Crystal Palace Park's dinosaur sculptures – the world's first life-sized models of prehistoric animals – are among London's quirkiest attractions. This week, the sculptures, originally created between 1852 and 1854, have been given a refresh as part of a wider regeneration of the park, which reopened to the public this month.

Led by Bromley Council and Crystal Palace Park Trust, the work supports the long-term restoration of the Grade II*-listed park, which was created after the Crystal Palace was relocated from the 1851 Great Exhibition to Sydenham.

At the heart of the scheme was the conservation of the Grade I-listed Geological Court, home to the dinosaurs. The sculptures – created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins under the guidance of palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen – were made when dinosaurs had only just been identified by science. Though many of them are now known to be anatomically inaccurate, they remain celebrated as a landmark of public palaeontology and a bastion of Victorian ambition.

During restorations, specialists used paint analysis, material testing and 3D printing to repair the sculptures while preserving their original materials – work that saw them removed from Historic England's Heritage At Risk Register.

Surrounding landscape work restored historic sightlines and topography, while the Upper Lake was desilted and fitted with a new recirculation system to revive its waterfalls. The Grade II-listed Italian Terrace underwent stonework repairs, the Grand Centre Walk, designed by park creator Sir Joseph Paxton, was reinstated as the park’s historic spine, and a bust of Paxton returned to its original site.

More than 7,500 tonnes of excavated soil were reused on-site, and new rain gardens and swales now help manage rainfall. Desilted lake sediment was repurposed into 500 sq m of habitat shelving, while around 58,000 sq m of wildflower meadow and 64,000 perennials have revived the park's once-famous horticultural displays.

Accessibility upgrades, a redesigned Penge Gate entrance echoing the Crystal Palace's modular architecture, a dinosaur-dig-themed play area, and a new timber Visitor Centre by Tate + Co complete the transformation.

Together, these efforts have secured the future of a uniquely Victorian vision – restoring a space where science, art and imagination first collided, and ensuring its prehistoric residents can continue to thrive for generations to come.

It’s been a busy few years for Selldorf Architects, the award-winning New York practice helmed by US400 architect Annabelle Selldorf, with museum projects including The Frick, The National Gallery and The Louvre in the books or on the boards.

The Clark Art Institute, a renowned museum and research institute located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is also set to receive the Selldorf treatment, via a new 15,000 sq ft wing, slated to open in 2028.

The addition will include 12 dedicated galleries to house more than 300 works of art donated by Aso O. Tavitian, a self-made entrepreneur who amassed a formidable collection of European art between 2004 up until his death in 2020. Tavitian also allowed for a $45 million gift to fund construction and support his collection’s curation and care.

‘Before Aso Tavidian's untimely passing, we had a discussion with him about who would be the ideal architect of the wing. Annabelle Selldorf was the person that he wanted, and the person that we wanted,’ said museum director Esther Bell during a press conference Wednesday afternoon.

The architects, who had renovated the Clark’s Manton Research Center a decade ago, faced a challenging task: how to unite a 1970s red granite gallery wing with the Clark's original marble building, a 1950s neoclassical design by Daniel Perry. (Tadao Ando also has two structures on the 140-acre campus). Previously, the buildings had been connected in a ‘shall we say, inelegant way,’ via a bridge, Annabelle Selldorf said. ‘It never felt like it was a gracious transition between one and the other.’

‘They’re personalities,’ the architect added, ‘So, what is one to do but to create a companion?’

That architectural 'companion' was revealed Wednesday for the first time. The insertion is Selldorf's brand of quiet elegance, appearing as a simple rectilinear volume nestled between two existing buildings. The facade, however, is a pixelated array of Calacatta Malva marble, whose rich indigo veining helps create a visual transition between the all-white ‘50s building and the speckled red-and-blue granite one from the '70s. The move, ‘creates a kind of mosaic but also brings together colouration and a sympathy in two directions,’ Selldorf explained.

The gallery interiors will be similarly straight-forward, with white oak flooring and bronze-framed windows, all the better to show off a new landscape, designed by Reed Hildebrand, and Tavitian’s treasures, which include four centuries of arresting Renaissance, Netherlandish, Baroque and 18th-century French artworks by Anthony van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Elizabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun and more. The works are the subject of an exhibition, now on view at the Clark through February 2027.

‘There's simply nothing more fun and interesting than to work with the curators, get to know the art, look at it first on small images on the computer, and then see the real thing,' Selldorf said. 'I think we're going to make really extraordinarily beautiful spaces for galleries in these 12 rooms.'

The new home for the Fonds Bustamante, the Eglise Saint-Croix, a deconsecrated 12th-century church in Arles, has been many things: a stop on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route, a private home, a spa, and now an art foundation for French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante.

Tour the Fonds Bustamante’s new home

At 74, Bustamante has a career spanning photography, painting and sculpture. He represented France at the São Paulo Biennale in 1994 and the Venice Biennale in 2003, and was director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris for four years. He has long been thinking about this project, including an aborted effort eight years ago to create it in his hometown of Toulouse (at the last minute, the city commandeered the building for a football club). When the church came up for sale in Arles, he jumped at it.

Arles presents a unique challenge, as it is home to a number of excellent art foundations as well as the annual Rencontres d'Arles photography festival. 'We have to do a good job,' says the tall, silver-maned Bustamante. 'Because we're going to be judged. People will say, “What have they brought that's new?"'

To renovate the church, he hired architect Charles Zana, whose work on the CAB foundation in Saint-Paul de Vence he admired. Zana gutted the building and did the job in only 18 months, keeping the building's historical integrity while adding a contemporary feel.

And though his intervention is subtle, he says it was a major undertaking: 'There were many scars from the past.' As to the exercise of turning a church into an art space, Zana found it natural. 'It's easier to make an art foundation in a place of worship than a nightclub. There's a silence that's similar in both places, and even a way of walking, whether looking at art or stained glass.'

The entrance is now a monumental door in bronze-coloured metal, with moucharabieh-like latticework. Inside, Zana kept traces of the stone walls and arches that had survived the years. He references the building's ecclesiastical past with a long nave-like axis on the ground floor, leading to a stairway at the end. Exposed white corrugated aluminium on the ceilings emphasises the architect's hand while reminding visitors that this was once an open space.

The exhibition rooms, spread over three floors, are in neutral shades of stone and concrete. Zana used warmer tones in the dramatically lit stairwell, with terrazzo stairs crafted by local artisans, and terracotta paint on the walls, colours which remind him of the nearby Camargue. Bustamante added a strip of enamelled lava tiles to the building's façade, choosing yellow in a nod to Vincent Van Gogh, the city's most famous former resident.

Bustamante means for the foundation to ensure his own legacy and also to support that of his peers, notably European artists from the 1980s onward. 'I lived through a very important time, between avant-gardistes and the end of the avant-garde,' he says. 'I don't want the artists of that tradition to be forgotten, and I think that today, memories are very short.'

To help with that task, he created a supervisory board and scientific committee of important figures from the art world. The inaugural exhibition, titled 'En Miroirs', features his work in dialogue with artists he's exhibited or worked with over the past 40 years, all friends or former students.

In the nave, PSSST GOD is a series of monochrome paintings by Gerhard Merz, a German painter born in 1947. Bustamante says, 'With monochrome, we arrive at the end of painting. He is no longer dealing with art history; he is dealing with God.' The first floor features a stunning double-height gallery, where the Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias created a large cast aluminium and glass sculpture especially for the space. It sits near a sculpture by Franz West and a photograph of an upside-down tree by Rodney Graham.

Another gallery includes an abstract painting by a former student, Alice Anderson, made while she danced a performance with a microwave oven. It hangs beside Bustamante's 1977 photograph of a house being built in Spain, what he calls a 'photographic painting', showing the world under construction at a certain moment in time.

On the top floor, an apartment with a spectacular view will be an artist's residence, as Bustamante plans for the foundation to be active year-round with exhibitions, masterclasses and symposiums. And the street-level café with its cobblestoned terrace is sure to be a hit with locals.

fondsbustamante.com

zana.fr

Faro Santander, a major new cultural destination about to launch northern Spain, has just announced its opening date – 8 September 2026 – and unveiled its majestic home, a period building redesigned by Chipperfield Architects. The historic Pereda Building in Santander, which was until recently the headquarters of Banco Santander, is nine years into its transformation journey to host the expansive art collection of the bank’s philanthropic foundation and invite visitors into its masterpiece-laden galleries.

Explore the new home for Faro Santander

The Pereda Building is an instantly recognisable, listed landmark, known by locals as a key point on Santander’s seafront. Chipperfield Architects has been hard at work, refreshing and reimagining the former office building into a thoroughly contemporary space for culture. Now, spanning ten storeys, the building will house the Banco Santander Collection and its thousands of artworks.

The interior – some 10,000 sq m of usable floor space – now includes 3,000 sq m of galleries across five floors. Respecting the original structure while refining and upgrading it for 21st-century art standards, the renovation sees the building awarded an Outstanding BREEAM certification, with a score of 92.96 – 'the world’s highest registered by a museum or cultural space', the museum's representatives explain.

Beyond simply restoring a historic structure, or creating a high-profile home for a private art collection, the project has a strong civic face too, David Chipperfield reminds visitors: 'Architecturally, it boasts a complex and multi-layered history.' The building has been part of the city's history for centuries, its oldest parts erected in 1795 and added to, reworked, and expanded over time. A major 1961 renovation by architect Javier González de Riancho was one of its more recent chapters.

'We focused on rethinking the spaces and connections a public building needs, while recognising that the real significance of the project lies in the institution’s commitment to openness, culture and participation,' says Chipperfield. He adds: 'The project is the result of a shared ambition to reimagine Banco Santander’s former offices as a civic and cultural space for the city.'

Daniel Vega Pérez de Arlucea, director of Faro Santander, concurs: 'The transformation was about pursuing our vision of creating a cultural centre that is open to everyone – somewhere that is welcoming and accessible, with wonderfully diverse and high-quality spaces, where every visitor can enjoy a truly unique experience.'

farosantander.com

davidchipperfield.com

In the woods above the well-known French spa town of Evian, a new concert hall, La Source Vive, is shaped like a horse's hoof and is as finely tuned as a Stradivarius.

Fifty years ago, Antoine Riboud, then CEO of Danone Foods, created a classical music festival here. When he hired Mstislav Rostropovich as artistic director, the great cellist requested a new concert hall, something between a Russian dacha and Yehudi Menuhin's tent in Gstaad. In response, the maverick French architect Patrick Bouchain created La Grange au Lac, a large, rustic wooden space with chandeliers, inaugurated in 1993.

Explore the new Evian concert hall

Fast forward to 2017, when another French philanthropist and music lover, Aline Foriel-Destezet, was looking to build a concert hall of her own. She saw La Grange au Lac, was charmed, and hired Bouchain. After searching for a location, they chose to place the new building next to Bouchain's earlier creation. 'My life has been exceptional, because 30 years apart, I received pretty much the same command from two different people,' says the architect, 'and both gave me the same freedom.'

Bouchain told Foriel-Destezet he wanted to work with a partner, someone who would do the heavy architectural lifting while he acted as artistic director. He had become friendly with Philippe Chiambaretta, whose firm, PCA-Stream (behind Paris' Stream Building), employs a design approach based largely on science and exploration. The two men's offices were minutes apart, and they frequently met over coffee to discuss theories and ideas.

The first step was a much-needed restoration of the 1,000-seat Grange au Lac, which would now be devoted to symphonies. Then the architects created a smaller, complementary building with 500 seats, for chamber music concerts and musical recordings, La Source Vive. The architects also tore down the existing foyer and replaced it with a new one that leads to both concert halls, a wood-and-glass structure that references a Novarina-Prouvé building in Evian. Together, the buildings form a complex named Les Mélèzes (for the surrounding larch trees), with a programme of music and performing arts throughout the year.

Music was the driving element for La Source Vive's design. 'It's interesting for an architect to have this type of command, where you're not only looking, but listening, too,' says Chiambaretta. He and Bouchain worked closely with violinist Renaud Capuçon, the current director of the Rencontres Musicales d'Evian festival, who told them he wanted a sound that was 'warm and silky', citing favourite venues such as the Vienna Musikverein. A key member of the team was the internationally renowned acoustician Albert Xu, who passed away at age 89, just as construction started.

La Source Vive's footprint was imposed by nature; since the team wanted to avoid cutting down any trees, they chose a round clearing that was practically bare. The number of seats determined its volume, as another rule in acoustics is about 11 cubic metres of volume per audience member – enough space for the sound to bounce around.

The design was an iterative process, guided by acoustic parameters such as reverberation time – ideally 1.8 seconds. Concert halls come in two main forms: a rectangular shoebox or a 'vineyard', with seating surrounding the stage. La Source Vive became a hybrid of the two, an oval shape with a conical roof. Bouchain made models out of wood or plaster, while Chiambaretta’s studio created a 3D digital model, inputting different shapes and materials to simulate sound quality and sightlines. 'The form resembled a brain, and we had scans, like MRIs, where we could know the reverberation time for each seat,' says Chiambaretta. 'It was crazy.'

At every stage of construction, acousticians from Meta captured sound at different points in the room and compared the results with the architects' predictions. 'Each time we remeasured, correcting the model to be sure the sound would be perfect,' says Chiambaretta. 'Because we knew if we screwed up, if we ended up with two seconds of reverberation, Capuçon and Aline would kill us.'

Specialised artisans used age-old techniques, such as plastering the walls with trowels. 'All the great concert halls of the 19th century are in plaster,' says Bouchain, a master of materials. The unpainted plaster is sculpted with squiggly lines that resemble an electrocardiogram, closer together at the bottom than at the top, for optimal reverberation.

Chiambaretta compares the building's shell to an onion, layered with plaster, concrete, a wood frame, and finally the envelope in oiled copper, an aesthetic choice that allows it to blend into the surrounding woods. Above the stage, acoustic aluminium panels open like a camera aperture, exposing an oculus in the ceiling. That way, says Bouchain, 'the musicians can rehearse by daylight rather than artificial lighting'.

Two-person seats like little sofas are made from orangey-beige leather (rejected by fashion houses due to small imperfections), and padded for comfort and sound quality. They can be moved around, even close to the instruments, offering an accessible experience for the hard-of-hearing.

Six months before opening, everyone who worked on La Source Vive was invited to a special concert to thank them and test the sound in the presence of an audience. This was followed by a 'technical' concert and more tweaking of the interior – like an instrument, the room's sound can be tuned from one concert to another. In mid-June, the venue had its first challenge, hosting a concert for world leaders gathering at the G7 summit.

And on 24 June, the Rencontres Musicales season finally opened at La Source Vive with a quartet that included Capuçon and superstar cellist Yo Yo Ma. The sounds of Brahms and Schumann were warm and silky, just as requested. As the musicians left the stage, Yo Yo Ma thanked the two architects, sitting in the front row.

Afterwards, Chiambaretta reflected on the experience. 'It was a good lesson to work with musicians who are used to playing together. That’s rare in architecture, where we’re usually competing. But Patrick couldn't have done this project without me, and I couldn't have done it without him.'

pca-stream.com

Barcelona's iconic Tres Xemeneies (Three Chimneys) thermal power plant - celebrated by architecture enthusiasts for its brutalist architecture silhouette and enjoyed by locals for the clandestine nudist beach at its feet- is carving out a new place on the city's cultural agenda. A major transformation into a media hub is set to follow.

Inside Three Chimneys, and the venue's future

It has been 15 years since Three Chimneys ceased operations, abandoned by Spain's national power company as its infrastructure became obsolete and its environmental impact increasingly untenable. Since then, the complex has become a symbol of an earlier Barcelona, before the city's transition towards renewable energy and legislation that curtailed development along the coastline.

Its three 200-metre-high, sand-coloured chimneys rising against the Mediterranean are often the first landmark seen by visitors arriving by air. In recent years, events including the Manifesta Biennial, open-air cinema screenings and, most recently, an exhibition responding to the themes of the 2026 UIA World Congress of Architects have drawn curious visitors to the site. For the most part, however, it has remained an extraordinary urban void.

Architecture practices MARVEL and Garcés de Seta Bonet Arquitectes have been commissioned to transform the complex into Catalunya Media City, a major hub for research, education, exhibitions and congresses. Recognising that Three Chimneys is Barcelona's defining industrial landmark, the architects aim to preserve as much of the existing structure as possible while opening the site to the public with new green spaces, pedestrian promenades and direct access to the beach.

A new transparent rectangular volume will extend south from the turbine hall towards the sea, accommodating the site's new programme while leaving the historic structure largely intact. Strategic cuts through the existing building will improve circulation and strengthen the relationship between old and new. Jordi Garcés, co-founder of Garcés de Seta Bonet Arquitectes, explained: 'We have designed a proposal that works through connections and knots, temporal, landscape and territorial.'

The project also follows passive design principles. Energy generation will come from 4,500 square metres of rooftop solar panels, while the north-facing façade will incorporate terraces and balconies overlooking the River Besòs and neighbouring Badalona. 'These architectural elements at different heights will offer new perspectives of the city,' stated Garcés. 'As if it were a piece of land art.'

uia2026bcn.org

Theodore Roosevelt is largely remembered for his heroic command at the Battle of San Juan Hill, for doubling the national park system and for surviving an attempt on his life thanks to a serendipitously positioned eyeglasses case. But when Roosevelt arrived in the North Dakota Badlands in June 1884, he was a broken man; both his mother and his wife had died within hours of each other just months before. The wild frontier offered a place where the 25-year-old could grieve. ‘Nothing could be more lonely and nothing more beautiful,' he recounted of moonlight striking the sawtoothed expanse. Roosevelt eventually remarried and, in 1901, became America’s 26th president, an achievement he credited to his time in North Dakota.

Explore the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library

More than a century later, Roosevelt is back in the Badlands in the form of a $400m Snøhetta-designed library and museum, which will be inaugurated on Independence Day for America's 250th birthday. With its low-slung profile and grassy roof, the building appears as but a murmur on the prairie. ‘You could easily have argued that the library should have been some grand, bold representational architecture that stood in violent contrast with the landscape – but that's not what we wanted,' says the new library's CEO Edward O'Keefe, a North Dakota native.

Snøhetta won the design job in 2020, following an extensive selection process. ‘Our starting point was how to make this landscape something real. We didn't talk about a building,' says firm co-founder, and Wallpaper* US400 honoree, Craig Dykers, who spent ten days hiking through the area (‘It's called the Badlands for a reason,' deadpans Dykers). A pair of pebbles picked up on the trek made their way to a design meeting, their smooth surfaces and complementary scales suggesting a two-part building. When a leaf drifted onto the table, the architects realised they had a roof – and their concept.

The resulting, 96,000 sq ft structure differs little from the rock-and-leaf exercise. The library consists of two volumes – one for exhibition space, the other for public programmes – united by a landscaped canopy. The unique structural system is a mass-timber-and-steel hybrid, with striated rammed earth walls, attributes that will help it achieve Living Building Challenge certification, one of the world's most rigorous sustainability standards. The roof, planted with prairie grasses and lined with trails, offers panoramic views of the Badlands, vistas that would have captivated Roosevelt more than a century ago.

