Metropolis Magazine

Toronto’s Sculptural Stormwater Treatment Plant Sparks an Interest in Infrastructure. Designed by GH3, the geometric structure uses architecture to help the public better understand their watershed.

Proudly placed at the heart of one of Toronto’s emerging harborside districts, a monolithic new building opened earlier this year. With its sharp angles, sculptural form and luminous skylight, you’d be forgiven for thinking this might be a new cultural destination or public space, perhaps an enigmatic art gallery or museum. In fact, this is the district’s surprising new Stormwater Facility; a plant designed to treat urban run-off from the city’s growing West Don and Quayside neighborhoods and release the newly clean water into Lake Ontario.

The clients—Waterfront Toronto and Toronto Water— demanded a landmark building for the district, and one that would use architecture to celebrate and inspire “civic responsibility towards ensuring safe and clean water ecology.”

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In Salford, U.K., a Government Building Makes a Statement in Brick. Three New Bailey features a high-tech brick cladding that’s inspired by Victorian factories and the city’s cotton-weaving heritage. There’s a new seven-story commercial building right next to Salford station in the north of England that looks like it’s been woven out of brick. It isn’t often you get to write those words or see such a tactile and dynamic facade in architecture. This mind-bending visual effect was made possible by advances in precast cladding technology and was inspired by the industrial heritage of the area. “The first options we looked at for the facades were all metal and glass, but it didn’t feel right, it didn’t feel of the place,” explains Stuart Fraser of Make Architects the practice behind the project. “The site was right next to these fantastic, vaulted railway arches and some really strong and bold red brick 19th century warehouses and buildings, such as the Cook Street Brewery, which we ended up taking inspiration from.”

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By the time Kathryn Webb entered architecture school at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, as an undergrad, she was already seasoned at exploring new spaces. “My mom’s job took my family to many states—Florida, Kentucky, Indiana, New Mexico, Illinois, Tennessee—which allowed me to experience new things and practice adaptability at a young age,” she explains. In high school Webb also completed a pivotal homestay in Germany through her region’s German American Partnership Program (GAPP), which opened up the world and her ability to become attuned to the nuanced design of a structure or gathering point. “I’m fascinated with people watching; I love seeing people interact with each other and their surroundings,” she says, noting that she has always been drawn to depicting rich scenes that “speculate and propose captivating narratives.”

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32 Adaptive Reuse Projects for a Better Future

Through decades of coverage, METROPOLIS rounds up the best adaptive reuse stories and projects from around the globe. Adaptive reuse is a forward-thinking approach to development that repurposes and creates new programs for existing buildings, offering a sustainable alternative to the continuous cycle of demolition and construction. As cities worldwide grapple with the challenges of climate change, resource scarcity, and urbanization, adaptive reuse architecture emerges as a solution that not only preserves historical heritage, but also reduces environmental impact. By transforming obsolete structures into functional spaces, adaptive reuse projects foster community revitalization, stimulate economic growth, and promote environmental stewardship. Here, METROPOLIS shows how the A&D industry can embrace adaptive reuse for the future, rethinking urban landscapes and modernist icons to meet the evolving needs of society.

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Recent research into the neuroscience of color suggests that color has not only psychological and emotional effects on us but a biological effect as well. Colors can affect our breathing, our blood pressure, and even our body temperature.

By examining the trending hues of today’s most innovative products, we can lean into the energizing properties of turmeric and gold, feel the cozy warmth of terra-cotta and burnt orange, fuel creativity with lavenders and lilacs, and relax and rest with sage and forest greens.

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Whoever said the washroom (the most frequented room in any building) shouldn’t be as nice as the lobby? ASI just gave the washroom a makeover— you can too. Explore the new standard for basis of design in washrooms. ASI Group

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Little Village, a hub of parks, art galleries, cultural spaces, artist studios, restaurants, and more, is expanding the city’s revitalization beyond downtown. In a (let’s face it) disheartening time, visiting Little Village Detroit a vibrant—and radically ambitious—new arts campus in Detroit, is a welcome, uplifting antidote. It’s a place that grows deeply out of the past but feels a lot like the future. One that celebrates art and its power to help build community even more.

Launched by local gallerists Anthony and JJ Curis, the endeavor spreads over multiple blocks of the city’s East Village, a quiet neighborhood east of Downtown with a rich history that had, over the last half century, fallen on hard times—evidenced by thick, abandoned fields and the tilting skeletons of former homes and businesses. Little Village’s focal point, a 110-year-old Romanesque church called the Shepherd (formerly the Good Shepherd), had, like hundreds of monumental buildings in the re-emerging Motor City, been left for dead. Its neglected landscape included overgrown grass and weeds, downed power lines, and fenced off patches of asphalt.

