20
Twenty-First Century Buildings That Matter
Story By ceros originals Design by Tri Vo
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Los Angeles, CA
A volumetric nautical fantasia inspired by the architect’s love of sailing, seminally rendered with French aircraft-design software, the Concert Hall, with its sinuous, gauzy stainless steel—twice buffed to tone down its original eyeball-searing refractory power—floats like a brilliant mirage in Downtown L.A. Outfitted with a forest’s worth of Douglas fir, painstakingly sculpted to the sonic specifications of acoustic wizard Yasuhisa Toyota, it was the building Los Angeles would learn to love—once Bilbao had shown the way.
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Los Angeles, CA
Architect: Frank Gehry (2003)
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Los Angeles, CA
Taipei 101
Taipei, Taiwan
Once the tallest building in the world—before it was eclipsed by Dubai’s Burj Khalifa—C.Y. Lee’s design for the 1667-foot tall Taipei World Financial Center (instantly dubbed “101” for the number of floors) blends cutting-edge design with traditional symbolic elements. With its greenish glass, it stretches upward in segments—eight, for luck—like a bamboo stalk. At unfavorable junctures of geometry, dragons ward against evil energies, while the roof auspiciously evokes the tail of a Phoenix. Under the hood, the building thrums with the engineering innovations required to build in a typhoon and earthquake hotspot; most strikingly, a Richard Serra-scale 660-ton iron ball, hung like a pendulum, that serves as an earthquake damper.
Taipei 101
Taipei, Taiwan
Architect: C.Y. Lee and Partners (2004)
Al Hamra Firdous Tower
Kuwait City, Kuwait
Metropol Parasol
Seville, Spain
Even as it was being built, the 412-meter high Al Hamra Tower—the tallest carved concrete tower in the world—was said to evoke a Kuwaiti man wrapped in a traditional long dishdashi robe. And the asymmetric folds of the building, which curl dramatically inwards, as if protecting its occupants from the elements, do evoke fabric as much as architecture. But the form is actually derived from the less poetic world of parametric modelling, in which raw inputs—of sunlight, square footage, and a host of other considerations—generate site-specific contours. No matter the inspiration, the building beguiles.
Al Hamra Firdous Tower
Kuwait City, Kuwait
Architect: Gary Haney, SOM (2011)
Inspired by the geometric swirl of security patterns printed inside envelopes, the Metropol Parasol, a series of six large latticed “umbrellas” connected by swooping walkways, cavorts through the former site of the Mercado de la Encarnación. A supremely intricate assemblage of CNC-milled lumber, interlocking via some 3000 “connection nodes,” the Parasol is one of the world’s largest timber structures—and the largest structure held together by glue. With a restaurant on the roof and Roman ruins below, the Parasol is a bold, playful reinvention of central Seville, a sun-shading canopy on a grand scale.
Metropol Parasol
Seville, Spain
Architect: Jürgen Mayer H. (2011)
National Center for the Performing Arts
Beijing, China
Heydar Aliyev Center
Baku, Azerbaijan
The French architect Paul Andreu, known principally for a number of canonical airport designs, brought a similar monumentality to Beijing’s Performing Arts Center—twice the size of Washington’s Kennedy Center. A pearlescent super ellipsoid of titanium and glass, surrounded by a vast reflecting pool that visitors pass under to enter, Andreu played upon the notion of round above square, based on the Chinese concept of heaven and Earth. Not unlike Jørn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House, the “Egg,” as it was dubbed, was controversial upon its completion, and now seems to be an elemental part of the urban fabric.
National Center for the Performing Arts
Beijing, China
Architect: Paul Andreu (2007)
Named for the former president of this former Soviet republic, which gained independence in 1991, the Aliyev Center rises like an abstracted iceberg from the sea out of a vast plaza in Baku, wiping away the traditional distinctions between building and landscape. Part of an experimental drift into what Hadid called “fluid space,” organic architecture based on the dynamics of water, the building is all undulating folds—virtually without right angles—a visual Mobius that dazzles the eye and imagination and achieves, as Hadid put it, “a certain infinity.” Meant to channel the optimism of a young country, it reads like a postcard from the future.
