A century-old Atlanta warehouse long home to a building supplies manufacturer is now a factory for art called Loop, thanks to a nimble renovation from architectural designer Jennifer Bonner and her practice MALL.

Georgia Tech purchased the property in 2018 from Randall Brothers, a building supplies company in Atlanta on the site since 1885. The seven-acre plot is slated to hold Georgia Tech’s new Creative Quarter, with academic buildings, student housing and even a hotel to come. Most buildings on the site were demolished. The historic warehouse that houses Loop was happily retained, now home to this event, exhibition and studio space operated by local arts organisation Goat Farm.

The project was rooted in felicitous chance. Bonner, who is based in Portland, Oregon, but formerly taught at Georgia Tech and has exhibited with Goat Farm, ran into Mark Dinatale, Goat Farm’s managing director on the site. She explains, 'Mark and I saw each other there and I said "we have to work together on this."'

Goat Farm operates nearly 200 artists’ rental studios at five locations throughout Atlanta. 'The revenue from studio rentals actually goes to support the arts programming. We can use it to subsidise harder-to-fund art forms and more experimental forms of art,' Dinatale explains. Goat Farm has worked with Georgia Tech in the past, and is collaborating on a three-year activation of the warehouse.

The building was in generally good condition. The design team made repairs to the roof and installed new HVAC, plumbing, windows and doors. A lingering layer of sawdust from its prior life was cleared out.

A temporary stay required a light touch, one successfully executed thanks to Bonner’s scheme. The structure provided easy guidance as to where to locate 17 artists’ studios, within the column grid along its two sides, while retaining the central volume for flexible use, including exhibitions, installations and performances.

To accommodate such a variety of uses, Bonner and her team relied on a literal loop, a translucent curtain composed of metallic flame-retardant polyester fabric which can be shifted or removed. 'Basically the curtain became a way to spatially close things off or divide them,' Bonner says.

Forty custom-fabricated planter carts, meanwhile, provide a cheap and easy source of ornament and spatial organisation. 'They can be recombined in terms of shapes and they can be all clustered together,' Bonner adds.

Lighting is another source of verve, consisting largely of LED strips. Bonner, working with lighting designer Pablo Gnecco of New York-based firm Studio Studio, placed the lights vertically on interior columns and horizontally on the building's front facade in a glowing band. '[It's] stretched the whole length of the facade, like Dan Flavin on steroids,' Bonner says.

The lighting design involves a range of shades from pink to purple to green, which can be fixed or pulsate.

The overall aim of Loop, as Dinatale explains, is to achieve 'an experimental space,' that grants artists access to space and technology. So far, Loop has provided a space for exhibitions and events, as well as performances by Hyojin Kwon and Frank Vigroux; dance companies; AI art; video game art; and even Georgia Tech’s Laptop orchestra.

Allie Bashuk, Goat Farm’s creative and design director, notes Loop's proven an ideal location for evening performances, with no residences around. Their aim has been to provide a strong platform for offbeat art. 'We try to elevate all these projects by giving them proper lighting and visual cues,' Bashuk says.

Bonner held an exhibition on roof designs at Goat Farm in 2014 titled Domestic Hats. This time, she's returned to work under a hat of her own devising – and an overdue accomplishment, she notes: Loop is the 'first building on the Georgia Tech campus designed by a female-led practice.'

The Shanghai Grand Opera House opens this weekend, marking an important moment for the Chinese city, which now welcomes an important new cultural destination into its folds; and set in a linear arrangement along the Huangpu River, the new venue does not disappoint. The building was conceived to bring together state-of-the-art performance, sculptural architecture and a green, walkable public realm – and so it does, to a design by renowned Norwegian architecture studio Snøhetta.

Explore the new Shanghai Grand Opera House

The building sits on a spacious, clean plot, looking out towards the river and city, placed within a park that is free and open to all. Snøhetta, whose past landmark projects include the lauded Oslo Opera House and its innovative, accessible roof woven into the city's waterfront, pulled out all the stops to craft a building that embraces its surroundings in a similar way here. The structure ducks and twists, bowing to the city and touching the ground to invite visitors in and onto its roof, which extends out like a viewing platform or promenade.

Underneath, the roof curves, responding 'to the ebb and flow of the Huangpu River,' the architects explain, while unifying everything underneath - from restaurants and circulation to education spaces and auditoriums. 'The roof becomes a stage, an observation deck, and a gathering place accessible throughout the year, strengthening a sense of shared ownership. A spiralling staircase connects the ground and roof, framing views towards the river and skyline, turning movement itself into a defining part of the public experience,' they add.

Inside, the Opera House spans a generous, roughly 146 sq m surface, incorporating three auditoriums (for a total of 4,200 seats), designed to accommodate anything from traditional opera to classical music and more experimental and contemporary productions.

The building is predominantly white, kept clean and minimalist, glowing against the region's warm sun. Therefore, the bold red-accented volumes in the main lobby and circulation space playful 'pop', as the expansive facade glazing allows plenty of natural light in. These features perhaps nod to the deep red of traditional theatre boxes - but the volumes' arrangement was designed to follow modern acoustic principles in order to ensure the best possible environment for the performances and overall venue functionality.

Meanwhile, the three auditoriums were each designed to have their own character. The colour palette used in each one subtly changes, transitioning from darker to lighter tones (from bigger to smaller). This not only establishes a gentle hierarchy among them, but also highlights each venue's distinctive character.

