A 1970s apartment becomes an aseptic dwelling with the potential to adapt and serve any of its possible occupants.

The Madrid practice of Eduardo Mediero tackled the project as a response to our society’s constant state of uncertainty, turning a rigid old 85 m² flat, placed in the city center, into a propositional system, more dynamic and open-ended. In an exercise of limited resources, every solution adopted is focused on maximizing spatial flexibility, avoiding predefined layouts and conventional typological divisions.

The scheme presents a grid of rooms placed en enfilade, connected to one another by large central openings that ensure visual continuity and dilute boundaries. A reduced range of materials is used, including epoxy resin for the floor, spray plaster in the ceiling, and mirror surfaces. In this way the apartment addresses only the variations of contemporary living, renouncing market-imposed threads of logic.

The firm of Bjarke Ingels has designed a new landmark in Denmark’s famous Wadden Sea National Park.

In the Wadden Sea National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located to the south of the peninsula of Jutland, this sculptural observation tower stands 25 meters tall and is a tourist attraction. With an elevator tucked into the core, it was built with close to 300 tons of core-ten steel on a concrete plinth.

The two strands of a DNA molecule provided the inspiration for the two flights of stairs: one for going up, with 146 steps, and the other for coming back down, with 131. The structure shoots up from a base 7 meters wide, broadening little by little to reach 12 meters in the viewing deck on top.

The Swiss practice offers a new example of how to turn obsolete industrial buildings into imposing museums of contemporary art.

Taking a cue from the marked presence of brick in the buildings close to the inner harbor of Duisburg, a city strategically situated between the Rhine and Ruhr rivers, the new construction has three parts standing 33.5, 30.5, and 27.5 meters, two containing exhibition galleries and the third the entrance, public facilities, and services.

The extension of the original museum, which Herzog & de Meuron carried out in 1999 over an old factory known as Küppersmühle, discreetly joins the brick structures lined up on the wharf. Two bridges connect the expansion to the old museum, while a sculptural staircase links up the various stories of the new wing.

The Chinese firm X+LIVING has created a bookstore which is something more than that. It is a meeting point in the city.

The historic city of Chongqing, famous for its mountain landscapes and mighty river, is a usual hub for writers in search of inspiration to pilgrim to. Part of this tradition is on the third and fourth floors of centrally located Zodi Plaza, where the bookstore Zhongshuge presents itself as a meeting place for readers and lovers of literature.

A walk through different areas leads to the main room, where stairs become shelves and the mirrored ceilings enlarge the space two-fold. The bookstore is designed to enable visitors to escape the outside world and get complete immersion in reading. The last stop is a spot for relaxing, where books are combined with coffee and friends.

Studio Zigzag and Rodrigo Delso have together transformed a former industrial shed into innovative offices for an audiovisual production company.

The intervention of the team formed by Bernardo Angelini, David Casino, and Rodrigo Delso strays from the deep-seated urban dynamic where novelty takes priority over saving what already exists. It aimed to give a second life to a space situated in the inner courtyard of an 1859 building: a basic laundry facility which had ended up as the abandoned ruin of a car repair.

With a limited budget, sustainable materials, and few but efficiently targeted actions (such as new openings in slabs and the ramp’s conversion into a point of contact with the street), the project achieved a creative reinterpretation of historical heritage, and a decadent building became an oasis of nature amid the frenzy of the city.

An old silo with a 6×6 m floor plan that had fallen into disuse has been transformed by Harry Thaler into a modern design studio.

The main motivation of the Italian firm was to save an important piece of the region’s industrial heritage from demolition. Located at the entrance to a business park in an Alpine valley of northern Italy, the concrete structure was a local carpentry’s storage for wood shavings. Standing 22 m on a 6×6 m floor plan, it posed several bureaucratic and architectural challenges.

The five new floors harbor a prototyping workshop, a material library, offices, a meeting room, and a terrace. A spiral staircase rises from bottom to top. To bring light into the workspaces, the thick concrete walls were perforated. Carried out on a low budget, the Silo Tower refurbishment is a call for ‘second chances’ and urban upcycling.

For a centrally located commercial space in Madrid, BURR has applied a new restaurant concept, drawing inspiration from Mexican street food.

In this project the studio BURR used techniques which are common in the fitting out of temporary eateries, recalling food trolleys and street stands during fairs. The space can be adapted to different situations – ‘doll up for galas or parties’ – with a naturalness and reversibility that goes with the brand’s gastronomic idea, close to Mexican street food and with high aspirations for change and evolution.

The exterior pavement continues indoors, so the Madrid street of San Bernardo enters the place. Inside, the preexisting space maintains its rawness, highlighting the contrast between the arches wrapped in yellow tarp – which with irony imitate the classical forms deliberately uncoordinated with the rhythms of the premises – and the open kitchen with its metal finishes. The furniture and lighting are also retractable, comtributing to the restaurant’s informal and spontaneous atmosphere.

Atelier Barda has refurbished an old industrial space to expand the headquarters of the fashion platform SSENSE.

In an old textile-manufacturing neighborhood of Montreal, Atelier Barda has transformed a former logistics and warehouse space into headquarters for one of the market’s most influential fashion platforms. While providing the necessary functionality and expressing the firm’s minimalist identity, the project had to stay true to the original construction’s factory image, but stripping it of any ostentatious and superfluous finishes.

The Canadian retailer’s philosophy called for huge unobstructed spaces where the ingrained hierarchy of offices gives way to a set-up that fosters collaboration among different work teams. All the actions taken were designed to promote staff interaction, with ample hubs for informal gatherings, constant presence of plants and a collection of innovative furniture designed for the occasion.

In the gaps between architecture and nature, the Spanish architect and photographer Iñaki Begera documents the scars of our territories.

The economic crisis hit the building sector hard and transformed the landscapes of the dream that architecture had been living, leaving many megalomaniac works of star-system figures unfinished. The restoration of the old Panticosa Spa in the Tena Valley and its conversion into a tourist center suddenly came to a halt in 2008, and Siza’s projects —with Jesús Manzanares— for a High-Performance Sports Center, apartment hotel, and parking facility became ruins resisting the passage of time.

The neglect and deterioration of incomplete architectures is a constant theme of Bergera’s shoots. He flees from the trite nostalgic and romantic view of ruins, preferring to portray the changes suffered by truncated structures, which in this case nevertheless preserve the Portuguese master’s idiosyncracies. The photographic series unfurls a new poetic of abandonment, and the aborted architecture of Álvaro Siza engages in a strange and intense fusion with the territory and landscape of the Pyrenees.

Following its success in Milan, Masquespacio has designed a new restaurant in Turin for the Italian hospitality chain Bun.

The Spanish architecture practice decided to go by the identity created for it in the Milan restaurant, repeating decorative elements like the furniture and arches, and materials like tiles and terrazzo. The scheme harnesses the tripartite division of the shop window, which indoors becomes three colors creating different dining experiences.

The chain’s characteristic green leads the visitor to the bar, while the pink and blue form two different sit-down areas. The pink zone features a raised level with booths marked by arches and surrounded by lower tables on steps. The blue part is more casual and playful, simulating a pool where swimmers can dine.