#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.

#146: THE MOST STRIKING BUILDINGS OF 2021

January 7, 2022

(photo by Junya Ishigami + Associates)

Once again, I look back at the past year in search of stand out projects. Instead of “the best”—which I dare anyone to define—I listed the most intriguing for 2020 and the most seductive for 2019. For closing out 2021, the operative adjective is striking. Common synonyms for ‘striking’ include: stunning, dramatic, prominent, remarkable, unusual, and beautiful.

1: In Thailand, elephants are seen not as random animals or pets, but as family members. For this project, elephants are the clients. Bangkok Project Studio created Elephant Museum Elephant World, housing 200 elephants in accommodations of grandeur and beauty, honoring their place in the country’s ancient history and royal ceremonies. With a nod to heritage and community, half a million bricks were proudly handmade from regional soil using a traditional local method.

2: Whether a metaphor of a potato chip or a clamshell, the Yabuli Entrepreneurs’ Congress Center sits gracefully in the dramatic topography and freezing climate of Shangzhi, Harbin, China. Capturing an agenda of critical thinking and ambitious vision, MAD Architects has designed the headquarters for the international economic platform known as the China Entrepreneur Forum.

3: Housing for this historic port at the strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf explores colors, shape, scale, and playfulness. A project of both childlike simplicity and heroic vision, ZAV Architects has offered numerous domes using an adobe technique of rammed earth and sand, pioneered by the famed Iranian-American architect, Nader Khalili.

4: MUDA-Architects delicately weaves architecture into nature for the Garden Hotpot Restaurant. Located in Chengdu, China, the design reduces the building to almost nothing, as it plays hide-n-seek with its amoeboid-like forms twisting through trees. The structure’s circumference measures 1,000 feet with a mere height of 10 feet, and white fluorocarbon paint finishes the galvanized steel roof which is held up by pencil-thin columns only 3 ½” in diameter.

5: As if Donald Judd installed land art in Puerto Natales, Chili, the abstract beauty of reduction is captured at the Aka Patagonia Hotel. By designer Larrou, an elevated walkway links the prefabricated wood cabins to each other. Together, the elemental box-like quarters—mute on one side but open on the other—embrace views to Chile’s Golfo Almirante Montt canal.

6: Known as the Santa Fe de Bogotá Foundation, this 12-floor hospital expansion uses brick in innovative and non-intuitive methods. Rather than the typical gravity-driven compressive state of masonry, architect El Eqiupo de Mazzanti explores brick in an extensive state like a woven fabric. Located in Bogota, Colombia, the massive iconic cube of a building with its signature dent on the surface is both massive and light, both solid and translucent.

7: A community building and a work of street sculpture, the Gallery House by Abin Design Studio serves the neighborhood with multipurpose spaces, gathering hall, dormitory, and garage. In Bansberia, West Bengal, India, the architect teamed with a local ceramic artist to select masonry blocks that were discarded for industrial use, a kind of reincarnation of rejected materials.

8. The Chapel of Sound, an 8,500-square-foot open-air concert hall, is a music venue never before seen. Located in Hebei Province, 200 yard from the Great Wall of China, the structure looks like an outgrowth of the hillside terrain , or perhaps an alien rock formation. By Open Architecture, this concert hall of cantilevered, stacked layers of concrete sits near a mountain resort, and includes a dressing room, green room, and restrooms.

9: Old meets new in Edinburgh, Scotland, for the music campus at Snape Maltings. Architect Haworth Tompkins has conceived of an artist studio where a weathering Corten steel box is inserted into a Victorian ruin of brick and decay. Within the plywood interior sits a flexible art space or performance/rehearsal room, which includes a mezzanine and kitchenette. With no intention of blending the new addition with the existing conditions, the result is less about cohesion and more about a curious parasitic relationship.

10: (See first image and above.) Striking due to its ambiguity, this plaza at Kanagawa Institute of Technology, Tokyo, is a versatile semi-outdoor gathering space, a massive urban sculpture of 59 ceiling cutouts, and an amazing feat of engineering akin to a suspension bridge. Architect Junya Ishigami states, “The process of passing time becomes the subject”.

(For the 2017 list of my all-time 15 favorite buildings, visit here.)

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