Latest Technical Case Studies
An architectural side note
The £57m Birmingham Conservatoire’s quiet restraint has produced an anonymous facade that conceals rather than celebrates the elegant music spaces within
The £57m Birmingham Conservatoire’s quiet restraint has produced an anonymous facade that conceals rather than celebrates the elegant music spaces within
OMA’s first science building, Lab City engineering school near Paris, humanises its rational grid structure through a system of streets and squares bathed in natural light.
In creating the UK’s tallest build-for-rent development – Highpoint in London’s Elephant and Castle – flexibility, efficiency and speed were key concepts for contractor Mace and structural engineer AKT II
When it’s finished, Goldsmith Street in Norwich will be the largest Passivhaus scheme in the UK - but built as a 100% social housing scheme, it had to be delivered for a competitive price. But how is it being achieved?
The humble British beach hut is being reconfigured for the 21st century, as Part 2 of our guide shows
The humble British beach hut is being reconfigured for the 21st century, as Part 1 of our guide shows
Take some well-tested modern manufacturing techniques, add them to a radical streamlined procurement route that makes the supplier king and you have the beginnings of what could be a revolution in how we build. Ike Ijeh reports on the latest advances in off-site manufacture
Bracknell is the first post-war new town to be comprehensively demolished and rebuilt - to the tune of £750m. Building visited just weeks before completion to see a scheme that hopes to get shoppers and visitors returning in droves
It’s good to be reminded of the high quality that characterises much of the new work being produced in housing
Amanda Levete’s £48m expansion of London’s V&A connects the museum with the public realm through a superb porcelain-paved courtyard. But it’s the sheer immersive power of its vast subterranean exhibition hall that will make visitors stand and gawp
Heneghan Peng’s £25m refurbishment of the National Gallery of Ireland is a sensitive and sometimes almost invisible intervention into an idiosyncratic building
Commercial development in the City has had the shadow of Brexit looming over it for a year now
Kengo Kuma’s extraordinarily complex design for the V&A’s outpost in Dundee would not have been possible without 3D modelling and analysis tools, not to mention complex construction techniques, that have left the city with a building of true grit
A Boston restoration project using advanced 3D-modelling and printing technologies could hold the key to a new age of decoration within contemporary design
New York and London are both bristling with new residential towers, a boom driven by demand for housing and skyrocketing prices for luxury flats
Columbia University’s new Manhattanville campus has championed a policy of inclusiveness not only for its students but also in the construction teams that built it
The Storyhouse in Chester is a daring construction of opposites, with a theatre, cinema and library brought together in a space that combines new-build and the spirit of the orginal 1930s picture house
The team behind 22 Bishopsgate has created a complex 4D virtual reality model intended to optimise every aspect of delivery. Is the industry at large prepared for this new reality?
Frank Gehry’s £28.5m Berlin concert hall is an unusual building for this celebrated creator of the unusual. Ike Ijeh finds that through its sharp contradictions of age, shape and material, it achieves a kind of peace
Building a medical centre is all in a day’s work for Galliford Try. But it’s a different matter when the work takes place on a volcanic island 2,000km from the nearest inhabited land. This is a prefab new-build with a difference
A 1980s office went back to nature and housing went beyond postwar with 21st-century prefabs
The Tate Modern extension provided a warped contrast against the former power station and the Design Museum gained a historically sensitive 1960s rebuild
Laboratories are most often architecturally dull affairs but not Sheppard Robson’s New Science Building
Constructing a six-lane road link across the River Mersey involved several challenges
Caught between the River Clyde and the notorious Gorbals neighbourhood, Glasgow College’s new Riverside Campus attempts to engage with both as part of a new wave of regeneration across the city
In converting a 1930s police station into the Metropolitan Police’s new HQ, contractor Bam faced a difficult case. But noise reduction criteria, a cramped site and a high level of security were no match for Bam’s trusty team
While many brutalist schools are being knocked down, one in south London is making a virtue of its architectural heritage and converting into housing. Photographs by Edmund Sumner
There is now an international standard for measuring how a building impacts on its users’ health and wellbeing. Ike Ijeh looks at how Studio Ben Allen Architects’ One Carter Lane will become the first European project to receive the accreditation