Inside, immersive exhibits put guests into vignettes from Roosevelt's life, from his childhood home to the Bull Moose campaign trail. There are also treasured artefacts on view, including Roosevelt's cavalry uniform and the eyeglasses case that thwarted an assassin's bullet. ‘In most museums, you're learning facts and figures about a person's life or time. Here, you're the main character in the story,' says O'Keefe.

One of the library's most important aspects is a one-mile trail that circumscribes the site and connects to a broader trail network, a nod to Roosevelt's legacy as a pioneering conservationist. At one moment, visitors may encounter an elevated boardwalk; at another, they may descend into a sunken channel and be eye-level with the prairie. ‘The idea is that we're helping people read and see this place, and learn from it in the ways that Roosevelt did,' says Michelle Delk, a landscape architect and partner at Snøhetta.

Working with North Dakota State University and restoration group Resource Environmental Solutions, the library has launched an initiative that sees students, volunteers and ecologists collect seeds from around 200 local species with the goal of cultivating and replanting them on the library site and across the Badlands region.

And there are attempts to heal the land in other ways. While Roosevelt remains one of America's most popular presidents, there are problematic facets of his legacy, including white supremacist views. Shortly after acquiring the land from the US Forest Service, the library's leadership invited members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara (MHA) Nation, along with Roosevelt's descendants, to the site for a land blessing ceremony. Representatives of the Standing Rock Sioux, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and other tribes were also present.

There has been a lot of talk of presidential legacies in the US lately, but this building has a different aim, says O'Keefe: to use the past to inspire and interrogate what it means to be a global citizen. ‘“Library” and “museum” are probably the two least accurate words to describe what we have built,' he says. ‘It's a call to adventure.'

snohetta.com

trlibrary.com

This article appears in Wallpaper’s August 2026 Creative America issue, available from 4 July, in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The National Museum of Finland in Helsinki was always supposed to be expanded, says Samuli Miettinen, founding partner of JKMM Architects and lead designer of the museum’s gleaming new extension due to be inaugurated in spring 2027. Even the famous architect trio of Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen, who designed the original museum, which was completed in 1916 and built in the National Romantic Style, had 'drawn plans to expand the wings and add a courtyard,' he explains. There were other projects too, including a brutalist architecture extension by prominent Finnish architect Aarno Ruusuvuori in the mid-1980s, Miettinen continues, but the resources and capital were never there, and the plans floundered.

Tour the refreshed National Museum of Finland in Helsinki

'So there have been decades of plans, but now it’s finally happening,' says Miettinen of this once-in-a-generation commission located across the road from Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia Hall and won by JKMM Architects in an anonymous competition in 2019. The expansion will see the museum gain, among other things, a new fully glazed entrance pavilion with a restaurant and art installations, new exhibition spaces for temporary shows and events, a glazed courtyard that acts a link between the old and new building and a new access route into the formerly enclosed garden and museum; the idea is that visitors and residents will have plenty of public spaces they can enjoy without having to pay for a museum entrance ticket.

About 90 per cent of the new extension is below ground, explains Miettinen, but the ten per cent that is above is a bright and airy 600 sq m sculptural pavilion with a 43m-wide saucer-shaped roof that appears to float above 5m-tall undulating glass walls. With its relatively low height and the fact that its connection routes to the historic museum building (which has also undergone a refurb and collection redesign) are all below ground, the new pavilion is low enough and discrete enough that it 'adapts well to the older construction,' says Miettinen with a smile, 'despite its controversial shape.'

The spherical structure is intended as a forward-looking 21st-century counterpoint to the ornate historic building it stands next to, and its pioneering structural engineering underlines this fact. 'The pavilion’s bowl roof weighs 1,400 tonnes and is the same diameter as the Roman Pantheon but stands on a pedestal of reinforced concrete three metres wide,' explains Miettinen, likening it to 'a water tower structure.’

The pedestal sits inside a slightly asymmetrically placed perforated golden box of bronze aluminium at the pavilion’s heart, which also conceals lift shafts, a service kitchen, and technical installations. The suspended ceiling inside the pavilion is covered in 5,000 handmade white ceramic tiles in the shape of hearts, clovers and crosses that weigh 20kg each and took a year to create – they are cast using plaster moulds and subsequently fired at temperatures above 1,100°C – and assemble into a pattern that looks at once organic and geometric.

The curved ceiling tiles and the roof’s globe-like shape radiate a celestial quality and 'reference our world, symbolising a universal message of tenderness, hope and a better future,' says Miettinen. If the original National Museum, which was built while Finland was still part of the Russian Empire, was symbolic of Finnish aspirations for independence, this pavilion and its handcrafted dynamic ceiling represent an evolution of what it is to be Finnish, says Miettinen, a less homogeneous identity in which 'people from different cultures and backgrounds can find themselves.'

Miettinen refers to the extension project as ‘quarry architecture’ as the concrete pedestal is anchored to ancient granite bedrock 30m down and much of the technical installations, storage spaces and services are carved into it too. Fittingly, as you travel down from the ground floor of this new airy, light-filled ‘public piazza’, things get darker, and the two new black box exhibition spaces (measuring 840 sq m and 270 sq m respectively) are stained with black fire protection paint inside and out.

The material palette of the project is rich yet also deliberately minimal. Brass and bronze aluminium are featured in beautiful touches; the former on the handrails in the new extension; the latter to luxuriant effect on all the bathroom stall walls and doors in the new pavilion. Timber too is used effectively in different hues; painted black on the new temporary exhibition space walls and left untouched in the museum shop lined in spruce.

On the journey down to the exhibition spaces, you can sit on informal auditorium-type seating covered in light green woven horse tail hair, 'the most durable fabric in the world,' says partner and interior architect at JKMM Päivi Meuronen. By spring, the lobby will also be filled with benches carved out of the elm trees felled to make way for the extension and then carefully charred and painted. Like all the interior architecture in the extension, and many of the design elements, these have been designed by the 15-strong in-house interiors team at JKMM led by Meuronen.

As is often the case with JKMM projects, integrated art also features prominently and is used to add layers, ornament and depth to the project. There are two nature-themed mosaics by Finnish artist Tuula Lehtinen in the foyer that feature 92,000 tiles made and glazed by hand by the artist and her team in the industrial city of Tampere, 170km north of Helsinki. Continuing with this theme of Finnish arts and crafts are the 103 bespoke white pendant luminaires placed at different heights above the restaurant and designed to 'create a smaller and more intimate scale so you don’t have the feeling that you are sitting in a big hall,' says Meuronen.

Designed after the lily of the valley (Finland’s national flower) by Finnish glass artist Milla Vaahtera in collaboration with JKMM, each one is made by hand — and therefore unique — in the historic Nuutajärvi glass factory in western Finland that has been active since the 1790s. 'Almost everybody in Finland collected these flowers when they were kids and would put them in their pocket so they could preserve their beauty,' says Vaahtera. 'We wanted to provide a humble but collective experience of beauty that people would remember from their childhood.'

kansallismuseo.fi

jkmm.fi

People generally have one question for architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien when they find out the duo designed the new Obama Presidential Center in Chicago: How involved was the 44th president in the project?

‘We joke that Barack was one of those clients that comes in and says, ‘If I weren’t a ______, I’d be an architect.’ Which is always a little problematic when you are an architect,” laughs Tsien

In fact, the former president has spoken several times about architecture as a youthful ambition. No surprise then, “[His] was a very dynamic and very interesting involvement,’ Tsien says.

The engagement of both the former President and First Lady Michelle Obama is evident throughout the site, which formally opens on Juneteenth (19 June, a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the US), nearly a decade after Williams and Tsien won a competition to design the centre. Barack pushed for boldness, at one point invoking Constantin Brancusi; Michelle kept returning to the word ‘fun.’

From the outset, the architects, who were awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2013, framed the project around the values of ennobling and enabling. The first represented a landmark worthy of the nation’s first Black president; the second reflected Barack’s years empowering residents as a community organiser on Chicago’s South Side.

‘We’ve always thought very much about not trying to just make a building, but trying to make a place,’ says Tsien. That place now unfolds within Jackson Park, the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed landscape that once hosted the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

The surprise of the 19.3-acre campus is how little it feels like a monument. Instead, it reads as a series of spaces for everyday life, with small surprises throughout. While the 225-foot museum tower is the most recognisable image, an argument could be made that the real story happens at ground level: a forum, a Chicago Public Library branch, a 21,000 sq ft playground, gardens, beehives, a picnic area (complete with grills, per Barack’s request) and a regulation basketball court (in a separate building designed by Moody Nolan), all woven into a landscape by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). With the exception of the museum, everything is free and open to the public.

'Play and fun was such a big part of what the Obamas wanted,’ says MVVA principal Matthew Bird, adding ‘having spaces to gather, and a variety of spaces, was extremely important.’

Interiors were the purview of Michael S. Smith, the Los Angeles designer responsible for the Obama White House interiors, and author of Designing History: The Extraordinary Art & Style of the Obama White House. He advised on furnishings and oversaw the museum’s full-scale recreation of the Oval Office circa 2014 (where visitors can have their photo taken at President Obama’s desk).

Art is everywhere, with more than two dozen commissioned works by artists including Julie Mehretu, Mark Bradford and Nick Cave, most of which can be viewed without a ticket.

About the tower. First: it is a museum, not a library, which explains the limited windows. The hand-made edifice is clad in what Williams describes as ‘very figured’ New Hampshire granite; other buildings on the site are clad in ‘a quieter stone.’

Visitors traverse the levels of exhibitions via escalators positioned directly next to the 83-foot-tall Mehretu stained glass piece, offering a colourful, filtered view of the city while ascending, often accompanied by music from Barack's own playlist.

Near the top, five-foot-tall concrete letters, creating sentences drawn from Obama’s 2015 Selma speech, wrap two elevations of the building. The installation, entitled You Are America, emerged from a collaboration with Pentagram consulting partner Michael Bierut, who suggested language as an alternative to an abstract pattern. The words – in the same typeface used by the former President during his campaign and his presidency - are intentionally difficult to read to avoid feeling ‘oppressingly bombastic,’ per Bierut.

Standing in the Sky Room at the top of the museum (the architects’ favourite space), visitors find themselves enveloped by those words, while gazing out across Chicago’s South and West Sides.

In a video posted by the Obama Foundation, Williams recalled that when the architects first met Barack, he said he wanted the centre to be ‘exactly the opposite of all presidential libraries.’ Mission accomplished.

In that same video, Barack lays out his hopes for its legacy: ‘Twenty years from now, 30 years from now, I want young people all across the South Side of Chicago, all across Chicago, all across America, to be able to look at this centre and say “this is a sign I count, and this is a sign that I can change the world."'

In Marble Falls, a Texas Hill Country town of about 10,000, a new gallery along Main Street, called Arthouse, offers an unexpected surprise: access to one of America’s great collections of private art.

Arthouse’s owners, Mickey and Jeanne Klein, have been gathering work for close to half a century. Their collection spans many of the most influential figures in contemporary art, from blue-chip names like Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell to emerging voices, across painting, photography, sculpture, large scale installation and more.

They developed their refined eye under the mentorship of legendary Houston patron Dominique de Menil, who toured them around the world in search of art. 'You learn about art by looking at art,' Mickey tells Wallpaper*. He adds: 'When we were with Mrs. de Menil we saw everything. We went to Moscow. We went to Chicago. We saw so much art. And we started seeing it through her eyes.'

The idea of providing that kind of exposure in a place that largely lacks it is a major driving force for the project. 'It will affect everyone,' he adds. 'It will open peoples’ eyes.'

The project began as an office relocation. After decades in Midland, in west Texas, Mickey sold much of his oil and gas operation, making a permanent presence there unnecessary. Two longtime employees asked to move the business, and Klein agreed. 'Find a place you love,' he told them. They chose Marble Falls. Then the Kleins chose San Antonio-based Lake Flato, which had designed (and later added to) their current house in Austin’s Westlake neighbourhood. After a few conversations, their office project had morphed into something much more ambitious.

Arthouse occupies a narrow infill lot. A front wall of unadorned, locally quarried Leuders limestone anchors it to the region. A perforated metal canopy, complemented by corrugated and meshed metal surfaces throughout, merge local vernacular with a lighter, more contemporary layer.

Lake Flato project architect Grace Boudewyns describes the material approach as 'off-the-shelf' where possible. The building is elegant, but not precious. 'We wanted it to feel like it belongs here,' says. 'But it also has to be a quiet backdrop for the art.'

Third generation Japanese gardener Sada Uchiyama designed a small, minimalist courtyard between the entry wall and the gallery, providing a brief pause and a buffer from the street. Low black mondo grass is punctuated by stone sculptures.

Inside, the 2,000 square foot gallery occupies the ground floor, with 12 foot ceilings and an off centre linear skylight that provides even, diffuse light. An open web metal truss provides exposed structure, and a touch of 'ranch tech,' as Boudewyns puts it, while mechanicals are hidden behind perforated ceiling panels. Other materials are simple but luminous. Polished concrete floors softly reflect light. High white walls carry the art, enveloping portions of the trusses above. A movable central partition allows the layout to change between exhibitions.

The opening exhibition, 'Words Matter,' pulls together text-based work by iconic figures like Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer and Faith Ringgold alongside fast-rising talents like Kenturah Davis and Nicolas Galanin, whose Never Forget depicts his full size recreation of the original 'Hollywoodland' sign, made to spell 'Indianland.' Upstairs, the offices are warmer, almost domestic, dominated by wood surfaces and big views. They’re also full of art, from conference rooms to bathrooms.

The Kleins are currently curating Arthouse’s exhibitions themselves, drawing from their sprawling collection. Shows will change every few months, including an upcoming exhibition focused on photography. Works range widely in medium and scale, but installations will be carefully edited, Jeanne says. 'We’re not putting as much around anymore,' she says. 'Just have excellence.'

The project, both rooted in place and elegantly modern, adds a powerful cultural layer in Marble Falls – which has chiefly drawn visitors with its small-town charm and access to several lakes – without changing its character. Reinforcing the Kleins’ focus on promoting looking and exploring, it is easy to read, not intimidating. It allows people to move through at their own pace, in any direction. Already local students have begun arriving, and a preview event for civic leaders drew nearly 100 people, many of whom had never met the Kleins before.

Mickey shares a simple guideline: 'Don’t try to see everything. Pick one work, spend time with it, then move on.' At 90, he says he’s less interested in accumulation than in sharing. Some of his grown children have wondered why he has put so much time and money into this faraway project.

'I’m getting so much pleasure out of it,' he says. 'Why not do it?'

Brusk, Bruges’ newest cultural building, designed by Belgian studios Robbrecht en Daem architecten and Olivier Salens architecten, has been seven years in the making. 'We really like that it’s not an isolated building in a park, but has that urban fabric of connection. It’s a place where you feel the city’s paths, its culture, its alleyways,' says Olivier Salens, and Paul Robbrecht agrees.

Discover the Brusk exhibition hall in Bruges

Located in the heart of the medieval northern Belgian city, a Unesco world heritage site, the 9,500 sq m new ‘exhibition hall’ occupies the site of a former school, allowing access to residents and visitors to this part of the city for the first time. It is composed of a glazed concrete building with an expansive sloping roof clad in textured dark green glass tiles and a long red brick service annexe with a sawtooth outline. The museum’s central feature is a generous and airy public passageway, dubbed the Scala Grande, which has been filled with a captivating monumental fresco by French artist Laure Prouvost. It can be visited for free and beyond museum opening hours.

Off this central space, visitors can find the ticketing hall, shop, educational spaces, an auditorium and a large, airy café that spills out onto an outdoor garden. 'We consciously decided to lift the exhibition spaces to the first floor to give the entire ground floor back to the city,' says Salens. Two sculptural staircases lead to the exhibition halls and cleverly allow for closer interaction with the Prouvost piece, which you soon realise is not just painted on the walls but also features textured and bas-relief elements made of mirror, bronze and glass.

Once inside the two exhibition halls, which measure 40x40m and 40x20m respectively, the mastery of what the architects have achieved becomes even more apparent. Both spaces are entirely column-free and soar up to 13.75m, despite the brief asking only for '5.5 m high spaces'. And both spaces feature 8m-high, tilted north-facing windows reminiscent of classic artists’ studios, which bathe the space in that prized northern light creatives are so keen to work in.

It is not too harsh, explains Robbrecht, because it comes in at an angle and has been diffused with southern light thanks to small apertures in the sloping roof on the opposite side. 'That mix of northern with a bit of southern light, which is not as cold, is important,' he says. Though the museum opened with two ‘dark’ shows that necessitated all the glazing be covered, the idea is that these two soaring cathedral-like spaces will also host large-scale sculptural installations or more experimental art or performances that are not necessarily display-based. One exhibition could also take place in both halls at once as they are connected by a wide walkway.

Given Brusk’s contemporary design, size and green glass roof, and the fact that it is surrounded by significant historic, cultural and residential buildings on all sides (including a home for over-65s), it is no surprise that the architects 'were initially worried that one of our neighbours might object to our planning application and the project could be stalled'. Luckily, this didn’t happen, in part because the architects 'went to huge efforts to talk with neighbours in the preliminary phase', says Salens.

This was also because Brusk is attuned to its surroundings, preserving historic sight lines and the Bruges skyline and lining up the central Scala Grande space with the iconic 13th-century Belfry (bell tower) to the north-west. Brusk may be a large contemporary building, but you walk up to it through a series of alleys, gardens and courtyards, and when you first come across it, it is almost an unexpected discovery.

The same approach of dialoguing with its neighbours, be they human, architectural or urban, and of bringing together old and new, is evident in the fact that two of the historic school buildings were renovated instead of being demolished as per the initial plan. A small one right next to the museum’s northern entrance has been turned into a very special ‘store room’ for local residents to put their bikes. A much larger and handsome 1930s brick building north of Brusk has also been kept. 'It was too good to demolish, so we said let’s keep it and think of a function for it,' says Robbrecht.

It has been restored and a new public square created outside and now houses Bron, the gleaming 1,000 sq m scientific research centre for Musea Brugge, the municipal umbrella organisation that manages the city’s art collection and 13 of its most historic buildings and prestigious art museums, including Brusk, centralising work that had previously been carried out on different sites across the city. ‘But also ensuring that the site isn’t just for visitors or people using the café,' says Salens, 'but that it is also a place of work.’

In a bid to further enhance operations and connectivity Bron has been joined to Brusk’s service building, which houses restoration workshops, storage spaces and offices, via a covered walkway. The two exhibition halls in Brusk are also connected to the service building via overhead walkways, facilitating the restoration and transportation of art and, importantly, allowing this nascent museum complex to remain car-free.

To the north-west, Brusk will eventually be connected at ground-floor level with the neighbouring Groeningemuseum (home to six centuries of Belgian art) and share ticket and locker facilities once the latter is renovated and reopens in 2031. 'We have already created a connection with Groeninge for artworks to come in from the service building and be transported via the northern walkway directly into the museum,' explains Salens, adding that this wasn’t part of the original brief.

