portable toilet that abutts the Gropius family garage, which presently functions as a small visitor's centre.

‘It’s the standard-issue, off-the-truck, porta potty – it serves its purpose,’ says Vin Cipolla, president and CEO of Historic New England. ‘It's unexpectedly in the spirit of the house, in a way: it's highly functional.’

Still, Cipolla and his team knew they could do better. Today (13 November 2025), Historic New England has announced a juried architectural competition to design a new outdoor restroom at the Gropius House, one that improves the visitor experience by prioritising accessibility and blending in with the aesthetics of the site (much like the recently added facilities at Balkrishna V Doshi’s 1959 Institute of Indology in India, for example). Design professionals and students alike are encouraged to enter, as are interdisciplinary teams across architecture, landscape and industrial design.

‘The idea of inviting the design community into the conversation felt very compelling to us,’ Cipolla says. ‘It's too cool an opportunity to give up.’

Gropius and his second wife, Ise, moved to the United States in 1937 after the architect accepted a teaching position at Harvard. By then, the Bauhaus school he had founded had been shuttered by the Nazis, who deemed his teachings as degenerate.

A local philanthropist provided Gropius with the land and funds in Lincoln, Massachusetts to construct a home for his family. Though the home was modest in scale, ‘it fit our life like a glove’, Ise later recounted.

The house has four indoor bathrooms, one of which is available for tour guests to use. But the set-up has been less than ideal for visitors waiting for their tour slot, or for those exploring the landscaped grounds.

Competition entrants are encouraged to be creative (Cipolla is even amenable to modular, porta john-like ideas) but submissions must check a few boxes: there must be two toilets and two wash stations; it must remain near, or be an extension of the garage; it must abide by ADA regulations; and it should evoke the Bauhaus spirit of innovation. The winning team, set to be announced in March 2026, will receive a prize of $5,000, have their work included in the Gropius House archive and be given an exhibition on the site.

Gropius never set out specific tenets for the design of a commode, but the competition’s organisers hope that participants will be flush with Bauhaus-inspired ideas. To paraphrase the master himself: ‘A public toilet is like an umbrella: it functions best when open.’

Entries are due 6 February, 2026. For more information and deadlines, visit gropiuscompetition.info

Tour a minimalist Portuguese house for two musicians

Located in Carnota, in the municipality of Alenquer, Portugal, the house was designed for two DJs, who wanted a simple design, but with a very important musical addition, as practice founder Matteo Arnone explains. ‘The clients’ brief was very simple. They needed two functional spaces: a living room and a bedroom; and two identical recording studios.’ Focusing on this duality, Arnone naturally leaned into a symmetrical approach to his design.

The architecture firm used an existing ruin, an old winery building originally used for storing large barrels, as the foundation for the new home. ‘From the very beginning, the main idea was to create voids that carve into the original volume, introducing internal patios to bring natural light and spatial depth that could embrace the two identical spaces,’ says Arnone.

‘Looking from the inside out, the absence of corners in the patio geometry creates a very calm feeling – almost a sense of infinity. The continuous, curved geometry gently precludes a direct view to vineyards, allowing the landscape to reveal itself gradually, with a harmonious rhythm that soothes the space.’

As a result, the long floor plan is perfectly symmetrical. The main living spaces are located on the ground floor, including a living room/kitchen area and a bedroom. The pair of identical recording studios are on the upper floor, nestled into the curvature of the building.

The integration of thick perimeter walls serves more than a structural purpose. It acts as the backbone for the mirrored layout and brings with it intriguing architectural features, such as the curved staircase and built-in furniture.

A key design element is the patio passageways, which weave through the house. For Arnone, this feature offers a quiet transition between architectural intimacy and nature, and offers a curated trajectory towards the pool. The curved aesthetic adds to the soothing nature of the home.

Says Arnone: ‘​By placing all the main functions within the thickness of the walls, the interior is left pure and open. Visitors experience a sense of calm as they enter – every space feels harmonious, balanced, and free from visual noise.’

matteoarnone.com

In fact, in creating anything from clothing – a custom-fitted white T-shirt – to a strap-on sub-woofer, Stone has brought a fresh perspective to every design he has developed, while going for aesthetics that set his work apart from the current mainstream. His early career was spent overseeing architecture projects in Los Angeles while developing an art practice with gallery and museum exhibits in the US and Europe. Eventually, this journey led him back to architecture, offering a take that feels entirely unique to the field.

Robert Stone's new desert house case study

Stone’s architectural style looks different because he thinks differently about architecture. ‘Like all other architects, I am enamoured with the abstract qualities of form and spatial compositions, but I am also interested in creating new aesthetics from current culture and the meaning that we attach to buildings and materials.’ As he’s not interested in perpetuating a fake past or future, Stone found a vast unexplored realm to make architecture that connects to ‘who we are now.’

After building the highly praised Rosa Muerta house in Joshua Tree – which was the site for a campaign photo shoot by Saint Laurent – Stone’s new home in Palm Springs comprises a main dwelling and a guest house. His inspiration finds its roots in its locale and Southern California culture, from Chicano to modernist. ‘Dreamer / Lil’ Dreamer’ isn't about a client or the architect, but endeavours to address the current ethos of its territory, while creating connections that might resonate with a wider art and design audience.

Examining the sloping roof

Almost like an exaggerated A-Frame, the project's sloped roof with reflective tiles and the abstract stacking of breeze blocks in different sizes showcase how Stone works hard to challenge the norm of what a contemporary Palm Springs house might look like. ‘I want to get them past “Wow, this looks different”, to “this makes me look at things differently”.’

The first noticeable element is that the roof touches the ground, but the floors don't. The house's shape emerged from a new formal concept. ‘It is a modern glass box and a Spanish tract house re-spawned at the same coordinates and digitally edited together,’ he notes. ‘The roof sits on the dirt like a dropped lowrider, while the floors hover above the earth as cantilevered planes.

‘In most homes, nothing happens until you get four feet above a person's head. And I like to do things that engage the body at the ankle, knee, hip, shoulders, and head. So, by bringing the roof down to the ground, it gives it this entirely different relationship to the body and the ground.’

This desert house certainly wakes up the senses, which is one of Stone’s goals, along with reinventing formal and design relationships while creating dynamic spaces. ‘Here, we are doing this by reinvigorating the basic vocabulary of desert architecture,' he says.

Astroturf and breeze blocks

Born and raised in Palm Springs, Stone draws from all elements of this context: architecture from classic modernism to Spanish, abandoned tract houses to golf courses, the desert lifestyle, multi-cultural chic, art, music, design, and fashion aesthetics, all converge to help him produce something that feels ‘relevant here and now.’

‘Palm Springs has an amazing history of iconic houses, but I was always lost by its disconnect with contemporary culture,’ he says. ‘In my past work, I have gravitated toward raw desert areas where I can produce highly cultured architecture that is amplified by its contrast with nature.' While Stone aims to move beyond the borders of modern architecture, he’s not working in opposition to modernism. ‘I just want to make architecture that engages our time. We're alive now. I tell my clients that the audience is not them or me, it's the world.’

To that end, Stone decided to elevate the artificial astroturf lawn – an element that is here reframed as a key building material. ‘It intersects the house, pool, and landscape in ways that a real lawn couldn’t, and it flows into the living room interior to rethink our connection to nature with a candour that fits our time, and I think it's more interesting in those qualities than just a perfect lawn.’

Stone also redefined a cornerstone of Southern California's traditional handcrafted materials and architecture, the Spanish tiled roof. The pottery-made tiles on the Dreamer home glitter with new glazes and four shades of silver that suggest a new kind of ‘California Chicano futurism’.

Stone strives to find a new kind of truth and beauty in his work with everyday items that are not normally celebrated. Case in point, the air-conditioner units that were transformed into gold-coated cube sculptures set on prominent podiums and presented as ‘idealised representations of ubiquitous equipment’ that are usually hidden. These pieces are now put in the spotlight as the ‘jewellery’ of the house, and an ‘honest assertion of our relationship to nature’.

Stone also approaches the quintessential, often mass-produced, modernist breeze block more like an artist’s composition on a canvas or sculpture. The house features perforated walls in various patterns and configurations that express both the beauty and limitations of its machine aesthetics, blending them with handmade craft. ‘Each block placed in the wall is a decision made by a person – arranged to pull the eye along it, create open and dense areas, and to suggest a pictorial reading.’

Mirrored ceilings and Spanish fusion

In the stainless steel and green-coloured kitchen, Stone took inspiration from Japanese Tansu cabinets and Prada handbags. Crocodile-textured leather and custom-made stainless hardware help create a new domestic interior aesthetic.

He is also seeking fresh surface combinations and uses ‘tension between colours to find new and unique beauty’. Copper pink, metallic avocado, shades of silver, purple, and green hues are combined in a way that draws from contemporary fashion references. ‘I went to the Miuccia Prada school of colour,’ he says. ‘I love colours that kind of like work against each other, but then come together beautifully.’

Polished stainless wrought iron at the front of the house turns the ubiquitous indicator of perceived ‘bad neighbourhoods’ in Southern California into an abstract sculptural form of Spanish fusion. ‘What would California be without that stuff? Our culture is 50 per cent Mexican-American,’ he says.

‘There's a little bit of a strategy that runs through a lot of my work. If you can change the proportions of something – and fashion designers do this all the time – you can make something really connect differently and wake up your senses. Lowriders do that by taking a 1963 Impala that is stock height, but if you drop it five inches, everything about it changes, and it becomes kind of sinister.’

Along with ‘refreshing the roof-ground relationship’, Stone’s use of the square mirrored ceiling panels is recurrent in his practice. They blend inside and outside by reflecting the desert flora when you look at the ceiling, while bringing natural daylight into the room.

One element that Stone pointed out about the mirrored ceiling is that not all the panels are perfectly set, so it’s a little bit like a disco ball; when you walk around, everything moves, and the reflections jump a little bit from the panels. It's a bold move. ‘You think it's going to be kind of tacky, but if it's detailed and done right, it can be taken seriously. It feels like what California architecture should be, but it can also be sexy and kind of druggie. That is who we are.’

In the end, Stone wants to make architecture that inspires the audience to attach meaning to it. ‘And, rather than being above or outside of culture, I am right there alongside the audience, questioning and connecting this architecture to the world we live in.’

robertstonedesign.com

Architects Haworth Tompkins orchestrated the redesign of an existing structure containing some tired backstage areas and a pub on the ground floor into a thoroughly contemporary structure, complete with timber-framed sustainable architecture, oodles of natural light, and a powerful, yet somehow still relatively subtle use of colour.

Tour Backstage at the Old Vic

The building combines a range of facilities to cover many uses and needs across six floors (one underground). It aims to become a vibrant hub for the local creative community – and beyond, as the theatre regularly works with local schools and other communities in both Southwark and Lambeth (it sits on the border between the two boroughs).

To that end, there is a generous, open and accessible ground-floor café and bar, which spreads across two levels and includes a 'writers' room' for creatives to book and work in (The Old Vic regularly works with new plays). A central, triple-height void brings airy ceilings and affords a distinct sense of space, while a script library for visitors to peruse nods to the spirit of the place.

Upstairs from there is a new green room, the Clore Learning Centre, a flexible studio space created from a converted rehearsal room, and an event space that opens to a dedicated roof terrace. On top of that, there is a fully accessible stage door, upgraded dressing rooms, staff offices, toilets, showers and cycle provision.

The building's timber frame is visible throughout, becoming a distinct part of the new space's identity. It is complemented by textured, natural material panels tinted in a colour palette that draws on The Old Vic's signature crimson shade. Shafts help natural ventilation and cooling, and bring sunlight everywhere, supported by a glazed façade which, however, is carefully shaded by a rather unique installation. The team put in a call for donations of old barn doors (the typical type of stage lights), which were collected, refurbished, painted and mounted to the façade in a captivating installation-cum-sunshade screen.

'The launch of the Backstage building marks a bold new chapter in the theatre’s remarkable 200-year story. The brief called for a building that was ‘colourful and warm, a space that could host the Old Vic’s extraordinary outreach programme and where you feel at home at any time of the day’, the resulting building is a place for creativity, learning and for the community to come together. The new extension supports every part of the theatre’s life, from writing and rehearsal to education, outreach and performance,' says Lucy Picardo, director at Haworth Tompkins.

'Sustainability sits at the heart of the building’s ethos, prioritising the use of recycled materials, low embodied carbon structure and passive energy systems. Working closely with the theatre’s team has been a privilege, their vision and purpose shaped every detail and every decision reflects The Old Vic’s commitment to be welcoming, creative, accessible and forward-looking with a building built to serve artists, audiences and the community for generations to come.'

The Bangalore-based firm designed the House by the Grove to be a ‘synergy between people, space, and nature’, thanks to its use of open verandas and walkways, with living spaces raised up above the surrounding landscape.

Tour this new Indian country residence

The built-up area extends over 5,400 sq ft, with much of the accommodation contained on the L-shaped ground floor. The core of the living space is housed in the great room at the heart of the house – with soaring ceiling heights and sliding glass partitions on each side allowing the entire space to be opened up to the elements – flanked by long verandas that are covered by the steeply pitched roof.

This room houses the kitchen, dining space and seating area, a linear arrangement sandwiched between a central service core, with store, utility spaces, and the principal bedroom. In contrast to the open living area, this room is more enclosed, with a curved, open air shower area projecting out from the building line, creating a sculptural contrast with the straight concrete walls.

A similar en-suite arrangement is found at the other end of the great hall, across a patio and water feature. From this patio, an external staircase leads up to the second floor. Here, twin walkways flank the void above the great hall, leading to a library and a third en-suite bedroom.

Finally, the accommodation extends out into the surroundings courtesy of another a covered veranda, this time with a smaller pitched roof and completely open sides. This forms the entrance block, distinct from the living block, with the two different roof heights creating a distinctly domestic scale composition. All roofs are clad with traditional ridged red Mangalore tiles.

The house is inserted into a space alongside mature trees and large boulders, with the raised concrete plinth creating a sense of being a part of the landscape. The material palette is simple, with a steel frame holding up the roof above hand-finished cement walls and columns. The latter add a rhythm to the view, framing the lush green surroundings and casting shadows across the interior and verandas. Underfoot, Kota stone flooring in the living areas is paired with Sira stone in the bathrooms.

House by the Grove combines its openness with niches and nooks for privacy and discovery, as well as the contemplative water feature by the entrance. By having bathrooms that are open to the sky, the elements are even brought into the more secluded bedroom spaces.

‘The farmhouse is ultimately a place of balance – between openness and privacy, light and shade, built form and landscape,’ say architects Shalini Chandrashekar and Ar G S Mahaboob Basha. ‘It is a home designed for gatherings and conversations, but equally for solitude and retreat, where architecture and nature seamlessly converge to create a timeless and soulful living experience.’

Chandrashekar and Mahaboob Basha founded Taliesyn in 2010 and have an impressive portfolio of private houses, public spaces and retail projects.

Taliesyn.in

So why has this not caught on yet? Part of the reason might be misconceptions (that it's a finite resource, or more expensive, or difficult to work with), or red tape (often, the industry is missing appropriate guidelines for its use) or market forces and consumer demands. Architect Amin Taha, principal of Groundwork and the architect behind the Future Observatory's newest project, The Stone Demonstrator – a structure currently on display in West London, is on a mission to dispel the myths linked to building with stone and get the industry on the material's side.

