Tag Archives: Architecture

Sicily’s New Concrete Church Is Quietly Rewriting Sacred Design

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When you think of a church in Sicily, your mind probably goes somewhere ancient. Mosaic floors, Byzantine domes, the kind of gold that took centuries to accumulate. So when I came across the new Santa Barbara Parish Complex in Licata, a small coastal city in the island’s southern province of Agrigento, it stopped me completely.

The complex was designed by architects Francesco Lipari, Lillo Giglia, and Giuseppe Conti, the team behind OFL Architecture, and it is one of the most compelling pieces of sacred architecture I’ve seen in years. It won a two-stage invited competition promoted by the Archdiocese of Agrigento and the Santa Barbara Parish, with funding from the Italian Episcopal Conference through the ‘8xmille’ program, and what came out of it is genuinely unlike anything you’d expect from a church commission.

Designers: Francesco Lipari, Lillo Giglia, and Giuseppe Conti

The concept is described as a “campus of faith,” and that framing tells you everything. Rather than positioning the church as a monument to be looked at from the outside, the architects designed it as a permeable, walkable space where the building and its surroundings flow into each other. The churchyard functions as an open civic square, directly connecting the complex to the city around it. On the western edge of Licata, a city that doesn’t get nearly enough architectural attention, this project becomes a new kind of civic landmark, the kind that earns its place in a neighborhood rather than simply occupying it.

Visually, the building is striking in a way that feels earned. Curved white surfaces define the liturgical hall, punctuated by small square openings and anchored by a golden portal that works as both entrance and visual statement. The flowing roof is where the design gets genuinely poetic, its sinuous edge framing the sky in a way that feels both deliberate and effortless. Inside, a suspended timber ceiling mirrors the curvature of the roof above it, creating a quiet continuity between form and material that’s hard to achieve and even harder to fake. Concrete here is not the heavy, utilitarian material we’re used to seeing in brutalist structures. It’s fluid, almost organic, moving in ways that concrete isn’t really supposed to move.

The cylindrical bell tower stands separately as a vertical landmark, a classical reference rendered through an entirely contemporary lens. It’s the kind of design decision that could easily feel gratuitous but doesn’t, because the rest of the complex earns it. The whole project has a consistency of thinking that’s rare, where no single element feels like it wandered in from a different brief.

Beyond its striking form, this project says something meaningful about the role of sacred architecture today. Churches are not the cultural anchors they once were in many parts of the world, and commissions like this come with real pressure to be relevant without being gimmicky. Lipari, Giglia, and Conti seem to have understood that the best way to honor that tension is to make a building that genuinely belongs to its community, not just spiritually but physically and socially. A church that also functions as a civic square, a campus that connects education, worship, and daily life, is an architectural idea that feels more urgent now than it probably did when the project began in 2016.

It took years to get here. The project period ran from 2016 to 2022 and the complex has since been making its way to completion, a timeline that speaks to the scale and structural complexity involved. The free-form reinforced concrete geometry required state-of-the-art structural engineering, and the result is a building whose ambition is matched by its technical rigor.

Sacred architecture has always had to carry more weight than almost any other building type. It has to mean something beyond its walls. The Santa Barbara Parish Complex makes a compelling case that meaning doesn’t have to come from tradition alone. Sometimes it arrives through fluid concrete, warm timber, and an open square that anyone can walk through.

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This 492-Square-Foot Canadian Tiny Home Has a Mud Room, a Bathtub, and Zero Apologies

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Rover Tiny Homes built the Apex for people who want to live smaller — not people who want to live with less. The British Columbia-based family-run builder has spent years crafting portable cottages that challenge the compromises typically written into tiny living — and the Apex might be the clearest statement of that philosophy yet.

At 492 square feet with an additional 80-square-foot loft, the Apex sits at the larger end of the park model category. It’s non-towable, built to live on a site rather than chase one, and designed with the sensibility of a mountain cabin that’s been quietly upgraded from the inside out. The exterior is clad in engineered wood and dark cedar shingles beneath a Prolok metal roof — restrained and confident, as good materials tend to be.

