Discover This Shanghai Office Enlivened By The Color Red

2024 Best of Year Winner for Large Financial Office

A massive, twist of spray-painted, 3-D printed acrylic weaves through the seven-story, 102,300-square-foot workplace for ChangJiang Securities Company in Shanghai, which was designed by M Moser Associates. It begins on the lowest level, where an atrium contains reception, and rises, entwined with a staircase that connects the upper floors. The ribbon continues even when the staircase is interrupted by the building’s structure; it simply takes a slenderer form and pirouettes in the middle of a circular seating area before traversing the slab and continuing upward, along a second staircase, to an atrium on the highest level. The installation’s color—vibrant red, which signifies happiness, prosperity, and celebration in Chinese culture—also appears elsewhere. The same hue enlivens an honor display wall where ChangJiang can show off industry awards, the seating and carpet in the aforementioned circular lounge, and even the lone desk chair appointing a meeting room equipped with modular furniture.

PROJECT TEAM: JOSEPH WANG; CAI JIA; JESSIE ZHENG; MICHAEL HSIAO; KEN ZENG; JOEY YU; CORA DENG; HELLEN GAO; ZOE WEI; KEVIN CHEN; LEO LEI.

Studio Arthur Casas Updates A Modernist Home In Brazil

2024 Best of Year Winner for Large Residential Renovation

The modernist house on a rocky hillside overlooking Ilha Grande Bay had been designed in the 1980’s by Fernando Peixoto, a Brazilian architect whose buildings were known for bright, primary colors. A recent renovation by Studio Arthur Casas for a couple with two children enlarged the Angra dos Reis, Brazil, house on five split levels and took it in a more naturalistic direction, emphasizing the connection between inside and out. Expanding the building without enlarging the residence’s footprint required excavating below-grade for spaces like a screening room. The main social areas are on the upper floors, where removing interior walls created an open flow. In the living room, natural materials and neutral colors predominate. The ceiling was reinvented with diagonal beams and woven straw, and a large opening frames rainforest plants in an indoor garden. Elsewhere, skylights and folding latticework screens filter light while welcoming sea breezes.

PROJECT TEAM: ARTHUR CASAS; NARA TELLES; FABÍOLA ANDRADE; LIGIA DAMIN.

Vibrant Hues Pop In This Renovated School In China

2024 Best of Year Winner for Large Early Education

Color and shapes are among the first things that children learn. After a facade redo that brought pizzazz to a drab concrete building, the Times China TIC Kindergarten school in Foshan, China, might well help students learn those fundamental concepts. The original building was rather forbidding with its hard lines and uniform gray. To make it livelier and more welcoming, while also modulating sunlight and heat gain, C&C Design Co. sheathed portions of the 17,200-square-foot project in perforated aluminum sheets, some of which were painted happy, nature-related colors and given rounded cutouts. The mesh panel enclosing an outdoor staircase, for instance, is vibrant green, with diagonal elliptical openings so that the pint-size attendees can see out while going up and down over the course of the school day. That same green peps up enclosures that expand outward around some windows, while blue was applied to others. The entry, meanwhile, is bright yellow.

PROJECT TEAM: PENG ZHENG; ZENG QINGHAO. 

This Quebec School Embraces The Cottagecore Aesthetic

2024 Best of Year Winner for Small Early Education

Impersonal-looking buildings, cookie-cutter classrooms, long corridors, fluorescent fixtures—these were the hallmarks of elementary schools built in the province of Quebec. So, Lab-École, a nonprofit research firm, was formed to move educational environments in less institutional, more welcoming directions. One result: the 37,000-square-foot École de l’Étincelle, or Spark School, in Saguenay, Canada, by Appareil Architecture, Agence Spatiale, and BGLA Architecture, which takes cues from the natural world and homey cottage architecture. The complex, its interconnected structures clustered around a schoolyard, is made almost entirely of wood, from the facades and pitched roofs to the cubby areas where the young students stow their coats and mittens. Large windows let in natural light. A central open area fitted with multipurpose bleachers encourages interaction and keeps sight lines clear, helping make spaces easy to navigate. There’s even a farm-to-table aspect to the progressive curriculum: Children grow vegetables in community gardens, then turn their harvest into healthy food in the school’s culinary lab equipped with a restaurant-scale kitchen.

How Mayan Construction Shapes a Luxury Condo Complex in Mexico

2023 Best of Year Winner for International Multiunit Residential

The first of an eventual 16 residential buildings across a 12-acre master plan that includes a resort, The Village in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, is visually complex and dynamic, both outside and in. Designed by Sordo Madaleno, the 160,220-square-foot condominium springs from a modular, Mayan-inspired “defragmented pyramid” system that facilitates construction—and nods to the region’s pre-Hispanic history. Approximately 13-foot-square structural boards make up the modules, which have been configured to produce six different apartment layouts, ranging from 900 square feet to more than 2,500, and one to four bedrooms. The concrete-framed construction yields a seemingly random array of terraces that add greenery to the exterior, harmonizing the project with its lush jungle setting. The terraces also provide space for residents to plant their own flower and vegetable gardens. 

