Tag Archives: Architecture

Africa’s Tallest Tower Was Worth the 40-Year Wait

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Forty years is a long time to wait for a building. But when you see what’s rising in Abidjan, the delay starts to feel almost intentional — like the city was simply holding its breath for the right moment. Tour F, the supertall skyscraper currently piercing the skyline of Ivory Coast’s economic capital, was first imagined in the 1970s as part of a sweeping urban development plan for Abidjan’s Plateau district. The idea was straightforward: complement the existing administrative towers — A through E — with a sixth.

What wasn’t straightforward was actually building it. The project stalled for decades, a vision suspended in bureaucratic and economic uncertainty. Construction finally broke ground in 2021, with BESIX Group drilling 70 foundation bars and 62-meter-deep diaphragm wall panels to anchor the structure.

Designer: Pierre Fakhoury

Designed by Lebanese-Ivorian architect Pierre Fakhoury — the same mind behind the breathtaking Notre-Dame de la Paix Basilica in Yamoussoukro — Tower F is not trying to be a generic glass box. It has something to say. The form is sculptural: a slender volume whose facade is carved into trapezoidal inclined glass planes, each facet tilting inward toward the earth or reaching toward the sky. The top is cleanly truncated, then crowned with a dramatic extension of the glass facade that dissolves into open air. It’s restrained and bold at the same time — a difficult balance that Fakhoury pulls off with architectural confidence.

What makes the design genuinely compelling is its embedded cultural logic. When viewed from a certain angle, the play of facets reads as a stylized African mask — a nod to West African artistic tradition embedded quietly into a 21st-century supertall. The building is symmetrical along its east-west axis, grounding the sculptural gesture in structural clarity. At street level, a simple rectangular podium houses the main entrance hall and support services, keeping the base honest and approachable despite the tower’s imposing scale.

At 421 meters, Tower F is set to claim the title of Africa’s tallest building, surpassing The Leonardo in Johannesburg. The gross floor area reaches approximately 140,000 square meters, consolidating government ministries and administrative units currently scattered across the city — a practical ambition wrapped in an extraordinary shell.

Construction costs are estimated at approximately €450 million, developed through a collaboration between the Ivorian Ministry of Construction and local firm PFO Africa. Completion is expected in 2026. For a continent whose architectural ambitions are accelerating fast, Tower F is exactly the kind of project that reframes the conversation — not just about African skylines, but about what it means to design a building that carries cultural memory into the future.

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This Extra Wide Tiny Home Ditches the Loft and It’s Better for It

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The loft bedroom is tiny home design’s most accepted cliché. Most designs in this space stack a sleeping loft above the living area and call it efficient. The Rose, a custom build by Vancouver Island-based Rewild Homes, takes a different position entirely, one that’s turning heads for all the right reasons.

Named after the client’s beloved donkey, the Rose measures 30 feet long by 10’6″ wide, making it extra wide by tiny home standards. That additional footprint isn’t just a spec sheet flex. It’s what makes the entire layout feel less like a compromise and more like a considered place to actually live. The interior opens up in a way that standard narrow builds simply can’t achieve, bright, breathable, and genuinely functional across a single floor.

Designer: Rewild Homes

The standout move here is the ground-floor bedroom. Rather than tucking a sleeping area into a loft accessed by ladder, Rewild Homes kept everything at eye level, sliding behind a private door with its own separate exterior entrance. Beneath the bed, storage is built in. Closet space is tucked neatly alongside. It’s the kind of thinking that makes a small home feel resolved rather than resigned. The small loft above the bathroom, meanwhile, has been repurposed entirely as a storage zone, a practical pivot that frees the rest of the home from clutter. High ceilings throughout give taller inhabitants room to breathe, a detail that rarely gets enough credit in this category.

The kitchen and open living room flow naturally into each other, with the bathroom and bedroom each accessed via sliding doors that keep traffic patterns clean without sacrificing privacy. Utility requirements are simplified through propane-powered water heating and cooking, allowing the home to run on a 50-amp electrical connection, lean by design, not by accident.

Outside, the Rose wears its West Coast origins confidently. A combination of metal and cedar siding gives the exterior a durable, low-maintenance finish that still has warmth and character. A metal roof rounds out the build, built to handle whatever the Pacific climate throws at it.

Rewild Homes operates out of Cobble Hill, British Columbia, building fully custom tiny homes with a focus on high-quality local materials. The Rose is a strong example of what that philosophy looks like in practice, a home that doesn’t ask you to sacrifice comfort for square footage, but rather rethinks what square footage can do.