Designer: Rover Tiny Homes

The interior opens onto a living room through double glass doors, defined by intersecting vaulted ceilings and two soaring A-frame windows that draw the landscape inside. Tongue and groove pine runs overhead, and reclaimed barn wood trim — over a century old — adds a warmth that no amount of staged furniture could manufacture. A fireplace with a custom mantle anchors one wall. A mini-split handles the rest of the climate, backed by insulation rated R24 in the walls and up to R31 in the floors.

The kitchen is where the Apex most directly rejects the idea of compromise. Quartz countertops, custom slow-close cabinetry, a four-burner propane cooktop, a dishwasher, and a fridge-freezer sit alongside a breakfast bar that seats three. It looks and functions like a real kitchen, because it is one.

Past the kitchen, a hallway leads somewhere most tiny homes don’t bother going — to a dedicated mud room with its own separate entrance. For anyone returning from a trail, a paddle, or a wet afternoon, that distinction matters more than any spec sheet can convey. The bathroom beyond it includes a full bathtub, a vanity, and a stacked washer-dryer, which rounds out a level of domestic functionality that genuinely surprises.

The bedroom at the far end of the home is spacious enough to stand upright in without performing any spatial calculus. Built-in storage, a double bed, his-and-hers closets, and a ceiling fan keep it calm and considered. The Apex starts at roughly US $150,000. Rover Tiny Homes delivers within three hours of Chilliwack, BC, and the model is available in A277, Z240-MH, and Z241 certifications to suit different site and foundation requirements.

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This Lithuanian Forest Retreat Glows Like a Lantern at the Edge of the Trees

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There’s a moment, just after dusk, when the Sanctum nature retreat reveals its most compelling quality. The gabled timber structures, dark and quiet against the Lithuanian woodland all day, begin to glow from within — large lanterns at the forest edge, warm light spilling through panoramic glass toward the treeline. It’s the kind of image that makes the architecture feel less like a building and more like an invitation.

Designed by Vilnius-based studio Arches and completed in 2026, Sanctum sits in a forest clearing near Bezdonys, Lithuania. The project spans 1,035 square metres and was conceived as a nature therapy retreat — a place where architecture actively participates in slowing people down, rather than simply providing shelter while they do it themselves.

Designer: Arches

The studio’s approach to form is rooted in familiarity. The silhouette of a traditional rural building is taken as a starting point, then stretched — proportions shifted, rooflines extended upward — until the gabled shapes enter a quiet conversation with the silhouettes of the surrounding treetops. The rhythm feels deliberate. Nothing about Sanctum is trying to announce itself.

Material choices reinforce that restraint. The exterior is clad in ecologically modified pine using Kebony technology, left entirely untreated to weather naturally over time — no maintenance, no intervention, just timber doing what timber does. Natural copper cladding runs alongside it, and together the two materials give the buildings their characteristic dark, almost monastic exterior. Inside, the same pine timber and cross-laminated timber panels are softly whitewashed, shifting the mood entirely from exterior to interior: severe outside, warm within.

The spatial organisation centres on a semi-covered inner courtyard, partially sheltered by coffered timber structures with glazing that draws natural light into the heart of the complex. It’s designed for communal outdoor activities — yoga, movement sessions, shared time. From there, the space connects directly to a transformable main hall: an elevated room filled with natural light, panoramic glazing opening toward the forest, and an acoustic partition that allows it to split into two independent spaces when needed.

What Arches has built here is not particularly loud. There are no dramatic cantilevers, no glass boxes engineered to shock. The ambition is subtler — to create architecture that makes you feel the wood, notice the shifting light, and register the silence. Sunlight filtering through the buildings casts moving shadows across the timber volumes throughout the day. By evening, the glow takes over. For a retreat that promises to return attention to fundamental human needs — nature, emotion, perception — Sanctum makes a convincing case with almost every surface it shows you.

