Architectural Record

10/15/2025

A new crop of interior cladding options look to the natural world for inspiration.

Check out our latest picks for wall and ceiling products: https://brnw.ch/21wWECE

Photos courtesy the manufacturers

A new crop of interior cladding options look to the natural world for inspiration.

10/15/2025

The Hill Dickinson Stadium, a new soccer stadium in Liverpool for English Premier League team Everton FC, has now opened, offering 53,000 matchday fans a state-of-the-art experience. Designed by Los Angeles–based sports and entertainment firm Meis Architects and delivered by BDP Pattern the sports division of BDP, the construction was an enormous undertaking. Estimated at costing just over $1 billion, the project required deep piling, employed 4D BIM technology, prefabricated large components offsite, utilized bespoke engineering solutions at the macro and micro levels, and poured 126 million gallons of sand into a historic dock to create the site.⁠
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The new stadium gives a big—if not very subtle—nod to the heritage of the place. Formally, it is a large brick box—a reference to the many brick warehouses that stood along the docks site, including some impressive structures which remain to this day—with a futuristic parametric form seemingly dropped into it from above.⁠
“Some people call it the spaceship,” Jon-Scott Kohli, director at BDP Pattern, says, “and I think it's a wonderful architectural metaphor about a scheme, a club, and a city that are respectful of heritage, but also looking forward to the future with a modern ambition.” What it isn’t is a particularly nuanced metaphor, and while it does seek to address the gap between Liverpool’s history and future, it comes through sharp juxtaposition rather than deftly weaved poetry.⁠
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Read more about the waterfront complex built for Everton FC at the link: https://brnw.ch/21wWE8J
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Words by Will Jennings
Photos © Nick Caville, BDP

10/14/2025

Nestled among small plazas and historic buildings in a quiet, old quarter of Valencia, one of Spain’s most vibrant cities on the Mediterranean, this understated multifamily home contains three apartments on four floors for a couple and the families of their two adult children. Each family occupies a floor, with the parents on top in a duplex that opens to a large roof terrace shared by all. The clients, who work together in a family business, sold their three suburban homes to make the move, drawn by the benefits of city living and of coming closer together as a multigenerational family.⁠
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For local architect Jose Fernández-Llebrez, the challenge was to adapt each floor to their different needs while shoehorning the program into the deep, eccentric infill site. The party walls shift in and out, so that the patio at the southern end drifts far off axis from the 30-foot-wide facade to the north. Despite this difficulty, he designed a large, continuous open space for the kitchen, living, and dining areas, that runs from the front to the back of the site in each apartment, assuring cross ventilation. He smoothed the irregular transition from the front to the back with rounded corners and two pairs of structural steel columns that bracket each side of the space, painted, like other metalwork, in matte off-black. ⁠
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Continue reading about this understated multifamily home in Valencia: https://brnw.ch/21wWCrA
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Words by David Cohn
Photos © Alejandro Gómez Vives

10/14/2025

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) has named Mexico's Mario Schjetnan as winner of the 2025 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. Schjetnan, a champion of the basic human right to public space, shares the honor with Mexico City–based Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU - Mario Schjetnan), an interdisciplinary landscape architecture, urbanism, and architecture firm that he co-founded in 1977 with architect José Luis Pérez. Together, Schjetnan and GDU are the third Oberlander Prize laureates, following Julie Bargmann of Charlottesville, Virginia–based D.I.R.T. studio (2021) and Kongjian Yu (2023), the late founder of Chinese firm Turenscape.

Major works by GDU include Xochimilco Ecological Park, part of a larger UNESCO World Heritage Site in the far south of Mexico City; the ambitious rehabilitation of Bosque de Chapultepec, a sprawling park and forest that serve as the “green lungs” of Mexico City; and La Mexicana Park, a heralded contemporary green space at the site of a former quarry in Mexico City’s Sante Fe district. While the firm works extensively in Mexico and Latin America, it has also completed projects in the United States, China, and the Middle East. Stateside projects include San Pedro Creek Culture Park in San Antonio, Texas, and Oakland, California’s waterfront Union Point Park, which was completed in 2005 as its first project in the U.S.

Read more about this year's recipient of the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize: https://brnw.ch/21wWBRS

Words by Matt Hickman
Photo by Barrett Doherty, courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation (1, 2)
Photo by Francisco Gomez Sosa courtesy Grupo de Diseno Urbano and The Cultural Landscape Foundation (3-6)
Photo by Sergio Medellín, courtesy Grupo de Diseno Urbano and The Cultural Landscape Foundation (7)

10/14/2025

The city of Nashville completed an $18.9 million project to enhance its water management infrastructure at the Gibson Creek Pump Station. Upgrades were installed to the pump station as part of Clean Water Nashville's Overflow Abatement program, which was established to reduce sewer overflows and improve water quality in the region. The project included the installation of 15 floor access doors from The BILCO Company due to their durability, corrosion resistance and ease of operation.

