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As the clay-plaster walls of architect Josh Piddock’s north London apartment were drying, he decided to inspect the finish. Captivated by its tactility, he could not resist touching the “sandcastle”-like surface. The deep fingerprint he left behind doesn’t bother Piddock. It only adds, he says, to the perfectly imperfect appeal of his interior; the natural tones and textures a gentle nod to the golden London stock brick of the 1920s home. 

Usually associated with traditional rural buildings, clay plaster — a mix of sand, natural fibres and earth — is a niche finish sold by just a handful of suppliers in the UK. But as architects and designers rediscover the ecological — and aesthetic — perks of homegrown earth-based materials, perceptions are shifting. It is now a high-end choice for apartments, town houses or swish new-builds.  

When Cornwall-based Adam Weismann founded specialist supplier Clayworks in 2010, he encountered scepticism. “Ironically, it can feel too natural for some people. They were worried it might fall off the wall. Part of our job was to educate.” His mission paid off. More than a decade and a half later, “now architects come to us,” says Weismann, who has travelled to countries including Japan and Morocco to study indigenous earth techniques, and co-authored two books on the subject with his wife Katy Bryce.

Today, clay is not a cheap alternative to off-the-shelf surface applications like paint or gypsum plaster. (Paint ranges from £9 to £18 per square metre, compared with £23 for clay). But there are benefits beyond its good looks: it is permeable and porous, and its hygroscopic (moisture-absorbing) qualities help to regulate humidity (just avoid using it in bathrooms). It is recyclable, repairable and good for acoustics, softening reverberations. Clay also does not have the environmental impact of concrete (4-8 per cent of annual global CO₂ emissions), as the manufacturing process requires relatively little energy or water, and does not produce any waste.

Architect Alastair Bowden, of McLean Quinlan, lined the internal courtyard of a rural Devon new-build in clay with soft, light-reflecting tones. Bowden likes its lo-fi appeal: “Clay has so many inherent qualities which don’t rely on machinery,” he says. Meanwhile, Pensaer architects’ recent extension to a Victorian Dulwich home makes extensive use of peachy-pink clay, both internally and externally. In the Netherlands, ribbed clay arches frame the doors of an experimental thatch-clad country home by architects Liminal Office. For a south London house, architect Alexis Germanos, of 23 Architecture, created a clay-swathed, swirling staircase.

Clay can be matt, polished, waxed, carved with motifs or sprinkled with shards of china for a terrazzo effect. Combined with mica, it has a glinting finish — as illustrated by the monastic 100 Acre Wood, a loch-side house in Scotland by Denizen Works. Coloured with natural pigments, tones range from subdued ochres and burnt siennas to rich blues or plums. At Clayworks, the choice has expanded to 400 made-to-order hues.

Piddock uses his apartment to trial techniques before presenting them to clients of his architectural practice Studio Merlin. A clay sun motif has been applied to clotted-cream walls in the kitchen, as well as a Mondrian-like grid of burnt orange, parchment and dove-grey tones.

You can see the maker’s marks; the push and pull as he manipulated the material

Most people enlist a skilled artisan to apply the finish. This is part of its appeal, says architect Simon Astridge. He watched specialist Guy Valentine’s “hands-on, embodied” technique with fascination. “You can see the maker’s marks; the push and pull as he manipulated the material,” says Astridge. “And the uneven surface makes the light bounce across the room beautifully.”

For Astridge, who suffers from asthma, clay has therapeutic properties. Like houseplants, it absorbs pollutants: “It’s like having a Dyson purifier embedded in your walls,” he says. 

Most of us are familiar with circular fashion; the same needs to happen in the construction sector, says architect Ken De Cooman. His practice, Brussels-based BC Architects & Studies, collaborates with local developers and government bodies to upcycle soil excavated from building sites and infrastructure works, which in Belgium amounts to around 37mn tonnes annually, some 40 per cent of which is not polluted. De Cooman’s sister company, BC Materials, recycles some of that into plasters, earth bricks and paints. Its output is growing, from 50 tonnes of products in 2019 to 3,300 tonnes last year.

De Cooman, whose clients include Hermès, learnt how to use these materials in Burundi, east Africa, where he worked, pro bono, on a library for locals. His practice now offers training to a new generation of “curious” architects. 

“Clay is an ancient medium, but it has so many possibilities,” says architect Jonathan Tuckey, who has collaborated with De Cooman on the renovation of a 19th-century tannery in Belgium. “The more people [who] use it, the better.”

After a year living in Zimbabwe, Tuckey became fascinated by its indigenous earth architecture. “The decoration was done annually, in patterns or intricate geometries. Each one expressed the [personality of its] owner,” he says. “I wasn’t just captivated by the energy and creativity, but by the way they made use of available materials — be it stones from the river or charred soil.”

Tuckey recently completed a house in Wiltshire using local earth, with clay walls in ochres and soft greens inside. In the turret-like staircase the light is filtered through niches over carved oak stairs. “The atmosphere is extraordinary, even the air feels soft. It’s immersive, as if you’re wrapped in clay,” he says. “There’s an elemental beauty; although it’s a new building it has an atmosphere of permanence . . . As if it’s always been there.”

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Visual Arts

by Jackie Wullschläger

Famm: Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, France by Samantha Baskind, Jennifer R Cohen and others (Merrell)
A rare pleasure: a book entering the minefield of art and gender politics with sense, sensitivity, style and surprises. A record of collector Christian Levett’s FAMM museum, opened last year, it offers an alternative modern art history, from undisputed greats — Berthe Morisot, Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois — to many intriguing lesser-known names.

American Photography edited by Mattie Boom and Hans Rooseboom (Netherlands Architecture Institute)
Photography entered everyday life, created American identity and shaped the American dream from the mid-19th century until now. Spanning documentary images, family snapshots, advertisements, protest posters, this rich account expands on the Rijksmuseum’s recent exhibition, unfolding both American history and the evolution of photography: democratic, accessible, innovative, and eventually ubiquitous.

Those Passions: On Art and Politics by TJ Clark (Thames & Hudson)
A lifetime’s thinking about painting’s relationship with politics and how “modern art has responded to the danger of modern life” is condensed in Clark’s exhilarating, original and urgent volume of essays. He is revelatory on Velázquez, Delacroix, Picasso, French impressionism, Russian formalism and much more, in prose soaring on the conviction that art matters and reflects social and emotional experience.

Sargent and Paris edited by Stephanie L Herdrich (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Marking the centenary of Sargent’s death, the exquisitely produced, gold-embossed catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum and Musée d’Orsay’s major exhibition about his formation in the French capital is significant in its own right, biographically and artistically illuminating, and a sparkling compensation for those who can’t get to the show.

The National Gallery: Paintings, People, Portraits edited by Anh Nguyen and Rebecca Marks (Taschen)
Rehung, refurbished, boasting stellar exhibitions and new acquisitions, the National Gallery in its bicentennial year triumphed on all fronts. This lavish outsize volume is an extravagant and delectable monument to its history, valuable especially for the quality and quantity of reproduced paintings, but also for wise commentaries, notably from living artists.

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Architecture and Design

by Edwin Heathcote

Dirty Old River by Tom Emerson (Park Books)
Named after an essay about a walk along the river Thames, this collection of essays and articles by Emerson, co-founder of 6a Architects, is a rare piece of readable and engaging writing from a practising architect. He is concerned not so much with theory as with how things are made and why, and with the connections between them. From essays on Frank Gehry’s early houses to Álvaro Siza’s window details and the writings of Georges Perec, it covers a lot of ground with a refreshing lightness of touch.

