Domestic Factories * Urban Elegance

Inserted tightly between party walls in Barcelona’s dense urban fabric, this compact yellow house by H Arquitectes operates as a micro-factory of habitation, where the language of industrial modernism —metal frames, exposed concrete, translucent polycarbonate— is reappropriated into a refined, civic domesticity that elevates the everyday through precise detailing and an unapologetically public-facing character; the yellow tubular steel structure, both expressive and rational, acts as exoskeleton and façade, framing large glazed openings that reveal the inner life of the home without shame, turning the act of dwelling into an architectural statement and the threshold into a stage, where private life is subtly performed for the street, recalling the elegance of modernist social housing but stripped of monumentality, replaced instead by cheerful minimalism and programmatic economy; the layout —inverted, sectional, transparent— suggests a spatial choreography that privileges light, porosity and continuity over enclosure, using industrial materials not as compromise but as aesthetic tool, in a gesture that dignifies the provisional and asserts that elegance can emerge from constructive honesty, particularly in contexts of urban constraint; this project participates in a broader Mediterranean tradition where the house becomes both retreat and interface, absorbing the vibrancy of the street while offering a measured, resilient envelope, transforming the house into a prototype of adaptable urban living, one that invites us to reconsider how materials of the factory can become instruments of intimacy, and how colour —when applied not as surface but as structure— becomes a political gesture: optimistic, clear and unafraid to be seen.

Vertical Speculation * The Eclipse of Koolhaas

The recent cluster of towers rising in Rotterdam, marked by a logic of speculative densification and criss-crossed volumetrics, embodies a paradox: in their pursuit of monumental real estate presence, they visually, symbolically, and urbanistically obscure Rem Koolhaas's De Rotterdam, a building that until recently dominated the skyline with its totemic presence, subtly offset yet imposing in its disciplined modernity and modular repetition, projecting an image of functional sophistication and restrained ambition that now appears outdated next to the formal exuberance and commercial hybridity of the newer developments, which pile up typologies, densify programmes and aestheticise surplus through cantilevers, sky-bridges and gilded crowns that saturate rather than engage the skyline, revealing not so much an urban evolution as a transformation of land into financial asset where architecture becomes a marker of investment value rather than a cultural artefact or urban device, and in this context, the figure of the architect-author is displaced by investment consortiums, collaborative studios and packaged sustainability rhetoric rendered in sunset-hued visuals, rendering Koolhaas’s project —ironically from one of the most incisive theorists of urban capitalism— a melancholic backdrop, as if the iconic had expired in the face of serial spectacle and vertical intensification stripped of any civic or symbolic epic, where the new no longer signals progress but becomes a simulacrum of contemporaneity, a decorative extrusion of capital veiled in golden cladding that conceals the erosion of narrative form in the city.

Collective Housing * Modernity and Myth

This housing project materializes a kind of contemporary archaeology of popular dwelling, where the deep red hue—burnt earth, dried blood, sacred clay—functions not as ornament but as a strategy of identity, memory and belonging, merging the rationalism of modernist social housing with a literary sensitivity to cultural landscape, evoking both the standardized typologies of OUD and the spectral atmosphere of Rulfo’s Comala, that ghostly town suspended between life and death; the seriality and modular repetition suggest echoes of interwar Dutch experiments, yet the decisive twist lies in the curving wall that undulates along the street with a Barragán-like softness, subverting linear rigidity and injecting urban fluidity, turning regulation into resonance through the emotional charge of color and form; above, white volumes pierced by small openings allude to vernacular perforated screens or light boxes, balancing the grounded mass below with abstraction and air, creating a dialectic between ancestral adobe and modernist cube; in this case, color operates not as surface decoration or mere symbolic code, but as a performative agent, constructing a shared atmosphere, anchoring collective imagination, and converting each wall into a territorial, affective gesture, an act of architectural storytelling that marks place with emotional density; this is not housing as repetition, but housing as ritualized geometry, where typology reclaims myth and the urban grid becomes a legible narrative field; here, modern housing is poeticized, grounded in place, pigment and memory.

