Architecture 2020: the most anticipated buildings of the year

Within Dubai’s Burj Khalifa district, Zaha Hadid models the shiny Opus Hotel, standing out amongst her late designs. Two adjacent towers, entirely wrapped by a sleek, ethereal curtain wall, are shaped so as to merge in two different points: on the ground level, where they are joined by the monumental four-story-high lobby, as well as through a glass bridge suspended 71 meters above the ground. Zaha Hadid Architects designed both the building and its interiors.

A fair-faced concrete cylinder inserted in a neoclassical cylinder. It is precisely in the relationship between these almost ideal volumes that resides the interest of Tadao Ando’s project for Paris’s Bourse du Commerce, opening to the public in 2020. It will host an exhibition space for contemporary art, structured around François Pinault’s collection, which already feeds the Venice venues of Punta della Dogana and Palazzo Grassi. 

Arquitectonica designs the tallest residential tower of Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood. A few miles away from the city’s downtown, Elysee features a telescope-shaped section, with the upper levels cantilevering from the lower ones. Elevations are entirely glazed, ensuring a 180 degrees view on the Biscayne Bay and its inland to all of the building’s 100 apartment units.

David Chipperfield completes the extension of Zurich’s historical Kunsthaus, designed by Karl Moser between 1904 and 1910, more than ten years after winning the related international competition. Chipperfield’s building is a self-standing, square plan volume, a compact, consistent, aniconic, monumental monolith. Alongside the existing Kunsthaus and the neighborhing Schiauspielhaus, it constitutes a relevant cultural pole, not too far from the city’s university area.

Tianjin’s Yujiapu financial district renovates its waterfront, where Diller Scofidio + Renfro build the local premises of the Juilliard School. Besides hosting the classrooms and other programs directly related to the school, the building also acts as a public space multiplier. The park seamlessly continues inside the lobby; the four multi-faceted volumes surrounding it (a concert hall, a recital hall, a black box theatre and a library) feature large glazed surfaces, which allow passers-by to contemplate the activities within them; furthermore, the accessible garden roof ensures a panoramic view on the river and the city.

Paris’s petit-ceinture is a long unused railway ring, which has unexpectedly turned into a reserve for biodiversity. Lina Ghotmeh reactivates one of its ancient stations, and continues the rails path with a spiral rolling up towards the sky. It winds around a sequence of workshops and research laboratories for professionals, scientists and artists specialized in the field of sustainable eating. On the top of the little tower stands a panoramic urban farm, strategically raised on the threshold between Paris consolidated center and its thriving, evolving banlieue.

The first out of two buildings of Heatherwick Studio’s 1.000 Trees, in Shanghai, is nearing completion. The structural pillars are extracted from its pyramid-like volume and repurposed as the support for hundreds of giant planters. A full-fledged podium is dedicated to each single tree, alongside its undergrowth, mostly made of vegetation sourced from the Yangtze River delta’s fertile lands.

In 2002, Henegan Peng Architects won the international competition for the massive Grand Egyptian Museum, which is scheduled to finally open to the public in 2020. Situated a few miles away from Giza's necropolis, the building stretches on a 50 meters slope, on the threshold of the Nile valley. Its main elevation, toward Cairo, is based on the repetition at different scales of the same triangular module. Its 24 thousands square meters of exhibition halls will host the collections which are currently preserved in the largely insufficient spaces of the capital’s historical Egyptian Museum.

Estudio Herreros’s Munch Museum is the latest addition to Oslo’s Museum Island, a few steps away from Snøhetta’s Opera House. Visitor experience through the museum is conceived as a upward movement, from the ground floor lobby to the observatory on the top of the building. According to the architects, visitors will alternately pace the enclosed exhibit rooms hosting the works of art, and the distribution spaces which are panoramic on the city. Along this path, they will reflect on the strong connection between Edvard Munch, one of Norway’s national treasures, and his nation’s capital.

Scheduled for 2020, the opening of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building marks the conclusion of the Houston Fine Art Museum’s campus renovation. Designed by Steven Holl, which has also recently completed the Glassell School of Arts, forming part of the same complex, the building is an elaborate, repeatedly carved volume, featuring a vaguely trapezoidal plan. Its elevations, coated with vertically laid-out glass slats, gently lit at night, are amongst its most distinctive features.