The New Design Museum: Co-Creating the Present, Prototyping the Future by Beatrice Leanza (Park Books)
The contemporary museum of design can be stuck between the world of art and of things but Leanza makes a case for it as a public forum. She uses interviews with museum directors and curators to outline the potential of the museum and of design as a fast-changing field of transformative ideas. There is plenty of curator-speak but do power through that for some genuinely radical ideas.

Ukrainian Modernism by Dmytro Soloviov (Fuel)
It is a painful time to write about Ukrainian architecture when so much of it is being destroyed. Yet this elegiac book becomes even more essential as a record of an astonishingly varied, Soviet-era architecture spanning everything from housing to public projects. Here it is clear that much socialist building was a striking blend of art, sculpture and architecture. There is a good introduction by Owen Hatherley, and part of the proceeds go to the Red Cross appeal for Ukraine.

Modernist Travel Guide by Adam Štěch (Sight Unseen)
Czech photographer and writer Štěch has one of the best Instagram feeds in architecture, recording lesser-known, often eccentric, always remarkable surviving modernist interiors and buildings around central Europe and the wider world. This pocket travel guide is packed with wonderful gems, a rare translation of good social media into publishing.

The Expressway World by Richard J Williams (Polity)
With its Ballardian title, this book concentrates on one of the most contested legacies of modernism: the urban expressway, cutting through cities, splitting neighbourhoods, polluting with noise and particulates and killing both social and financial value. Williams looks at how we got here and what might be done. There is plenty of optimism here, with the various ways in which neglected real estate around freeways can be repurposed, and how it might actually present an opportunity.

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Termoli: an Italian town you’ve probably never heard of, in a part of Italy you may well never have passed through. Slotted between Abruzzo and Puglia, the region of Molise – Italy’s second-smallest – reaches deep into the peninsula, its Adriatic coastline an agro-industrial plain and its mountainous inner reaches marked by woodland, half-abandoned medieval villages and an ancient Roman settlement. Surrounded by newer, municipal sprawl, Termoli’s borgo antico juts into the sea on a teardrop-shaped promontory, its narrow lanes lined with gaily painted houses; on its lone square is a romanesque cathedral, its façade pockmarked by centuries of salt air.

In the summertime, says Giorgio Pace, the old town is thronged with tourists. But when the co-founder of roaming arts-design festival Nomad and I visit his hometown in spring, the borgo is in hibernation. A chill wind off the Adriatic whistles down crooked streets, some no wider than footpaths, setting the laundry strung high above them billowing and snapping. At night, we’re the only two people out walking.

A fixture on the contemporary arts scene for nearly 20 years, Pace has worked at the Met and the Guggenheim, curated at the Venice Biennale and produced a Rick Owens retrospective in St Moritz. His consultancy, Giorgio Pace Projects, connects luxury brands with arts enterprises worldwide. Bringing provocative culture to unexpected places has become his sought-after stock in trade.

I wanted to make a space where people could be inspired 

But he’s also a proud Termolese going back generations on both sides of his family; and now his sights are set on the little town he grew up in, with no less ambitious a goal than to make it an international cultural destination. On a square lined with cafés and palm trees in Termoli’s new town, Pace is turning one of two adjacent 19th-century ancestral homes into a private museum. When it opens next year, the Giorgio Pace Foundation will be a dazzling architectural statement by Kengo Kuma, to whom Pace was introduced by the artist and designer Christoph Radl in 2021. Its design will marry striking interventions in glass, bronze and steel with original tile floors across three storeys; the planning-permission gods willing, a fourth floor with an outdoor patio will be added, while the house’s back garden will become a leafy café. Its 16 rooms will showcase a rotation of contemporary artists and creatives. 

Pace, however, has brought me to Termoli to see another, even older ancestral home, this one in the centre of the borgo antico. Working with the architect and designer Marco Parmeggiani, he has transformed the first floor of the townhouse into a two-bedroom artists’ residence. Filled with artefacts, antiques, family heirlooms and works from Pace’s own collection, it offers a stay that’s curated in the literal and colloquial senses – a unique aesthetic expression in, and of, Termoli. 

“I wanted to make a space where the people who are giving their time and expertise to the museum could be inspired,” says Pace. “Not just artists and architects” – both Kuma and the Albanian artist Adrian Paci, whose work will inaugurate the museum, have stayed in the flat – “but chefs, writers, and musicians.” We are speaking over tea in the residence’s dining room. The 1930s French mahogany table is covered in a blue antique Burmese textile, found on Pace’s travels; the banquette is lined with cushions upholstered in an indigo fabric by London- and Paris-based designer Jennifer Shorto, an old friend. 

Pace’s paternal ancestors were gentleman farmers who cultivated wheat for flour and grapes for export. The house, set at the edge of the old town, descends down the rampart wall to the marina below; it appears to have just two storeys from its cobblestoned street entrance, but in fact there are four. “The bottom part of the house was a warehouse in the 18th and 19th centuries,” says Pace. (Today he rents the space to an Irish artist with a passel of friendly dogs.) After the second world war, the goods were moved elsewhere, and the house given to Pace’s father, who later bequeathed it to Pace. He eventually embarked on a full restoration “because I had the idea for the residence already germinating, but also because I needed a place to put all the furniture and art from my flats in London and Paris, which I had sold. 

“Marco and I met a long time ago through friends, and he’d always stood out as a talented architect and interior designer,” Pace says of Parmeggiani. “But beyond that, he knows all my stuff, so he was the perfect person to work with me on this.” The brief they set themselves: use every piece of art and furniture from the former houses that would make sense in a coherent whole. “He always talked about it in terms of a sort of retreat,” says Parmeggiani. “The whole ‘dream of Italian travels’, this was also a bit my idea,” Pace interjects. “That historical beauty, what Italy does so well. That’s why the piano is still there,” he adds, indicating a burlwood baby grand – another heirloom – dominating the corner of the sitting room.

“This is a vera casa storica,” Pace continues, pointing out the details. The foundations date back to the early 16th century; the handpainted detailing in the sitting room is 19th-century. A trompe l’oeil fresco on a wall in the ground-floor foyer, depicting an open arch and, beyond, the Adriatic sparkling, is an homage to the actual archway and view that the foyer gave on to before 1992. “The wall was ugly,” Pace laughs. “We had to do something.”

The artist’s residence has been interpreted as “a circular Roman house; a palindrome, including the terrace” – the latter is as wide as the residence itself, and shaded by a Guido Toschi-designed canvas canopy. Wardrobes were removed in both bedrooms, amplifying space. In the master bedroom, the bed is flanked by two of India Mahdavi’s signature Ringo tables; a sea-toned rug by Federica Tondato lies underfoot. The bathroom has been carved out of the bedroom space by half-wall bookcases. Parmeggiani aligned the passage between them with the bathroom’s tall paned window to allow light to pass through. The grey-beige stone that clads the shower is smoothly polished. “The sink is 18th-century, and definitely Molisano, probably used as a washbasin,” says Parmeggiani, pointing out its worn, cratered surface. “But the stone is the same.”

“This borgo is very unique,” says Parmegginani. “It’s almost a discrete promontory from the rest of the town and it’s almost in the sea, like an island,” he notes. 

“It made the colours difficult, because they change so much with this light,” says Pace of the decorative challenge. “The master bedroom’s walls, for example, are a sort of military grey, but it shifts tone throughout the day.” He and Parmeggiani had little idea how the deep brown they chose for the guest bedroom would read until it was actually painted. It casts a theatrical but pleasing contrast between walls, original russet tiled floors and the monochrome brocade on the beds.

