Last year, MACK Books published Architecture from Below, which anthologized writings by the French Brazilian architect, theorist, and painter Sérgio Ferro. (Douglas Spencer reviewed it for AN.) Now, MACK follows with Design and the Building Site and Complementary Essays, the second in the trilogy of books dedicated to Ferro’s scholarship. The following excerpt of the author’s 2023 preface to the English edition, which preserves its British phrasing, captures Ferro’s realization about the working conditions of construction sites in Brasília. The sentiment is likely relatable even today for young architects as they discover how drawings become buildings. Design and the Building Site and Complementary Essays will be released on May 22. If I remember correctly, it was in 1958 or 1959, when Rodrigo and I were second- or third year architecture students at FAUUSP, that my father, the real estate developer Armando Simone Pereira, commissioned us to design two large office buildings and eleven shops in Brasilia, which was then under construction. Of course, we were not adequately prepared for such an undertaking. Fortunately, Oscar Niemeyer and his team, who were responsible for overseeing the construction of the capital, had drawn up a detailed document determining the essential characteristics of all the private sector buildings. We followed these prescriptions to the letter, which saved us from disaster. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine the degree to which the construction of Brasilia inspired enthusiasm and professional pride in the country’s architects. And in the national imagination, the city’s establishment in the supposedly unpopulated hinterland evoked a re-founding of Brazil. Up until that point, the occupation of our immense territory had been reduced to a collection of arborescent communication routes, generally converging upon some river, following it up to the Atlantic Ocean. Through its ports, agricultural or extractive commodities produced by enslaved peoples or their substitutes passed towards the metropolises; goods were exchanged in the metropolises for more elaborate products, which took the opposite route. Our national identity was summed up in a few symbols, such as the anthem or the flag, and this scattering of paths pointing overseas. Brasilia would radically change this situation, or so we believed. It would create a central hub where the internal communication routes could converge, linking together hithertoseparate junctions, stimulating trade and economic progress in the country’s interior. It was as if, for the first time, we were taking care of ourselves. At the nucleus of this centripetal movement, architecture would embody the renaissance. And at the naval of the nucleus, the symbolic mandala of this utopia: the cathedral. Rodrigo and I got caught up in the euphoria. And perhaps more so than our colleagues, because we were taking part in the adventure with ‘our’ designs. The reality was very different — but we did not know that yet. At that time, architects in Brazil were responsible for verifying that the construction was in line with the design. We had already monitored some of our first building sites. But the construction company in charge of them, Osmar Souza e Silva’s CENPLA, specialized in the building sites of modernist architects from the so-called Escola Paulista led by Vilanova Artigas (which we aspired to be a part of, like the pretentious students we were). Osmar was very attentive to his clients and his workers, who formed a supportive and helpful team. He was even more careful with us, because he knew how inexperienced we were. I believe that the CENPLA was particularly important in São Paulo modernism: with its congeniality, it facilitated experimentation, but for the same reason, it deceived novices like us about the reality of other building sites. Consequently, Rodrigo and I travelled to Brasilia several times to check that the constructions followed ‘our’ designs and to resolve any issues. From the very first trip, our little bubble burst. Our building sites, like all the others in the future capital, bore no relation to Osmar’s. They were more like a branch of hell. A huge, muddy wasteland, in which a few cranes, pile drivers, tractors, and excavators dotted the mound of scaffolding occupied by thousands of skinny, seemingly exhausted wretches, who were nevertheless driven on by the shouts of master builders and foremen, in turn pressured by the imminence of the fateful inauguration date. Surrounding or huddled underneath the marquees of buildings under construction, entire families, equally skeletal and ragged, were waiting for some accident or death to open up a vacancy. In contact only with the master builders, and under close surveillance so we would not speak to the workers, we were not allowed to see what comrades who had worked on these sites later told us in prison: suicide abounded; escape was known to be futile in the unpopulated surroundings with no viable roads; fatal accidents were often caused by weakness due to chronic diarrhoea, brought on by rotten food that came from far away; outright theft took place in the calculation of wages and expenses in the contractor’s grocery store; camps were surrounded by law enforcement. I repeat this anecdote yet again not to invoke the benevolence of potential readers, but rather to point out the conditions that, in my opinion, allowed two students (Flávio Império joined us a little later) still in their professional infancy to quickly adopt positions that were contrary to the usual stance of architects. As the project was more Oscar Niemeyer’s than it was our own, we did not have the same emotional attachment that is understandably engendered between real authors and their designs. We had not yet been imbued with the charm and aura of the métier. And the only building sites we had visited thus far, Osmar’s, were incomparable to those we discovered in Brasilia. In short, our youthfulness and unpreparedness up against an unbearable situation made us react almost immediately to the profession’s satisfied doxa. Unprepared and young perhaps, but already with Marx by our side. Rodrigo and I joined the student cell of the Brazilian Communist Party during our first year at university. In itself, this did not help us much: the Party’s Marxism, revised in the interests of the USSR, was pitiful. Even high-level leaders rarely went beyond the first chapter of Capital. But at the end of the 1950s, the effervescence of the years to come was already nascent:  […] this extraordinary revival […] the rediscovery of Marxism and the great dialectical texts and traditions in the 1960s: an excitement that identifies a forgotten or repressed moment of the past as the new and subversive, and learns the dialectical grammar of a Hegel or an Adorno, a Marx or a Lukács, like a foreign language that has resources unavailable in our own. And what is more: the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, the war in Vietnam, guerrilla warfare of all kinds, national liberation movements, and a rare libertarian disposition in contemporary history, totally averse to fanaticism and respect for ideological apparatuses of (any) state or institution. Going against the grain was almost the norm. We were of course no more than contemporaries of our time. We were soon able to position ourselves from chapters 13, 14, and 15 of Capital, but only because we could constantly cross-reference Marx with our observations from well-contrasted building sites and do our own experimenting. As soon as we identified construction as manufacture, for example, thanks to the willingness and even encouragement of two friends and clients, Boris Fausto and Bernardo Issler, I was able to test both types of manufacture — organic and heterogeneous — on similar-sized projects taking place simultaneously, in order to find out which would be most convenient for the situation in Brazil, particularly in São Paulo. Despite the scientific shortcomings of these tests, they sufficed for us to select organic manufacture. Arquitetura Nova had defined its line of practice, studies, and research. There were other sources that were central to our theory and practice. Flávio Império was one of the founders of the Teatro de Arena, undoubtedly the vanguard of popular, militant theatre in Brazil. He won practically every set design award. He brought us his marvelous findings in spatial condensation and malleability, and in the creative diversion of techniques and material—appropriate devices for an underdeveloped country. This is what helped us pave the way to reformulating the reigning design paradigms.  