FORMA’s architecture coverage — major openings, museum projects, retail design, and the buildings reshaping how we move through cities.
Architecture, in FORMA’s reading, is inseparable from the other categories we cover. Museums shape how design is seen. Retail spaces shape how fashion is sold. Pavilions and installations shape how design weeks are experienced. The buildings matter not just as objects but as the infrastructure of the broader culture.
We cover major openings — Zumthor’s LACMA, the V&A East, the Vitra Campus — alongside smaller, more specific work: pavilions, retail interiors, and the residential projects that quietly redefine domestic space.
Junya Ishigami's Vitra Pavilion: A Building That Almost Isn't There
The Vitra Campus has, since the late 1980s, functioned as an open-air collection of contemporary architecture. Frank Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum, Tadao Ando’s conference pavilion, Zaha Hadid’s fire station, Herzog & de Meuron’s VitraHaus, and SANAA’s factory building have made the site, in Weil-am-Rhein on the Swiss-German border, into one of the few places where significant work by major architects can be experienced in concentration. It is a campus that has, over four decades, accumulated Pritzker laureates the way most institutions accumulate furniture.
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Zumthor's LACMA: The Museum That Floats
Twenty years is a long time to wait for a building. When Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries opened to the public on April 19, the inevitable question was whether the result could possibly justify the duration — the demolished buildings, the displaced collections, the cost overruns, the public debate that at various points turned genuinely hostile. The answer, like most things Zumthor designs, is both simpler and more complex than expected. Here is a building that does not look like the cultural argument it is, that hides its polemics under a coat of board-formed concrete and a tinted-glass eyebrow, and that has at last been built — not as the project the city debated, but as the project the architect drew.
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V&A East Opens: A Museum Shaped by Couture
The most interesting new building in London this year is one that borrows its logic from fashion. The V&A East Museum, designed by Dublin- and London-based practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, opened on April 18 in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park — and it is, by any measure, a remarkable piece of civic architecture. What makes it genuinely distinctive, however, is the conceptual framework from which it emerged: the sculptural tailoring of Cristóbal Balenciaga and the Japanese spatial concept of Ma. Most museums begin with a brief about square footage, circulation, and climate control. This one, by the architects’ own account, began with the question of how a Spanish couturier shaped the air around a body, and what a building might learn from that.
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