Architectures

Rem Koolhaas's Villa dall'Ava, a single-family dwelling, sets a fantastical imaginative enterprise in the bourgeois Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud. Rem Koolhaas's Villa dall'Ava, a single-family dwelling, sets a fantastical imaginative enterprise in the bourgeois Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud.

Jean Nouvel's utopian block of council flats in Nîmes looks like an ocean liner - and turns social housing clichés on their heads.

The Charlety Stadium's airy outline stands out in an otherwise densely urban area. Bruno and Henri Gaudin have broken with the classic design of a closed stadium, and created a bridge between Paris and its suburb.

A real / mock Middle Aged castle rebuilt by Viollet Le Duc for the Emperor Napoleon III. A reconstruction that paradoxically opened the way for modern architecture.

Otto Wagner designed one of the first office blocks of the 20th century, radically departing from the style of architecture traditionally associated with banks.

At the turn of the century, Otto Wagner designed one of the 20th century's first office buildings, breaking radically with traditional bank architecture.

Richard Rogers' and Renzo Piano's winning design for the Pompidou Centre looks like an outsize meccano structure, and contrasts sharply with the surrounding Parisian architecture. The architectural project as set out in the competition rules had to meet criteria of interdisciplinarity, freedom of movement & flow and an open approach to exhibition areas. The competition was won by two young architects: Italian Renzo Piano and British designer Richard Rogers who proposed an architecture freed from constraints and in the vein of the 60s' spirit. The supporting structure and movement & flow systems such as the escalators were relegated to the outside of the building, thereby freeing interior space for museum and activity areas. Secured to the external west façade of the building and constituting "dressing" for the structure, the technical ducting featured four colors: blue for air, green for fluids, yellow for electrical sheaths and red for movement & flow. The transparent nature of the west main façade makes for an outside-looking-in approach which enables people to see what is going on inside the Center from the piazza, a vast esplanade which the architects conceived as a continuity zone linking city and center.

Jean-Baptiste André Godin put Charles Fourier's ideas for community living into practice, building palatial collective housing for the workers at his factory.

Maison Bordeaux sits on a small cape-like hill overlooking the city of Bordeaux. The house was designed for a couple and their family, but before Koolhaas and OMA were commissioned for the project in 1994 the husband of the family was in a life threatening car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Two years after his accident, the couple approached Koolhaas to design them a new home outside of Bordeaux. Despite having been paralyzed, the man did not want a straightforward house rather he wanted a complex design, stating: Contrary to what you would expect. I want a complex house because the house will define my world.

Built in 1926, the Bauhaus at Dessau remains Walter Gropius' most important building - and one of the most famous examples of twentieth-century architecture.