With no shortage of historical buildings in need of expansion or repurposing, alterations of older architecture via contemporary interventions have flourished in the past four decades – particularly in service of new or growing art museums. These spaces represent the resilience of our historical legacy through contemporary times, demonstrating that the combination even of two vastly different architectural styles can be both beautiful and impressive. Here are ten of the best examples of contemporary interventions on historical buildings in art museums around the world.

Videos

This article was originally published in Metropolismag.com.

Set to screen at the ADFF:NOLA festival, Frank Gehry: Building Justice showcases how Gehry-led student architecture studios developed proposals for more humane prisons.

Thanks to initiatives like the Art for Justice Fund, Open Society Foundations, and a slew of insightful reporting, the American criminal justice system has been under great scrutiny and pressure to reform. Some of these changes have been quite prominent—such as the increasingly-widespread decriminalization of pot and pending major federal legislation—and have faced opposition from the powerful lobbying of the private prison corporations. However, despite the depth and breadth of criminal justice reform, one critically important element has remained mostly overlooked: the design of correctional facilities.

Post World War II, Brutalism found its way across Europe, redefining modernist architecture and establishing a new style for mass housing and communal buildings. Although most of the light was shed on concrete landmarks in major cities, European suburbs have also housed many exceptional brutalist buildings such as the 'Hammer-shaped Tower Blocks' or the 'Houses on Chicken Legs'.

To showcase Central and Eastern Europe's "unnoticed" brutalist architecture, Zupagrafika have shot and put together more than 100 photographs in a book titled 'Eastern Blocks', inviting readers to explore brutalist mass housing developments across Moscow, East Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest, Kyiv, and Saint Petersburg.

+ 17

Universal accessibility in architecture refers to the capacity that all people have to access and inhabit a space regardless of their cognitive and physical capacities, and it is a subject that cannot be dismissed. Although little modifications can make a difference, it is ideal for the spaces to be thought out according to universal design guidelines from the beginning.

In the case of the kitchens, a series of new technologies that increase the comfort and efficiency of our daily spaces have made an appearance. Thus, multiplying its functions and allowing better use of the available surface. Let's take a look at the latest innovations presented by Häfele.

+ 19

Commercial project performance has risen globally on a year-to-year basis. Reports from the Project Management Institute (PMI) show that 71 percent of projects have met their original goals and business intent in 2018, up from 68 percent in 2016.

Project managers have continued to be a driving force behind this change and they are in high demand around the world. PMI also reported the need for 97.7 million project professionals globally by 2027. Without qualified talent in these positions, billions of dollars could be lost to businesses worldwide.

Picture this. You're in a restaurant and you can hear the conversation of the person in the table next to you better than the person you're sitting with. Then, everyone begins to speak louder, making the environment chaotic. Absorption, reflection, reverberation, frequency, decibels, etc. Although acoustics is a complex science that can render buildings almost uninhabitable when not properly thought out, architects do not always possess the theoretical resources nor have the necessary concern to develop acoustically comfortable spaces.

+ 32

Videos

Federico Babina has published the latest series from his extensive collection of architectural imagery. “Abstructure: architectural embryos” seeks to question the use of architecture in creating a drawing, rather than the use of a drawing in creating architecture.

Through the compositions, Babina proposes an ideal link between architecture as a form of representation and the representation used in the drawings. Volumes of architecture are broken down to achieve an “abstract” representation, without losing the essence of the design.

+ 19

Unlike its TV and film counterparts, which imagine the future as an over-populated dystopian nightmare overrun with violence and chaos, Black Mirror paints a picture of a near future that aligns far more with our current reality--and nowhere is this more apparent than in the architecture shown in the series.

The relationship between the human body and architecture has always been a key element in architectural design and practice, however, the connection between the two wasn't documented or even accepted until the rise of ergonomics some years ago. Nowadays, the question is how is the body perceived in modern times? How does this perception influence the way we design the buildings and spaces that we inhabit? Too often, ergonomics is seen as a discipline that emphasizes the separation between body and object; however, not only is it the connection between them, it is also the pre-established blueprint that maximizes and synchronizes their productivity. At its most basic level, it's a technical discourse on the increasingly mechanized human dwelling. 

I met Vera Primavera in Ibarra, Ecuador, during the sixth edition of EARQ (PUCE-SI)—a graffiti and tattoo artist whose work revolves around mysticism, magic, intimacy, and women in the city.

Continuing the series of articles by Nikos A. Salingaros, David Brain, Andrés M. Duany, Michael W. Mehaffy, and Ernesto Philibert-Petit on social housing in Latin America, this installment explores economic alternatives to address construction costs. Review all previous publications and the new article below.

A single family house may often have been considered as a very small pixel within any urban context, but the fact is, on average more than fifty percent of the urban fabric is being shaped by these tiny small pixels. It is well said by Tadao Ando: “The house is the building type that can change society.” Thus, this is how a client, a developer, a builder, an architect, or a designer could or should be responsible and willingly participate in a collective effort to shape a better urban context.

There are many kinds of white, all have no color but they are very different from each other: some silent, others deafening; there is the white of absence and also the one of eloquent presence; neutral white is very common, which one day may be painted with other tones; but there are also things born to be white, which could not be of any another color. Fran Silvestre’s architecture is composed of few essential signs, lines, planes and volumes thought and built with great geometric control.