Each of these stages - titled Harmony Hall, Soar Theatre and Open Stage - is fine-tuned for acoustics and other technical requirements. Beyond 21st-century performance mod-cons, though, they also provide a visual feast through their carefully calibrated tiered seating, built-in flexibility and emphasis on ensuring the audience feels as close to the live programme as possible.

The aim, the architects stress, is to approach performance architecture as 'an open typology' - a space that belongs to all and to the city, rather than something exclusive and reserved for expensive-ticket holders only. With the new Shanghai Grand Opera House, Snøhetta explain that they used learnings from past successes with works such as the Oslo Opera House, and translated them to the specific site and audience in the bustling Chinese port city.

The studio writes: 'Beyond its role as a venue, the Opera House creates a shared framework for artistic expression and civic life. Its stages support world-class performance, while its public spaces carry the experience of culture beyond the auditorium and into the everyday life of the city.'

snohetta.com

In the small German town of Künzelsau, north-east of Stuttgart, a new pavilion by David Chipperfield Architects has opened. Here, you can find the painting Schwarze Flocken (2007), a large-scale work by German artist Anselm Kiefer, best known for his confronting paintings that capture post-war Germany. His pieces sit at the intersection of contemporary art and neo-expressionism.

Inside the Anselm Kiefer Pavilion

The pavilion stands within the sculpture garden of Museum Würth 2at the Carmen Würth Forum cultural centre, also designed and realised by David Chipperfield Architects, and matches the distinct architectural language of the existing buildings.

It comprises one monolithic volume with bush-hammered concrete walls, a sculpture in itself. Inside, the architecture firm worked with the artist to determine the proportions, openings, and colouring of the wall surfaces.

Kiefer’s large-scale work measures 11m in height and 7.10m in width; it is the largest by the artist in the Würth Collection and, due to its dimensions, has not previously been exhibited.

The painting's title, Schwarze Flocken (meaning Black Flakes), is borrowed from a poem by Romanian poet Paul Celan. He wrote this around July 1944 in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi, Ukraine), following his return from a forced labour camp. It was a response to the news of his parents’ fate during the Holocaust – his mother was shot, and his father died of typhus in a camp in Transnistria, in Moldova. Kiefer’s painting is one of reflection. And through abstraction, he visually captures the poem’s description of the harsh winter landscape and grief.

The building was designed in close collaboration with the artist and specifically tailored to the work. The room doesn’t have strict artificial climate control or lighting parameters. Instead, the architects optimised its three-layer wall construction – concrete, brickwork and clay plaster – to create natural climate control.

The overall result is building that creates a tranquil atmosphere, centred fully on the artwork on display.

davidchipperfield.com

For much of the 20th century, the Île Seguin, a 28-acre island just west of Paris, was a huge industrial complex, home to the first Renault factory. Now, 34 years after the factory's closure, the island is finding new life as a destination for culture.

It's been a long road to get here. The Renault plant closed its doors in 1992, and the buildings were demolished by 2005. Since then, the island has lain fallow, often described as cursed, the scene of a series of failed attempts to build ambitious projects. Early on, François Pinault asked Tadao Ando to design a contemporary art museum here, but he changed the location to Venice after losing patience with bureaucratic red tape. More recently, the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier tapped Jean Nouvel to build a cultural 'micro-city' on the island, but Bouvier was forced to abandon the project after allegations of fraud. One rare success story was a Shigeru Ban-designed concert hall, La Seine Musicale, built in 2017.

Step inside the new Île Seguin art centre, Large

Now it is joined by another cultural venue at the opposite tip of the island, where Laurent Dumas, CEO of the French real estate group Emerige, is constructing a 'Pointe des Arts'. The complex includes an IMAX cinema, a hotel, and a contemporary art centre called Large, which opens this month.

In contrast to the black glass sphere of La Seine Musicale, the Pointe des Arts is an angular group of buildings shaped like a sideways fin, with the museum in the middle like a copper-coloured ship. It's the first project in greater Paris for the Catalan firm RCR Arquitectes, which won the Pritzker Prize in 2017.

As RCR co-founder Carme Pigem explains, it was important to underline the project's location on an island and to engage with the surroundings. Openings and pedestrian thoroughfares cut through the buildings, providing glimpses of the river banks to either side. Metal cladding references the island's industrial history. The façade of the cinema is in rust-coloured corten steel, while the museum is covered in copper-pink scales of anodised aluminium.

'Corten steel develops a patina,' says Pigem. 'Then, as a counterpoint, we have the polished anodised aluminium, which plays on the changing atmosphere of the river landscape, capturing and creating these magical moments between the reflections on the water, the times of day, the different seasons, the interplay of ephemeral moments that you experience in a landscape like this.'

Some of the aluminium scales have microperforations that let sunlight in through large glass windows. From the exterior, the cladding appears as a solid skin. But from inside, these tiny holes create a filtered mashrabiya screen effect. RCR associate architect Gilles Trégouet explains, 'As you walk toward the exhibition rooms, you discover with surprise that this interior, which seemed quite introverted from the outside, actually multiplies the viewpoints out onto the landscape.'

In French, 'au large' means out to sea. But the museum's name also reflects its generous size: 5,000 sq m. Its sculptural form creates a multitude of shapes and volumes within it, some grand and others more intimate. 'All these spaces can be used for exhibition,’ says Pigem. ‘It’s not just that there's a small room dedicated to a small artwork. It’s about this entire space being for art, regardless of size or level. An entire journey centred around art, even outside on the terrace, where artwork can be displayed. Ultimately, it’s about creating a little world filled with endless possibilities.'

