Ytong España / Xella Group   The Ytong solution of tongue-ingroove panels is made of cellular concrete, which weighs much less and insulates better than conventional concrete. It is obtained in an autoclave on a base of sand, silica, and lime.

Thomas Phifer and Partners   United States   The firm Thomas Phifer and Partners has built a red concrete pavilion for the recently completed Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park in Battery Park, at the southern tip of Lower Manhattan. Designed by AECOM, it incorporates strategies to improve flood resilie

MARS Architectes   France   Taking up a city block on Boulevard Poniatowski in Paris, this social housing development is clearly inserted into its homogenous urban context. The immediate surroundings are characterized by a uniform system for arranging the facades: a horizontal

Nuno Melo Sousa   Portugal   Abiding by a firm economy of means, each element is minimized to its essence, but this does not prevent the building from attaining a certain degree of spatial monumentality...

Bofill Taller de Arquitectura   Morocco   Fearing that a foreign power would appropriate the immense phosphate reserves that were appearing in Morocco’s central region, in 1920 the French protectorate set up the office that is now the OCP Group, an industrial giant that is key to the country

Taller de Arquitectura de Bogotá - Daniel Bonilla    Colombia   The Human Sciences building of Universidad Industrial de Santander strategically stands at the main entrance into its central campus in Bucaramanga. With a built area of 14,585 m². …

Studio Arthur Casas   Brazil   The Ibaté building is located on a corner lot in the Vila Nova Conceição neighborhood of São Paulo, an area that acts as a transition zone between a high-density urban hub and a lower-density, quieter residential neighborhood. This hybrid nature of t

Mecanoo   United Arab Emirates   The Natural History Museum in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Cultural District is now open. Designed by Mecanoo, the Dutch firm led by Francine Houben, the building takes up over 35,000 square meters with its architecture of concrete inspired by the region’s r

ZAO / Zhang Ke Architecture Office   China   A sculptural pavilion that continues the rugged terrain of the surrounding area endeavors to become part of the network of public facilities that enlivens a coastal resort. Open on all sides, the undulating ground floor is sheltered by a framework su

b+   Germany   Two abandoned concrete towers are transformed into an experimental hub for architectural production. Without altering their structure, the project reactivates the site with minimum interventions, focusing on its adapation and on recovering its legal

OFS architects   Spain   The buildings blend with their urban surroundings, dominated by towers, through carefully selected materials and proportions. The prefabricated concrete of the facade, with predominantly vertical elements and a tone that evokes the stone of nearby co

ZAO / Zhang Ke Architecture Office   China   Nestled in a rugged landscape, this museum dedicated to the painters Xiao Feng and Song Ren is located at the foot of the Daci Mountain, in the Xihu district of Hangzhou. Built with concrete colored with black ink and processed on site, the building

Adjaye Associates   United States   The new Princeton University Art Museum has opened its doors in the heart of the New Jersey campus. The building, which doubles the size of the original museum, is organised around nine interconnected pavilions, totalling 13,565 square metres spread

Bernardo Bader Architekten   Austria   The modest home of the local football team has increased its capacity through a stand marked at the corners with slender light towers that give the site an identity. The new structure delimits the playing field on three sides, respecting the existing

DB Studios   Pakistan   After fifteen years in rented spaces, the non-profit organization now develops its formative and support programs in a new, light-filled multistory facility situated in a dense peri-urban area. Structured by a stairwell that opens up to the atrium, t

OAM - Oficina d'Arquitectura a Mallorca   Spain   In Manacor, on an elongated plot with a slight slope, surrounded by pine and carob trees, stands this single-level house. The project adapts to the terrain by putting it on the high part of the site, substantially reducing earthworks and intervention

AAU Anastas   Palestine   The architects devised their own studio as an open-plan platform where different programs and countless activities can take place, making up for the West Bank’s lack of cultural spaces. A simple raw concrete grid structures the building’s three level

O Arquitectura   Spain   The neighborhood known as that of the ‘cheap houses’ was built in Lodosa in the 1950s. These were simple, single-level dwellings with a backyard that followed a functional and economical logic. The plot of this project is located at the corner of one

HW Studio   Mexico   This house addresses the climate of Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s Pacific coast, where sunshine and humidity dominate one’s days and shade is a valuable asset, a refuge. From the start, the idea was for the dwelling, built with concrete, to embody the

BAAS   Spain   At the corner of a block located in the Catalonian city’s Eixample, a new construction adopts a stepped section to let its work spaces benefit from planted terraces. Automated canopies protect the facade looking toward the access square, while the ex

pihlmann architects   Denmark   Formerly a factory and later a civic center for people with disabilities, the building has now been transformed into a multifunctional space. The project centers on self-recycling, and up to 95% of its original elements have been reused or repurposed

Summary   Portugal   The architecture studio Summary, founded by Samiel Gonçalces in Porto, is the author of this group of five single-family homes built with prefabricated reinforced concrete. The project stands out for its modular approach, its constructive efficiency,