Enter The Stone Demonstrator and explore building with stone

The Stone Demonstrator is a case study – a construction created as a showcase of how stone can be used, efficiently and sustainably, in every aspect of design and building, from foundations and floors, to walls and ceilings. Situated in Empress Place in Earl's Court, the project was created by the Design Museum's research arm focusing on green transition, the Future Observatory, together with the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), London-based architect and stone use pioneer Amin Taha, and specialist engineers Webb Yates and Arup.

'The idea is that people can come and study it and understand what the supply chains need to be, what the trade skills need to be, and that ultimately we're trying to move the construction industry away from steel and concrete because of the high carbon emissions associated with them, and fire clay bricks,' says Taha.

The structure spans three storeys tall and was designed as a sampling of different techniques and block sizes when building with stone. It uses pre-tensioned stone structures (both beams, slabs and columns) to a footprint of 6.5m x 6.5m and is surrounded by a garden that offers seating areas in further stone configurations - highlighting different shapes and sizes of stone bricks in a green setting by landscape designers Lyndon Osborn & Team.

Part of the point, Taha explains, is that it 'is not designed to look radical,' so that visitors - clients, architects or contractors - can see that existing skills and aesthetics can be used and achieved through stone construction as well, only with a fraction of the carbon emissions.

'It is a cost-effective, easy and normal way of constructing things,' stresses engineer Liam Bryant of Webb Yates. 'We have reached a point where it's somehow considered a complex and unusual, and high-risk construction method to build with stone, when it is in fact 1/3 of the process in all aspects,' compared to, say, building with concrete, which is a lot more labour-intensive. On top of this, 'it's also quite a local material, because everywhere you are in the world, you'll have a different stone,' Taha adds.

The results are impressive. 'The Stone Demonstrator is a prototype of an alternative way to build that reduces carbon emissions by approximately 70% compared to a reinforced concrete frame, and 90% compared to a steel frame,' reads the Future Observatory's report. And if the government plans to build 1.5 million homes in the near future are to be followed, then choosing the right material, one which doesn't burden the environment, feels more crucial than ever.

If you want to compare results, the team has numbers to back up its claims. A clay brick facade can emit around 40,000 kg of carbon dioxide; at The Stone Demonstrator, a similar structure produces some 3,000kg of CO2. Justin McGuirk, director of Future Observatory highlighted that 'it’s a building as a research tool, a 1:1 scale demonstrator of an ultra-low-carbon structure for the sector to study. And the accompanying design guide being produced by UCL [led by Professor Wendel Sebastian] is another key step in the adoption of structural stone.'

The Stone Demonstrator is set to stay on its West London site and remain open to the public for a few months at least. Its goal is to provide evidence and a powerful talking point for the building with stone – an often overlooked material, but one which its engineers here, Webb Yates and Arup, argue can be used a lot more widely and with impressive results. The self-supporting structural frame they have designed would be even suited 'for buildings up to 80 storeys tall,' and even in seismic areas, they say. It is hard to remain indifferent in the face of their facts and enthusiasm.

designmuseum.org

futureobservatory.org

Tour LuxeIsland Farm by Various Associates

Set along the Zhujia River in Jiang’an District, the project, crafted by the Shenzhen-based architecture studio that is led by co-founders Lin Qianyi and Yang Dongzi, spans a staggering 230,000 sq m. Flanked by tree-filled mountains and a pier towards the water, the site was conceived as a mico-destination for locals and tourists who are keen to admire the region's nature and fauna.

The architecture, unconventional and almost otherworldly, was purpose-designed to catch the visitor's eye, combining fun and a futuristic architecture take, while being firmly rooted in its location – employing, for instance, bamboo weaving and more local materials, such as timber and stone.

'The buildings, resembling "fallen meteorites", scatter throughout the valley. Their bamboo-woven roofs seem to grow naturally from the pasture hills, casting delicate, shifting shadows and engaging in a visual dialogue with the site’s natural terrain. This is the architectural totem we crafted for LuxeIsland Farm,' say the team at Various Associates.

Beyond the sprawling green outdoor areas, the project includes animal enclosures, a creative workshop, retail and dining. Everything is connected by a clear aesthetic which is centred on organic shapes and curved volumes that imitate natural boulders. Meanwhile, green roofs ensure more conventional, flat-topped elements remain discreet.

The tourist destination aims to blend wild charm and a fun architectural vision for its green valley setting, intriguing its visitors while inspiring interaction with animals and flora through a series of animal pens, displays and activities such as family workshops.

various-associates.com

Explore the renovation of a Clerkenwell rooftop in London

The couple were already familiar with the site. They had lived within the building in the past, in a flat on the second floor, but were looking to relocate. They 'long envisioned the rooftop as a potential site,' so 'the setting and conditions were already well known, as were our design requirements,' explains Bell, whose past works include a slick Cajrati Crivelli house in Bel-Air.

While the rooftop home would be an extension to the existing building, the architect wanted to ensure that the addition felt like it had always been there. The site, overlooking the Spa Fields Park across the street, offered openness and greenery. By crafting a design that is set back from the existing structure's façade line, allowed not only for a terrace to wrap around two sides of the property, creating outdoor space for the residents; but it also made sure the upwards build did not feel imposing, altering the feel of the wider neighbourhood.

At the same time, the columns of the new structure were designed to be perfectly aligned with the piers of the original building, to maintain visual continuity. This, as a result creates a grid which is either left open to the elements, to provide a pergola-like external space, or has been filled with glass panels that bring plenty of natural light in and offer views out. The gesture makes for an addition that feels light and airy, despite its comfortable size.

The interior contains a large, open-plan living space that includes a kitchen and dining areas and is wrapped in glazing. The expansive views span south toward the City of London, past the nearby church on Exmouth Market in the west, and through to the Grade II listed BT Tower towards central London. The rear of the apartment contains a generous main bedroom, bathroom and utility spaces.

'I am interested in creating flexible open space that does not compromise on function,' Bell describes the project. 'Although the footprint could have accommodated a permanently partitioned bedroom and/or office, our desire was for an open plan as spacious as possible. To allow for working and to accommodate guests when needed, a stained oak monolith at the east end of the living space serves several functions.'

She continues: 'Doors on one side conceal a work studio; on the other side a hinged desk provides a second workspace. When friends stay, the monolith slides on industrial hardware away from the east glazing, expanding the space sufficiently to fold down a king size bed. Other doors hinge out to close off the ‘guest bedroom’ from the living space. A series of sliding and folding doors on the adjacent wall conceals a guest wardrobe as well as a dedicated storage and layout space for the work studio.'

The pair have furnished their space with products and pieces they have lovingly collected over decades. Interiors include vintage pieces, such as pairs of Westerham and Selsdon chairs designed by the British designer William Plunkett in the 1960s, a pair of early Eames aluminium group lounge chairs, and a coffee table by Poul Kjaerholm.

studiofelicitybell.com

‘If I learned one lesson from this project, it is “Beware of tackling bridges”,’ founder Vinu Daniel says with a laugh. ‘But these challenges are what get me up in the morning.’ Merging bridge and home was also prudent for the client. ‘It saved them money and reserved more land for farming.’

Constraints often give rise to ingenuity and here, they were plentiful. The foundations couldn’t rest within the 100ft width of the spillway; there needed to be enough clearance for a JCB to clean the stream beneath; and Wallmakers wanted to use local materials – following Gandhi’s principle that the ideal house should be built with those from a five mile radius – but the only abundant local option was grass. Added to this, it wished to avoid using a central pillar, which usually holds most of the weight of a bridge, as this would dissect the core of the house.

Its response was to create four hyperbolic paraboloids – double-curved surfaces that resemble saddles – using minimal steel pipes and tendons to give the structure tensile strength. Positioned on their sides in pairs towards each end of the bridge, and supported by poles in the water, these saddles form voids for living spaces.

But the poles and tendons weren’t enough: Wallmakers needed to add compression strength. The practice is known for its Debris Wall construction, combining earth with all manner of waste, but this time it looked to straw. ‘I’d always known I’d try thatching one day but I was looking for the right project,’ says Daniel. Like in many parts of the world, thatching has declined in the region but it has not entirely vanished. ‘We had to become students again,’ he adds. A composite of thatch and mud would provide the requisite strength for the house’s shell, while the latter would stop animals from burrowing into the straw – a perennial problem in the area.

Trying to thatch double curves, however, is no easy feat, particularly because it gives water a chance to penetrate from both sides. ‘First we looked at fish scales, then we hit upon pangolin scales, which move as the animal moves,’ Daniel explains. ‘We did a few tests with thatch and mud scales and they worked. The scales allow movement, while ensuring water can’t get through.’ Used for the underside of the house too, they give it the appearance of a suspended cocoon amid the forest and, as with many of Wallmakers’ material choices, they also camouflage the building within its surroundings. Meanwhile, the lightweight structure just has four footings, for minimal intrusion on the landscape.

Visitors enter on the upper floor of the house, which holds two bedrooms, bathrooms and a kitchen and dining area at one end, overlooking a triangular-shaped pool. At the core of the bridge is a living area, decked in reclaimed wood from the shipping industry (Daniel allows more mileage leeway for reclaimed materials). It’s a space where the inhabitants can enjoy the elements: an open oculus above allows rain water to pour through the building’s heart, running through holes in the floor to the stream below. They can also relax on chairs made from folded carpets with fibres made from PET bottles and abandoned fishing nets, which Wallmakers will soon launch as a collection in collaboration with a carpet company. Meanwhile the lower level holds two further bedrooms, including the master, which has expansive glazing overlooking the surrounding forest.

Daniel has developed a close-knit construction team of masons, welders and craftspeople, who he works with from project to project and this stretched their skills to the max. ‘The steel ropes were made by people I’ve been working with for 15 years and my welders are now in the second generation. Challenging projects like these create a lot of memories for us. We crossed the bridge together.’

wallmakers.org

An art piece in its own right, the Madison Avenue landmark — known fondly as the Breuer Building — is defined by its dramatic overhangs and protruding angular windows. For decades, it was home to the Whitney and, for the past 10 years, served as an outpost for both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection. Today, Sotheby’s is banking on the building’s storied past, quite literally, by transforming it into its global headquarters.

‘It’s a homecoming of sorts,’ says Charles Steward, Sotheby’s CEO. ‘It's nostalgic. You can talk about the Breuer as an architectural landmark. You also can talk about it in terms of art history: all of the exhibitions, artists and collectors that have been affiliated with this space over the last six decades.’

Moving from its long-held seat in an all-glass mid-rise much further east on York Avenue, the auction house is now significantly closer to Museum Mile institutions like the Guggenheim and the Met, as well as blue-chip galleries like Gagosian.

Sotheby’s tapped leading architecture practice Herzog & de Meuron (H&dM) to adapt the building. The Swiss firm felt like a fitting choice, given its deft transformation of London’s Bankside Power Station into the Tate Modern, as well as the design of other notable museums including the M+ in Hong Kong and the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, New York. The Swiss firm worked closely with local preservation practice PBDW Architects on the careful, ‘light-touch’ renovation of the landmarked building.

‘It was a great honour but also a great responsibility,’ says Wim Walschap, H&dM senior partner. ‘One of Breuer's key projects, the building is a rare example of post-war modernism in New York with distinct beauty and clarity, specifically designed for public use. Our goal was to preserve and re-accentuate its timeless appeal and architectural integrity while adapting it for a dynamic future; respecting its original purpose and while preparing it for a new use.’

The seven story, 78,000 sq ft structure now plays host to adaptable exhibition and auction hall spaces, offices and a soon-to-open basement-level restaurant from prolific New York interiors firm Roman and Williams as an extension of their upscale Soho French bistro La Mercerie.

The few major alterations include a seamlessly integrated bulkhead extension toward the building’s rear; a newly centralized freight elevator accommodating the more frequent movement of art throughout the space; and increased ADA accessibility. Gallery spaces on the second through fifth floors were also opened up and reconfigured to host exhibitions.

In the lobby, a new technologically advanced screen was introduced above the main reception desk. Flush-to-the-wall vitrines were added off to one side to delineate a gift shop. On the second floor, a larger 1,832 sq ft open-plan area — with demountable walls — doubles as one of the main auction halls with seating for 90 to 100 guests. On the third floor, walls were positioned on either side of a central corridor so that one of the building’s iconic windows could become the main architectural focal point.

With its soaring 17-foot-tall ceilings and windows facing Madison Avenue, the fourth floor has been fashioned into Sotheby’s marquee sales room. A private mezzanine level was fitted out with double-sided mirror walls and, according to some sources, can only be accessed through a private elevator to accommodate guests that would rather remain anonymous.

Where H&dM and PBDW’s intervention truly shines is in the meticulous restoration of surfaces and light fixtures. Before Sotheby’s acquired the building, the silver bowl light bulbs of the building's famed dome pendants were mismatched, meaning they emitted different hues. A completely new suite of bulbs was introduced, re-enlivening the space with just the right amount of brightness.

Bush-hammered concrete walls were steam-cleaned. Bluestone floors throughout were repolished. Oak flooring in dedicated areas was replaced. The firms went through multiple rounds of approval with local community boards and the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Marking the opening of Sotheby’s new Breuer Building HQ is a robust fall 2025 program. Bolstered by public exhibitions, this year’s New York sales (taking place 18 to 21 November) will focus on the comprehensive Modernist and Impressionist collection of Leonard A. Lauder, as well as that of Cindy and Jay Pritzker. Also on view as part of an upcoming contemporary sale, is Maurizio Cattelan’s solid gold toilet, America (2016), and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Crowns (Peso Neto) painted in 1981. The work was featured as part of Basquiat’s first major retrospective, held in this very building in 1992.

As Madeline Lissner, Sotheby’s EVP of global fine art and major collections, hints, ‘There’ll be many more of these homecoming moments in our galleries’ — but for now, Sotheby’s will celebrate its own.

The Swiss British architect, who delivered an astonishing 600-plus structures across the UK capital throughout the 1960s and 70s, including Centre Point, The NatWest Tower and Space House just off Holborn’s Kingsway, is credited both as being the man who brought the high-rise office block to the UK and the designer who has shaped the London skyline more than any other.

Welcome to Richard Seifert's London

But ubiquity and popularity don’t always go hand in hand. No stranger to criticism, Seifert was reviled by many throughout his career thanks to his uncompromising style – urban, modern and bombastically brutalist. He even managed to get on the wrong side of Princess Margaret, who expressed her dislike for his Royal Garden Hotel overlooking her garden at Kensington Palace.

Now, over 60 years on and in the wake of a growing commitment to preserving mid-century modernist architecture, the tide is turning, and a resurgence is afoot. In the words of developer Martyn Evans, London is whispering Richard Seifert’s name. 'His buildings are having their moment,' says the creative director of Landsec. 'It feels like a rediscovery, a quiet celebration. This isn’t nostalgia. This is affirmation. Richard Seifert’s buildings weren’t fleeting gestures or fashionable curiosities. They were designed to last and to matter.'

Indeed, they have, as demonstrated by a recent spate of sensitive and environmentally conscious restorations. These are projects that have proven Seifert’s original, pared-back designs, no matter how disparaged they were at the time or since for their aesthetics, lend themselves remarkably well to modern, sustainable architecture conversions.

The most recent of these was the redevelopment of Space House, the former Civil Aviation Authority HQ building in Covent Garden, where it has stood since 1968. In a bold departure from the lure of the new, 90% of the original structure – a distinctive 17-storey cylindrical tower linked to a rectangular block by an enclosed bridge – has been retained for a fresh generation of office occupiers.

Reopened at the end of last year, the Grade 11-listed building has been praised by Historic England as ‘one of the most important redevelopment projects of our time’ given the unwavering commitment from developer Seaforth Land, architects Squire & Partners and environmental engineers Atelier 10 to not only breathe new life back into the structure, but to ensure it has the sustainability credentials to guarantee ongoing longevity.