Visitors enter an expansive atrium on the ground floor, with a triangular staircase composed of steps and amphitheatre seating, a curved mezzanine overhead, and plenty of diffuse natural light through floor-to-ceiling windows. The flooring is made of dark galvanised steel planks. A cylinder runs up through the building's six floors like a vertebra, concealing the elevators.

A monumental escalator takes visitors from the mezzanine to the fourth floor, where the main exhibition space is a stunning 1,000 sq m and 14m high in places, without a single supporting pillar – a great space for showing monumental artworks. From here, visitors can step out onto a landscaped, panoramic terrace that wraps around the building and meets up with a café designed by Constance Guisset. The fifth and sixth floors contain smaller exhibition rooms (but still big enough to display a salt-corroded Renault covered in vegetation by South African artist Bianca Bondi).

The museum's unusual shape allows natural light to enter the main exhibition space through strategically placed slits. A week before opening, Laurent Dumas was walking through the newly installed inaugural exhibition, admiring the relationship between architecture and artworks. 'What surprises me is to see the reflected light, the extraordinary light on this work by Dubuffet, on the photos, on the background,' he said.

His aim with Large is to promote the French contemporary art scene – embracing both local and international artists living or working in France – with two seasons of temporary exhibitions per year, made up of loans from museums, artists and collections, including his own.

Curator Cecilia Alemani, who leads the art programme of New York's High Line, was invited to curate Large's inaugural show. Called 'Imaginary Engine,' it is dedicated to the theme of the automobile and all its facets: mechanics and assembly lines, factory workers and unions, the car as an object of desire, man and machine...

The show contains 120 works from the 1930s to today, nearly half from the Renault collection, dating back to the 1960s when the company started inviting artists to visit and collaborate with the factory. It includes exceptional works by Jean Dubuffet, Arman, Victor Vasarely (who designed the Renault logo), Simon Hantaï, Niki de Saint Phalle, Julio Le Parc and Jean Tinguely. The carmaker even hired a 22-year-old photographer unknown at the time, Robert Doisneau, to photograph the factory.

Large also commissioned 17 contemporary artists to create new works for the exhibition, such as Ghanaian sculptor Paa Joe, who made a 'fantasy coffin' inspired by the Renault taxi manufactured in the early 1900s. French artist Bertrand Lavier transformed a Formula One race car into a sculpture by covering it with a thick coat of paint.

Dumas wants Large to be accessible to the public, so 40 per cent of the space is open to all, and the exhibition is completely free for anyone aged 26 or under. And though Île Seguin isn't Venice, and there's no vaporetto, RCR has designed a charming new pedestrian bridge to the museum.

Large's exhibition 'Moteur Imaginaire/Imaginary Engine' runs from 17 October 2026 to 7 March 2027

large-emerige.fr

Belgium’s Ghent Design Museum, the biggest of its kind in the country, has reopened after a revamp led by British architects Carmody Groarke alongside local architects Atama. The extensive project has been one of expansion, consolidation, as well as heritage restoration by specialist studio Re-st, with a new circulatory loop carved through the museum’s existing historic buildings and the route completed with a new low-carbon entrance wing.

Explore the new Ghent Design Museum

The site of the new wing had lain derelict for years, hosting the museum toilets inside a huge toilet-roll sculpture – a tongue-in-cheek act of protest representing the space’s wasted potential. Today, that potential has been fulfilled with a different kind of waste: a building built with bricks made from Ghent’s municipal construction rubbish.

These lime-cured bricks, developed specially by Carmody Groarke and BC Materials with a grant from Circular Flanders, hold a third of the embodied carbon of a standard clay-fired Belgian brick. And, they’re just the start of a material journey that captures the museum’s ambition to show, as well as tell, how design can change the world.

The new wing is Belgium’s tallest public timber-structured building at five storeys, and after stepping through the 3D-printed recycled aluminium entrance gate designed by Unfold, you’ll discover design contributions from more than 30 local designers. These include modular furniture, toilets clad in bio-materials, an upcycled curtain by Chevalier-Masson, and a column of the museum’s own medieval, 18th-century, and 1990s demolition waste by Grond Studio.

When the site was excavated for the new lower ground level, the remains of a 12th-century house constructed from the timber of a boat were discovered. It turned out to be Ghent’s oldest-ever found residential structure. Architect Andy Groarke, co-founding director of Carmody Groarke, describes it as a ‘metaphor’ for the whole museum’s design approach that honours the ‘humility of deep time and resourcefulness'.

He describes the architecture as a ‘postmodern counterfactual archaeological project’ – a museum rising from debris, history and the city itself, creating a ‘hyper-local vernacular’, where past material is reconfigured into the present. Museum architecture of the early 21st century has often been presented as a ‘frictionless object’ he says, which denies the ‘enjoyment and struggle of process’, and ‘the human qualities of improvisation and resourcefulness’.

Groarke delights in the idea of it becoming almost ‘deauthorised’ over time, gaining layers of character. 'The building isn’t an endpoint. It's a scaffold for young Belgian designers, who are going to continually hack, redesign, interpret, misinterpret, use and misuse this building. We see the architecture as a sort of infrastructure to enable things to happen and a test site for trial and error.'