Following the VIA 57 Street asymmetrical pyramid, in Manhattan, and in anticipation of the (heterozygous) twin towers on Williamsburg's new waterfront, in Brooklyn, in 2020 Bjarke Ingels delivers the XI Towers, a multifunctional complex in the heart of Chelsea. The two buildings bend and twist from their podiums, in order to maximize the views on the Hudson and to related to the neighboring High-Line elevated linear park.

For the new museum of Audemars Piguet, a renowed watch manufacturer, Bjarke Ingels carves and models the gentle landscape of the Swiss hilly countryside, shaping a double spiral, partially underground and featuring fully glazed façades. It contains a double sequence of spaces: on the one side, the exhibition galleries; on the other, the working laboratories of Audemars Piguet's expert watchmakers. Ingels’s pavilion is the latest addition to the brand historical headquarters, established in Le Brassus in 1875.

‘Carlsberg’s old Mineral Water Factory may be listed, but it is no delicate flower’: this is how Dorte Mandrup describes Copenhagen’s historical building that underwent several and inconsistent alterations through the decades, and that she is now commissioned to refurbish. Starting from these considerations, the Danish architect’s design for its transformation into a multifunctional complex is primarily inspired by the pragmatic need to reactivate and update its spaces, rather than by the sake of a philological conservation. The Mineral Water Factory neighbors a second project by Mandrup, the Mineral Water House, also scheduled for completion in 2020. 

Houston’s Barbara Jordan Post Office will soon re-open to the public, in the new guise designed by Rem Koolhaas and OMA. In the promoters and architects' intentions, the enclosed container of the service building will turn into a condenser of programs that will participate in the regeneration of Houston’s downtown northern neighborhoods. The historical complex, whose structures will be for the most part preserved, will host retail spaces, exhibition galleries, co-working areas, as well as an endless, green terrace roof, designed by Hoerr Schaudt.

V-A-C Foundation’s GES 2, in Moscow, will become Russia’s largest contemporary art museum. Renzo Piano is the author of the architectural project, transforming an ancient electric power plant on the Moskva’s riverfront, in the heart of the capital. The building’s core is a large covered square, from which visitors can access the complex’s different areas. This central hall is filled with the zenithal light diffused by its glazed roof. The theatre front is also entirely transparent, allowing for a panoramic view on the neighboring park and the little birch trees grove (also under construction).

A few years after Grafton Architects, SANAA also contributes in the expansion of the Bocconi University’s campus, in Milan, whose first core was completed in 1941 by Giuseppe Pagano. The Japanese firm’s design includes a student house, office spaces and a sport and recreational center open to the city. Organically-shaped buildings gather around a sequence of courtyards, enclosed by meandering arcades. SANAA also aims at bringing to light a short section of the Vettabbia, a covered stream which flows along the West edge of the project’s site.

The glazed elevation designed by SANAA stands out as a surprising contemporary addition to the urban elevation of Paris’s rue de Rivoli, a few steps away from the Louvre Museum. Its wavy panels, ethereal and almost fluid, contrast with the opaque and solid stone façades of the surrounding city. Besides SANAA’s intervention, La Samaritaine department store’s renovation project also includes the reconversion into a luxury hotel of Henri Sauvage’s historical building on the Seine’s riverfront, completed in 1928.

After an almost seven-decade-long career, Álvaro Siza, the doyen and undisputed master of Portuguese architecture, is now ready to complete his very first skyscraper in the United States. The subtle interpreter of the Lusitanian tradition deals with the American metropolis, the craftsman with the large scale of the high-rise building. In 2020 the result of this “unexpected” architectural event will be available for appreciation and criticism.

The French daily newspaper Le Monde celebrates its 75th birthday in 2019, and at the very beginning of 2020 it moves to its new headquarters in Paris’s 13th arrondissement. Snøhetta’s design, shaping a curvy bridge complex, is the latest addition to the Paris Rive Gauche neighborhood. The building’s elevations are wrapped by an uninterrupted curtain wall, made of a sequence of glass pixels of different texture and transparency.

Fully complying with the tradition of large-scale Universal Exhibitions, Dubai 2020 will also feature a catalogue of pavilions designed by some of the most popular protagonists of contemporary architecture. Amongst the others: Santiago Calatrava for the United Arab Emirates, Nicolas Grimshaw for the Sustainability Pavilion, Foster + Partners for the Mobility Pavilion, Selgascano for Spain and Carlo Ratti as part of the Italian team.