Altogether these buildings and walkways are creating what will eventually become a veritable Museum Quarter, replete with a large park for art and leisure to the south of Brusk that will allow access into the building from that southern side. Designed by Swiss landscape architect Georges Descombes, the park will also offer residents and visitors restored access to centuries-old trees and a historic canal. Unlike many museum quarters, however, the beauty of this one is that it’s right in the heart of the historic city.

robbrechtendaem.com

A new viewing platform, the Southern Lookout, has just opened on the northern edge of Sydney. The structure, the work of local practice AJC Architects, has been designed to bring a contemporary visitor attraction and intervention that turns the spotlight onto Australia’s bushland – and in particular, this area surrounding a former quarry.

Discover Australia's new Southern Lookout

The project, an elegant, linear structure, 42m in length, sits elevated on a steeply sloped site, jutting out towards the leafy wilderness. It is one of the first initiatives in opening up the site to the public (it was previously out of bounds due to the quarry business), who can now visit the 60-hectare space thanks to ongoing landscape-led regeneration plans.

Taking its cues from the quarry's elemental and utilitarian nature, the Southern Lookout adopts a similarly industrial aesthetic with its weathering steel construction. Its form is 'simple and robust', the architects explain.

The platform's shape is striking – slender yet sturdy and crafted to have a minimal footprint on the nature below, to protect the surrounding ecosystem. It also achieves an impressive 18m span and a 6m cantilever, as it projects into the air towards the former quarry site.

The wider setting, titled Hornsby Park, is currently being reimagined by the local authorities, Hornsby Shire Council, as a public open area for locals and visitors to enjoy. Sydney-based AJC Architects and its emphasis on creativity and sustainable architecture were crucial in making the visitor attraction happen. The team worked on it together with the studio of Clouston Associates.

architectsajc.com

Set within Napa Valley’s storied To Kalon Vineyard, Robert Mondavi Winery is widely credited with putting California wine on the global map. When it opened in 1966, its mission was as much cultural as oenological: to welcome the public into the experience of wine. Its iconic tower and sweeping arch – designed by midcentury designer Cliff May – served as both beacon and invitation, signalling a departure from European-inspired models toward something distinctly Californian.

Over time, however, as the brand expanded and the campus grew in an ad hoc, increasingly inward-looking way, its identity diffused. The facilities no longer reflected advances in winemaking or how visitors engaged with it, prompting a dramatic reimagining. For Aidlin Darling Design, the San Francisco–based practice known for finely tuned, site-driven work rather than large corporate commissions, it was an unexpected but compelling opportunity. ‘This is a project that’s way too important – we have to do it,’ recalls founding partner David Darling.

The intervention, says brand marketing director Peggy Hemphill, preserves the estate’s legacy while bringing production to a state-of-the-art level and rethinking the visitor experience – 'blurring the boundaries between architecture and the land’ to reconnect guests with the vineyard and the Mayacamas Mountains beyond. At its core is a renewed emphasis on place: opening the estate to its surroundings and integrating production with hospitality.

The reimagined campus – spanning 216,000 sq ft – pairs restraint with clarity. Decades of accretions have been stripped back and replaced with new layers that sharpen May’s original vision. The arch and tower are restored and repurposed, while a new south wing gathers indoor and outdoor hospitality functions beneath a dynamic, canopy-like roof that stitches together tasting rooms, terraces, retail and a courtyard. An adjacent wood-clad culinary wing and veranda further expand the estate’s public-facing role. Designed for Napa’s climate, many of the open-air spaces can be enclosed with sliding or pivoting glass. On the production side, upgraded fermentation and barrel cellars are on display, bringing the winemaking process into view.

A defining gesture is the inverted gable roof – a multipurpose form that collects water, echoes the Mayacamas Mountains, and establishes a clear dialogue with the historic structures. The project is also grounded in its materiality: concrete walls have an intentionally earthen character, while salvaged wood – oak tank staves marked by peg holes and wine stains, along with heavy timber beams – carries the imprint of the winery’s past into its present. ‘If architecture can have terroir, we wanted it to have a sense of terroir,’ says Darling, framing the project’s link between land, history and human craft.

Sustainability, particularly water stewardship, is central. ‘The future of winemaking is dependent on water – how we use it, how we conserve it, and how we clean and reuse it,’ Darling notes. That thinking informs everything from advanced wastewater treatment to an architectural language that makes cycles of collection and renewal legible. It extends to the buildings themselves: ‘To the greatest extent possible, we wanted to reuse the existing materials and structures,’ he adds – preserving legacy while embedding more responsible practices.

Led by Roderick Wyllie of Surfacedesign, Inc., the landscape design was developed in close collaboration with Aidlin Darling, creating a range of integrated indoor-outdoor environments that offer both expansive and intimate experiences. ‘People can enjoy being outside and feel that connection to the land and the vineyards,’ he says. Native plantings – oak, grasses, manzanitas, yarrow – combine with sculpted topography and locally sourced stone to root the experience in Northern California.

That same emphasis on stewardship carries into the landscape, where water also plays a central role. A bioswale captures runoff for reuse, while an aqueduct-like feature—fed by roof water and composed of quarry spoils and reclaimed slab material—runs east–west, alluding to the connection between the Mayacamas and the Napa River. This focus on natural systems extends to the ground plane, where the former event lawn has been reshaped into a sequence of naturalistic garden rooms, with pathways that draw visitors toward the vineyard itself.

For Mondavi, the transformation is less a reinvention than a realignment – bringing the winery back into closer register with the land, and with the cultural ambition that first defined it.

Downtown Pittsburgh’s cultural district certainly doesn’t lack things to do, between its 10 performance venues, 50 restaurants, dozens of shops and numerous galleries.

One thing it lacked, however, was substantial green space. The 14-square-block zone contained a number of pocket parks well-suited to briefly contemplate your Mahler or Verdi ticket, but nothing of a scale to quite relax. It’s a deficit newly remedied with the city’s new Arts Landing, a 4.5-acre park intended to accommodate concerts and rotating sculpture installations as well as the simpler pleasures of a lounge on the grass.

The park is the latest development of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, an arts organisation that has doubled as a very savvy real estate developer since the 1980s. Its efforts have played a central role in turning the city’s former red light district into a vibrant cultural cluster. The Trust manages about one million sq ft of real estate in the district, but realised something was missing – namely ‘a space for performing and visual arts activation, moments for recreation and moments for relaxation,’ says the organisation’s president and CEO Kendra Whitlock Ingram.

After acquiring several parcels of land, the Trust tapped the landscape firm Field Operations to reimagine the site as a ‘a green oasis in the heart of downtown,’ according to Ingram.

Lisa Tziona Switkin, a partner at Field Operations explained the firm’s task of accommodating a variety of uses (including the city’s Three Rivers Arts Festival) so that none dominated the one-square-block site. ‘We really wanted to strike a balance of working as an event space but also one where you want to come and sit on the lawn and take in the view,' she says.

The Field Operations team opted to raise the site in its centre; its 5 per cent grade isn’t much in this exceptionally hilly city but it provides a scenographic summit in the middle of its great lawn separating hardscaped spaces along Penn Avenue from the grassy sweep down to a riverside concert pavilion. Switkin explains their aim as crafting ‘small intimate moments that expand to become a bigger moment. You slowly rise up to this high point where you get a glimpse of the river. It was really meant to take what was a one-liner open space and create a series of spaces inside.’

The park was designed to provide a view corridor between Pittsburgh’s downtown and its Allegheny River – one nearly entirely absent previously. ‘The city kind of hugs that. You have a dialogue between the rivers and the city,’ Switkin adds.

The design team also aimed to inject a parcel, as Switkin put it, that was ‘more lush’ than existing downtown pocket parks. Dan Kiley’s Katz Plaza nearby is superb but features only linden trees. Arts Landing by contrast, hosts mixed plantings of red maples, sugar maples, tulip poplars and magnolias and various smaller plants. Stormwater gardens and permeable pathways are integrated nearly unnoticeably into the slightly rolling landscape. Benches of concrete and slatted wood comport to slopes. Fanciful trashcans are painted purple and pink, resembling the shades of the Cultural Trust’s logo.

The playground, meanwhile, is pure fun. Switkin explained, ‘We had an ethos around not using typical playground equipment and picking something more artful. We wanted equipment that was in a way sculpture in itself.’ This aim was easily fulfilled with non-prescriptive play structures from Earthscape Play with titles such as Hexy Wobble Board and Moku Yama.

As befits its name, Arts Landing features plenty of actual art: 23 pieces by 10 artists with links to Pittsburgh. The most prominent of the current sculptural installations is a series of bronzes, Touching the Earth, by revered Pittsburgh-based sculptor Thaddeus Mosley. These were originally commissioned by the Public Art Fund in New York. Mosley died at 99 in March. The exhibition has ended up as fitting tribute, and a full circle moment. Anastasia James, director of galleries and art for the Trust explained, ‘Mosley’s very first exhibition was at the Cultural Trust in the 1950s.’

Such artworks are a welcome addition to Pittsburgh. The city lacked any sort of rotating public art program and this was a step towards remedying that absence–-while also intended to provide a literal pedestal for talent. ‘I saw it as an opportunity to commission works by artists to take the next step in their career,' James says.

The Cultural Trust had relationships with some of the artists they selected, others were new collaborators. Some were deliberately commissioned for works outside of their speciality. The artist Shikeith, for example, has principally been known as a photographer, his iron, glass, and neon piece is his first public art commission. Mikael Owunna and Marques Redd’s This is the Body of the Sun depicts the solar god Ra. Vanessa German crafted artful and useful bright benches featuring the handprints of centenarians – including Mosley.

The Trust also made efforts to incorporate works by disabled artists. Darian Johnson crafted several local animal sculptures, including a whimsical raccoon, snail and a black bear. James said, ‘One day he made these little animals, and he wrote a note that said, 'Show Anastasia'. I said, “we have to make these”.’

The sculptures will soon be joined by the world’s first artist-designed pickleball court. Sharmistha Ray drew on cosmological imagery, Steelers team colors and historic life-sized Mughal Parcheesi boards in crafting its design.

One work was designed with wildlife in mind. Lenka Clayton and Philip Andrew Lewis’ Bird Circus is a series of big top-inspired poles designed to attract winged creatures. 'Pittsburgh’s along a major migratory corridor,’ says Clayton. ‘We thought, let's make sculptures that welcome the birds.’

Turns out Arts Landing is a resting place not just for humans but any creature that cares to sit down.

If you go to the newly opened David Geffen wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), I recommend you head there later in the afternoon, when the sun is a little lower on the horizon. When I first visited at 11am, the sun was directly overhead, and Peter Zumthor’s highly anticipated $724 million, 110,000 sq ft new building struck me as a dismal, dated, inelegant brute. But when I came back at 4pm, I came to a wildly different conclusion: in that more flattering light, I saw a brilliant innovation and true gift to the city. I think both visions can be true.

Commissioned by LACMA director Michael Govan 20 years ago, Zumthor was tasked with replacing an existing 1965 William Pereira building as the home of the encyclopedic museum’s permanent collection. In 2019, the city approved Zumthor’s plan to elevate an amoeba-shaped single storey high above the ground, with sinuous walls of floor-to-ceiling glass that would span Wilshire Boulevard like a bridge. Over the years, the design evolved in the face of various obstacles, including the diversion of time and budget towards removing fossils that were discovered on site, plus the realities of American construction at this scale. Best known for the material sensitivity and rigour of his often preciously small European projects, Zumthor publicly lamented how his design had been essentialised in the process. ‘There are no Zumthor details any more,’ he told The New York Times in a 2023 interview. (Although more recently, he’s disavowed this disavowal.)

At 900ft long, the finished building has no particularly beautiful angles from the outside. Where Zumthor’s renderings featured delicately curving glass and sandy-coloured stone, reality delivered windows framed in conspicuously thick bronze with more corners than curves, sandwiched between a pair of oppressively dark, remarkably flat concrete slabs. On the interior, the same sombre concrete forms the load-bearing walls of 26 standalone galleries that look like bunkers. At the top of the entrance’s 30ft-tall outdoor stairs (optional; there are also elevators), I wondered how I ended up in a basement.

At 11am, in the shadow of concrete eaves, the 360-degree windows cast a pallid light on the interiors and a glare on the vitrines. Among 21st-century museums, glass walls are a popular gesture of public-facing transparency, and in LA, a familiar feature of domestic space. But here they could’ve been used more discerningly. The view over Wilshire Boulevard is nice, like standing on a quintessential LA overpass, or the mezzanine in LACMA’s permanent collection above Metropolis II (2010), Chris Burden's kinetic sculpture of whizzing toy cars. Then the bridge ends with an anticlimactic, panoramic view of a nearby apartment complex’s stucco.

But just like LA public life, the building really starts to come alive in the later afternoon. During these magic hours, golden rays enter the museum horizontally, warming and brightening the concrete. The curtains become luminous, casting stripes of light and shadow on the floor. Suddenly, everyone’s complexion looks amazing.

The Geffen wing is the brilliant reinvention of the museum that LACMA says it is: exhibitions are porous and make use of every wall, both inside enclosed galleries and the interstitial, oddly shaped spaces in between. Not every feature, however, is precisely as described. The press release highlights Govan’s desire to exhibit the history of the world on a single, non-hierarchal plane, where Zumthor’s amorphous floorplan invites free-form exploration. The inaugural hang defines regions around bodies of water rather than by continent, a particularly beautiful way of repositioning ourselves in the world. Hierarchies, however, are inevitable. Some galleries are designed for more traffic than others. The entrance is positioned to send visitors down the long, linear hall facing Wilshire, where their first encounters are with Greek and Roman sculpture. Mounted right at the centre, for all of Wilshire Boulevard to see, top billing goes to Francis Bacon’s famed Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), a gift from the late mega-collector Elaine Wynn.

Where the museum purports to have no prescribed circulation paths, I disagree. This is an architecture that pulls and confounds, directing towards seductively framed views. Different pathways approach the same gallery from such remarkably different angles that you are drawn back into spaces you’ve already seen. One Mediterranean gallery seems to have an inexplicable gravitational pull. At the intersection of the Ottoman, Spanish and North African corridors, it forms a vortex where visitors often ask, ‘Weren’t we just in here?’ I asked a guard if he could point to our location on a map, and he said, ‘Good question.’

The joy is very much in getting lost. Zumthor intended for the interiors to feel like a walk through a forest, but I would say the dilation and contraction of the space feels more like a medieval town’s narrow streets and town squares. Overall, the building feels very familiar, local and correct. It adopts local vernacular architecture to a museum scale and animates visitors with recurring moments of awe. Alongside the sweeping vistas of sunset over Hancock Park, the aforementioned stucco apartments actually feel perfectly appropriate. The architecture is embedded with metaphors of taking a second look in a different light. It’s a tour through the truth of LA, both its banalities and grandeur. After many years of demolition and construction, complaints and delays, LACMA has finally come home.

Royal Festival Hall: A Living Icon, published by Merrell, launches today (16 April 2026), bringing together architects, musicians, historians and cultural programmers to tell the story of one of London's best-loved buildings. Published to coincide with the 75th anniversary of its opening, the book features 21 written contributions covering different aspects of the hall, from its architectural history to the story of its famous organ and the life of its production team, illustrated with photography specially commissioned from architectural photographer Edmund Sumner.

Royal Festival Hall first opened on London's South Bank in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain. It was the first major modern public building in post-war Britain, conceived as a symbol of national recovery. As British art historian Dan Cruickshank describes it in his foreword, the hall was ‘a tangible expression of a burning desire to create a better society after the destruction inflicted on London during the Second World War’.

The architects Robert Matthew and Leslie Martin faced significant practical challenges – the site was hemmed in by railway lines and required draining before construction could begin. Few concert halls of this scale had been built before, and space was tight. Their solution was to raise the auditorium as an ‘egg within a box’ – the inner auditorium suspended inside the building's outer envelope – which also provided acoustic isolation from the surrounding noise.

Inside, walls, stage canopy and floor were clad in elm, sycamore and birch, with teak ribs along the lower sections. The cantilevered seating boxes, which project outward from the sides of the auditorium, drew admiration even from Le Corbusier, who called them ‘a joke, but a good one’.

The building was not universally welcomed. In 1951, the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham told the Liverpool Echo that he questioned whether ‘in 350 years there has ever been erected on the soil of this grand old country a more repellent, a more unattractive, a more ugly and more monstrous structure’.

Yet its intentions were primarily social: unlike traditional concert halls, it was designed without class divisions – no separate bars or entrances for different audiences. The foyers were conceived as open civic spaces, and the building was intended to welcome everyone, whether attending a performance by a world-famous orchestra or stopping in for a cup of coffee.

The hall has since been awarded Grade I-listed status, recognising it as a building of exceptional historic and architectural importance. Whatever reservations greeted it in 1951, it has long since become an integral part of London's cultural life.

The David Geffen Galleries, which will open on 19 April 2026 to members and on 4 May to the public, offer Los Angeles an entirely new way of experiencing the diverse collections of its premier art museum. Architect Peter Zumthor worked closely with museum director Michael Govan and executive architects SOM to create a sinuous sweep of concrete, wrapped in glass and elevated nine metres above the ground.

An auditorium, bookstore, education centre, restaurant, café and elevators are housed in the seven supporting blocks. That separation allows visitors to immerse themselves in art on a single floor that is naturally lit from every side. Within the void are 27 inner galleries, ranging in size from 15 to 300 sq m, containing anything from a single Qing Dynasty court robe to a dense array of classic paintings. Art and architecture conduct a dialogue in the context of sweeping views over the city and the La Brea tar pits.

Explore LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries

Zumthor is best-known for Vals Thermal Baths, two chapels and meticulously crafted European museums. The LACMA commission was his first in the US, and it gave him the chance to work on a heroic scale and with a brutalist architecture aesthetic. Some of the details in the original design were sacrificed, but plenty of distinctive elements remain. Tiny white shells are embedded in the black concrete terrazzo floor, reminding us that this area was once a seabed.

A new, silicon-based paint in tones of dark red, indigo and black coats the concrete walls of the enclosed galleries, which are lit from a narrow clerestory and Zumthor-designed wall brackets that cast a soft, even glow over light-sensitive exhibits. However, the glass walls are UV-protected, and sheer metallic gauze curtains of different densities, custom-designed by Reiko Sudo, allow fabrics and works on paper to be displayed within five meters of the glass.

The layout is a radical departure from the enfilade of white cubes in traditional art museums. That concept of artificially lit, neutral spaces is still the default setting – and it’s a recipe for fatigue. As Govan observes, it’s time to experiment. Zumthor’s building replaces an ageing, dysfunctional complex of pavilions grouped around a courtyard, begun in the 1960s as an insubstantial variant on New York’s Lincoln Center. Later additions include Bruce Goff’s idiosyncratic Japanese Pavilion to the east and Renzo Piano’s two skylit pavilions for temporary exhibitions to the west.

The new galleries provide a unified platform for constantly changing, interdisciplinary installations drawn from LACMA’s encyclopedic collection. No two galleries are alike, and there’s a constant shift of space, light levels and vistas, inwards and outwards. The irregular plan allows visitors to wander freely and make their own discoveries. Serendipity replaces regimentation in this expansive cabinet of curiosities.

