Vernacular Architecture

For Tatiana Bilbao, an architectural project’s limitations are opportunities to experiment with new approaches. With artist Terence Gower she revisits recent ventures and Mexico’s architectural tradition.

Just when we thought of Asia as fertile territory for the monumental interventions of a handful of star architects, Joseph Grima features a few projects that let us in on the true nature of the architecture shaping contemporary China, South Korea, and Japan. Although Grima’s methodology, which he calls a “Polaroid of a changing continent,” is fragmentary, the result is holistic. 

“People define iconic buildings as being these singular things that transform everything else around them.” James Timberlake 

The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.

Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza blends the taut gestures of modernism with the complex, ever-shifting organic designs of nature and the city in his achievement at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in Oporto in the summer of 1999.