Discovery · Island Architecture & Climate
A village scale of hospitality.
At HOSHINOYA Taketomi Island, Rie Azuma uses walls, thresholds and separate rooflines to give a contemporary resort the spatial intelligence of a village.
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Places & Architecture
Architecture, landscape and the qualities that give a place meaning.
Image: Joshua Kettle (opens source in a new tab)IN THIS AREA
- Homes & estates
- Significant architecture
- Places with a particular character
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Readings & discoveries.
Discovery · Adaptive Reuse & Historic Hospitality
The cloister with a next chapter.
At Santo Estevo in Galicia, a former monastery has become a hotel without making its cloisters irrelevant. The attraction is the conversation between different uses of the same building.
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Discovery · Museum Architecture & Natural Light
A room that teaches you to see.
At Canova’s Gypsotheca in Possagno, Carlo Scarpa made daylight part of the collection. The building changes how the plaster sculptures can be understood.
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Discovery · Domestic Architecture & Technical Heritage
The work behind an open room.
Villa Tugendhat’s apparent ease has machinery behind it. Seeing both the living space and the technical floor makes Mies van der Rohe’s Brno house more interesting, not less.
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Discovery · Adaptive Reuse & Hospitality
A second life inside Breuer’s concrete.
Hotel Marcel turns a former office building by Marcel Breuer into a place to stay. Its strongest proposition is that preservation and demanding new performance can be pursued together.
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Discovery · Public Architecture & Living Traditions
The building that borrows the shore.
Löyly’s timber envelope is a screen, a silhouette and a set of places to look out. Avanto’s Helsinki sauna gives an everyday tradition an unusually public architectural form.
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Discovery · Civic Architecture & Shared Resources
The library that makes room to stay.
At Vennesla, twenty-seven timber ribs do more than shape a roof. Helen & Hard’s library turns a public service into a place people can inhabit together.
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Discovery · Architecture & Public Ground
The museum that gives the roof to the city.
Amos Rex puts its galleries underground and makes their roof a public landscape. Helsinki gains an art museum without losing the life of the square above it.
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Discovery · Housing & Collective Stewardship
The residents who kept the idea alive.
Walden 7 is more than a striking red building. Its residents’ account reveals an architectural experiment that survived through repair, organisation and continued habitation.
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Discovery · Architecture & The Ethics of Restoration
Repair without erasing the break.
Berlin’s Neues Museum shows another way to bring a damaged building back. Old fabric and new intervention remain distinguishable without making the place unusable.
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Discovery · Civic Architecture & Continuing Use
A town hall you can stay with.
Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall brings public life, a courtyard and places to stay into one brick ensemble. Its architecture can still be encountered through use.
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Discovery · Museums & Daylight Architecture
A building that filters the sky.
Peter Zumthor’s Kunsthaus Bregenz is more than a glass box. Its envelope turns daylight into part of the experience of looking at art.
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Discovery · Industrial Architecture & Continuing Use
A monument that still goes to work.
The Fagus factory in Alfeld helped change the language of industrial architecture. Its continuing working life matters as much as its glass corners.
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Discovery · Experimental Housing & Material Continuity
The house that could be assembled again.
Aluminaire House began as a 1931 argument for industrially made housing. Its reconstruction in Palm Springs gives that unfinished argument a visible second life.
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Discovery · Art Deco & Architectural Stewardship
The villa that needed another life.
Villa Empain in Brussels is more than a restored Art Deco interior. Its continuing public life shows what preservation has to do after the photographs are taken.
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Discovery · Architecture & Human Dignity
A building that lowers the threshold.
Snøhetta’s Maggie’s Aberdeen puts thoughtful architecture at the service of people affected by cancer. Its purpose is more important than its sculptural outline.
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Discovery · Landscape & Architecture
A room that knows where to look.
At Juvet in Norway, privacy comes partly from the direction a room faces. The landscape is not a decorative backdrop added after the building.
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Discovery · Architecture & Cultural Stewardship
The work behind keeping art.