Given that adding external insulation was 'impossible without altering the building’s historic character,' says Tim Gledstone, partner at Squire & Partners, efforts were focused on replacing windows with high-performance glazing using 3D scanning and installing micro-chilled beams for heating and cooling. The result? A revitalised structure dating back to the late 1960s, underpinned by a coveted BREEAM Outstanding Certification.

This is not a one-off occurrence. The Typewriter on Borough High Street, originally designed by Seifert and Wilem Fischman in the 1950s and since reimagined by developers W.RE and Cowie Montgomery Architects, was completed in 2023 as part of a low-carbon refurbishment.

The Acre, built on Covent Garden’s Long Acre in the 1970s and reopened last year, has been transformed by global design practice Gensler into a modern, sustainable workplace, saving around 4,200 tonnes of carbon and retaining 80% of the original structure.

Metropolis, the former Woolworths headquarters on Marylebone Road, first commissioned in 1955, is being reimagined as 'the most sustainable building that has already been built' by architects AHMM, set to operate on 100% renewable energy when it opens later this year.

There can be little question that this widespread pursuit of ambitious sustainability credentials is future-proofing Seifert’s legacy. Yet, when it comes to the growing popularity of his works, there is also much to be said for the power of provenance. History, original features, a story – that all holds value, and it does so now more than ever, in a city where modern, glass commercial buildings prevail.

In the words of Tyler Goodwin, founder and CEO of Seaforth Land and the developer behind Space House, people are prepared to pay a premium for something different when 'one office is the same as the next, as the next as the next.'

As for Richard Seifert, his architecture had long been dismissed as being ‘of its time’, says LandSec U+I’s Evans. The reality, in his opinion at least, is rather different. 'Time hasn’t washed those buildings away,' he says. 'It has just revealed their strength. They aren’t relics. They’ve proved to be adaptable, enduring and capable of new life with new purpose.'

Tour this contemporary house in Cunha

‘The main inspiration for this project came from the site itself – a small plateau at 1,300m above sea level, set within a rugged mountain region with privileged views in every direction,’ says Roberto Brotero, founder of the practice.

‘The idea was for the house to become part of the mountain without disappearing into it, and for the windows to frame the landscape in different ways from each room, so that the view would never feel flat or uniform inside the house.’

The residence wasn't designed to mimic its mountainous context. Instead, it emerged from a desire to add to the continuous horizon. As a result, the home creates a dialogue between architecture and view.

Brotero studied old Brazilian farmhouses during the design development; however, he was keen to avoid romanticism. The design is distinctly contemporary – from its white volumes to its stone flooring and plastered masonry. Yet the integration of timber and traditional elements, such as a large fireplace and a red wood-burning stove, add a hint of nostalgia and warmth to the whole. The architects have created a harmonious balance between cosy rustic charm and the clean lines of a modern, airy space.

The living space's corner glass windows, which extend the rich landscape and invite it inside the house, are Brotero’s favourite design element. Slotting neatly into the structure's block volumes of varying sizes and heights, the glass dissolves the boundary between indoors and outdoors.

Inside, the Cunha house is awash with natural light and gentle ventilation. Each part of the home is designed to offer different views of the mountain or closer contact with the surrounding vegetation. The design assertively inhabits the landscape, but does not compete with it.

Brotero says: ‘The intention is that the architecture gradually reveals the surrounding mountain views, framing the landscape differently through each space.’

robertobrotero.com

Louis Kahn: a modernist myth

From small-scale, sole practitioners to the world-renowned starchitects, architects around the world have been inspired by Kahn’s work for its modernist artistry and design precision, at once laudable and almost unattainable. Yet the man behind the myth lived a life marked by struggle, one that was financially precarious and personally fractured. The contrast between the serenity of his work and the turbulence of his existence continues to shape Kahn’s legacy.

Louis Kahn: a brief history

Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky was born in 1901 into a poor Jewish family in Kuressaare on the remote western Estonian island of Saaremaa, then part of the Russian Empire. At the age of three, the boy, captivated by the light of coal burning in the stove, put some glowing lumps into his apron, which immediately caught fire, badly burning his face.

The resulting scars would disfigure Louis Isadore Kahn (the name officially given to Itze-Leib in 1915, some years after the family had moved to Philadelphia) for the rest of his life. Poverty continued into Kahn’s early years growing up in America, where, unable to afford pencils, he would make his own charcoal sticks to allow him to earn a little money from drawing. Despite having notable artistic talents, Kahn turned down a fully paid scholarship to study art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, choosing to take numerous jobs to self-fund an architecture degree at the same institution.

You may ask what bearing Kahn’s early struggles have on understanding his architecture. Yet only by recognising his hardships and the fact that it was not until he was in his fifties that he began producing the works that defined his portfolio, can we grasp the depth of his genius and the weight of his legacy. After graduating in 1924, he built a steady if unremarkable career, first as a draftsman for a Philadelphia city architect and later in several prominent firms there.

In 1932, at the height of the Depression, he co-founded the Architectural Research Group with Dominique Berninger, an ambitious attempt to pursue socially responsive design. Unfortunately, commissions were scarce, and the venture soon dissolved. For two decades, Kahn laboured largely in obscurity, producing modest projects while supporting himself through teaching, where he began to articulate architecture on his own terms. For him, architecture was fundamentally the search for order, light, and meaning.

A turning point

A decisive turning point in Kahn's career came in 1950, when a residency at the American Academy in Rome confronted him with the grandeur of antiquity. Among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla and the Pantheon, he absorbed a sense of monumentality that transformed his vision. Soon after, Kahn’s design for the Yale University Art Gallery (1951-53) announced the arrival of his mature voice – a fusion of modern construction and timeless gravitas, and the first of the great works that would secure his legacy.

These buildings chart the emergence of one of modernism’s most distinctive voices. The Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania (1957-61) spoke a new language of articulated forms. The Salk Institute in La Jolla (1959-65) was a crystal-clear distillation of his vision, while the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (1966-72) demonstrated his unrivalled mastery of light. Perhaps most ambitious of all, the Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban in Dhaka (1962-83) gave architectural form to a nation’s democratic aspirations. Across these projects, Kahn’s respect for materials and his belief that light was 'the giver of all presences' shaped buildings that stand today as testaments to modern architectural achievement.

And yet Louis Kahn remains an enigma, one where the misty solemnity of a clutch of beautiful works belies the turbulence of his life. Kahn was frequently in debt and relied on teaching to sustain his practice. His personal life was infamously fractured. He married once, but fathered three children with three different women. In the Oscar-nominated documentary My Architect: A Son’s Journey (2003), his son Nathaniel captures this complexity with candour, setting the absence of the father against the grandeur of the architect. That grandeur endures because Kahn pursued the most elemental of questions: 'What does a building want to be?' Footage captures him asking his students this in the film.

His life ended in 1974, at the age of 73. He died of a heart attack in the restrooms of New York’s Penn Station, returning from a trip to India. The humanity of his life and death makes his creations all the more allegorical.

An origin story

On 12 September 2025, the Louis Kahn Estonia Foundation hosted a day-long international seminar at the Bishop’s Castle in Kuressaare, the place of Kahn’s birth. Guest speakers presented the Estonian Government-backed initiative to establish the Louis Kahn Centre on the island of Saaremaa. At the centre’s core will be a permanent exhibition, library and archive showcasing Kahn’s work and philosophy.

9 key buildings

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (1951-53)

Kahn’s first major building revealed a new architectural voice. The gallery introduced his hallmark clarity through exposed concrete, brick, and a pioneering tetrahedral ceiling that combined structural efficiency with sculptural presence. It provided naturally lit, flexible galleries that broke from sterile modernist templates. Modest in scale yet radical in intent, it established Kahn as a thinker committed to material honesty and spatial dignity. The commission, awarded while he was teaching at Yale, gave him the platform to explore ideas that would mature into the monumental works of his later career.

Richards Medical Research Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1957-61)

A turning point in laboratory design, Richards Laboratories separated service towers from research spaces, allowing flexible interiors filled with light. Its bold concrete towers became a defining image of Kahn’s search for 'served' and 'servant' spaces, terms he coined to describe the hierarchy of functions in architecture. Though controversial at the time, and far from loved to this day, the building demonstrates a major gear shift for Kahn.

Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla (1959-65)

Jonas Salk invited Kahn to design a campus that would inspire scientific discovery. The result is an oceanside, modernist marvel: paired concrete laboratory wings flanking a travertine plaza, where a thin channel of water draws the eye to the Pacific horizon. Kahn combined functional laboratories with contemplative space, embodying his conviction that science, like architecture, seeks truth. The Salk’s blend of utility, serenity, and monumentality continues to make it one of the most revered research environments in the world, admired as much for its spiritual resonance as its technical performance.

Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Exeter, New Hampshire (1965-72)

Widely considered one of the finest libraries of the modern era, this one at Phillips Exeter Academy exemplifies Kahn’s ability to create order through clarity. A massive brick cube contains a luminous central atrium framed by soaring concrete crossbeams, surrounded by concentric rings of study spaces. Students encounter books in intimate carrels before ascending to the cathedral-like core. Function, ritual, and poetry align seamlessly.

Norman Fisher House, Hatboro, Pennsylvania (1960-67)

This modest private residence demonstrates Kahn’s mastery of scale at the domestic level. Two wood-slatted brick cubes, linked by a central stair hall, form a composed yet complex plan. Large windows create an interplay of light and privacy, while careful detailing lends gravity to a small structure. The Fisher House distills Kahn’s monumental language into an intimate family dwelling.

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (1966-72)

Kahn’s Texan masterpiece is revered for its flawless integration of art, light, and structure. A sequence of cycloid vaults houses galleries flooded with soft, natural light, filtered through ingenious skylights and reflectors. The architecture elevates the experience of viewing art without distraction or spectacle. Commissioned after a competitive selection process, the Kimbell affirmed Kahn’s international standing. Its blend of restraint and richness remains unmatched, setting a benchmark for museum design that continues to influence architects around the world.

Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (1969-74)

Kahn’s last completed work, the Yale Center for British Art reflects a lifetime of refinement. Behind a restrained concrete and steel exterior lies a sequence of galleries organised with luminous clarity. Natural light animates the spaces, while oak panelling adds warmth. Completed after the architect’s death (it opened in 1977), it stands across the street from his first gallery at Yale – a fitting bookend to his career.

Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (1962-74)

Invited by Vikram Sarabhai, one of India’s leading industrialists, Kahn created a campus of brick forms and geometric rigour. Monumental arches, voids, and corridors foster a sense of community while shielding interiors from the harsh climate. The design blends modern structural thought with the spatial traditions of India, producing a place both practical and profoundly symbolic. Though incomplete at his death, the campus remains one of the most influential works of educational architecture in South Asia.

Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (National Assembly), Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962–83)

Commissioned by Pakistan but completed for independent Bangladesh, this vast parliamentary complex epitomises Kahn’s belief that architecture can embody civic ideals. Colossal concrete walls are pierced with geometric openings, creating dramatic interiors filled with light and shadow. The Assembly Hall, ringed by reflecting pools, combines solemnity with openness. Construction spanned decades after Kahn’s death and was a monumental national endeavour for Bangladesh, then one of the poorest countries in the world. Today it stands not only as his magnum opus but as a symbol of national identity, demonstrating architecture’s capacity to represent democracy itself.

The new RIBA awards, launched this year as part of the UK institution's International Awards expansion, focus on two territories – the Middle East and Asia Pacific – freshly added to its prestigious roster. As revealed today (5 November), nine buildings share the 2025 RIBA Middle East Award top spot, while the Asia Pacific winners will follow in a few weeks.

The 2025 RIBA Middle East Award winners

These Middle East awards, which will be celebrated at an event on 7 November 2025 during Dubai Design Week, were created to put a spotlight on the region's creativity and pioneering architecture. The winners span from the world’s first purpose-built women-only mosque in Qatar, to the world’s largest city park, in Riyadh. Scroll down for the full list.

Discover the winners

• Adaptive Reuse Winner: The Serai Wing, Sharjah – Bait Khalid Bin Ibrahim by Anarchitect
• Design for Living Winner: Al Wasl Plaza, Dubai – Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture
• Future Project Winner: King Salman Park, Riyadh – Gerber Architekten is leading a joint venture with two engineering partners, Buro Happold, and Setec
• RIBA Member Winner: Buhais Geology Park Interpretive Centre, Al-Madam Plan – Hopkins Architects
• RIBA Member Winner: Expo 2020 Thematic Districts, Dubai –Hopkins Architects
• Social Architecture Winner: Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women, Doha – conceived by Her Highness, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro
• Sustainability & Resilience Winner: Jafar Centre, Dubai College, Dubai – Godwin Austen Johnson
• Temporary Architecture Winner: Singapore Pavilion, World Expo 2020, Dubai – WOHA
• Temporary Architecture Winner: World Food Waste Teahouse: Arabi-an, Dubai – Mitsubishi Jisho Design

RIBA's new awards: an explainer with president Chris Williamson

We caught up with RIBA president Chris Williamson to discuss the institution's new territory awards – their significance, the RIBA International Awards expansion, and how to submit.

Wallpaper*: Why establish The Asia Pacific Award and the Middle East Award?

Chris Williamson: The establishment of these awards marks an exciting new chapter for RIBA’s international engagement. Both the Asia Pacific and the Middle East are regions of extraordinary architectural ambition and diversity, where innovation, heritage and rapid transformation coexist. Launching these regional awards is part of RIBA’s mandate to celebrate design excellence wherever it is found and to be a supportive platform to projects that address pressing global challenges in their local contexts.

These awards are the first phase of our expanded international awards programme, recognising the architectural creativity shaping two of the most dynamic parts of the world today. They create new pathways for projects to gain global recognition and contribute to RIBA’s long-term aim of connecting architects across regions through shared learning, sustainability, and cultural exchange.

W*: What were you hoping to see in the submissions and shortlists?

CW: This year’s process was led by our Middle East and Asia Pacific Award jury panels, whose collective expertise and regional insight have been invaluable in shaping the results.

We hoped to see work that truly reflects the spirit of its place and understands its cultural, climatic and social context while pushing the boundaries of architecture. Both the Asia Pacific and Middle East shortlists deliver exactly that.

They demonstrate how architecture is addressing universal challenges, climate change, urbanisation, and social inclusion, through intelligent and contextually attuned design. What stands out is how architects are drawing on tradition, technology and local materials to create spaces that not only respond to their environments but actively enrich them.

W*: Are there specific highlights and innovations that you would flag as exceptional from the two shortlists?

CW: The juries’ assessments revealed rich and diverse forms of innovation across both regions. In the Middle East, [winning] projects such as the Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women in Qatar were recognised for advancing new social models through architecture, spaces that integrate spiritual, educational and communal functions in ways that reflect contemporary shifts in society. The King Salman Park masterplan in Riyadh was also commended for its scale and ecological ambition, transforming the city’s public realm and setting new benchmarks for urban sustainability.

In the Asia Pacific [shortlist], the jury identified a distinct movement toward socially and environmentally responsive design. BRAC University in Dhaka exemplifies this with its flood-resilient, low-energy campus that connects learning with nature and community. The Shenzhen Energy Ring reimagines industrial infrastructure as public architecture, turning a waste-to-energy facility into an expressive civic landmark.

As observed by the jury, these projects reflect a regional shift toward architecture that is both technologically advanced and deeply responsible to people and place.

