Built between 1904 and 1908 in Bálchug (Bolotny óstrov), a river island in the heart of Moscow, GES-2 was a power station.

The old plant is now a space conceived as an experience of going from visual to performing arts, via a welcoming civic space. The 20,000-square-meter building is the new headquarters of the V-A-C Foundation, and includes a library, an auditorium, exhibition halls, classrooms, and workshops. Parts that had been added to the industrial facility were removed in order to bring back the original volume and massing. Also, the central bay was stripped of all elements that made the whole length of this space difficult to perceive.

One of the main focuses of the project was preserving the historical metal structure. This called for chemical analysis and inspection of every time-damaged element to replace or repair. Four chimneys were maintained, but with brick giving way to steel, and they now capture clean air 70 meters above the ground, activating natural ventilation and reducing energy consumption. The project is based on two main concepts: a space where visitors feel guided by their own intuition, and fluid circulation in a ‘spatial sculpture.’

Storing over 151,000 artworks, Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen opens to the public in Rotterdam (6 November 2021), a work of the Dutch firm MVRDV.

The outcome of a competition held in 2014, the 15,000-square-meter construction rises in the north part of Rotterdam’s OMA-designed Museumpark. The curving facade comprises 6,609 square meters of glass subdivided into 1,664 mirrored panels, which, because they reflect the surroundings, help to mitigate the building’s visual impact. The compact, bowl-shaped volume has a small footprint and a generous rooftop terrace 35 meters above the ground.

Through crisscrossing stairs and display cases the central atrium offers a route up the depot, floor by floor, to give visitors a rare glimpse into how the museum takes care of and maintains its possessions, and connecting the galleries to the restoration workshops, storage spaces, and a restaurant. The museum’s collections will be kept and displayed in five microclimates, depending on the specific temperature and humidity requirements of the pieces and genres, produced with different materials.

The store reflects the brand’s captivating, colorful imagery and offers a creative experience catering to the particular interests of each customer.

The new shop of the young fashion line is located in the up-and-coming Poblenou neighborhood. The design of Evvo starts off with respect for the preexisting, so leaves unaltered all the marks that the passage of time has left on the walls, as well as features that rooted the construction to the district. The new strokes are carried out like one more layer of a palimpsest.

The chosen color range of mild pastel tones and the use of industrial materials like aluminum and concrete stamp the brand’s identity onto the physical space, and create an eclectic universe of arches re-marked by the theatrical textures of the curtains. Retail aside, there is also a design studio, a workshop for personalizing items, and a gallery.

The project is mimicked in the landscape, manifesting its presence only with concrete walls. Two to retain the soil, and the other two to form a path wide enough to pass through but narrow enough to do so in single file. The access to the house slopes downward slightly, conducive to reflection, interrupted only by a vigorous tree and culminating in a gentle vault that marks the entrance.

The public areas are placed left of the house and face a ravine, while on the other side the more private zones are organized around a courtyard from which one can gaze at the sky and the treetops. A reduced palette of materials – stone, wood, concrete, and steel – combines with strategies to conceal MEP services, electrical appliances, and light fittings, creating an ancestral atmosphere, the primitive mountain refuge.

An early 20th-century agricultural and livestock construction in a town of the Castilian plain has been transformed into a dwelling.

The intervention preserves the identity of the farming facility and the vernacular character of the construction. The bay of the barn harnesses thermal energy through the inertia of the adobe wall. The roof is insulated and waterproofed by means of a sandwich panel inserted between the old tiles and the frame of logs and wood-shake boards. Changing the corrugated panel for a polycarbonate one, a skylight over the stairs brightens up the spaces upstairs and down.

To take advantage of the free height without altering the original massing, a lightweight slab of exposed metal beams and sandwich panels is put in, but the total height is maintained at both ends of the barn, with the staircase on one side and a room on the other. The second bay, where the cellar was, had three timber trusses. Because of leaks, one of them had deteriorated. It was removed, and a central courtyard was created to form an outdoor space beside the kitchen.

The Basel firm has opened a new cultural center for art, design, architecture, and the moving image.

With the ambitious idea of giving Hong Kong a world-class artistic hub, the West Kowloon Cultural District envisions an enclave of new spaces for educational activities and the arts within a large park beside Victoria Harbour. Among them the M+ Museum, a work of Herzog & de Meuron, is the project’s flagship, and it finally opened to the public on 12 November.

This new center devoted to contemporary visual art is organized in a building that takes the shape of an inverted T. It features thirty-three galleries laid out within the huge base, a variety of multipurpose halls, a research center, and offices in the slender 12-floor block whose facade incorporates a system of LED that transforms the actual building into an enormous digital art medium.

Suzuko Yamada has designed a house inspired by Rwandan forests for a small corner lot in a Tokyo residential neighborhood.

The house rose on the idea of something that would be easy to enlarge, refurbish, and revamp through a structure of steel bars serving as prelude to an intricate indoor forest of timber beams and pillars. All elements are exposed to view so that supports, bracings, pipings and the like are dispersed amid books, jardinières, and plants giving form to the scenes of everyday life.

The boundary between inside and outside is blurred, there is no clear built limit. The symbiosis between the garden and the house is such that the fruit trees and other plants are confused with the scheme of metal bars forming the porch, the stairs facilitate pruning, the walkways serve as guides for the vines, and the branches contribute to ensuring privacy indoors.

For the flagship store of a young fashion line, the Madrid studio DIIR has created a neutral setting that enhances the brand’s collections.

In the shop located on Colón, one of Valencia’s busiest streets, a grid of thick partitions divides the establishment into nine identical areas. Large openings arranged in an enfilade link them up in a fluid series. The color range is limited, dominated by pastel tones; the only spark of color is provided by a robust staircase of red microterrazzo.

It is an exceptional commercial space, one of palace reminiscences, with display volumes helping to organize the rooms and a cladding of local stone framing the thresholds. Shoppers are invited to reflect on new sales concepts, in a shopping experience based on spatial boldness and the material quality of atmospheres.

A 1970s apartment becomes an aseptic dwelling with the potential to adapt and serve any of its possible occupants.

The Madrid practice of Eduardo Mediero tackled the project as a response to our society’s constant state of uncertainty, turning a rigid old 85 m² flat, placed in the city center, into a propositional system, more dynamic and open-ended. In an exercise of limited resources, every solution adopted is focused on maximizing spatial flexibility, avoiding predefined layouts and conventional typological divisions.

The scheme presents a grid of rooms placed en enfilade, connected to one another by large central openings that ensure visual continuity and dilute boundaries. A reduced range of materials is used, including epoxy resin for the floor, spray plaster in the ceiling, and mirror surfaces. In this way the apartment addresses only the variations of contemporary living, renouncing market-imposed threads of logic.