A pink concrete world in the middle of Los Angeles: Adjaye Associates designs the new Flagship Store for The Webster.

“The acropolis of consumerism.” This was the media’s pronouncement on opening day, in 1982, of an eight-floor bulk raised on an entire block between Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, and which has since provided Angelenos with high-end stores, popular restaurants, and moviehouses: a near-inexhaustible offer that has made Beverly Center the archetypal civic hub of the quintessential city of sprawl. The last decade saw a certain slump caused by the moving-out of some major firms and the rise of online shopping, but the mall has now embarked on a full renovation – both physical and conceptual – that seeks to bring in brands and customers anew. The new

boutique of a luxury fashion house takes up the curved corner of the building and cedes part of its commercial space to create something which is a rarity in the metropolis where the automobile reigns supreme, a public pedestrian zone preceding a landscape of organic forms that serve as retail display furniture, all of them made of concrete poured into formworks on the site. The stark materiality of these elements draws attention to the products on sale, but the atmosphere of the boutique is enriched by the alternation of concrete textures and a pink tone that the saturated Pacific light accentuates, giving shoppers an experience way beyond the transactional purpose of a store.

ZAV Architects has built Presence in Hormuz, a playful cluster of domes of different sizes and colors, built with the super-adobe technique.

The old port of Hormuz is a strategic place in the Persian Gulf, in southern Iran, that controls the dispatch of oil from the Middle East. Presence in Hormuz is a project of ZAV Architects that involves a series of urban developments conceived to empower the population by harnessing the island’s landscape. The second phase is Majara, a residential complex, mixed with other uses which is to establish a cultural and economic link between visitors and the life of the inhabitants. In a country marked by political conflicts beyond its borders, the architecture focuses on pursuing alternative modes of community governance.

Majara brings together landowners of the neighboring port, investors from the capital, Tehran, and the people of Hormuz as coparticipants in the project. Social change is achieved through an economy of means, budgets that prioritize manual labor over importation of materials, hiring of local workers, and a set-up responsive to different needs. The project is a cluster of domes of varying sizes built with the innovative super-adobe technique of Nader Khalili, using rammed earth and sand. The range of colors used results in a rainbow topography that blends with the island’s surrealist landscape.

A pneumatic creation designed by DOSIS studio for KENZO during Paris Fashion Week last February.

On the morning of February 26, 2020, Felipe Baptista Oliveira presented his first autumn winter collection as creative director of KENZO in the V district of Paris. In the same place where the Romans once settled, René Descartes alternated thoughts of geometry and philosophy, Pierre and Marie Curie strolled while discussing their point of view on radioactivity, or the Situationists practiced la derive, two young Spanish architects, Isabel Collado and Ignacio Peydro, made sure during the last week of February 2020 that the itinerant and instantaneous architecture they had created worked properly for the event that was being produced for Kenzo. Places remain and time flows. Maybe not. Isabel and Ignacio have long been determined to make instant cities, inspired by those imagined by Peter Cook for Archigram. Cities that flow through space-time, moving where society needs them.

Before even finishing the degree, at the same university that Peter Cook himself directed, they imagined facades that flew and moved through the city detached from the building that once held them. Since then, time has passed, but their interest in making architecture focus on life, on events, and not on style, is the constant that defines their work. “Architecture is about life, everything else is circumstantial” – they passionately affirm. If the KENZO autumn winter 2020 collection is a collection inspired by nomadism and travel, in the richness of transit, the architecture that welcomes it is essentially nomadic. It is a living structure that practices the situationist derive, moving around the world without a pre-established destination. It also shares the transformable quality with the KENZO FW20 collection. As in previous DOSIS works – the studio founded by Collado and Peydro in 2006 – the structure they have created is reconfigurable and transformable. It dynamically adapts to every situation and every location. It is a living structure that transmutes depending on the conditions of the ecosystem that hosts it.