The design approach responded to the vision of Katrien Laporte, museum director since 2013, to create a place of investigation, research and innovation, with an environmentally conscious mission. She recruited a panel of 40 elected local citizens with the intention of discovering what people really needed from a design museum today, to improve accessibility and civic relevance.

What became clear was that, as well as displaying as much as possible from the collection of approximately 24,000 objects, the design museum of today is a place that can evolve with its audience and become a space for open-ended congregation: one ‘where you're not forced to perform or consume and you can just be’, says Groarke.

In the new wing, functions are mainly social. There’s a spacious foyer for informal encounters and a new café with a courtyard garden designed by Bureau Bas Smets. The all-important new lift core for disabled access and timber staircase lead to the ‘Co-Lab’ or ‘Collective laboratory’ for experimental workshops and further up to the high-ceilinged ‘Loft’, another gathering place with its huge window to the city.

In an ‘overmediated’ society where we’re often distanced from experience by technology, for Groarke, today’s design museum is a ‘touchpoint for the physical world and the social world’, where ‘people can come together to make sense of their time and place’. Both anchored in the layers of the historic city and ready to set sail into the rest of the century, Ghent Design Museum is a new vessel, laboratory and ‘third space’ for the city.

carmodygroarke.com

designmuseumgent.be

atama.website

re-st.be

There’s no question we’re living in an uncertain time as artificial intelligence, climate change and political upheaval threaten life around the globe. The world’s heritage sites – the buildings, landscapes and landmarks that define our shared cultural history – are not immune to these shifts. A new report from a global preservation authority, though, demonstrates that the biggest threat to these significant places comes down to something far more pragmatic: money.

Today (30 September 2026), the World Monuments Fund (WMF) released a study showing that government austerity leads the list of hazards threatening global heritage sites. In fact, 86 per cent of candidates for its 2027 WMF World Monuments Watch designation cited lack of funding and resources as the top reason the location was at risk.

‘This year’s nominations show that the pressures on heritage are intensifying while the resources to protect it are not keeping pace,’ said WMF president Bénédicte de Montlaur.

It isn’t just lack of government funding that’s squeezing stewards of global sites, the study found. An analysis of the 372 nominees also cited local economic constraints and rising construction costs as stressors. More than a dozen large heritage projects in France, for instance, required $2.3 billion in public funding, a cost that’s projected to double in years ahead. In the UK, funding from local municipalities to fund heritage projects have fallen nearly 47 per cent since 2009.

The outlook is even more grim for under-resourced regions, including in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where less than $1 per capita is invested in protecting historically significant places. The United States, meanwhile, has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in its federal budget devoted to the arts, the humanities and national parks.

While economic constraints led the list of 14 primary challenges the WMF identified, the report found that climate hazards, as well as lack of access to expertise were next on the list. Severe winds have damaged the Unesco World Heritage Site Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove in Nigeria, for instance, while increasing storms have put pressure on Fingal's Cave, a stunning basalt cave in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland.

While the results of the report are concerning, the WMF hopes that it will help both local and global preservation groups strategise on how to best support local efforts. ‘These findings are a call to action, and they will help guide where our work is needed most,’ de Montlaur said.

Situated beyond the Art Gallery, above the Concert Hall, and framed by the sweeping curve of Frobisher Crescent, the Barbican’s semicircular Sculpture Court was conceived as a space where art and architecture could be experienced as part of everyday life. Over the years, the one-acre courtyard periodically opened to the public for seasonal installations and events, such as outdoor cinema screenings, but in more recent times, the brutalist architecture complex's deteriorating infrastructure and limited accessibility left it largely underused.

Reviving the Barbican’s Sculpture Court

Now, as part of the wider Barbican Renewal, a long-term conservation programme ensuring the restoration of the Centre’s most iconic spaces ahead of its 50^th anniversary, the brutalist courtyard is set to be revitalised as a fully accessible public space opening in 2030.

The City of London Corporation has approved the plans, with an initial £147k grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, the UK’s largest funder for heritage. The revival will be led by architects Allies and Morrison, working with engineers Buro Happold: proposed interventions include climate-resilient planting, improved lighting, upgraded infrastructure for events, accessible seating and paths, step-free access and clearer wayfinding. These changes will transform the Court into a welcoming space while safeguarding the heritage significance of its Grade II* listed landscape.

'The Sculpture Court is a much-loved part of the Barbican's remarkable heritage and one of London’s most distinctive Grade II* listed Brutalist landscapes,' said Stuart McLeod, Director of England, London & South at The National Lottery Heritage Fund. 'This project will not only safeguard its heritage for future generations but also establish a vibrant urban green space that will enrich the Barbican experience for visitors and the local community. We look forward to seeing the plans progress as the Barbican reimagines this important place for the next generation.'

While the Barbican is recognised globally as an architectural icon, collaboration with local communities is also central to the project. During a Co-Design Day, young people aged 16 to 25 were invited to contribute ideas for making the Sculpture Court more inclusive, exploring how the space could bring people together through culture and shared experience.

'Culture belongs to everyone, to our communities and to the next generation,' said Philippa Simpson, Chief Operating Officer at the Barbican Centre. 'These milestones represent further momentum in the Barbican Centre’s renaissance, securing the future of a cultural icon and global destination as we approach our 50th birthday, and making sure these special spaces continue to inspire people for generations to come.'