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What If City Monuments Generated Power Instead of Just Looking Good?

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Public art has long served as a cultural mirror, reflecting what a society chooses to honor. As climate change intensifies and cities face mounting pressure to decarbonize, questions about what our monuments should stand for are getting harder to ignore. Most renewable energy infrastructure stays invisible, buried in utility corridors or mounted on rooftops, rarely acknowledged as something worth celebrating in public spaces.

Santa Fe-based artist Michael Jantzen has spent years addressing exactly that through his Public Eco-Art Proposals. The series imagines a different kind of monument, one that doesn’t merely symbolize sustainability but actively practices it. Each proposal takes the form of a sculpture or pavilion that generates electricity from the sun or wind, collects rainwater, stores energy in batteries, and sometimes sends power into the local grid.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Jantzen gives his work an aesthetic freedom that most utility-driven designs don’t have. Rather than concealing the mechanics, he treats solar panels, wind turbines, and structural frameworks as sculptural elements in their own right. The visual language is deliberately technological and mechanical, blurring the line between a functional energy structure and art worth stopping for.

Walk through one of these proposed spaces, and you might find yourself beneath a pavilion whose curved solar canopy quietly feeds electricity back to the neighborhood. Or stop to look at a series of angular sculptures lined up across a park, their solar-panel tops tracking the light. What looks like a meditation on shape and form turns out to be a modest power station doing actual work.

The proposals span a wide range of environments. Some are designed for open fields or public parks, while others imagine coastal settings with floating platforms supporting wind and water energy structures. A chevron-shaped sculpture with a solar panel at its angular peak stands in what appears to be a university courtyard. Another piece holds solar panels above cylindrical battery storage pods, blending the practical business of energy collection with an unexpectedly considered form.

This approach also reframes the relationship between art and urban infrastructure. Municipalities already commission sculptures for parks and plazas; so why shouldn’t those commissions do more? A solar-powered gathering space generates electricity, makes clean technology approachable, and sparks conversations among the millions of people who walk through it, most of whom would otherwise never engage with energy infrastructure at all.

Jantzen’s vision extends beyond any single installation. He imagines these structures placed in cities and parks worldwide, shifting how communities relate to the energy they consume by making that relationship visible and beautiful. For him, celebrating sustainability means building things worth caring about, giving clean energy a presence that people can gather around, the way they’ve always done with the landmarks that define a place.

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TRÆ Is the Timber Tower That Turns Waste Into Architecture

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There’s a word in Danish, ‘træ’, that means three things at once: tree, timber, and three. It’s a fitting name for a building that refuses to be just one thing. Designed by Lendager and completed in Aarhus’ former industrial South Harbour, TRÆ stands 78 meters tall across three interconnected volumes, earning its place as Denmark’s tallest timber tower and the world’s first upcycle timber tower.

The ambition behind it is disarmingly simple: prove that a tower can be built from waste and wood without sacrificing safety, economy, or quality. What makes TRÆ remarkable isn’t just the height, it’s the conviction. The building operates within two material ecosystems simultaneously: the biogenic and the circular. Mass timber columns, cross bracing, and CLT floor slabs form the primary structure, with low-carbon concrete used only in the cores for fire safety and stability. Everything else is drawn from what already exists.

Designer: Lendager

The façades are the project’s most striking argument. Salvaged aluminium sheets, arranged to evoke the texture of birch bark, mottled, imperfect, alive, clad the exterior in industrial leftovers that feel entirely intentional. Retired wind turbine blades, repurposed as solar shading, line the building’s south-facing elevations. A comparative analysis showed their estimated carbon footprint to be 27 times lower than conventional aluminium solar screens. The math is compelling. The aesthetic is better.

Measured against a conventional concrete benchmark, TRÆ achieved a 26 percent reduction in CO₂ emissions, 21 percent from the timber-led design and 5 percent from integrated reused materials. It’s a number that reshapes the conversation around tower construction, a typology long associated with emissions-heavy concrete and steel. The project doesn’t chase certification checklists. Instead, it follows a value-driven framework that prioritises measurable outcomes from the ground up.

The social dimension is just as deliberate. TRÆ houses a volunteer initiative providing daily meals to families in need, and involves homeless people in the building’s upkeep, folding existing social realities directly into the life of the building. An undulating pedestrian bridge, starting at street level, snakes upward to connect TRÆ to Aarhus’ new highline, threading the tower into the city rather than above it.