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5 Stunning Projects That Prove Your Trash Is Architecture’s Most Valuable Material Right Now

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Sustainable architecture is entering a new era where discarded materials are becoming the foundation of innovative buildings, products, and interiors. Across architecture, interiors, and product design, discarded textiles, construction debris, recycled metals, glass, and wood are being transformed into high-performance materials and beautiful objects.

Circular design encourages architects and designers to keep materials in use for as long as possible, minimizing landfill waste while reducing the demand for virgin resources. As material innovation accelerates, waste is becoming an essential ingredient in creating resilient, functional, and aesthetically compelling spaces.

1. Waste as the Foundation for New Building Materials

One of the biggest shifts in sustainable design is the development of innovative building materials created entirely or partially from waste streams. Instead of extracting new raw materials, designers are now engineering solutions that transform discarded matter into high-performance construction products, reducing pressure on natural resources while maintaining structural integrity and durability.

These waste-derived materials often combine recycled textiles, agricultural byproducts, plastics, or industrial residues to create composites suitable for architectural applications. This approach not only minimizes landfill accumulation but also introduces new aesthetic and functional possibilities in design, where sustainability becomes an active driver of innovation rather than a limitation.

Foresta System is an innovative modular acoustic panel solution that combines fungal mycelium with upcycled textile waste to create a sustainable alternative to conventional sound-absorbing materials. Developed by Italian company Mogu, the panels demonstrate how bio-based materials can deliver both environmental and functional benefits. Mycelium, the root-like network of fungi, offers remarkable strength while remaining lightweight, renewable, and biodegradable, making it an increasingly popular material in architecture, interior design, and construction.

The system features a timber framework composed of wood branches and connecting nodes that can be securely mounted to walls. Integrated magnetic connections allow the mycelium panels to be easily attached, removed, and rearranged, offering flexibility for changing interior spaces. Designed for restaurants, offices, and commercial environments, Foresta effectively improves acoustics while adding a natural aesthetic.

2. Giving Construction Waste a Second Life

Construction and demolition activities generate enormous quantities of waste every year, yet many of these materials retain significant structural and material value. Increasingly, architects are shifting toward reclaiming timber, stone, brick, and metal from existing sites, treating them not as debris but as reusable building components that can reduce the demand for virgin resources.

This approach extends the lifecycle of materials while preserving their embodied energy, lowering carbon emissions associated with new production. By reintroducing salvaged elements into contemporary design, architects also add layers of history and character to new structures, turning construction waste into a meaningful part of the built environment.

Studio Padron transformed construction waste into a striking architectural retreat by building the Hemmelig Room, a compact cabin crafted entirely from mature oak trees felled during the construction of a nearby residence. Instead of discarding the timber, the architects carefully milled the logs into large rectangular sections and allowed them to dry naturally for several years before incorporating them into the project.

Clad in blackened timber, the geometric cabin conceals a warm interior where the oak’s natural grain becomes the defining design feature. Non-uniform timber panels seamlessly transition into built-in bookshelves, creating a cozy library atmosphere that celebrates craftsmanship and material authenticity. Expansive floor-to-ceiling windows connect the intimate reading space with the surrounding landscape, while a wood-burning stove ensures year-round comfort.

3. Recycled Glass Creating New Design Possibilities

Glass is one of the few materials that can be recycled repeatedly without losing its quality, making it a key driver of circular design strategies. Designers are increasingly reprocessing discarded bottles and containers into new forms, turning what was once waste into valuable material for contemporary production.

This renewed glass is being used across lighting, furniture, and architectural accessories, offering both durability and visual refinement. By extending the lifecycle of glass through creative reuse, designers reduce environmental impact while unlocking new aesthetic possibilities that highlight transparency, texture, and light interaction.

Heineken South Africa’s Waste-to-Wear initiative redefines everyday packaging as a valuable design resource and not just disposable waste. Launched alongside the introduction of returnable glass bottles, the project transforms discarded glass into functional homeware and wearable accessories, reinforcing the principles of circular design. In collaboration with creative agency Sonic State, broken glass collected from urban “hotspots” is reprocessed into products such as rings, medallions, dinnerware, and decorative lighting.

