Architectures

The Villa Dall'Ava

Rem Koolhaas built a unique villa on the heights of Saint-Cloud.

Nemausus 1

In Nîmes, Jean Nouvel conceived a block of tenement houses reminiscent of a cruise liner. An archit...

The Iron House

In late 19th century Brussels, the Art Nouveau movement was laying the foundations of a new concept...

Charlety, a Stadium in the City

Bruno and Henri Gaudin have broken with the classic design of a closed stadium, and created a bridg...

Pierrefonds, the Architect's Castle

Middle Aged castle rebuilt by Viollet Le Duc for the Emperor Napoleon III. A reconstruction that pa...

The Vienna Savings Bank

At the turn of the last century, Otto Wagner designed one of the first 20th century modern office b...

The Georges Pompidou Centre

A giant meccano-like structure designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, a museum-factory that ha...

Family Lodging in Guise

The philanthropist company boss Andre Godin built a workers' housing estate with a palatial air. So...

A House in Bordeaux

Designed by the architect Rem Koolhaas for a couple whose husband became disabled following a road...

The Dessau Bauhaus

Walter Gropius' main achievement is the buildings of the Bauhaus, built in 1926. His pioneering arc...

Satolas - TGV

An astonishing concrete and steel structure designed for an open field in the Lyon countryside. An...

The Johnson Building

These famous office buildings were designed and built between 1936 and 1939 for the wax manufacture...

The Paris Fine Art School

In the heart of Paris, architect Duban's 'École des Beaux-Arts' provides its students with an archi...

The Siza School

The Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza built Porto's Faculty of Architecture, a mediation on space an...

The Stone Thermal Baths

The Spa of Vals-les-Bains, designed by Peter Zumthor, redefines the very concept of public bathing,...

The Galleria Umberto I

Built in Naples, this is one of the last and largest covered passageways to be constructed in Europ...

The Saint Pancras Station

In the 19th century in London, the Midland Company had Saint Pancras and a luxury hotel built. Engi...

The Wind Box

The Fort de France Education Authority is the only example of a contemporary architectural building...

The Garnier Opera

The Garnier Opera by Charles Garnier This is Paris's most prestigious 19th century building, the pi...

The Jewish Museum Berlin

The Jewish Museum in Berlin, by Daniel Libeskind, tackles the emptiness left by the extermination o...

The Convent of La Tourette

With the Convent of La Tourette, commissioned by the Dominicans of Lyons, Le Courbusier was charged...

The Auditorium Building in Chicago

At the end of the 19th century, Louis Henry Sullivan, the father of American architecture, built th...

The Municipal Center of Säynätsalo

Built in 1952 by Alvaar Alto, this town hall building lies in the heart of a rugged landscape in Fi...

The Casa Milá

A block of flats in Barcelona, the Casa Milà is an extraordinarily sculpted work created by the gre...

The Glass House

In 1928, Pierre Chareau built the poetic and remarkable Maison de Verre, one of the unique building...

The Abbey Church of Saint Foy at Conques

Built in 1050, the Abbey is one of the foremost pilgrim churches of the Christian world. Rational,...

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao

Known for his strange and deconstructed forms, Frank Gehry designed this monumental, but chaotic an...

The Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans

The visionary architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux, one of the earliest exponents of French Neoclassical...

Jean Prouvé's House

In 1953, while going through his worst life-crisis, French designer Jean Prouvé built "his" house....

The Multimedia Library of Sendai

A glass cube, built in 2001 by Toyo Ito, this library provides an example of immaterial and evanesc...

The Alhambra, Grenade

Worried that their dynasty would disappear, the Nasrid sultans built this Red Castle in a strategic...

Phaeno, Building as Landscape

The sculptural power of the science center in Wolfsberg, Germany, in which the plan is a landscape...

The House of Sugimoto

Built in Kyoto in 1743, this traditional Japanese architectural masterpiece portrays a different un...

The Reception and Congress Building in Rome

In the most ambitious of the Mussolini regime's buildings, the leader of Italy's modern movement Ad...