W*: What does the foundation of these two new awards mean for the other RIBA awards’ categories, such as the International Awards, for instance? How do the new honours sit within the RIBA awards cycle?

CW: These new regional awards represent an evolution of RIBA’s International Awards. They strengthen the entire awards ecosystem by providing a more localised and inclusive structure for recognising excellence.

All built projects from the Asia Pacific and Middle East Awards will be eligible to progress towards the RIBA International Prize in 2026, the world’s most eminent prize for architecture.

This creates a more layered, global awards journey, recognising regional talent first before elevating the very best projects to an international stage. It adds depth, context and diversity to the International Awards cycle, ensuring that significant architecture from every region is celebrated, understood and showcased worldwide.

W*: How are the new awards judged, and what do architects need to submit?

CW: The prestige of the RIBA Awards rests on the rigour and integrity of the judging process. Every built project, regardless of size or style, is visited and analysed by an architect with extensive knowledge of the specific region, ensuring that our awards are grounded in first-hand assessment.

The new regional awards follow the same principles. Each jury comprises award-winning architects with deep experience working in the respective regions, capable of evaluating projects within their cultural, climatic and economic contexts.

For this cycle, architects were asked to submit projects they’ve completed between 2020 and 2024 and provide supporting sustainability data. Entries span up to ten categories, from Adaptive Reuse and Social Architecture to AI-powered Design and Sustainability & Resilience.

Ultimately, we assess design excellence in its broadest sense: how a project meets its brief, serves its community, responds to climate, and contributes positively to its environment and future generations.

riba.org

Check out Accra's Backyard Community Club

Working with the precast rammed-earth system, the architects crafted a structure that feels sculptural and textural – and at the same time, thoroughly contemporary. It was created for the local community, but also serves as an exciting case study that shows the building method's scalable potential.

The project is set on a compact plot in the dense neighbourhood of Osu and stands out for its looks, but also the 230 sq m ‘sustenance garden’ running along one of its sides. It includes over 20 species of edible and medicinal plants.

The venue features a rich red, clay tennis court at its heart. It's been designed for professional-level doubles play, and also allows athletes under 18 to train in a high-quality environment. There is a shaded, built-in floating bench for spectators, as well as all the ancillary spaces required in a modern sports building, such as changing rooms, shaded seating, outdoor prep counters, and a barbecue area.

Functional and captivating, the Backyard Community Club looks great, but undoubtedly shines through its material honesty, use of local expertise, and social purpose too – elegantly showing off its sustainable architecture credentials. The architect writes: 'From the outset, our team prioritised deep engagement with local builders, athletes, and educators – from the Rome Masters to rammed-earth technical advisors to define a design process that is both inclusive and exemplary.'

DeRoche is no stranger to working with community projects in the region. The Accra-based architect recently also worked on Dot.ateliers | Ogbojo, a writer’s and curator’s residency space commissioned by artist Amoako Boafo, as well as the Surf Ghana collective in Busua (both completed in the studio's previous iteration, DeRoché Strohmayer).

derocheprojects.com

Tour this brutalist Chilean pavilion in the countryside

A self-initiated project, the small structure sits within the grounds of studio founders Sofía von Ellrichshausen and Mauricio Pezo's own property in the Yungay region – Luna House, which serves as both an expansive home and a workspace.

'The pavilion is a kind of self-commission, since it is located within the same farm in which Luna house sits – a 150-hectare property adjacent to the Cholguan river, which demarcates the Ñuble Region, at the foot of the Andes mountains, about 1,000m above sea level,' explains von Ellrichshausen.

She continues: 'The project is part of the Artificial Foundation, a non-profit initiative we have founded, which aims to protect the native forest while promoting the production (and contemplation) of art within such a natural environment. The whole purpose of this philanthropic project, including the land and its constructions, is [for it] to be left for public use.'

The architects, acting as custodians of the land and actively promoting the arts in their country, crafted the pavilion as a home for an organisation that could attend to both preoccupations and serve as a symbol of their intentions. It is also a form that mirrors the values of the nearby Luna House, bringing together making and exposed concrete; texture and geometric compositions; brutalism and minimalist architecture.

'The pavilion has a double purpose. It is a room that serves the processing of honey while also providing an open infrastructural function when the room is closed [and not in use]. The volume has a strong asymmetry, with an altarpiece-like façade facing the sunset and an amphitheatre facing the sunrise, towards ancient trees,' adds Pezo.

pezo.cl

Famed for training illustrious chefs in the craft of fine dining, the Basque Culinary Center has stood on the city’s outskirts since 2011, but this new €26 million development is located in the bustling Gros neighbourhood. The cascading design, which drew from the crashing waves of the Basque Country’s coastline, also acknowledges Mount Ulía just beyond.

'This is a place where the city meets the mountain,' says architect Bjarke Ingels, who first visited San Sebastián while studying architecture in Barcelona, 'so it’s also a meeting place for disciplines and cultures.'

The five-storey building includes flexibly-designed spaces that can be adapted for work, leisure and learning. Different levels are colour-coded by shades of pink corresponding with meat cooking grades: rare, medium and well-done. Windowed partitions create what Ingels calls 'vitrines' containing laboratories, classrooms and workshops, while the glass facade allows bystanders a glimpse of what’s cooking inside.

Public walkways and green areas lead around and above the site. There is an outdoor amphitheatre at the back, while the rooftop gardens offer a view of Zurriola beach, popular with surfers. The institute also stands on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage traversing northern Spain, which means trekkers have a striking new landmark to admire along the route.

The building's profile resembles a wave of moving water, yet there are no curved lines in the structure. 'Everything is made with modular elements,' Ingels explains. 'There is a symphonic quality to these rational elements coming together to create the illusion of a wave.'

A brise-soleil adds to this feeling of dynamism and also, according to BIG architect João Albuquerque, shades the interiors.

The rust-red building is clad in weathering steel, a move that recalls the monumental works of the late Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, whose open-air museum is in nearby Hernani. Ingels says he was drawn to the richness, weight and industrial energy of the metal and also to Chillida’s 'gently curving rectangular geometry,' which informed the dynamic modules.

Simplicity, according to Ingels, is a crucial ingredient in both architecture and gastronomy. 'It's like making a dish with the simplest ingredients,' he says, 'but it’s the magic of the kitchen that brings out something incredible.'

The Museum of Architecture is again welcoming The Gingerbread City in 2025. Opening on November 29 2025, the exhibition invites architects, engineers and designers to create urban landscapes entirely from baked goods – celebrating (and stretching) the creativity of professionals imagining the cities of tomorrow.

This year’s theme, ‘The Playful City’, challenges participants to explore how design can inspire joy – and to consider how curiosity and connection can shape our built environments. While the concept is whimsical, the underlying idea is perfectly serious: to champion ‘play’ as an architectural principle – and a catalyst for wellbeing, creativity and community.

Real-world examples of this include Copenhagen’s Superkilen Park – which celebrates cultural diversity through three colour-coded zones filled with more than 100 objects from around the world – and Bristol’s Hello Lamp Post, an interactive public art project inviting people to text everyday street objects like benches or lamp posts. At The Gingerbread City, architects bring these ideas to life through edible public squares, rewilded rooftops, and buildings that encourage interaction – from a train station that doubles as a skate park to a school where slides connect classrooms.

‘We love choosing themes that get architects dreaming big – and the public smiling. The Gingerbread City 2025 asks how fun, imagination and interaction can shape the future of our urban spaces. It’s about rethinking what cities are for – and reminding everyone that good design can be joyful, inclusive and fun,’ says Melissa Woolford, founder of the Museum of Architecture.

Beyond the exhibition, visitors can take part in workshops to build their own houses, following the theme by crafting a community centre in gingerbread form. There is also a ‘gingerbread button’, created by sponsor and AI design platform Gendo, which lets visitors transform themselves into gingerbread figures. Gendo has also collaborated with participating architects to create gingerbread versions of their real-life projects, blending creativity, technology and play in delicious form.

The Gingerbread City will run from November 29 2025 at The Museum of Architecture at Coal Drops Yard, King's Cross, London

Roughly two years later, Bo Bardi and Lelé completed their collaboration on the Ladeira da Misericórdia, a steep, cobbled street connecting Pelourinho to the commercial district below. They used Lelé’s accordion-folded ferrocement panels to reinforce crumbling colonial buildings for social housing and small businesses, and to turn a half-ruined structure into a rooftop café. Around the base of a pre-existing mango tree, they built a pair of circular volumes that would serve as a democratic gathering place for a city divided by topography, race and class: a restaurant called Coaty.

That, at least, was the idea. Bo Bardi, who had migrated to Brazil from her native Italy after the Second World War, first fell in love with Salvador’s singular culture, shaped by its Afro-diasporic majority, in the late 1950s. After a US-backed military coup in 1964 drove her socially-oriented practice into recession, Bo Bardi retreated to São Paulo. She returned to Salvador two decades later when the city government invited her to help revive Pelourinho, which had recently been declared a Unesco World Heritage site. Her ambitious plans centred on what researcher Weslley Pontes calls ‘spaces of encounter’ — theatres, cinemas and public infrastructure that would serve the neighbourhood’s mostly poor population. Coaty in particular, Pontes says, ‘was always an experimental space’.

Behind the new home for Pivô in Brazil's Salvador da Bahia

Around the time of Coaty’s completion in 1989, the municipal government changed, discarding Bo Bardi’s communitarian plans and launching a brutal displacement campaign to sanitise Pelourinho for tourism. She died three years later, in 1992, aged 77.

From the mid-1990s onward, Coaty was intermittently abandoned and occupied, stripped for parts and sealed with cement block. Then, in 2024, the non-profit arts institution Pivô approached Salvador’s Secretary of Culture and Tourism to inquire after Bo Bardi’s lost masterpiece. Five months later, it was announced that Pivô, with its strong global fundraising base, would manage the building’s ‘reactivation’, with a mandate, says Lua Leça Escobar, an adviser in the Secretary’s office, to ‘connect artists and researchers from Salvador to the world’.

Pivô opened its research and residency programme in 2012 in a sprawling three-storey space in the Copan, an Oscar Niemeyer-designed apartment block in São Paulo that had seen better days. Over the next decade, Pivô developed free programming with artists and scholars from across Brazil and the world – particularly, says Fernanda Brenner, Pivô’s founder and artistic director, from Bahia. When Carolina de Sá, Pivô’s institutional director, showed Brenner her grandmother’s half-empty house in Salvador – a space that, in the 1960s, had been an informal salon for cultural luminaries including Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil – they decided to expand. To date, Pivô Salvador has hosted 28 residents, more than a third from Brazil’s politically and economically marginalised Northeast.

‘We’ve proven twice that we have the strength and the stamina to take over ruins,’ Brenner says. The Coaty announcement met with blowback from members of Salvador’s arts community, who saw the concession as part of a troubling pattern. In Bahia, ‘people come, they see, they take, and they don’t give back,’ says Lanussi Pasquali, co-creator, along with her late husband Joãozito Pereira, of the artist-led initiative Projeto Ativa. ‘And when something important comes along, the project always goes to someone from outside.’ In 2016, Pasquali and Pereira occupied Coaty for eight months on minuscule government grants, hosting events such as art installations, poetry readings and concerts. ‘It was a seed planted to say “we exist, this place exists, and it needs to be public”,’ she says. ‘We didn’t depend on people from outside to tell us how to run it.’

Brenner, de Sá and their team understand these frustrations and know the only means of defusing them will be the programming itself. ‘We understand the responsibility,’ says de Sá, who grew up in Salvador. ‘We have to make sure that everyone feels welcome, that everything is done for the city.’

As Pivô collaborates on structural plans with academics and surviving colleagues of the architects, its programme manager, Ramon Martins, has started compiling an extensive archive on the Ladeira’s history. Eventually, the spaces conceived for social housing will host residencies, educational programmes, a seed bank and free studios for local artists, while the never-realised café will become a restaurant where paying clients will subsidise meals for art workers. Pivô will also relocate the bulk of its residencies and public programming to Salvador, generating jobs and training for the local culture industry.

How much of this comes to pass will depend on political will and continuity. ‘Lina left the city twice because of a change in the political system,’ says Martins, and while the municipal government will remain in place until 2029, Brazil remains polarised and unpredictable. Meanwhile, the gentrification of Pelourinho has raised the stakes for this narrow slice of a crowded, unequal city, where ‘culture is the only space for people to breathe,’ says Pasquali.

Bo Bardi was a European emigré and a wealthy Paulistana: in Salvador, an outsider twice over. Yet Brenner and de Sá, Pasquali and Pontes all invoke her as inspiration for the Ladeira’s future, which, they agree, must centre on restoring Coaty to public use. For the moment, Martins says, ‘We can dream. That’s why we’re trying to do everything now.’

pivo.org.br

Explore CCA Tashkent, the Uzbek capital's newest cultural hub

Sara Raza, its artistic director and chief curator, arrives from prior intervals at the Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, and much else. The CCA Tashkent, spearheaded by the ACDF and its chairperson, Gayane Umerova, will serve as a centre for exhibitions, education, and research. It, she explained, 'is site-specific and rooted in the unique topography of the city of Tashkent, which has been an important hub for visual cultures from antiquity to the modern and contemporary periods. For me, the artistic vision is about rethinking Tashkent’s role as a centre of soft power in the 20th century, drawing on its rich history in cinema, literature, and its deep engagement with the Global South.'

These links are not merely overland; Raza recounted more distant cultural links, such as the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences from the 1950s to 1980s and the Tashkent Film Festival within a similar span. The Centre aims to serve the 'local, but also the local within a global context, and celebrate and centre artists as part of this exploration.'

Uzbekistan is the most populous of the Central Asian States. Its capital, Tashkent, is also the largest city in the region (it was the fourth-largest in the Soviet Union in 1989). Its character is that of an ancient city to which an imperial radial city was appended. There remain some ornate 16th-century mosques and madrassahs; although the city’s building stock has suffered from earthquakes, most dramatically and destructively in 1966.

The rebuilding was something of a Brezhnev-era demonstration project and resulted in a bounty of striking Soviet Modern structures built subsequently, replete with mosaics, murals, and reliefs (its metro is hugely impressive due to such station adornments). These have become increasingly a focus of preservation attention. All sorts of artistic traditions have remained robust; a number of the most impressive works at the Bukhara Biennial were local ceramic or textile works, frequently combining traditional craft and contemporary conceptual elements.

The CCA Tashkent straddles two eras of the city's history in its dual locations. The Centre itself is under construction in a relatively rare Tsarist relic in the city centre, a former tram station and diesel power hall designed in 1912 by Wilhelm Heinzelmann (a few of whose other designs survive in the city centre, including the former Romanov Grand Duke’s residence). Artists' residences are located in a historic 19th-century madrassah and mosque, and a former kindergarten nearby in yet older neighbourhoods.

Studio KO encountered a site that was cluttered with undistinguished later buildings; the diesel hall was literally coated in black grease, residue of its prior use. The scent of this past was powerful. Yet they found a sturdy relic in the former power hall. Olivier Marty, co-founder of Studio KO, explained, 'It has many features that are typical of Imperial architecture throughout the region. It’s using brick as the main module to create ornament. It is very Russian, but it also has a little something of Central Asia because Central Asia is all about making motifs with brick.' They were taken by the interior. Marty explained, 'It’s like a cathedral - there’s a very spiritual quality to it.' Their task was to accentuate this grandeur.

Marty said, 'The first part was almost archaeology. Just think of the existing premises, what do you do to revive it? So it's like finding a composition that is wrong. You want to make it right again, so you decide what to remove.' There were a number of later buildings that they demolished, retaining the power hall and the lower floors of an administration building, the sole structures that dated from 1912.