Watch the video to learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RHTjh8BYbU

10/14/2025

Recognition is part of the experience. The first-ever Architectural Record Awards will be held October 30 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, where we’ll honor this year’s most compelling work and voices in architecture. Tickets are included with your Innovation Conference registration or available separately here: https://brnw.ch/21wWBOm

10/13/2025

Read an excerpt from ‘Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums’ by Béatrice Grenier, the director of curatorial affairs at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris.

Photo © Ji Yun

https://brnw.ch/21wWAzL

10/13/2025

🚀 Starting a firm. Building a practice. Shaping a future.
In our latest webinar, three of RECORD’s 2025 Design Vanguard winners share their journeys—from concept to construction—and how they’re expanding the boundaries of architectural practice today.

👥 For students + emerging professionals
📅 Earn CEU credit: 1 AIA LU/Elective | 0.1 ICC CEU
🗣️ Moderated by Leopoldo Villardi, Managing Editor

Don’t miss it → https://brnw.ch/21wWAzx

Sponsored by The Ornamental Metal Institute of New York, The Steel Institute of New York, Think Wood and Vitro Architectural Glass

10/13/2025

Selldorf Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, SANAA, Amanda Levete Architects (AL_A) and Sou Fujimoto Sou Fujimoto are among the firms on the finalist teams.

Photo by Pedro Szekely, Wikimedia Commons

Selldorf Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, SANAA, Amanda Levete Architects, and Sou Fujimoto are among the firms on the finalist teams.

10/13/2025

The famous observation decks of 20th-century buildings—the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, the World Trade Center—were low-tech but thrilling open-air platforms ringed by coin-operated telescopes and spiky iron fences. The formula was simple: wind in your hair, city at your feet. Vertigo addicts still chase stratospheric heights, but, in 2025, standing flat-footed at 1,000 feet doesn’t cut it. The thrill isn’t gone, it’s just higher-maintenance.⁠
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The next generation of sky-high, high-tech jungle gyms packs an adrenaline punch, sporting Ferris wheels, roller coasters, and glass elevators. Urban playgrounds like New York and Shanghai can absorb spectacles; skyscraper architects have always chased the show-stopper. But when designs integrate figure eight Ferris wheels, maybe the thrill has gone too far. Nobody asked for a Six Flags Skyline Park. At least, not yet.⁠

It started innocently enough. From Berlin to Bangkok, revolving restaurants crowned towers and luxury hotels. Giant turntables in the sky revolutionized urban immersion, cocktails included. Developer-architect John Portman set the tone in 1967 with his blue-domed Hyatt Regency in Atlanta (1967). The East China Architectural Design & Research Institute rocketed the motif into retro-Jetsons parody with the Radisson Blu Hotel Shanghai New World (2003).
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Read about how towers around the world are increasingly resembling theme parks: https://brnw.ch/21wWA6z
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Words by Nathan Eddy
Photo © Aaron Fedor, courtesy Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF)

10/12/2025

In November 2016, the 7.8-magnitude Kaikōura earthquake, spawned by multiple fault lines, rocked New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington. In its aftermath, the country, long familiar with the destructive force of seismic events, revised its building codes. The Te Rua Archives New Zealand, designed by Auckland-headquartered Warren and Mahoney Architects (WAM), offers a best-in-class demonstration on how to design for such exigencies, and honors the country’s Indigenous heritage through a contemporary interpretation of Māori motifs.⁠
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The new nine-story, 284,000-square-foot rectangular volume is located within Wellington’s parliamentary precinct and replaces the existing national archives building nearby that, with the incredible load of its collections, failed to meet the country’s new seismic standards. (There are plans for its adaptive reuse.) The archives had a construction budget of $170 million and broke ground in 2022 on the site of another government property, one irreparably damaged during the quake; its L-shaped basement was retained and incorporated into the present structure. The new building, completed in May, was developed by assets manager Dexus in partnership with New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs.⁠
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Read more about New Zealand's earthquake-resistant national archives: https://brnw.ch/21wWyP8
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Words by Matthew Marani
Photos © Warren and Mahoney Architects (1, 3) and Jason Mann (2, 4, 5)

10/12/2025

With its Gothic town hall, art-filled churches of St Martin and Our Lady, UNESCO-listed belfry and begijnhof (a 17th-century laywomen’s community), and pronounced penchant for red and brown brick, the small Belgian city of Kortrijk is as Flemish as they come. Located barely six miles from today’s border with France, it was the site of the 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs, when the farmers of Flanders routed the French king’s cavaliers—an event symbolically important for the Flemish nationalist movement. As elsewhere in the region, the Catholic Church was long a dominant power, and Kortrijk counted several religious houses, including Groeninge Abbey, founded by Cistercian nuns in the medieval period and later, in the 19th and 20th centuries, home to a community of Poor Clares.⁠
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This spring, Abby Kortrijk, a new, $14.8 million art museum, opened in what remains of the complex. Rather than a permanent display, Abby holds temporary exhibitions built around the rich municipal collections of fine art, furniture, and ceramics. Barcelona-based office Barozzi Veiga led the conversion, in association with Ghent firm Tab Architects and heritage specialists Koplamp Architecten. ⁠

Read more about this Flemish abbey turned art museum: https://brnw.ch/21wWyzv ⁠

Words by Andrew Ayers
Photos © Simone Marcolin