Heydar Aliyev Center
Baku, Azerbaijan
Architect: Zaha Hadid (2012)
Burj Khalifa
Dubai, UAE
The Interlace
Singapore
The Burj Khalifa (née Burj Dubai, the new name came with the funding by Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan) is, as the world’s tallest building, a sort of monument to itself. More than twice the height of the Empire State Building, it soars 163 stories and some 828 meters. It consumed 110,000 tons of concrete and 22 million man-hours of labor. Adrian Smith, who cut his teeth at SOM on projects like the John Hancock Building, and has become the maestro of the super tall—his next tower, in Saudi Arabia, is set to eclipse the Burj. Rather than gargantuan mass, however, the Burj has won admirers for its slender, diminishing profile, the result of slenderizing wings and carefully staged setbacks, done as much for wind amelioration as for aesthetic effect.
Burj Khalifa
Dubai, UAE
Architect: Adrian Smith/Gordon Gill (2010)
Looking to avoid the tall-building “vertical silo of repetition,” architect Ole Scheeren instead took 31 six-story apartment buildings— comprising 1000 units—and massed them in a series of interlaced stacks, looking at first glance like some colossal game of Jenga amidst the arboreal landscape of Singapore’s Southern Ridges. Beneath that seeming randomness was a carefully crafted layout that blended privacy with communal living and maximized the new horizontality that was gained (the terraces provide 112% of the green area of the unbuilt site). This is more proof that Singapore is possibly the most vibrant architectural laboratory on the planet.
The Interlace
Singapore
Architect: Ole Scheeren and OMA (2013)
Marina Bay Sands
Singapore
Marina Bay Sands
Singapore
Elbphilharmonie
Hamburg, Germany
The massive Marina Bay complex—at $5.7 billion, it’s the costliest stand-alone resort property ever constructed—has become synonymous with Singapore. No visit seems complete without a selfie from its stunning rooftop pool. It also put the Israeli-born architect “on the map,” as he said, in Asia (Safdie also designed the new “Jewel” at Changi Airport). Overruling the developer’s vision of a single tower, Safdie built three, separated by irregularly spaced voids. When the low-rise “podium” areas at ground level provided insufficient space for amenities, he designed a massive 2.5 acre elevated SkyPark—hulled like a ship—to bridge the three towers with a 747-worth of cantilever jutting out into space. The whole thing is an audacious engineering marvel, but also a compelling examination of public and private space.
Marina Bay Sands
Singapore
Architect: Moshe Safdie (2010)
Famously delayed and over budget, the Elbphilharmonie, a performance space and restaurant/hotel complex sitting atop a red-bricked 19th century warehouse on the River Elbe, is a Sydney Opera House for Hamburg—a building that forever changes the city, residing in the psychic imagination as the very expression of that city. With its soaring, tented roof—evoking everything from a jagged mountain range to a gleaming crown—and beguiling facade, with 1,100 mirrored, irregularly curved glass panels, marked with graphic gray forms, it stands like a joyous secular cathedral.
Elbphilharmonie
Hamburg, Germany
Architect: Herzog & de Meuron (2016)
World Trade Center Station, “The Oculus”
New York, NY
Seattle Central Library
Seattle, WA
Aqua Tower
Chicago, Illinois
U.K. Pavilion
(Shanghai World Expo)
Beijing, China
The Broad
Los Angeles, CA
Acropolis Museum
Athens, Greece
30 St. Mary Axe, “The Gherkin”
London, England
Absolute Towers
Mississauga, Canada
Beijing National Stadium
Beijing, China
Beijing National Stadium
Beijing, China
Museum of Islamic Art
Doha, Qatar
Museum of Islamic Art
Doha, Qatar
Santiago Calatrava’s work has been marked by biomimetic, elaborately sculptural work—he calls his architecture “an abstract, figurative art”—that tends to be vastly over budget, initially controversial, and then popularly celebrated. His “Oculus” took those tropes and turned it up to a New York City 11. The advertised flappable wings of his just-released bird motif didn’t make the cut, and on street level, it sometimes seems stranded amidst the surrounding towers like the bleached bones of some Mesozoic beast. But inside it really shines, with a huge, elliptical plaza bathed in light beneath vaulted white ribs marked by a 330-foot-long central skylight, arrayed to capture the light on 10:28 a.m., when the North Tower of the World Trade Center tower fell.