It all comes to exuberant fruition in the sitting room, where 19th-century colour and design already existed in such abundance that they dictated Pace’s decision to install only black-and-white art. Monumental works by Gianluca Di Pasquale, Alexander Vethers and Charles Avery are displayed “almost as with a cinematic screen”, says Pace, against the ornately frescoed ceilings and panel-painted walls. A Chapter One bookshelf by India Mahdavi is filled with primitive pottery and artefacts from Puglia. Two sofas – one an original Christian Liaigre design, the other by Mahdavi – face each other over a 1950s Danish coffee table; on a third side is an early-
19th-century divan. Covering the original 18th-century flagstone floor is another Federica Tondato rug, this one a riot of colour that’s a modern rhyme with the old walls.

It’s a culmination of Pace’s history, writ large and boldly, in a showplace that plays convincingly the role of a home. Above all, the residence is a very contemporary and sophisticated surprise, here in tiny, uncelebrated Termoli. Which, if Pace has his way, won’t be a valid description for much longer. 

Cape Town sits between ocean and mountain, so its natural allure is assured — but can the city cope with its continued popularity? This city report kicks off this special issue, which also travels from sculptural rammed-earth homes in the desert to 18th-century mansions on the shores of Lake Como, from turquoise lagoons in Florida to swimming in the Seine . . . 

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Twenty-five years ago, Zaha Hadid designed a tent outside the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens. Its white fabric roof was folded into a geometry of irregular triangles, swooping and lifting. It was quite a modest thing, a one-off commission for an acclaimed architect who had at that time, almost unbelievably, never built anything in her adopted home city. 

That tent would become the first iteration of an annual programme that has become a highly anticipated summer moment and, looking at this year’s contribution, one which has continued to grow in scale, ambition, expense and expectation. This year’s Serpentine Pavilion comes in the form of a large hangar of a structure designed, in a neat symmetry, by another brilliant woman architect from a Muslim country, Marina Tabassum. 

That long run of projects, however, a quarter of a century of commissions, takes a toll in sustaining interest. New themes have emerged over the course of the commissions: climate, sustainability, history, nature and memory (in a very meta move, architects Herzog & de Meuron and artist Ai Weiwei excavated the site to reveal the archaeology of the pavilions themselves). A certain inflation has set in, an increase in impact to maintain visibility. There has been a clear move away from white men (Bjarke Ingels was the last in 2016) but the commission has mostly kept to its core mission of exposing architects who have otherwise not built in the UK before.

Occasionally, the rhetoric clashes with reality. Despite much talk of sustainability, these are solid structures, requiring plenty of concrete and steel, which have to survive the unpredictable English weather through to autumn and accommodate an increasingly demanding schedule of events. 

What is a little surprising is that Tabassum, a Bangladeshi architect who is accustomed to working with minimal resources using light-touch materials such as bamboo and woven panels (at least in her work for the poor and marginalised), has employed heavy materials and substantial engineering to create her pavilion this year. 

The building is the shape of an extravagant jelly mould, a cylinder with half-domed ends and dark timber arches clad in tinted polycarbonate panels. It is big, and reminded me of those photos of epic, early 20th-century airship hangars. It has also been designed to move, one of its sections sliding to allow different permutations of open and enclosed space, although to me it looked like it might be quite a palaver for not that much effect.

The interior is undeniably impressive, an echo of the vast British greenhouses of the Victorian era. The light is diffused through various shades of brown and the surrounding foliage casts gorgeous, shifting shadows while the open sky remains visible through gaps in the structure. At its centre is a single ginkgo tree, the leaves of which will turn from green to yellow over the course of the pavilion’s existence in the park (for those worried about the harming of trees, it will be replanted in the park after the pavilion is gone). Apparently inspired by the shamiana structures of south Asia, temporary wedding and festival venues that appear overnight saturated with colour and excitement, this capsule is a more refined, more heavyweight version, similarly aimed at creating a sense of occasion and gathering.

Nearby this year is another structure, a “play pavilion” for children which sees the sudden return of white men, this time in the form of 1960s pop radical and Archigram co-founder Peter Cook. His structure, sponsored by Lego (and looking every inch of it), was still under wraps when I visited but there was plenty visible. A garish orange pavilion with layers of Lego applied as decoration in the form of contoured landscapes, it looks a little self-consciously wacky, in the vein of dungareed kids’ show presenters, but also refreshingly unserious. Its folded roof even contains a subtle hint of Hadid’s triangulated structures. Which would be the only subtle thing about it.

Back in the brown, though, it might be that the burden of having to follow so many designs by so many esteemed designers is beginning to result in a certain burden. Lina Ghotmeh’s structure in 2023 similarly struggled to reconcile big social space with the frippery of the temporary. Minsuk Cho attempted to reintroduce a certain playfulness last year, but maybe the pavilions have lost some of the lightness and whimsicality which, you might think, should define a pavilion in a park. Perhaps the world has become a little too dark for pavilions, and architecture has been overburdened with responsibilities.

There is also, counter-intuitively, something a little too finished about this pavilion. It sounds a curious critique but it is very beautifully made, the subtle gradations of tones in brown and beige are super-tasteful and the result is something that looks ostentatiously luxurious, like those exclusive fashion pop-ups in Parisian or Milanese courtyards around catwalk shows. 

Yet this remains an astonishing, admirable programme. At the press launch, Serpentine artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist called it “an architecture without doors — free and open to all”. And absolutely it is. All this costs not a penny of public money (funding comes from Goldman Sachs, among others) and provides an opportunity to experience designs by the world’s most esteemed and intriguing architects first-hand. Its ephemerality is sometimes criticised (including by me), and yet it is also its essence; its impermanence is its urgency. See it while you can. 

Opens June 6; ‘Play Pavilion’ by Peter Cook opens June 11; serpentinegalleries.org

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From the bay window in our dining nook, the view down the gently sloping terrain to the road and parallel train tracks is a still one, apart from a frantic lizard hoping to avoid the watchful eyes of a roadrunner. A gust of wind stirs up a dust devil, making the yucca stalks wave. The land is dotted with colour from wild flowers and hummingbirds. This is summer in Marfa. It’s the time of year we cherish most, here in the far west of Texas.

While much of the state is dripping with humidity, our days are dry. A certain slowness is required. In animals, the search for respite is called aestivation: a period of dormancy, much like hibernation but in the warm season. We humans, meanwhile, cultivate indoor spaces to become cool, calm shelters from the sun during the day; we nurture outdoor alcoves to allow us to be outside as it rises and sets. After all, according to Joan Didion, writing from California’s Death Valley, “stories travel at night on the desert”. These regions, which make up a third of the Earth’s land, might seem inhospitable — but for those who learn to live with them, they can be magical. 

We — two arts writers and photographers, who met while studying in Austin and were drawn back to Texas after living in Denmark, Germany, Mexico and Cuba — decided to find others who, like us, welcome the heat. We visited the Patagonian Steppe, Mars-like swaths in Jordan, the India-Pakistan border and the south-western US. The result — our book Desert by Design — is an ode to these arid landscapes and the creative minds who inhabit them. These are difficult places to live, and over thousands of years a number of architectural tricks have been developed to live in them comfortably; the people we meet have put them to use with style and innovation. 

