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1 week ago | 
architectural-review.com | Kristina Rapacki
The ghost of New York’s master road builder continues to haunt the 21st-century city – and its would-be plannersIn her 1970 book Superhighway –Superhoax, the journalist Helen Leavitt dug up a cringeworthy piece of road‑building ephemera.
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1 week ago | 
architectural-review.com | Kristina Rapacki
A superstructure designed in the 1970s with a motorway running through its core still purrs along nicely because it was built for people, not carsMost 1970s superstructures have a habit of shouting their presence from miles away. In the sleepy Berlin borough of Wilmersdorf, the Schlangenbader Straße estate is more a case of hiding in plain sight. At 600m‑long and up to 46 metres high, the main building contains 1,064 units, with an additional 694 in a block running parallel to it.
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1 week ago | 
architectural-review.com | Kristina Rapacki
OMA’s new bridge for Bordeaux offers space for public events, but little reason to linger on residents’ daily commutesBordeaux’s new bridge, named after French feminist politician Simone Veil, is described by its architects OMA as a ‘linear public space’.
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2 weeks ago | 
architectural-review.com | Kristina Rapacki
In 2024, Egypt completed its 1,155km stretch of the Cairo–Cape Town Highway, a 10,228km‑long road connecting 10 African countries – Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. The imaginary of ‘Cape to Cairo’ is not new. In 1874, editor of the Daily Telegraph Edwin Arnold proposed a plan to connect the African continent by rail, a project that came to be known as the Cape to Cairo Railway project.
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2 weeks ago | 
architectural-review.com | Kristina Rapacki
Barricades, as we know them today, are thought to date back to the European wars of religion.According to most historians, the first barricade went up in Paris in 1588; the word derives from the French barriques, or barrels, spontaneously put together. They have been assembled from the most diverse materials, from cobblestones, tyres, newspapers, dead horses and bags of ice (during Kyiv’s Euromaidan in 2013–14), to omnibuses and e‑scooters.
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4 weeks ago | 
architectural-review.com | Kristina Rapacki
The Swiss Federal Railways’ repair works in Zürich are being lightly transformed for new commercial usesWorkers at the Swiss Federal Railways’ (SBB) central repair works in Zürich used to climb the roof of its halls and practise handstands. It was as good a place as any to do gymnastics: out in the open air, with a view to the Käferberg rising across from a tangle of railway tracks and the river Limmat.
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1 month ago | 
architectural-review.com | Kristina Rapacki
Recycled and reused construction materials turn Urko Sánchez Architects’ Waldorf campus in Nairobi into a teaching aidWhen designers at Urko Sánchez Architects received a commission to design a campus in Nairobi’s leafy Karen neighbourhood, the brief from the client, the Nairobi Waldorf School Trust, was direct and concise: design a school deep in the woods without harming the trees, while preserving the old, British colonial‑style structures that would house some classes and other amenities.
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1 month ago | 
architectural-review.com | Kristina Rapacki
Cross‑border collaboration to supply recycled building materials to Ukraine counters the exploitative forces of the global marketIn March 2025, around a hundred people gathered in a courtyard in Kalush, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in western Ukraine, to initiate the conversion of the dilapidated building in front of them into a dormitory for displaced people.
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2 months ago | 
architectural-review.com | Kristina Rapacki
Recent attempts to ‘reinvent’ the hospital are not as innovative as their architects would like you to believeIn December 2024, Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) unveiled plans for Jawaher Boston Medical District in Sharjah in the UAE – a series of rectangular pavilions under a canopy of photovoltaic cells described by Piano as ‘a new model for the hospital of the future’. Three years earlier, in 2021, OMA and Buro Happold presented their designs for the Al Daayan Health District in Qatar.
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2 months ago | 
architectural-review.com | Kristina Rapacki
Undercutting and regulatory neglect make construction the deadliest job in the UKNeil Hayes was a talented footballer, described by those who knew him as a sharp wit, someone who could tear up a dance floor. Last summer, Hayes became a statistic, one of dozens of UK construction workers who die on the job every year, when he was crushed by a hydraulic machine while preparing the ground for Allies and Morrison’s latest smooth‑skinned enclave for the branded gentry.
