After pandemic-era delays slowed down the openings of major new construction projects like hotels and museums, the architecture world is once again flourishing. Around the globe, established and up-and-coming firms—from the female-fronted Studio Gang (which has offices in the United States and France) to Norway’s cutting-edge Snøhetta—are debuting record-breaking hotel skyscrapers, postindustrial arts spaces, timber-topped airport terminals, and visionary buildings that push the boundaries of eco-minded design. These 10 recently debuted or soon-to-open projects are so innovative they’re worth booking an entire trip around.
Beijing City Library
Beijing, China
Norwegian firm Snøhetta is no stranger to innovative libraries: It beat out more than 500 competitors to design the reimagined Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, and its more recent Calgary Central Library made the Canadian city an unexpected must-visit spot for architecture lovers. Its latest project, opened earlier this year, is this sun-drenched, glass-lined library in Beijing’s burgeoning Tongzhou District. The world’s largest climatized reading room is meant to evoke the banks of the nearby river, with seating areas camouflaged as terraced hillsides and columns that rise skyward toward ginkgo-leaf-shaped roof panels. The effect is like sitting with a good book under a shady tree canopy.
Norway’s newest arts center is carved out of a 1935 grain silo.
Photos by Alan Williams
Kunstsilo
Kristiansand, Norway
Think of the Kunstsilo as the Nordic world’s answer to London’s Tate Modern or Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa: Like those attention-grabbing institutions, this new art museum is a postindustrial marvel that still proudly shows off its previous form. It started life in 1935 as a functionalist silo that held 15,000 tons of grain, and Barcelona-based architecture studios Mestres Wåge Arquitectes, BAX, and Mendoza Partida helped transform the space into a cavernous waterfront museum. Inside, they carved out an enormous atrium that stretches nearly 70 feet high, and the galleries surrounding it house the world’s largest collection of Nordic modernist art, plus Norwegian contemporary art and handicrafts. About a 200-mile drive from Oslo, Kristiansand is Norway’s southernmost city, known for its abundant sunshine, swimmable sand beach, an old town filled with quaint wooden buildings, and an adjacent archipelago of more than 1,000 islands.
The white facade and irregular windows of the Populus are meant to evoke the bark of the aspen tree.
Courtesy of Studio Gang
Populus Hotel
Denver, Colorado
Billed as the country’s first carbon-positive hotel, the Populus is the nature-inspired brainchild of Studio Gang, an American architecture firm founded by Jeanne Gang. If it sounds familiar, it made waves in spring 2023 for a radically inventive and cave-like new wing at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. For this new hotel, which is expected to welcome guests in late 2024, the studio has once again looked toward organic forms, and the vaguely flatiron-shaped facade is inspired by the trunk of the aspen tree—whose scientific name (Populus tremuloides) gave the Populus its name. The most notable aspect will be eye-shaped windows that provide shade and channel rainwater, while a green roof planted with local species will attract native wildlife and insects.
The hotel will achieve its carbon positivity (meaning it will remove more carbon dioxide from the environment than it produces) through the use of local and recycled construction materials, renewable electricity, and even a biodigester that composts all food waste. But for the splashiest initiative, the hotel looks toward its inspiration: Populus will plant one tree for every night you stay, and it has already planted 70,000 in Gunnison County, Colorado, during construction.
One Za’abeel now ranks as the world’s longest cantilevered building, according to Guinness World Records.
Photo by Arnold O. A. Pinto/Shutterstock
One Za’abeel
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Dubai isn’t wanting for skyline-defining buildings, but this H-shaped double-tower from Japanese firm Nikken Sekkei is a particularly impressive architectural marvel; it officially opened in February 2024. Home to offices, residences, the One&Only hotel, and a slew of world-class restaurants from the likes of Anne-Sophie Pic, One Za’abeel is most notable for the Link, a 754-foot-long horizontal bridge that connects the two towers. It includes a cantilevered section that extends 216 feet past the building and hovers more than 300 feet over the street below—and it’s such a feat of engineering that Guinness World Records recently recognized it as the longest cantilever building in the world.
PDX’s new terminal features an eye-catching Douglas fir ceiling and a forest’s worth of live plants below.
Photo by Ema Peter/Port of Portland
Portland International Airport
Portland, Oregon
PDX’s rustic-chic new terminal opened in summer 2024 after a $2.15 billion renovation, and ZGF Architects has leaned into Pacific Northwest materials and inspirations. The showstopper is a nine-acre timber roof made from Douglas fir that’s been sustainably harvested from forests within a 300-mile radius. Forty-nine skylights let in abundant sunlight, allowing the space to support some 5,000 live plants, including 72 large trees. For locals, the most important part of the redesign was a simple one: the return of the cult-fave green patterned carpet, which debuted in 1987 and was removed in 2015. It appears in a few different spots around the terminal, and you can even search for “the carpet” on the online airport map so you can capture a #PDXcarpetshoefie.