The Covid shutdown of 2020 gave the 45 LACMA curators extra time to devise new strategies of display. Unable to travel, they began talking to each other about joint projects and came up with 300 proposals, which were whittled down to 80 for the initial presentation. Junior curators suggested oceans and their role in linking cultures as an organising theme. It was an opportunity for fresh thinking that rarely occurs in the museum world. As curator Nancy Thomas recalls, 'Each of us had stories to tell and knew the strengths of our collections.' Leah Lembeck, curator of European paintings and sculpture, noted the importance of listening and reconciling different visions. And Britt Salvesen, the curator of works on paper, delighted in the opportunity of 'bringing photography into the light of day'.

Nothing better captures the collaborative nature of these installations than the table-top display of ceramic bowls from different cultures and eras, which drew on the holdings of eight different departments. A newly commissioned sphinx complements a display of Egyptian antiquities, and contemporary artworks hang beside historic treasures. A few key pieces stand alone. A ceramic panel by Henri Matisse occupies the tip of a wing, framed by views of nature and neighbouring buildings. You can admire it from one of Zumthor’s leather benches and glimpse it through the glass at night.

In contrast, the Ardabil carpet, a Persian masterpiece of 1520, is shielded from direct light to protect its vivid colours and spare it the fate of its faded twin in London’s V&A Museum. There are constant surprises. A few steps take you from Hokusai prints to California car culture, exemplified in the Studebaker Avanti that Raymond Loewy customised for his own use.

There’s a refreshing lack of barriers, but vulnerable objects are displayed in Zumthor’s elegant, climate-controlled vitrines. The whole 275m-long building is mounted on base isolators, making this one of the safest places to be when LA experiences the long-awaited 'big one', and every exhibit is secured against seismic shocks. And the sense of openness is equally welcoming outside. The building offers shade on a hot day and frames views of the Japanese Pavilion and the bold geometry of Piano’s galleries to either side. The footprint of scored concrete was designed by artist Mariana Castillo Deball, with witty touches that include imprints of birds’ feet leading out of the restaurant. Major sculptures in the orbit of the galleries include Tony Smith’s Smoke, a monumental cat’s cradle.

LACMA, located halfway between downtown and the ocean, is already a popular gathering place, and it should become more of a magnet when the latest subway station opens across the street in early May 2026. Zumthor’s building will continue to stir debate, but it’s likely to enjoy broad appeal, and it could serve as an alternative model for museums that are fixated on growth.

lacma.org

The opening of the V&A East Museum marks an important moment for London's much-loved Victoria & Albert Museum. When the new venue throws open its doors to the public on Saturday 18 April 2026, the popular cultural and design destination will have completed its East London presence with two hubs of creativity and culture, the other being the V&A East Storehouse (opened 31 May 2025).

Located near each other in Stratford's East Bank, in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, they share an important mission: to bring culture and design to the fore, and welcome everyone to engage with their displays and explore the V&A's rich collection. And if Storehouse is a celebration of the notion of archive – albeit, as we discovered at its opening last year, not as we know it – the brand-new V&A East Museum is all about the process of making, inviting both locals and young people in, and generously opening up to the city beyond the museum's immediate site. Says Jayden Ali, head of JA Projects, who worked with creative studio A Practice for Everyday Life and artist Larry Achiampong on the space's permanent ‘Why We Make' galleries: ‘We want 16- to 24-year-olds to feel comfortable walking in and spending time here.'

Explore V&A East Museum, London's shiny new cultural destination

The new building is certainly eye-catching – an elegant and dynamic form, featuring patterns, a geometric, faceted façade and a permeable ground level with different points of entry. Designed by Dublin-based practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, the architecture stands its ground in an impressive waterside line-up, including Sadler’s Wells Theatre, the BBC Music Studios, and a 2025 Stirling Prize nominee, the London College of Fashion by Allies and Morrison.

The unusual shape is not random. It came out of an idea born during an exhibition about Balenciaga, which took place in 2017-18 at the V&A in South Kensington. One of the items on show was an X-ray of a silk taffeta dress and its interpretation by artist Nick Veasey. ‘I began to think about the space between the figure and the form, what it is and what it can be,’ Tuomey told us when we previewed the project with a tour of the construction site in 2023. ‘They are not visibly connected, but they are very connected, and you move in between the body and the fabric.’

V&A East Museum was designed as 'a place for people to meet, find ideas and encounter making in all its forms', the architects write in their statement at the opening – and their concept, centred on 'the space in between', the Japanese concept of 'Ma', draws on this. Its ground floors (one entrance is on a lower level than the other, but both open to communal areas with no barriers or ticketing booths) are free and porous, crafted to invite the city and its people in, rather than control who enters, as traditionally has been the case in many organisations of its kind.

The flowing, accessible ground levels feature retail and a café, slowly morphing into a dramatic circulation route and a generous, winding staircase that takes visitors all the way up to the galleries – two permanent and a 900 sq m temporary one, as well as offices, education spaces and a multifunctional event area at the top. All displays are conceived to put an emphasis on 'making' and the process of craft and creation.

The building itself is a work of craft, featuring a façade made from 479 sand-coloured precast concrete panels. They are all different and cut bespoke to fit a large, three-dimensional surface puzzle. Their patterns reference the V&A’s distinctive logo, which also has pride of place over the entrance and the very top of the structure.

Three public terraces are carved out of the façade, not only adding to the formal composition but also providing additional al fresco space for activities within, as well as ensuring light comes into the interior as needed (although the main exhibition spaces are placed at the building's core, so they can be protected from sunlight if the exhibits require it).

The exhibition areas launch with two permanent 'Why We Make' galleries, composed as a fresh exploration of the V&A archives; and the largest-ever exhibition on Black British music and its impact in the UK, 'The Music is Black: A British Story'. The artistic programme aims to be timely and topical, investigating topics that will speak to a broad range of audiences. Elsewhere, special commissions and displays have been co-produced with local artists and young East Londoners – this and the new museum's expansive live events programme work towards the same goal, emphasising how youth and people help shape global culture right now.

'V&A East Museum’s Why We Make galleries offer a new way in to experiencing the V&A’s collection. Topical and resonant, the galleries look at objects through a contemporary lens and explore themes and issues that matter to our audiences most,' says Zofia Trafas White, senior curator at V&A East.

The museum promises to be dedicated to all people, addressing key issues of our times, from representation, identity and wellbeing to social justice and environmental action – all we have to do is visit.

V&A East Museum opens on 18 April 2026 in London, UK

vam.ac.uk

odonnell-tuomey.ie

ja-projects.com

Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighbourhood is a study in layered urban life: along busy Fifth Avenue, a mechanic’s garage sits beside a furniture warehouse and down the block from a wholesale bakery, while modest apartment buildings give way to luxury towers. Into this mix, Green-Wood Cemetery’s new education and welcome centre, the Green-House, inserts itself with quiet assurance, its presence mediating between inheritance and change.

Designed by New York-based Architecture Research Office (ARO), the unapologetically contemporary building straddles multiple worlds, wrapping itself around – and deferring to – a landmarked greenhouse that anchors the street corner. The gesture is apt: positioned along this commercial thoroughfare, the centre becomes a new point of entry to the historic cemetery across the street, itself a place where the complexities of New York are writ large.

Founded in 1838, Green-Wood emerged from the rural cemetery movement as both burial ground and public landscape – 478 acres of hills, glacial ponds and lush vegetation set improbably within Brooklyn’s dense fabric, dotted with mausoleums and monuments. From the outset, it was conceived as a place where life and death might coexist: as much for promenades and carriage rides as for mourning. At its height, it was said to be the state’s second most popular tourist attraction, after Niagara Falls. Over time, it became the resting place of a wide-ranging cast of luminaries – ‘permanent residents,’ as they are known – from Boss Tweed to Leonard Bernstein, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Paul Auster.

By the late 20th-century, however, like many cemeteries, it had slipped into decline, open only to mourners. Then-president, Richard Moylan, recognised it would need to move beyond memorialization, understanding its value as a cultural resource mirroring the city’s history. Under his leadership, it was reopened to the public and reanimated by returning to its original premise: a place for the living.

The cemetery, now operating as a nonprofit, hosts a wide range of events and activities, from birdwatching and performances to workshops and festivals, including those that engage with mortality itself. Today, a National Historic Landmark and accredited arboretum, it remains an active cemetery and a vital cultural resource, its identity grounded in what its stewards describe as three intertwined elements—history, art and nature.

As public offerings expanded and annual visitation climbed into the hundreds of thousands, Green-Wood’s public-facing infrastructure remained largely unchanged. The cemetery envisioned a visitor centre—sited just outside its boundaries to create a more welcoming point of entry.

‘You can’t easily get people to walk through cemetery gates – no matter how elegant – because of a natural fear of confronting loss,' says Green-Wood president Meera Joshi. ‘We needed something to demystify the experience – a gentler transition onto the grounds.’

The 1895 Victorian Weir greenhouse, set down the hill from the main entry’s imposing Richard Upjohn–designed brownstone gate, offered a compelling anchor: a delicate steel-and-glass remnant of the once-thriving funerary ecosystem that surrounded the cemetery. ‘Restoring the greenhouse felt inevitable,’ says Joshi. ‘It’s what Green-Wood does – bringing history back so it can be experienced today – it’s in our DNA.’

At just 1,750 sq ft, however, it could not accommodate the necessary infrastructure or programme.

The resulting design brief called for a new building that would integrate the landmarked structure while providing classroom and exhibition space, offices, and archives – consolidating previously dispersed functions and supporting year-round use. More than a threshold, it would orient visitors to Green-Wood’s narratives and rich landscape, extending its reach to both the city at large and the surrounding Sunset Park community. ‘The new centre,’ says ARO principal Kim Yao, ‘would support their mission of continuing their transition into a cultural organization.’ Adds ARO principal Stephen Cassell, ‘In some ways, the building and greenhouse are almost symbolic of this future.’

For ARO, the challenge was one of calibration: how to build alongside a fragile historic structure without overwhelming it, while accommodating a multi-part programme. Working with restoration architect Walter B. Melvin, the team carefully rebuilt the greenhouse – replacing its glazing and much of its structural framing, and discreetly integrating life-safety, lighting and mechanical systems. A large ceramic tile map of the cemetery, based on an 1882 visitor’s map, is set into the floor, transforming the space into a flexible, light-filled venue for events and gatherings.

The new 17,000 sq ft LEED Gold building takes an L-shaped form that embraces the greenhouse while holding back from it. A low, one-storey volume with a green roof contains the lobby and classroom and sits to one side, preserving views from Fifth Avenue and allowing the historic structure to read as an object in the round. Opposite, a two-storey wing pulls away to form a landscaped entry court by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, echoing the greenery of the cemetery beyond. This volume houses galleries for collections and rotating exhibitions, research space and offices, with the archive tucked below grade in a climate-controlled suite.

Prioritising daylight and views, the architects resisted an all-glass solution. Instead, they clad the building with custom glazed terracotta—its aubergine tone a contemporary counterpoint to the Upjohn gate’s brownstone and a foil to the greenhouse’s copper roof as it patinates. Composed of a rain screen and vertically oriented baguettes acting as a brise-soleil over a curtain wall, the façade filters light and frames views while receding into the background. ‘The materiality was about tying into the cemetery’s rich palette,’ says Cassell, ‘but in a way that doesn’t compete with the greenhouse and lets it be read clearly.’

Inside, restrained finishes – porcelain tile floors, plaster ceilings, and wall panels of slatted white oak over acoustic backing – bring warmth and clarity to the interiors.

Looking ahead, the centre signals an ongoing shift in how the cemetery positions itself within the city – as a place that, as was originally intended, is engaged with the living world and with its surrounding community. ‘We can now serve more New Yorkers through diverse programming—and create space for people to better understand mortality, loss and how to navigate both,’ says Joshi.

As Yao notes, the project ultimately mirrors Green-Wood’s broader mission: ‘stewarding the past while looking to the future, quite literally, through the architecture.’

The National Gallery in London has announced that Tokyo-based architect Kengo Kuma and Associates, in collaboration with UK firms BDP and MICA, will design a major new wing – the gallery's most significant expansion in two centuries.

The decision follows an international competition launched in September 2025, which shortlisted practices including Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Farshid Moussavi and Annabelle Selldorf. In the end, however, the jury awarded Kuma’s design the highest score, praising it as ‘both innovative and beautiful, meeting the ambition and sensitivity required for an international gallery commission’.

The £350 million wing, expected to open in the early 2030s, will be built on the site of St Vincent House, a 1960s hotel and office complex owned by the gallery, just north of the Sainsbury Wing (which was revamped last year). Clad in Portland stone, the new addition will feature landscaped gardens and a rooftop terrace overlooking Leicester Square.

Inside, the ground floor will host public facilities and temporary exhibition galleries. The main gallery floor will echo the Sainsbury Wing with vaulted arches and simple, clean interiors, while the upper floor will adopt a more geometric design, described by the jury as adding ‘variety and a change of design pace’. A bridge will connect the new wing to both the Sainsbury Wing and the original Wilkins building.

The expansion will add 1,500 square metres of permanent hanging space – a 15 percent increase – and 800 square metres of temporary exhibition space, nearly doubling the capacity of the Sainsbury Wing basement.

The new wing is central to Project Domani, a £750 million initiative to redefine the gallery for the coming century. The project also marks a shift in its collection strategy: previously focused on works up to around 1900, in line with a longstanding agreement with Tate, the National Gallery will now display paintings from the late 19th century to the present, making it the only museum in the world where visitors can experience the entire history of Western painting.

Kuma, whose projects include the V&A Dundee and Tokyo Olympic Stadium, described it as ‘a privilege’ to work on the expansion, adding that ‘the National Gallery's collection is a treasure of humanity’.

President Donald Trump’s plan to tack a 90,000 sq ft Neoclassical-style ballroom onto the White House is one step closer to becoming a reality.

With a vote Thursday, members of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) – the organisation tasked with planning oversight for federal buildings in the Washington, DC region – approved the design of the extension, which was designed to accommodate 1,000 guests for state functions and also contain administrative spaces.

Critics of the design, by local firm Shalom Baranes Associates, have called into question the ballroom’s scale, its $400 million price tag and the speed at which the project has evolved; on Tuesday, a federal court even granted a preliminary injunction banning further construction on the project.

Even so, the project appears to be moving ahead. At the hearing, committee chairman William Scharf, who was appointed by President Trump to lead NCPC last July, noted that the ‘order really does not impact our action here today.’

‘The White House is ever-changing, ever-evolving to meet the programmatic needs of an ever changing and evolving United States presidency,’ Scharf continued, citing past alterations to the building. ‘And any argument that relies on the idea that the White House is unchangeable or should be unchangeable, flies in the face of the very history of the structure such critics claim they are trying to protect.’

NCPC consists of one dozen commissioners, three of which are appointed directly by the president. Commissioner Michael Blair, who serves as the White House deputy chief of staff, praised the design because ‘it blends great architecture with great hospitality.’ GSA administrator Edward Forst, who has an ex officio role on the committee added, ‘We’re going to wonder why we didn’t do it earlier.’

Just one commissioner, Phil Mendelson, questioned the scheme, particularly its swift design development. ‘What, we've had this for maybe three months?’ he said, pointing to an initial design presentation in January, not to mention changes that President Trump revealed to reporters aboard Air Force One Sunday night.

‘I think there's a lot of value to the iterative process, and we've not had that,’ Mendelson continued. ‘We don't have to choose between respecting our history for the American people and accommodating modern government's needs.’

When it was time to vote, though, Mendelson was the sole dissenting voice.

The approval marks a critical step forward in the ballroom project. But it remains to be seen how the ongoing federal court case, filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in December, will impact construction. (The National Trust declined to comment on the NCPC decision).

Still, President Trump interpreted the vote as a decisive victory. Writing on Truth Social, he said, ‘I am honored to be the first President to finally get this much-needed project, which is on time and under budget, underway. When completed, it will be the Greatest and Most Beautiful Ballroom of its kind anywhere in the World, and a fabulous complement to our Beautiful and Storied White House!’

East Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, where Kino International is located, was purposefully laid out as a striking showcase of socialist architecture. From its monumental apartment blocks to the lofty, domed towers at Frankfurter Tor, everything along the grand boulevard was built to impress. And among the jewels in its crown was this film-lover's destination, a gleaming modernist cinema conceived as a statement of Soviet sophistication.

Tour Kino International, a cinema gem reborn in Berlin

No expense was spared when it came to its construction. Architects Josef Kaiser and Heinz Aust’s bold design features a cantilevered foyer on the first floor that floats unsupported over the entrance below, with its windowless side walls covered in a vast sculptural relief depicting scenes of a Communist utopia. The cinema opened 1963, with custom-made crystal chandeliers and gleaming parquet floors leading audiences to the 500-seat auditorium – complete with elaborate wood panelling and a distinctive, wave-shaped ceiling that was meticulously shaped to optimise acoustics.

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the building was granted heritage protection and taken over by the Yorck Cinema Group. But by 2024, after more than 60 years of continuous use, the once-futuristic movie theatre was beginning to show its age. Architecture firm Dickmann Richter was called in to bring the building back up to scratch with modern technical standards and polish up some of its original features, and the cinema has just reopened following 18 months of painstaking renovations.

'The building services systems have been completely modernised, and the latest projection and sound technologies have been integrated,' says Dickmann Richter architect Helen Hart. 'With restored architectural surfaces, a refreshed colour scheme, and carefully designed lighting, the building once again radiates the modernity that distinguished it at its opening in 1963.'

The process of breathing new life into the cinema’s historic fabric required the expertise of a team of master craftspeople who were assembled from across Germany to work on the project. 'Almost 800 sq m of textile wall covering were replaced, and all of the wooden slats – amounting to more than 7km in total – were meticulously refurbished,' says Hart. But of all these restoration challenges, one feature called for particular attention: the stage curtain, which was adorned with some 40 million sequins. 'It’s certainly the building’s most iconic feature, and its restoration required an enormous amount of care and effort.'

For architect Daniel Dickmann, co-founder of Dickmann Richter, the refurbishment was a rare opportunity to safeguard one of the city’s key architectural landmarks. 'We consider it extremely important to preserve such a significant representation of recent German history,' says Dickmann. 'For many East Berliners in particular, Kino International is not merely a cinema, but a place of shared memory across generations.'

dickmannrichter.de

See more of the best cinemas around the world.

A visit to the Netherlands Fotomuseum will not only allow visitors to enjoy the organisation's vast archive, which traces a fascinating, broad and rare visual history of the country – it will also anchor this to its location, now housing said collection within a reimagined building on the rich and layered Rotterdam waterside. The national photography museum’s new location, which opens its doors this weekend (7 February 2026) in the Rijnhaven dock area, contains a collection of more than 6.5 million items and sits within a listed industrial warehouse in what used to be the Dutch city's enormous port (before it gradually moved its operations further out towards the sea).

Be of the first to tour the Netherlands Fotomuseum

The structure has been revamped, both delicately, so as not to disturb the building's heritage fabric too much, and smartly, combining exhibition, archive and restoration spaces with hospitality, artists' residences and more. The sensitive project included a full redesign and a rooftop extension, all done by Renner Hainke Wirth Zirn Architekten from Hamburg and the locally based WDJArchitecten – previewed in 2024, when plans for the museum’s move from its old Wilhelminapier location were starting to take shape.