Artists’ residences were initially envisioned on site, but they found this a bit too congested a program, as they were intent on retaining space around the diesel hall in a neighbourhood that is otherwise dense with taller buildings. Marty said, 'In the middle, we created empty space. The void is as important as the two solid buildings; it’s about the relationship.'

The diesel station was actually in considerably good shape; its ornamental bricks were restored, and some structural elements replaced (in fair part to support a sort of suspended performance pod within). New windows are of shocking transparency, featuring a violet filter visible outside but not in.

The hall’s main entrance is oriented away from the street entrance, which posed a question of how to orchestrate the broader site. They arrived upon a novel solution which accentuates the scale of the diesel hall, namely by creating an entrance sequence through the administration building, which then proceeds down via circular stairs or elevator to galleries tunnelled to then provide an initial basement view of the hall’s height. Marty explained. 'We wanted nothing to spoil the appearance of this beautiful building; the only way to do it was through the basement.'

Practical functions of ticketing, logistics, and a library are housed in the administration building, Marty said, 'enabling us to keep the diesel station as a perfect, empty space.' They also sought contrast and complement in material and form, confronting the question, as Marty indicated 'Old and new? How do they converse with one another? How do they slide within one another?' They literally slid a new self-supporting concrete building into the footprint of the former administration building, clipping off brick at one corner to make clear what they were up to, which Marty referred to both as 'facadisme' and a hearty 'lipstick' of brick.

There’s an addition to the administration structure built of the same poured concrete, about whose character they were quite particular. They were fascinated by local aggregate, which, Marty explained, 'has very dark stones: dark greys, dark reds, dark yellows.' They are, he said, 'almost too strong to be exposed,' but that’s exactly what they chose to do, in order that 'the modularity of the brick and the colour of the brick could be matched by a very abstract concrete.'

Contrast in form to rectilinear buildings will also be provided by an expressive 'comma', Marty explained: a curved concrete wall within the courtyard, derived from the sense that the space needed some final punctuation to draw it together. Marty invoked 'the power of a curve; there’s something magical about the perfect proportions of a circle' and they built a portion of one to provide gentle shape to the Centre’s courtyard.

Studio KO’s work at the residencies displayed a similar balance of interests. The main frame is existing structures; deep brick and heavily vaulted rooms surrounding a courtyard lined by a small mosque. This contains an intriguing assortment of relics of past intervals of décor, and is being used as an exhibition space. The inaugural cohort of residents is at work currently. They inserted a rather Miesian narrow two-floor workshop screened off by a wall from the view of the residencies.

Raza explained the CCA’s aim as complementary to that of the National Museum. The latter provides an encyclopedic accounting of past national art, and the former looks to the present, in a wide variety of forms. She described it as 'akin to a Kunst Halle, a non-collecting institution that invests in current thinking about art and ideas, but also expands to include other disciplines such as music, dance, and technologies.' Its opening exhibit, Hikmah, the Uzbek term for wisdom, will feature an assortment of Uzbek and international artists.

Marty welcomed the idea of this brief of potentiality. 'There is no proper collection; a combination of artists and characters and personalities will give meaning to the building.'

Maltese architect Richard England: a brief history

England was born in 1937 with architecture in his home—his father had an established studio and bequeathed him his first commission in 1962: the Church of St Joseph in the island’s northern village of Manikata. Designed when England was only 25, the church became emblematic of Malta’s post-war period, breaking with the islands’ unchallenged pre-modernist loyalty to Renaissance, Baroque and Neo-Gothic ecclesiastical architecture.

From that project onwards, England built prolifically, moving into tourism and civic sectors and shaping the identity of Malta’s post-war decades. England’s buildings - coloured by the influence of a wide-reaching network of peers and an incorrigible thirst for international ideas - stewarded the island’s journey into a newfound state of independence. By the 1980s, his work was synonymous with what foreign architecture writers termed ‘critical regionalism’, and with what locally formed part of the transdisciplinary zeitgeist of a young Republic.

England was exported early in his studies to intern in the studio of Gio Ponti - the Italian architect, industrial designer and writer who helped father Italy’s modern movement from the 1920s onwards. He spent five months working on Ponti’s Church of San Carlo Borromeo, inheriting an obsession with phenomenology, the strand of architecture theory centred on the physical experience of buildings. It was buttressed eventually by lifelong citations of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s thesis on architectural embodiment and total sensorial impact.

Pallasmaa’s words appear in textual vignettes throughout the current exhibition in Marseilles, alongside quotes from figures such as the Swiss humanist architect Mario Botta and England’s own words—all pointing to a philosophy of synthesis, where architecture becomes an incubator for the intangible, or what England identifies as ‘the soul’.

'Looking for Richard', the architect's Marseille retrospective

Curated by Laura Serra and Maxime Forest, the exhibition expressly focuses on the purity of England’s virgin designs - shown in original sketches sourced from collections in Malta and the architect’s own expansive archive. In doing so, the show comments on England’s standing in his native home, where the legacy of his built projects has been visibly eroded - his buildings pervasively demolished or edited beyond recognition over time.

Within a palette of pale oranges, pinks and aquamarines, paired with deeply stained lines of zealous ink drawings, a route to England’s vision of a nation is traced within the walls designed by one of his own heroes - Le Corbusier. In both cases, the architects expounded ideas of living across a full spectrum of creative output - writing, designing, building, speaking - profoundly influencing and giving shape to a time and place every time.

To ensure you don’t miss a thing – and to showcase the scope of residential architecture today – we’ve launched a monthly series: The Architecture Edit. Each instalment will highlight our favourite houses of the month: buildings that demonstrate creative planning, innovative methods and, of course, aesthetic excellence.

A terraced home transformation

Architects Edward Williams and Laura Carrara-Cagni of Cagni Williams Associates reimagined this Edwardian terraced house in south London as a sustainable, light-filled home. A striking new ‘gallery’ extension – clad in Corten steel and glass – replaces the old conservatory and brings a sculptural modernity to the rear façade. The rest of design balances bold forms with natural warmth, linking home and garden through large pivoting doors and oak-lined interiors. From the outset, sustainability guided the project, which features an air-source heat pump and underfloor heating.

A Malibu beach pad

Interior designer Pamela Shamshiri has transformed a 1990s Malibu beachfront compound for producer Jana Bezdek, fusing Hollywood glamour with Brazilian modernism. Inspired by Lina Bo Bardi and James Bond, the main house features a sculptural De Sede sofa, white terrazzo floors and a curved timber bar, all cast in an elegant taupe-to-caramel palette. Elsewhere, a crimson screening room exudes California luxury, and mirrored walls ensure ocean views from the bedroom and office. Outside, lush landscaping and tiered terraces further blur the boundary between indoor and out.

An Arizona compound

Prompted by a zoning law change that sanctioned attached secondary units, architect Benjamin Hall converted this suburban Phoenix house into a multigenerational desert compound. Using cost-efficient concrete masonry units (CMU), he designed a 1,700 sq ft addition that harmonises with the desert landscape both aesthetically and environmentally – thick, insulated walls, concrete floors and maple cabinetry create a minimalist yet welcoming interior, while sliding doors open onto a courtyard planted with native flora and framed by mountain views.

A Canadian modernist gem

Perched on Bowen Island near Vancouver, Morse House (1983) by Dick Mann of Thompson Berwick Pratt epitomises West Coast modernism. Crafted from cedar, fir, stone and glass, the 21,526 sq ft residence immerses its occupants in forest and ocean panoramas. A cedar staircase descends to a glazed façade surrounded by gardens and waterfalls, leading to an atrium centred around a 50ft pool and a soaring great hall. With its guesthouse, gym and private dock, this handcrafted home achieves a rare equilibrium between architecture and nature.

An eco-brutalist sanctuary

On the outskirts of Hyderabad, Antriya by 23 Degrees Design Shift redefines brutalism as lush, livable and sustainable. Constructed from local Khammam sandstone and Markapuram slate, and softened with reclaimed teak and abundant greenery, the 14,500 sq ft residence accommodates three generations of one family. Cascading plants and lily pad-filled ponds blur boundaries between architecture and nature while passively regulating the tropical climate. Concealed behind boundary walls, the home seems to emerge from the undergrowth as you approach – a tactile, nature-infused reimagining of brutalism.

A Canadian cabin 

In Ontario’s wooded hills, AKB Architects’ Timbertop is a minimalist four-bedroom retreat designed for family gatherings and outdoor adventure. The single-storey, barn-inspired home marries rural simplicity with modern refinement. Clad in crisp white to contrast with the surrounding evergreens, the home withstands heavy snow and wind while maintaining warmth and intimacy under its pitched gabled roof. Open-plan living, kitchen and library spaces create a cosy refuge amid the winter landscape.

A rainforest retreat

Set deep in the Costa Rican jungle, Studio House by Dagmar Štěpánová of Formafatal appears to float above a slope on concrete and Corten steel supports, minimising impact on the terrain. Designed as Štěpánová’s personal residence, the 125 sq m structure consists of open terraces, raw concrete interiors and a glazing-free ocean-facing window which immerses the home in the sounds and textures of the forest. Two simple bedrooms and an infinity pool continue the elemental aesthetic, while the rooftop and east terraces offer uninterrupted views of the Pacific.

A brick and concrete home

In Ahmedabad, architect Vaissnavi Shukl’s Teen Vaults reinterprets brick-and-concrete construction. Originally conceived as a weekend retreat, it evolved into a full-time family residence organised around three vaulted volumes – one for for dining, one for living, and one for reading. Exposed brick walls, terrazzo floors and teak furniture evoke a grounded simplicity, while a folded concrete staircase with a wooden-bead railing adds sculptural elegance. A central courtyard surrounded by mango and frangipani trees serves as the home’s spiritual heart.

Discover the inspiration behind this tranquil Mexican home

‘Our inspiration was the territory, the landscape and the topography. We focused on how to position the project over and into the ravine and how to integrate the territory in the project through the colours of the earth, the framing of the views and a serene sense of place,’ explain the architects at SOA.

The residence sits all on one level and each material element reflects the surrounding landscape and was chosen for its timeless quality, such as concrete, stone, and wood. The design balances shadow and light creating a warm, yet cooling space. Anchoring the home is an espino tree which survived construction and stands tall between the terrace and pool.

Entering through the courtyard area, the house unfolds in a series of flowing interiors. To begin, the kitchen, dining and living area seamlessly blend into each other, allowing for an open social hub. The furniture reflects the architecture with sofas and tables crafted from linen, cotton and stone, adding to the raw and honest space.

This entry sequence is the architects’ favourite element in the space, they explain to Wallpaper*: ‘This is the point when you enter the house and you have a first glance of the landscape framed in its entirety by the architecture. The hall acts as a divide between the public and the private areas, making it a core space of the house.’

A flat-roofed volume organises three bedrooms along a corridor. The primary suite takes in its ravine vista, while at the opposite end of the corridor, is a covered terrace overlooking a rain-fed water feature.

On the other side of the central courtyard is the guest pavilion with two bedrooms. The atmosphere is cool and calm, rooted in raw honesty with a hint of brutalist flair, with grey stone underfoot and the cocooning tactility of the interior walls.

‘We want visitors to feel a sense of discovery of the place and the project itself, say the architects. ‘They should feel a sense of human scale, a calm, welcoming space where the architecture, the interiors and the landscape are integrated through spatial composition and a thorough selection of materials.’

The Zone 5 regulations stipulated elements of the design like the distance between boundary and structure, as well as capping built square metres to a percentage of the plot area. Other strictures determined the environmental credentials of the house, governing the amount of plot given over to permeable surfaces, for example, as well as the number of solar panels required and insulation rating.

‘In terms of the proposed architecture, we had quite a lot of freedom,’ says the practice’s Hiéronyme Lacroix, ‘I would say that it was not complicated to propose this type of architecture for the permission.’ The neo-brutalism of the exterior, with the visible vertical shuttering marks, is paired with polished concrete floors and exposed concrete interior walls. Stone edging adds another material dimension.

‘The combination of raw concrete construction and interior insulation was unbeatable,’ Lacroix continues, adding that the key constraint was economic. The house is designed in such a way that the walls were all poured as solid elements with no holes for windows. Instead, floor-to-ceiling gaps for doors and windows were created in between the concrete structure.

In addition, the house features many step backs and angled elements on the ground floor level, what the architects describe as the ‘fragmentation of the cascading volumes.’ This has the effect of making the living spaces feel much larger than they are, with views long axial views contrasted with the diagonal views between angled walls, niches and full-length windows. Care was taken to avoid large spans – and therefore costly structure – without compromising the sense of openness.

On the ground floor, the entrance hall, kitchen, dining room, and living room form a flowing sequence, with more private areas like a study and bathroom tucked away in the idiosyncratic floorplan. The ground floor also houses a self-contained one-bedroom flat for an older relative, and the house sits above the traditional Swiss basement, here used for storage and as a media and games room.

Upstairs, there’s a large principal bedroom with dressing area and top-lit ensuite, as well as two smaller bedrooms with a separate bathroom, also lit from above. The floor-to-ceiling fenestration also continues here, albeit with deliberately different alignments to the windows on the ground floor. The brutalism of the exterior also serves to distinguish the new villa within its eclectic, leafy suburb.

‘Our aim is to create quality architecture that is both contemporary and timeless,’ the architects write. Established in 2005 by Hiéronyme Lacroix and Simon Chessex, along with partners Grégoire Martin and Ludovic Durand, the award-winning office is based in Geneva.

‘Each commission is approached as a new avenue of exploration, without preconceived ideas, formal a priori, or advance knowledge of the final result,’ they continue, ‘Each project begins again at zero, forcing us to constantly challenge ourselves… In today’s globalized and generic world, we strive to create buildings specific to each site and its uses. Our structures must be able to elevate and enhance every one of these always unique situations.’

LacroixChessex.ch, @LacroixChessex

Tour this Athens apartment, bridging old and new

The architects worked hard to bridge those two characters – the home's existing material-rich, midcentury appeal, and the contemporary sensibilities of the owners' lifestyle. The team writes on its approach: 'The craftsmanship of 1960s Athens formed the foundation of our architectural intention: to respect it, preserve it and reinterpret it.'

'The residence is therefore not just a renovated apartment, but a comprehensive treatment of the materiality of the era – a bridge between two periods, where craftsmanship and memory of the past are transformed into tools for the practice of architecture.'

The existing surface palette and décor in the penthouse includes some fine Athenian craftsmanship - from refined marblework and intricate wood details to hand-painted ceilings, all enveloped in the residential building’s original façade, which is distinctly clad in travertine marble featuring a range of decorative motifs.

The design team centred its reimagining of the apartment on a key gesture: they reworked the kitchen as the heart of the home, wrapping it in glass blocks which offer separation but also plenty of natural light where needed, and carving out strategic openings that frame views across the home, opening up the overall layout arrangement.

More design interventions include adding Didyma marble to the interior, which gently nods to the travertine exterior skin of the building. Existing Tinos marble, aged with beautiful, natural patina, was complemented with green Cipollino in bathrooms. Elsewhere, colourful tiles add another dimension in select areas.

A lot of the existing fabric was kept and carefully maintained to extend its natural life. This includes the hand-painted ceilings, the wooden inlays in the living room, and the herringbone parquet in the bedrooms (there are four of them). The result is a family home that thrives in its 20th-century identity but also feels distinctly contemporary, perfectly fitted to its owner's daily life.