Rotterdam’s Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen turns art storage into a public encounter. The most important exhibit may be the work that keeps a collection alive.
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Discovery · Adaptive Reuse & Aviation Architecture
The terminal you can stay with.
The TWA Flight Center no longer needs to function as its original airline terminal to remain an extraordinary place to arrive.
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Discovery · Libraries & Public Architecture
A city within the books.
At Mexico City’s Biblioteca Vasconcelos, suspended bookshelves make knowledge feel like a landscape you can enter.
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Discovery · Adaptive Reuse & Cultural Infrastructure
The space inside the silos.
At Zeitz MOCAA, an extraordinary entrance was carved from a structure designed to hold grain. The old tubes become the starting point for a new public interior.
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Discovery · Cooperative Housing & Shared Ownership
A home without a resale thesis.
Barcelona’s La Borda separates the right to inhabit a home from the right to sell it. Its architecture is only half of the experiment.
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Discovery · Adaptive Reuse & Public Roof Landscapes
A garden above a difficult history.
The St. Pauli bunker carries a public garden above a wartime structure. Its value depends on making room for present-day life without allowing the planting to conceal how the building began.
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Discovery · Experimental Housing & Inhabited Heritage
A garden for an apartment.
Habitat 67 stacks homes without surrendering the idea of a private terrace. Almost six decades later, its strongest argument is that people still live inside the experiment.
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Discovery · Urban Reuse & Public Water Landscapes
The shopping mall that became a lagoon.
At Tainan Spring, the remains of a shopping mall help frame a sunken public landscape. The useful inheritance is not another shop, but another way for the city to occupy the site.
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Discovery · Sacred Architecture & Material Attention
A chapel that leaves room for the sky.
Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus chapel stands in a field rather than at the centre of a grand complex. Its scale, changing light and continuing devotional purpose give the architecture more than a striking silhouette.
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Discovery · Timber Architecture & Shared Cultural Buildings
A timber tower with a public life.
Sara Kulturhus in northern Sweden brings a hotel, a library, theatre and art into one timber building. Its most interesting scale is not just upwards, but outwards into the daily life of a city.
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Discovery · Architectural Reuse & Contemporary Art
A circle inside another century.
The Bourse de Commerce in Paris keeps its historical envelope while making room for a contemporary collection. The new intervention is interesting because it makes the older building more visible, not less.
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Discovery · Modernist Homes & Material Reconstruction
A modern house recovered from its traces.
Villa Cavrois looks remarkably assured for a house once abandoned and vandalised. Its restoration reveals how much knowledge is needed to recover an architectural idea, not simply repair its walls.
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Discovery · Public Infrastructure & Rooftop Landscapes
A power plant with another public life.
CopenHill puts a recreational landscape on a working waste-to-energy plant. The valuable idea is a second use for an industrial roof, not an architectural image being mistaken for proof of carbon neutrality.
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Discovery · Exoskeletons & Contemporary Hospitality
The structure becomes the architecture.
Morpheus in Macau turns its load-bearing exterior into the building’s identity. The spectacle becomes more interesting when you understand what that lattice makes possible inside.
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Discovery · Gallery Bridges & Spatial Invention
A bridge you walk through for art.
At Kistefos in Norway, BIG’s The Twist is both crossing and gallery. A ninety-degree turn makes wall, ceiling and riverbank part of the same architectural question.
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Discovery · Industrial Landscapes & Public Reuse
The ironworks that became a park.
At Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, blast furnaces and loading structures remain part of a public landscape. A place built for production acquired another kind of usefulness.
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Discovery · Railway Heritage & Adaptive Hospitality
The station you can sleep in.
Canfranc’s former international station has another life as a hotel. The interesting luxury is not a star rating, but the possibility of inhabiting an ambitious railway building again.
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Discovery · Research Architecture & Shared Space
The courtyard between the laboratories.
At the Salk Institute, Louis Kahn placed a remarkable open court between working laboratories. Its value is more than a view towards the Pacific: a place for science that also makes room for thought.