As temperatures rise globally, “we are going to have to look to homes in regions like these to understand how future generations are going to live”, says Demion Clinco. A Democrat who served in the Arizona House of Representatives, he is also chief executive of the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation and counts a 1970s residence designed by Judith Chafee as part of his property portfolio.

Areas for sitting and dining are open to the outdoors — capitalising on cool breezes and the shade as they shift throughout the day. One circular dining space has tall walls but no ceiling; the perfect spot for stargazing

The American architect, who married a modernist style with a reverence for nature, had immersed herself in the 4-acre site near the Santa Catalina Mountains, Arizona, learning the patterns of the sun and the shade. The result is a network of interconnected rooms that twist around courtyards and patios of varying shape and size, keeping the Sonoran Desert in view without letting it become overwhelmed by sun and heat. 

Partially submerged into the earth, the lower levels stay cool with opposing windows that encourage a cross-breeze. It is precisely this attunement to the local landscape and climate that is its enduring strength, says Clinco; the question for future architects is not just how to live with heat, but how to do so while minimising reliance on air conditioning.

Nadia Begin, a resident of the experimental eco-city Arcosanti, in Arizona, agrees; architecture should not fight its surroundings, but be adapted to it — and that goes for the residents too. Arcosanti might have imposing concrete structures with sci-fi geometries and huge circular windows, but they are built into the hillside; the walls were cast in the ground’s silt so that the texture and tone match. “We constantly have to develop more sustainable systems, which means that we have to learn to effectively engage with [the environment] around us,” she says. “Isn’t that what the world needs more of?”

Begin and her husband adopt low-tech cooling tactics such as lime-washing windows to filter the light. “We are intentionally not isolated from the desert,” she says. The late Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri, who began designing Arcosanti in 1970, “consciously wanted us not to get too comfortable. We should feel cold in winter and warm in summer. We shouldn’t be in a bubble.” 

Soleri had studied under Frank Lloyd Wright, and though the two had differing visions, they both believed in organic architecture that harmonises with its surroundings, that takes inspiration from vernacular construction, but reinterprets it in modern materials.

Other architects embrace tried and tested elements just as they are. When Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty, of Studio KO, and their mentor Jean-Noël Schoeffer acquired an old farmhouse 33 kilometres from their Moroccan base, they renovated it as a retreat to suit their modern needs. But they did so, Fournier says, by “creating with as little impact as possible”, maintaining the traditional insulating thick walls, small windows, network of small rooms and low doorways that all work to regulate temperature.

Johnny Ortiz-Concha, a chef based in a secluded northern New Mexico village, and his partner, curator Maida Branch, are some of the many people we spoke to who are sanguine about the heat, accepting that living in a desert simply means you will be hot. They live in a traditional earthen home, where they eschew air conditioning and central heating (it can get cold here, too). “Experiencing discomfort is part of existing in the natural world,” Branch says. “It’s where growth happens.”

For the couple, the summer heat makes the nights here, and their daily margarita, all the more satisfying. Ortiz-Concha forages rose hips, plums, pine shoots and prickly pear from the surrounding area for his supper club. “Desert plants are harder to get to and tend to produce less [fruit],” he says. “But they’re so much sweeter because they have to fight to survive.”

These environments are far from barren; many are their own small oases amid the sand and rock. In Egypt, near the Libyan border, the home shared by designer-architect India Mahdavi and her friend, environmentalist Mounir Neamatalla, is surrounded by a verdant grove of palm trees.

Positioned between the salt lakes of Siwa with the dunes of the Sahara beyond, and the western slope of Adrére Amellal (the “White Mountain” that lent its name to Neamatalla’s eco-hotel), the sandy pink house blends into the environment. Small windows minimise the heat. A number of areas for sitting and dining are open to the outdoors — capitalising on cool breezes and the shade as they shift throughout the day. One circular dining space has tall walls but no ceiling; the perfect spot for stargazing. The compound is more than a den for midday hibernation; it is built in concert with the desert.

Eight hundred kilometres east, in the cacophonous desert metropolis of Cairo, the art scholar and traditional costume collector Shahira Mehrez has also created her own lush enclave in the sky. Collaborating with sustainable architect Hassan Fathy, she modelled her penthouse apartment on the layout of traditional homes where “no space is lost”, with latticework window coverings and a sunken marble bathtub.

She refers to darker, more intimate corners, like her bedroom, as “cocoons” and says she spends the majority of her time in the courtyard, with its plants, central fountain and pink plaster walls. Here, adobe bricks stacked in triangular formations filter daylight while allowing a draft to flow through. “It is a house for all seasons,” Mehrez says triumphantly.

Fournier, Marty and Schoeffer used Berber techniques and natural insulating materials such as mud, chalk, palm and eucalyptus in Marrakech, while Mahdavi and Neamatalla’s thick walls are made from the local Egyptian material known as kershef, a blend of mud, rock salt and other minerals, which means the building melds with its surroundings.

In a micro-desert in the Otago province, New Zealand, Veronica Alkema and Gary Stewart also turned to the ground, utilising rammed earth for thick walls that regulate temperatures in their modern, angular house. “Actively engaging with a place, being connected to the way things change season to season, understanding the cycle of nature, has been great for our mental balance,” says Alkema.

But others have a more radical interpretation of traditional methods. In the high altitudes of southern Colorado, artist Ronald Rael engages with the earthen buildings of his ancestral homeland by restoring existing adobe structures and creating contemporary ones with technologies such as 3D printing.

“I feel like I grew up in the 1800s, when electricity and running water were brand new,” Rael says of his rural upbringing. “And now I work with robots in the very same place.” His mud-based buildings and sculptural installations are at once familiar — inspired by indigenous tradition and “the genius of the past” — and completely futuristic.

Meanwhile, in the Indian state of Rajasthan, Dushyant Bansal and Priyanka Sharma of Studio Raw Material opted for another bountiful natural resource: marble. Both studied at London’s Royal College of Art but were drawn back to their home country by the stone. From centuries-old quarries, the duo harvested a patchwork of castoffs to pave their long central hallway, which connects to spacious rooms with sparse furniture and high ceilings. They show that what is often seen as a barren and inhospitable land can provide great treasures. 

It may be like an oven out there, hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement, but in these dry, dusty locales, incomparable beauty, a trove of generational knowledge and a wealth of resources can be found, for those who pay attention. To live stylishly and sustainably, the best solutions are often right under your feet.

“Desert by Design”, by Molly Mandell and James Burke (Abrams)

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On a hill overlooking the city of Bordeaux is a spectacular glass and concrete house constructed in a trio of layers. What really sets the 1990s structure by architecture studio OMA apart, however, is the “James Bond-esque” platform lift in the middle of the building, says Christopher Scarffe. The London-based architect with Universal Design Studio pinpoints the property as a bold example of design that prioritises the desires of its disabled inhabitant, who used a wheelchair.

“Contrary to what you would expect, I do not want a simple house,” the homeowner said in his brief. “I want a complex house, because the house will define my world.” OMA’s response was not simply a technical solution, but a form of “liberation”.

“When we talk about disability, we often ignore the quieter moments in our lives,” says Natalie Kane, curator of Design and Disability, an upcoming exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that draws attention to accessibility in a holistic, experiential sense; how it can and should do more than the bare minimum. “For me, the home is where it starts, and then it goes outwards.” 

The exhibition celebrates “the radical contributions of disabled, deaf and neurodivergent people to design history and contemporary culture” — and demands that society does more to cater to them. The discussion comes at an inflection point for architecture and design, when building regulations are regularly being reassessed along more sustainable lines, when housebuilding is under the spotlight, and when retrofitting and repurposing heritage buildings is top of mind. With people living for longer, there is also growing pressure to cater to the needs of an ageing population. Why is it that disability is still often framed as a problem to solve, not a lived experience that shapes how one in six people globally, according to the World Health Organization, relate to the world?   