The Barbican will continue to welcome audiences while works take place, extending its programming beyond the Centre with a season of performances, exhibitions and events across London.

barbican.org.uk

Just outside Shanghai and set beside Jinji Lake, the Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has officially launched to the public. The 60,000 sq m landmark soft-opened its doors on 30 August 2026 with a series of preview exhibitions – among them a show on the architecture firm's own work.

Step inside BIG’s Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art

BIG created the museum to unfold like a village, and it features a contemporary interpretation of traditional Suzhou gardens. Under a ribbon-like roof, the project comprises 12 pavilions with a central covered corridor that acts as a stem, branching into the varying exhibition spaces. Bridges and tunnels are positioned above and below ground, connecting visitors to the changing exhibitions.

‘If the historic city centre is the cradle of the Chinese garden, the [Jinji] lake district is the cradle of a new Suzhou. The site of the Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art is sandwiched between the city and the lake. A newly constructed Ferris wheel partially blocks the relationship with the water,' says Bjarke Ingels, founder and creative director of BIG.

'By dissolving the museum into a Chinese garden of interconnected galleries, distributed across the site like pavilions in a park, the museum becomes a connection between the city and the lake, rather than an obstacle. Its urban porosity allows citizens to walk through sculpture gardens to the lakefront, while the water penetrates between the pavilions to reach the city,' he continues.

The Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art marks the first completed art museum for the architecture firm. The museum also presents BIG’s own 'Materialism' exhibition, which invites visitors on a journey that explores ten different materials that helped shape the firm's work. The show includes large-scale mock-ups and models of projects from around the world.

The museum is a significant new venue for contemporary art, design, and public life in Suzhou, with a focus on cross-cultural relationships between Eastern and Western artistic traditions, headlined by a Picasso exhibition and a large survey of contemporary Chinese art.

Ingels continues: ‘Not only do I see our design as an homage to its local heritage, a sort of Scandinavian reinterpretation of a unique typology, the Chinese garden, but the result is in many ways a manifestation of the ancient future of Suzhou and a testament to the construction quality and technical sophistication that is becoming the rule rather than the exception in contemporary Chinese architecture.’

suzhoumoca.com

big.dk

Shenzhen has never been about the past – and in the new Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, set in a city younger than many of its inhabitants, there is a delicious irony in the project presenting itself as even remotely ‘ancient’. It is an irony that deepens when, viewed against the International Style glass towers of the Houhai financial district in the background, it is also the most futuristic building around.

So far, Shenzhen’s story has been vertical, both in its architecture and its ambition. It is a glittering arc of towers, totems of speed and economic might in the city where modern China first opened to the world.

Discover the new Shenzhen Bay Culture Square by MAD

Shenzhen is no longer the world’s factory and, edging away from its second coming as China’s Silicon Valley, it seeks to become a cultural powerhouse in the emerging Greater Bay Area, a sprawling metroplex of 11 cities and nearly 90 million residents whose economy rivals that of several major nations.

A hop and a skip from the AI museum being built by Tencent (Shenzhen is still home to tech giants like Huawei and BYD), the latest project by Beijing studio MAD, the 18.8-hectare Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, falls squarely into that new ambition.

Located on the western waterfront, the vast mixed-use cultural complex houses museums, performance spaces, shops, and public amenities beneath a series of flowing forms that rise and fall like topography. Less an object inserted into the skyline than a landscape, it is designed to evoke the appearance of rocks emerging from receding water.

It is the latest, and perhaps most complete, expression of MAD founder Ma Yansong’s vision of the (re)integration of nature and urban life, which he has explored in various forms for the last two decades under the rubric of the ‘Shanshui City’ – an 'idealised Chinese worldview' that proposes an urban space where residents can seek refuge in nature and sites that appear like they have always been there – an 'ancient future'.

MAD’s early work exudes a science-fictional quality. That sense of theatre remains in the curving confines of the Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, where spaces are linked by courtyards, organic openings and elegant ranks of cantilevered escalators. The echoing exhibition hall at the top of the northern pavilion, for example, is a work of such breathtaking dimensions that its low-lit simplicity is almost religious in nature. Elsewhere, the brilliantly lit lecture theatre that materialises at the end of a warm, winding corridor of wood is instantly reminiscent of that all-white room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But there is also a new maturity here. The studio’s characteristic mastery of movement is cleverly expressed in the shifting orientation of the stonework, small blocks that not only make possible the cladding of these mathematically complex forms but discreetly disguise their monumentality. But where previous projects such as Mississauga’s Absolute Towers or the Harbin Opera House verged on the alien, their sculptural, flowing forms a rude salute to the rectilinear logic of the modern city, the soft curves of Shenzhen Bay Culture Square read more as an invitation.

Designed as a link between city and sea, it is not simply a monument but rather a piece of public infrastructure. It is not an object to be admired but instead seeks to choreograph public life, drawing visitors onto its roofs and terraces and down to the waterfront.

This dedication to the public realm reflects Shenzhen’s latest phase as a city moving beyond building 21st-century infrastructure to building memory. It also speaks to China’s contemporary cultural ambitions, where flagship public buildings are increasingly required to offer more than high-tech galleries or auditoria and are expected to become destinations, landmarks, and pieces of urban theatre, capable of projecting national confidence both domestically and internationally.

Yet perhaps the most striking aspect of the project is that, despite its power and scale, it does not seek to dominate its surroundings. Instead, and in what may be its most radical gesture, it attempts to dissolve into them.