The Yoyogo Olympic Gymnasiums

For the 1964 summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, Kenzo Tange designed two concrete gymnasiums which evok...

The Villa Barbaro

By inventing the villa, a new type of housing, in 1550, Palladio sought to combine aesthetics with...

The Royal Mosque at Isfahan

In 1598, King Abbas planned an immense urban project. His royal mosque captured his unprecedented w...

The Menier Chocolate Factory

The Menier factory at Noisiel, outside Paris, was the largest chocolate factory in the world betwee...

The Pyramid of Pharoah Djoser at Saqqara

The Djoser pyramid, the work of legendary architect Imhotep, is the oldest in Egypt, and bears witn...

The German Pavilion in Barcelona

How and why did this minimalist structure end up embodying 20th century modernity? Between rigor an...

The SAS Royal Hotel

The SAS Royal Hotel tower marked Denmark's entry into post-war modernity. It is a major work that c...

Roissy 1

Opened in 1974, Roissy 1 was the first time architecture had entered the realm of airport construct...

The Maisons Castle

Although its posterity has now rendered its image commonplace, the Maisons Laffitte Chateau revolut...

The Luxembourg Philharmonic

The elliptical shaped Philharmonic, with its filter of white columns and colorful cliffs, houses th...

VitraHaus

In 2006, the company Vitra asked the "Herzog & de Meuron" agency to create a building for it's "Hom...

The Igualada Cemetery

The Citadel de Lille

Vauban's "Queen of the citadels" was the model for military construction all over France. Built bet...

The Sainte-Geneviève Library

Breaking away from the 19th century neoclassical trend, Henri Labrouste erected a powerful public b...

The Church of Notre-Dame du Raincy

In a country ruined by World War I, Auguste Perret took up the challenge of building a church. In c...

Ewha, the Seoul Hidden University

With this building, Dominique Perrault continues a concept that is dear to him, the absence of arch...

The Rolex Learning Center

Poised on the shore of Lake Geneva, a wave of cement and glass has inspired many metaphors, from a...

The National Dance Center

The mutation of a concrete mastodon, the Pantin Administrative Center (1969) into the French Nation...

The Cologne Cathedral

Started in 1247, the Cologne Cathedral was completed in 1880 after a 300 year break in the work car...

The Citadel of Leisure, the Pompeia Social Service Center

In the Palmeiras district of São Paulo, early 20th century former factory workshops are aligned wit...

The Hotels de Soubise and de Rohan

From 1705 to 1752, the house of the Princes of Soubise was the setting for wild ambition and dreams...

The French Communist Party Headquarters

A mysterious white dome and an undulating glass facade, the headquarters of the French Communist Pa...

The Unal House

Designed by Claude Hausermann-Costy, and built by Joel Unal between 1972 and 2008, it's a bubble ho...

The Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam

A cross between Taylorism and Bauhaus, the Van Nelle factory at Rotterdam was built between 1926 an...

The Glass Galleon

On the fringes of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, a grand galleon with 12 glass sails, billowing in...

Itimad-ud-Daulah, the Mughal Mausoleum

The mausoleum of Itimad-ud-Daulah, built of white marble encrusted with semi-precious stones, in Ag...

The Home for All at Rikuzentakata

After Japan's 2011 tsunami, a group of architects led by Toyo Ito launched the "Home for All" proje...

The Wa Shan Guesthouse

The Wa Shan, literally "Tile Mountain", is an astonishing guesthouse, built by Chinese architect Wa...

The Glasgow School of Art

Built at the dawn of the 20th century by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Glasgow School of Art is a...

The Sante, a Prison in Paris

La Sante prison (1861-1867) is a unique and impressive work of architecture. At the cutting edge of...

The Bamboo School of Bali

An astonishing structure in which three cones flow together into one roof that protects a school bu...

Médiacité - a Designer Mall

Seen from the sky, a long stained-glass window structures the commercial center. At Médiacité, the...

The Phillips Exeter Academy Library

A masterpiece of geometry and of architectural precision, the library is one of Lous Kahn's last wo...