A raft of architects is challenging this imbalance, creating buildings for people to flourish and enjoy themselves, not simply complying with legislation. Often their experiences, while forging new paths, expose flaws in the system. 

In England, 9 per cent of homes meet the basic accessibility standard. Some 400,000 wheelchair users live in unsuitable homes. The built environment sector must up its game, says Amanprit Arnold, a disability urban strategist who advised the Greater London Authority on its design policy and founded the DeafCity Hub. “Not only is it the right thing to do, it’s better business. The spending power of disabled households in the UK alone is £274bn per year, and there is a clear market gap.” 

In 2023, the DisOrdinary Architecture collective, which campaigns to shift paradigms about disability across the UK built environment, published Many More Parts Than M! — a compendium that rails against the Building Regulations’ minimum accessibility standard: Part M. It is a manifesto for spaces to go “beyond the limitations of banal ‘one-size-fits-all’ technical solutions, especially when these tend to be mere ‘add-ons’ at the end of the design process”.

Not only is it the right thing to do, it’s better business. The spending power of disabled households in the UK alone is £274bn per year, and there is a clear market gap

Currently, the regulations are largely focused on mobility — there’s little reference to the needs of deaf or blind people, or those with neurodivergence or learning disabilities. The sector has waited since 2022 for a second consultation on raising expectations. DisOrdinary Architecture draws on disability scholarship and activism to think not just about the ability to “get in”, but also about pleasurable, beautiful places. 

This includes sound, smell and touch. The V&A exhibition highlights a boarding school for blind children in India, where as well as walls with different textures to aid navigation, corridors are designed with echoes in mind, and the scent of an aromatic courtyard draws the children outside. 

Accessible design need not be medicalised and clinical; it can be holistic and beautiful. In 2019, Tigg + Coll Architects extended a Surrey home for a couple whose two children have Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a disorder characterised by progressive muscle degeneration and decreasing mobility over time. The L-shaped addition, shortlisted for the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) House of the Year award in 2021, is topped with a latticed timber roof that also wraps around the existing building. It is light and airy, yet the “diagrid” structure is strong enough to support hoists. The large canopied, open-plan space evokes “the spirit and enjoyment of being in the garden”, says architect David Tigg, while the architecture should still work as their needs change.

On a practical level, large bedrooms can fit adjustable beds and motorised wheelchairs, non-load-bearing walls can be easily moved, and sliding doors offer unimpeded navigation. “The final design captures what we were after: intelligence, creativity and practicality . . . to meet our sons’ needs, present and future,” says homeowner Nick Taussig. “It is life-changing and life-affirming; it will make a deep impact on the quality of Theo and Oskar’s lives. It will enable them, not disable them further.”  

Often the key is in creative thinking rather than technical fixes, which Tigg says doesn’t have to cost more. “You just need to use more brain power and imagination to develop it — with details that avoid a clinical aesthetic.” 

Architecture today tends to subscribe to the social model of disability, which asserts that people are not disabled by their bodies but by social and physical barriers — just as not having stairs prevents an able-bodied person from going up a floor, so does the absence of a ramp for someone in a wheelchair. 

“But where is the ramp?” asks Scarffe. His research into how spatial design can empower or disable, and his advisory role for the mayor of London and the Greater London Authority (GLA) both drew on his own experience of disability — he has congenital upper limb difference. “Yes, it’s important to remove barriers, but how you’re removing them is important: are you sending people in wheelchairs through the back or front entrance? You perceive people differently if they enter a building like a second-class citizen.” 

As well as OMA’s Bordeaux Bond lair, Scarffe points to the Edinburgh home created in 2013 by Thea McMillan for her own family, by way of positive example. There, a ramp — ostensibly for her daughter, who has cerebral palsy — is a central feature for everyone to enjoy, with spaces emanating from it. 

Another successful example is a RIBA award-winning London project by 6A Architects where a winding new wooden intervention between a pair of existing Grade II-listed cottages catered to the needs of a busy mother who used a wheelchair; as well as a direct route to the garden and additional ground floor space, it allowed her to see the kitchen, people moving through the old houses and the street beyond.

Accessibility is among the judging criteria for RIBA awards. It specifies that winning projects balance “ideas of beauty and culture, history and context with societal concerns for inclusivity and diversity, ecology and sustainability, all bound together in a memorable and emotional spatial experience” — rather than thinking of it as a silo.

When Alexander Hills Architects converted old stable buildings at the Norfolk home of a retired farmer who used a wheelchair, the design not only considered accessibility — level thresholds and wide doorways, for example — but also the journey through the home, lowering sightlines to open up expansive views across the Glaven Valley landscapes he farmed for 70 years. 

These projects demonstrate the possibilities of visionary architecture. But most must make do with what already exists. Mark Carlisle, a former property estate manager who lives in rural Oxfordshire, has adapted his privately rented home over time as his multiple sclerosis has progressed, and he has moved from using a walking frame to a wheelchair — by knocking down a wall between two smaller rooms, adding ramps, grab rails and remote control switches. “It’s worked for five years, but it’s not perfect and what works today won’t necessarily tomorrow,” he says. “And even though the landlord is relaxed, the changes we make have to be generally acceptable or reversible.”

The fact is that, in the UK, there simply aren’t enough homes that prioritise disability. While new-builds and conversions have to comply with accessibility regulations, developers are often driven by cost considerations to do only the bare minimum. Research by Habinteg, one of the country’s few accessible social housing providers, revealed that someone joining a local authority waiting list for a wheelchair-accessible home in England today could have to wait up to 47 years, based on the estimated 20,000-person backlog. 

In the private rented sector the Equality Act compels landlords to make “reasonable adjustments” for tenants’ needs, but what that means is subjective and market realities limit choice. “Trying to rent in London means you’re competing with 200 people for each place, which might be the only one in weeks that’s suitable for me,” says Poppy Levison, an architecture student and researcher who is blind and advised on the V&A exhibition.

Christopher Laing, an architect at Stirling Prize-winning architectural studio Haworth Tompkins and founder of advocacy group Deaf Architecture Front, says part of the problem is the underrepresentation of people with disabilities in the building process (there are only seven known deaf architects in the UK). This means there’s a lack of understanding of specific needs, such as “DeafSpace” principles. “For example, reflective tiles in a kitchen could alert a deaf person that someone is behind them while they are cooking,” he says. 

For example, reflective tiles in a kitchen could alert a deaf person that someone is behind them while they are cooking

The same applies to other disabilities. Levison points to the mistaken assumption that you don’t need to consider lighting when designing for visually impaired people. “If you get a bunch of blind people in a room together, the one thing they will not shut up about is what lighting levels they like,” she says. “Some people have light sensitivity, for others a really bright light means they can see things. Something small like having a light over a hob in a kitchen can be completely groundbreaking — it means I can cook.” 

Levison, who is currently studying for an MA in architecture at the Royal College of Art, believes the necessary shift in mindset starts with education. “Over my four years of study I haven’t had one lecture about accessibility,” she says.

As a result, it is treated as a box-ticking afterthought. “Which means it’s often ugly, reinforcing the idea that it’s an inconvenience,” continues Levison. “But if you’d considered it from day one, it wouldn’t look incoherent with the rest of the building.” Just as sustainable design is associated with a particular aesthetic, accessibility can be too, if architects see it as desirable and life-enhancing. 