In this city defined by verticality, MAD has produced something that invites residents not to look up, but to wander across, around, and through.

i-mad.com

The White House ballroom battle entered a new phase today. After a federal appeals court ruled last week that construction on the 90,000 sq ft expansion must stop, President Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to allow the project to move ahead.

'This case involves an extraordinary and unlawful injunction that will halt the ongoing construction of the integrated military complex, including a totally secure ballroom space, at the East Wing of the White House, which is vitally required by national security,' US Solicitor General John Sauer argued in a filing with the high court.

The ballroom project has been a lightening rod for controversy since President Trump unveiled the concept a year ago, for both its design and its $400 million price tag, to be funded by private donations.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit that seeks to protect historically-significant sites across the US, brought suit against the plans in December 2025, arguing that the project required approval from Congress to move forward. Following months of legal back-and-forth, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit moved to block work on the project, upholding an earlier decision by a lower court.

‘Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence,’ the court wrote. ‘The President has no – and claims no – constitutionally assigned authority over that property, which is designed and maintained for the use of all Presidents, current and future, and for the American people.’

The Trump administration's petition with the Supreme Court, however – the nation's highest court – marks a significant escalation in the ongoing skirmish. The National Trust has until noon on 18 August to respond.

'Each court reviewing this case has ruled that construction of the Ballroom is unlawful,' the National Trust said in a statement. 'Each court has seriously and carefully considered the Administration’s asserted national security concerns. And each court has ruled that while underground bunker construction can continue, Ballroom construction must stop.'

The Trump administration, however, says it may be too late to halt the project. The Supreme Court filing noted that the building's superstructure is 65 percent complete, 'with millions of pounds of steel procured, tens of thousands of cubic yards of concrete poured and miles of conduit laid...Given those developments, the injunction promises chaos in service of nothing.'

Construction photos included in the filing show the extent of the work, which includes towering concrete shear walls. New renderings also depict what the complex will ultimately look like. The Neoclassical structure is designed by local firm Shalom Baranes Associates and will include a ballroom with gilded ornamental ceilings; a colonnaded exterior with 'magnificent Corinthian columns'; and decorative gold presidential seals on the facade.

The filing also touted the design's security features, which will include a droneport, a bunker five-storeys deep; and materials that are 'missile-resistant,' 'droneproof' and 'bullet, ballistic and blast-proof.'

One afternoon in 1969, a group of shaggy-haired rock musicians took the stage during a music festival held on Monmouth University’s campus in West Long Branch, New Jersey. The band, a local Jersey Shore act called Child, was fronted by a 20-year-old named Bruce Springsteen. What ensued was a ‘wild, mind-bending show’, the student newspaper reported – so raucous, in fact, that neighbours complained about the noise.

Springsteen, of course, went on to achieve international superstardom and is considered one of the most influential American musicians alive today, with 20 Grammys, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and ​​a National Medal of Arts from President Joe Biden. But echoes of that early performance still reverberate around Monmouth University, thanks to a new museum and research centre dedicated to preserving Springsteen’s legacy and sharing the ever-evolving story of American music.

Designed by New York-based firm CookFox Architects, The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music is about narrative, inside and out. Architect Rick Cook didn’t count himself as a big fan of ‘The Boss’ before taking on the project. But gradually, he fell under the singer-songwriter’s spell: ‘I actually fell in love with Bruce as a great American storyteller. That I understood, because architecture is storytelling,’ Cook says.

The building, located on the eastern corner of Monmouth University's campus (just a mile from the humble blue bungalow where Springsteen composed ‘Born to Run’), appears as a brawny, two-storey rectilinear box that, once the landscape is grown in, will hover amid a swaying meadow. While the massing is simple, Springsteen lore pervades the building, from the weathering-steel louvres that evoke the musician’s working-class roots, to a tree alongside the museum’s entrance that nods to a majestic Copper Beech that stood at Springsteen’s childhood home in Freehold, New Jersey. Most notably, a plank ramp leading to the front entrance forms an analogue of the Asbury Park boardwalk, where Springsteen first emerged on the local music scene. ‘How do you design a building that honours Bruce and American music? Obviously, start with a boardwalk,’ Cook says.

Like Springsteen, the museum collection had humble origins – one shaped by the Jersey Shore. The collection sprang from the Bruce Springsteen Archives, a repository of fan-collected items and ephemera related to Springsteen and his backing musicians, the E Street Band. At first, the 15,000-piece collection was stored at the Asbury Park Public Library; in 2011, Monmouth University acquired the collection and stored it in a small house on its campus. But as the collection grew (some items were even stored in the bathtub), it was clear that it needed a more appropriate home.

That’s when Bob Santelli, a Monmouth alum and veteran music journalist who’s helped curate the museum at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grammy Museum and many others, stepped in as executive director. ‘The thought [had been] that Bruce’s memorabilia and archives would go to the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress. And the idea was no, it’s going to stay in New Jersey,’ Santelli says, who began covering Springsteen in 1973 as a cub music reporter. ‘He is so synonymous with the state of New Jersey – no one is as synonymous with their respective state as Bruce.’

There was only one thing left to do: ask the Boss for his blessing. Springsteen was hesitant about having a museum devoted to his legacy, but when the remit evolved to include the history of American music more broadly, he gave the project the green light.

