#198: THE MOST COMPELLING BUILDINGS OF 2024

January 3, 2025

(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.

#111: THE MOST SEDUCTIVE BUILDINGS OF 2019

December 31, 2019

UCCA Dune Art Museum, Qinhuangdao, China (photo by Qingshan Wu)

I am avoiding “The Best of” list, because I don’t know how to define “the best.” Instead, I have chosen the adjective “seductive.” Seduction is an act that might lead to enticement or worse, being led astray into questionable moral ground. Seducing someone suggests lurid temptation and even sexual desire.

So why not? Why not list ten projects of 2019 that have led the creative mind astray, enticed and tempted us to desire such an experience?

1: The 500,000-square-foot National Museum of Qatar is both a structural feat of glass-fiber reinforced concrete over steel frames, as well as a metaphor of the local mineral formations called the Desert Rose. Upon seeing this work of Atelier Jean Nouvel, I initially questioned if such a striking work of originality was real or a make-believe digital image. Yes, it is real.

2: Architect Formzero designed this “Planter Box House” for a retired couple in tropical Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. With edible plants abound and sustainable split bamboo as the concrete formwork, the design is a combination of a green house, garden courtyards, and vertical farm, as well as a statement of Abstract art and Minimalist sculpture.

3: For me, the 770-room Morpheus Hotel in Macau doesn’t represent the curvaceous surfaces of China’s traditional jade carving—as PR statements promote. Regardless, Zaha Hadid’s free styling steel and aluminum exoskeleton presents a stunning visual character unlike anything seen before in city skylines.

4: In Kopargaon, India, the undulating roof of a building is transformed into a walkable surface, a social area for this children’s library. Sameep Padora’s singular exploration of local tile vaults in structural compression defines the Maya Somaiya Library.

5: Is it a museum or a massive sculpture? A giant symbolic ship honoring the historic waterfront? Or maybe the bizarre building surface recalls the cliffs of Scotland? Over 2,500 textured precast concrete panels create this enigmatic and beautiful United Kingdom project called V&A Dundee.

6: In my early years living in New York City, I was fascinated by the works of Peter Eisenman and his propaganda of Formalism, Deconstructivism, the Avant-Garde, Post Humanism, Jacques Derrida, Giuseppe Terragni, blah, blah, etc. I have no idea what the “emancipation and autonomization of the discipline” is about. Critics and users alike considered Eisenman’s buildings to be hostile environments or simply confusing. But at the Residenze Carlo Erba in Milan, the result is not an overly complicated pompous statement of critical theory and mathematical analogs, but rather, the design is an elegant and beguiling composition of program, structure and geometry.

7: Toshiko Mori’s Fass Elementary School is much more than yet another one-classroom schoolhouse. It is a poetic statement of global and local proportions. The modest output of village labor and techniques, such as the bamboo structure, mud brick walls and a grass-thatched roof, delivers a profound, elemental and humane building for the remote area of Sengal, West Africa.

8: To his students, Louis Kahn famously suggested, “You say to a brick, what do you want, brick?” In Brooklyn’s Park Slope, how far can Frida Escobedo go with a brick for Aesop, the beauty products boutique? The theme-and-variations on brick patterns, details, tones, and textures are far-reaching, as Escobedo finds inspiration in the historic fabric of New York’s brick and brownstone buildings.

9: Simply called the “House in a Garden,” Gianni Botsford’s 2,500-square-foot jewel-of-a-building occupies a tight urban London site. Recalling the Pantheon in miniature, a heavenly oculus tops off the double-curved, copper and timber roof.

10: (See first image and above.) Yes, this is the third museum on my list. Buildings that house art are usually also seductive statements of art themselves. In Qinhuangdao, China, the UCCA Dune Art Museum goes bizarrely further. Dug into sandy dunes like children with beach toys, this museum is sometimes there and sometimes not. With cave-like galleries partially hidden from the sea, OPEN Architecture’s design for Qinhuangdao is primitive, raw and unforgettable.

(For the list of my all-time 15 favorite buildings, visit here. )

Tag Archives: BEST OF