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In Portland, the Adidas Village Connects Creativity, Community, and Sport

Following a national design competition, adidas selected LEVER Architecture and Studio O+A to realize a 460,000-square-foot expansion of its North American headquarters in Portland, Oregon.
Entering the reception area at Adidas Village in Portland, Oregon, it’s easy to assume kickoff is imminent. Located at the base of the Gold Building, one of two new structures completed this year to round out the existing seven-building campus, it sits beside a glass wall overlooking a soccer field—almost like a skybox suite with a view of the game. An adjacent hallway, clad in concrete block, feels like the tunnel leading from the locker room to the field.

“Everybody’s the athlete here,” says Primo Orpilla, a principal with San Francisco interior design firm Studio O+A, which co-designed the expansion with Portland’s LEVER Architecture. Though sports stars do occasionally visit Adidas Village, the idea is to celebrate the apparel and those who design it.

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Designed for KFI Studios by Union Design, the Loci table collection blends sustainability and versatility. Loci is responsibly crafted from wood grown within 200 miles of our factory, ensuring environmental care from forest to furniture.

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In Canada, a Cabin Disappears into the Landscape

In the belief that humans are a part of nature, not distinct from it, Canadian architect Michael Leckie designs architecture that restores us to the wilderness and the wilderness to us.

Arcana is the pilot site of a micro-hospitality project located two hours north of Toronto. It contains three prototype guest cabins clad entirely in mirror-polished steel to reflect the surrounding forest as if they were wearing camouflage. Arcana’s goal—to reconnect people with the “super natural powers” of the outdoors—reflects Leckie’s own love of nature, activity, and stillness, from meditation to sound healing and adventurous travel.

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Farshid Moussavi’s Open-ended Architecture Comes to the U.S.

The London-based architect keeps both her design process and her built projects fluid and ever-changing.
In her ecological horror novel Paradise Rot, author Jenny Hval viscerally blurs the boundaries between building and body; a similar intrigue in the affective and embodied experience of architecture drives the work of Iranian-born, London-based architect Farshid Moussavi. Moussavi has run her eponymous practice, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA), out of east London since 2011. With projects spanning a flaneur-friendly port terminal in Japan, a shimmering cloud-shaped housing complex in France, and a soon-to-be-completed cultural and religious center in Houston, the architect is known for her innovative work that blends theory, politics, and practice.

Prior to establishing FMA, Moussavi—an elected member of London’s Royal Academy since 2015, a professor in practice , and a recipient of the 2022 Jane Drew Prize for women in architecture—ran a collaborative practice called Foreign Office Architects (FOA). Earlier works completed in this partnership, like the Yokohama International Port Terminal (2002), reveal both a striking material sophistication and a deep understanding of the aliveness of architecture, qualities that have flourished in her later practice.

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How do urban architects engage rural communities? That was the question asked by Shenzhen-based Atelier XI when tasked with building a structure aimed at providing a place for art and education for the residents of the vast Xiuwu County in China’s Henan province. Instead of just one building, architect Chen Xi executed a series of cast-in-place concrete pavilions for the scattered villages, a decision further influenced by the wide range of landscapes and topography. “We proposed a design approach to break the original 300-square-meter design brief into several miniature pavilions across the county,” he says.

His latest project, Library in Ruins, is located in Sunayo Old Village, one of seven sites chosen for the pavilions. “Since 1996, villagers have moved into the newly built brick-concrete houses in the new village next door one after another, leaving behind many aged adobe houses and cave dwellings,” he notes. Inspiration came from the unique site and Xi hopes it will help locals rethink quality of life, as well as “alleviate isolation and poverty.”

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Landscape Forms and the Landscape Architecture Foundation hosted students for a three-day charrette at CalPoly for the tenth edition of Xtreme LA.

Held in collaboration with the university’s landscape architecture department, the intense sessions deeply considered the past and future of nearby Morro Bay and the sacred Indigenous site of Morro Rock, an ancient volcanic plug that guards the harbor. Two teams of of 11 young landscape design professionals and students were paired with landscape architecture mentors Sarah Kuehl of EinwillerKuehl Landscape Architecture and Maura Rockcastle of TEN x TEN.

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Located just south of Todos Santos, Mexico, and half a mile from the Pacific Ocean in the small agricultural village of El Pescadero, the El Perdido Hotel utilizes traditional construction materials to pay homage to the regional culture. Over the last decade, the area has quickly developed; however, there are still many spots with secluded wilderness, beaches, and rich farmland. Estudio ALA first hospitality project is one such oasis.

For the new hotel project, Estudio ALA cofounder Armida Fernández began with a climate analysis. “We always try to be sustainable, conscious, and responsive to the location,” she says. To accommodate the site’s varying geographic conditions, wind, precipitation, and heat, the main building and guest villas are laid out for maximum efficiency, while the communal areas, such as the central house with sunken conversation pit, have no walls to allow for natural ventilation. The hotel also has a water treatment system, saltwater pool, and has eliminated all single-use plastics.