The Boss also has thoughts about the building, according to Cook: when the architect showed Springsteen an initial design presentation, the musician offered just one word of feedback: ‘Badass.’

When visitors enter the museum, they encounter an airy atrium constructed of heavy timber, another nod to New Jersey’s historic factories and mills. The ground floor includes a gift shop and information desk, in addition to a theatre and galleries.

The theatre comprises one of the building’s boldest design moves. Fronted entirely by glass, the state-of-the-art auditorium can host films, lectures and, of course, musical performances. Little design details speak to Springsteen – flooring made from end-cut wood, and seats clad in a blue-jean fabric – ‘a little bit literal’, Cook jokes. Over in the gift shop, display cases, sporting merch including jewellery, posters and replica E Street Kings tank tops, are made from the stage flooring used in Springsteen on Broadway.

After watching an orientation video in the auditorium, visitors are directed to the galleries on the building’s south end, whose displays celebrate the evolution of the American musical canon. Via a series of interpretive vitrines, guests can get up close and personal with treasures ranging from Frank Sinatra’s shoes to Prince’s guitar and a Lady Gaga costume. A special exhibition, ‘Chimes of Freedom: Protest, Patriotism and the Power of Song’, spotlights music’s ability to spur change – items on display include the lyrics for Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ and Springsteen’s ‘Streets of Minneapolis’.

Upstairs, the Springsteen pilgrimage truly begins. The second floor is dedicated almost entirely to Springsteen and E Street Band history, with displays ranging from a recreation of Springsteen’s Rumson, New Jersey living room to a listening room that replicates live concerts. The objects on display are enough to bring any Boss fan to their knees, and include Springsteen’s first-ever song, written in 1967 when he was a teen; Grammy awards; an album of press clippings maintained by the artist’s mother; and the iconic blue jeans and white T-shirt worn on the cover of Born in the USA.

A separate area contains the museum’s research center, which includes spaces for study, listening and storage for archival materials. Visitors can make an appointment to view pieces from the collection, which now consists of more than 30,000 items.

‘You can get plenty of information on the Internet,’ Santelli says, but the museum aims to provide something else – a tangible connection to history. The director anticipates the museum will draw die-hard Springsteen aficionados and music connoisseurs alike. But he’s most interested in the impact the centre will have on people outside the music orbit.

‘We’re in a tourist area so we’re going to get Mr and Mrs Smith on a crappy day at the beach,’ Santelli says. ‘They may not be Bruce fans, but the idea is to give them a sense of Bruce's importance not just to New Jersey but to America.’

Cook, the architect, is one of those converts. ‘Music exists in a moment in time. Architects deal with things in space, physical things, but music is that magic that happens,’ he says. ‘Bruce is a magic act.'

Heatherwick Studio has unveiled its new design Stateside, which sees the transformation of a forgotten civic space in Louisville, Kentucky. The open area, titled Belvedere, is located downtown, nestled between the city’s commercial centre and the Ohio River.

Off the back of opening London’s Olympia this July (2026), the UK architecture firm has been busy fine-tuning Belvedere’s details, aiming to create welcoming public spaces that will include spacious pavilion-style structures and vast amounts of planting.

Heatherwick Studio unveils plans for Belvedere civic space in Kentucky

Elevated above a main road, the site spans approximately four American football pitches. The new design transplants outdoor gathering into the city, inviting people to meet friends, host community events, and watch performances near the waterfront.

The defining feature of the proposal is the Firefly Pavilion. The striking structure is designed for everyday use throughout the year but also acts as a platform to host events.

Belvedere originally opened in 1973 and slowly weathered, eventually appearing disjointed from the city. The firm worked closely with the community to hear their insights, which informed the project's development. Construction of Belvedere is expected to begin this autumn, with a grand opening anticipated in 2030.

‘For more than 50 years, the Belvedere has been a stage for public life in Louisville. But over time it’s become barren and disconnected from the energy of the city around it. My studio’s design is about restoring the buzz and sense of connection of its early years by creating a greener, more welcoming urban heart, where everyday life can take place: from chance encounters and children's play to festivals, performances and community celebrations,’ says Thomas Heatherwick, founder and design director of Heatherwick Studio.

‘Our goal is for the newly reimagined Belvedere to reflect Louisville’s unique character, and bring people together again across generations, backgrounds and interests, and go on to become a place that local people proudly call their own.’

heatherwick.com

President Donald Trump’s plan to build a 90,000 square-foot, privately-funded ballroom next to the White House has been mired in political and legal quagmire. That still hasn’t shut down work on the sprawling structure, which has been steadily rising from the ground since it broke ground last autumn.

But a federal appeals court ruled Friday that construction on the ballroom site cannot continue without direct congressional approval. The 2-1 decision, handed down by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, upheld an earlier decision by a district court to block work on the project.

‘Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence,’ the court wrote. ‘The President has no – and claims no – constitutionally assigned authority over that property, which is designed and maintained for the use of all Presidents, current and future, and for the American people.’

The decision marks another chapter in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit that advocates for historic buildings and sites across the US, against the National Parks Service, the federal agency that oversees the White House and its grounds.

‘This is a great day for our country and for the American people's right to voice their opinions about the historic places they cherish, including the White House,’ said National Trust president and CEO Brent Leggs in a statement. ‘From the beginning, our position has been clear and consistent: the law states that only Congress can authorize the construction of a ballroom at the White House.’

