The 10 most significant architectures of the 21st century

The conversion of the Bankside power station, built between 1947 and 1963 and dismantled in 1982, into a museum adopted a measured and essential approach, preserving the industrial character of the site and introducing some essential but striking gestures, such as the translucent roof ex novo from which natural light generously filters into the exhibition spaces.

The Mirador, included in a vast programme of redevelopment of the capital's metropolitan areas, is an emblematic intervention in the panorama of public housing in Madrid in the early 2000s. Openly breaking away from the recurring collective housing in the district, represented by anonymous courtyard buildings, MVRDV designs a 22-storey skyscraper to house 156 flats, composed of the aggregation of 9 autonomous blocks with recognisable external treatments, assembled around the empty space of the panoramic terrace on the twelfth floor which serves as a common square and visually frames the Guadarrama mountains.

The Mirador, included in a vast programme of redevelopment of the capital's metropolitan areas, is an emblematic intervention in the panorama of public housing in Madrid in the early 2000s. Openly breaking away from the recurring collective housing in the district, represented by anonymous courtyard buildings, MVRDV designs a 22-storey skyscraper to house 156 flats, composed of the aggregation of 9 autonomous blocks with recognisable external treatments, assembled around the empty space of the panoramic terrace on the twelfth floor which serves as a common square and visually frames the Guadarrama mountains.

Built on land formerly occupied by a disused mine in the 1980s, the new museum is a regional outpost of the Parisian Louvre, following along the footsteps of the major European post-industrial cultural projects built in a decentralised location and aimed at triggering new social, cultural and economic energies in the territory (starting with the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Frank Gehry, 1999). The complex is composed of five parallelepiped pavilions made of glass, steel and anodised aluminium, which periodically house part of the Louvre's works, and which find their own expressive autonomy in their neutral and evanescent forms as opposed to the obvious stone gravity of the Parisian headquarter.

Immersed in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the new headquarters of the California Academy of Sciences rearranges its naturalistic collections with the utmost attention to environmental sustainability. The heart of the project is the green roof which, suspended about 10 metres above the ground, follows a slight undulating movement evoking a landscape of grassy hills and conveying the suggestion of architecture as a living organism. The green roof, interrupted in the perimeter strip by a glass roof in which 55,000 photovoltaic cells are integrated, promotes indoor thermal-hygrometric comfort by reducing the use of mechanised systems, increasing biodiversity and absorbing air pollution.

The Gando primary school and the buildings that have been added to it over time (the teachers‘residence, students’ residence, library and new classrooms) is a striking example of powerfully civic architecture, in which tradition and modernity coexist. The buildings, built by local craftsmen using local materials and construction techniques, are carefully designed to ensure bioclimatic comfort through passive design principles (from the study of orientation to the arrangement of openings to facilitate cross-ventilation, to the high thermal inertia of the materials) and to provide through education an opportunity for social redemption and building a sense of community.

The centre, designed to host the nation's main cultural programmes, is part of a broad process of urban regeneration of Baku with the aim of relaunching the city on an international stage,, breaking with the rigid Soviet-style monumental architecture widespread in the capital. Fluid forms emerge from the natural topography of the landscape and accommodate the various interconnected functions under one continuous shell that is articulated among undulations, bifurcations and inflections.

The new location of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow's Gorky Park is a crucial reference point for the promotion of contemporary art in Russia. From its original site in the building designed in 1927 by Konstantin Melnikov (Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, from which the museum takes its name), the museum moved to a temporary pavilion designed by Shigeru Ban in 2012, and finally, since 2015, to its current location, which housed a restaurant then left unused for decades. The renovation has preserved the architectural elements testifying to the Soviet period, while introducing a contemporary touch that can be read in the double-layered polycarbonate shell enveloping the prefabricated reinforced concrete structure.

Servicio Social do Comércio (Sesc) is an institution that oversees operating centres in various fields (culture, sports, education, health,...). Sesc24 de Maio, which houses recreational and service facilities, occupies the former site of the Mesbla department store in the centre of São Paulo. The design was set both to enhance the attractiveness of the urban context and to readapt the structure of the building to a completely new set of specific uses and programmes (including an open square inside the building as a social hub, a theatre, a dance school, some exhibition spaces, a dental clinic, a restaurant, a library and swimming pool on the roof), according to a concept of democratisation and full accessibility of services as a tool for individual autonomy and active citizenship.

Superkilen is a (successful) experiment in urban and social regeneration, in one of the city's most ethnically diverse and problematic neighbourhoods. The project involved the creation of a 750 m linear park, divided into three chromatically and materially differentiated parts (red, black-dark grey, green), which host a sequence of public spaces to encourage intercultural dialogue, neighbourhood relations and outdoor life: a square, a market, playing and sports areas, relaxation spaces. The project is also a large open-air installation, where the multiple souls of the neighbourhood emerge from the parade of works and objects from all the places that ideally converge here: from gymnastics equipment from the beaches of Los Angeles to sewage drains from Israel, from palm trees from China to neon signs from Qatar and Russia.