The Aarhus Architecture Awards jury awarded TRÆ Best Building in 2025, noting that it “does not necessarily adhere to a classic architectural or beauty ideal” but stands as “an energetic reckoning with well-tested solutions and zero-error culture.” That’s exactly the point. TRÆ isn’t trying to be perfect. It’s trying to be right.

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Slide, Spiral, Learn: Bernard Tschumi Completes a Science Centre Built on Motion

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A science centre that asks students to slide between floors is either a gimmick or a statement. At Institut Le Rosey, it’s unmistakably the latter. Philo, the newly completed science and innovation centre by Bernard Tschumi Architects in Rolle, near Geneva, brings that idea to life with an architectural precision that feels entirely intentional.

The building, which took shape between 2019 and 2025, sits on the campus of one of Switzerland’s most prestigious international boarding schools, right alongside Carnal Hall, the metal-domed music venue Tschumi completed for the same institution back in 2014. Where Carnal Hall curves inward with acoustic purpose, Philo opens up — a ring-shaped structure five storeys tall, wrapping itself around a grand central atrium that functions less like a corridor and more like a covered public square.

Designer: Bernard Tschumi Architects

That atrium is the building’s beating heart. Three concentric walkways surround it, and vertical and horizontal circulation paths cut through the space, generating constant movement. Helical slides thread through the interior alongside the sculptural spiral staircase, turning the everyday act of moving between floors into something worth doing. It sounds playful — and it is —, but it’s also deeply considered. Tschumi has spent decades arguing that architecture only comes alive through movement and event, and Philo reads like a direct translation of that thinking into built form.

The programme inside is built around student innovation. Philo houses a Fabrication Lab, a Start-up Incubator Space, and a Pitch Room — a flexible rectangular space that can be reconfigured for presentations or performances. Classrooms and laboratories fill the remaining floors, all oriented around the central void. The result is a building that doesn’t separate learning from making, or thinking from doing. Every space feels connected, both literally and conceptually.

Externally, the ring form gives Philo a strong presence on campus without overpowering it. The circular geometry creates a clear dialogue with Carnal Hall’s dome, establishing a coherent architectural language across two very different building types. Aerial photography by Iwan Baan captures just how deliberately the two structures have been positioned — companions on a campus that now has a genuine architectural identity.

Philo isn’t trying to reinvent education. What it does, with impressive restraint, is create the conditions for a different kind of learning — one built on movement, collision, and chance encounter. For a studio whose founder once wrote that there is no architecture without events, it’s a building that lives up to the theory.

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This House in Rural India Is Actually a Bridge — and It’s Covered in Scales

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Most architects would see a seven-metre-deep gorge cutting through a site and call it a problem. Vinu Daniel and his studio, Wallmakers, looked at it and saw the house. The Bridge House in Karjat, Maharashtra, is exactly what its name promises — a weekend home that spans a 30-metre-wide spillway, with enough clearance below for diggers to pass through. Completed in 2025, the 4,500-square-foot structure sits across two parcels of land separated by two streams, and it does so with a quiet, almost organic confidence.

The structural logic is deceptively simple. Four hyperbolic parabolas form the spine of the suspension bridge, held together by minimal steel pipe and tendons working in tension. Over that skeleton, a grid of steel cables was laid out in a twisting hyperbolic paraboloid surface, then coated in a layer of mud — the same material Wallmakers has long treated as a primary architectural medium. The mud isn’t decorative. It provides the compressive strength that stabilises the entire bridge and acts as a barrier against the pests that typically undermine thatched construction.

Designer: Wallmakers

And then there’s the skin. The outer layer is local grass thatch, applied in overlapping scales that give the structure a texture closer to a living creature than a building. The resemblance to a pangolin is intentional. “Thatched roof construction, even though sustainable and thermally efficient, has been on the decline due to problems like pest invasion, lack of skilled labour, deforestation, and the hassle of constant reapplication,” Daniel noted. The mud-thatch composite here attempts to address exactly those failures — rethinking the material from the inside out rather than simply reviving a tradition.

Getting materials to the site was its own challenge. The remote location in Karjat pushed the team toward using what was available locally, which ultimately shaped the entire material palette. The result is a building that feels pulled from the landscape rather than dropped into it. Translucent screens and raw mud surfaces define the interiors, keeping the atmosphere spare and tactile. The design team — Preksha Shah and Ramika Gupta — worked within tight constraints that only tightened the design thinking.

Bridge House is the kind of project that makes the site’s difficulties readable in the finished form. The gorge isn’t hidden; it’s the reason the house exists at all. That honesty — structural, material, spatial — is what makes Wallmakers’ work consistently worth paying attention to.