Demographic realities may soon force a shift. “Not necessarily because people want to do things for disabled people, but because non-disabled people are ageing and demanding it,” says Levison. It’s increasingly common to find housing developments for older people that eschew an institutional look: among them is Stirling Prize-winning architect Witherford Watson Mann’s Appleby Blue Almshouse in Southwark, south London, a social housing development for over-65s.

For Levison, the London home that architect Sarah Wigglesworth designed for herself and her husband — a live-work unit in an old forge — is an unusually forward-thinking example. “They did a retrofit to make it more accessible as they age, with nicely designed grab rails and a step-free shower,” she says. It is refreshing, she says, to “see people being upfront with the fact their needs will change: usually it’s reactionary”.

If it’s possible to create spaces that consider accessibility and experience for older people, what would it take for developers and architects to consider disability more broadly? 

Scarffe’s own particular interest is in retrofitting — a pertinent subject given that the UK’s housing stock is the oldest in Europe. He’s adamant that protecting heritage should never be an excuse to deny equal access, but also that refurbishment represents a chance to assert more progressive values. “Some of the most celebrated buildings were designed in a time where disabled people were ostracised,” he says. “Retrofitting them boldly is an amazing opportunity to send a message that we are rejecting the ideas of the past.” 

And yet, he concludes, “Even in a world where everything was ramped, disability would still exist, because there are cultural barriers when it comes to how you view someone with a disability.” He is calling instead for an affirmative model of disability: “We need to go beyond legislation to a cultural change, where disability is treated as an identity to be celebrated.”

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It’s difficult to imagine an architecture further from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s South Kensington home than that of its new venue, the Storehouse. When the Victorians built a cultural landscape, they did not mess about. They created a group of buildings and institutions so massive and monumental it is difficult to think of them ever disappearing. They will make magnificent ruins. 

When, however, the London of the early 21st century built its cultural quarter, this time from the toxic industrial landscape of east London, they made something very different. Instead of a piece of city it was more a collection of things in a park surrounded by as yet non-existent (although now very existent) developers’ spec towers. One of those buildings was a media centre, sitting on the site of a former dog-racing stadium. Almost a 1,000ft long, profoundly utilitarian, it was destined to become that most dismal of architectural archetypes, a data centre.

Instead something much more interesting has happened. The V&A has taken a big chunk of it and stored part of its vast archive there. Museum storage is almost always in nondescript warehouses, usually in anonymous industrial parks. But what the museum has done here is not the usual secretive and secure warehousing. Rather they have made it into a spectacle; a spectacle of storage. The architects are Diller Scofidio + Renfro, a New York-based practice that has been experimenting with different approaches to cultural space for decades and whose work includes New York’s High Line and Shed and LA’s Broad Museum. At the Broad, a decade ago, they were already exposing the storage at the heart of the building by giving visitors a glimpse into its racks. Now, in Stratford, they have eliminated the exterior presence altogether and created a cultural warehouse.

Visitors arrive at an unassuming entrance marked only by a supergraphic V&A sign. A lobby is equally modest, resembling a relaxed co-working space. They then ascend a stair (it does seem a little inaccessible to start with a stair) and are thrust right into the storage space, squeezed between two stacks of classical busts, from antique to modern, braced and seatbelted on their wooden pallets.

If the exterior seems purely functional, this interior is theatrical, a device for suggesting the sheer scale of the collection

From there a gantry takes them on into the vast space, surrounded entirely by racks of stuff. If the exterior seems purely functional, this interior is theatrical, a device for suggesting the sheer scale of the collection. A few exhibits have been strategically placed to create moments of revelation; an intricately carved dome from a palace near Toledo (the Torrijos Ceiling, 1490s); a chunk of the concrete facade of the late 1960s/early 1970s brutalist Robin Hood Gardens housing estate from nearby Poplar; a wonderful Frank Lloyd Wright timber-lined 1930s office interior (which I last saw in the 1990s and has been in storage ever since) and a tiny pioneering 1920s Frankfurt Kitchen by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, a condensed example of pure modernist functionalism. And, below your feet and visible via a glass floor panel, a section of the 17th-century marble Agra Colonnade from Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s bathhouse. Another huge space allows a display of large artefacts, for now a large painted stage front cloth from 1924 based on a Picasso painting for the Ballets Russes.

Most of what you see, however, is just stuff, the brown furniture of the museum world. There are chests inlaid with marquetry, majolica and mopeds, paintings, hardware, clocks, sewing machines, guitars and injection-moulded plastic chairs. If it was in a vitrine you’d walk right past it but oddly here everything looks like a find, more intriguing, like a treasure unearthed in a junk shop.

Mini-displays allow curators to show what they are currently working on or thinking about, little ensembles of curious objects which, together, tell a story. Tim Reeve, the V&A’s deputy director, whose baby this very much is, points out a case of four stelae, funerary markers with human heads carved in stone which are here for safekeeping, awaiting their return to Yemen, having been intercepted after likely being looted, an unexpected story of objects in limbo. “There’s a desire here to be a bit more responsive, more spontaneous,” Reeve tells me. “We’re expecting a younger audience here, one which might be a little intimidated by a museum so we’re trying to make it more immediate.”

The sense that you are in a back-of-house space is, of course, itself an artifice. But it works. There are viewing gantries looking down into conservation workshops and there will be staff moving objects around, to go on display or on loan, to be repaired or to be returned. That is the idea, says Reeve, to get an idea of the museum not as a static, secretive institution but as a place of everyday work and study, observation and movement. Visitors will be able also to order up items in advance from the archive, making this huge collection of 250,000 objects, 350,000 books, and almost 1,000 separate archives genuinely fully accessible for the first time. The David Bowie Collection, currently being built inside, will open soon as well.

Architecturally this is as much the world of Ikea or the distribution centre as it is the world of museums. The racks are, according to the architects, pretty much the same as those in commercial warehousing and DIY stores. It is also very much in the vanguard of a global shift in thinking about museums in which archives are being dragged out into the light. The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s Depot in Rotterdam got there first but that was a much smaller scheme and more carefully choreographed. Museums are often criticised for showing so little of what they have in store (particularly when facing claims about restitution, as keeping objects in storage undermines the case for retention) and the hierarchies of selection, of elite objects being picked above others, are becoming unfashionable.

Twenty-five years ago Tate Modern opened to almost universal acclaim. In a way, it changed everything. The idea of reuse of a structure, once quite marginal, now seems not only reasonable but inescapable. Here, a banal building has been imbued with magic with its piling up of things, Citizen Kane style, each object seemingly re-enchanted. But more than that, this strategy absolves the museum from the burden of creating an identity.

The V&A already has an image in South Kensington; this intervention smartly elides the inescapable issue of the icon by being all about the interior. I think it may prove to be as important to the museum as Tate Modern was 25 years ago. It represents a huge shift in museology; the deliberate revelation of the process. Curators, conservators, art movers and handlers, for so long hidden away, are being acknowledged. I’d suggest that this building is that rare thing in culture: a genuinely radical work in which the architects have sublimated their ego and retreated into the background to give way to process and the spectacle of the artefacts themselves to create a new and very contemporary kind of museum.

Opens May 31. vam.ac.uk/east

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Two of the first places ever listed as Unesco World Heritage sites were, perhaps surprisingly, both in Ecuador; the Galápagos Islands and Quito. The Galápagos we can understand: the giant tortoises, the iguanas, the penguins, Charles Darwin, an isolated tropical world. Quito — a city so high up it makes you nauseous, edged with apparently undistinguished office blocks and heavy traffic — is perhaps less scrutable.