By extending the lifecycle of glass, the initiative shows how durable materials can be creatively repurposed to reduce landfill waste while encouraging more responsible and resource-conscious

4. Digital Fabrication Unlocking the Potential of Recycled Materials

Advances in digital manufacturing are making recycled materials more versatile than ever. Technologies such as 3D printing and computational design allow designers to transform reclaimed resources into precise, high-performance components while reducing material waste in the production process.

By combining digital fabrication with circular material streams, designers can create complex geometries that were previously difficult or impossible to achieve using traditional methods. This approach not only extends the usefulness of discarded materials but also expands the creative boundaries of sustainable design, where efficiency and innovation work together.

Aectual is redefining sustainable manufacturing by developing a 3D-printable wood-based material that combines design flexibility with circular production. Created from wood waste blended with natural binders such as lignin and cellulose, and reinforced with plant fibers like flax and hemp, the material replicates the appearance, texture, and even the scent of natural wood. Unlike conventional plastics commonly used in 3D printing, this innovative material offers a renewable alternative that reduces dependence on fossil-based resources while enabling architects and designers to produce intricate forms with minimal waste.

One of the material’s most significant advantages is its fully circular lifecycle. Once a product reaches the end of its useful life, it can be shredded and reprinted into an entirely new object, allowing the same material to be reused repeatedly before safely biodegrading like natural wood. This capability makes it ideal for creating complex partition screens, window coverings, and interior design elements that would be difficult or impossible to manufacture using traditional woodworking techniques.

5. Circular Design Extending Beyond Buildings

Designers are increasingly using recycled and repurposed materials to create products that balance environmental responsibility with contemporary aesthetics and functional performance.

These material-driven products play a crucial role in strengthening the wider ecosystem of sustainable design by increasing demand for reclaimed resources. In doing so, they help normalize circular practices across industries, turning sustainability from a niche approach into a mainstream design principle.

The Alice Stool by Studio LoopLoop is an interesting example of how sustainable materials can be transformed into a premium design product without compromising aesthetics or comfort. Designed as a sculptural seating piece, the stool combines a base made from 100% recycled aluminium with a plush seat upholstered in plant-based faux fur. The aluminium is finished using an innovative plant-based anodising process that produces soft, naturally inspired colour gradients, while the hand-dyed upholstery ensures that every stool is unique. Together, these carefully selected materials create a product that is visually distinctive, highly tactile, and environmentally responsible.

Beyond its playful appearance, the Alice Stool showcases the potential of circular product design. Its recycled aluminium structure offers durability and longevity, while the renewable, bio-based upholstery provides a sustainable alternative to conventional synthetic or animal-derived materials.

Circular design is fundamentally changing the relationship between waste and architecture. Instead of viewing discarded materials as environmental burdens, designers are recognizing them as valuable resources capable of generating innovative buildings, interiors, products, and construction materials. As advances in material science and digital fabrication continue to expand these possibilities, waste will increasingly become the foundation for a more resilient, resource-efficient, and creatively inspiring built environment.

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Colombia’s Most Important New Building Isn’t in Bogotá

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Most cultural centers get built as cultural centers. They show up polished and purposeful, eventually becoming the kinds of places that exist for people who already feel at home in cultural spaces. The Villas de San Pablo Cultural Center in Barranquilla, Colombia, was designed with an entirely different intention, and it shows.

Completed in 2025 by ETH Zurich architects Hubert Klumpner and Diego Ceresuela Wiesmann alongside Colombian architect Alejandro Restrepo Montoya of UPB Medellín, the 2,200-square-meter center sits in the southwest of Barranquilla, a neighborhood planned for more than 20,000 housing units and predominantly home to displaced families, migrants, and low-income residents. The design team has said that the challenge was not simply to build an urban facility in a social housing neighborhood, but to formulate infrastructure capable of supporting an urban process marked by displacement, migration, and the need to rebuild community. That framing alone sets this project apart from most architectural commissions.