World Trade Center Station, “The Oculus”
New York, NY
Architect: Santiago Calatrava (2016)
Jeanne Gang’s inspiration for the LEED-certified Aqua Tower— the tallest building designed by a woman—came from the striated limestone cliffs that abut the Great Lakes; indeed, the building, with its undulating exterior, seems shaped by the erosive powers of wind and time. Gang took the conventional box of a skyscraper and adorned it with rippling concrete forms (given playful names, like “flares” and “clefts” during the design process) that not only lend the building its supple and seemingly organic façade, but provide solar-sheltering balconies and help dampen the wind effects that would otherwise render them untenable on the upper floors.
Aqua Tower
Chicago, Illinois
Architect: Studio Gang (2009)
The “Seed Cathedral” was the standout of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai and the building that launched Thomas Heatherwick into the public eye. The premise was disarmingly simple: A 60-foot steel-and-timber-composite cube pierced by some 60,000 transparent fiber-optic rods, 25 feet in length, that radiated outward in a magnificent blur, moving gently in the breeze like grass. The effect was something like magic. Inside, where the rods drew in diffuse light, inside of each tip was implanted a seed sample, courtesy of Kew Royal Botanic Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank Project. The building was dismantled after the Expo, the seeds dispersed throughout China.
U.K. Pavilion (Shanghai World Expo)
Shanghai, China
Architect: Heatherwick Studio (2010)
Basking in the stainless-steel glow of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall just across the street, The Broad, operating at a different scale—at a different temperature—is no less monumental. Eclipsing the projected number of visitors since day one, it’s got authentic star power in the land of fame. Dubbed “the veil and the vault,” the LEED-certified museum features a filigree-like honeycombed exterior, with one corner seductively raised as an entrance, that envelops the looming concrete heart — where the art is stored. The architects aspire to the “cinematic,” and like a great film, The Broad transports the visitor.
The Broad
Los Angeles, CA
Architect: Diller Scofidio + Renfro (2015)
Located an ancient stone’s throw from the Parthenon, the singular architectural achievement of Western Civilization, the Bernard Tschumi-designed Acropolis Museum is a serene concrete-and-glass exercise in rigor and harmony, and winningly contextual. The entire structure rests atop a forest of irregularly distributed, earthquake-resistant pilotis, a design move required after the ruins of an Athenian city were discovered pre-construction. While the building lies on an east-west axis by necessity, the best views of the Acropolis are to the north. So Tschumi gave the glass-walled Parthenon Gallery a 23-degree twist, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Acropolis Museum
Athens, Greece
Architect: Bernard Tschumi (2009)
Built on a site destroyed by a catastrophic 1992 I.R.A. bombing, Foster’s iconic headquarters for Swiss Re instantly redefined what London’s skyline could be, and sent people scrambling for visual metaphors. Upright zeppelin? Cubist Fabergé pine cone? It was the pickle that stuck, but Foster’s masterwork was actually inspired by the form of a Venus flower basket, a deep-sea sponge whose latticed form allows it to withstand the convulsions of ocean currents; the elongated ovular shape of the 41-story building, in which no two floors are equally situated, allows it to gracefully deflect wind currents.
30 St. Mary Axe,
“The Gherkin”
London, England
Architect: Sir Norman Foster (2004)
Looking to depart from the rather standard residential towers that had come before, the developers of Absolute World, a skyscraper complex in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga, opened up an international competition. The winner was Ma Yansong—the first Chinese architect to win a major international competition—and his design, instantly dubbed “Marilyn Monroe” for its suggestive curves, proved such a hit that a second tower was commissioned. Looking to avoid “listless, boxy buildings,” Yansong had each floor, wrapped in a continuous balcony, twist from one-to-eight degrees from the ones adjacent. The result was an ever-shifting form in which none of the hundreds of apartments are alike.