Tour the New York home of architect Victoria Blau

When looking for inspiration, Blau naturally found herself first turning to the building itself. Designed in 1926 by John B Peterkin, the 15-storey structure features a limestone façade and an ornate Italianate lobby, with expressively veined grey marble walls, a chequerboard marble floor, and finely detailed mouldings. While she desired a space that expressed her architectural identity, she didn’t want a complete stylistic break from the rest of the building, especially since her unit is on a lower floor and has a strong relationship to the streetscape.

As she was designing the apartment, she recalled how jarring it was to visit Antoni Gaudí’s residential projects in Barcelona and experience the artistry of his façades and shared areas, such as the stairwells, then to head into renovated apartments that did not connect to the whole. ‘I felt having continuity was important,’ Blau says. With too stark a contrast, ‘the story gets lost’.

In essence, Blau nestled a minimalist modern box into a traditional shell. This meant retaining the landmark windows and, wherever possible, the original ceiling mouldings (which needed to be repaired or reconstructed). She then established a datum line below the mouldings and designed everything beneath it to be modern – a technique that enabled her to also tuck mechanical infrastructure into the walls without obscuring the ceiling.

Then, on the first day of renovations, her neighbour informed her that she was putting her unit on the market. Blau had already completed the arduous design and permitting process, but saw a unique chance to combine the apartments and create a residence with a sophisticated promenade architecturale. ‘We already had enough square footage, but it was an opportunity for a grander plan,’ she says.

The resulting corner unit is a play on the public and the private, the formal and the informal. The living room, dining room and library face Fifth Avenue and Blau designed the sequence of spaces so that it’s possible to walk directly from one end of the apartment to the other. On the side facing 83rd Street, which is a much quieter one-way road, she sited the family’s working and living quarters, with each room becoming slightly more private than the one preceding it: Blau’s home office, the family room, children’s and guest bedrooms, then the primary bedroom suite at the end, which includes an expansive dressing room.

To keep the interior from feeling stark, Blau emphasised materiality throughout. This included tinted lime-plaster walls that have the texture of suede, black lacquered millwork that was wire brushed until it achieved the finish of a Steinway piano, custom-made antique brass mesh draperies, and herringbone wood floors. And, occasionally, highly expressive materials punctuate the space, including a macassar ebony vanity in one bathroom and grey-veined Italian marble that completely envelops another bathroom.

‘Even though a lot of the detailing was modern, it has a very warm feel,’ she says. Many of the features reference projects that Blau designed for clients. She enjoyed collaborating with the skilled craftspeople and subcontractors so much that she brought them in to work on her home. ‘As an architect, it’s a gift to work with people who care so much about the final product or their small piece of the job,’ she says. ‘It’s what keeps me going on wanting to do the next project and the next one and the next.’

The attention to detail extends to the furnishings, which have restrained silhouettes but remarkable materiality and craftsmanship. In the living room, Blau specified Vladimir Kagan sofas upholstered in boiled wool Chamonix and cashmere silk, a brass coffee table by Willy Daro, and glass chandeliers by Erik Höglund displayed like sculptures. For the dining room, where the family has hosted 30-person dinners, Blau commissioned an acacia wood table on bronze Eric Schmitt bases and surrounded it with chairs custom-made by Dune and upholstered in Armani Casa fabric.

A sculpted bronze console by Paul Evans, and a Harry Bertoia Sonambient sound sculpture deepen the space’s textural composition. In the public areas, Blau used a neutral palette of hues dotted with deeply saturated accents that complement the artworks, a fine example being the Mies van der Rohe ‘Brno’ chairs in the breakfast room, which are covered in a soft blue ultrasuede that picks up on the palette of an abstract Ryan Wallace painting.

The family’s art collection reads like a who’s who of 20th and 21st-century practitioners, including the likes of Cecily Brown, Rita Ackermann and George Condo. And while much of the apartment’s wallspace is dedicated to these works, Blau also installed glass vitrines for her husband to display his hockey memorabilia, a testament to how she designed the space for the specific character of her family. ‘It was a labour of love,’ she says.

Organised across five territories – Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and North America – the 2025 Holcim Foundation Awards were judged by dedicated juries for each region grouping. A prize pool of 1 million USD is then divided across the winners, with five regional Grand Prize winners being pulled from their respective territory winning schemes. All winners are celebrated equally, while the Grand Prize winners will be announced in an awards ceremony in Venice on 20 November 2025.

The 2025 Holcim Foundation Awards - through the eyes of Sou Fujimoto

What marks a truly sustainable project? The organisation behind the awards, the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, defines this as a design that promotes a healthy planet through sensible resource management and future-proofed impact in both construction and in terms of viable economics; supports its users and helps communities thrive; and ultimately, creates uplifting places for its users to enjoy.

Sou Fujimoto served as jury chair for the Asia Pacific region (the other jury chairs include Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, Sandra Barclay, Lina Ghotmeh and Jeanne Gang). We met with him to find out more about the prestigious award and its goals.

Wallpaper*: What were you looking for when judging the award?

Sou Fujimoto: [The main criterion was] sustainability – we were looking for the future. The entries were so varied, from a tiny project relating to the local community to large-scale national projects. In the end, we got a good balance. It is important to talk about choice and balancing scale. It’s a key message. So it's like we don’t have a single direction, but several, and even smaller projects can be very significant.

W*: That is so true. There is a smaller community space, but also an entire city among your winners. How do you compare them?

SF: Even bigger projects are for human beings. They affect larger populations, but you still want them to be connected to the human element. Everything ultimately relates to human activities and the environment.

W*: How do you feel might awards make a difference? Why do awards matter?

SF: Recognition is important for a designer and their client, but of course, I think it's more important for the public, because they will see what is appreciated, and they will see the overall message. We are always thinking about our contribution to society, and to the world, for the Earth.

W*: Did you see common threads among the entries overall, or the winners?

SF: Every region has its different ways of addressing things and expressing solutions. Natural materials, recycling, reusing, and refurbishment were central everywhere – I’d say maybe using natural materials was the most common thread found. At the same time, it’s good to have different directions; it is very helpful, because sometimes forcing one direction can be quite restrictive.

W*: Does this approach of getting closer to nature and natural materials resonate in your own work?

SF: I grew up in Hokkaido, Northern Japan, and there, I was surrounded by nature. I was playing in nature, in the forest. That was my childhood. And then, of course, I came to Tokyo, which is a super artificial city, full of winding, narrow streets, electric poles and cables, and it can be rather chaotic. But it also grew organically; it’s an ecosystem, so in a way, my childhood and this big city overlapped. Now, I am trying to create architecture like a forest, together with greenery and trees, and with natural materials. We should understand the environment and not divide it from architecture.

20 ambitious and inspirational winning projects - the complete list

Asia Pacific

Gelephu Mindfulness City - Gelephu, Bhutan | BIG – BJARKE INGELS GROUP

Healing Through Design - Bengaluru, India | THE AGAMI PROJECT / A THRESHOLD

Old Dhaka Central Jail Conservation - Dhaka, Bangladesh | FORM.3 ARCHITECTS

Pingshan River Blueway Landscape - Shenzhen, China | SASAKI ASSOCIATES, INC.

Europe

Art-Tek Tulltorja - Pristina, Kosovo | RAFI SEGAL A+U, OFFICE OF URBAN DRAFTERS, ORG PERMANENT MODERNITY, STUDIO REV

School in Gaüses - Girona, Spain | TED'A ARQUITECTES

The Crafts College - Herning, Denmark | DORTE MANDRUP

The Southern River Parks - Madrid, Spain | ALDAYJOVER ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE

Latin America

Barrio Chacarita Alta Housing - Asunción, Paraguay | MOS ARCHITECTS & ADAMO FAIDEN

Return of the Lost Gardens - Medellín, Colombia | CONNATURAL

Schools for Flood-Prone Areas - Porto Alegre, Brazil | ANDRADE MORETTIN ARQUITETOS ASSOCIADOS, SAUERMARTINS

Sesc Parque Dom Pedro II - São Paulo, Brazil | UNA ARQUITETOS

Middle East & Africa

Brookside Secondary School - Asaba, Nigeria | STUDIO CONTRA

Qalandiya: the Green Historic Maze - Qalandiya, Palestinian Territory | RIWAQ – CENTRE FOR ARCHITECTURAL CONSERVATION

Waldorf School - Nairobi, Kenya | URKO SÁNCHEZ ARCHITECTS

Zando Central Market - Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo | THINK TANK ARCHITECTURE

North America

Buffalo Crossing Visitor Centre - Winnipeg, MB, Canada | STANTEC ARCHITECTURE

Lawson Centre for Sustainability - Toronto, ON, Canada | MECANOO ARCHITECTEN

Moakley Park - Boston, MA, United States | STOSS LANDSCAPE URBANISM

Portland Intl. Main Terminal - Portland, OR, United States | ZGF

holcimfoundation.org

The project originated from an international architecture competition held in 2003, won by the Dublin-based firm, which then collaborated with Arup and Buro Happold. Their design was envisioned as a bridge between ancient history and modern innovation. ‘Designing a museum of this calibre, in such close proximity to a landmark as monumental and symbolic as the pyramids, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,’ says Heneghan Peng founding partner Róisín Heneghan. ‘Our design works to strengthen that connection to history and place, providing a home for some never-before-seen artefacts that rests upon the very land from which they were created.’

The museum’s geographical context played a key role in shaping its design. Perched on a desert plateau formed by the Nile, the building radiates outward toward the pyramids, its visual axis aligning with the three ancient structures. The radial lines of its walls and roof create a fan shape that echoes the shape of the pyramids, but which doesn’t rival their height.

At the heart of the museum lies a six-story staircase lined with monumental artefacts – such as the ten statues of King Senusret I – which leads visitors chronologically through Egypt’s history, from the Predynastic Period through to the Coptic era. The journey culminates at the top floor, home to the Tutankhamun Gallery’s permanent exhibitions, before opening out to a panoramic view of the pyramids.

Natural light is used wherever possible, although – as with all museums – this must take conservation concerns into account, and is mainly employed in areas housing more robust artefacts. Reinforced concrete helps regulate internal temperatures, reducing reliance on air conditioning.

Beyond its role as a world-class exhibition space, the Grand Egyptian Museum is envisioned as a cultural and educational hub for Cairo. Developed with landscape architects West 8, its extensive gardens evoke the verdant beauty of the Nile Valley. The museum also includes one of the largest conservation and research facilities in the world, featuring 17 specialised laboratories connected to the main building via an underground tunnel. These labs safeguard Egypt’s vast heritage – from fragile papyri and textiles to sculptures, pottery and human remains.

The completion of the Grand Egyptian Museum marks a milestone in the country’s heritage, standing as a testament to Egypt’s enduring influence on world civilisation.

Forefront offers a glimpse of what might happen when architecture allows art to become an integral part of how we experience space. For Guntas, it’s just the beginning of a conversation she hopes will ripple far beyond its central London location. We caught up with her to talk about the idea, the collaboration and why the boundaries between architecture and art are ready to be redrawn.

Dicle Guntas on Forefront, the new platform blending art and architecture

Wallpaper*: Could you start by introducing HGG and how the Forefront initiative came about?

Dicle Guntas: HGG London is a design-driven property developer that creates sustainable places for people to live, work and gather. We work closely with architects and designers to propose innovative solutions to technical complexities and constraints of urban sites. I am very keen on supporting art and emerging artists and have been a patron of various art institutions and museums over the years.

Ever since our first development project, The Interlock, I have been very interested in the intersection of art and architecture and how they influence each other. In recent years, we have been having more specific conversations around this topic, which resulted in interesting collaborations and commissions. This was happening organically and not necessarily in a curated way, so I started to think about how we could structure these dialogues intentionally. That is when the conversations with Sadie began about Forefront.

W*: The current Forefront show features work by Jason Bruges Studio; what was the curatorial reasoning behind leading with their work?

DG: Jason is a multidisciplinary artist and designer who blends art, architecture and technology. We commissioned them for a public art project, a light installation that will go under a passageway in one of HGG London’s projects.

What particularly interested us was the way the team responded to the building’s architecture and the physical constraints of the site while experimenting with new forms of design through passive kinetic movement. This territory was previously unexplored in their work. The exhibition developed as a research-led showcase, offering a view into that creative evolution. The studio translated their ideas into the gallery setting by generating dynamic computational caustics through choreographed metallic topologies, animating what might otherwise have been a still space.

W*: Forefront positions itself as a platform facilitating a mutual exchange between art and architecture. What does that mean in practice for clients, architects and artists?

DG: While we aim to facilitate mutual exchange between art and architecture, we are still developing, experimenting and forming what that means in practice. We believe that it should be shaped by the conversations we are having, depending on the needs of a space, place, or project.

W*: Do you see this initiative as a response to something missing in architectural discourse or practice today?

DG: I do think that we need more architecture programming within art and cultural institutions; however, Forefront is not a direct response to this. We are hoping to create a platform and act as a facilitator to have more of it.

W*: How do you choose who to work with? Are you looking for artists whose practices already engage architecture, or is part of the goal to create new encounters?

DG: We are forming a creative advisory panel consisting of artists from various disciplines who will support shaping the cultural programming. Absolutely, I think it is very interesting to create new encounters, and we would love to enable those via our programme.

W*: How do you see Forefront growing? Is this the start of a series, a network, or perhaps a model for integrating art into development projects more directly?

DG: Can I say all of the above!? When we describe Forefront, we explain it as a cross-sector initiative, cultural platform and a creative task force. Through this position, it intends to provide a replicable model to integrate more art and culture into placemaking, while also aiming to be a space where raw creative ideas can be explored, tested and realised through the right mix of people and resources.

W*: Finally, what do you hope visitors take away from this first show and what might come next?

DG: Curiosity.

'orefront's first show, ‘Living Cornice' by Jason Bruges Studio, is on show at Milieu, 134 Old Street, London, EC1V 9BL (visits by appointment)
hgglondon.co.uk

In south London, the pair has transformed a large Edwardian terraced house into a sustainable contemporary living space, with a striking new bespoke extension replacing an old conservatory. Completed in summer 2025, the light, open and energy-efficient house completely fulfils the clients’ brief.

Enter the Corten-clad Gallery house extension

‘My day job is working alongside architects and engineers to guide large-scale projects to completion,’ explains the client, a senior building industry figure. ‘When my wife and I turned our attention to our own home, we wanted to commission something that would feel very special. We knew Cagni William’s work, and their reputation for inventive use of space, immaculate detailing and coherent use of materials. Plus the practice is a leader in sustainability.’

Carrara-Cagni relished the opportunity to work with such an enthusiastic and informed client and found the brief inspiring. ‘It helped us produce something quite different from a standard glass box or traditional conservatory,’ she says. ‘And the clients’ ambition to create an energy-efficient, climate-friendly house enabled us to embed sustainability from the start. The terraced houses may look similar from the street, but at the rear and inside this home is very special.’

A bold Corten steel and glass volume known as the Gallery, the new extension certainly makes a big impression, with curved glass corners; perfectly executed joinery by WG Studio; large pivot patio doors; a central column hiding a wood-burning stove; and a welded roof supporting a wildflower garden. But its unique shape presented some unexpected challenges.

In Europe, Corten is sold only in sheets, so the architects had to change the columns from circular to welded cross shapes. ‘The curved glass corners with tight radii are only made in one factory in Germany, so this added lead time to the programme,’ they explain. ‘The pivot patio doors were made bespoke from Corten frames to fit into the structure, together with other Corten elements, and the whole gallery was given a final oil coat to blend them all together.’

Between the Gallery and the original Edwardian terraced house is a large timber and expressed steel open space kitchen/dining room with a long wall in textured oak panelling unit running the whole width of one side and concealing plenty of storage space, kitchen appliances and services.