Russian Dolls * Wite Vessel

This pristine white volume in suburban Japan by Sou Fujimoto is more than a domestic experiment —it is a spatial manifesto that reduces architecture to its most elemental scaffolding, where layers of voids within voids construct a nuanced interplay between interiority and exterior, recalling the logic of Russian dolls in which each envelope reveals another, creating an inhabitable cascade of thresholds, transparencies and nested scales; the project is neither a house in the conventional sense nor a sculptural object, but rather a sequence of shells, or architectural filters, where domestic life unfolds across a porous constellation of interconnected microclimates, negotiating light, privacy and vegetation with exquisite restraint; blancura absoluta becomes both medium and message, erasing boundaries and articulating space through absence rather than form, inviting a sensorial stillness rarely achieved in urban architecture; each opening, calibrated like an ocular device, frames fragments of nature and ritual with surgical precision, turning every gesture —a meal, a step, a shadow— into a spatial event; the house operates through conceptual minimalism yet defies sterility, using emptiness as structure and light as material, producing not austerity but atmospheric depth; it is in this recursive geometry of rooms inside rooms, volumes within volumes, where architecture abandons its tectonic weight and becomes cognitive landscape, orchestrating experience through non-hierarchical circulation and anti-programmatic flexibility, suggesting a radical rethinking of domestic space as a continuum of inhabitable cavities rather than compartmentalised functions; what at first appears as a pure white box gradually reveals itself as a meticulous theatre of voids, where dwelling is reimagined as a choreography of transparency, and where architecture becomes a vessel not of objects but of potentialities.

Camouflaged Monolith * Ochre Cliffs

Carved into the ochre cliffs of the Mediterranean terrain, this residence by Mold Architects dissolves the boundary between architecture and geology, presenting itself not as an object on the landscape but as an incision within it, a tectonic gesture of camouflage and permanence that echoes the stratification of the surrounding stone; constructed almost entirely from materials that mimic the chromatic and textural qualities of the site —burnished limestone, terracotta-toned concrete, weathered steel— the house performs as an inhabitable fault line, a crevice that captures views, shade, wind and silence, transforming the harshness of the arid topography into a sanctuary of tactile comfort and visual drama; from the cliffside, only fragments are visible —a shadow, a ledge, a void— rendering the dwelling nearly invisible, its presence announced only by the geometry of its cut and the rhythm of its recesses; internally, spaces are organised as a series of framed scenes, where interior and exterior dissolve in a choreography of stone walls, deep thresholds, and glazed spans that draw the eye across a horizon of sea and rock, while textures underfoot and overhead remind the body of its anchoring in mineral matter; the pool, cantilevered and sharp-edged, becomes both mirador and mirror, extending the house into the abyss with surgical elegance, asserting that luxury need not be ornamental, but can instead emerge from restraint, contextual intelligence and elemental alignment; this is not a house that seeks contrast with its environment, but one that embraces the radical act of disappearing into it, positing a form of architecture where the coolness of water, the stillness of stone and the heat of the sun coexist in calibrated equilibrium.

Sunday

COPOS 615 CITY SIGHTSEEING

Green Forest * Vertical Geometry

Inserted like abstract totems in a dense woodland, this ensemble of green volumes by MIX Architecture explores a vernacular of archetypal forms, manipulating pitched roofs, triangular prisms and vertical silhouettes to construct a narrative of ascension and retreat, where geometry becomes both gesture and camouflage, rising from the forest floor in a dialogue of contrast and harmony; painted in a luminous matte green that both disrupts and dissolves into the surrounding foliage, the architecture avoids mimesis in favour of a chromatic tension that amplifies its sculptural presence while reinforcing its botanical kinship, evoking children’s book imagery, minimalist churches or forest observatories, depending on the observer’s imaginary, yet always anchored in a logic of modular assembly and spatial humility, where each volume —living, meditating, resting— functions as a discrete programmatic cell within a loose compositional syntax; the triangular typologies, with their steep gables and circular fenestration, conjure a symbolic verticality, a pull toward the canopy, the sky, or introspection itself, recalling the sacred geometries of traditional Asian temples transmuted into contemporary spatial fragments, their interiors sheathed in pale plywood that reflects warmth and simplicity, contrasting the vibrant exterior and creating an inner quietude that mirrors the forest’s own silence; this interplay of outside and inside, height and enclosure, saturation and restraint, positions the project not as a house but as a habitable landscape, an architecture that withdraws from urban legibility to engage in a subtler reading of presence, domesticity and form, where upwardness becomes both a spatial tactic and a metaphysical metaphor, and where architecture reclaims its role as a sensorial interface with the forest rather than a colonising artefact.