Absolute Towers
Mississauga, Canada
Architect: Ma Yansong (2010)
Debuted in front of a global stage during the 2008 Olympics, Beijing’s National Stadium did not disappoint. Dubbed “The Bird’s Nest” long before the first foundation stone was laid, the design had an alluring, fractal quality—what looked like a solid elliptical mass from afar was revealed, upon closer inspection, to be an intricate weave of some 36 kilometers of curved steel. “Façade and structure are identical,” said the architects, with the dualistic feel evoking the Chinese polarities of order and disorder. Nestled in-between the latticework were inflatable cushions, not unlike the mud that birds use in nest construction, that could be deployed depending on the weather. No mere Olympic one-off, the Stadium was intended from the beginning to become a vital part of the city.
Beijing National Stadium
Beijing, China
Architect: Herzog & de Meuron, Arup Sport, China Architectural Design & Research Gropu, Ai Weiwei (2007)
Lured out of semi-retirement by Qatar’s royal family, the nonagenarian I.M. Pei embarked on an immersive six-month pilgrimage into the world of Islam to acquire the cultural grounding for his soft-power masterpiece, built on an artificial island off the coast of Doha. A shining citadel of French limestone inspired by Cairo’s Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun, as well as a series of Tunisian fortresses, the nearly-400,000-square-foot building (with interior contributions from Jean-Michel Wilmotte) dazzles with its play of geometry, its “severe” oppositions of light, stone, and shadow, and represents an elegant Janus that bridges the history and future of Islamic culture.
Museum of Islamic Art
Doha, Qatar
Architect: I.M. Pei (2008)
Al Hamra Firdous Tower
Kuwait City, Kuwait
Metropol Parasol
Seville, Spain
National Center for the Performing Arts
Beijing, China
Heydar Aliyev Center
Baku, Azerbaijan
Burj Khalifa
Dubai, UAE
The Interlace
Singapore
Elbphilharmonie
Hamburg, Germany
Aqua Tower
Chicago, Illinois
U.K. Pavilion
(Shanghai World Expo)
Beijing, China
The Broad
Los Angeles, CA
Seattle Central Library
Seattle, WA
Acropolis Museum
Athens, Greece
London, England
30 St. Mary Axe, “The Gherkin”
Absolute Towers
Mississauga, Canada
It’s been dubbed the “most Instagrammed library in the world.” The New York Times architecture critic at the time of its unveiling called it “the most exciting new building” he’d seen in 30 years. A boldly angular faceted jewel glittering like a starburst in gray Seattle, OMA didn’t just make a beautiful building—they blew away the dust on what a library could be and reasserted its centrality to the culture, in an age when information was no longer strictly stored between covers. From its fir and maple paneling, to its zesty chartreuse elevators, to the famous “book spiral,” a flowing ribbon across three floors that presented the collection in a kind of organic totality, the building is pure civic uplift.
Seattle Central Library
Seattle, WA
Architect: Rem Koolhaas (2004)
Taipei 101
Taipei, Taiwan
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World Trade Center Station, “The Oculus”
New York, NY
Scrow down and tap on each building to learn more
20
Twenty-First Century Buildings That Matter
Story By ceros originals | Design by Tri Vo
A volumetric nautical fantasia inspired by the architect’s love of sailing, seminally rendered with French aircraft-design software, the Concert Hall, with its sinuous, gauzy stainless steel—twice buffed to tone down its original eyeball-searing refractory power—floats like a brilliant mirage in Downtown L.A. Outfitted with a forest’s worth of Douglas fir, painstakingly sculpted to the sonic specifications of acoustic wizard Yasuhisa Toyota, it was the building Los Angeles would learn to love—once Bilbao had shown the way.
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Los Angeles, CA
Architect: Frank Gehry (2003)
Once the tallest building in the world—before it was eclipsed by Dubai’s Burj Khalifa—C.Y. Lee’s design for the 1667-foot tall Taipei World Financial Center (instantly dubbed “101” for the number of floors) blends cutting-edge design with traditional symbolic elements. With its greenish glass, it stretches upward in segments—eight, for luck—like a bamboo stalk. At unfavorable junctures of geometry, dragons ward against evil energies, while the roof auspiciously evokes the tail of a Phoenix. Under the hood, the building thrums with the engineering innovations required to build in a typhoon and earthquake hotspot; most strikingly, a Richard Serra-scale 660-ton iron ball, hung like a pendulum, that serves as an earthquake damper.