The dining nook is connected to the Gallery by an opening in the original back wall which creates an enclosing space for the dining table. Oak shutters can be left open to admire views into the new extension and garden beyond, or can be closed to create a cosy dining space.

‘The glazed pivot doors create a glide from the entrance to the garden through the kitchen/dining open space, but when we open the shutters the whole home is seamlessly connected with the garden, the garden comes in the home and the home in the garden. We love this,’ say the clients.

The project is underpinned by the highest standards in craftsmanship, but also by the search for sustainability. In 2025, the practice launched Cagni Williams Energy, a dedicated subsidiary with a mission to accelerate decarbonisation in the built environment, helping clients to meet ambitious sustainability goals.

Thanks to an air source heat pump in the garden, underfloor heating throughout the new ground floor, and augmented by ventilation to avoid overheating and condensation, the entire house is now heated by electricity only.

cagniwilliams.com

Luckily, the property itself was not short of cinematic charisma. The narrow, half-acre plot featured three structures, built in the late 1990s, that bookended a garden and a pool. These included a pair of two-storey volumes containing a 5,000 sq ft primary residence and guest suites. From the beach-facing main house, with its broad expanses of windows and low-slung profile, it felt like you could almost touch the Pacific Ocean.

Tour this modern Malibu beach house

For the property’s owner Jana Bezdek, co-founder of production company FourthWall Theatrical, the home fulfilled a lifelong yearning to be on the water. ‘My husband is from a neighbourhood called Rustic Canyon and I grew up in Del Mar, California. We were always drawn to being close to the beach,’ she says.

So when she came across the property four years ago, Bezdek pounced. The house would not only serve as a beach escape for her family, but it would also be a romantic nod to her husband, who proposed to her on that very section of beach. To realise her vision, Bezdek tapped Shamshiri, who had previously designed her family’s main residence in LA, as well as her New York pied-à-terre. ‘She was the only person I could imagine working with,’ Bezdek says.

Shamshiri was struck by the compound’s low-slung modernist vocabulary, something of an anomaly in this part of Malibu. A silver screen-worthy concept emerged, one with modernism as its protagonist. ‘We were like, what if it’s 007 at the beach? What if Lina Bo Bardi, her Brazilian modernist friends and a Bond girl could all walk in and have a cocktail?’ the designer remembers. ‘We really treated it as a Brazilian pavilion in Malibu.’

Fortunately, the structures required zero spatial rejiggering, leaving Shamshiri and her team to focus on infusing the spaces with drama. For inspiration, they researched Bo Bardi’s oeuvre – which encompasses some of Brazil’s most renowned modernist buildings – and watched back-to-back Bond films.

For the main residence, which contained the kitchen, living and entertaining spaces on the ground floor and the primary bedroom suite on the upper level, the designer wanted to incorporate ocean views everywhere, even when you weren’t facing it directly. So she installed dark mirrors on all of the surf-facing walls. ‘I love mirrors,’ Shamshiri says. ‘They can act as a portal that transports you to somewhere else. You’re just in a swirl of water in motion.’ Structural steel columns, meanwhile, were painted in a deep ocean blue hue for added effect.

To counter the gleaming surfaces, the design team wanted to create a cocooning sensation. Though the main house was largely open plan, the ceilings were low. Shamshiri and her team ran with it. ‘We accepted right away that the ceilings were low. So we created a sandwich of white ceilings above and white floors below, and then made everything else dark,’ she says.

The team opted for a palette of taupe, mocha and caramel. A wall backing the kitchen was painted black (‘It’s like a faded black T-shirt colour,’ Shamshiri says), while corridors and the primary bedroom were swaddled in a luxurious suede wallcovering (‘It came with a brush!’ she adds).

Entering the open-plan living space, with the ocean waves crashing in view, offers the chance to both take a load off and become the most glamorous version of yourself. The pièce de résistance here is a ‘DS-600’ leather sofa, a 1972 design by De Sede, which snakes across practically the entire length of the room, creating discrete seating nooks within its curves, populated with pieces by Bo Bardi contemporaries such as Joaquim Tenreiro. ‘I love that living room so much,’ Shamshiri says. ‘If you’re two people or you’re 50 people, it doesn’t make a difference.’

The clients love to entertain, so having a standout cocktail set-up was a must. The custom-made timber bar, whose undulating form echoes the shape of the sofa, comes clad in a row of olive-green tiles for a funky kick. You can almost imagine Bond, perched on a ‘Mexique’ stool by Charlotte Perriand, ordering his signature martini. ‘We wanted it to feel that you could be barefoot, in your bathing suit, making a drink, and it still feels elevated,’ Shamshiri explains.

Up a set of floating stairs is the primary bedroom suite. The mood here quietens down, but like the living area, the bedroom is anchored by a statement sofa, a pair of Patricia Urquiola ‘Tufty-Time’ sofas for B&B Italia arranged back-to-back. ‘We emphasised the horizontal, because the horizon is the greatest thing about being at the beach,’ the designer says. There’s also an office space for Bezdek and her husband, where, thanks to mirrors cleverly installed behind the shelves, the ocean is always nearby.

In fact, nature is always close at hand, thanks to lush grounds created by LA-based landscape designer Matthew Brown. Working alongside Shamshiri, he created a series of outdoor spaces including a firepit, a pool deck and, most striking of all, an oceanfront living room. ‘He has such a great way of softening and letting things feel very native in California, but overgrown,’ notes Shamshiri.

One of the guest suites contains a glamorous secret: a screening room where every surface, from the carpet and the ceiling to the Loro Piana fabric on the ‘Togo’ sofas, is drenched in the same crimson hue. ‘If this is Hollywood at the beach, what colour would you want to be drenched in? We were like, red,’ says Shamshiri. Here, Bezdek, her husband and their two young sons can pile in for movie nights. A bar hidden behind the red panelled walls is perfect for hosting friends. ‘Late at night, everyone always ends up in that room, even just to talk,’ Shamshiri adds.

Bezdek and her family are putting the house to good use, hosting impromptu dance parties in the living room and taking in the crash of waves on the terraces. ‘She can intuit someone’s inner vision, and then deliver something far beyond what anyone could have ever imagined,’ Bezdek says of Shamshiri. For the designer, that’s the sign of a job well done. ‘I love seeing how much everyone smiles,’ she says. ‘People just love this house.’

studioshamshiri.com

Tour this Arizona home by Benjamin Hall

Hall, whose studio is based in Arizona's capital city, met with a retired couple who wanted to make good on an unusual offer they had made their daughter and son-in-law. The younger family members returned home with their then-baby, now toddler son, contingent upon the promise of moving into in the family base of over three decades while the elder generation lived elsewhere.

However, the plan didn't require a major move, since the idea was to simultaneously nurture familial closeness and healthy boundaries by designing and constructing a contiguous addition to the late 1970s suburban house. 'We had been looking to downsize, but never found what we wanted,' the husband says. 'So we did it by building.'

A friend of the clients' son-in-law recommended Hall, who had earlier in his career worked for Will Bruder. They were already familiar with the noted architect's work at the synagogue they attend, which Bruder designed in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Hall had long nurtured an interest in mixed-generational housing that began during the year he lived and studied in Copenhagen, and lamented the lack of such arrangements in the US. It was an auspicious confluence. 'When this project landed in my lap, it resonated,' he says. 'I wanted something to be a case study for Phoenix.'

When the effort began in 2023, Hall was tasked with devising a scheme for a self-contained, 1,700-square-foot expansion on an underutilised part of the spacious lot. Conforming to the existing single-family zone requirements was a challenge, given that the code didn't allow for a second fully equipped kitchen with a range. The adoption of a 2024 ordinance permitting an additional unit on SFR lots, however, meant that building an attached home with a proper kitchen became legal.

Budget concerns scuttled early plans for a cast-in-place concrete structure. So, Hall, who has extensively researched and developed expertise using earthen materials that specifically tap into the region's history and heritage, proposed an intriguing solution. 'I had discovered on my own from saw-cutting grade CMU (concrete masonry unit) walls that there's an unusual mix of aggregate,' he explains about the resulting reddish hue. When used artfully, premade goods readily available from building suppliers could form the basis of warm and inviting spaces — not the cold, alienating environments often associated with industrial concrete block.

Hall's skill in optimising CMU structures for energy efficiency and heat mitigation made using the prosaic material in an unconventional way feasible. Each surface is strategically configured so that 'every wall directly exposed to the sun at minimum has to be a 12-inch-deep block,' with foam insulation in the core that provides an insulated barrier, he explains. To lighten up the interiors, features like poured concrete flooring and blonde maple wood built-ins offset 'this darker block that we weren't really sure what it would look like in the end,' Hall says. The bet paid off.

Following a one-year-long construction timeline with partner Rare Form Builder, the outcome is understatedly beautiful and extremely livable — and very much of its desert setting. Stacks of horizontally oriented, modified CMU blocks establish monolithic surfaces and envelop an open floor plan within flat-roof volumes.

'Here in Arizona, the north is the friendly side,' Hall observes, so fully pocketing doors lead from the dining area facing this direction, establishing an indoor-outdoor connection, with a mature olive tree in the adjacent courtyard and largely native vegetation flourishing on the grounds. Windows are cleverly integrated into the block and sized with respect to their position to the sun in order to facilitate the interplay of light and shadow through the large interior spans.

Finishes strike a balance between accessible and bespoke. Ikea's high gloss white kitchen cabinetry and storage modules can be further customized if needed, Hall notes, and he designed maple wood doors that are compatible with the company's closet systems. One departure from the overall minimalist sensibility is in the shower, for which the clients commissioned a boldly geometric and colourful ceramic tile installation during a trip to Morocco.

Best of all, the occupants are thrilled with the lifestyle improvement, as well as how Hall enhanced a previously hidden asset. 'He saw there's a mountain a mile away we needed to pay attention to,' the wife says about Lookout Mountain, a landmark that became the focal point. The addition, which anticipates aging-in-place needs such as wider doorways and a consistent grade, has piqued the interest of many of the couple's friends who also want to live very near — but not necessarily with — their children, and vice versa.

A swath of the original stucco is intact in the hallway where a connecting doorway links the two homes, an element that will likely remain after the main house undergoes a remodel that Hall is in the preliminary stages of designing. It's all part of an ever-evolving family story. 'We get these little knocks in the mornings or the evenings,' the matriarch says about the regular visits from her grandson. 'We have our space and they have theirs, but it's community.'

benjaminhalldesign.com

Now, there's a new feather in Vitra's cap; welcome to Doshi Retreat, the revered and ever-growing campus' contemplative installation by Indian 2018 Pritzker Prize-winning architect Balkrishna Doshi, designed in close collaboration with his granddaughter Khushnu Panthaki Hoof and her husband Sönke Hoof. The structure, nestled in a green field next to Tadao Ando's Conference Pavilion, is not only the first piece of architecture by Doshi outside of his native India but also the first he designed to be completed posthumously – as it is also the last the modernist architecture master worked on before his death, in 2023.

Stepping inside the Doshi Retreat

Doshi Retreat is an homage to the great architect's legacy, and was conceived by him as a place for serenity and spirituality – a sensory journey of sound and feeling. Its origin story begins with Vitra chairman emeritus Rolf Fehlbaum's visit to India a while back, Panthaki Hoof recalls. 'It all started with a friendship between them. Together they visited a temple [the Modhera Sun Temple], which had a small shrine as part of it.' It inspired Fehlbaum to approach Doshi much later for the design of a 'space for silence' in the campus – something that would reflect the serenity and feelings of calm he felt when inside that small shrine.

Doshi created a concept around a number of notions and words, trying to distil the project's meaning. He went to Panthaki Hoof with it, saying, 'Here, this is the retreat.' This birthed the design, which the three architects developed together. 'Our question to answer was, what do you want to feel in this place? What does the shrine mean?' she recalls. The project progressed during the pandemic, and Doshi's passing left the husband-and-wife team (who have since worked on more projects linked to Doshi's legacy, such as the new toilet block at the Institute of Indology in Ahmedabad) to complete it.

The design evolved in an organic way as the three architects collaborated on it – growing beyond the compact space that Fehlbaum might have originally envisioned. 'We were a bit nervous as Rolf was expecting a 2x2m shrine, and this was bigger. It was all driven by intuition,' says Panthaki Hoof. She explains: ‘This architecture was born from a dream Doshi had of two interweaving cobras. From this subconscious vision emerged a written narrative, followed by a sketched concept composed of notes and evocations. It then evolved into an invitation to embark on a journey of discovery.’

The piece – part architectural pavilion, part art installation – sits near the edge of the campus, off the main entrance and a stone's throw from Vitra's manufacturing facilities and museum. This was not where it was originally meant to be, but the architects, walking through the site as they were working on their design, stumbled upon a piece of land next to the Conference Pavilion that felt like the perfect fit. Fehlbaum feels that this way, the project's 'silence answers to Ando,' as all the buildings in the Vitra Campus 'need to speak with each other.'

The parcel of land included three mature trees and a sloped terrain, so the design was crafted to weave between these existing plants, digging a 'river delta-like' path towards the main pavilion space. This journey into the pavilion is as exciting as the arrival at its inner sanctum. As the visitor moves towards the main room, the walls retaining the site's earth and greenery get taller, the guest's gaze urged to turn upwards towards the sky. It affords a feeling of seemingly leaving the prior surroundings behind.

This experience serves as a smooth, gradual transition from the busy, working campus towards the retreat's meditative nature. Meanwhile, small rest stops on slightly higher ground are formed around the trees, offering opportunities to emerge, take a breath and look around.

The project's materiality is key. The pathways are flanked by weathered XCarb steel, the same cladding that wraps the main space too, which is matched in colour with the crushed bricks that line the approach. This reddish colouring creates a strong contrast with the leafy lawn, yet brings in a tactile feel. It also somehow accentuates the green element, bridging effortlessly nature and architecture – an element Vitra is keen to explore further. A masterplan for the wider campus is currently in development with Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets and involves the creation of mini forests across the entire site.

Inside the Doshi Retreat, a single, round chamber featuring a water pond and two simple, curved stone benches invites guests to sit and enjoy the gentle hum of a sequence of gong and ceramic flute that echoes in the room. This sound piece was faintly heard upon approach, too, but here it becomes more engulfing and subtly cocooning. A hand-hammered brass mandala crafted in India adorns the ceiling.

The project's main material, steel donated by ArcelorMittal, is set to age and change patina over time, adding to the pavilion's relationship with nature. As Hoof explains, it was produced using renewable resources to support a sustainable architecture approach. To that end, the foundations were not dug deep but were instead screwed in, so as to minimally disturb the existing land.

The Doshi Retreat was created as an invitation to solitude and a mindful pause – a space without a specific label. Its thoughtful nature and inauguration this week highlighted the Indian modernist's legacy – and his absence. What was it like, finishing the project without the great master, one of its three creators? Panthaki Hoof: ‘[Doshi] used to say that “silence is the most generous form of guidance”, and when he left, his absence was that silence for us.’

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Designed in 1983 by Dick Mann, a principal at the legendary firm Thompson Berwick Pratt (one that employed the likes of Arthur Erickson and Ron Thom), the home hearkens back to a midcentury era – when less was more, and connection to site was all.

Discover the riches of Vancouver modernism with Morse House

An anachronism to the 1980s postmodernism that reigned supreme at its inception, the artful architecture of Mann manages to make the 21,526 sq ft residence situated on a 23-acre lot feel cosy.