We had to do what Flávio had done in the theatre: thoroughly rethink how to be an architect. Upend the perspective. The way we were taught was to start from a desired result; then others would take care of getting there, no matter how. We, on the other hand, set out to go down to the building site and accompany those carrying out the labor itself, those who actually build, the formally subsumed workers in manufacture who are increasingly deprived of the knowledge and know-how presupposed by this kind of subsumption. We should have been fostering the reconstitution of this knowledge and know-how—not so as to fulfil this assumption, but in order to reinvigorate the other side of this assumption according to Marx: the historical rebellion of the manufacture worker, especially the construction worker. We had to rekindle the demand that fueled this rebellion: total self-determination, and not just that of the manual operation as such. Our aim was above all political and ethical. Aesthetics only mattered by way of what it included—ethics. Instead of estética, we wrote est ética [this is ethics]. We wanted to make building sites into nests for the return of revolutionary syndicalism, which we ourselves had yet to discover. Sérgio Ferro, born in Brazil in 1938, studied architecture at FAUUSP, São Paulo. In the 1960s, he joined the Brazilian communist party and started, along with Rodrigo Lefevre and Flávio Império, the collective known as Arquitetura Nova. After being arrested by the military dictatorship that took power in Brazil in 1964, he moved to France as an exile. As a painter and a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble, where he founded the Dessin/Chantier laboratory, he engaged in extensive research which resulted in several publications, exhibitions, and awards in Brazil and in France, including the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 1992. Following his retirement from teaching, Ferro continues to research, write, and paint.

Villa Air / ARK-architectureSave this picture!© Bilel KhemakhemHouses•Tunis, Tunisia Architects: ARK-architecture Area Area of this architecture project Area:  1500 m² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2024 Photographs Photographs:Bilel Khemakhem Manufacturers Brands with products used in this architecture project Manufacturers:  Trespa, Elements, QUICK-STEP, REVIGLASS, Saint Gobain Glass, Schüco, TOSHIBAMore SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. Villa Air is a distilled expression of contemporary architecture rooted in the Tunisian landscape. Set within a two-hectare plot in Morneg, this 1,500 m² residence unfolds as a meditative dialogue between built form and topography. The site, defined by its gentle slope and sweeping views, culminates in the striking silhouette of the Jbal Errsas mountain range—a natural horizon that anchors the architectural narrative. From the outset, the project embraces a central duality: the tension between gravitas and lightness, between groundedness and suspension. This dialectic, subtly embedded in the villa's name, structures the entire composition. Distributed across three levels, the house is articulated as a series of horizontal strata punctuated by bold cantilevers. These projections—remarkably slender at just 45 cm thick—embody both structural daring and environmental responsiveness, casting precise shadow lines that temper the Mediterranean sun.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!Rather than asserting dominance over the terrain, the architecture yields to it. The villa engages the land with measured restraint, allowing the natural contours to guide its form. A textured finish in earthy tones fosters chromatic continuity with the ground, while the massing cascades along the slope, suggesting a geological emergence rather than an architectural imposition. The principal façade distills the project's ethos: a calibrated composition of apertures that frames the landscape as a sequence of living tableaux. Each elevation is attuned to its orientation, choreographing a spatial experience that is both immersive and contemplative. Here, architecture acts not as a boundary, but as a lens.Save this picture!Materiality is approached with deliberate restraint. Pristine white volumes capture the shifting Mediterranean light, animating surfaces in a daily choreography of shadows. Travertine and timber introduce tactile warmth, while concrete elements — subtly tinted with sand pigments — ground the building in its context and enhance its material belonging. Internally, the spatial organization privileges continuity and flow. Circulations are not mere connectors, but choreographed transitions. Double-height volumes channel daylight deep into the core, while vertical pathways become elevated promenades offering ever-evolving perspectives of the surrounding landscape.Save this picture!Save this picture!Save this picture!The architecture explores a central paradox: the reconciliation of intimacy with openness, of enclosure with exposure. This tension is resolved through a refined gradation of thresholds, where interiors dissolve into terraces and open platforms, softening the boundaries between inside and out. Twin infinity pools extend the architectural geometry toward the horizon, amplifying the sensation of lightness and spatial suspension. Water and sky converge in a silent dialogue, completing the project's aspiration to exist not merely in the landscape but in symbiosis with it. Villa Air stands as a testament to a site-specific Mediterranean modernism — one that privileges clarity, precision, and sensory depth. More than a functional residence, it evokes a poetic condition of dwelling: a place where form, matter, and perception converge in quiet resonance.Save this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less About this officeARK-architectureOffice••• MaterialConcreteMaterials and TagsPublished on May 30, 2025Cite: "Villa Air / ARK-architecture" 30 May 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1030593/villa-air-ark-architecture&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

For nearly 10 years I have written about science and technology and I’ve been an early adopter of new tech for much longer. As a teenager in the mid-1990s I annoyed the hell out of my family by jamming up the phone line for hours with a dial-up modem; connecting to bulletin board communities all over the country.When I started writing professionally about technology in 2016 I was all for our seemingly inevitable transhumanist future. When the chip is ready I want it immediately stuck in my head, I remember saying proudly in our busy office. Why not improve ourselves where we can?Since then, my general view on technology has dramatically shifted. Watching a growing class of super-billionaires erode the democratizing nature of technology by maintaining corporate controls over what we use and how we use it has fundamentally changed my personal relationship with technology. Seeing deeply disturbing philosophical stances like longtermism, effective altruism, and singulartarianism envelop the minds of those rich, powerful men controlling the world has only further entrenched inequality.A recent Black Mirror episode really rammed home the perils we face by having technology so controlled by capitalist interests. A sick woman is given a brain implant connected to a cloud server to keep