The Aesthetics of Hidden Shelter

In contemporary residential architecture, the intersection of brutalist materiality and organic spontaneity proposes a redefinition of the domestic sphere, one where the visual harshness of exposed concrete is softened and subverted by the ungovernable presence of vegetation, transforming what might be perceived as a bunker-like mass into a contemplative sanctuary; the house depicted in these images exemplifies this tension and harmony, its monolithic façade appearing austere and impenetrable from the street, yet crowned by a wild overgrowth that spills over the rooftop, suggesting that life not only persists but flourishes despite—or precisely because of—the weight and silence of the built form, and in this merging of structure and plant life, the home becomes an urban hideaway, a space of retreat from the noise of public life, where intimacy is not merely preserved but fiercely protected, for the lack of ornament, the absence of overt transparency and the refusal of spectacle suggest a deeper ethic of interiority, of quiet self-containment, wherein the inhabitant claims sovereignty over their own rhythm, distanced from the demands of exposure; the project resonates with the language of defensive architecture, yet inverts its premise: rather than repelling the outsider, it absorbs nature as a protective veil, its green topography acting not just as a camouflage but as an extension of interior sensibility, as seen in the hidden staircase and the quiet courtyard where trees pierce the concrete envelope, mediating light, air and seclusion, thus what first appears as a fortress reveals itself as a vessel for personal autonomy and ecological coexistence, evoking a profound need for shelter that is both physical and emotional—a contemporary ark for uncertain times.

Vertical Biotopias * Sectional Invention

Martos House, a compact yet eloquent insertion by Adamo-Faiden in a dense urban context of Buenos Aires, reimagines the single-family dwelling as an infrastructure for vertical biotopias, proposing a syntactical inversion of interior and exterior relationships where the domestic program recedes to allow the vegetal to ascend, the project unfolds in a tight parcel yet articulates a volumetric generosity through its section, characterized by a pronounced setback and inclined plane that hosts a linear garden, this operation not only liberates the facade but turns the building into a mediating membrane between the street and a sequence of layered voids, with public-private gradients defined not by walls but by thresholds of light, vegetation and enclosure, the structural diagram shows a delicate stacking of functions that embrace porosity—service spaces below, living quarters midsection, and an open rooftop garden framed by a mesh fence as a quasi-urban mirador, the facade, clad in corrugated metal sheeting, abstracts the house into a silent monolith by day, yet its subtle folds, the perforated gate and strategic openings generate a tension between concealment and invitation, especially at night when the soft interior light reveals the silhouette of the interior garden, the most radical gesture, however, lies in the way the house acts as a support system for plant life, converting architecture from object to scaffold, as seen in the case of the elevated tree that perforates the second floor and extends toward the open sky, thus Martos House transcends the typology of infill housing to become a prototype of urban ecological infrastructure, proposing a discreet yet firm resistance to overbuilt logics through the performativity of vegetation and sectional invention.

Sculptural Exception

In the experimental dwelling known as the Maison Dom-Ino, designed by Virgilio Vallot and Pascal Häusermann, we encounter not an exercise in function nor a monument to programmatic clarity, but rather an exuberant celebration of autonomous form, a visual and spatial composition echoing the biomorphic impulses of Arp and the surreal gestures of Miró, where architecture sheds its utilitarian obligation and embraces its plastic autonomy as a field of invention; here, the built object hovers above the earth, not only physically elevated on pilotis cónicos but conceptually removed from gravity-bound rationalism, becoming a formal manifesto that resists reduction to shelter and instead performs as a sculptural event, where volumes, curves, protrusions, and voids engage in a micro-symphonic dialogue that transcends scale and narrative; this is not architecture as frozen music, but architecture as improvised jazz, where each gesture, each extrusion, each convex tension contributes to a choreography of tension and release, of shadow and mass, of curiosity and estrangement; while critics may argue that such structures deviate from architectural culture, these formalist explorations affirm that form-making in itself constitutes a legitimate mode of cultural production, one that embeds play, intuition and spatial wonder into the discipline’s evolving vocabulary; a paradigmatic moment is the fragmented facade facing the Alps, where no elevation is alike, and the building reads like a three-dimensional collage, reinforcing the idea that architecture need not always justify itself through efficiency or social program to remain profoundly human and historically resonant, as these plastic games—though seemingly gratuitous—reside forever in the memory as radical poetic acts.

