All the hallmarks of Tadao Ando’s work are displayed in this concrete ‘church’ in Wonju, which uses light and geometric forms to encourage a meditative state.

Dubbed ‘Space of Light’, the angular building is the second meditation space designed by the Japanese architect for Museum SAN. It’s a purposeful contrast to Ando’s first, dome-shaped design, with sharp corners and straight lines in place of gentle curves.

Visitors enter via a long, concrete corridor to discover a bunker-like room, washed in light, filtering through a cross-shaped aperture in the roof. There’s no other source of light or furniture to encourage people to ‘directly’ encounter nature, according to Andao.

The architect is currently the subject of an exhibition at the rural  Korean museum, which he also designed, that explores 250 works spanning his career.

Photography: Museum SAN

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The structure is part of the VEEN|HUIS|HOTEL initiative – a series of seven experimental cabin hotel rooms designed to encourage people to visit the 200-year-old village of Veenhuizen in Drenthe.

There’s plenty of history associated with the site, which, in the 1800s, became a penal housing colony for vagrants who were set to work on the surrounding farmland. Veenhuizen is now home to several natural sites of interest and a community of farmers exploring more restorative forms of agriculture.

The VEEN|HUIS|HOTEL cabins are similarly focused on sustainability. Overtreders W specialises in temporary and recyclable architecture and took a strict approach to materials for Stable Shack, which occupies a peaceful spot in the middle of a peat meadow. Everything is sourced from the immediate area, with absolutely ‘no flashy new components’ added into the mix.

It lends the shack a distinctive, piecemeal appearance, with wood borrowed from a local carpenter and roof tiles sourced from a nearby farmyard – tied together using fabric straps and balanced on a concrete base.

Stable Shack (and six other cabins) are available to rent until the end of October, starting at €125 per night.

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The new, eponymous panoramas will appear in the form of ever-changing giant artworks projected onto the 100-metre circumference. But the name also refers to the sweeping views provided from three steel platforms at various levels up the 34-metre rotunda. The building will open officially in autumn, but it’s already serving as an event venue. Pre-sale tickets are available to book online.

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Koyori Architects oversaw the building’s transformation and adaptive reuse, deciding to repair and preserve existing features rather than starting anew. The result is a patchwork of old and new, akin to architectural sashiko (the art of visible repair) and wabi-sabi, celebrating the beauty of imperfection.

The design team used elements typically seen in Japanese machiya  (traditional, wooden townhouses that functioned as both a residence and place of business), including earthen flooring and straw – which will develop a gradual patina to complement the weathered appearance of the rest of the interiors.

Continuing the rawness of the material palette, Koyori Architects brought in vintage bricks, which have been used to build the Kyoto cafe’s counter,  and made furniture from slices of wood and tree trunks. A cache of steel chairs contrasts the natural elements, and textures are further emphasised at night, when passersby can look up to glimpse the original wooden ceiling beams, now much bowed, and the rough exterior of the stacked bricks.

Hoo’s menu is decidedly less traditional than the surroundings suggest, with coffee served alongside cream doughnuts and hot dog-filled buns.

467-3 Hashimotocho, Nakagyo Ward, Kyoto, 604-0072, Japan

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The modern Earthship dates from the 1990s and belongs to artist and interior designer Arianna Danielson, burrowing into the ground in the hills of the Black Forest of Colorado Springs. Danielson bought the Earthship with her family in 2022, posting a walk-through of her unusual organic home on TikTok where, to date, it has had over 4.7m views and 1m likes.

The self-sufficient forest home is built in the berm of the earth, using natural and recycled materials, including tires, glass bottles and straw, which thermally insulate the house and regulate its temperature year-round. A facade of large windows runs the length of the house above ground windows, flooding its cavernous interior with light.

The eco-home is off-grid, powered by solar panels with a backup generator, water well and a septic tank system. It’s not short on mod-cons either, having been upgraded with smart tech systems.

Interiors have soft organic shapes and what Danielson calls a ‘clean, sweet, earthy’ scent, with a bank of foliage along the living room and hanging plants throughout the home, adding bursts of greenery.

The Colorado property is available on Airbnb from $250 per night and sleeps up to six guests. It’s also pet friendly – meaning you can bring Fido along to maximise walks in the surrounding Black Forest.

Take a tour of the eco-home in the gallery above. And see more US holiday homes for rent.

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Film reels and projectors inspire the kinetic design of this open-air cinema in the Czech town of Prachatice by Mimosa Architects.

The practice was tasked with reviving and modernising the existing outdoor cinema complex in the South Bohemian town, which had become dilapidated and unusable, reducing it from 800 seats to a more sustainable 350 seats. It looked to the origins of cinema technology for inspiration, drawing on the principle of film reels threaded through a projector to inspire its retractable roof, with roof ropes and pulleys controlling a tarpaulin cover.

With the old cinema buildings deemed unusable and the original projection wall shading the adjacent Štěpánka’s Park, they were demolished. Three new smaller structures were erected in their place to house the cash desk, projection booth and washrooms for the Kino Narodka summer cinema. A smaller projection wall was also rebuilt, with ‘fractured’ fencing from the original complex preserved in the spirit of the site and inspiring new gabion walls around the north.