her alive. The system is managed through a subscription service where the user pays for monthly access to the cognitive abilities managed by the implant. As time passes, that subscription cost gets more and more expensive - and well, it’s Black Mirror, so you can imagine where things end up. Titled 'Common People', the episode is from series 7 of Black MirrorNetflix The enshittification of our digital world has been impossible to ignore. You’re not imagining things, Google Search is getting worse.But until the emergence of AI (or, as we’ll discuss later, language learning models that pretend to look and sound like an artificial intelligence) I’ve never been truly concerned about a technological innovation, in and of itself.A recent article looked at how generative AI tech such as ChatGPT is being used by university students. The piece was authored by a tech admin at New York University and it’s filled with striking insights into how AI is shaking the foundations of educational institutions.Not unsurprisingly, students are using ChatGPT for everything from summarizing complex texts to completely writing essays from scratch. But one of the reflections quoted in the article immediately jumped out at me.When a student was asked why they relied on generative AI so much when putting work together they responded, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?”My first response was, of course, why wouldn’t you? It made complete sense.For a second.And then I thought, hang on, what is being lost by speeding from point A to point B in a car? What if the quickest way from point A to point B wasn't the best way to get there?Depositphotos Let’s further the analogy. You need to go to the grocery store. It’s a 10-minute walk away but a three-minute drive. Why wouldn’t you drive?Well, the only benefit of driving is saving time. That’s inarguable. You’ll be back home and cooking up your dinner before the person on foot even gets to the grocery store.Congratulations. You saved yourself about 20 minutes. In a world where efficiency trumps everything this is the best choice. Use that extra 20 minutes in your day wisely.But what are the benefits of not driving, taking the extra time, and walking?First, you have environmental benefits. Not using a car unnecessarily; spewing emissions into the air, either directly from combustion or indirectly for those with electric cars.Secondly, you have health benefits from the little bit of exercise you get by walking. Our stationary lives are quite literally killing us so a 20-minute walk a day is likely to be incredibly positive for your health.But there are also more abstract benefits to be gained by walking this short trip from A to B.Walking connects us to our neighborhood. It slows things down. Helps us better understand the community and environment we are living in. A recent study summarized the benefits of walking around your neighborhood, suggesting the practice leads to greater social connectedness and reduced feelings of isolation.So what are we losing when we use a car to get from point A to point B? Potentially a great deal.But let’s move out of abstraction and into the real world.An article in the Columbia Journalism Review asked nearly 20 news media professionals how they were integrating AI into their personal workflow. The responses were wildly varied. Some journalists refused to use AI for anything more than superficial interview transcription, while others use it broadly, to edit text, answer research questions, summarize large bodies of science text, or search massive troves of data for salient bits of information.In general, the line almost all those media professionals shared was they would never explicitly use AI to write their articles. But for some, almost every other stage of the creative process in developing a story was fair game for AI assistance.I found this a little horrifying. Farming out certain creative development processes to AI felt not only ethically wrong but also like key cognitive stages were being lost, skipped over, considered unimportant.I’ve never considered myself to be an extraordinarily creative person. I don’t feel like I come up with new or original ideas when I work. Instead, I see myself more as a compiler. I enjoy finding connections between seemingly disparate things. Linking ideas and using those pieces as building blocks to create my own work. As a writer and journalist I see this process as the whole point.A good example of this is a story I published in late 2023 investigating the relationship between long Covid and psychedelics. The story began earlier in the year when I read an intriguing study linking long Covid with serotonin abnormalities in the gut. Being interested in the science of psychedelics, and knowing that psychedelics very much influence serotonin receptors, I wondered if there could be some kind of link between these two seemingly disparate topics.The idea sat in the back of my mind for several months, until I came across a person who told me they had been actively treating their own long Covid symptoms with a variety of psychedelic remedies. After an expansive and fascinating interview I started diving into different studies looking to understand how certain psychedelics affect the body, and whether there could be any associations with long Covid treatments.Eventually I stumbled across a few compelling associations. It took weeks of reading different scientific studies, speaking to various researchers, and thinking about how several discordant threads could be somehow linked.Could AI have assisted me in the process of developing this story?No. Because ultimately, the story comprised an assortment of novel associations that I drew between disparate ideas all encapsulated within the frame of a person’s subjective experience.And it is this idea of novelty that is key to understanding why modern AI technology is not actually intelligence but a simulation of intelligence. LLMs are a sophisticated language imitator, delivering responses that resemble what they think a response would look likeDepositphotos ChatGPT, and all the assorted clones that have emerged over the last couple of years, are a form of technology called LLMs (large language models). At the risk of enraging those who actually work in this mind-bendingly complex field, I’m going to dangerously over-simplify how these things work.It’s important to know that when you ask a system like ChatGPT a question it doesn’t understand what you are asking it. The response these systems generate to any prompt is simply a simulation of what it computes a response would look like based on a massive dataset.So if I were to ask the system a random question like, “What color are cats?”, the system would scrape the world’s trove of information on cats and colors to create a response that mirrors the way most pre-existing text talks about cats and colors. The system builds its response word by word, creating something that reads coherently to us, by establishing a probability for what word should follow each prior word. It’s not thinking, it’s imitating.What these generative AI systems are spitting out are word salad amalgams of what it thinks the response to your prompt should look like, based on training from millions of books and webpages that have been previously published.Setting aside for a moment the accuracy of the responses these systems deliver, I am more interested (or concerned) with the cognitive stages that this technology allows us to skip past.For thousands of years we have used technology to improve our ability to manage highly complex tasks. The idea is called cognitive offloading, and it’s as simple as writing something down on a notepad or saving a contact number on your smartphone. There are pros and cons to cognitive offloading, and scientists have been digging into the phenomenon for years.As long as we have been doing it, there have been people criticizing the practice. The legendary Greek philosopher Socrates was notorious for his skepticism around the written word. He believed