The new site comprises a period structure, known as the Santos warehouse, built between 1901 and 1902. It was originally designed by Rotterdam architects JP Stok Wzn and JJ Kanters, and served as storage for the Brazilian coffee trade. It was acquired, as a donation, by the Fotomuseum in 2023.

Working with the existing warehouse fabric was challenging for the renovating architects, as they were only allowed to implement light alterations due to the building’s heritage status. The team addressed the issue of circulation and natural light in a building that was not made to consider either, particularly, by cutting a void through the structure's heart. This opening unites the different floors and becomes the heart of the building – its main circulation core as well as a light well.

Architect Sander Nelissen of WDJArchitecten explains: 'Going up, the void and stairs move and break the strict organisation of the building. The beautiful beam structure is on display. We had to take into account the city policy that says we needed to reuse what we demolish.'

Meanwhile, to avoid touching the existing fabric too much and to respond to the demands of creating highly controlled areas for storage and restoration of artworks, the architects worked with a 'box within a box' concept. Nelissen says: 'This, and separation from the general area, manages sensitive pieces that need special climate control.'

The archive depot and restoration ateliers are indeed given a rare spotlight (although Rotterdam has been pioneering in this realm, with the Boijmans Depot nearby too), with large glazed openings offering views in for visitors to enjoy previously unseen areas, such as the restoration labs. This occupies two entire floors in the museum, which spans eight public levels in total, including the ground floor with its shop, library, café and event areas, offices, three floors of permanent and temporary exhibitions, and the two archive ones (levels four and five). The restaurant sits at the top of this sequence, offering long views of Rotterdam, its river and the new port in the distance.

The Fotomuseum opens with a permanent display on Dutch photography and a show dedicated to the city of Rotterdam, as well as two temporary exhibitions. The institution's collection is broad and diverse, and many of its treasures have never been seen by the public. This, the museum team vows, is about to change.

'We want to show that photography is not just images on a wall but heritage,' explains Martijn van den Broek, head of collections. He highlights how rare it is for a museum to plan its depot at its heart in this way, as well as include its art storage among its main exhibitions.

The museum has been designed in a way that allows visitors – and the displays – to breathe, offering flexibility to the curators as they plan their shows. There are large/expanded and small/compressed spaces; 'hidden' seating corners to be discovered; and nooks that invite a break to rest. Both the building design itself and the exhibition set-ups within it give agency to the visitor, offering different routes and choices.

This makes what could have been a stiff and unwieldy warehouse structure relatively light and transparent, but also unexpected and quirky – and all this without losing its utilitarian character: a heavy-duty old port's working building, now refreshed and embracing its city’s character with zest, reimagined as a cultural destination.

The Netherlands Fotomuseum opens on 7 February 2026, Brede Hilledijk 95, 3072 KD Rotterdam, Netherlands

nederlandsfotomuseum.nl

For the Bay Area’s largest and most historic synagogue, everything old is new again – thanks to a modernisation that seamlessly connects 21st-century design with a century-old landmark.

Completed in 1925 by Bakewell & Brown – the prolific San Francisco architecture firm responsible for a number of notable buildings including San Francisco City Hall, the City of Paris department store and the San Francisco Art Institute – Temple Emanu-El was constructed in the Byzantine Revival style as an homage to the Second Temple of Jerusalem, an ancient place of Jewish worship. And, although the beloved synagogue has remained the centre of life and worship for one of California’s oldest congregations, accessibility issues and necessary seismic upgrades had significantly impacted its ability to serve the Jewish community for nearly four decades.

Finally, after nearly five years of research and planning, and almost two-and-a-half years of construction, the 100-year-old structure is welcoming its community as intended, thanks to the vision of Mark Cavagnero Associates, one of San Francisco’s preeminent architecture firms.

'It is humbling to have been given the opportunity to re-envision the building and advance the institution's mission,' says founding principal Mark Cavagnero, who was tasked with making the necessary updates while honouring the synagogue’s heritage.

The result is a landmarked structure that, with the addition of 19,000 sq ft of programming and gathering spaces, thoughtfully blends historic and contemporary materials while fulfilling the long overdue accessibility and seismic requirements.

'For me, bringing back that sensibility and restoring the historic grandeur of the temple’s original concept was really important,' Cavagnero says, 'but we also needed to make the building more secure in these modern times.'

To that end, Cavagnero and his team inserted a two-storey glass and bronze structure that wraps around the courtyard’s interior perimeter and houses new community and education spaces. 'The congregation wanted to add quite a bit of space in that area,' explains Cavagnero. 'It’s what senior Rabbi Jonathan Singer called "sticky space", where people could socialise and have more of a communal experience.'

Elsewhere, within the existing structure, a gently curved bridge was constructed to connect the two sides of the lobby (putting you at eye-level with rich architectural details that otherwise went unnoticed), and a monumental – albeit previously inaccessible – tower was carved out to add a floor in place of a stairway leading to the courtyard.

Another key area of focus was the children’s preschool and play area that were relocated from the courtyard and basement levels up to the fourth-floor rooftop. 'Before, you could look in the windows off Lake Street directly into the classrooms, so they had to put screening over the historic bronze gates [to the courtyard],' the architect explains, noting how seriously the synagogue takes safety.

But perhaps the most meaningful and significant change was the re-establishment and restoration of the temple’s original grand entry on Lake Street, which had been closed since 1990 due to accessibility laws. 'They’d lost probably the most important part of the architecture – the actual relationship that took you from the street into the sanctuary,’ notes Cavagnero. 'The majesty, the history, and sense of tradition dating back to the Second Temple were lost.'

Now, without a staircase impeding entry for mobility-challenged congregants, a new glazed entry lobby at street level means everyone can enter through building’s tremendous arch as initially envisioned by Bakewell & Brown. 'That which is new is very new, and that which is old is very respected, restored and revered,' Cavagnero reflects.

A stone’s throw from Milan city centre, a new urban district, Milano Santa Giulia, is under development as part of a regeneration project. At the epicentre is a collaboration between global consultancy Arup and David Chipperfield Architects, which has designed a new arena to accommodate sporting and cultural events. Its first duty is to turn into an ice rink for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, which take place from 6 to 22 February. (And for which developments also include the new 2026 Winter Olympics Village, already completed in Milan’s Porta Romana, by SOM.)

Step inside Milano Arena, home to the Winter Olympic ice rink

The new building, construction of which began in 2021, is a contemporary nod to the city’s former Roman amphitheatre, and is able to accommodate up to 16,000 visitors. As visitors approach, they are first drawn up a wide flight of steps to a raised podium, which occupies the majority of the site. It provides a 10,000 sq m piazza-like area that can be used as a venue for outdoor events.

Atop the podium, the arena’s exterior appears as three rings, seeming to float one above the other. These aluminium tubes, which are lit up with LED strips during the evening, bring a sense of fluidity, movement and almost gentleness to the arena's hard materiality.

Inside the building, visitors will see two tiers above the ground-floor seating and standing area, echoing classic theatre design. Seating is accessible through lobbies on all levels (including catering and other facilities), while lounges and sky boxes are nestled on the upper level. Parking is located on the northern part of the site.

In an effort to minimise consumption of resources and CO2 emissions, the architects integrated photovoltaic systems on the roof. Green spaces outside are scattered with trees that also cascade down the staircase. When the Winter Olympics are finished, the arena will host concerts, festivals and other sporting events to come, providing an enduring social hub for Milan.

olympics.com davidchipperfield.com

When Africa Hall opened in Addis Ababa 64 years ago, it was unlike anything the Ethiopian capital had seen. Notably, the sweeping modernist complex, designed by Italian architect Arturo Mezzedimi, had no fences. That simple design gesture symbolised the building’s role, contributing to an open and unified continent as the headquarters for the UN Economic Commission for Africa and as a critical player in the formation of the African Union.

‘Today … the peoples of Africa can, at long last, deliberate on their own problems and future,’ Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, observed at the time.

Over the decades, like many structures of the age, Africa Hall fell into disrepair. Following a $60 million, decade-long restoration led by Australian firm Architectus that was completed in 2024, the building was meticulously restored to serve as an emblem of progress once again. Today the renovation has received what is considered the top honour in the realm of preservation – the World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize.

The award, a joint initiative of the World Monuments Fund (WMF) and Knoll, is granted every two years to extraordinary projects that safeguard threatened modernist buildings. Past honorees have included a once-abandoned concrete residence in Argentina; a crumbling French school dedicated to Karl Marx; and even a bus station in Preston, UK.

The prize, said Bénédicte de Montlaur, president and CEO of the World Monuments Fund, was created to ‘highlight exemplary preservation efforts around the world. The renewal of Africa Hall by Architectus embodies this mission, honouring the original architect’s vision while ensuring the building can continue to serve as a vital place for cultural exchange and African unity.’

Between 2014 and 2024 Architectus worked carefully to preserve the building while transforming it into a contemporary hub for diplomacy. In addition to addressing critical work like the building’s concrete structure, the firm restored decorative elements, including 13 million mosaic tiles, a dazzling 1,600 sq ft stained glass window by Ethiopian artist Afewerk Tekle, and some 500 pieces of original, bespoke furniture.

The renovation also included important new upgrades, such as more seating for member states in the soaring Assembly Hall, updated AV and mechanical systems, as well as a new museum, visitors’ centre and café.

Africa Hall ‘stands as one of the most important expressions of modern architecture on the continent’, said prize jury chair and professor Barry Bergdoll. ‘The recent restoration has allowed the clarity of Messedimi’s design to speak again, revealing the ambition, craftsmanship, and symbolic power that have made the building a landmark of modernism and a continuing stage for African diplomacy.’

Architectus will receive the award, which comes with a $10,000 cash prize, at a special ceremony on 18 February 2026 during Modernism Week in Palm Springs, California.

It’s been a decade since the New Museum announced that it would be expanding its SANAA-designed building on Manhattan’s Bowery. Now, the project – which is set to double the museum’s exhibition space thanks to a 60,000 sq ft extension designed by OMA – finally has an opening date. The contemporary art museum today announced that it will reopen to the public on 21 March 2026.

‘[The] building on the Bowery signals our redoubled commitment to new art and new ideas, and to the museum as an ever-evolving site for risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation,’ museum director Lisa Phillips said in a statement.

The New Museum’s OMA expansion gears up for its launch

The OMA expansion, helmed by Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas, designed in collaboration with Corgan (formerly Cooper Robertson), will feature new galleries, a reimagined entrance plaza and new flexible programming space, including studios for artists in residence. The addition will also expand the lobby, which in addition to a larger bookstore and museum shop, will include an art-filled restaurant designed by Shigematsu and operated by the Oberon Group.

Crucially, the redesign will address what was considered by many to be the SANAA building’s Achille’s heel: its confusing and clunky circulation. Before, the museum floors were accessed via a single freight elevator and an ancillary hidden staircase. The OMA addition aims to introduce ‘fluid’ movement throughout the building, via three additional elevators and a stairway in the atrium.

‘I am honoured to be awarded this project in the city perhaps most central to OMA’s philosophy, and am thrilled to work with an institution that deeply values the practices of creative forward-thinkers,’ Shigematsu commented in 2017, when OMA was announced as the selected design team. ‘As a Japanese architect, I am very happy to engage in a unique dialogue with SANAA and build alongside one of their seminal works.’

The completed New Museum will be the only building in the world combining the work of two living Pritzker prize-winning architects. It will open with a survey exhibition; new commissions by artists including Tschabalala Self, Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winner Klára Hosnedlová and Sarah Lucas; and offer free admission during its opening weekend.

A new Korean garden has just been unveiled to the public. The impressive 23,000 sq m site is located in Yangpyeong within Gyeonggi Province, which surrounds Seoul, nestled in a quiet valley once filled with wild mekkot (a species of the ipomoea morning glory flower). Médongaule Korean Gardens is an ambitious undertaking to reinterpret the country's rich garden tradition that had largely faded from the peninsula's cultural landscape following Japan’s colonisation of Korea (1910-1945) and the subsequent rapid industrialisation. Rooted in the spirit of the Joseon Dynasty (14th-19th century) and its Neo-Confucian academies, scholar gardens, and traditional Korean villas (complexes known as seowon), the project reimagines tradition for contemporary times.

Tour the Seongok Academy Building at Médongaule Korean Gardens

When Korea’s prominent architect Seung H-Sang, who is widely respected for his vision, emphasising modest, nature-harmonising designs with deep Korean cultural roots, met the client in 2018, they agreed to build a modern seowon within the garden, inspired by the country's landmark Byeonsang Seowon. The latter, a heritage site, was built in the 16th century as a private, rural Neo-Confucian academy that served as both a school and a Confucian shrine. It is considered an outstanding example of Korean architecture to this day.

The more modern Seongok Seowon Academy at Médongaule Korean Gardens has just been completed and is designed for a wide range of cultural activities, including learning, meetings and exhibitions. Its madang, a central, open, flat ground area, also acts as a flexible, communal space for events, such as concerts and festivals. Its undulating topography mirrors the site's terrain, naturally evoking the image of the similarly sloped Byeongsan Seowon. 'How to reinterpret Byeongsan Seowon in a contemporary manner became the challenge I set myself,' Seung says.

According to the architect, Byeongsan Seowon possesses exceptional spatial qualities. 'It is not the architecture itself that is significant, but rather the exquisite manner in which the buildings relate to nature. The rules, order, and scale of the void spaces created by the architecture are outstanding, and the way in which the architecture enables those within the space to view nature is truly remarkable,' he explains.

While fully embracing that approach, Seung naturally adapted the materials, techniques and forms of his design to suit the modern time. It was important for him to apply his philosophy of ‘Beauty of Poverty’, showcasing how a humble life – one of emptying and sharing, a life that knows how to be poor despite having money – can be beautiful.

Seung also brought the power of Mandaeru, the tower-shaped pavilion that serves as a conduit linking nature with the architecture at Byeongsan Seowon, to his own, new seowon. People can pass beneath the tower structure, but also climb up, allowing different perspectives in relation to the surrounding ground level. This approach was not unique to Byeongsan Seowon; it is a common method employed by Buddhist hermitages (amja), which are often nestled within mountains and sloped sites.

According to Seung: 'The concept of emptiness from Byeongsan Seowon was applied, but the rest reflects my own architectural philosophy.' He explains that, unlike Byeongsan Seowon, the structure here possesses a markedly different internal layout where all buildings are interconnected and permeate one another.

For Seung, connecting buildings means creating spaces that organise and enrich one’s life by bringing together people and nature, moving beyond mere function or aesthetics to foster contemplation and meaningful dwelling, often using voids and deliberate ‘discomfort’ to make life more vital and connected to place and memories. 'I designed it so that upon entering, while one traverses through the space, the differing levels of each building allow visitors to experience distinct spatial qualities. Within this framework, various activities are designed to be closely interlinked.'

Asked how he wants people to use Seongok Seowon, the architect mentions ‘Heterotopia’ by French philosopher Michel Foucault – a thesis that argues that some physical places also act as 'other' worlds – cemeteries or gardens, for example. Similarly, Seung believes the purpose of a garden is to enable people to leave the mundane world behind, finding energy in its enchanting beauty, and then returning refreshed to their daily lives. 'Like traditional seowons, the building was going to be placed in a quiet corner within the Medongaule, and I wanted it to be a space for contemplation and reflection where one could forget the world and discover a new self.'

Seung designed the seowon complex arrangement to reflect such an intention. The Tower of Dokrak (a word meaning 'enjoying solitude') symbolises a space for those wishing to find escape from the everyday world. Meanwhile, the Gyeongoeam Buddhist Temple is a place for retreat at the very top of the land. It contains nothing but a single room and a single madang (courtyard), with no other facilities. It was designed solely for sitting and contemplation, conceived to allow users to enjoy solitude most profoundly.

medongaule.com

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When Aga Khan IV, Karim al-Husseini, died in February, he left behind a legacy that centred around faith, charity, his beloved Thoroughbred horses and a passion for architecture. He established the Aga Khan Architecture Award in 1977 to honour exemplary architecture around the world.

Aga Khan IV also served as a direct patron of buildings in his support of a network of Ismaili Centres, worship and cultural spaces for Nizari Ismailis, the branch of Shia Islam he headed (his son, Aga Khan V, now holds that role). The first Ismaili Centre opened in London in 1985. In the 40 years since, five more were built around the globe in locales ranging from Lisbon to Toronto.

This December, a seventh Ismaili Centre will open in Houston, Texas. Designed by London-based architect Farshid Moussavi, the new building continues the Aga Khan's legacy of exceptional design. The focus of the centres has always been outward-looking, containing spaces designed not merely for the Ismaili community but for everyone. In Houston, Moussavi set to build upon that mandate by creating 'an open destination for social encounter.' She's created a dazzling monument in the process.

The Houston centre was commissioned by Aga Khan IV to contain an assortment of spaces: a prayer hall, a theatre, classrooms, a library, a cafe and more, most of which are very specifically open to the general public. Moussavi wanted to work ‘with space, light, geometry, and ornament that one finds in historical works found in the Muslim world, but make them contemporary and make them unique to Houston,’ she tells Wallpaper*.

The site, on Houston’s Buffalo Bayou about two miles to the west of the city’s downtown, lies partially in a 200-year floodplain which meant the building needed to be sited carefully. The resulting five-storey, 150,000 sq ft building is roughly square in plan with one corner removed so that the building, from afar, registers as a series of cubes. It contains three wings, with entrances on each side. 'Instead of having a front and a back, it is all front,' Moussavi says.

The architect and her team incorporated Persianate eivans – or verandas – beneath three entrances, offering outdoor space shielded from sun or rain. These entrances are a gesture of openness but are also useful, enabling easy access to concurrent functions at the same time, with the prayer hall in the main volume, a cafe and social halls to the east, and a library, theatre, classrooms, and more in its western portion.

The building is large, but Moussavi leveraged architectural detailing to bring it down to human scale. Portions of the exterior, for instance, are covered in an ethereal screen of triangular and scallop-shaped tiles that are threaded on tension rods. From inside, the effect provides varying degrees of visibility and shade, while casting a dappled daylight throughout the spaces.

Once inside, a central oculus is a moment of great drama. In a move reminiscent of Louis Kahn’s not-quite-barrel-vault ceilings at the Kimbell Art Museum a few hours away in Fort Worth, it isn’t a dome, although it might look like one. 'It is a very contemporary structural system, a Vierendeel system that hangs one floor from another,' Moussavi explains. The move allows for the floors to create a rhythmic, interlocking pattern that culminates in a central skylight.

Looking up is encouraged in more subtle ways, as with a monumental, concrete stair, poured into diagonally-placed formwork that sweeps the eye skywards. 'We are not emphasising gravity but movement. It makes the stair feel light,' the architect says.

Light-touch strategies like this lend a sense of ornamentation, but one that's never overtly decorative. Triangular patterns are everywhere, from the off-the-shelf acoustic plaster ceiling tiles to the pattern on the poured-concrete floors. 'Structure, surface and ornament come together, rather than one overriding the other,' she says – a balance she's achieved startlingly well.

