+ 18

+ 18

+ 8

+ 20

+ 14

+ 23

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has unveiled the design for a new congress center in Rouen, France, featuring a distinctive sweeping timber roof that reflects the city's long-standing relationship with the water. Located along the Seine riverfront, the building, nicknamed "The Sail," is envisioned as a public gathering place that reconnects the city with its waterfront while offering new cultural and civic amenities. Designed for the Rouen Normandy Metropolis, the project combines contemporary architectural expression with references to Rouen's maritime and urban heritage.

+ 12

+ 17

+ 24

+ 27

+ 23

+ 19

+ 19

+ 10

+ 27

When Archigram published their fanatical vision for pneumatic cities and walking megastructures in the 1960s, they seemed to be designing buildings. Beneath the surface, the avant-gardeists were pushing culture through radical alternatives to lifestyles and forms of organizing in the city. Laboratories found themselves between the lines of copy on Domus or Casabella magazines, propositions doubling as blueprints for the civilizations to come. From Gropius's Bauhaus in 1919 to Arcosanti's desert experiments in the 1970s, architecture operated as a form of cultural prophecy. Built form was the argument. The drawing was the vision. Today, we live in a world that remarkably resembles what the starchitects of the 1900s imagined - modular construction, interconnected digital cities, and automated systems. Yet contemporary architecture rarely proposes culture with the same totalizing confidence.

+ 1

+ 24

+ 14