‘This decision is particularly meaningful as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and advocate for renewed protections for historic preservation,’ Leggs added.

The defendants have 14 days to decide whether to appeal the decision.

President Trump, however, was clear about next steps. ‘We will be immediately appealing to the United States Supreme Court,’ he wrote on Truth Social – indicating that the ballroom battle is far from over.

The Unesco World Heritage Committee has closed out its annual session with the decision to add 25 new sites to the World Heritage List. The additions span cultural and natural sites, from Iran's Alamūt Castle to Mongolia's Xiongnu nobility cemeteries and the historic medinas of the Comoros.

The list, reserved for places of ‘outstanding universal value to humanity’, increasingly embraces a newer category of heritage: 20th-century modernist architecture. Finnish works by architect Alvar Aalto and his collaborators, the modernist city centre of the Polish city of Gdynia, and the modernist architecture of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, have all been added to the list, signalling a growing recognition of modernism as the next frontier in heritage preservation.

Finland’s Aalto works

This designation covers 13 buildings across Finland constructed between 1928 and 1988, credited to architects Alvar Aalto, Aino Marsio-Aalto and Elissa Aalto and their studio. The buildings – a mix of civic, community and residential projects in both cities and rural areas – embody the modern movement's core aim of addressing social needs through architecture. The works are rooted in Finnish tradition, yet engaged with the international ideas sweeping through architecture over the 20th century.

Five of the 13 buildings are in Helsinki: the Aalto House and Studio Aalto in the Munkkiniemi suburb, the National Pensions Institute (KELA) building in the Töölö district, the House of Culture, and Finlandia Hall in the city centre. Visitors can explore the Aaltos' legacy further through a permanent exhibition at Finlandia Hall and a design museum exhibition running through January 2027. Finlandia Hall itself – refurbished between 2022 and 2025 – now offers short-stay apartments furnished with Aalto-designed pieces.

Gdynia, Poland

Unesco’s inclusion of city-centre Gdynia, on Poland’s Baltic coast, covers its key interwar-era streets and building blocks, showcasing how modernist planning principles were applied at scale to transform Gdynia into a major seaport for the first Polish Republic between the World Wars. The listing includes villas on Kamienna Góra hill and the surrounding residential architecture, which together mark a decisive break from historicist design traditions in Poland.

Tashkent, Uzbekistan

The Tashkent inscription recognises ten buildings constructed between the 1960s and early 1990s as part of the rapid reconstruction that followed the devastating earthquake that struck the Uzbek city in 1966. The buildings – which include museums, exhibition halls, hotels, a market, a metro station and residential complexes – show how Soviet-era planning merged with Central Asian spatial traditions, climate-responsive design and local craftsmanship to produce a distinctive architectural style.

The inscription makes Uzbekistan the first Central Asian country recognised for its 20th-century architectural heritage, and the buildings are now, by construction date, the youngest structures to hold World Heritage status.

A broader shift

The addition of these sites to the Unesco World Heritage List signals a wider reassessment within the heritage world of what counts as historically significant – extending protection not just to ancient monuments, but to the concrete, glass and steel of the 20th century.

Following 20 years of fits and starts, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open to visitors on 11 December 2026, according to an announcement released today. The museum, designed by late architect Frank Gehry, will join a cluster of starchitect-designed cultural institutions on Saadiyat Island, a 10-square-mile landmass off the coast of Abu Dhabi.

The project, a partnership between the Guggenheim Foundation and Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism, will be a temple to modern and contemporary art from around the world – a collection the museum has been amassing since 2009.

While details about programming and specific artworks have yet to be released, the museum says that it will display works across mediums, including painting, sculpture, film, installation, digital art and more. A 2015 exhibition titled 'Seeing Through Light: Selections from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Collection' included works by artists including Yayoi Kusama, Rachid Koraïchi, Robert Irwin, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Douglas Wheeler.

‘The museum’s art collection is uniquely local and global, centered in the region but with works from all continents,’ said Guggenheim Foundation director and CEO Dr. Mariët Westermann in a statement.

Gehry, who died in December 2025, conceived of the building as an assemblage of 10 conical volumes that together create a ‘skyline’ of stainless steel mesh, glass and onyx. The 125,000 sq ft structure will contain 30 galleries which surround a towering central atrium. The museum, according to the Guggenheim Foundation, ‘is designed to impress at every level.’

The Guggenheim Foundation first revealed that it would build a satellite museum on Saadiyat Island in 2006, a project that would join Guggenheim locations in New York, Venice and Bilbao, Spain – a Gehry-designed project so successful that it became a byword for urban revitalisation.

Reaching the project’s finish line, however, wasn’t without hurdles and controversies. Contract changes and economic strain caused the museum, first projected to open in 2013, to be delayed for years. The treatment of migrant labourers on Saadiyat Island construction sites also drew fire from human rights activists and artists, sparking protests and eventually leading Gehry to engage a human rights lawyer to monitor site conditions.

Still, said Westermann, the ‘Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will be a source of wonder, a hub of connection, and a place of curiosity and joy for people from the United Arab Emirates and the world.’

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will join multiple museums and cultural sites on Saadiyat island, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel; the Zayed National Museum, designed by Foster + Partners; the Abrahamic Family House, designed by David Adjaye; in addition to the under-construction Dar al Funoon Abu Dhabi, a performing arts centre also designed by Gehry.

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.'

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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.'

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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.

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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.

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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

iroje.com

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.