The Brutalist

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a formally ambitious, emotionally charged cinematic construction that, despite certain scriptual fragilities and uneven pacing, leaves a lasting impression due to the sheer gravitas of its protagonist —a magnetic Adrien Brody in perhaps the most contained and tragic role of his career— who inhabits with stoic depth the figure of László Toth, a fictional exiled modernist architect whose journey from postwar Europe to industrial Pennsylvania becomes a parable of idealism, trauma and compromise, articulating through architecture the tension between utopia and capital; Corbet’s direction, both rigorous and sensuous, builds a layered atmosphere where monumentalism is not merely aesthetic but ideological, questioning whether visionary architecture can survive without being co-opted by power, especially as the narrative pivots on the conflict between Toth’s wounded moral clarity and the seductive charisma of industrialist Van Buren —a patron figure whose wealth enables yet distorts the architectural dream, drawing parallels with the patronage dynamics of postwar America; visually composed like a series of static tableaux that recall the austerity of Tarkovsky or the severity of early Haneke, the film constructs space as psychic terrain, using concrete, steel and misty light to underscore the emotional estrangement of its characters, while sound design and silence become tools of tension and interiority; although the narrative at times falls into schematic binaries —genius vs industry, Europe vs America, memory vs ambition— its strength lies in its cinematic architecture, a slow, weighty unfolding that asks not whether architecture can change the world, but at what ethical cost such transformation is made visible, making The Brutalist a rare and haunting artefact of intellectual cinema.

Restless Leg Syndrome * Hammasichanimmada

Residency Clothing — The Elegant Series

 

During a scorching day in a Zagreb residency, the clothes worn in the studio—torn, stained, exhausted—became the work themselves. Fixed onto the museum floor and punctured to hold their final shape, the garments were transformed from functional fabric into a sculptural imprint of labour, heat, and duration. What began as daily wear turned into an artifact of process, a material testimony of weather, exhaustion, and commitment. This “elegant and brutal” series has continued across more than nine hundred cuts, each one a small incision into the boundary between body and trace, between what is used and what remains.

Thin Circle — Border Piece

The thin metal circle, exhibited in Dunjaka Streda, functioned as a fragile boundary—more a vibration than an object. It framed the space lightly, almost disappearing into the wall, yet holding a precise tension between presence and invisibility. During the performance, a passer-by moved through the installation wearing the shoes I had found, activating the piece with a minimal choreography. The circle became a perimeter of possibility, an edge that connected discarded objects, movement, and the faint trace of a narrative. Its simplicity was its force: a line that marked a moment, a limit that remained open.

Urban Gems — One Hundred Rings

 

The small coloured rings came from the streets—elastic bands collected across cities until they formed a group of one hundred. Each one was a tiny urban relic, shaped by chance, pressure, weather, and the rhythms of the places where they were found. Exhibited later in a Belgrade showroom, they became a constellation of overlooked materials elevated into a delicate taxonomy of the everyday. The series was never about accumulation but about attention: learning to see what is already there. I no longer collect them; I simply notice them. The possibility of restarting the series hovers like the rings themselves—light, circular, unresolved.

These fragments remain alive, even in silence.

 

Each thumbnail is a gate: a memory paused, an action folded, an object waiting for its next resonance. Nothing here expires. The images—whether drawn from studios, landscapes, rituals, or fleeting collaborations—form a dispersed autobiography of materials, gestures, and encounters. Some pieces belong to long-running series; others appeared only once, briefly, and disappeared again. But all of them carry the same pulse: the conviction that art survives through circulation, reinvention, and the quiet persistence of things. This archive is not linear. It behaves like a constellation—shifting, porous, rhythmic. A bag of oranges, a stretched arm in a gallery, a lake in Provence, a bent triangle from a forgotten shoe shop, clothes punctured under the Zagreb sun, metal rings found on the street, the yellow bag crossing borders, a bubble inflated in Düsseldorf, and dozens of other scenes—each becomes part of a relational geology that keeps expanding. Their contexts change, their meanings mutate, yet the works remain accessible, ready to surface again when needed. These fragments stand here without urgency: they don’t demand closure, they don’t ask to be explained. They simply rest, charged with potential. When the time comes, they will resurface—reframed, reactivated, renewed. In art, as in memory, nothing truly disappears. Everything waits.