The prayer hall sits underneath the main upper eivan and requires deep beams to span the 115-foot space. It features two layers of patterned aluminium incorporating lighting above. 'As a result, you don't quite know where the ceiling ends, which we hope creates this idea of boundlessness,' Moussavi says. Anigre wood walls are incised with Kufi calligraphy, a strategy that provides additional ornament while absorbing sound.

This sense of boundlessness continues outdoors, where visitors can discover nine acres of gardens by Nelson Byrd Woltz. 800 Texas trees and countless perennials meet symmetrical Islamic gardens, traversed by triangle-patterned walkways. You can discover Prairie grasslands near the Buffalo Bayou, live oaks on a terrace and numerous reflecting pools throughout the grounds.

'It's something new,' Moussavi explains of this shining new building. 'It's not about getting stuck in traditionalism and its representation, but using historical ingredients and giving them a new life.'

Last summer, we reported that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fountainhead had come on the market for $2.5 million; following its listing with Crescent Sotheby’s International Realty, the property has now been acquired by the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA).

The purchase of the Wright-designed residence in Jackson’s mid-century Fondren neighbourhood marks a significant step in the museum’s goal of engaging local communities, and will open Fountainhead to the public for the first time.

The house, also known as the J. Willis Hughes House, was designed in 1948 and completed in 1954 for oil speculator J. Willis Hughes, who lived there with his family until 1980. It was later purchased by the architect Robert Parker Adams, who devoted years to its restoration before his death in July.

Fountainhead has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980 for its architectural significance. It is a quintessential example of Wright’s Usonian philosophy – his vision for a distinctly American style of architecture. Usonian homes were typically single-level bungalows designed for middle-income families, emphasising affordability, functionality, aesthetic simplicity and harmony with nature.

Fountainhead was constructed without traditional materials such as stud walls, sheetrock or brick, instead featuring Heart Tidewater Red Cypress walls and ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. Its parallelogram layout responds to the site’s unique topography, influencing everything from wall placement to door proportions.

The residence is known as Fountainhead partly due to the belief that Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, was inspired by Wright’s life. The name also refers to a key architectural feature: Wright used the site’s sloping terrain to extend the bedroom wing into the landscape, incorporating a fountain that feeds into a swimming pool, which then flows into a stream.

Following the acquisition, MMA will begin restoring the home and developing a plan for its maintenance, with the public opening date to be announced later. The museum will manage the property and its programming to ensure its long-term relevance, including providing bus shuttles to the site. MMA director Betsy Bradley describes that, in making Fountainhead an extension of the museum’s offerings, it will ‘[allow] access to this national treasure, inviting visitors to engage deeply with Mississippi’s architectural heritage and design legacy’.

The board of trustees chair, Lisa Percy, predicts that ‘Fountainhead will become a must-see destination and unique experience for residents of and visitors to Jackson’, adding that MMA was inspired by successful initiatives at other institutions, such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s purchase of Wright’s Bachman-Wilson House in Arkansas.

Southwark Underground Station has been granted Grade II-listed status by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, following advice from Historic England. This makes it the youngest of 72 London Underground stations on the National Heritage List for England, having opened in 1999 as part of the Jubilee line extension.

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.

Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire is one of the most postcard-like Ivy League universities, a leafy and Neo-Georgian idyll. Modern and postmodern buildings by Venturi Scott Brown, Lo-Yi Chan and Charles Moore took great care to fit in. But Wallace Harrison’s 1962 Hopkins Center for the Arts – affectionately known as ‘the Hop’ – dared to shake things up.

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.’

The highly anticipated Grand Egyptian Museum has been completed by Heneghan Peng Architects. Located just over a mile from the Pyramids of Giza, the landmark institution will showcase more than 5,000 artefacts and is set to become the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single civilisation. Its Tutankhamun Gallery will open to the public on November 1 2025.

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.

Mallorca’s Voramar Supermarket is no ordinary grocery store. Situated in the Port of Pollensa, this distinctive destination combines local produce with architectural grit. Designed by Minimal Studio – winner of the Gold award at this year’s Japan International Design Pioneer Awards – the space has been reimagined as a brutalist wonderland.

Tour this brutalist supermarket in Spain

Voramar is a fully functioning supermarket, with an extensive wine cellar, a takeaway section and an array of produce. Yet, Minimal Studio’s project – named Plastic Box – goes beyond conventional retail design, transforming the supermarket into a site of architectural exploration. Let’s step inside.

The supermarket is encased in a monolithic concrete shell, exuding material austerity. Sculptural counters, steel shelving and polished floors all echo brutalist architecture’s language, while overhead, a modular ceiling composed of more than a thousand plastic crates gives an industrial edge, while also filtering light to cast shifting geometric shadows throughout the day. The contrast between the unadorned façade, which is marked by dark portal entrances, and the brightly illuminated interior captures the quintessential sensory experience of entering a supermarket.

Plastic Box is more than an exercise in aesthetics; it serves as a critique of consumer culture, symbolised by the oppressive presence of the stacked crates. The use of brutalist aesthetics – which emerged in the midcentury and reflected the modern construction techniques that enabled mass housing, later resented for its perceived soullessness – also resonates with the commentary.

Brutalism is often criticised for its not-exactly-sustainable properties (due largely to its historic use of concrete, hence the emergence of movements like eco-brutalism). Plastic Box challenges that legacy and embraces a circular approach: the plastic crates are recycled and integrate ventilation and rainwater collection systems, and all elements are repurposed from industrial contexts.

Minimal Studio’s supermarket not only reinvents the urban commercial space – offering a true immersion for brutalism enthusiasts – but also asks us to interrogate it.

When ancient forms meet contemporary architecture, remarkable things happen. Few places exemplify this union as masterfully as the Basilica di Massenzio in Rome, where architecture firm Alvisi Kirimoto has unveiled a new exhibition pathway commissioned by the Colosseum Archaeological Park. Woven into the historic fabric of the site, this intervention fosters a dialogue between memory and modernity while introducing new layers of functionality.

The Basilica di Massenzio, one of the grandest structures in the Roman Forum, was originally commissioned by Emperor Maxentius around 308 AD and later completed by Emperor Constantine I. Alvisi Kirimoto’s project enhances the landmark with a multifunctional stage, restored flooring and interactive informational totems.

At the heart of the intervention is the stage, located in the central hall. It re-establishes the spatial relationship with the aisles – originally used by congregants when the basilica served as a civic centre or courthouse. Constructed using a modular system, with a steel frame and Keller grating platform, the stage will host theatrical performances, film screenings and conferences, reviving the building’s original function as a public gathering place.

‘The new stage is a contemporary element – clearly legible, yet discreetly embedded,’ says Massimo Alvisi, co-founder of Alvisi Kirimoto. ‘It offers a solution that balances functionality with a deep respect for the monument.’

It is not only a functional centrepiece, but also a vantage point from which to admire the basilica’s majestic architecture. Accessible from all sides, the stage has a stepped seating area with views toward the Horti Farnesiani, the Renaissance gardens on Palatine Hill. The birch plywood surface is articulated with wooden slats that intensify toward the centre, subtly guiding the viewer’s eye to the monument’s core.

The project has also reimagined the basilica’s forecourt, resurfacing it with a natural mix of earth and lime. Informational totems, equipped with audiovisual systems, provide visitors with an enriched experience.

Every detail – from the stage and seating to the flooring and signage – works to enhance the site, transforming it into a living, inclusive space. Alvisi Kirimoto’s design goes beyond conservation; by reactivating its role as a civic space, one of Italy’s most iconic landmarks is reinterpreted through a contemporary lens.

When the project to transform Tselinny, the 1960s modernist Soviet cinema in Almaty, Kazakhstan, into a multidisciplinary arts venue first started taking shape, seismic engineers initially recommended that the building be completely demolished. 'The seismic approach in the 1960s was very different to what it is today,' explains architect Asif Khan, who worked on the project closely with his wife, Kazakh architect Zaure Aitayeva, of the contemporary engineers’ concerns. Looking at the building anew, 'there was a great deal of fear that if there was a major earthquake in Almaty, like there was back in 1911, the building would just fall down'.

Fortunately, Khan and the wider team behind the project were able to convince state research and design body KazNIISA that the building was worth saving – and the journey towards creating the first bricks-and-mortar home for the Tselinny Centre of Contemporary Culture began.

Tour Asif Khan's Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture in Kazakhstan

Founded in 2018, the privately funded institution aims to provide a national and international platform for (and archive of) Kazakh and Central Asian art in a country where state support for the arts is limited and in 'a city where there are a lot of artists but very few arts venues and galleries', explains the centre’s director, Jamila Nurkalieva.

The architects started by stripping back the building to the 18m-tall auditorium at its heart, reinforcing it internally with a steel frame but keeping the original roof. Everything around the auditorium had to be rebuilt, but this was done within the original footprint of the building. Retaining the structure's original size and height was important, as the cinema is a familiar and significant local landmark. 'It was where you would bring your first date,' says Khan, 'and in fact the founder of Tselinny, Kairat [Boranbayev], brought his wife Sholpan here for their first date in 1987.'

More recently, in the early 2000s, the cinema was converted into a hybrid venue with a nightclub. 'They served sushi and pizza and had photo booths,' says Nurkalieva. 'It was very successful and a focal point of the city in what was then a relatively recently independent Kazakhstan.'

It was during the building’s nightclub era that the monumental 42m-long sgraffito by Russian-born artist Evgeny Sidorkin, which adorned the large glazed public foyer of the original building, was covered up behind drywall. 'They had put in a steel frame to create a mezzanine and divided the sgraffito into several pieces, damaging it permanently,' explains Khan. The Tselinny team worked with local restorers and archival photographs to remake the sgraffito, cleaning off the layers of paint that had been added to the piece over the years and installing it in what is now a column-free and airy foyer. 'We decided to leave the scars visible so all the areas that were damaged in the 2000s and reconstructed are in white and distinct from the original,' says Khan.

Like many things in the region, the history of the Tselinny cinema is a rich and complex one. Opened in 1964, it was named after a colonial Soviet agricultural campaign – Tselina (or Virgin Lands), initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in 1953 – that saw hundreds of thousands of volunteers from elsewhere in the Soviet Union brought in to appropriate the traditional nomadic homeland of the Kazakh people – the steppe – and transform it into farmland. 'It shaped modern Kazakhstan in dramatic ways,' says Khan, 'and was the nail in the coffin of a nomadic way of life that had endured for thousands of years.' The decision to keep the cinema’s original name is part of an intentional attempt to 'deal with and repair these past and traumatic histories and attempt to move forward without the baggage of the past'.

Another way of dealing with the building’s and region’s history was to reconnect the site with its indigenous past. This can be seen on the new concrete envelope of the foyer building, which is covered in petroglyphs that reference both the ancient symbols and forms found in Sidorkin’s mural and the geological markings found across Kazakhstan. Most of the petroglyphs are carved into the wall and atmospherically illuminated at night; others are punctured into the building and become enigmatic-looking windows.

The region’s pre-colonial past is also referenced in the gently undulating ‘wall’ of white-painted steel fins that covers the building’s glass façade and invites people in. Khan and Aitayeva both speak of nomadic cosmology and the spirits Tengri (sky) and Umai (earth) as the inspiration for this cloud-like threshold or ‘device’. 'We wanted to bring a mythological force from ancient memory into the building so that the past and the future, the earth and the sky, could confront one another,' says Khan. 'The cloud softens and diffuses the rigid frame of the original building that represents colonial power.'

One of the most transformative changes to the building is arguably also the most practical. Thanks to the team’s removal of the original steps up to its entrance and 'digging down until we reached a universal level', the new Tselinny has been made far more accessible and welcoming and is now visually connected to the external landscape and street. The entire ground floor is on one plane, something Khan likens to the horizontality of the Kazakh Steppe.

At its heart is the original auditorium, a space that originally held over 1,500 seats. This vast space will host everything from performances, such as theatre and music, to exhibitions and roundtables, while more intimate shows will be held in the ‘capsule’ gallery in one of the foyer’s wings. Elsewhere on the ground floor, there’s a glass-fronted café and bookshop and a tearoom at the back that, when opened, will look out onto St Nicholas Cathedral and the park beyond.

Upstairs, there is a learning ‘atelier’ and offices, and on the top floor, a yet-to-open rooftop restaurant that looks out onto the surrounding snow-capped mountains. Both the restaurant, which is named after Sidorkin’s wife, Gulfairus ('probably the most important Kazakh artist that has ever lived', says Khan), and the café are designed by local female-led architectural practice NAAW.

The café features earthy organic tones and a communal burnished-stainless-steel table designed in a river-like form that echoes the fluidity of the sinuous outdoor landscaping, which in turn references the rivers in and around Almaty. It’s another nod to ancient Kazakh landscapes in a layered project intent on unearthing and honouring deep histories – a project that reclaims the past in order to embrace the future.

A new brutalist mosque in northern Kerala, India, echoes qualities found in Tadao Ando’s Church of Light – the simple concrete box in Osaka, cut through by a cruciform, remains one of the most iconic and pivotal statements of religious architecture from the late 20th century. Transforming raw materiality and atmosphere into carriers of faith, the Japanese structure made use of light itself as an intangible medium of architecture, poetically solidifying it through the void – a sensibility now found in this new, Indian project.

Tour this brutalist mosque in Kerala, India

Common Ground’s Masjid an-Noorayn, pared back to the elemental, is shaped from just one material: exposed concrete. With the austere gravitas of brutalist architecture and the contemplative simplicity of the Zen philosophy that first inspired Ando, it is configured with deliberate restraint into a low-lying silhouette, contrasting its tropical context. In stripping away the symbols, ornamentation, and forms that have come to typify Islamic architecture over the centuries (such as domes, arches, geometric motifs, crescents, and stars), the rectilinear planes evoke a return to its earliest origins, defined by simple forms and orientation alone.

A counterbalance to the mosque’s stark geometry is a cylindrical minaret and an entryway drawn out through a concave gesture above a pivoting door. This threshold leads worshippers from brightness into dark and heightens the sensorial shift of arrival into the meditative space within.

Inside, without the use of formal windows, the architects’ experimental explorations introduce light in various ways as a symbol of spirituality: a linear skylight follows the curve of an inverted arch and funnels light down across the walls; the minaret doubles as a lightwell; and a narrow incision between the building’s base and the ground invites a faint glow to seep into the prayer hall. A skylight is also positioned above a central mimbar, the pulpit at which the imam delivers his sermons, forming a symbolic link between the earthly and the divine, while softening and purifying the weight of the concrete and its rough textures.

Designing a community mosque today also inevitably carries cultural weight, and notably, Masjid an-Noorayn was conceived by a team of architects consisting of Muslim women. It was led by Common Ground’s founder, Simi Sreedharan, who, from the outset, ensured that women would have equal access to the space as men. The women’s prayer hall is thus given equal presence from the entrance, and nearby, Sreedharan has also integrated a community space that remains open outside of prayer hours, emphasising the mosque as a civic anchor in the community.

A new tiny church in Denmark is intended to reimagine contemporary sacred space. The small, 12-sided wooden building was designed by Danish architect Julius Nielsen, who was selected from over 100 entries in a 2023 design competition, initiated by Hans Egedes Parish and the Church Foundation. The project, completed in collaboration with timber flooring manufacturer Dinesen, has just opened its doors. The modest 75 sq m Tiny Church Tolvkanten can be found in Copenhagen’s North Harbour district.

Inside Tiny Church Tolvkanten

The religious building's interior is honest and raw. It has been entirely crafted from wood and steps away from the stone and iconography found in many of Denmark's traditional churches. Its timber construction and scale also mean it has been hailed as Denmark’s second most sustainable building (the project's Life Cycle Assessment has found it produces a mere 2.8 kg CO₂e/m²/year meaning it has a very low carbon footprint).

The floors, altar and font are made from Douglas fir, while offcuts have been repurposed for skirtings and door reveals. The floorplan is arranged in a web-like pattern, which is framed by a central skylight, making for a warm, yet spacious environment.

Nielsen’s goal was to deliver a new approach to the traditional church concept. The idea was to expand on what a church is perceived to be, making it more than a place of worship, but also an area for concerts, yoga and community dinners, for example. In addition, the building's modular design allows it to be dismantled and relocated.

‘Tiny Church Tolvkanten blends modest scale with meticulous attention to detail,’ says Nielsen. ‘Unlike traditional churches that use symbols and sacred images, this sanctuary looks inward. Its sacred essence is instead derived from the architecture, carefully chosen materials, and the gentle filtering of daylight. The high-quality Douglas fir floor, with its thoughtfully positioned boards and rich textures, creates a warm and resonant atmosphere, imbuing the space with depth.’

dinesen.com
juliusnielsenoffice.com

Canaletto's bridge; Poussin's clouds; Sir John Soane's 1815 building, which inspired his design for the now world-famous London red telephone box; and now, there's something for the younger visitor to the Dulwich Picture Gallery on offer, too. This weekend (6 September 2025) will see the public launch of the south London cultural institution's brand-new ArtPlay Pavilion and Sculpture Garden – a seminal project designed by architects Carmody Groarke, in collaboration with a host of artists and specialist creatives, which the gallery hopes will 'unlock art for everyone'.

Discover the ArtPlay Pavilion at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

The permanent pavilion designed by Carmody Groarke is a characterful, and yet rather subtle, minimalist timber structure that sits low and unobtrusive, placed next to the (also revamped, to include a canteen) Grade II-listed and formerly disused Gallery Cottage. The exterior references the gallery's architecture and colours (just as the canteen's timber cladding and colouring is a nod to the Dulwich Estate's modernist architecture on the other side of the site).

It may appear discreet, but big round openings and a series of canopies that make it look like a just-opened box about to reveal its present inside hint at its unexpected and enticing nature. Stepping inside, a riot of colour and playfulness unfolds.

Inspired by the gallery's famous paintings (the aforementioned bridge and clouds are part of the plan), a cruciform main interior has been designed by artistic duo Sarah Marsh and Stephanie Jefferies of HLD Collective as a rich, sensory play experience for children up to eight years old. Slides, swings, ball games and a wind tunnel are part of the immersive space, which is arranged around four themes (sunlight, water, wind, and earth) and will be available to book from 6 September – with dedicated days available free for local community groups.

Andy Groarke, co-founder at Carmody Groarke, says: 'The circular windows meet you straight on. The point was to make an intervention to create more engagement with the art. We also wanted it to extend out. The canopies reach out, something that the old building doesn't quite do.'

The architecture team also ensured the building is sensitive and sustainable, using locally sourced and milled Douglas fir from the UK for its wood architecture, as well as natural ventilation techniques (a central operable skylight brings in plenty of light and air) and a ground source heat pump.

If all this is not enough to tickle your fancy, an outdoor slide – an interactive, fully functional artpiece by Harold Offeh, titled Hail the New Prophet – is set to draw visitors of all ages, blending contemporary art and quirky fun.

'We wanted to bring a sense of playfulness and to open our art to everyone,' say Jennifer Scott, director of the gallery, which was founded back in 1811. 'That quirkiness is in our DNA – we are the world's first purpose-built public art gallery.'