With space reclaimed from the site’s reduced capacity, Mimosa introduced a ‘buffer zone’ around the perimeter of the theatre to dampen sound for the neighbouring residential buildings. Meanwhile, corrugated sheets add to the illusion of movies, commanding shadow and light and connecting to the city’s Municipal Theatre of Prachatice. Granite and gabion walls nod to the stonework that dominates the town centre and the newly revamped Štěpánka Park.

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The brutalist Mexican holiday home is available to rent for the first time via Airbnb from around $290 per night. It is a playful inversion of Mérida’s famous limestone colonial architecture and rich Mayan heritage. The Yucatán capital is nicknamed The White City for its white-washed buildings, some built with stone from Mayan ruins. Godefroy riffs on this history, making the villa out of cast concrete and enveloping it in vegetation – like a temple ruin emerging from the jungle.

Mexico is a top destination for remote workers, and Casa Dzul caters neatly to this crowd, with a designated workspace and common area set up for a productive workday – made more fun by a quick, cooling dip in the villa’s private swimming pool, which cuts through the two-bedroom villa’s concrete volumes.

Its two bedrooms are airy and minimalist, with clerestory windows cut into the double-height concrete walls and pivoting, steel-frame glass doors that open to the courtyard.

The courtyard and pool are the villa’s focal point, with interior spaces converging on this breezy outdoor space. And while craggy and austere, thanks to its multitude of concrete, it’s also highly colourful thanks to views of blue skies overhead and towering trees and fronds which wave above the garden walls, with curated ‘moments’ of discovery – the rock garden, a cluster of succulents and palms, and views through the geometries of the house.

Cast concrete surfaces and built-ins also feature in the kitchen, which juxtaposes tropical brutalism with tactile boulder walls, hand formed from stone to recall the origins of the site and the city’s heritage.

Casa Dzul is minutes from downtown Mérida and less than an hour’s drive from Casa Dzul is Uxmal – a world heritage site, home to the Pyramid of the Magician. It’s the most distinctive Maya structure on the Yucatán Peninsula, and its influence on Casa Dzul will become immediately apparent.

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Using a mix of non-invasive ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistivity tomography and seismic noise tomography, joint researchers from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the Association for Archaeological Research were able to generate images of the tunnels, which flow beneath the Church of San Pablo. Spanish missionaries later constructed a Catholic church on the site in the 15th century.

The ARX Project Lyobaa team announced its findings in a press conference on 12 May 2023, confirming the existence of the tunnels and chambers.

The Zapotec people (contemporaries of the Aztecs) constructed the structures around 600 BCE as the entrance to the Lyobaa or ‘House of the Dead’. Dominican priest Francisco de Burgoa wrote about the underground Lyobaa temple complex in 1674, shortly before missionaries sealed it off to disconnect the Zapotec people from their ‘pagan’ gods and convert the population to Christianity.

Local legend said that San Pablo’s church was built directly atop the site, and now 3D models have revealed that this blocked-up entrance is located directly beneath the main altar of the Catholic church.

With the rediscovery of the tunnels, researchers hope to ‘determine the true extent’ of the complex and learn more about the Zapotec’s death customs. A second season of non-invasive scans is planned for September 2023 by the ARX Project research team, focusing on the structures to the west and south of the church grounds.

Find out more about Project Lyobaa and see the full report.

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The Grade II-listed military building is one of the best-preserved examples of a Chain Home station in southwest England – a ring of early warning radar stations built around 1941. Dubbed the Transmitter Bunker, the structure was officially decommissioned in 1956, and for more than half a century, it languished – a dank, windowless space covered for 65 years.

RIBA-award-winning British practice Lipton Plant Architects – now part of Corstorphine & Wright – led the station’s radical adaptive reuse, working with structural engineer Symmetries to retain as much of its original features as possible. That means low ceilings and cracked and weathered walls, offset by new additions that make the space more habitable.

The Transmission Block looks over the countryside from a new ‘bomb blast’ window carved into its solid, concrete exterior and opens onto a small patio overlooking the coast. The interior is embedded into the slope of a hill, while the station’s roof is wholly grassed over, hiding it from view.

A stay at the converted bunker starts around £732 for three nights, sleeping four people via a mix of plywood bunk and twin beds. There’s also a fully functioning, though compact, kitchen, bathroom and a woodburning stove for staying warm.

Immediately enclosed by peaceful fields, The Transmission Block will appeal to history enthusiasts and wildlife lovers who can watch birds and bats flying overhead. The shingle shore of Ringstead Bay is close by, as is the South Coast Path – a 630 miles National Trail that runs from Minehead in Somerset to Poole Harbour.

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‘The Condor’s passageway’ was discovered last May when archaeologists at Peru’s Chavín de Huántar UNESCO site unearthed a sealed entranceway. According to Reuters, archaeologists believe the tunnel, at the southern portion of the temple complex, was closed due to ‘structural weakness’ and dates from the earliest days of Chavín culture – a society that thrived more than 2,000 years before the Incas.

The archaeology team, led by Stanford anthropology professor John Rick, used robot-mounted cameras to explore the debris-filled tunnel, which partially collapsed due to flooding. They discovered a colossal 37 lbs ceramic piece at the entrance of the passageway decorated with what is believed to be a condor’s head and wings. In Chavín culture, the condor symbolises the sun deity and the ‘upper world.’

What we have here has been frozen in time,’ Rick told Reuters this week. He added that much of the complex is still to be excavated.

[h/t Reuters]

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