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Discovery · Thatched Houses & Adaptive Reuse
The house that found another daily life.
Chiiori in Japan’s Iya valley preserves a thatched house through another form of use. A bookable stay makes the relationship between old fabric, modern comfort and continuing care tangible.
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Discovery · Domestic Architecture & Modern Convenience
A house built for daily life.
Villa Necchi Campiglio pairs Milanese architectural presence with lifts, service routes and a private pool. Its most revealing details concern how a house actually worked.
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Discovery · Bathing Architecture & Material Experience
A building you enter through water.
Peter Zumthor’s thermal baths at Vals turn local quartzite, light and water into architecture a visitor experiences bodily. The place does not need to be owned to matter.
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Discovery · Public Architecture & Shared Tools
The library that lets you make.
Helsinki’s Oodi offers books, workshops, studios and public rooms. The unusual value is how much a city lets people do without owning the building or equipment.
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Discovery · Layered Architecture & Public Memory
The building that keeps its ruins.
Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba does not clear away the history beneath it. The museum lets visitors move among the remains and the new building.
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Discovery · Architecture & Total Design
A house designed down to the light.
At Maison Louis Carré, the furniture, materials, rooms and landscape belong to one conversation. It remains a place a visitor can study.
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Discovery · Water Architecture & Public Heritage
The architecture below your feet.
At Rani-ki-Vav in Gujarat, the descent toward water became architecture and sculpture. The old practical purpose still changes how we read it.
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Discovery · Architecture & Material Imagination
When a house remembers a garden.
At Casa Vicens, flowers and palm leaves become tile and iron. Gaudí’s early house offers a more concrete lesson than the word iconic.
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Discovery · Industrial Heritage & Adaptive Reuse
A mill that kept a place alive.
Saltaire is more than a handsome mill. Its buildings show how a place can retain its identity while making room for entirely different work.
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Discovery · Adaptable Homes & Spatial Design
A house that changes with the day.
At the Rietveld Schröder House, moving a wall changes the relationship between privacy and shared life. The radical part is still useful.
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Discovery · Design Schools & Modern Architecture
A building that shows its work.
A century after its 1926 opening, the Bauhaus Building in Dessau is still a useful place to ask how an institution makes its ideas visible.
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Discovery · Adaptive Reuse & Public Architecture
A factory that learned to make public life.
At Sesc Pompeia in São Paulo, Lina Bo Bardi made an existing industrial structure useful to an entirely different kind of city life.
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Discovery · Industrial Heritage & Gardens
A salt factory with a second life.
At Arc-et-Senans, Claude Nicolas Ledoux gave salt production the presence of a monumental civic project. Today you can walk into its unfinished argument.
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Discovery · Homes & Architecture
Can Lis: a house you can learn from.
You do not need to own Jørn Utzon’s Mallorcan house to take something lasting from it.
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Discovery · Architecture and Stays
A ruin made room for living.
Astley Castle lets people inhabit a protected ruin because the new architecture makes its losses visible rather than pretending them away.
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Discovery · Productive Land and Cork
The value beneath the bark.
Herdade da Baliza shows why productive land should be read through ecology, operating decisions and public scrutiny, not acreage alone.
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Discovery · Homes & Architecture
A house designed around a life.
At E-1027, Eileen Gray made furniture, privacy and the movement of daily life part of the architecture.
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Discovery · Vineyards & Ownership
When an entrepreneur buys a vineyard.
Michael Baum and Julie Carabello acquired Château de Pommard in 2014. The interesting investment question begins after the purchase.
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Discovery · Homes & Architecture
The house that needs its caretakers.
Fallingwater’s extraordinary relationship with its landscape also explains why enduring architecture depends on less visible work.
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Discovery · Vineyards & Productive Places
The land behind the bottle.
Familija Estate in Slovenia offers a useful shift of perspective: from wanting a bottle to understanding the place and work behind it.
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