The ArtPlay Pavilion comes with a new entrance to the gallery grounds to facilitate circulation for the families and other visitors, including school groups, set to book and use the new and old structures and the reworked (and free to access) wider grounds from this autumn. The grounds include a new Sculpture Garden featuring a wealth of new artworks, such as an undulating piece by landscape artist Kim Wilkie in the Lavington Sculpture Meadow, where an unloved hedge row and storage space used to be.

The new ArtPlay Pavilion and Sculpture Garden offer plenty of reasons to visit what is the biggest redevelopment at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in over 20 years. And now there's no excuse not to take the family with you.

dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk

The majestic National Gallery of Denmark's main building in Copenhagen dates back to the late 1800s and forms an essential part of the Danish capital's must-see visitor circuit. Its architectural pedigree includes a famous creator, Vilhelm Dahlerup (he designed it with technical assistance from Georg EW Møller), who is behind much of Copenhagen’s best-known architecture, such as Carlsberg’s famous Elephant Gate, the Glyptoteket and the Hotel d’Angleterre. Dahlerup's travels around Europe served as inspiration for many of his grand designs, and helped shape the city through the 19th century.

SMK, as the National Gallery is known by locals, was inspired by the Italian Renaissance, which was one of Dahlerup’s fascinations. It is also unique in that its architect insisted on using 'real' materials, such as marble, limestone and brick, as opposed to faux/concrete look-alikes used in many of his other works. As a result, the building is a feast for the senses, and that’s even before you start looking at the artworks within.

Explore the National Gallery of Denmark's newest venue

The choice of materials also plays a significant role in defining the architecture of the new branch of SMK, opening on 29 August 2025 in the tiny hamlet of Doverodde near the Thy Natural Park in the northern part of Jutland.

'Rather than build “out of nothing”, we built with what was already there – stone, timber, silence, wind,' explains Reiulf Ramstad, whose eponymous firm won the commission to design the new SMK Thy back in 2021, after SMK had secured a large donation from the AP Møller and Chastine McKinney Møller Foundation to realise a longtime dream of opening a branch outside of Copenhagen.

The site was already dotted with an eclectic mix of buildings. A beautiful old farmhouse from 1852, a huge three-storey brick warehouse from two years later, a 42m-tall grain silo from 1962, and a couple of more structures in different stages of dilapidation.

The farmhouse has been respectfully renovated and contains the museum café, administration and two apartments for use by artists and researchers. The silo, repainted and given a new grand Corten steel entrance, serves both as a viewing platform to enjoy the stunning surrounding nature and an exhibition space, containing three small display rooms.

The main exhibition space was originally planned to be built inside the old warehouse, but after a thorough investigation of the building, it was decided that the structural and architectural integrity wasn’t up to the high standards needed for a museum to show some of the most important works of 700 years of European art history. The warehouse was carefully torn down, but the bricks were saved, cleaned and reused for the exterior of the new building that took its place – using the exact same footprint and elevation as its predecessor.

'When we were invited to shape the new branch of the National Gallery, I immediately sensed that this project was not about imposing something onto a place. It was about responding to what was already there. About crafting a space where art and landscape, culture and community, could not only coexist but enhance one another,' says Ramstad about the decision to disturb the original architecture on the site as little as possible.

The architects also proposed expanding the scope of the renovation to include facilities that would accommodate outdoor experiences, such as a kayak hotel, fire pit shelters and even a dry dock with an adjacent workshop for a Viking Ship Guild already operating on the premises. These buildings are part of The Nature Village – a local initiative to bring nature and outdoor activities to the area – and close to the art exhibited at SMK Thy.

'Our visitors are invited to be present in the artwork, the architecture, and nature. We want to encourage visitors to spend time and be attentive. More broadly, I want to ensure that nature comes to play a significant role in our work in the future,' says Astrid La Cour, director of SMK.

The unpretentious and honest wood architecture of these structures frames the 19th-century farmhouse and the newly rebuilt warehouse in what really feels like a village atmosphere. Materials and elements, such as the massive trusses that carry the roof or the off-cut Dinesen Oak shingles used as cladding of the dry dock, are left exposed so visitors can marvel at the quality of the craftsmanship. Even the humble fire pit buildings have been clad in raw-edge oak planks in a testament to the project's 'quality', Ramsted says.

'I really believe that the more we talk about sustainability, the less sustainable it is. We should rather be talking about quality,' he explains. It is an approach clearly evident here in the reuse and selection of materials; in the careful placement of the new additional buildings; and, of course, in the idea of bringing some of Denmark’s most precious art to what might be perceived as the middle of nowhere.

Yet there is a thoughtful and poetic, full-circle moment in the National Gallery's move. Much of the Art in SMK’s vast 200,000-plus piece collection is precisely paintings of beautiful nature, such as the surrounding Thy National Park. Now some of that art will be going back to its origin.

'As a national cultural institution, we aim to be relevant outside the capital – not by becoming local, but by being present and engaged with local life,' explains La Cour. Just like the silo, dominantly visible on the horizon from far away, SMK Thy might just become a new cultural beacon for doing exactly this.

After more than a decade and four proposed sites, the $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is finally taking shape in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park. Designed by Ma Yansong of Beijing studio MAD Architects (which has an office in LA), with Stantec as executive architect, the swaggering, futuristic museum – co-founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson – is nearing the final stages of construction, edging toward a projected 2026 opening on its 11-acre campus.

The five-story, 300,000 sq ft building will house galleries, theatres, classrooms, dining and retail spaces, all in service of the museum’s mission to explore how visual stories reflect and shape society. It will contain much of Lucas’ art collection – illustrations, paintings, photography, and other media centred on visual storytelling – as well as artifacts from the Lucasfilm archives, such as props, costumes, and storyboards from Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

The museum was originally envisioned for a site in San Francisco’s Presidio in 2010, with a design by Dallas-based Urban Design Group, but the proposal was rejected by the Presidio Trust. Lucas then looked to Chicago’s lakefront, where the project faced opposition from preservationists advocating to keep the site open for public use, and MAD’s design, which had been selected through an international competition in 2014, was ultimately shelved. Undeterred, Lucas and Ma developed parallel proposals for San Francisco’s Treasure Island and LA’s Exposition Park, with both cities competing to host the project. In 2016, Los Angeles was selected. Initially slated to open in 2021, the museum has seen delays due to the pandemic and other setbacks.

Though his firm created designs for three different sites, certain ideas held firm, says Ma. From the start, the Lucas Museum was conceived as a space to embody the emotional and narrative power of art and storytelling, he notes. 'That core vision remained constant across all three iterations, even as the contexts shifted.'

The final site offered unique opportunities. Surrounded by cultural institutions and embedded in a park landscape, 'we were able to shape a building that is both part of its environment and entirely its own', Ma says. The long design process also gave the team time to refine their thinking around sustainability, materials, and public space. 'It allowed the design to mature – not just in form, but in spirit.'

It’s hard to avoid the term space-age when describing the museum’s jaw-dropping form. While Ma is known for his attention-grabbing designs, his work is deeply rooted in nature and its relationship to the built environment. 'Nature is not simply an aesthetic reference for me,' he says. 'It’s a way of thinking about space, emotion, and experience.'

The building’s flowing curves and softened edges stand in contrast to the city’s rigid geometries. They’re inspired by natural topographies – mountains, clouds, waves. 'Yet they are not literal imitations,' says Ma. 'They create a spatial experience that feels both grounded and otherworldly.'

Elevated at the centre to preserve views and form a public gathering space, the building acts as a canopy over a plaza that connects it to the surrounding landscape and streetscape. An elliptical oculus crowns the plaza, marking a gateway to the larger park.

The idea of nature extends to the museum’s sustainability strategies, which include a geothermal system, rainwater harvesting, 24,000 sq ft of rooftop photovoltaics, a super-insulated envelope and seismic isolation engineered to withstand 42 inches of ground movement in any direction. 'The building becomes part of a living system,' says Ma. 'It becomes part of the park, part of the city, and part of the natural world.'

As the vessel for the museum’s collection, the landmark structure is also intended to be part of the storytelling experience. Soaring north and south lobbies draw visitors into 100,000 sq ft of exhibition and public space. Clad in 1,500 uniquely shaped white fibreglass-reinforced polymer (FRP) panels, the Lucas Museum strives to be both iconic and contextually integrated – its landscaped roof helping it blend into the park’s topography.

That nearly 1.5-acre roof is part of a broader vision by Mia Lehrer of Studio-MLA, who is transforming what was once a parking lot into a verdant, immersive environment. The new landscape will feature undulating landforms, 200 trees, hundreds of native and drought-tolerant plantings and a series of experiential elements: a hanging garden, amphitheatre, meadow and a waterfall designed to contribute to the museum’s passive cooling strategy.

Ma has said he hopes his architecture evokes emotion – not a single feeling, but a range of responses shaped by the experience of space. 'Architecture should move people. It should create a sense of wonder, of possibility, and of being connected to something larger than oneself,' he says.

At the Lucas Museum, whether walking through public spaces or sitting beneath the plaza canopy, 'I want visitors to feel openness, imagination, and peace. The soft, sculptural form invites reflection. The pathways and thresholds encourage movement and discovery.'

Visitors will soon be able to draw their own conclusions, as the museum’s long journey comes to an end and they are able to experience it firsthand.

Shut your eyes and jab a finger at a map of the US and you will likely find a brand new, freshly spruced up or forthcoming art museum within driving distance of your digit.

In the Great Plains, there’s the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, with its sweeping new wing by Snøhetta. Venture south and you’ll encounter the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee, by Herzog & de Meuron, and can look forward to the development of a Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art expansion, in Kansas City, Missouri, currently being designed by Weiss Manfredi. Head to New York and discover the reimagined Frick Collection, a Beaux Arts-era mansion overhauled by Selldorf Architects, in addition to soon-to-open expansions of the New Museum, Studio Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, helmed by OMA, Adjaye Associates and Frida Escobedo Studio, respectively.

Museums are getting bigger on the western seaboard, too. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will soft launch its Peter Zumthor-designed extension this summer, while The Broad, completed only a decade ago, is also getting a makeover – it just broke ground on a new 50,000 sq ft addition by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. And that’s not even touching on projects in the wider cultural sphere, such as the revamped Storm King sculpture park in New York’s Hudson Valley, or the Doris Duke Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow by Mecanoo, the performing arts centre slated to open this summer.

According to data collected by AEA Consulting, a global firm that offers strategic services for the cultural sector, around 90 new cultural projects were announced in North America last year alone. ‘The museum sector has been on a long-term building binge,’ says AEA founder Adrian Ellis.

This may seem paradoxical, especially for the US, which has been plagued by culture wars and budget cuts, so what is behind the boom? One obvious culprit is the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw construction projects around the world grind to a halt before then picking up again. Aaron Dorf, a director at architecture firm Snøhetta, thinks museum work has always been cyclical, but the pandemic definitely contributed to a fresh wave of activity. ‘There were probably plenty of institutions that were in the pre-planning phase and hit pause, so that shifted the timeline for a number of them,’ he says. But there is more than that at play. One of the biggest drivers, says Brian Butterfield, a director at Why Architecture, is quite simply to do with building lifecycles.

'The biggest failure point of museums is the mechanical systems,’ he says, citing critical conservation infrastructure, such as temperature and humidity control. ‘Every 20-30 years, you have to replace them.’ Renovations and expansions are a prime opportunity to not only upgrade ageing systems but also to fund them. ‘It’s quite hard to raise a lot of money for what a layperson sees as an air conditioning replacement project,’ notes Butterfield, pointing to his firm’s recent overhaul of the 40,000 sq ft Michael C Rockefeller Wing at the Met, a portion of the museum that first opened more than four decades ago. Working with the Met’s design team, as well as Beyer Blinder Belle, they were able to reinstall art collections from Africa, Oceania and the Americas, but also incorporate digital features, display light-sensitive works (some on view to visitors for the first time) and conduct a complete mechanical overhaul. ‘The public sees the gallery renovation, but underneath the skin is a full systems upgrade that will hopefully last another 50 years,’ says Butterfield.

Ellis sees the recent uptick in museum openings and expansions as part of a longer trajectory, one that began way back in 1997 with the opening of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Gehry. Cities began to look for more ways to make themselves appealing to both residents and visitors. ‘One of the things those cities alighted on was cultural infrastructure,’ says Ellis. ‘Bilbao was the poster child for this.’

Institutional soul-searching combined with macro trends such as globalisation, the need for heightened security post-9/11, and the ability to access culture in the palm of your hand via a smartphone, among other factors, necessitated a radical shift in the way museums got built, how they courted visitors and how they stacked up against their peers.

‘The tricky thing with museums is how do you keep your existing audience while attracting new ones that are younger and more diverse?’ says Butterfield. ‘Museums want to stay relevant. To do that, you have to evolve. And mostly, that means big capital projects.’

The LACMA extension, which has been in the works for nearly two decades, is a case in point. Its David Geffen Galleries will add nearly 110,000 sq ft to the museum. The project will not only comprise traditional spaces for art viewing, but also a new visitor entrance, outdoor plazas, a theatre, a store, dining destinations and educational facilities.

And museums aren’t the only ones thinking about the future; it’s a question that America’s ageing donor class also has top of mind. ‘There’s a certain generation with priceless art collections. And there are a lot of big capital projects that are being driven by promised gifts,’ says Butterfield.

The Joslyn’s new wing, for example, was built in part to accommodate the collection of the late entrepreneur Phillip G Schrager, a monumental gift that included 52 works by the likes of John Chamberlain, Jenny Holzer, Roy Lichtenstein and Antony Gormley. And the drive is not just steered by philanthropists and collectors – museum directors are also thinking about their legacies. ‘How do you make your mark?’ says Ellis. ‘Often the easiest way is a capital project. It’s very concrete, no pun intended.’

The money for such projects is certainly out there. According to data collected by Ellis’ firm, of the world’s top ten budgets for recently announced cultural construction projects, nine are in the US. ‘We’re talking about a quarter of a billion to half a billion dollars in the larger projects. These are incredible sums of money,’ he says. ‘Where are these sums coming from? They’re coming from private philanthropy in one form or another. We’re living in a period that’s not dissimilar in many ways from the Gilded Age when all those big museums, like the Met, were formed a century ago.’

However, it does look like this golden age for museum construction, at least in the Western world, is starting to slow down. ‘I think, to some extent, that trend has run or is running its course in Europe and America,’ says Ellis. Dorf concurs: ‘I think we’re on the downslope of a crest.’

The data supports those observations. According to the AIA’s April Architectural Billings Index, an indicator of construction health in the US, project billings have softened for 28 out of the past 31 months, which economists chalk up to uncertainty. Museums will likely feel the squeeze, too, says Ellis. ‘I’m not saying there’s going to be a precipitous decline, but I’m saying you may be looking at peak museum building as a function of peak museum planning.’

Which begs the question, are bigger museums better? ‘If you look at museums that people uniformly declare to be their favourite museums, they tend not to be enormous buildings but relatively modest, like the Sir John Soane’s Museum – they are relatable experiences,’ says Ellis. ‘Very few people put mega museums as their favourite. And I think there’s a lesson there that we probably need to learn.’ A lesson that half-billion-dollar budgets cannot buy.

There is nothing much like Jacob's Pillow, the renowned cultural hub that is home to America's longest-running international dance festival, and whose campus in the leafy Berkshires is a designated National Historic Landmark. The complex, which hosts performances, residences and a school, in a year-round programme, has been growing organically – figuratively and literally – since its inception in 1933. Today, it is widely acknowledged for its pioneering history in its art form and represents an important centre for dance in the country, as well as globally.

Jacob's Pillow and the Doris Duke Theatre: a history

Jacob's Pillow’s revolutionary founder, modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn, was in search of a home for his all-male company (a rarity at the time), Ted Shawn and His Men Dancers, when he came across a farm on top of a wooded hill in Becket, Massachusetts. Accessed via a zigzagging road, the site was locally referred to as 'Jacob's Ladder' (from the Biblical story) and had existed since the 1700s. A round rock on the site resembling a pillow soon gave the venue its name. There, the company's dancers slowly built – often with their own hands and while living off-grid on-site – a family of structures using the area's traditional timber frames, which eventually became the vibrant campus you find there today.

The complex contains buildings that house offices, rehearsal rooms, an archive and exhibition centre, and of course, stages – among them, the Ted Shawn Theatre (which was thoroughly renovated in 2022) and the breathtaking, outdoor Henry J Leir Stage where shows take place against the backdrop of the surrounding rural landscape. A third performance site, the Doris Duke Theatre, completed the set, but in 2020 it was tragically destroyed by fire.

To make up for this loss and responding to the organisation's growing needs, Jacob's Pillow, now headed by director Pamela Tatge, commissioned Dutch architecture studio Mecanoo to create a new home for its third stage. Architect and practice founder Francine Houben unveiled her design for the new Doris Duke Theatre in 2023, working with New York design firm Marvel and artist Jeffrey Gibson, whose Choctaw-Cherokee heritage is often reflected in his art, inspired by the North American Indigenous aesthetic. Jacob's Pillow rests on the ancestral homelands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok or Mohican people, and acknowledging this and having the North American Indigenous community be an integral part of the new design was pivotal to the dance centre's plans and future.

It was equally critical for the complex to develop holistically and on a larger scale, too, allowing visitors to experience not just a specific performance when they visit, but the wider campus, its nature, and cultural and architectural heritage.

Tour the latest campus addition at Jacob's Pillow

Tatge explains why Mecanoo was the perfect fit for the commission: 'There were a number of reasons why we picked Francine. One is her deep experience in creating theatres, and we had to make sure that this was a theatre that was going to work for us. The second is her amazing work with wood; she engages with it in a very poetic way.

‘She had also recently created a reimagined wood building on her property in the Netherlands, called the Shed – it is a nonprofit that supports performance, meetings, and retreats in dialogue with the landscape. I thought, if someone can make such magnificent work on a large scale, and can also make something like this, she's our candidate. And the final thing, which was really important, was that we asked every design team to [include] an Indigenous artist. She selected Jeffrey Gibson, who has a performance background. For all those reasons, Mecanoo was the right choice.'

All existing buildings at Jacob's Pillow follow the typical local vernacular, conceived to be highly functional and pragmatic. They are beautiful in their gentle, wood architecture and utilitarian looks. The reimagined Doris Duke Theatre sits on the site of the former structure and echoes the same spirit, using, for example, modern timber construction. The new building, however, aims to be more open and more inclusive and accessible, as well as more flexible and larger – the main stage seats 230 people – than its predecessor, while maintaining the old theatre's intimacy and warm feel.

Following these themes, both Tatge and Houben agreed that the building had to be connected to its land. 'We [were] not building a theatre in Brooklyn,' Tatge says. 'It needed to resonate with the surrounding environment, and also be responsible in terms of sustainability. We needed to make environmentally conscious decisions, and also embrace new technologies and make sure the campus is accessible.’

'Jacob's Pillow is a spectacular place,' says Houben. 'It is a collage of buildings. I loved the colour and tactility of the old [Doris Duke] building, and how it opened and connected to nature. That is one of the unique things here; you are always connected to nature. Also, it is on Indigenous land, and all the buildings are of colonial typology. We wanted to go back and celebrate the diversity and the Indigenous history of the site.'

