Concrete architecture

First look at Kengo Kuma’s V&A Dundee

The highly sculptural V&A Museum of Design Dundee is Japanese architect Kengo Kuma’s first UK building – as well as Scotland’s very first dedicated design museum. The new structure is now complete and gearing up to throw open its doors...

KWK Promes wraps up a house with a concrete road in Poland

Located in the heart of the green Polish countryside next to a winding river, the By The Way house designed by KWK Promes is formed of a long concrete pathway that wraps up the house, views and landscape together. The client requested...

Ibañez Shaw’s Fort Worth Camera Studios land in Texas

Fort Worth is blessed with a wide range of cultural institutions by an enviable array of international architecture heavyweights. With Louis Khan’s Kimbell Art Museum (including Renzo Piano’s recent extension) and a modern art museum by Tadao Ando, the Texan city easily...

Pálás in Galway takes arthouse cinema to the next level

Some 14 years after the idea for a new arthouse cinema in the west Irish coastal town of Galway was initially proposed, and now with film producers Element Pictures (who also run Dublin’s Light House Cinema) firmly on board, Pálás...

Oasi Architects’ FGN House is an exercise in concrete subtlety

The sleepy village of Fagnano Olona in Italy – also home to an Aldo Rossi-designed elementary school – has just welcomed a new piece of modern architecture; a new-build house by Busto Arsizio-based architects Oasi. The structure, a home for a local family, is...

London’s brutalist Balfron Tower is brought back to life

Completed in 1967, the Balfron Tower, as well as the low-rise Carradale House alongside it, remains one of the best-known works of the legendary modernist provocateur Ernö Goldfinger. Located on the northern approach to the Blackwall Tunnel, in London’s Poplar...

New brutalism: Constantin Brodzki’s Brussels HQ is up for renovation by Fosbury & Sons

Brutalist cathedral in the UK opens to the public following renovation

Architecture buffs might recognise the brutalist cathedral in Clifton, Bristol by its distinctive, irregular, elongated hexagonal floorplan. What many don’t know however, is that the iconic building has been suffering from water leakages for years, due to its large, striking lead...

Californian dream: Gluckman Tang’s minimalist poolside guesthouse in La Jolla

There’s something about the pool house typology that is inherently Californian. It might be the open spaces and water element that it implies, or perhaps the low scale, single-storey structure that often references modernist gems, such as the region’s iconic...

Brutalist icon Preston Bus Station gets facelift by John Puttick Associates

You’d be hard pressed to find a British brutalist icon outside London that is as instantly recognisable as Preston Bus Station. The project, originally completed in 1969 to a design by BDP, is Grade-II listed, but was in need of a...

Harty and Harty design the perfect artist’s studio in Norfolk

If all a writer needs to find inspiration is a secluded cabin in the woods, then the artist’s equivalent would be a light-filled, purpose-built studio with amazing views; and this is exactly what an artist in Norfolk got, when she...

V&A pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale to explore the legacy of Robin Hood Gardens

At the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, the Victoria and Albert Museum will launch an exhibition titled ‘Robin Hood Gardens: A ruin in reverse’ curated by Dr Christopher Turner and Dr Olivia Horsfall Turner that explores the legacy of the infamous London housing estate. For the...