But this city of around 3mn inhabitants also has a remarkable historic centre, far better preserved than many in Latin America. It has churches that appear to be lined with solid gold, sun-shaded colonial-era courtyards and Baroque towers that look like they’re dusted in icing sugar. And it has a wealth of modernist architecture, made by a generation of central European émigrés. 

In the foothills of the Andes, at almost 3,000 metres above sea level (only La Paz is a higher capital), you might think Quito would not be seeking still more height. Yet for just over a decade, the development firm Uribe Schwarzkopf has been adding a succession of high-rise apartment buildings of remarkable ambition. Well-known names including BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), MAD, MVRDV, Tatiana Bilbao, Jean Nouvel and Moshe Safdie have been commissioned to inject Quito with a dose of architectural adrenaline. The developer has completed more than 200 projects in Quito and the fruits of its labours are now transforming the city skyline.

Founded by architect Tommy Schwarzkopf in 1973, the developer inherits a tradition of Ecuadorean modernism influenced by central Europe. The country saw a wave of immigration from what was then Czechoslovakia, after the Munich Agreement in 1938 and during the second world war, as Jewish citizens fled the Nazis. They found a small, quiet city defined by its colonial heritage and introduced a crisp new architectural style — one from a country that had been revelling in redefining its cityscapes post-Austro-Hungarian liberty, until they were crushed again by war. 

Over the past 12 years we’ve tried to bring great architects in to make Quito a modern city. We’re trying to create a skyline, an identity

Quito’s centre is still punctuated by remarkable buildings and monuments from this era.

Casa Kohn, built by architect Karl Kohn for his family in 1949, is an exquisite time capsule of Czech modernism, with hints of Adolf Loos and Josef Frank tempered with tropical influences from Brazilian architecture. The vivid blue and white 1952 Olga Fisch Folklore Flagship Store, named after the Hungarian designer and crafts collector and designed by Czech émigré Otto Glass Pick, is also still open. 

Tommy Schwarzkopf himself is the grandson of Czech émigrés who arrived in Quito in 1939; the legacy is one both he and his son Joseph are well aware of, and have even self-published a book about Ecuador’s Czech modernists.

If that modernist influx was a significant moment in the globalisation of Quito’s architecture, Uribe Schwarzkopf’s portfolio suggests another. The starchitect-designed buildings introduce a flashier, more exhibitionist style amid Quito’s still subdued skyline.

“Over the past 12 years we’ve tried to bring great architects in to make Quito a modern city,” says Joseph Schwarzkopf. “We’re trying to create a skyline, an identity.”

Tommy says that Quito has long seen “the middle class abandoning the historic centre”; it has become less and less desirable as a residential hub as buildings fall into disrepair. In the early 2000s there were nearly half a million Ecuadoreans living in Spain and not many fewer in the US. “They and their children who were raised in Europe became used to a more European, Mediterranean lifestyle, living in the city, going to restaurants and cafés, walking rather than using cars all the time,” Joseph says. The developer’s urban apartment blocks are designed to cater for a returning cohort, but also, they suggest, to attract them back to invest in their homeland. 

Architect and theorist Christian Parreno, a professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, questions the strategy. “There are people returning from Europe,” he says, “but not at a big scale and those that return tend to be young. Even if the prices look affordable, they are very expensive for younger people who have yet to establish themselves.” Rather than the developments forging their own identity, he adds, “They are very much influenced by a US lifestyle. Big, open kitchens and living spaces, pools, lots of amenities.”

One of the developer’s most impressive new structures is the 32-storey Iqon (completed in 2022), a tower composed of a stack of boxes twisted into a spiral. Designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and his practice BIG, it overlooks the large, central La Carolina Park. It is undoubtedly striking, and the rotating arrangement of box units are generous and uncompromised (except for the occasional massive concrete column poking through). But it does have more than a hint of Miami to it.

Large balconies with trees “allow the park to cross the street and climb up the building” Ingels says. Concrete-lined, the interiors have high ceilings and dramatic floor-to-ceiling glazing. BIG is also responsible for (the equally questionably named) Epiq, an elliptical tower split into two stepped, interlocking parts, with similar astonishing views of the surrounding hills. 

In the Cumbaya neighbourhood to the east, Aquarela looks like a city within a city. It’s an undulating mass of strata, wrapping a series of courtyards and gardens filled with tropical plants. Wandering around, a vivid hummingbird appeared in a bough right next to my head. Aquarela was designed by Jean Nouvel, the architect behind the striking Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Qatar National Museum. Clad in stone and engulfed by greenery, it appears almost like the part-excavated remains of another civilisation and evokes experiments in housing from the late 1960s. 

Building in the centre means we don’t have to build huge parking lots and can make denser, more walkable cityscapes. It is becoming a 15-minute city again

There is such a wide spectrum of architecture here that some, perhaps inevitably, is less to my taste. Chinese architects MAD seem to be trying a little too hard with Qondesa, a kind of swaying, slightly queasy tower. Its fluid concrete frame creates a bent cage through which balconies squeeze. Moshe Safdie’s Qorner tower, with its eroded, pixelated profile, hovers somewhere between intriguing and overbearing. But the nearby Qanvas, a slim tower designed by local architects Diez and Muller looks very fine indeed — a throwback to the slick mid-century modernism of the city centre. 

Despite this starchitect presence, Quito is not Manhattan and La Carolina is not Central Park. Prices for apartments range from $1,800-$3,200 per sq m. “You can buy one of our apartments on the park for $100,000,” says Joseph. The top flight offerings in Iqon and Aquarela are around half a million US dollars. “We can’t sell at prices like London or New York,” says Joseph. “A legacy for the city,” is driving the strategy, he claims. 

I ask Parreno if locals see these projects as gentrification. “In a way, yes,” he says, “but the problem in Quito is that we have a very thin middle class; [those] that would be responsible for gentrification [are] not really here in numbers.”

Joseph, however, points to the opening of the new Metro line and the arrival of more European-style cafés as markers of how the city is becoming more cosmopolitan. “Building in the centre means we don’t have to build huge parking lots and can make denser, more walkable cityscapes,” he says. “It is becoming a 15-minute city again.” I wonder if this is perhaps a little hopeful. It is a hilly, traffic-clogged city; those with money seem to be driving. 

There are continuing questions too about security. Ecuador had historically been a haven from the drug cartels that plague neighbouring Peru and Colombia, but over the past few years the port of Guayaquil, an eight-hour drive to the south, had become a hub for exporting cocaine, bringing with it a bout of crime and unrest. Uribe Schwarzkopf has been busy there too, with buildings by Dutch architects MVRDV and Philippe Starck, but Guayaquil remains a volatile city. Quito may have calmed since the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio in 2023 but its peacefulness appears fragile.

Perhaps working with prestigious international architects provides a note of optimism. “On the one hand you have to credit them with building at scale and at height and to a real quality,” says New York-based Ecuadorean architect Felipe Correa. But, he says, “the typologies offer one particular lifestyle: urban, cosmopolitan, high-rise. These are essentially gated communities and it would be good to see them experiment a little more.”

These towers, much as they are striking, could be anywhere, Correa says, “but you have to also credit them with using design as marketing; it raises consciousness of the importance of architecture for the city.” Parreno adds that Uribe Schwarzkopf’s huge portfolio is also training a generation of high-end construction workers. It also has a scheme to train more women; 10 per cent of workers on its sites are women.