knowledge emerged through a dialectical process so writing itself was reductive. He even went so far as to suggest (according to his student Plato, who did write things down) that writing makes us dumber. “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” Wrote Plato, quoting Socrates Almost every technological advancement in human history can be seen to be accompanied by someone suggesting it will be damaging. Calculators have destroyed our ability to properly do math. GPS has corrupted our spatial memory. Typewriters killed handwriting. Computer word processors killed typewriters. Video killed the radio star.And what have we lost? Well, zooming in on writing, for example, a 2020 study claimed brain activity is greater when a note is handwritten as opposed to being typed on a keyboard. And then a 2021 study suggested memory retention is better when using a pen and paper versus a stylus and tablet. So there are certainly trade-offs whenever we choose to use a technological tool to offload a cognitive task.There’s an oft-told story about gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. It may be apocryphal but it certainly is meaningful. He once said he sat down and typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby, word for word. According to Thompson, he wanted to know what it felt like to write a great novel. Thompson was infamous for writing everything on typewriters, even when computers emerged in the 1990sPublic Domain I don’t want to get all wishy-washy here, but these are the brass tacks we are ultimately falling on. What does it feel like to think? What does it feel like to be creative? What does it feel like to understand something?A recent interview with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, reveals how deeply AI has infiltrated his life and work. Not only does Nadella utilize nearly a dozen different custom-designed AI agents to manage every part of his workflow – from summarizing emails to managing his schedule – but he also uses AI to get through podcasts quickly on his way to work. Instead of actually listening to the podcasts he has transcripts uploaded to an AI assistant who he then chats to about the information while commuting.Why listen to the podcast when you can get the gist through a summary? Why read a book when you can listen to the audio version at X2 speed? Or better yet, watch the movie? Or just read a Wikipedia entry. Or get AI to summarize the wikipedia entry.I’m not here to judge anyone on the way they choose to use technology. Do what you want with ChatGPT. But for a moment consider what you may be skipping over by racing from point A to point B.Sure, you can give ChatGPT a set of increasingly detailed prompts; adding complexity to its summary of a scientific journal or a podcast, but at what point do the prompts get so granular that you may as well read the journal entry itself? If you get generative AI to skim and summarize something, what is it missing? If something was worth being written then surely it is worth being read?If there is a more succinct way to say something then maybe we should say it more succinctly.In a magnificent article for The New Yorker, Ted Chiang perfectly summed up the deep contradiction at the heart of modern generative AI systems. He argues language, and writing, is fundamentally about communication. If we write an email to someone we can expect the person at the other end to receive those words and consider them with some kind of thought or attention. But modern AI systems (or these simulations of intelligence) are erasing our ability to think, consider, and write. Where does it all end? For Chiang it's pretty dystopian feedback loop of dialectical slop. “We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?” Ted Chiang

Cabin in Woods | © Egemen Karakaya Set on the Kozak Plateau near Pergamon in western Turkey, Cabin in Woods by Ediz Demirel Works presents a compelling investigation into the relationship between architecture, landscape, and inhabitation. Modest in scale but conceptually rigorous, the 36-square-meter structure explores dualities in materiality, spatial experience, and construction technique. Its design resists conventional tropes of vernacular mimicry, opting instead for conscious contrast. This architectural gesture neither disappears into the land nor dominates it but negotiates a dynamic tension between embeddedness and autonomy. Cabin in Woods Technical Information Architects1-2: Ediz Demirel Works Location: Kozak Plateau, Pergamon, Izmir, Turkey Area: 36 m2 | 387 Sq. Ft. Completion Year: 2025 Photographs: © Egemen Karakaya The identity of the structure is shaped by the interplay of two opposing tectonic approaches in terms of materials, construction techniques, production methods, and the contrast between locality and foreignness. – Ediz Demirel  Cabin in Woods Photographs © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya © Egemen Karakaya Design Intent and Conceptual Framework The cabin occupies a terrace wall from a former vineyard, utilizing the dry stone retaining wall as a literal and conceptual foundation. This gesture roots the project within the existing agricultural topography, establishing a minimal intervention approach. Yet from this grounded base, the cabin rises as an artificial insertion. Its steel frame and corten cladding introduce a formal and material vocabulary foreign to the rural surroundings, underscoring a deliberate dialectic between context and object. At the heart of the project is a sunken conversation pit, an introspective space that anchors the plan and serves as the primary social node. This recessed area draws the inhabitant downward into the landscape, offering a tactile and spatial contrast to the protective shell above. The lowered core reframes domesticity in spatial terms, allowing for a gathering space that privileges horizontality, intimacy, and thermal mass. Around this core, other functional programs such as wet areas, storage, and circulation are deployed as appendages. Above, a mezzanine floor is delicately inserted within the steel shell, creating zones for sleeping and working without compromising the spatial clarity of the core below. Spatial Organization and Experiential Strategy Despite its compact footprint, the cabin achieves a high degree of spatial complexity. This is accomplished not through planimetric manipulation but through sectional richness and the careful calibration of views, light, and thresholds. A singular horizontal aperture cuts through the shell, framing a panoramic view of the forested hills. This gesture provides more than visual access; it actively orchestrates a dialogue between the interior and the broader ecological context. The facade, punctuated with small cantilevered openings, introduces sculptural moments that protrude into the landscape. These elements operate simultaneously as light sources, thermal breaks, and spatial cues. They animate the exterior envelope while mediating the inhabitant’s sensory experience from within. The strategy reveals an architectural sensibility attuned to the nuances of perception, perspective, and phenomenology. The sunken core, in particular, reinforces this experiential ambition. It is not merely a spatial curiosity but a site of temporal deceleration, a hearth-like void where fire, conversation, and reflection converge. In this sense, the project subtly reinvigorates domestic rituals through spatial articulation, encouraging modes of living that prioritize gathering and grounding over visual spectacle. Material Strategy and Construction Logic The architectural language of Cabin in Woods is structured around a deliberate contrast between local, irregular materials and prefabricated, controlled systems. The foundation, comprising a reinforced concrete slab cast directly into the existing dry stone terrace, extends the material logic of the landscape. This decision grounds the structure physically and symbolically, linking it to the region’s vernacular heritage. Conversely, the corten steel cladding