Taipei 101
Taipei, Taiwan
Architect: C.Y. Lee and Partners (2004)
Even as it was being built, the 412-meter high Al Hamra Tower—the tallest carved concrete tower in the world—was said to evoke a Kuwaiti man wrapped in a traditional long dishdashi robe. And the asymmetric folds of the building, which curl dramatically inwards, as if protecting its occupants from the elements, do evoke fabric as much as architecture. But the form is actually derived from the less poetic world of parametric modelling, in which raw inputs—of sunlight, square footage, and a host of other considerations—generate site-specific contours. No matter the inspiration, the building beguiles.
Al Hamra Firdous Tower
Kuwait City, Kuwait
Architect: Gary Haney, SOM (2011)
Inspired by the geometric swirl of security patterns printed inside envelopes, the Metropol Parasol, a series of six large latticed “umbrellas” connected by swooping walkways, cavorts through the former site of the Mercado de la Encarnación. A supremely intricate assemblage of CNC-milled lumber, interlocking via some 3000 “connection nodes,” the Parasol is one of the world’s largest timber structures—and the largest structure held together by glue. With a restaurant on the roof and Roman ruins below, the Parasol is a bold, playful reinvention of central Seville, a sun-shading canopy on a grand scale.
Metropol Parasol
Seville, Spain
Jürgen Mayer H. (2011)
Inspired by the geometric swirl of security patterns printed inside envelopes, the Metropol Parasol, a series of six large latticed “umbrellas” connected by swooping walkways, cavorts through the former site of the Mercado de la Encarnación. A supremely intricate assemblage of CNC-milled lumber, interlocking via some 3000 “connection nodes,” the Parasol is one of the world’s largest timber structures—and the largest structure held together by glue. With a restaurant on the roof and Roman ruins below, the Parasol is a bold, playful reinvention of central Seville, a sun-shading canopy on a grand scale.
National Center for the Performing Arts
Beijing, China
Architect: Paul Andreu (2007)
Named for the former president of this former Soviet republic, which gained independence in 1991, the Aliyev Center rises like an abstracted iceberg from the sea out of a vast plaza in Baku, wiping away the traditional distinctions between building and landscape. Part of an experimental drift into what Hadid called “fluid space,” organic architecture based on the dynamics of water, the building is all undulating folds—virtually without right angles—a visual Mobius that dazzles the eye and imagination and achieves, as Hadid put it, “a certain infinity.” Meant to channel the optimism of a young country, it reads like a postcard from the future.
Heydar Aliyev Center
Baku, Azerbaijan
Architect: Zaha Hadid (2012)
The Burj Khalifa (née Burj Dubai, the new name came with the funding by Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahyan) is, as the world’s tallest building, a sort of monument to itself. More than twice the height of the Empire State Building, it soars 163 stories and some 828 meters. It consumed 110,000 tons of concrete and 22 million man-hours of labor. Adrian Smith, who cut his teeth at SOM on projects like the John Hancock Building, and has become the maestro of the super tall—his next tower, in Saudi Arabia, is set to eclipse the Burj. Rather than gargantuan mass, however, the Burj has won admirers for its slender, diminishing profile, the result of slenderizing wings and carefully staged setbacks, done as much for wind amelioration as for aesthetic effect.
Burj Khalifa
Dubai, UAE
Architect: Adrian Smith/Gordon Gill (2010)
Looking to avoid the tall-building “vertical silo of repetition,” architect Ole Scheeren instead took 31 six-story apartment buildings— comprising 1000 units—and massed them in a series of interlaced stacks, looking at first glance like some colossal game of Jenga amidst the arboreal landscape of Singapore’s Southern Ridges. Beneath that seeming randomness was a carefully crafted layout that blended privacy with communal living and maximized the new horizontality that was gained (the terraces provide 112% of the green area of the unbuilt site). This is more proof that Singapore is possibly the most vibrant architectural laboratory on the planet.