Though international names are the most prominent, Uribe Schwarzkopf is also tapping into local architectural talent. Much of the most interesting architecture in the world is currently happening in Latin America, including remarkable urban interventions in the informal hillside settlements of Colombia, Gloria Cabral’s delicately wrought work in Paraguay, Freddy Mamani’s exuberant postmodernism in Bolivia, and the enigmatic work of Smiljan Radic and Pezo von Ellrichshausen in Chile. For a small city, the architecture scene in Quito is in rude health: architects Felipe Escudero, Leppanen Anker, and Diez and Muller are all working with Uribe Schwarzkopf.

Few developers have been so committed to their home cities as to commission such a vast vista of landmark architecture. But with this impact come questions, not least if Uribe Schwarzkopf is building itself a virtual monopoly on high-end development.

However, in tracing a line back to the mid 20th century central European architects, Uribe Schwarzkopf has continued the city’s lineage of global exchange. Quito remains a fascinating city with layers of history: these huge projects add one more; boosting the skyline of this high-altitude city, whose name roughly translates to “the centre of the world”.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture and design critic

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When Dutch seamen went on strike in 1911, Rotterdam’s shipping companies brought in Chinese labourers who were willing to strike-break and work for a fraction of what their European counterparts were paid. Many would settle in the Katendrecht neighbourhood, just over the water from the old city and amid the docks’ vast warehouses, quays and cranes. In a neat echo of what became continental Europe’s first Chinatown, the biggest of the Katendrecht’s warehouses has now been converted by Chinese architect Ma Yansong into a museum of migration. 

The Fenix is housed in a building that once accommodated the fruits of the trade between Europe and America, right opposite the elaborate 1901 brick headquarters of the Holland America Line, once a squat, now the Hotel New York. The neighbourhood was a red-light district in the early 20th century and went through phases as seedy and dark, poor but sexy and, as so often happens, cool, arty and ultimately gentrified.

Now the century-old concrete warehouse has been cleared out, cleaned up and crowned with a super-shiny swirl of polished stainless steel. Inside is a museum of art which all relates in some way to migration, ranging from a Holbein portrait of Erasmus (Dutch and peripatetic) to a “Refugee Astronaut” by Yinka Shonibare. 

The first thing to say is that the gallery spaces, on the two huge upper floors, are sensational. I seriously doubt any architect could have built from scratch anything better. The concrete structure has been left raw and intact, framing the art in an industrial material language which is somehow both permanent and solid and yet suggests the transitoriness of goods stored only until they travel somewhere else. The light is magical, pouring in from both sides via the original windows and slightly angled clerestories. It might have been built in 1922 but it has a tinge of 1970s brutalism, very fashionable. Those windows also afford panoramic views across the city, taking in a chaotic modern skyline which might only be matched by London’s for its anarchic, apparently unplanned energy, daring and ugliness. The exhibits are always tied back to the city outside, one of Europe’s fastest-changing and most diverse. 

Migration is all about movement, and I wanted to express movement at the heart of this building, an experience for visitors

The centrepiece here is not an artwork but an architectural intervention. Beijing-based Ma Yansong is known for his fluid and occasionally unlikely buildings, revelling in the kind of double helix curves that would have been impossible before the huge computing power of the modern age. One of China’s most successful and admired architects, Ma often invokes the imaginative forms of shan shui, traditional Chinese depictions of landscapes in which mountains and streams form into complex, mystical layers, rendering three dimensions into two and producing new forms. He is currently designing George Lucas’s huge Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, due to open next year.

For Rotterdam he has created a tangle, an intertwined pair of spirals that wind up through the building, kissing occasionally and exploding out beyond its roof. It might be a staircase, the main route up through the building, but this is not really about function. The gleaming stair, which the museum refers to as the “Tornado”, twists its way up to become a logo, a landmark on a dockside increasingly dominated by towers. It looks like a shredded Anish Kapoor sculpture. “Migration is all about movement,” Ma tells me, standing in the sunshine on the roof, “and I wanted to express movement at the heart of this building, an experience for visitors.”

It all looks extremely expensive. I understand that one stainless steel panel takes 100 hours to polish. There are 297 panels. And they will need to be polished as long as they are there. It is, I suppose, a way of competing with the city’s burgeoning skyline using surprise and complexity rather than scale and height. I was unsure whether it was an excessive intervention into what is otherwise a functional and extremely fine building. But every museum needs its logo and the experience of bursting through the roof in this spinning vortex, 30 metres over once-buzzing docks (now being reimagined as leisure space, with a sandy beach emerging on one end), is certainly memorable. 

The real interest, however, lies inside. Two floors of art are thoroughly engaging and finely curated. There are terrific set pieces including Red Grooms’ “The Bus”, a cartoonish, full-size New York bus which visitors can walk into to find shonkily sculpted human passengers. There are blockbuster works such as Willem de Kooning’s “Man in Wainscott” and provocative pieces like Francis Alÿs’s sly study of borders, “Geographies”. The diversity of media, scales and styles neatly reflects the diversity of the subject. 

Interspersed with the artworks are artefacts, often mundane or familiar objects which here, in this setting, take on new meanings. A set of Delft tiles depicting various stereotypes of foreigners reminds us that migration is not new but that materials travel, too: Delft, informed by Chinese ceramics, went everywhere. Elsewhere, antisemitic and anti-immigrant pamphlets illustrate long-standing hatreds.

Back downstairs, one room is occupied by a “suitcase labyrinth”. Built from 2,000 cases, steamer-trunks and chests, many decorated with labels and stickers from hotels around the world, it is a slightly clunky but nevertheless effective metaphor for movement. Each case was donated along with its stories, each a record of a life of travel. There is something a little unsettling about it, a reminder, perhaps, of the piles of personal artefacts in Holocaust museums, even though the fates of most of these travellers were less traumatic. The other big exhibition space is currently occupied by The Family of Migrants, a show of almost 200 photos inspired by MoMA’s 1955 The Family of Man, perhaps the most widely visited and travelled photo exhibition of all time. It is an intensely moving exhibition, shot through with drama, sadness and longing. 

The final space is next door to the museum and independent of it. The huge “Plein” (public square) is a community hall, a fully flexible public space of 2,275 square metres which, the museum’s director Anne Kremers suggests, will evolve with and for the community: “It has already been used for Chinese New Year celebrations and will host a food market, meals and events.”

This is an ambitious and enlightened museum and an admirable example of architectural reuse, and it opens in an era of sharply increasing hostility towards immigrants in the Netherlands with a resurgent far right triumphing in recent elections. Privately funded, by the Droom en Daad (“Dream and Do”) Foundation, which is itself the legacy of the Holland America shipping line, it has more freedom than if it were tied to government. And that freedom will be critical. 

This museum allows us to make connections. Rotterdam was where Albert Einstein, Johnny Weissmuller and Lee Harvey Oswald sailed from

As I’m leaving the museum I run into Wim Pijbes, the irrepressible former director of the Rijksmuseum and founder and managing director of Droom en Daad. “This museum is great,” he says. “It allows us to make connections. This was where Albert Einstein, Johnny Weissmuller and Lee Harvey Oswald sailed from,” he grins mischievously, while unchaining his bicycle.

The Fenix is destined to be a perennially pertinent place. And the circularity, from its funding, its brilliant reimagining of a warehouse and the choice of a Chinese architect building on the edge of the former Chinatown, reveals a city profoundly aware of its history, but not at all afraid of its future.

fenix.nl

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