and the structural steel frame are fabricated off-site and assembled locally. This bifurcation in construction methods aligns with the project’s conceptual division. The base engages the earth and honors the irregularity of place, while the shell expresses a technological detachment and formal precision. With its evolving patina and atmospheric depth, the use of corten adds a layer of temporal expression to the architectural language. It ages, oxidizes, and marks time, introducing a poetic dimension to the otherwise industrial envelope. Such a contrast is not merely aesthetic. It reflects a broader interrogation of architectural identity—how buildings can simultaneously belong, estrange, settle, and provoke. The tectonic opposition between ground and shell becomes a vehicle for this inquiry, inviting reflection on how architecture positions itself in relation to site and memory. Contextual and Critical Significance Beyond its immediate programmatic function as a short-term rental, Cabin in Woods engages with urgent disciplinary questions. How should contemporary architecture respond to rural contexts without defaulting to nostalgia? How can compact dwellings foster depth of experience without resorting to over-programming? And how might architecture embrace contradiction as a generative force rather than a problem to be resolved? Ediz Demirel’s response is measured yet assertive. Rather than dissolving into the landscape, the cabin asserts its autonomy while acknowledging the terrain. The project frames its site not as a passive backdrop but as an active participant in the architectural narrative. Its minimal footprint, precise detailing, and tectonic clarity demonstrate how small-scale interventions can yield disproportionately rich spatial and conceptual outcomes. Cabin in Woods Plans Floor Plan | © Ediz Demirel Works Section | © Ediz Demirel Works Elevations | © Ediz Demirel Works Details | © Ediz Demirel Works © Ediz Demirel Works Cabin in Woods Image Gallery About Ediz Demirel Works Ediz Demirel Works (EDWorks) is an Istanbul-based architectural studio founded in 2022 by Ediz Demirel. The practice focuses on small to medium-scale projects integrating design, construction, and development. EDWorks emphasizes material experimentation, site-specific strategies, and balancing traditional craftsmanship and contemporary tectonics. Notable projects include Cabin in Woods and Pergamon House in the Izmir region. The studio’s approach reflects a commitment to architectural clarity and contextual sensitivity. Credits and Additional Notes Design Architect: Ediz Demirel Site Architects: Ediz Demirel, Tuna Ökten

Julian Rose’s Building Cultures, published last year by Princeton Architectural Press, contains 16 in-depth interviews with leading architects who have designed museums around the world. In 2022, András Szántó’s Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects, published by Hatje Cantz, offered a complementary glimpse into the sensibilities of a new generation of voices. (The titles share four interviewees: David Adjaye, David Chipperfield, Elizabeth Diller, and Kulapat Yantrasat) Rose and Szántó sat down with AN’s executive editor Jack Murphy to discuss the museum’s inexhaustible spatial variety and its capacity to shape civic and cultural space today. Julian Rose’s Building Cultures, published last year by Princeton Architectural Press, contains 16 interviews with architects. (Courtesy Princeton Architectural Press) AN: Julian, what are the major themes, concerns, and anxieties that you heard when interviewing architects about designing museums? Julian Rose (JR): The conversations in Building Culture grew out of my time at Artforum, so they began nearly 10 years ago in a pretty different world. In that context, one important theme was looking at the museum to understand how architecture relates to arts. Architects, either by choice or because the culture at large compels them to, are always defining what they do in relation to other cultural practices, especially the visual arts. This relationship goes back to the modernist avant-garde, and you could trace it even further. I was drawn towards architects who had deep connections to art, maybe they had even gone to art school or had a record of collaboration; not coincidentally, a lot of them have become known as museum specialists. The answers I heard were refreshing; people were not necessarily learning the lessons I expected. As an example: With Peter Zumthor, I thought we were going to have a focused conversation about the very architectural aesthetics and materials used by certain artists like Richard Serra or Donald Judd. No—he wanted to talk about the bigger picture, the emotional and philosophical connections. He’s obsessed with Walter de Maria’s landscape works like Lightning Field. Even if they don’t seem to have an obvious connection to architecture, he loves the scale and ambition. This kind of surprise happened in several conversations. The other key topic is the typological problem of the museum. As I write in my introduction, the museum refuses spatial optimization—there’s no “best” way to design one. In part, that’s because contemporary art is evolving. Look at the popularity of large-scale installations today, which require big open spaces, versus the more old-fashioned idea of a museum being the place you go to have a one-on-one moment with a masterpiece, which needs intimate galleries. Until recently, “public art” was a kind of forlorn category. It was something you might happen on in a park or a subway station, and it was separate from what most people thought of as real art, which of course was what you saw in the museum. And you went to the museum to have what was essentially a private experience of that art. Now you go to the museum to have an experience that’s both aesthetic and social—to look at art and to enjoy a public space—and I think that’s a huge part of why museums are so popular today. One of the fundamental takeaways from the book is that contemporary art is becoming more and more public, and the evolution of the art museum has been a crucial part of that shift. Artists are creating work that’s meant to be experienced by many people at once, and they need new spaces to do that. At the same time, all the architects wanted to talk about circulation, because there is a tension on some level between how we traditionally think of experiencing art and the crowds that certain museums are starting to receive. András Szántó’s Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects also features interviews with leading architects who design museums (Hatje Cantz) AN: András, how does this compare to how you approached your book? András Szántó (AS): One reason why the two books are quite complementary is that their genesis is so different. Julian, your book approaches its subjects with an interest in their relationship to art and their creative work. For me, the direction of travel was different. My talks came out of a previous book, which I did during the pandemic, for which I interviewed museum directors about how their institutions are changing. Rather than reviewing past projects, I was interested in the architects’ overall perspective on the museum as a form. Generally, there is the idea that architecture saved the visual arts from the fate of other forms of high art. And there has been a post-pandemic realization that you can do highly elitist and exclusive architecture in the language of modern design, just as you can using neoclassical architecture. We see a reckoning for how to realign museums to serve a wider segment of the population, not just the creation of these beautiful confections to attract the wealthy, highly educated cultural tourists of the world, but maybe the ability to send the message to someone who lives two miles away, “This is for you.” Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London, U.K., 1991 (Matt Wargo) Sainsbury Wing renovation by Selldorf Architects (Edmund Sumner/©The National Gallery London) AN: How did you go about selecting the architects you wanted to interview? AS: You consign yourself to a lifetime of apologies to people who you didn’t interview. I wanted to be global, so I didn’t stack my book with New York–based architects. I wanted to attempt a gender balance, which was difficult. Again, I think our books work well together, Julian, because you spoke with a lot of people on my dream list. JR: I agree that our books are a good pair; it was fun for me to read your book when mine was in progress. I was first educated as an architect, but I’m also coming at this as a historian, so the idea was trying to figure out how we got here: How did museums become so important? I think that the success of both the museum and contemporary art in general is a bit of a surprise to everyone. In this century, we’ve seen so many traditional “highbrow” forms of culture get pushed to the periphery, but museums are thriving. I thought about Building Culture as an oral history project. I almost did the opposite of András: I have a couple younger voices, but I wanted to speak with established figures because that generation has shaped the present and has ideas about the future, too. Frank Gehry was one of the first people I interviewed; he’s 96 and he still has important museums under construction. It was interesting to ask Renzo Piano what he thinks is next. People like Frank and Renzo have had plenty of media exposure, but I did feel like there was a certain depth missing from journalistic coverage. I wanted to do a relatively small number of longer conversations and cover the widest historical range I could. I was thrilled to have Denise Scott Brown in there, because the Sainsbury Wing [of the National Gallery, London] alone is a paradigm-shifting project. She’s part of a whole generation that had a huge impact through postmodern museum designs, although most of [her peers] are no longer with us. That felt important to capture. Gehry Partners, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, 1997 (Courtesy Gehry Partners, LLP/© Frank O. Gehry) AS: We’re discussing the success of contemporary visual art, which for most people feels inscrutable and hard to access. You had an interesting thought experiment: What would the same art have done without the scaffolding of the museum around it? The art museum could have become a dusty, irrelevant thing—and often still is—but through the efforts of a new generation of museum experts, working together with architects, communicators, and other specialists, this form has been lifted up and made super contemporary through, frankly, a lot of the functions that were seen as somewhat secondary. This is where the rubber meets the road for architects: So many of the metrics, even the audience metrics, are related to the non-gallery functions of the museum. People flock to the museum as a place, and this is where architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design have been superb. Museums have become civic hubs, which was maybe a secondary concern initially. That’s why people like Piano and Gehry are interesting, because they came up having to work in both worlds. They created this highly successful institutional typology, which still has those art at its core, but it’s the civic infrastructure that is the most successful. JR: Museums have always had a civic function, but almost as a secondary part of the program. With an institution like the Centre Pompidou in Paris the civic aspect starts to dominate. Meanwhile, all of these other institutions that used to provide shared social space have largely disappeared, which has an isolating and alienating effect on culture. It’s funny: Civic engagement started out as almost an afterthought, but it has become a crucial function of the museum in the 21st century. AS: Another point to make about generations: Do not confuse age with being namby-pamby or conservative. Today’s older architects are people of the 1960s, absolutely. Many, like Elizabeth Diller and David Chipperfield, were more radical then than some of our younger architects are today. They did not necessarily expect to be multimillionaires. They were devoted to the public sphere. These “older” figures who now get giant commissions are, on a DNA level, super radical people. JR: Richard Gluckman is another important example. Like Chipperfield, he has a direct connection to modernism through his education. We can talk all day about modernism as a failed project, but the fact is that back when people like Richard and David were in school, architecture was still seen as a fundamental part of the progressive state. Gluckman went to school at Syracuse University in the late 1960s, and as a student he worked for his professors exclusively on projects like housing and university campuses. But by the time he got around to opening his own office, it was 1977. New York had almost gone bankrupt—no one was building that stuff anymore. Gluckman got involved in designing spaces for art, and this was his way of basically sneaking back into the public sphere. I think their generation was connected to a very different—and very powerful—understanding of what architecture meant for society, and you still see that in their work today. AS: We can think about the art museum as a scaffolding building around a core enterprise of artistic experience. But this means something different for collecting versus non-collecting institutions. Often, you find institutions places that are dedicating more and more of their space to social functions around the art, contemplative aspects of art, and so on. The best architects are absolutely capable of doing both things: One is creating transparency, porosity, ease of access, and landscape integration in a way that flows, and the other is delivering wonderful amenities like shops and cafes. We can question some old dichotomies: How hard do you have to separate gallery space and social space? How porous could those boundaries be? What everybody profoundly believes is that a successful museum experience must have a magic combination of three things: objects, humans, and architecture. And when those three things come together—incredible real objects with a social experience in the company of other people in a magisterial architectural space—that creates an enduring magic that you cannnot sacrifice. Shohei Shigematsu/OMA, rendering of the New Museum of Contemporary Art expansion, New York, New York, anticipated completion 2025 (Courtesy OMA/bloomimages.de) JR: It was interesting for me to think about how conservative the museum can be. My conversation with Shohei Shigematsu at OMA put that into relief for me. He was one of the lead architects for the Whitney Museum extension proposal. At the time, OMA’s whole thing was reinventing typologies for the 21st century—think CCTV twisting the skyscraper, or Seattle transforming the public library. They took that aggressive critical method to the museum too—in the 1990s for MoMA and the Tate Modern, and then to the Whitney in 2001, and didn’t win a single competition. The establishment was not interested! AS: I agree that architects are often more radical than their clients. Hopefully nobody misunderstands this, but there is often a profound disconnect between the veneration of rule-breaking, iconoclastic innovation in the gallery versus the conservatism of the museum organization. Organizationally speaking, most museums have not read an airport book on modern management. I see architects trying to push against that. An easy example: Why do these buildings still look like fortresses? Libraries have been redesigned to work for people while still accommodating books. All too often, art museums still feel like citadels with lots of walls. Why? Because walls are great for hanging art on the inside of the building. Is that really the singular goal? AN: How does the scale of the institution shape what it can do? AS: We have certainly seen the emergence of a lot of small institutes and institutions, because of the enormous expansion of private museums. I