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San Diego Is Getting One of the Most Ambitious Military Museums in America

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Contemporary angular building with a glass façade, as people walk and gather in a sunny plaza in front of it.

San Diego has always had a deep, unspoken bond with the U.S. Navy. The city is home to one of the largest military concentrations in the country, and just across the bay in Coronado, every Navy SEAL is forged. So when the Navy SEAL Museum San Diego opened its doors on October 4, 2025, at 1001 Kettner Blvd, steps from the Embarcadero, it felt less like a ribbon cutting and more like a homecoming. But that was just the beginning.

In April 2026, the Port of San Diego Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to advance an environmental review for a far more ambitious vision: a striking, $256 million, four-story, 85,000-square-foot flagship museum at 1220 Pacific Highway, positioned at the northern edge of Lane Field Park along Harbor Drive. The vote was unanimous, and the enthusiasm in the room was hard to miss. “I predict that this is going to be the No. 1 museum in San Diego,” said Commissioner Frank Urtasun. “That design that you came up with is unbelievable. I love it.”

Designer: ZGF Architects

Modern waterfront complex with an angular dark-blue building, glass office tower with a yellow column, palm trees, and ships in the harbor.

The design, by US-based ZGF Architects, is nothing short of striking. The structure draws direct inspiration from stealth watercraft used by maritime special forces, with angular massing and faceted metal surfaces that give it the appearance of a futuristic ship cutting through open water. Perforated metallic panels will filter natural light into the interior, where immersive, technology-forward exhibits designed by Gallagher & Associates will bring the history of the SEALs to life across seven distinct galleries.

The proposed museum would also include a 2,500-square-foot theater, virtual reality environments, a youth education space, a café, retail, an event terrace overlooking San Diego Bay, and a new 150-foot public park that would complete Lane Field Park along Harbor Drive. The project is being developed in partnership with Hensel Phelps, which will oversee design, entitlement, construction, and completion.

The museum is part of the nonprofit UDT-SEAL Museum Association, the same organization behind the original Navy SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, which has been operating since 1985. San Diego’s location was chosen deliberately, sitting just across the bay from Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, where all Navy SEALs train. The city draws more than 30 million visitors annually, placing it alongside cultural neighbors like the USS Midway Museum and the Maritime Museum of San Diego.

The California Environmental Quality Act review is expected to take roughly a year and a half before construction timelines are confirmed. But the direction is clear. San Diego is building something that honors the past and commands the waterfront for generations to come.

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This Tiny Home Has No Loft, No Stairs, and Honestly No Compromises

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Most tiny homes play the same card — stack a loft above everything, make it work. Removed Tiny Homes had a different idea. Their flagship model, the Tallebudgera, skips the ladder entirely, landing on a single-floor layout that feels less like a workaround and more like a deliberate design choice. It’s a tiny home built for the way people actually want to live.

Named after a creek on Queensland’s Gold Coast, the Tallebudgera sits on a triple-axle trailer and wraps itself in Colorbond steel roofing and wall cladding, punctuated by plywood feature panels that give it warmth without trying too hard. A sliding glass door and a generous run of windows pull in natural light and airflow, making the interior feel far bigger than its footprint on paper. The 9.6 model measures 29.5 feet long and 7.8 feet wide — compact enough to travel, generous enough to live in.

Designer: Removed Tiny Homes

Step inside, and the interior doesn’t feel like a compromise. Tongue-and-groove wall panels pair with a plywood ceiling and vinyl flooring to build a palette that’s grounded and considered. The living area makes room for a full sofa and wall-mounted TV, while the kitchen rolls out a breakfast bar that doubles as a dining space — the kind of layout that makes a single room feel like two. There’s nothing gratuitous here. Every surface earns its place.

The bedroom is tucked at the rear, accessible either through the bathroom or via its own sliding door — a small planning decision that makes a real difference to how the space breathes. It sleeps two comfortably, with built-in wardrobes handling storage without eating into floor space. The bathroom itself comes with a full walk-in shower, and a dedicated laundry rounds out the amenities. This is a home that covers the basics without making you feel like you’ve settled.

The Tallebudgera 9.6 is priced at US$94,500. Removed Tiny Homes, based in Brisbane, builds each home to order and delivers across Australia, with a custom design package included at no extra cost. The model has already appeared at both the Hawkesbury Tiny Home Expo in Sydney and the Brisbane Tiny Home Expo, picking up attention from people who didn’t expect to be convinced. The Tallebudgera isn’t trying to be everything — it’s trying to be enough. And in a market full of novelty, that restraint might be its smartest feature.

