The young city of Almere keeps on growing. From the first buildings completed in 1976, the city has gone on to see population estimates of 350,000 inhabitants in 2030.

The City Beautiful movement came about at the end of the 19th century in the United States to beautify the cities around the country. Its goal was not simply to be beautiful but to be a social control mechanism, to promote civic morals and harmonious social order and to improve the lives of citizens. Macarthur Square was devised inside this context.

The proposed modular system offers high efficiency and versatility in both construction and programme. The equally-sized cells can be added or taken out of the structure according to the changing needs of the building, for residential or office use.

This project is based on the idea that optimising energy efficiency in buildings is not enough if, with this improvement, disperse city life is not left behind.

A continuous cladding using wood slats unifies the volume of this Trondheim residence.

This project is located on a lot in the medieval area of Riga. The proposed solution takes on the idea of sloped roofs, part of the medieval surroundings included in the lists of UNESCO.

Forwarding Dallas is the result of a competition (Re:Vision Dallas) organised by  three NGO s to transform a municipal car park.

Two buildings fill up the inside of this block in the very multi-coloured centre of Paris and favour relationships between different types of users.

This project is included inside an urban recovery intervention involving a 19th century textile factory. In 2012, the main atrium of this complex will form part of a network of municipal cultural centres, placed in former industrial buildings.

The building takes on the role of a geographic feature isolated in the landscape and is meant to be a highly volumetric rock, made up of non-coplanar plans.

Zurich’s Aussersihl district, a working-class neighbourhood not far from the city centre, is undergoing deep rehabilitation.

These two buildings make up part of the Brent Cross Cricklewood plan, designed to regenerate 150 hectares of residual land to the north of London.

This filling element for the historic fabric of Paris affronts integration with heritage by means of a main facade with silk-screen printed sandwich panels.

The intervention relates to previous experience from the 20th century which are now coming back.

This project involving housing for the elderly is inserted into a block of public facilities which also includes a sports centre and a residence for elderly people.

This transformation of a former dairy in an enclosure with multiple uses points out  the first step in the recover of the old industrial area of Arnhemse Broek.

This project modifies the closed block with a large inner patio due to urban planning regulations and introduces volumetric variations to the insubstantial landscape of this future expansion of Malaga.

This lot is located inside a city block, mostly occupied by the public gardens of the ainte Périne hospital.

This proposal by Technion University students is devised as a reaction to plans for the area approved by the Tel Aviv city hall.

This programme of a mere 20 housing units adapts to the complexity of the lot and the diversity of the surrounding buildings.

This building stands lined up with a large city block with row housing outside of Brussels. With the building, the main plaza of this former city, absorbed by Brussels, is provided with a large variety of overlapping uses.

This proposal is integrated into the existing historical fabric, introducing social housing on a lot in Hausmann’s bourgeois extension of the city.

In Aargau, located between Zurich and Basel, political actions involving the transformation of obsolete industrial areas are being taken.

Lately a large number of competitions for transform railway lands in Switzerland have been organised. In this case, the train tracks separate two very distinct interventions included in the same competition.

This project won the IBA competition, focused on the transformation of ‘interior outskirts’ spread out on the islands of the Elbe river.

This group of houses aims to provide services to very different lifestyles and to
give users a generous outdoor area.

Finland currently has one of the largest ecological footprints per capita in the world and it is faced with the challenge of overcoming its environmental deficit.

From all of the Paris housing initiatives, we include a total of six small- and  medium-sized projects that adapt to empty lots of the consolidated city.

It is rare to find a city in Spain which has not undergone some sort of urban planning project in the past few years. The pattern is almost always the same: a uniform and single function grid next to the old part of the city, with rows of buildings for housing.

Three new buildings are added to the three existing structures that made up an old mill in the centre of Meiningen.

The Víctor-Hugo residential complex, 1955-1957, is made up of 282 dwellings and a small shopping area. The original land for this development came from a former distillery which fell into disuse after the Second World War...

Author of the video: TimeMagazine
Project published in The Public Chance

The Point-du-Jour residential complex, 1957-1963, is contemporary with Le Parc in Meudon, a work by the same author. In this case it is somewhat smaller. It is made up of 2,260 dwellings and a shopping area...

Author of the video: BIGSOLUTIONS
Project published in Hybrids I. High-Rise Mixed-Use Buildings

There is confusion about what green means for design, architecture and urbanism. Winy Maas asserts that green projects are still disconnected efforts which fail to attain the scale of the interventions that are actually called for. Green is fashionable, but its design potentials remain unexplored.

Rem Koolhaas  has stated that at this moment in time we are unable to evaluate, as they deserve to be, the works and projects of the sixties and the seventies: 'I would like to state the contrast existing between the 'acceptance of life' of Pouillon and the 'artificiality so as to recognise life' in Nouvel'. (1)

Author of the video: MonkeyBusiness
Project published in HoCo Density Housing Construction & Costs

A Barriga de um Arquitecto is mainly focused on contemporary architecture and urban design, covering recent works from Portuguese architects as well as projects of international significance.