do think small scale is good. When you ask most people about their favorite museums, they will frequently mention places that are quite intimate, like the Fondation Beyeler, in Basel, by Renzo Piano, soon with a lovely modest expansion by Zumthor. Nobody likes a super tanker, which is easy to respect but hard to love. When it comes to big, we need to differentiate between the gigantic temple on the hill versus what I think could be the future: the SESC Pompéia model, an interdisciplinary, social-cultural hub that may be quite big in the aggregate, and where the visual arts play a role inside a larger matrix. Particularly in our big, sprawling cities, such multipurpose, campus-like configurations could be an ideal setting for a museum. JR: I agree that the future might be more like the biennale model: When done well, the whole city is activated. In that sense maybe the size of the institution itself is less important. But I worry that smaller institutions will be hurt as public funding dries up and all museums become increasingly reliant on philanthropy. The regional, kunsthalle-like spots will suffer because those aren’t glamorous places to give money, but those are often the locations the programming makes the biggest impact in the community. AN: What else should we discuss? AS: Globalization is worth mentioning. There is a parallel to be drawn, perhaps, to the evolution of art. At the end of the 20th century, an astonishing amount of liberation became available to artists as the master narrative of modernism splintered to a more pluralistic discourse where all kinds of positions were accepted as art. Today I think something similar has happened in museum architecture: With the proliferation of museums globally, the language of museum architecture has opened up into a new openness to difference and variation, often informed by regional, vernacular forms and needs. Museums can be built using local materials or respond to local typologies, versus the older ideas of the white cube or the enfilade gallery sequence. Anything can be a museum—not just because of reuse, which is important, but because architects can build some crazy stuff inside almost any kind of building: a power station, a prison, a hospital, an army barracks. And people will say, “That’s a museum.” JR: There’s a running joke in museum design that the Louvre is an adaptive reuse project. And it’s true: The world’s first public art museum started out as a palace. This speaks to the museum’s typological flexibility. Its program is very architectural in the sense that it’s about how people and artworks interact in space, but it’s not like an airport or a hospital with a hyper-specialized program that is understandably difficult to fit into an existing structure. I’m optimistic that museums will stay on the cutting edge of adaptive reuse even as it gets more and more important for the whole architectural profession. Another thing that came out of my book is how much museum architects pay attention to the spaces artists are working in. The New York loft is the classic example. Once upon a time, not every gallery looked like a renovated postindustrial space, but artists moved into defunct industrial spaces decades ago and eventually exhibition spaces followed. This exchange goes both ways—its dialectical. As museum buildings have gotten more varied, artists have had a lot of fun learning how to use these new spaces. The Guggenheim in New York is an example. For decades, [Frank Lloyd] Wright’s design has been criticized because it’s hard to show most traditional art forms on the spiral ramps. But the best things I’ve seen in that museum in the past ten years have been installations in the atrium. Artists can do something wild with that space. After seeing that, do you really want to look at a little painting on a curvy wall? Julian Rose is a designer, critic, and historian. He is currently completing a PhD at Princeton on the origin and evolution of museums of contemporary art. András Szántó advises museums, foundations, educational institutions, and corporations on cultural strategy and program development, worldwide. This post contains affiliate links. AN may have a commission if you make a purchase through these links.

Songzhuang Z Museum | © Jonathan Leijonhufvud Located in the remote mountainous terrain of Zhejiang Province, The Quartet: Songzhuang Z Museum presents a compelling study of architectural adaptation, contradiction, and transformation. Situated in Songzhuang, a 600-year-old village that remained largely untouched by modernization until recent years, the project by TEAM_BLDG offers an architectural response that neither retreats into nostalgia nor imposes a foreign image. Instead, it constructs a spatial and material dialectic, acknowledging incongruity, emphasizing contrast, and subtly embedding itself into the evolving cultural landscape. The Quartet: Songzhuang Z Museum Technical Information Architects1-6: TEAM_BLDG Location: Songzhuang Village, Songyang County, Zhejiang Province, China Area: 472 m2 | 5,080 Sq. Ft. Project Year: 2024 – 2025 Photographs7: © Jonathan Leijonhufvud Better to stand out than to disappear. – TEAM_BLDG Architects The Quartet: Songzhuang Z Museum Photographs © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud © Jonathan Leijonhufvud Reframing the Village Artifact The project begins with a conflict: a 1990s brick-concrete residence towering awkwardly over the village’s low-slung, contiguous rammed-earth structures. Its scale and materiality severed it from the surrounding context, and it was long deemed a misfit within the village’s traditional fabric. Yet rather than camouflage its presence, the architects embraced its dissonance as a narrative condition. Guided by the client’s directive to amplify, rather than suppress, the building’s incongruity, TEAM_BLDG approached the structure not as a problem to resolve but as a site of architectural inquiry. The question was not how to erase the past intervention but how to recalibrate it into a new typology: the rural museum. In doing so, the firm leveraged the tension between the old and new, not as a binary opposition but as an opportunity for mediation. From Monolith to Quartet The building’s spatial transformation unfolds through a deconstructive logic. The formerly monolithic mass was subdivided into four distinct volumes, a gesture that echoes the scale and fragmented rhythms of the surrounding village dwellings. Interstitial courtyards separate and unite these volumes, allowing light, air, and spatial rhythm to intervene in the once-heavy structure. The design’s vertical core is a newly inserted light well. This atrium spans the height of the building, acting as a conduit for natural light while simultaneously connecting the interior’s horizontal strata. Circulation is organized around this vertical void, allowing for a fluid visitor experience that maintains visual continuity between floors. Each level wraps around the central shaft, reinforcing a sense of openness and transparency that contrasts with the building’s original opacity. Visitors enter through an adjacent, preserved rammed-earth house that has been minimally modified to serve as a “prologue” space, a deliberate moment of compression and quietude before ascending into the brighter, open volumes of the main structure. This spatial sequencing, dark to light, low to high, becomes a sensory transition that enhances the visitor’s perceptual engagement with the museum’s content and context. Weaving Lightness into Mass The project’s defining material intervention is its façade, reconceived as a woven skin inspired by the techniques and metaphors of textile making. TEAM_BLDG wrapped the structure in a finely spaced lattice of aluminum square tubes, painted red on three sides and white on one. The resulting grid creates a dynamic interplay of light, shadow, and chromatic variation, responding to the shifting sun and weather conditions. The design team intentionally avoided a uniform application. Instead, they introduced