#198: THE MOST COMPELLING BUILDINGS OF 2024
(photo by arch-exist)
2024 was a good year of good work. The ten buildings listed below are forceful architectural designs, hailing from Australia, Belgium, India, Mexico, Spain and the UAE. Four projects are from China, and unintentionally, none from the U.S. Perhaps my tastes for the “best of” lean towards international voices or maybe we American architects need to catch up. Nonetheless, here we go.
1: In Rizhao, China, architect Junya Ishigami offers the “gently gigantic” Zaishui Art Museum. Of this 0.6-mile long exhibition space, visitor center and shopping center, Ishigami explores, “How to bring environment and architecture as close as possible to each other…how to make nature the gentlest presence possible for us humans?” Daring and simple (not simplistic), the architect crafts 200,000 square feet into a linear form of air, water and white.
2: The Rajkumari Ratnavati Girl’s School, located in Salkha, Rajasthan, India, stands as both a heroic and modest gesture in the desert. For this school serving 400 girls, Diana Kellogg Architects present an elliptical masterpiece of hand-carved local Jaisalmer sandstone. To counter the 120-degree heat, the project employs ancient water harvesting techniques, a solar canopy that is also play equipment, and several passive cooling strategies.
3: Domain Architects connect two 1930s houses with a bridge-like corridor hovering over a pond. For Jiasing, China, the Lakeside Teahouse provides a resting spot for tourist, expressed as the collision of forms and time periods: the traditionalism of old structures with a sleek contemporary form of today.
4: With its sliding panels of wood slats, the façade of Paseo de Mallorca 15 is kinetic, expressing the many activities within. For this residential complex, architects OHLAB address the Mediterranean sun of Palm, Mallorca, Spain with straightforward means and methods. The result is a hand-crafted design countering the machine-fabricated architecture too often seen in apartment buildings.
5: With the Gran Acuario de Mazatlan in Mexico, Tatiana Bilbao creates a new kind of aquarium: the “flooded ruin.” 19 rooms within 186,000 square feet define an enigmatic, bunker-like composition. Intentionally heavy handed, raw, and gritty, the rose-tined concrete forms contrast the delicate spectacle of sea life. The fictional archeology might be accused of being theme-ish— perilously close to stage set design.
6: Together, architects Perkins & Will and Schmidt Hammer Lassen designed the monumental Beijing Performing Arts Centre for the historic port of Tongzhou, near Beijing, China. The ambitious program of an opera house, theater, concert hall, multipurpose hall and outdoor stage are expressed through metaphor—as both the sails of traditional canal boats and the parting of theatre curtains.
7: For the Melbourne Holocaust Museum in Elsternwick, Australia, Kerstin Thompson Architects expands the museum’s first home, an early 20th-century brick and timber building that had once been a pharmacy. The architects chose a “safe space” approach of informational exhibits, rather than the narrative experience at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. or the jarring architecture at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Behind a new façade of glass bricks and clay bricks—a patchwork of opacity, translucency and transparency constructed around the original museum—sit 20,000 historical artifacts within 43,000 square feet of educational and outreach spaces.
8: Giant, slender, mushroom-like columns—reminiscent of China’s ancient Ginkgo tree—become the signature of Snohetta’s Beijing Library in the Tongzhou District. Within today’s digital age, the architects argue for, “cultivation of human connections…” This sentiment generates the world’s largest conditioned reading room wrapped in the country’s largest load-bearing glazing system.
9: Building blocks stack like toys, generating the striking Atlantis The Royal in Palm Jumeirah Islan, Dubai, UAE. Architect KPF composes 2 million square feet of 795 hotel rooms and 231 residences, and occupies the skyline and context of the small surrounding homes. A play of positive and negative forms—presence and absence—creates terraces, private pools, gardens and prevailing breezes.
10: Along the Belgian coast of the seaside town of Middelkerkel, ZJA cleverly integrates architecture with flood defense infrastructure. A barrier of 33,000 square feet of sheet piling and 1,000 vertical piles provides storm resilience. Simply named Silt, this casino and 76-room hotel is both a landmark of civic presence interweaving craft and strength, design and engineering, and aesthetics and pragmatics.
For past years’ “top ten,” visit 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Or see my all-time 15 favorite buildings. Check out my favorite projects in Los Angeles and around Los Angeles. Lastly, my favorite architects living and from the past.
