AD Recommends: Best of the Week

© Åke E:son Lindman

Did you saw Tham & Videgård’s Tree Hotel last week? This amazing project in Sweden, plus four other amazing buildings that you may have missed, after the break.

Tree Hotel / Tham & Videgård Arkitekter
A shelter up in the trees; a lightweight aluminium structure hung around a tree trunk, a 4x4x4 meters box clad in mirrored glass. The exterior reflects the surroundings and the sky, creating a camouflaged refuge. The interior is all made of plywood and the windows give a 360 degree view of the surroundings (read more…)

© Daniel Libeskind

Westside Bruennen / Daniel Libeskind
The Westside project, a new center for leisure and shopping in Bern-Brünnen, is an urban scale architecture project totaling 1.5 million sq. ft. In addition to the 55 shops, 10 restaurants and bars, hotel, multiplex cinema, fun bath with wellness center and housing, this mixed-use program radically reinvents the concept of shopping, entertainment and living (read more…)

monument to the soviet army

Forgotten Monuments From the Communist Era in Bulgaria
As part of his series dealing with forgotten monuments from the communist era in Bulgaria, Nikola Mihov has shared with us his story and photos of the many iconic communist era monuments in Bulgaria that were dismantled after the fall of the totalitarian regime in 1989. Nevertheless, more than one hundred important monuments built between 1945 and 1989 remain standing (read more…)

© Moris Moreno

Salvador Dali Museum / HOK
This week marked the grand opening for the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. The new building‘s 68,000 sqf doubles the size of the original one storey warehouse Dali Museum built in 1982. Utilizing free-form geodesic geometry, the triangulated glass organically flows around and attaches to the rigid unfinished concrete box, a play of hard and soft, protecting Dali’s paintings and simultaneously providing natural daylight (read more…)

© Fran Parente

Fidalga 727 / Triptyque
The urban landscape of São Paulo is heavily influenced by two main characters that coexist independently and simultaneously. On one hand, the vertical constructions – most of them faithful to the modernist/rationalist models –, which evolve randomly with the inconstant guidelines of the urban planning (read more…)