Designers: ETHZ + Alejandro Restrepo Montoya (Photos by Alejandro Arango Escobar)

I think about that phrase, “rebuild community,” often. It gets used so loosely that it risks becoming meaningless. But when you look at how this project came together, the word carries real weight. The design process was participatory, involving residents, community leaders, artists, universities, and public institutions, all working together to shape a space that reflected the neighborhood’s own identity rather than an imported aesthetic vision. The building didn’t just land in a community. It was authored, at least in part, by one.

The result is an architecture that reads as both humble and generous. The centerpiece is a continuous lightweight canopy that serves as the structural and symbolic heart of the building, providing shade and shelter against Barranquilla’s hot, arid climate. The city deals with intense solar radiation and seasonal rains, so this isn’t a design flourish for the sake of it. It’s a practical move that communicates something clearly: the physical comfort of the people who will actually use this space matters. You’d think that would go without saying, but in the long history of public architecture built for low-income communities, it very often does not.

Beyond the building itself, Villas de San Pablo has been developed around a 20-Minute City model, a walkable neighborhood concept that places essential services within reach without forcing families into long daily commutes. The cultural center slots into that framework as a hub combining programming with a maker’s space approach, weaving together elements of indigenous Carnival culture, digital tools, and economic development into a single interconnected vision. The idea that a cultural center can also be an economic catalyst for its own neighborhood is one I find genuinely exciting.

What strikes me most about this project is how directly it challenges the persistent idea that design quality gets distributed to places that can afford prestige. Thoughtful, well-resourced architecture tends to cluster in wealthy areas, which means the communities who might benefit most from it consistently get the least of it. Villas de San Pablo is a quiet but deliberate counter-argument to that pattern. It makes the case that rigorous, people-centered design belongs precisely where displacement and social complexity are highest, not as a gesture of charity, but as a matter of course.

The collaboration between ETH Zurich and local Colombian architects is also worth pausing on. Not because global-local partnerships are unusual, but because of how they worked here and for how long. The project ran from 2018 to completion in 2025, with sustained support from the Swiss Secretariat for Economic Affairs, the Fundación Santo Domingo, and the Municipality of Barranquilla. That kind of long-term institutional commitment, years of engagement before a single slab was poured, makes a real difference in the depth of what gets built.

The Villas de San Pablo Cultural Center does not look like a monument. It looks like a place people can actually use, in all the ordinary and extraordinary ways a community needs a gathering space to function. That, more than any signature gesture, was always the point.

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Vienna’s Weirdest Street Objects Are Secretly Genius

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The first thing you notice is the red. A thick, corrugated red hose loops and curls its way through the Hirschstetten neighborhood of Vienna like something that escaped from a construction site and decided to stay. It pools on the ground. It arcs overhead. It feeds into wooden towers and snakes between them, connecting whoever happens to be on either end. That hose is the heart of The Outsiders, a set of mobile urban objects designed by collective Moradavaga for ROOMING INN’s neighborhood Living Lab, and it’s a smarter piece of design thinking than it initially looks.

The objects themselves are built from pale, knot-studded pine, cut into wide slatted panels and assembled into structures that sit somewhere between a flatpack bookshelf and a scaffolding tower. The tallest units reach well above head height, with ladders built into their frames and enough structural openness to feel climbable and explorable. These are not delicate objects. They’re chunky, honest, and built to be handled. The wheels at their base, red-rimmed and pneumatic, reinforce that utility. Nothing here is trying to look expensive.

Designer: Moradavaga for Rooming Inn

The circular openings punched into the wooden panels are where the design gets genuinely interesting. Each unit features two or three large black-rimmed circles, set at different heights, designed to accept the ends of those red corrugated tubes. From a distance, they give the structures an almost face-like quality, a pair of eyes staring out from a slatted wooden body. Up close, they’re speaking and listening ports, the endpoints of an acoustic communication system that requires no electricity, no app, no screen. You put the tube to your mouth and talk. Someone at the other end hears you. It’s as low-tech as design gets, and precisely because of that, it works on everyone instantly.