JAVIER SORDO MADALENO BRINGAS; JAVIER SORDO MADALENO DE HARO; FERNANDO SORDO MADALENO DE HARO; LUIS HERNÁNDEZ; JAVIER PÁEZ; ALEJANDRO OLIVIER; ANTONIO URRUTIA; RAYMUNDO BALDOVINOS.

Nature Motifs Enliven This Subway Line in Shenzhen, China

2023 Best of Year Winner for Transportation

Transit riders on a recently opened subway line in Shenzhen, China, got a whole lot more than a new way to get from point A to point B. Working with the Guangshou Academy of Fine Arts on the 300,000-square-foot project, Vantree Design incorporated an abstracted representation of the landscape, neighborhood character, or cultural characteristics of the aboveground locale at each station for Shenzhen Metro Line 16. In one, a rocky creek bed inspired the bronze-toned faceted crystals that appear to tumble across the ceiling composed of white triangular panels. In another, a wandering dragon motif incorporates ceiling elements that evoke the animal’s scales. In yet another, a circular sunken plaza ringed by columns is a riff on a Hakka saying about green lotus trees swaying around a house.

vantree design: minxi cai; junjie li; Guanbao Ye; shangzhao yang; xiaofeng li; xingchen song; dongming shen; dejun li; jiajun yin; zhuohui hu; qinshuang yang; damian chan; liu tao; songjun chen; jinge li, weijun su.

Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts: muchuan xu.

How Designers Transformed a Historic Carriage House into a Cultural Center

2023 Best of Year Winner for Office Transformation

Renovations of historic properties often yield surprises. In the case of a 1908 carriage house built for horses and linked to a mansion from the same era, both of which were donated in 1929 by Swan Turnblad and now contain the American Swedish Institute, Minneapolis—a place to experience Swedish culture and that serves immigrants of all backgrounds—peeling back layers of earlier modifications yielded such original details as textured floor pavers and a turntable used for rotating Turnblad’s car after he grad­uated from a horse. Some of these were incorporated into the 7,000-square-foot offices by HGA, which were given the warmth of a Nordic home with custom millwork painted a color inspired by the existing patinated copper on the building’s exterior.

nancy blankfard; rebecca krull kraling; michelle hammer; andy weyenberg; ginny lackovic; justin bice; chrysanthi stockwell; elizabeth manning; kevin kaufman.

This Well-Manicured Beach House Landscape Wows

2023 Best of Year Winner for Residential Landscape

It is always best when house and landscape work hand-in-hand, particularly on Long Island’s tony South Fork. That’s certainly exhibited with this 10,000-square-foot contemporary home by Blaze Makoid Architecture and Shawn Henderson Interior Design,
sited on 3 acres in Southampton handsomely manicured by LaGuardia Design Group. Raising the site 12 feet around the house enhanced views toward Jule Pond and the Atlantic Ocean beyond and allowed for burying drainage and sanitary systems above groundwater. The resulting sculpted landform, seeded with native grasses to create maritime rolling meadows, and accented with such indigenous plants as Northern Bayberry and Inkberry, has a walkway that winds to the front door, its planks of stone echoing the vertical fins of the facade. The linear motif continues with the Luis Barragán–inspired steel pickets of the deck railing flanking the vanishing-edge pool

CHRISTOPHER L A GUARDIA; DANIEL THORP; JOHN HAMILTON.

Explore a Forest-Inspired Home in Mexico City

2023 Best of Year Winner for Medium Residential Transformation

With its curved wooden paneling and efficient built-ins, the two-bedroom apartment in the Residencias La Loma complex might call to mind a fine yacht interior. But it was the forest, not the sea, that provided inspiration for Esrawe Studio. To maximize views of trees on the western side of the home, divisions were removed, creating a 3,000-square-foot open plan. Perimeter walls were wrapped in oak veneer, as was a structural column; a low console trimmed in brass extends from both sides of the column enclosure, while Rochelle marble runs underfoot. Appliances in the minimalist kitchen all but disappear. In the guest bathroom, however, the washbasin is the focus of attention, its base of Tikal marble doubling as sculpture.

HÉCTOR ESRAWE; ANGEL CAMPOS; JAVIER GARCÍA-RIVERA; RAÚL ARAIZA; JAIR ROCHA;
VIVIANA CONTRERAS; MADIÁN ALVARADO.

Old Meets New in This Updated Brooklyn Carriage House

2023 Best of Year Winner for Small City House

Mass timber has been gaining traction as a more sustainable alternative to concrete and steel, which emit large amounts of greenhouse gases in their production. The engineered product has made headlines when used in skyscraper construction, but it has also been deployed in small-scale projects, as witnessed in this 1870’s carriage house in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, outfitted with a new 3,100-square-foot interior by Schiller Projects. When the building was stripped to its shell, structural beams were salvaged and milled locally for the flooring. Glue-laminated Douglas fir was utilized for the staircase and second-floor bridge. And everything was designed so that sometime in the future the parts can be removed for repurposing yet again.

aaron schiller; Colin Cleland; Alberto Rodriguez; Sophie Hodges.