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400 Square Feet, Two Private Bedrooms, and Zero Apologies — Meet the Halcyon Grand

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There’s a version of small living that doesn’t ask you to give anything up. Fritz Tiny Homes has been chasing that idea since day one, and with the Halcyon Grand, they’ve come the closest to nailing it. It’s their largest model to date, 400 square feet of considered, unhurried design that feels less like a compromise and more like an upgrade.

The Halcyon Grand measures 44.5 by 10.5 feet and ships as a certified Park Model RV, meaning it lives on wheels but doesn’t feel like it. The main floor spans 350 square feet, with a 50-square-foot loft tucked above, a split that gives the home two genuinely private bedrooms without the usual tiny home trade-offs. The king master suite sits at one end, wrapped in floor-to-ceiling glass, a sliding patio door opening onto a covered deck, and a full wall wardrobe with storage built into the bed frame. The loft is its own world, a queen bedroom that closes off completely from the rest of the home, something Fritz says was a direct response to what their clients kept asking for.

Designer: Fritz Tiny Homes

The kitchen and dining area anchor the middle of the plan. There’s a table for four with integrated storage underneath, a full-sized kitchen designed to actually cook in, and a hall closet most apartments would envy. Fritz fitted the bathroom with 6’10” ceilings, reportedly inspired by their first Halcyon Grand client, who stands 6’7″, and the space comes standard with a soaker tub, with the option to upgrade to a custom concrete and glass walk-in shower. A washer/dryer combo is included, with room to swap in a full side-by-side unit if needed.

Throughout, the finishes lean into warmth: custom concrete tile, hardwood floors, timber detailing, dimmable LED lighting, and custom millwork that makes every inch feel intentional. Fritz Tiny Homes, the Alberta-based family company founded by craftsman Kevin Fritz and Heather Fritz, who sits on the National Tiny Home Builders Committee, has always built to a higher standard than the category typically demands, and the Grand is the clearest expression of that yet.

For those who’d rather skip the wheels, the Halcyon Grand is also available as the Modular Grand, engineered for permanent foundation placement and built to meet local building codes on both sides of the border. Pricing starts at $330,225 CAD (approximately $239,507 USD), with limited availability in 2026. This isn’t a tiny home that asks you to live small. It asks you to live better.

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This Traditional Japanese Home Was Brought Back to Life by Opening It Up to Everything Around It

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Returning home is a deeply intentional process. Not just to a place, but to a life — one shaped by memory, family, and the particular quality of light that falls through a familiar window. That is precisely the spirit YNAS brought to House in Miyakonojo, a renovation and extension of a traditional timber home in southern Japan that quietly redefines what it means to belong somewhere.

The project began with a couple who, after raising their children and shifting careers, chose to return to the wife’s ancestral home in Miyakonojo to live alongside her father. The house carried history in its bones — a traditional layout of rooms partitioned by sliding screens, arranged off a dark, L-shaped corridor that kept the living area, kitchen, dining room, and bedroom firmly separated from one another. It was a home that had turned inward, closing itself off from both the people inside and the landscape beyond its walls.

Designer: YNAS

YNAS dismantled that introversion entirely. The studio opened up the cramped internal layout, dissolving the rigid partitions to let space breathe and flow the way a home shared between generations should. The transformation is not just structural — it’s philosophical. The design rejects the idea that privacy requires enclosure, leaning instead into a more generous, paradoxical logic: that openness itself can become a form of protection.

That thinking is most visible in the corrugated metal canopies YNAS added to the exterior. Timber-framed and industrial in material, they extend the home outward, creating covered outdoor spaces that blur the threshold between inside and out. An outdoor kitchen and a wood-fired bath become part of daily life, not luxuries tucked away from it. Neighbors might catch a distant glimpse of the family gathered outside, or notice smoke rising from the stove — and that, the studio argues, is the point.

“The house once again becomes a part of the landscape through the ‘signs of life’ it emits,” YNAS noted of the project. It’s a rare architectural position — one that treats visibility not as exposure but as community, as a soft signal that a home is lived in and loved.

The result is a house that honors its past without being imprisoned by it. The ancestral bones remain, but the rooms now open to each other, to the garden, to the sky. Corrugated metal and old timber sit side by side without apology. Three generations share space under a roof that has finally learned how to exhale. In Miyakonojo, YNAS has done something quietly radical: they’ve made a home feel, again, as it belongs to the world around it.

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