The corrugated hose itself deserves more attention than it typically gets. It’s a standard drainage pipe, the kind you’d find buried in a road trench, and that material choice is a deliberate design statement. Moradavaga didn’t reach for something beautiful or engineered-looking. They reached for something recognizable and repurposable, something that reads as industrial but behaves as playful. When the tube is stretched across a courtyard, held at arm’s length by one person while another crouches at the opposite end, it becomes a choreographic object, shaping how bodies move and position themselves in space.

Each unit in the collection has a different scale and configuration. The lower, table-like structure with its speaking horns angled upward operates differently from the tall tower with its ladder and elevated panels. Set together, they create a small temporary landscape. Separated, each one holds its own presence in a street or park. The modularity isn’t just functional. It’s part of the visual language of the project, the sense that these objects are always mid-arrangement, never quite finished, always open to being moved somewhere new.

That mobility is embedded in the design from the ground up, literally. The red-wheeled casters aren’t an afterthought. They signal that these objects are not meant to settle. They belong to the ROOMING INN Living Lab, based in a former kindergarten, but the design brief was always for them to travel through the surrounding Hirschstetten neighborhood, showing up at workshops, events, and public squares. A piece of street furniture on wheels is a small act of formal rebellion against the logic of permanence that governs most urban infrastructure, and I think that’s worth appreciating on its own terms, separate from any community design agenda.

Moradavaga describes their goal as bringing “a little bit of surprise into people’s everyday life, making them look at space from different perspectives.” The Outsiders achieves this through form before it achieves it through function. The pale wood, the red tube, the circular eyes, the wheels at the feet: the objects read as characters before they read as furniture. They look like they arrived somewhere and are still deciding whether to stay. That tension, between object and presence, between furniture and installation, is exactly where the most interesting design tends to live.

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CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati’s Hospital of the Future Puts Nature at the Center of Healing

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What if a hospital felt less like a clinical institution and more like a campus you actually wanted to spend time in? That’s the central idea behind the winning proposal for the Hospital of the Future in Brescia, developed by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, Park Associati, and Politecnica Building for Humans, alongside a multidisciplinary team including Openfabric, Dotdotdot, Eckersley O’Callaghan, and Studio Mattioli. Unveiled at Teatro Grande in Brescia and attended by regional government officials including the President of Lombardy, Attilio Fontana, the project carries significant institutional weight.

It’s designed around the principles of One Health — the idea that human health, environmental systems, and social infrastructure are fundamentally inseparable — and translates that philosophy directly into architecture. With construction set to begin in 2028 and an investment of approximately $300 million USD, with additional funding expected from the Lombardy Region, it is one of the most ambitious healthcare redesigns in Italy’s recent history.

Designer: CRA- Carlo Ratti Associati, Park Associati & Politecnica Building for Humans

The design takes its structural cues from engineer Angelo Bordoni’s early twentieth-century masterplan — specifically its hexagonal core and radial layout — and reinterprets them as the foundation for something far more porous and alive. Nature doesn’t decorate the edges here; it runs through the entire campus. Patients, staff, and visitors move through landscape as much as through architecture, with views of the Brescia Prealps framed from patient rooms and natural light pulled deep into the building’s core.

The Main Hospital organizes itself around three interconnected wings that open the complex toward the city. At street level, a continuous glazed lobby creates an urban threshold overlooking a new public square — the kind of civic gesture that signals the building belongs to its city, not just its institution. Inside, the logic is deliberately legible: clear circulation, acoustic comfort, calibrated daylight, and spatial proportions that reduce the psychological weight of being in a hospital. Each patient room is treated as a space of recovery first, with landscape connection as a measurable design strategy rather than an afterthought.

The Children’s Hospital takes a different formal approach — three cylindrical volumes of varying heights arranged around terraces and internal courtyards that function as therapeutic gardens. A full-height atrium anchors the entrance, housing play areas and consultation zones within a bright, protected space that reads more like a community building than a ward.