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“We have been entrusted in both this company and our planet, and must pass them along better than we received them,” says Tom Pendley, President and CEO, Mannington Mills. Learn more about how they craft with purpose in their ESR Report: Values in Action. Mannington Commercial

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Terry & Terry Architecture put DeafSpace concepts into practice with plenty of space, even lighting, and clever visual cues. Streamlined, partition-free spaces are a hallmark of modern architecture. But for those who are Deaf, they’re more than just aesthetically pleasing: Clear sight lines are critical for communicating in sign language. So when San Francisco Bay Area architects (and brothers) Alex and Ivan Terry of Terry and Terry Architecture designed a house for Deaf clients, they strove for exceptional clarity.

Located in Palo Alto, California, the 3,000-square-foot home for Gabe Leung and Susie Lai, a Deaf couple with a seven-year-old son, and their extended family, embodies DeafSpace concepts. Developed in 2005, the guidelines highlight the importance of allotting ample space—specifying 3 to 10 feet of space betweenpeople—for good visual communication.

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Pélissanne is a small community in the South of France with about 10,000 inhabitants. Many of the historic townhouses and their gardens are well preserved and cared for. In 2015 Pélissanne held an architectural competition, which was won by Dominique Coulon et associés a French architect based in Strasbourg whose design aimed at preserving as much of the historic park as possible. While most of the other participants in the competition placed the extension in front of the existing building, Coulon moved it to the eastern side. This makes the transition from old house to new extension a bit more difficult but preserves almost the full view of the historic facade and thus the connection between the old house and the park. At the same time, the extension creates a lively new public square which connects to the town’s main square in front of the church and the town hall to the West. The gesture of moving the extension to the side also preserved a hundred-year-old plane tree, around which the new building forms a gentle and expressive curve.

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In 2017, the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Nicholas Fox Weber, launched a competition to design an extension to a pediatric hospital in Tambacounda, Senegal. Initiated by Le Korsa France a philanthropic arm of the Foundation that has been active in eastern Senegal since 2005, the project was aimed at radically transforming the conditions under which mothers and newborns receive care in the region.

An invitation found its way to Switzerland-based architect Manuel Herz, who has done extensive research on African architectural contexts. In 2015, he authored the first volume of African Modernism, which explored Modernist architecture throughout Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. (A second volume is currently in the works.) One year later, he presented his research on the refugee camps of the Western Sahara, which host the Sahrawi population in the border zone of southwestern Algeria, at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, marking the first time a nation in exile was represented at the event.

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Natural building materials like wood and stone have been employed for millennia. But these 2024 METROPOLIS Future100 honorees are finding inventive ways to apply them.

Drawing upon references to indigenous knowledge, history, and nature, Chizumi Kano (BArch graduate, California College of the Arts), Samuel Wylie (MArch graduate, University of Oregon, Andrea Rubero (BArch graduate, Rice Architecture), and Ala Zuchniak (bachelor of interior design graduate, Toronto Metropolitan University reimagine how we build with a new generation of sustainable and culturally attuned projects that frequently partner with new technologies.

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Looking at Dutch Studio RAP might reveal the architecture office of the future. Lucas ter Hall and Wessel van Beerendonk met at the Delft University of Technology, and following their graduation in 2014, launched their own practice with the goal of bridging the gap between digital design and physical construction. In school, says ter Hall, they learned how to create complex designs with the computer. But there wasn’t much about how to transfer these designs into reality. “Back then, only a few architects were doing parametric design, and even less knew about digital or robotic fabrication methods.” - As a start-up, the team got an office space in Rotterdam’s Makers District, and in the beginning, they rented a robot. “We don’t have rich parents and we didn’t get any funding, so at first we took any commission we could,” remembers ter Hall. By making models for other architects, museums, or artists, they learned what the robot could do.

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Minimalism doesn’t always mean taking away… With Chronologies—part of the just-launched Pacific Standard Time collection—Bentley Mills Los Angeles dialed up the design to give this finely detailed, pure minimalist pattern a surprising touch of texture. Like all Bentley-manufactured products, Chronologies is PVC-free and Red List Free.

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Meixi Xu, a senior interior design student at New York's School of Visual Arts loves to sketch. “Drawing helps me better understand the relationship between spaces and moments,” she says, noting that her design inspiration often comes from everyday observations, including attention to what a space may intuitively lack in community or belonging.

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In the spirit of reinvention, Suzanne Tick modernizes timeless weave structures with the Twist on a Classic collection. Houndstooth, herringbone, nubby modern wool, boucle texture, two-toned drapery, and large-scale graphic pattern motif are reimagined through scale studies, iridescent color combinations, and coating technology that make for unique, tactile surfaces.

Crafted with a commitment to sustainability, these six textiles tell a story of mindful innovation upon every interior surface.

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Luum Textiles

Axel Olson a 2024 METROPOLIS Future100 nominee and master’s graduate from the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning straddles the line between disciplines, be it architecture, film, industrial design, or digital art. His projects include SIGNS OF LIFE, a scalable system that employs standardized products used by maintenance staff to activate temporary architecture, and SELF STORAGE, a temporary dwelling is made for the reclamation and dispersal of domestic things. “There’s always a chance to rethink uses, building types, and reality,” he says.

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