variations in spacing and density, especially across different levels and orientations. The upper portions of the façade are denser, while the lower remain more open, modulating both visibility and porosity. On the terrace, the façade becomes multidirectional, layering dimensional complexity and deepening the woven metaphor. In bright sunlight, the façade takes on a soft pinkish hue; in overcast or snowy conditions, it becomes a subdued white veil. This chromatic fluidity imparts a temporal quality to the structure, each visit offering a subtly different impression of the building’s mood and presence. The weaving principle is further extended through custom interior furniture, constructed with woven red straps over slender steel frames, echoing the façade’s tectonic logic and material language. Songzhuang Z Museum: Mediation Through Architecture Rather than asserting itself as an icon or retreating into contextual mimicry, the Z Museum mediates between eras, materials, and scales. Its relationship with the village is neither submissive nor dominating; instead, it engages in a form of spatial dialogue. Reconfigured windows frame specific views of the surrounding village, allowing exterior scenes to interact with interior exhibitions. On the third floor, large apertures in the stairwell wall transform the space into a semi-outdoor condition, encouraging visual and behavioral connections with the outside world. The rooftop terrace offers a final moment of release: an unprogrammed panoramic platform where boundaries dissolve, and visitors are immersed in the landscape. The architecture recedes, allowing elevation changes and open material transitions to a gently structured experience without overt control. In an architectural climate often dominated by formal spectacle or overbearing contextualism, The Quartet – Songzhuang Z Museum proposes a third way, rooted in spatial logic, material clarity, and conceptual subtlety. It neither replicates tradition nor denies its presence. Instead, it proposes a weaving of time, space, and perception, where architecture becomes an active thread in the evolving cultural fabric of rural China. The Quartet: Songzhuang Z Museum Plans Level 1 | © TEAM_BLDG Level 2 | © TEAM_BLDG Level 3 | © TEAM_BLDG Roof Plan | © TEAM_BLDG Section | © TEAM_BLDG The Quartet: Songzhuang Z Museum Image Gallery About TEAM_BLDG Design Team: Xiao Lei, Deng Caiyi, Shen Ruijie Structural Design: GongHe Architecture Design Group Co., Ltd. Custom Furniture & Lighting Design: TEAM_BLDG Visual Identity Design (VI): TEAM_BLDG Client / Operator: Mountain Creations (山风大美) Curatorial Team: CSC Communis Photography Assistant: Wai Wai Altitude: Approximately 400 meters above sea level

Casa De Blas | © Hisao Suzuki Set on a hillside in Sevilla la Nueva, a town southwest of Madrid, Casa De Blas is a distilled expression of the architectural dialectic between weight and lightness, earth and sky. Designed in 2000 by Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza, the house is both an act of landscape intervention and a metaphysical construct, a spatial meditation on essential form and material logic. Casa De Blas Technical Information Architects1-3: Alberto Campo Baeza Location: Sevilla la Nueva, Madrid, Spain Area: 250 m2 | 2,690 Sq. Ft. Project Year: 2000 Photographs: © Hisao Suzuki This house aims to be a literal translation of the idea of the tectonic box upon the stereotomic box. Like a distillation of the most essential in architecture. Once again, more with less. – Alberto Campo Baeza Casa De Blas Photographs © Hisao Suzuki © Hisao Suzuki © Hisao Suzuki © Hisao Suzuki © Hisao Suzuki © Hisao Suzuki The Architecture of Duality: Ground and Sky Campo Baeza’s work consistently revolves around a search for architectural clarity. In Casa De Blas, this clarity manifests as two boxes: a grounded concrete volume that holds the domestic program and a glass pavilion above that elevates the act of looking. The house is not merely built on the landscape; it is in dialogue with it. The conceptual strategy of Casa De Blas is rooted in a tectonic-syntactic opposition between the stereotomic base and the tectonic roof. The lower portion consists of a robust concrete platform embedded in the earth like a carved podium. This base supports a lighter glass structure above, where steel elements define the enclosure with minimal mass. The house engages the site with careful restraint. Rather than dominate the hilltop, it accepts the slope and turns its attention to the northern view of the Sierra de Guadarrama. This orientation informs light and shadow’s spatial organization and phenomenological qualities. Inside the concrete base, the architecture follows a precise logic. A service band is located toward the rear, while primary living spaces occupy the front, facing the landscape. Square window openings, deeply set into the thick walls, frame views with the intentionality of a camera obscura. These apertures do not merely let in light; they shape perception, creating a sense of distance and inwardness. The Pavilion as Apparatus for Contemplation Above this grounded core, the transparent upper volume serves as a lookout. Reached from the interior by ascending stairs, the glass box sits lightly on the podium, offering a counterpoint to the cave-like enclosure below. There is no visible carpentry, just frameless glazing and a white steel canopy, which shades the upper level while preserving its airy, open quality. The north-facing glass stretches toward the edge, embracing the panoramic view. On the southern side, the volume recedes to create a shaded void, regulating solar gain. This sectional asymmetry allows the architecture to perform environmentally without compromising its compositional purity. Campo Baeza describes the house as a literal translation of the idea of a tectonic box upon a stereotomic box. The reference is not metaphorical but structural and spatial. The upper pavilion is not a symbol of transparency but a mechanism for perception. In this way, the house operates as a philosophical instrument as much as a dwelling. Casa De Blas Proportion and Compositional Rigour The power of the project lies in the spatial sequence from the heavy to the light, from the shaded to the luminous. The contrast between these two atmospheres creates a duality of experience: shelter and openness, introspection and projection. The structural order contributes to this sense of serenity. Steel supports are arranged in double symmetry, reinforcing the composition’s static quality. Nothing feels arbitrary. Every gesture is reduced to its essential nature. The palette is limited to concrete, glass, and steel, yet the result is rich in meaning. The interior is equally restrained, avoiding superfluous detailing. It is architecture as a frame, a backdrop for landscape and thought. Campo Baeza’s work here touches the territory of the poetic, not through expressionism but through control and abstraction. Casa De Blas Plans Concept | © Alberto Campo Baeza North Elevation | © Alberto Campo Baeza East Elevation | © Alberto Campo Baeza Upper Level | © Alberto Campo Baeza Floor Plan | © Alberto Campo Baeza Section | © Alberto Campo Baeza Casa De Blas Image Gallery About Alberto Campo Baeza Alberto Campo Baeza is a Spanish architect born in 1946 in Valladolid. Renowned for his minimalist and essentialist approach, he emphasizes the interplay of light, gravity, and proportion in his designs. His notable works include the Casa Turégano, Casa de Blas, and the Caja de Granada headquarters. Campo Baeza was a full-time design professor at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) from 1986 until his retirement in 2017. He has received numerous accolades throughout his career, such as the RIBA International Fellowship and the Heinrich Tessenow Gold Medal, recognizing his contributions to contemporary architecture. Credits and Additional Notes Design Team: Alberto Campo Baeza, Alfonso González Gamo Structural Engineer: Julio Martínez Calzón, MC-2 Collaborators: Teresa Campos