Connecting everything is the CareRing, a continuous ring stretching over one kilometre that separates operational and logistics flows below ground from a tree-lined public landscape above. It’s the project’s most conceptually elegant move: infrastructure that doubles as a park, connecting the campus to the city while embodying the One Health principle that human health and environmental health are the same conversation.

The structure itself uses hybrid timber-and-steel construction with dry assembly techniques, reducing embodied carbon and shortening build time. The modularity is intentional — the building is designed to reconfigure as medical technology and models of care evolve, which at this scale and investment horizon, they inevitably will. The new hospital delivers 60,500 square metres of clinical space and more than 745 beds, with historic pavilions repurposed for academic and research use in partnership with the University of Brescia’s Faculty of Medicine.

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This Belgian Brutalist Villa Doesn’t Sit on the Dunes — It Grew Out of Them

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The Belgian coast has always attracted the slightly surreal — fishermen on horseback, a ship-shaped restaurant, and now, a concrete villa that looks like it was carved out of the dune rather than built on top of it. In Oostduinkerke, on a corner plot at the edge of a protected dune reserve along Belgium’s North Sea coast, architect Magalie Munters has built a home that appears to have emerged from the ground rather than been placed upon it. Completed in 2025, Villa Nouvelle Vague is 330 square metres of sculpted concrete — shaped by terrain, wind, and light rather than by facade composition.

The name borrows from the French New Wave cinema movement, and the reference earns its place. There is something filmic in how the house builds narrative as you move through it — compressed thresholds that open into volume, light sweeping across curved walls, deeply set openings that frame the dune landscape like a held shot. This is architecture with a point of view.

Designer: Magalie Munters Architecture

From the street, the facade reads as a protective shell. Munters gave the concrete surface a horizontal grain that recalls the striations left in wet sand when the North Sea withdraws at low tide. The texture is not decorative. It is a structural character — the surface behaves as if it has been sedimented rather than cast. The volume tapers toward the rear of the plot, a subtle geometric decision that creates a generous garden while allowing sunlight to reach both the southern and western facades simultaneously. In a compact building, that kind of continuous light is earned, not given.

The bedrooms sit half-buried in the dunes, anchored and sheltered. Above them, the living space rises toward the horizon — a vertical shaft cuts through the mass toward the roof, organizing movement and pulling light down through the interior. Munters cites Le Corbusier as a touchstone, specifically in how spaces contract and expand, and in the logic of a rooftop solarium that turns the roof into usable terrain. The ceiling is not incidental. It descends toward the kitchen, which sits lower and more intimate, and rises again over the main living space, where the curved walls catch the evening light with near-tactile presence.

Inside, concrete is a spatial substance, not cladding. The staircase, bathrooms, built-in seating, and kitchen are each conceived as carved elements within the monolithic body — robust and unadorned. Lime-washed surfaces and sandblasted oak furniture soften the mineral presence without undermining it. The rooms feel less like interiors and more like the inside of a shell: enclosed, resonant, precise.

Munters describes the tension at the heart of the project as one between a hidden, highly controlled building logic and a more archaic material expression. That tension, held rather than resolved, is exactly what makes Villa Nouvelle Vague worth studying.

The post This Belgian Brutalist Villa Doesn’t Sit on the Dunes — It Grew Out of Them first appeared on Yanko Design.

Get Ready for the Pavilion That Was Designed by the Sun Itself

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Architecture has always had to reckon with the sun. Buildings are oriented, shaded, and glazed in response to it, and solar panels are bolted onto them afterward. In most cases, the sun’s behavior is accommodated rather than consulted. The resulting forms come from a designer’s intentions and a structural engineer’s calculations, with sunlight as something to manage rather than the thing that generates the shape itself.