The Interlace
Singapore
Architect: Ole Scheeren and OMA (2013)
The massive Marina Bay complex—at $5.7 billion, it’s the costliest stand-alone resort property ever constructed—has become synonymous with Singapore. No visit seems complete without a selfie from its stunning rooftop pool. It also put the Israeli-born architect “on the map,” as he said, in Asia (Safdie also designed the new “Jewel” at Changi Airport). Overruling the developer’s vision of a single tower, Safdie built three, separated by irregularly spaced voids. When the low-rise “podium” areas at ground level provided insufficient space for amenities, he designed a massive 2.5 acre elevated SkyPark—hulled like a ship—to bridge the three towers with a 747-worth of cantilever jutting out into space. The whole thing is an audacious engineering marvel, but also a compelling examination of public and private space.
Marina Bay Sands
Singapore
Architect: Moshe Safdie (2010)
Famously delayed and over budget, the Elbphilharmonie, a performance space and restaurant/hotel complex sitting atop a red-bricked 19th century warehouse on the River Elbe, is a Sydney Opera House for Hamburg—a building that forever changes the city, residing in the psychic imagination as the very expression of that city. With its soaring, tented roof—evoking everything from a jagged mountain range to a gleaming crown—and beguiling facade, with 1,100 mirrored, irregularly curved glass panels, marked with graphic gray forms, it stands like a joyous secular cathedral.
Elbphilharmonie
Hamburg, Germany
Architect: Herzog & de Meuron (2016)
Santiago Calatrava’s work has been marked by biomimetic, elaborately sculptural work—he calls his architecture “an abstract, figurative art”—that tends to be vastly over budget, initially controversial, and then popularly celebrated. His “Oculus” took those tropes and turned it up to a New York City 11. The advertised flappable wings of his just-released bird motif didn’t make the cut, and on street level, it sometimes seems stranded amidst the surrounding towers like the bleached bones of some Mesozoic beast. But inside it really shines, with a huge, elliptical plaza bathed in light beneath vaulted white ribs marked by a 330-foot-long central skylight, arrayed to capture the light on 10:28 a.m., when the North Tower of the World Trade Center tower fell.
World Trade Center Station, “The Oculus”
New York, NY
Architect: Santiago Calatrava (2016)
It’s been dubbed the “most Instagrammed library in the world.” The New York Times architecture critic at the time of its unveiling called it “the most exciting new building” he’d seen in 30 years. A boldly angular faceted jewel glittering like a starburst in gray Seattle, OMA didn’t just make a beautiful building—they blew away the dust on what a library could be and reasserted its centrality to the culture, in an age when information was no longer strictly stored between covers. From its fir and maple paneling, to its zesty chartreuse elevators, to the famous “book spiral,” a flowing ribbon across three floors that presented the collection in a kind of organic totality, the building is pure civic uplift.
Seattle Central Library
Seattle, WA
Architect: Rem Koolhaas (2004)
Jeanne Gang’s inspiration for the LEED-certified Aqua Tower—the tallest building designed by a woman—came from the striated limestone cliffs that abut the Great Lakes; indeed, the building, with its undulating exterior, seems shaped by the erosive powers of wind and time. Gang took the conventional box of a skyscraper and adorned it with rippling concrete forms (given playful names, like “flares” and “clefts” during the design process) that not only lend the building its supple and seemingly organic façade, but provide solar-sheltering balconies and help dampen the wind effects that would otherwise render them untenable on the upper floors.
Aqua Tower
Chicago, Illinois
Architect: Studio Gang (2009)
The “Seed Cathedral” was the standout of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai and the building that launched Thomas Heatherwick into the public eye. The premise was disarmingly simple: A 60-foot steel-and-timber-composite cube pierced by some 60,000 transparent fiber-optic rods, 25 feet in length, that radiated outward in a magnificent blur, moving gently in the breeze like grass. The effect was something like magic. Inside, where the rods drew in diffuse light, inside of each tip was implanted a seed sample, courtesy of Kew Royal Botanic Gardens’ Millennium Seed Bank Project. The building was dismantled after the Expo, the seeds dispersed throughout China.