Designed with a simple yet elegant palette of cedar, fir, glass and stone, the materials reflect the surrounding environment, which includes a grove of 800-year-old conifers. The house becomes a device for viewing the surrounding forest and ocean, reflecting it back to the viewer from the outside and drawing it deep within the interior.

When approaching the steeply graded site carved out of bedrock that processes down to the shores of the Pacific, where whales and eagles are regular features in the ever-shifting panorama, one is greeted by a protective fortress of cedar. Only a triangular slice of peekaboo window hints at what lies within.

As one walks north towards the water, the real entrance is revealed, via a descending cedar staircase, and a façade of glazing, cedar and Colorado quartz. Framed by lush landscaping, gardens of ferns and waterfalls, it feels like a West Coast modern Moorish courtyard, with tiles of fossilised sunrise flagstone from a lake in Utah offering textural intrigue. Intricately angled geometries of roofs and windows amplify and contain the space at once, with every edge and reveal finely crafted.

Inside, the house is anchored by a giant atrium, featuring a 50ft swimming pool, and adjacent children’s bedrooms grounded by south-facing window views of earth and native greenery. Light streams through floor-to-ceiling atrium glazing, while the language of cedar beams supported by fir posts continues through to the adjacent great hall, mitigating scale with angled intimacy. All is a grand visual dance drawing the eye to the Pacific waters below – including the upstairs master bedroom that practically levitates over the ocean – while trees shelter this unique sanctuary.

An adjoining guesthouse up the eastern slope features a gym and a tennis court, as well as a garage converted into a studio by TBP’s Fook Weng Chan. While this house has starred in several Hollywood movies, its scale, simplicity and embrace of nature remain decidedly Canadian. Its private beach and dock allow for boating to the mainland and, along with its lovingly crafted design – with materials barged in and cast on site – mean that a home like this can never be built again. And in a province with no heritage laws to protect it, one can only hope that its exquisite beauty will save it.

The Morse House by Thompson, Berwick & Pratt Architects, 1982, Bowen Island, British Columbia, is on the market through West Coast Modern

Many architects seek tabula rasa conditions in designing their homes. Graves was different, building his house gradually within a literal self-storage warehouse. Where others once stored surplus belongings in cubes, he saw possibility. Built by Italian stonemasons of hollow clay tile, brick, and stucco, Graves was taken with the warehouse’s look. Karen Nichols, currently principal at Michael Graves and an employee since 1977 (when the firm was Michael Graves & Associates), explains: 'When he went to the American Academy in Rome, he became enamoured of all things Italian. When he found the house, in around 1974, he was dumbfounded that it was a Tuscan vernacular building in terms of both construction type and its formal characteristics.'

Tour the Michael Graves house in Princeton

Graves did not, of course, live in the warehouse’s 44, 10ft lockers. He revamped the interior multiple times, first finishing half of the L-shaped structure in neo-deco style (while the remainder retained a dirt floor for years), then switching to neoclassicism for the second half. He returned and classicised the first half (save for one bathroom, which remains a green and black deco artefact). He rearranged its internal circulation, shifting from a double-loaded corridor plan to a main circulation axis along one side. He carved through several double-height spaces along the way and made some modifications to the exterior. The main entrance is the former truck-loading dock, which likely can't be said of a single other architect's house in history.

The property remains with us in perfect condition thanks to Kean University, whose main campus is located about 40 miles to the north and is home to the Michael Graves College (which includes schools of architecture and design). It acquired the house in 2016 as a gift from Graves’ estate on the condition that it would preserve the property. Universities are undersung stewards of a number of distinguished properties; USC operated the Gamble house in Pasadena for 50 years, until 2019, and its policy of public access continues; Stanford owns Wright's Hanna house in Palo Alto. These sorts of properties often don't have tours you can simply walk up to – but they can be arranged by contacting the institutions, as at Kean.

Michael Graves was an architect of great talent whose quality of work was, for a time, obscured by some of his most successful commissions. He started out as an orthodox late modernist, leagued famously with Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman and Charles Gwathmey among the more formalist 'Whites', against the more contextual and eclectic tastes of the 'Greys', such as Charles Moore and Robert Venturi (the two groups represent different strands of postmodernism in the US). Graves soon morphed radically, moving well beyond grey to become a postmodern harlequin. He was an enormously successful architect in the 1980s and 1990s, eventually building the Swan and Dolphin resorts at Walt Disney World and designing housewares lines for Target and JCPenney.

For all general wishes that architects should venture into popular design, they're often criticised when they do it, and Graves was no exception. The quality of his work has received much-warranted re-evaluation in recent years, with his Portland Building in Oregon City becoming an object of preservation attention, as is, more recently, his excellent Humana building in Louisville, Kentucky, which is soon to be sold by the company of that name. He built many excellent houses, from the Hanselmann House in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to the Plocek House in Warren, New Jersey, but your odds of getting into most of them are low – save for here.

Graves’ own house provides an intensely strong argument for the value of his design philosophy. It is an elegant home that wields classical devices in all sorts of clever ways. It is also as far from an open-plan house as one can get, instead, wielding vistas and subtle shifts in form to lend constant variation. Ian Volner, in his biography of Graves, wrote of his later works’ 'far stronger focus on poche – the walls made thicker and indented with niches and recesses, such that each room had a different spatial character and a different quality of light'.

Nichols relates, 'You'll see a round room, then you'll see a passage, then you'll see something else. He liked the composition of things, he liked the axial view, he liked the terminus.'

The main passage ends at the library on one side and the dining room on the other; there are numerous excellent internal views throughout the house beyond these. Nichols continues: 'Graves also placed a special emphasis on shaping the ceiling. It's a part of what draws you through and makes you understand the architecture.' This wasn't all. She explains that he even used slightly different shades of white throughout the house to accentuate his other devices. Sometimes, he would also brazen out an architectural point; the exaggerated entasis in living and dining room columns is simply enjoyable.

The result is exceptionally comfortable and even intimate, belying the idea that classical detailing needs to be grandiose. David Mohney, dean of the Michael Graves College at Kean, says: 'What surprised me the most is the domestic scale of the house.' If there are palazzo-like elements within, the whole is really not all that large, containing only three bedrooms. Of the living room, he comments: 'This is the biggest space in the house. You can't fit more than a dozen people in it. You can't fit more than eight people at the dining table. It's all very personal and very domestic.'

The double-height library at one end of the house is especially striking. Towering bookcases filled with volumes on everyone from Wittgenstein to Christopher Wren to McKim, Mead & White, rise within this skylit space – overlooked by Graves’ own bedroom. There you'll find one of several cheeky design shortcuts. The bookcases look luxe; their supports are actually PVC pipes painted to resemble the grain of bird’s-eye maple. As Nichols quips, 'he was pretty cheap'.

Make no mistake, there are plenty of actually costly items around. The library holds Etruscan pots, including reproductions and examples the architect collected in Italy (while this was still legal). Still, Graves did maintain artificial distinctions about high- and low-cost permissibility in the home.

The living room is an elegant space; there are expensive features and also, humanisingly, those that only pretend to be so. The largest piece of art in the room – which looks like a painting of Psyche at the Bath – is actually framed wallpaper. It also contains Graves’ own copy of a Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot view of Rome. A steady source of interest throughout the property is seeing the architect’s own designs of all sorts of ages. His armchairs for Sunar are there, as are his Alessi kettles and Target clocks and phones. Alabaster lighting fixtures in the living room were bespoke.

Furnishings throughout the house also vary dramatically. There's a Le Corbusier chaise and lounge chair, 19th-century Biedermeier pieces, and also things that it's believed Graves simply bought at local flea markets.

You will chuckle throughout. The candelabras on the dining room table have birds’ feet as a base. Nichols explains: 'The objects are not always [about] serious collecting, sometimes they're just for fun; he was full of wit and whimsy.' Scattered throughout the house are other collectors’ novelties: a range of magnifying glasses and 12 inkwells in the shape of the Temple of Vesta. There are also all sorts of engrossing architectural prints.

The breakfast nook is another double-height, exceptionally bright space studded with busts mounted on brackets, this time with a rather unmistakable influence. Nichols explains: ‘Charles Jencks took us to John Soane’s house and also his Dulwich Picture Gallery. A lot of what you see in the house after [that] was influenced by Soane.’

Stairs are sculptural and topped, naturally, by a bust. Upstairs, the primary bedroom directly overlooks the library; there are no windows or shutters. As Mohney comments: 'There are no barriers to the [view] into the library. Privacy came about not through barriers but through distance.' The main bathroom features five sources of natural light on the sides and above. The guest bedroom is also exceptionally airy.

The second floor features clear traces of Graves’ paralysis due to a spinal cord infection in 2003. His hospital bed remains, as do the necessary alterations: a balustrade around a circular area was removed, a blue-tiled wheel-in shower was converted from a former closet, and an elevator was also installed.

A prime attraction is Graves’ painting studio. Works there might seem like plein-air exercises, but Nichols explains that all of them date from after he was paralysed. 'He often drew from memory or from books. Those are all remembered or imagined compositions influenced by artists like Morandi or Cezanne.'

And that's all, merely skimming the surface of interests to be found in the house. Kean University uses another building on the site for classes and has hopes of providing lodging for more permanent student guides on site in two apartments. The house itself is used occasionally for university meetings. The Michael Graves firm continues to hold a summer picnic in the grounds.

The Michael Graves house in Princeton remains a singular chance to see a postmodern interior when you're not on Larry Ellison's dinner-party invitation list (he owns a Graves house in Malibu). More importantly, you can actually see the architect’s life just as it was lived. Says Mohney: 'This was his own private museum of architecture on his own terms.' And now ours as well.

Access to the Michael Graves house may be addressed to the Michael Graves College at Kean University

This week, 112 years after the financier’s death, a new House of Morgan has sprung up in Manhattan, four miles north at 270 Park Avenue. If 23 Wall Street was Morgan’s Parthenon, this building is his Colossus: designed by Foster + Partners, the JPMorganChase tower rises a quarter-mile over Midtown and will accommodate some 10,000 employees by year’s end.

The $3 billion skyscraper, criss-crossed by a striking structural megaframe, occupies an entire city block and contains 2.5 million gross sq ft of flexible work spaces – including eight state-of-the-art trading floors, boutique wellness facilities and even a Danny Meyer-curated food hall.

‘It's really the workplace of the future, today,’ Norman Foster, founder and executive chairman of Foster + Partners, said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony Tuesday.

Foster + Partners was brought aboard the project in 2018, after winning a competition to create a revamped global headquarters for JPMorganChase, one that would replace an International Style skyscraper designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

The site was complicated, due to the complex system of rail lines that run beneath. But Lord Foster – whom David Arena, JPMorganChase’s head of global real estate, cheekily referred to as the project’s ‘Lord and often our saviour’ – designed imaginative structural system consisting of fan-shaped columns and triangular bracing that would anchor the building to bedrock 400ft below, while allowing the skyscraper to sit lightly on the site. In fact, the building hovers 80ft above the ground, creating room for a public plaza and green spaces – according to Foster, two-and-a-half times what is typical for such mammoth buildings.

‘This is a somewhat unusual tower,’ the architect continued. ‘It's different, and it's different for very positive reasons’ – chief among them, sustainability. 270 Park Avenue is the largest all-electric tower in New York City with net zero emissions, according to JPMorganChase. It’s also entirely powered by hydroelectric energy.

The building was also designed with employee wellness in mind, from taller-than-usual ceilings (the building is 60 stories, but is comparable in height to a 100-storey tower, according to Foster), circadian lighting, fresh air (more than double than what is usual) and a host of health-minded amenity spaces like a fitness centre, meditation rooms and even indoor spin studios. New-age guru Deepak Chopra was even brought in as a consultant.

But for all the innovation, the building is firmly rooted in tradition, according to Foster, just like the 225-year-old company it houses. ‘It doesn't use any of the fashionable computer wizardry to create exotic shapes,’ the architect said. The design team was inspired by both New York City’s grid system – which came of age with JP Morgan himself – and the grandeur of the traditional banking hall.

No greater is this communicated than in 270 Park Avenue’s soaring lobby, clad in travertine and illuminated by hundreds of honeycomb-like LED ceiling lights. Once visitors pass through a security barrier, they ascend a grand stairway towards an airy elevator lobby. The stairway is flanked by two monumental works by Gerhard Richter, Color Chase One and Color Chase Two. At the stair’s summit, near the elevators, is a lounge, carpeted in cream, dotted with club chairs and encircled by a slatted enclosure. At its centre is an American flag that flutters from an unseen breeze, a creation by Foster himself called Wind Dance.

Heritage is communicated on the exterior of the building, too: the muscular braces are clad in bronze. ‘Park Avenue is one of the great urban spaces in the world… The architecture is the celebration of that,’ Foster said. ‘Bronze is timeless in its qualities, in its endurance.’

The project is not without its controversy. In order to make way for the new 270 Park, JPMorganChase needed to demolish Bunshaft and de Blois’ Union Carbide building, a move that drew outcry from architects and preservationists. The company insists that, with its replacement, it’s giving back to the city, to the tune of $42 billion annually to the local economy, 8,000 construction jobs and the public plaza.

For JPMorganChase’s rank-and-file employees, there’s also the question of returning to the office. While many corporations have adapted to hybrid work schedules, JPMorganChase reinstated a full return-to-office mandate, a move that led employees to circulate a petition and for CEO and chairman Jamie Dimon to fire back with expletives. While the new office may offer some of the most attractive worker amenities in the city (‘You're never going to want to even go home, it's so incredible here,’ New York governor Kathy Hochul joked during the ceremony), it remains to be seen if spin classes and gourmet lunches will be enough.

At the building’s opening, though, the message was firm in more ways than one: before the ribbon-cutting, a DJ played an energetic Jackson 5 remix. The tune? ‘I Want You Back’.

Designed by 23 Degrees Design Shift, Antriya is the dream home of two brothers who envisioned a retreat to be shared across three generations of their family. Spanning 14,500 sq ft, the building is constructed from locally sourced Khammam brown sandstone and Markapuram slate, and, indoors, reclaimed teak and grey lime plaster. These choices subtly soften the harshness associated with brutalism, leaning into a more tactile, natural aesthetic.

Inside, the home is visually and physically open. Expansive living areas boast soaring 15ft ceilings, while coconut trees and curtain creepers break down the building’s scale. Greenery planted on the overhang slab is visible through clerestory windows, reinforcing the sense of living within the landscape. The flexible configurations and profusion of greenery continually blur the boundary between indoors and out – Antriya is all light, air, earth and sky.

The integration of greenery is not merely aesthetic – it’s also functional. In Hyderabad’s humid climate, passive cooling is essential. The home uses natural airflow, cantilevered overhangs and and expansive lawns to mitigate heat.

Among the many standout features is a sculptural staircase that serves as the backdrop to a semi-open lounge. Nearby, a verandah – the social heart of the home – can be opened or enclosed with sliding glass panels. The pool, meanwhile, is a sequestered sanctuary with vines hanging from the ceiling.

A lily pad-covered water body encircles the home, making it feel as though it is floating (the feature also serves the practical purpose of keeping wildlife out). This effect lends another layer of contrast between the manmade and the natural, and is repeated throughout Antriya’s design: from the elevated walkway that leads to the main entrance to the thickly planted landscape by Kiasma Studio that shrouds the house, making it seem to emerge from the undergrowth like a brutalist treehouse. On approach, vision-blocking boundary walls preserve the drama of the reveal, keeping the house hidden until the last possible moment.

In many ways, Antriya redefines what the brutalist style can be: not cold and detached, but alive, responsive and connected. This is a multi-layered family home primed for connection, but it is also a carefully choreographed architectural experience.