Presenting your model containing various assets can give your client a better understanding and vision of how everything would look in real life. There is no need for building 3D scene objects by yourself or pay a lot of money for them. For example, if you own an Enscape license you have access to many kinds of 3D models, such as people, furniture, vegetation, street items, vehicles and other accessories. Just by using drag and drop, you can put the assets into your model and scale them to the size you need.

In some cases, an experienced user would be able to create similar content using your CAD software or import it from other sources – but even then, those assets would demand a lot more resources. But if you would use unnecessarily complex and/or foreign geometry in your CAD, those assets would take a lot more resources and the 3D views would be much slower. Enscape content, instead, is represented by a simple placeholder in your CAD program (Revit, SketchUp, Rhino or ArchiCAD) and replaced with these high-quality components in Enscape’s real-time rendering environment. The web-based library is being updated regularly.

+ 5

The recent budget cuts for federal universities have reignited a debate that deserves to remain permanently active: the quality of education in Brazil. The first edition of the Encontros de Arquitetura, organized by IABsp, set out to address this theme through the lens of architecture, bringing together four professionals with extensive experience in school design: Catherine Otondo, Marina Grinover (Base Urbana), Keila Costa (+K), and Pablo Hereñú (Hereñú & Ferroni Arquitetos).

Videos

Currently, nearly 65 million people worldwide have been forced to flee their homes due to conflicts unfolding across the globe, leaving behind their belongings, years of personal history, and years of hard work to find themselves adrift. Many of these families are forced to cross oceans and diverse terrains in search of a promising future to start from scratch. These journeys often lead to informal settlements where many perish due to rampant disease and shortages of medicine, food, and clean water.

Juries, assessments, 15 minutes of hell... no matter what you call it, a critique is always agonizing. Regardless of how confident you are with your proposal and how much thought and effort you have put into every detail, at least one of the jury members will make sure to find something to complain about.

To prepare you for upcoming juries, artist Chanel Dehond has illustrated 12 steps to having a successful critique (or surviving one, at least).

Only recently in Brazil has "cultural landscape" emerged as a new category for the preservation of cultural heritage. Understanding its meanings requires, on the one hand, evoking the preservation experience in two different spheres—both international institutions and the work developed in Brazil. On the other hand, this understanding also requires highlighting the specific academic origins of the cultural landscape concept.

Traveling around Japan can be an impressive experience for a Western tourist - especially if they have some connection with architecture. In addition to the huge cultural differences, the country is known for its rich architectural production - eight of the 42 Pritzker Prize laureates are Japanese - which has maintained its consistency since the 1960s.

Videos

The London Festival of Architecture, the world’s largest annual festival of its kind, took place across the city this June. The month-long festival welcomed thousands of people to explore architecture installations and creations, and take part in the activities and discussions, which included an event put together by SKNYPL.

The theme for the year 2019 was ‘Boundaries’ in all its forms: zones, walls, city limits… And for their first international show, SKNYPL presented “PHOBOS”, a film-installation about Moscow and the fearful impact of having physical and metaphysical boundaries. The studio created a special online version of the film especially for ArchDaily readers.

The course that Vincent Van Duysen has covered since 1990 shows a great consistency and a coherent design vision. From the start, he has focused on making a profile for himself with the design of a number of retail projects. This focus was no coincidence. Van Duysen has said on many occasions that if he had not had the opportunity to study architecture he would undoubtedly have pursued a career in fashion. It is therefore unsurprising that after his studies in Sint Lucas Gent he moved to Milan, a city renowned as one of the world capitals of design and fashion. In Milan he became convinced that a designer should not only express a concept as clearly as possible, he should also pay attention to every significant detail.

One of the first things I hear upon arrival is that the sixth edition of the Academic Event of the School of Architecture (EARQ) was not only organized by students, but is also part of the graduation requirements to become an architect at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador (PUCE-SI). This management work, without a doubt, carries conditions that closely align with what we recognize as necessary in our discipline today.

Videos

Past, Present, Future is an interview project by Itinerant Office, asking acclaimed architects to share their perspectives on the constantly evolving world of architecture. Each interview is split into three video segments: Past, Present, and Future, in which interviewees discuss their thoughts and experiences of architecture through each of those lenses. The first episode of the project featured 11 architects from Italy and the Netherlands and Episode II is comprised of interviews with 13 architects from Spain, Portugal, France, and Belgium.

The goal of the series is to research these successful firms and attempt to understand their methods and approaches. By hopefully gaining a clearer picture of what it means to be an architect in the 21st century, the videos can also serve as inspiration for the next generation of up-and-coming architects and students as they enter the field.

The article series by Nikos A. Salingaros, David Brain, Andrés M. Duany, Michael W. Mehaffy, and Ernesto Philibert-Petit investigating social housing in Latin America continues by exploring the choice of building materials. Read all past articles and the new piece below.

1- Design Capable of Establishing 'Emotional Belonging' 2- Anti-Patterns of Latin American Social Housing 3- Geometry of Control 4- Biophilia, Connectivity, and Spirituality 5- Using the Work of Christopher Alexander 6- Construction Strategies for Social Housing 7- Examples of Patterns and Generating Codes 8- Design Strategies 9 - Design Sequence 10 - Practical Suggestions for Successful Projects