U.K. Pavilion (Shanghai World Expo)
Shanghai, China
Architect: Heatherwick Studio, (2010)
Basking in the stainless-steel glow of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall just across the street, The Broad, operating at a different scale—at a different temperature—is no less monumental. Eclipsing the projected number of visitors since day one, it’s got authentic star power in the land of fame. Dubbed “the veil and the vault,” the LEED-certified museum features a filigree-like honeycombed exterior, with one corner seductively raised as an entrance, that envelops the looming concrete heart — where the art is stored. The architects aspire to the “cinematic,” and like a great film, The Broad transports the visitor.
The Broad
Los Angeles, CA
Architect: Diller Scofidio + Renfro (2015)
Located an ancient stone’s throw from the Parthenon, the singular architectural achievement of Western Civilization, the Bernard Tschumi-designed Acropolis Museum is a serene concrete-and-glass exercise in rigor and harmony, and winningly contextual. The entire structure rests atop a forest of irregularly distributed, earthquake-resistant pilotis, a design move required after the ruins of an Athenian city were discovered pre-construction. While the building lies on an east-west axis by necessity, the best views of the Acropolis are to the north. So Tschumi gave the glass-walled Parthenon Gallery a 23-degree twist, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Acropolis Museum
Athens, Greece
Architect: Bernard Tschumi (2009)
Built on a site destroyed by a catastrophic 1992 I.R.A. bombing, Foster’s iconic headquarters for Swiss Re instantly redefined what London’s skyline could be, and sent people scrambling for visual metaphors. Upright zeppelin? Cubist Fabergé pine cone? It was the pickle that stuck, but Foster’s masterwork was actually inspired by the form of a Venus flower basket, a deep-sea sponge whose latticed form allows it to withstand the convulsions of ocean currents; the elongated ovular shape of the 41-story building, in which no two floors are equally situated, allows it to gracefully deflect wind currents.
30 St.
Mary Axe, “The Gherkin”
London, England
Architect: Sir Norman Foster (2004)
Built on a site destroyed by a catastrophic 1992 I.R.A. bombing, Foster’s iconic headquarters for Swiss Re instantly redefined what London’s skyline could be, and sent people scrambling for visual metaphors. Upright zeppelin? Cubist Fabergé pine cone? It was the pickle that stuck, but Foster’s masterwork was actually inspired by the form of a Venus flower basket, a deep-sea sponge whose latticed form allows it to withstand the convulsions of ocean currents; the elongated ovular shape of the 41-story building, in which no two floors are equally situated, allows it to gracefully deflect wind currents.
Absolute Towers
Mississauga, Canada
Architect: Ma Yansong (2010)
Debuted in front of a global stage during the 2008 Olympics, Beijing’s National Stadium did not disappoint. Dubbed “The Bird’s Nest” long before the first foundation stone was laid, the design had an alluring, fractal quality—what looked like a solid elliptical mass from afar was revealed, upon closer inspection, to be an intricate weave of some 36 kilometers of curved steel. “Façade and structure are identical,” said the architects, with the dualistic feel evoking the Chinese polarities of order and disorder. Nestled in-between the latticework were inflatable cushions, not unlike the mud that birds use in nest construction, that could be deployed depending on the weather. No mere Olympic one-off, the Stadium was intended from the beginning to become a vital part of the city.
Beijing National Stadium
Beijing, China
Architect: Herzog & de Meuron, Arup Sport, China Architectural Design & Research Gropu, Ai Weiwei (2007)
Lured out of semi-retirement by Qatar’s royal family, the nonagenarian I.M. Pei embarked on an immersive six-month pilgrimage into the world of Islam to acquire the cultural grounding for his soft-power masterpiece, built on an artificial island off the coast of Doha. A shining citadel of French limestone inspired by Cairo’s Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun, as well as a series of Tunisian fortresses, the nearly-400,000-square-foot building (with interior contributions from Jean-Michel Wilmotte) dazzles with its play of geometry, its “severe” oppositions of light, stone, and shadow, and represents an elegant Janus that bridges the history and future of Islamic culture.
Museum of Islamic Art
Doha, Qatar
Architect: I.M. Pei (2008)
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