Buchner Bründler Architekten   Switzerland   Three turrets built with reinforced concrete rise as sculptural skylights on top of the roof of an old merchandise warehouse transformed into a hall for showcasing art. The base of the lanterns is used as a way to separate the spaces of the exhibitio

Buchner Bründler Architekten   Switzerland   A block which contains open-plan levels for offices and retail premises simultaneously provides a covered nexus between a railway platform and a bus shelter. With one of its bays jutting out in a cantilever, the monolithic ensemble of supports and sl

Bloomberg   Feargus O'Sullivan   British schools are crumbling due to an aerated material that was popular after World War II. The issue centers around “reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete,” a material known more widely as RAAC, which can become dangerous if exposed to water. The

Scientific American   Mark Fischetti   Nick Bockelman   Wil V. Srubar   New techniques and novel ingredients can greatly reduce the immense carbon emissions from cement and concrete production. We make more concrete than we do any other material on Earth. Cement is one of the most energy-intensive products on the planet.

The Economist   The concrete used was self-healing and anachronistically green The romans were master builders. Many of their works, from the Pantheon (pictured above) and the Colosseum in Rome itself, to the Pont du Gard in southern Gaul and the equally impressive

The Economist   They offer ways to produce cement without releasing carbon dioxide. Concrete is one of the world’s most important materials. But making the cement that binds it generates about 8% of anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions. This is not just because of

The Economist   It is a big source of emissions, but might one day be the reverse. The romans perfected concrete, and their legacy still stands in the form of the magnificent roof of the Pantheon, the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. Since it was complete

Scientific American   Sophie Bushwick   But for now, a square meter of the building material holds roughly the energy of two AA batteries. Concrete, after water, is the world's most used material. Because it already surrounds us in the built environment, researchers have been exploring the

The residential building that the Madrid-based trio Arenas Basabe Palacios has raised in the Spanish capital’s Salamanca neighborhood has two different faces: towards the street it presents a classical tripartite composition soberly regulated by pref

Brutalism with a friendly countenance: this is how one might venture to describe the architecture that Grafton Architects – Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara – have been carrying out for the past twenty years in Ireland, Europe, and America, from t

Students of the Master of Advanced Studies in Digital Fabrication and Architecture program at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich have built ‘Concrete Choreoraphy,’ an installation of columns made of special concrete with the assistanc

dbt   From ancient civilisations to the present day, columns have served as elements of architecture particularly tied to the harmony, balance and proportion of architectural orders – so much so that they have come to be recognised as works of art in their

The rise of a renewed interest in Brutalism seventy years after its birth is reflected both in the growing defense of heritage ascribed to this architectural current – arising from the Modern Movement with Le Corbusier and the use of béton brut (raw

Libraries have been one of the symbols of bourgeois society. Originally confined to monasterios and palaces, distant havens of elitist knowledge, libraries eventually became quintessential public spaces in the capitalist and increasingly democratic c

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   After a generation in the doghouse, concrete is more fashionable than ever. So why don’t we take better care of our brutalist architecture? Concrete is everywhere. It is not only under our feet and above our heads, forming the background infrastructu

Empty the building, leave its sculptural brick enclosure exactly the way it is, and implant in it a massive heart of concrete. This was the strategy followed by Tadao Ando when he transformed an old residential block in the city of Chicago into the n

It has been announced by the College of Architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago that the winner of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) – awarded every two years to the finest works of architecture carried out in t

Kurt W. Forster   Though partly discredited and forgotten, Rudolphs buildings continue to be considered a powerful body of work in American architecture. 

After a protracted process, a period of eight years, that has not been spared its dose of controversy (in 2015 it was announced that the building’s real cost would exceed the initially budgeted amount of 50 million euros by a good 70%), Scotland’s ow

Ignacio Serna   Since early in the 20th century, when August Perret referred to it as “the stone that we craft,” reinforced concrete and the industry associated with it have evolved to the point that we can raise buildings entirely with this material. Perret – who w

The Irish firm of Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, operating since 1978 as Grafton Architects, has been much acclaimed for the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan, a half-buried civic box of concrete – completed in the year 2008 – that strikes an i

Pepa Cassinello   It was she herself, Mother Nature, who first fabricated concrete, and the Stone Age man was first to imitate it. Not in vain. In the beginning it was a material formed simply by mixing natural abiotic elements, small dry stones, conglomerate dust (p

Eduardo Prieto   Since its very beginnings, the concrete industry has always gone hand in hand with the production of chemical agents that have the potential to improve the properties of the material. At first, the focus of these chemical products was on reducing the

The most unique characteristic of this residential complex comprising twelve social housing units in La Alberca de la Záncara (Cuenca) is its low-cost – but very efficient – building system. These dwellings combine concrete blocks forming three-meter

Among the products of translucent concrete currently on the market, the Lucem Lichtbeton system, developed by the German firm of the same name, stands out for its technical caliber, and especially for its competitive selling price, which is not much

Peter Chadwick   London  2016  
Phaidon   - 224 Pages 

Adrian Forty   A Material History

Karla Cavarra Britton   Londres  2001  
Phaidon   - 255 Pages