The Sun Shadow Pavilion starts from a different premise. Before any walls were drawn or a floor plan drafted, a scale model of a large square array of photovoltaic solar panels was placed above a flat white surface facing south. The sun then did the rest. The shadows it cast on that surface, traced every hour for eight hours as it crossed the sky, became the raw material for the entire structure.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

Eight shadow outlines, each representing a different hour of the day, were converted into three-dimensional forms. Solid planes were inserted from the edges of each shadow up to the edges of the solar panels above, creating a set of inclined surfaces that defined the interior volume. That enclosed space, shaped by accumulated light and time rather than a stylist’s instinct, became the pavilion.

The design is also inherently site-specific and date-specific. If built, the shadows used to generate its form would be traced on the actual opening day, at the exact build location. A pavilion in the American Southwest, traced on a different opening date, would look different from one in northern Europe, or from the same structure inaugurated a decade earlier or later. Each built version would be unrepeatable.

The exterior form that results from this particular study is dramatic and unmistakably asymmetric, a cluster of dark, angled, sloping planes radiating outward from the flat solar array at the top. The interior is a complete reversal. The translucent solar cells that generate all of the pavilion’s power also filter light through the roof, keeping the space naturally bright during the public hours the shadow tracings were drawn to represent.

Walking through, the floor carries painted outlines of all eight shadow positions, so the exact geometry that produced the walls above can be read directly underfoot. The building’s origin story isn’t hidden in a design brief or a notebook; it’s painted on the ground you’re standing on. The structure explains itself to anyone willing to look down as well as up.

Beyond the solar panels, the structure handles its own climate without mechanical systems. The dark outer surface absorbs heat, and a double-skin wall construction moves warm or cool air into and away from the interior as needed. Rainwater collected from the exterior surfaces feeds underground storage tanks for use on-site. The pavilion’s stated purpose, to display advances in alternative energy technology, is also its operating model.

There’s an honesty to the whole approach that’s relatively rare in landmark building design. Most structures acquire their form through aesthetic decisions, historical references, or personal sensibility. This one derived its shape from a physical process that would have happened regardless of any design intention. The sun was going to cast those shadows anyway. The design simply had the sense to use them.

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This 24-Foot Tiny Home From Australia Proves Small Space Design Is All About Intention

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Most tiny homes ask you to sacrifice. The Springbrook 7.2 doesn’t. The Springbrook 7.2 from Gold Coast–based Removed Tiny Homes is the opposite of that. Named for its 7.2-meter length (23.7 feet), it’s a build that makes a convincing case for intentional design over raw square footage.

Built on a standard trailer and clad in Colorbond steel, the home’s exterior is durable and weatherproof — Colorbond is a popular choice across Australia precisely because it holds up in extreme climates without losing its clean, contemporary finish. An awning runs along the exterior, extending the home’s livable edge and softening its profile against the surrounding landscape.

Designer: Removed Tiny Homes

The interior greets you through double glass doors that open into a living area anchored by an L-shaped sofa. The ceiling reads high, and generous glazing keeps the space from contracting inward the way so many compact homes do. Light fills the room freely, which is less a given than it sounds in a build this size. Removed’s design instinct here is to borrow volume from the outside rather than manufacture it through material trickery alone.

The kitchen, positioned deeper into the plan, is remarkably complete. There’s a sink, an oven, a two-burner propane stove, a fridge and freezer, and a full complement of upper and lower cabinetry. Beside it sits a booth-style dining nook with bench seating and a table — the kind of tucked-away setup that feels more intimate than cramped, more considered than squeezed in.

The bathroom sits at the far end of the home. A composting toilet, a vanity sink, and a walk-in shower occupy the space with no sense of conflict. The shower is topped by a skylight, a small detail that does a lot of work — it draws natural light straight down into what could easily have been the home’s darkest corner, and keeps it private without compromising that openness.

Circulation between levels is handled by a corner staircase that integrates storage into its structure, winding up to the loft bedroom above. The loft holds a queen-sized bed and a desk built directly into the balustrade, converting the sleeping area into a workspace without any additional furniture. The ceiling sits low up here, but the resolution is smart: it makes the space feel cocooning rather than confined.

The Springbrook 7.2 was designed and delivered as a custom commission. Pricing is available on request directly through Removed Tiny Homes.

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