25 Masterpieces That Prove 2016 Was an Incredible Year for Architecture
The year's best architecture experimented, turned heads, and played nice with its surroundings.
Iwan Baan
In 2016, the best architects rethought everything. They transformed familiar building types like skyscrapers, offices, and museums. They resurrected once-neglected materials like brick and plywood. They tweaked expected features like skylights and balconies. And they found novel ways to fuse structures with their surroundings, carving out new public spaces, inserting contemporary forms into historic fabrics, and merging buildings with landscapes. Some of the very best designs were sequels—extensions to existing structures, reuses of historic buildings, or painstaking renovations. And structures that are often ignored or overlooked—salt sheds, filtration plants, and the like—finally got some love. Here, in no particular order, are 25 projects of note from the past year.
Iwan Baan01OMA, Faena Forum, Miami
The architects at OMA installed intricate geometric windows and divided the building into two volumes. One is a cube that houses meeting rooms, a black box gathering space, and a 40-foot atrium. The other is a spiraling cylinder that accommodates gathering spaces, meeting rooms, and a dome. At the ground level a wedge from the cylinder has been carved out to form a plaza along Collins Avenue.
Iwan Baan02BIG, Via West 57th Street, New York
BIG’s greatest gift is its ability to contort and adapt building envelopes to their sites, and its Via West 57th, a tetrahedron-shaped Manhattan apartment tower, is no exception. The design wraps, pyramid-like, around an internal courtyard bathed in natural light. It's a combination skyscraper-courtyard building. BIG calls it...drumroll please... a courtscraper.
Iwan Baan03Steven Holl, BNIM, University of Iowa Visual Arts Building
This visual arts complex is a three dimensional piece of art. Light reaches the center of the building through multiple vertical shafts, while floor plates slide past one another to create projecting balconies and gathering spaces indoors and out.
Alan Karchmer04Freelon Adjaye Bond/Smith Group, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC
The National Museum of African American History and Culture is perhaps the most symbolically important building of the year. (For space reasons, it's also likely to be the last museum to be built on the National Mall.) A visitor's path through the museum's exhibits---which begin in the building's subterranean lower levels and ascend, chronologically, toward the upper floors---parallels African Americans' ascent out of bondage and injustice. Lead designer David Adjaye calls it narrative construction. It's an architectural approach also embodied in the museum’s façade, a three-tiered, trapezoidal structure inspired by the staggered crown of an early 20th century Yoruban sculpture.
Iwan Baan05Diller Scofidio and Renfro, Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center, New York
Columbia’s medical school had a problem: it lacked a real campus. Diller Scofidio + Renfro came up with a clever solution: a building that served as one. Their 14-story Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center incorporates classrooms and labs as well as a glassy, interconnected network of social and study spaces known as the study cascade. Oh, and don't forget the incredible views.
Iwan Baan06Snohetta, SFMOMA, San Francisco
Snohetta's gorgeous, glacier-like [expansion of the SFMOMA](https://www.wired.com/2016/05/new-sfmoma/) finally opened this year, following a three year renovation. The addition doubles the museum’s exhibition space and includes numerous innovative design touches, including a new grand staircase, [location-aware audio guides](https://www.wired.com/2016/05/sfmoma-audio-tour-app/), and one of the largest living walls in the US.
Hufton & Crow07Zaha Hadid Architects, The Port House, Antwerp
Zaha Hadid Architects transformed a derelict fire station into a mesmerizing new headquarters for the Port of Antwerp. Clear and opaque glass sheets clad the elevated, rippling extension, which hovers above the historic building like a giant gem, flat on one end and pointed on the other.
Rafael Gamo08wHY, Speed Art Museum, Louisville
wHY’s redesign of Kentucky’s oldest art museum consists of what the firm calls acupuncture architecture---a series of precise interventions meant to modernize and bring new life to what was a rather predictable, if noble, institution. It’s not predictable anymore.
David Lena09SOM, United States Courthouse, Los Angeles
Located in the middle of downtown LA, this cube-shaped building is clad with a folded glass facade that reduces heat dramatically and gives the building a gem-like quality. Inside, the courtrooms are organized around a warmly lit atrium that feels anything but institutional.
Iwan Baan10Herzog & DeMeuron, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg
Ten years in the making, this tent-shaped, mirrored, glass-clad concert hall is perched atop a historic brick warehouse along the Elbe River. The building also contains a chamber music hall, restaurants, terraces, a large raised plaza, apartments, and even a hotel.
Ed Lederman11Beyer Blinder Belle, Met Breuer, New York
Marcel Breuer’s legendary Whitney Museum was reborn this year as the Met Breuer. The architects at Beyer Blinder Belle have actually improved the space, preserving its patina, restoring concrete, stone, bronze, and wood, and removing unwanted past interventions. Some new exhibitions have broken up the space, but the best ones let the architecture breathe and speak for itself.
Field Condition12Dattner and WXY, Spring Street Salt Shed, New York
This folded, exposed concrete structure evokes the faceted forms of salt crystals. It's probably the most beautiful building ever created for storing NaCl. Enough said.
Richard Barnes13Saitowitz Architects, Raymond G. Perelman Center For Jewish Life, Philadelphia
Brick, it seems, is making a comeback, and no building better illustrates this than the new Raymond G. Perelman Center at Drexel University. Clad with a rich, tactile pattern of red masonry, the four-level building looks surprisingly light inside, thanks to ethereal lighting and large, geometric skylights.
Alan Karchmer14Santiago Calatrava, World Trade Center Oculus, New York
New York's new transportation hub doubles as one of the world’s most architectural malls. The structure's spacious, gleaming-white interior is supported by massive steel ribs, which afford glimpses of surrounding skyscrapers. History will determine whether it was worth the $4-billion price tag, but in the meantime, there's no denying it's a mesmerizing addition to Lower Manhattan.