The John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture & History is a celebration of Nigerian art housed in a building that ignores colonial clichés.
Photo by Ademola Olaniran Jide Atobatele
John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture & History
Lagos, Nigeria
In 1928, John Randle—one of the first West Africans to earn a British medical degree—funded a public swimming pool to compete with the nearby members-only club opened by the colonizers. A defiant symbol of African identity, it unfortunately fell into disrepair and has sat empty since the 1970s. Now, Studio Imagine Simply Architecture (SI.SA) is transforming the space into a soon-to-open cultural center with a design that principal architect Seun Oduwole called “unapologetically Yoruba.” Colorful and curvy, the museum ignores colonial architectural clichés and instead rises out of the earth organically, with a screen exterior that nods to ancient crafts like metalwork and weaving. Inside, you’ll find exhibits on Yoruba wood-carving, fashion, and storytelling, plus a library, gift shop, and restaurant; outside, there’s a sloping green roof perfect for picnicking—and, best of all, a new pool for locals to swim in. While in town, take in more local culture at the Nike Art Gallery, which was founded by Yoruba textile designer Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye, and the Kalakuta Museum, which occupies the home of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti.
The Grand Egyptian Museum’s wide staircase acts like a timeline, with works situated chronologically.
Photo by Creativity lover/Shutterstock
Grand Egyptian Museum
Giza, Egypt
The much-, much-, much-delayed institution seems to be finally ready to open its doors, and when it does, the billion-dollar institution (with a B!) will be the largest archaeological museum in the world, housing more than 100,000 artifacts, including the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Irish firm Heneghan Peng Architects won a design competition way back in 2003, and its monumental creation sits on the edge of a desert plateau between Cairo and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Its awe-inspiring atrium holds a 36-foot-tall statue of the Pharaoh Rameses II that dates back about 3,200 years; other showstoppers include a grand staircase that serves as a timeline from modernity back to the earliest days of Ancient Egypt, with a glass wall at the top offering views out toward the pyramids.
Pritzker Prize–winner Fumihiko Maki completed this new postwar art museum in Germany shortly before his death.
Photo by Klaus Helbig
Museum Reinhard Ernst
Wiesbaden, Germany
Lovers of postwar art shouldn’t miss this new museum in the German city of Wiesbaden, about 40 minutes west of Frankfurt and easily accessible on the S1 S-Bahn line. It houses the private collection of Reinhard Ernst, who made his fortune in manufacturing gears and motors and now, in his 70s, spends it on decidedly more abstract objects, like the works of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Frank Stella, and Helen Frankenthaler. The stark white box in which the collection is housed opened in June 2024, just weeks after the death of its architect, Pritzker Prize–winner Fumihiko Maki. In addition to the midcentury canvases, you’ll find newly commissioned works that add pops of color to the space, like Katharina Grosse’s rainbow-hued glass panel Ein Glas Wasser, bitte.
Many of the construction materials used for India’s new Hampi Arts Labs were sustainably sourced from a local steelworks.
Courtesy of Hampi Arts Lab
Hampi Art Labs
Toranagallu, India
This newly opened arts center sits about 20 miles from Hampi, a UNESCO World Heritage site that protects ancient Hindu temples and palaces in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka. Those historic structures are monumental, angular, and imposing, but the new landmark is anything but. Designed by Sameep Padora, of sP+a, it’s a sinuous, snaking complex of studios, galleries, and courtyard gardens inspired by the curves of the nearby Tungabhadra River and made with earthy materials that have a unique sustainability story: Many are by-products from a local steelworks, with excavated earth being used as concrete framework, slag waste turning into paving blocks, and even iron oxide giving the building its distinctive terra-cotta hue. We won’t sugarcoat it: Hampi is a trek, at about six hours from Bangalore or seven hours from Goa, but its temples are a must-see for history buffs that often earn comparisons to Angkor Wat.
Tatiana Bilbao designed the new Mazatlán aquarium to look like a “flooded ruin” in the distant future.
Courtesy of Gran Acuario Mazatlán
Gran Acuario Mazatlán
Mazatlán, Mexico
Aquariums don’t always invite architectural experimentation, but this Pacific coast beach town went all in on its striking, $100 million design by Tatiana Bilbao. The Mexico City–born architect conceptualized Mexico’s largest aquarium—dedicated to marine life in the Sea of Cortez—as a “flooded ruin,” a brutalist building done up in subtly mauve concrete that looks as if it’s been taken back by nature. As Bilbao has described it, you should think of the space as existing in some distant future in which rising sea levels have destroyed this building and then receded, leaving behind tiny pockets of ecosystems, such as ponds and tanks, in open-air exhibit spaces. Plants dangle through skylights, staircases lead into maze-like spaces, and ponds and tanks exist in rooms that are moody and shadowy. Think of the space as the unexpected marriage of Planet of the Apes and Finding Nemo.
