7 Striking Concrete Buildings around the World
Often associated with the practical—and not the beautiful—concrete can yield surprisingly diverse architectural results. Whether used for private dwellings, as in David Chipperfield’s Berlin home and studio, or even an entire city, like Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret’s Chandigarh in India, the common construction material can be molded into nearly any shape, allowing structures to exist in both curvilinear and stark geometric forms.
1. Brazilian modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer’s swoops and arches in reinforced concrete are a testament to the material’s sculptural quality. For the National Museum of Brazil, Niemeyer designed what resembles a planet embedded in the ground, the other half of the sphere created by a reflection in an adjacent pool.
2. Villa Saitan—a housing complex in Kyoto, Japan, completed in 2006 by local firm Eastern Design Office—is encased in a concrete shell with undulating cutouts that mimic the roots, trunk, and leaves of a tree.
3. In 2013 Mari Ito, of the Tokyo-based Urban Architecture Office, designed the Science Hills museum in Komatsu, Japan, with a wavy concrete roof that integrates the building’s architecture with the land, creating a structure that also serves as a park.
4. Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Meier designed Jubilee Church, just outside Rome, as part of Pope John Paul II’s 1993 initiative to reinvigorate parish activity in the city. Three concrete sails, modeled on the half circle, are supported by a square spine. Windows nestled between each of the slabs allow light to fill the volume at varying degrees, depending on the hour.
5. Santiago Calatrava’s auditorium in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands cuts a striking figure against the Atlantic Ocean. Inside the structure, completed by the Spanish architect in 2003, a performance space is enclosed by curving abstract concrete forms.
6. For two buildings at Chile’s new Diego Portales University campus, Chilean architects Duque Motta & AA and Rafael Hevia sought to create a design that stood out from the other glass-box structures in the area. To that end, they incorporated green space—parks, gardens, and living walls—into fortified concrete structures.
7. Chandigarh, the utopian city designed by Le Corbusier with Pierre Jeanneret in 1947, in post-independence India, was built largely out of concrete. It is situated on a reflecting pool, the swooping sculptural form at the entrance contrasts with the building’s linear concrete columns throughout