The structure is built in pine, which will age and turn silver over time. Its rounded shape and the garden behind it reflect shapes and layouts that are important in Indigenous culture – as does the number '7', which makes its appearance in various elements, such as the horizontal 'bands' of timber cladding seen on the external skin.

The rounded form is 'thanks to Jeffrey Gibson, who pointed out that Indigenous structures are circular and colonial structures are all right angles,’ continues Houben. ‘We [had] no curves at Jacob's Pillow. What would it mean to introduce a curve? So we introduced this hugely inclusive veranda that represents what we want this place to be. What we want this theatre to be is a welcoming space for all. The final form is not a perfect circle, but there is something really important about imperfection.'

As a result, the building's ground-level flowing veranda leads to a west-side lobby, welcoming guests in a sheltered, pre-show area. Another lobby on the east side can be used flexibly as a rehearsal space and multipurpose event area, spilling out to a lush garden that pushes the boundaries of dance performance. Here, art pieces including contributions from Indigenous artists will be displayed, and there's also a medicinal garden and a fire pit for gatherings. And, of course, there was a reason why this garden sits on the east, Houben explains: 'According to Indigenous philosophy, you need to enter from the east.'

Inside, the main stage and all its seating and technical magic sit within a 'box', placed within the external, rounded volume. 'In theatre, we talk about the “black box”. We mean a rectangle that's hugely flexible. So this is a black box, a wooden box, and Francine takes it to the next level: it's a magic box because of all the ways that you can use the space,' says Tatge.

Houbin explains that the theatre opens in all four directions, combining, visually and physically, art and nature. It feels open and flowing. 'We imagined [dancer] Emily Johnson dancing on the roof – we wanted to make spaces that can be both formal and informal,' the architect says. There are also new support spaces, acoustic panels and ventilation, which not only work well but are also beautiful to look at. It all works perfectly in tune with both its natural and built environment at Jacob's Pillow, a perfect addition to the complex that hosted ‘the first theatre in the USA that was really designed for dance’, Houben says.

The reimagined Doris Duke Theatre opened at Jacob’s Pillow on 6 July 2025 with a week of festivities across the campus, including the Trinity Irish Dance Company, a three-day Pride celebration featuring The Illustrious Blacks, and performances by Indigenous Enterprise, Calpulli Mexican Dance Company, and Sydnie L. Mosley Dances.

jacobspillow.org

mecanoo.nl

marveldesigns.com

Zaria Court, the adaptive reuse of a modernist building in Kigali, Rwanda, has just been unveiled, to a design by NLÉ, the studio founded by Kunlé Adeyemi (also behind the Floating Music Hub in Cape Verde) and now co-led by him and design partner Berend Strijland. The team worked with Masai Ujiri – president of basketball team the Toronto Raptors and founder of non-profit Giants of Africa – to redesign the existing structure into a hub to serve the country's younger generations, as a new centre for sports, hospitality, community, and culture.

The transformation of modernist Zaria Court in Rwanda

Zaria Court has had a special place in the country's history. The 20th-century structure was originally built as government housing, but became the base for the United Nations' temporary headquarters in Rwanda during the country's 1994 Genocide, serving as a refuge. It also doubled as the Rwandan Health Authorities’ office during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In transforming this structure, which is known and established in Kigali, to prepare it for its new chapter, NLÉ was committed to not only revitalising the old building's bones but also to creating valuable space for the local community to thrive.

Adeyemi says: 'What excited me about Zaria Court was the opportunity to transform a historic site into a vibrant catalyst within Rwanda’s emerging sports ecosystem. And through a development partnership, we demonstrate how architecture could positively impact communities and provide a replicable model of innovative infrastructure – empowering African youth and accelerating sustainable urban development across the continent.'

The generous project has been redesigned to launch a range of new facilities within its folds. There is a multifunctional court and event space for sports, music, fashion, entertainment, and cultural programming; an 80-room hotel; indoor facilities such as a gym, co-working spaces, conference room, meeting areas, with a swimming pool and a rooftop bar; five-aside soccer pitches, and an outdoor calisthenics training area; and a children’s play area featuring lush native landscaping and open green zones that encourage safe play and informal social interaction for all ages.

Aiming to support young talent and Rwanda's creative spirit, a special landscape of stacked shipping containers on site is set to serve as a modular – and affordable – retail park, which will become home to Kigali’s emerging designers, food vendors, and local entrepreneurs.

Zaria Court becomes operational in June 2025, with an official opening taking place in July 2025

nleworks.com

A once-neglected venue for an annual livestock and agricultural event in Chetumal, Quintana Roo – a south-east Mexican state – has been refreshed as a multifunctional fairground wrapped by a verdant urban park. The project, a government commission won by the London- and Mexico City-based architecture practice Aidia Studio, is situated on the outskirts of Chetumal and borders the lush foliage of the Yucatán Peninsula’s subtropical forest. Consisting of a series of light, seemingly floating, round pavilions with geometrically patterned roofs, the scheme creates an otherworldly image when seen from above; yet this family of structures was crafted with pragmatism in mind, as well as a strong desire for it to become embedded into the local community, responding to its needs and wellbeing.

The studio studied the project’s site and its wider area – ten hectares surrounded by jungle, next to a 20km-long boardwalk that runs along an estuary popular with families, cyclists and pedestrians. ‘The primary challenge was to create a facility that could be used year-round while designing structures that could accommodate a variety of uses and events,’ says Aidia Studio’s co-founder Rolando Rodriguez-Leal. ‘The project aligned with our studio’s ongoing commitment to biophilic design, which emphasises the importance of creating environments that foster a strong connection between users and nature. In the context of the park, this connection is achieved both literally and through the evocative architectural forms.’

Tour the new Quintana Roo park

The pavilions – open to the air but providing thick shade to protect from the region’s hot sun – create a perfect home for the fair while in operation. They also provide a platform that allows for a variety of community events throughout the year, supported by a number of facilities on site. There is a 1,000-person capacity arena for sports and concerts, covered basketball courts, a skate park, shops, a playground, a civic square and callisthenics equipment. It’s a remarkable feat considering the scheme’s budgetary and time constraints, with Rodriguez-Leal noting there was ‘a stringent construction timeline of 12 months’.

He adds, ‘From the beginning, our objective was to create a tension between the circular footprint of the pavilions and the meandering, delta-inspired pathways that connect them. We recognised the potential for visitors to explore these features while wandering through the greenery, allowing them to detach from the strict orthogonal grid that characterises Chetumal and become enveloped in the natural environment.’

Following this approach, nature is woven into the design as an important part of the project. Eleven ceiba trees, a species indigenous to the area that can grow up to 70m tall, mark the borders of a square at the park’s entrance and act as symbols for each of Quintana Roo’s 11 municipalities. Elsewhere, a mix of chit palms and banana trees, both known to thrive in the region, dot the campus. ‘Throughout the design process, we prioritised nature as the central element, aiming to create structures that would be partially concealed by the trees over time. This approach not only provides shade for visitors, but also enriches the experience of being in a tropical park,’ says Rodriguez-Leal.

As earthy and nature-inspired as the concept may seem, it was designed using cutting-edge architectural technology, such as parametric tools that allowed
for tailor-made adaptations of hyperbolic paraboloids and customised form-finding. Still, the overall low density of the complex throughout ensures existing foliage is preserved as much as possible. This helps to cool down the park in what can be an intensely hot and humid climate. The studio’s biophilic approach is reflected in the chosen material palette – olive green steel columns, clay-tiled roofs and cladding, and wood details help the structures to blend in with the surrounding trees. Brick patterns, meanwhile, add texture while supporting natural ventilation, and modular elements brought costs, building site timings and environmental impact down as they can easily be disassembled if necessary.

aidia-studio.com

The newly opened Shenzhen Science and Technology Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, is located in the Greater Bay Area of the Guangming District of Shenzhen, the world’s largest metropolitan region with a population of 100 million. The museum will showcase scientific advancements, research and technologies across 35,000 sq m of exhibition halls and galleries, as well as theatres, cinemas, laboratories, educational facilities and an innovation centre.

An institution whose aim is to solidify Shenzhen's role as a leader in technological development should look the part: ZHA, the architecture firm behind some of the most futuristic-looking buildings in the world, has created a design that is both striking and advanced.

The 28,276 sq m museum looks like a spaceship, with a solid spherical volume which transitions into a series of outdoor terraces as it extends westward into the new Science Park. These serve as extensions of the interior galleries, which emerge from the floor and walls of a grand central atrium, while other spaces float above. The atrium serves as a focal point for the building, featuring a large glazed wall looking out to the park, which allows for natural light to pour in and views of the landscape.

The construction of the Shenzhen Science & Technology Museum pushed the boundaries of modern architecture. For example, the façade features dual-colour INCO technology, which creates the appearance of a celestial-feeling blue-to-grey gradient without paint.

The building is also sustainability-focused. ZHA used computer simulations to optimise the building's performance for Shenzhen's subtropical climate: the result is the use of passive environmental strategies such as orientating the building in a way that minimises solar heat gain in the atrium, or having terraces on each floor to shield the facade from direct sunlight.

Elsewhere, a system of stainless-steel panels creates a ventilated cavity between the facade and the external walls, which also incorporate photovoltaics to generate solar energy. The museum’s smart systems should reduce energy consumption significantly, and the building aims for the highest rating of China’s Green Building Evaluation Standard.

zaha-hadid.com

‘As you may see, Rotterdam is not Rome. It is not Paris, and definitely not Amsterdam. We are different,’ says Robert Simons, vice mayor of Rotterdam’s port and economy. ‘We do have a rich history which allowed for our architectural journey to take a different turn. After the Second World War, our city centre was destroyed. From this, Rotterdam decided to make a bold decision, to rebuild and restore. This allowed us to focus on innovation and our connection to the river mass.’

Enter the new Rotterdam visitor centre: Portlantis

His notes mark the opening of Portlantis, a new educational centre built on the cusp of the port in Rotterdam, where the land meets the sea. Its main purpose is to offer an interactive journey which takes visitors through the story of the city’s rich maritime history, while projecting a glimpse into the future.

The building was designed by architecture studio MVRDV, with interior design by Kossmanndejon, who worked closely with each other to make sure the structure was built with sustainable architecture in mind, while informed by functionality requirements and the surrounding environment. The result is a demountable building with reusable façade panels. It is fully energy-neutral, drawing from its own wind turbine and 266 solar panels.

Located around 45 minutes from the city centre, Portlantis is a modern marvel overlooking the sea. Comprising five cubic volumes, its geometric façade is intriguing and playful, taking on the shape of a Rubik's cube in play. Each level holds distinct character and educational purposes to ignite a spark within the young children who visit, perhaps inspiring them to pursue a future career in Rotterdam’s maritime industry.

Winy Maas, the architect leading the project for MVRDV, says of the design concept: ‘The port is the opposite of the cuteness of the Netherlands. When designing this project we had to think, “How on earth do we compete with this? The cuteness of the windmills or the considered eyesore of gigantic stacks of cargo containers?” Here we wanted to be inspired by [the windmills]. Which is why we created the building as a “cute stack”.’

Maas continues, 'It all started with materials from the port. The façade is constructed with sandwich panels, which are most robust against the wind, salt and dust. We made them shiny because they [happen to] help monitor the levels of dust and wind – signalling when the façade needs to be cleaned and maintained. [For us] it is a poetic interpretation of the harshness of the surrounding environment and a beacon in the landscape.’

Matte black, cylindrical revolving doors guide visitors through a series of swirling lights and deep hums, before they enter the core of the building. Here, the history of the port is unveiled. A large interactive screen highlights the area's development from the Second World War to the present day. Suspended above and taking up the full 22m atrium height are yellow models of parts of a large boat, its propeller and anchor chain, for example, moving and creating different compositions during the day.

The second floor is about the impact and influences of the port on the region's economy, employment, and environment; while the third floor looks to the future. ‘We are in a world of climate change,’ says Herman Kossman, the exhibition designer for Portlantis. ‘We need to think about energy transition and geopolitical changes. This is something the port wants to present, to showcase answers on how to deal with these issues in the future.’

The fourth and fifth floors host a restaurant and an accessible rooftop offering a panoramic view where you can put everything that the exhibition has relayed into context.

The centre is predicted to host 150,000 visitors per year. It is designed to allow visitors to find their own way through the building in order to connect with the port’s maritime spirit.

‘Portlantis’ interior and exterior are designed to be connected,’ explains Kossman. 'Its content and form are interconnected. In our professional world [many projects] start with a building. The architects design it, and then exhibition designers come in and set up their displays. This isn’t just a building with a story inside. The building is also part of the story.’

Portlantis is located at Pr. Máximaweg 301, 3199 KG Maasvlakte Rotterdam, Netherlands portofrotterdam.maglr.com

mvrdv.com

kossmanndejong.nl

Manchester United football club has revealed plans for a jaw-dropping new stadium, which Sir Norman Foster, founder and executive chairman of Foster + Partners, the project’s architect, has described as ‘arguably the largest public space in the world’. The stadium will be built close to Manchester United’s current home, Old Trafford, and have capacity for 100,000 fans.

The club’s co-owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has said: ‘Our current stadium has served us brilliantly for the past 115 years, but it has fallen behind the best arenas in world sport. By building next to the existing site, we will be able to preserve the essence of Old Trafford, while creating a truly state-of-the-art stadium that transforms the fan experience.’

Foster + Partners has released conceptual images of how the stadium and its surrounding areas might look, which is, in a word, distinctive. Three masts, 200m high and visible from 40 miles away, will rise, trident-like, from the structure.

In a video released by Manchester United, Lord Foster explains that, acoustically, the stadium will ‘[cultivate] a huge roar’. It will not be a ‘fortress surrounded by a sea of cars’, but ‘open’, contained by what he describes as a ‘vast umbrella’ which will ‘[harvest] energy and rainwater and [shelter] a new public plaza that is twice the size of [London’s] Trafalgar Square’.

The stadium will be ‘the beating heart of a new sustainable district, which is completely walkable, served by public transport, and endowed by nature’, Lord Foster continues, describing this new district as a ‘mixed-use miniature city of the future’. This refers to the fact that the stadium will act as the centrepiece to the regeneration of the Old Trafford area, and of southern Manchester as a whole. The start date for the project, therefore, will depend on ‘how quickly the government gets going with their regeneration programme’, Ratcliffe said.

A project of this magnitude would usually take ten years to complete. Manchester United has announced its plan to do this one in five, slashing the construction time with prefabrication – building large parts of the stadium off-site and transporting them via Manchester’s canal network. ‘It will be a modular build – that means it can be built far more quickly,’ said Ratcliffe. ‘There are yards which specialise in building very large structures, which are then shipped to locations around the world.’ Lord Foster added that construction time would be halved ‘by using the network of the Manchester ship canal, bringing it back to a new life, [and] shipping in components, 160 of them, Meccano-like’.

It’s a full circle moment: during the Industrial Revolution, Trafford Park was the nation’s industrial heartland; now, the very infrastructure that made that possible will pave the way for the Manchester of the future.

fosterandpartners.com

The Trump administration has promised to make civic buildings great again. Now, according to an announcement from the General Services Administration (GSA), the federal agency that oversees the nation’s commercial real estate portfolio, there will likely be fewer of those buildings.

According to a statement released Tuesday by the GSA’s Public Buildings Service, the agency is targeting 'non-core assets' – underutilised office space, in particular—so that American 'taxpayers no longer pay for empty and underutilised federal office space.'

'Decades of funding deficiencies have resulted in many of these buildings becoming functionally obsolete and unsuitable for use by our federal workforce,' the statement reads. 'We can no longer hope that funding will emerge to resolve these longstanding issues.'

What those buildings are, precisely, remains to be seen. According to the Associated Press, an initial roster outlined more than 440 properties across the United States to shutter or sell. That lineup included key government buildings in Washington, D.C., from Brutalist landmarks (a style derided by President Trump) like the ‘60s-era J. Edgar Hoover Building, to historic neoclassical buildings, like the American Red Cross National Headquarters.

It also included contemporary structures, like the Charles Gwathmey-designed United States Mission to the U.N. in New York and the Thom Mayne-designed Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco. The list was revised Tuesday and removed altogether by Wednesday.

But, as GSA spokesperson Paul Hughes told Wallpaper* Thursday in an emailed statement, 'To be clear, just because an asset is on the list doesn’t mean it’s immediately for sale.'

'However,' he added. 'We will consider compelling offers (in accordance with applicable laws and regulations) and do what's best for the needs of the federal government and taxpayer.'

The announcement received an 'overwhelming amount of interest,' according to Hughes, who added, 'We anticipate the list will be republished in the near future after we evaluate this initial input and determine how we can make it easier for stakeholders to understand the nuances of the assets listed.'

According to the GSA, the agency has more than 80 million rentable square feet in its real estate portfolio and notes that such measures could result in savings of $430 million per year in maintenance costs, in line with President Trump’s executive order to reduce government spending.

Last week, the New Museum, a Manhattan hub for new art and ideas, announced that it will open a 60,000 sq ft expansion in autumn of this year. The building has been designed by international architecture firms OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) and Cooper Robertson, and its opening will coincide with an inaugural exhibition called New Humans: Memories of the Future.

The New Museum originally opened in 1977 on New York’s Hudson Street; it has since moved and expanded, becoming a renowned space for contemporary art. OMA founder Rem Koolhas and partner Shohei Shigematsu are among the architects to work on the extension, the practice's first public building in New York, which will be named after the late philanthropist Toby Devan Lewis, a long-serving New Museum trustee. It will ‘usher in a new era of possibilities for the New Museum as a vital civic resource for New Yorkers and the global arts community’, said Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis director of the New Museum.

She added that ‘the New Museum has always been a ‘future-facing museum’ – ‘not a place for preserving and recording history, but a place where history is made’. As such, the extension will complement the existing building on the Bowery at Prince Street, which was designed by SANAA, whilst also bringing a new dimension, doubling the museum’s gallery space, improving visitor flow, and creating new venues for artist residencies and public programs. The new building will be a ‘highly connected yet distinct counterpart to the existing museum’s verticality and solidity’, said Shigematsu.

The OMA partner also revealed that the extension will ‘offer horizontally expansive galleries for curatorial variety, open vertical circulation, and a diversity of spaces for gathering, exchange, and creation’. It will include, he said, an outdoor plaza at the ground level, ‘moments of transparency throughout the central atrium’, and terraced openings at the top.

The inaugural exhibition will be an ‘encyclopedic, interdisciplinary exhibition that continues the Museum's engagement with the most pressing issues of today’, said Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson artistic director of the New Museum: ‘Through the work of more than 150 artists, writers, and cultural figures, New Humans reveals how our most terrifying contemporary concerns are in fact as old as humanity itself. [The exhibition] highlights the role artists play in interpreting and confronting the critical issues that will shape our collective fate.’

The New Museum is ‘an incubator for new cultural perspectives and production’, said Shigematsu, and we look forward to seeing OMA’s architectural interpretation of this methodology.

oma.com