Hiding and blending into nature is a practice that dates back to ancient times and across many latitudes, born from defensive, ritual, or climatic needs. From Paleolithic cave dwellings to the Berber underground houses of the Maghreb, from North American pit houses to Chinese yaodong villages, camouflaged architectures—built underground or integrated into the landscape—share a common thread: the deep interpenetration between the natural and the artificial, and a minimal visibility from the outside.
In recent decades, architectural thinking has turned camouflage into a field of compositional research, exploring the tension between “nature” as a living, organic habitat and “city” as an artificial, inorganic construct. From the 1970s onward, bioclimatic architecture has widely investigated underground buildings for their reduced ecological footprint, their ability to “vanish” into the landscape, and their remarkable energy efficiency, thermal and acoustic insulation, and microclimatic stability—thanks to the ground’s natural thermal inertia.
Designing hidden buildings: 15 examples of camouflaged architecture
From Tadao Ando to BIG, from MVRDV to Zaha Hadid, we have explored some possible expressions of mimetic architecture, including hypogean, topographical and conceptual “disappearances”.
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along the paths and terraces historically excavated by quarry workers, now redeveloped as platforms for reading and cultural activities.
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- Chiara Testoni
- 20 October 2025
Yet camouflage today takes many forms beyond the subterranean. Other strategies of disappearance arise not only from ecological urgency but also—often more so—from scenic and aesthetic aspirations. There is topographic and material mimesis, where architecture merges with the natural structure of a site, adapting to and reinterpreting it through materials and textures; and mirror camouflage, where reflective surfaces create visual illusions that turn a building into a mirage.
From Sweden to Saudi Arabia, from Spain to Japan, we explored a series of contemporary examples of camouflaged architecture: a radical approach to building that, beyond literary fascination (think of Calvino’s Invisible Cities), opens up a series of questions. On the one hand, designing to disappear can be read as a negotiation between culture and nature, especially in certain climatic and landscape contexts. On the other, it risks feeding an ambiguous rhetoric—treating architecture as something to be hidden—without freeing it from the inevitable environmental impact of any human intervention.
And it raises a paradoxical doubt: that precisely because it is unseen, architecture might be allowed to spread anywhere—underground, behind foliage, or beneath a mirror.
Opening image: Henning Larsen, Eysturkommuna Town Hall, Norðragøta, Faroe Islands 2018
The intervention, among the most iconic by artist César Manrique, is located in the lava tunnel formed by the eruption of Volcán de la Corona and represents the total interpenetration between nature and art. In the evocative underground landscape, the work houses the Casa de los Volcanes, a center for scientific dissemination about volcanoes.
The Chichu Art Museum is part of the “Benesse Art Site Naoshima” master plan, which has transformed the island of Naoshima into a Mecca for lovers of contemporary art. The building is almost entirely underground, arranged in geometric forms carved into the hillside and only partially visible from the outside through concrete walls emerging from the earth. The rooms are lit by courtyards and skylights, emphasising the spiritual and immersive character of the space. In addition to this and the other cultural buildings in the area, the Naoshima New Museum of Art was added in May 2025: this building, also designed by Tadao Ando, has three levels (two of which are underground) and an irregular layout following the topography of the site, and focuses on contemporary Asian art.
The house, designed in honour of the Korean poet Yoon Dong-joo, is inspired by the ancestral relationship between nature and man, and by the biunivocal dialectic between earth and sky. The building consists of a 14 x 17 metre concrete box entirely underground. The interior spaces (kitchen, a studio, two bedrooms, bathrooms), located in the centre of the excavation, overlook two open spaces: a thin slit through which light filters, on the one hand, and a courtyard on which domestic life expands and from which the gaze is projected towards the sky, on the other.
Breaking with the typical patterns of vernacular Alpine architecture, the holiday home near Peter Zumthor's thermal baths in Vals is set into the mountainside, from which it overlooks the valley through a large elliptical glazed opening. Local materials and construction techniques, including the façade made of local quartzite, deeply anchor the building in the earth and in the spirit of the place. The villa is thermally insulated and has a geothermal heat pump, radiant floors, heat exchanger and uses only hydroelectric energy generated by the nearby reservoir.
An underground bunker is renovated to make the best possible use of the minimal interior space (9 square metres of floor area by two metres in height) and converted into a holiday home. The floor plan is reproduced above ground through a platform that serves as a terrace.
BIG's intervention expands and transforms a hermetic concrete bunker from World War II into a cultural complex perfectly integrated with the listed landscape of Blåvand in western Denmark. The building, totally hidden in the landscape, consists of a single 2,800 square metre structure with four exhibition spaces excavated in the earth and marked on the surface by a series of cuts in the hillside that lead into the heart of the museum.
The partially hypogeal house is set against the hillside, from which it is overhung by a green roof with avocado trees: landscaping and technologically effective solution that offers optimal interior conditions in an area affected by considerable temperature fluctuations. Inside, the volume unfolds as a large exposed concrete container with a functional and flexible layout. The living area gives access to a panoramic terrace and connects the various adjacent rooms; on the opposite side, a patio dug into the ground provides further access and a second source of natural light and ventilation.
The complex is part of the Messner Mountain Museum, a circuit of six museums (Firmiano, Juval, Ortles, Dolomites, Ripa and Corones) spread throughout the Alpine region and dedicated to the relationship between man and the mountain: the building, embedded in the mountain peak at 2,275 m a.s.l. and almost entirely underground, emerges on the outside with fluid and sculptural volumes in cement and glass that seem to be a continuation of the granite rocks and offer spectacular viewpoints over the Dolomites.
The town hall building serves as civic and territorial infrastructure: it bridges the river in the village of Norðragøta, uniting two previously separated municipalities into one. The building was designed to revitalise the local community: terraces and green roofs are open to the public for picnics or swimming in the river.
The monolithic reinforced concrete structure, sloping and wedged between the cliff and the seabed like a fragment of rock that has slipped into the sea, houses a partially submerged restaurant. The raw material is coated with salt water and blends in with the rocks chromatically.
The tourist infrastructure consists of two monolithic volumes sculpted like geodes and in osmosis with the landscape, evoking the ancient rock formations shaped by the wind and sea in the area.
In an eco-friendly hotel in the far north of Sweden, a small cubic volume (4x4x4m) suspended in the forest and accessible via a walkway evokes the archetype of the tree house revisited in a conceptual key: the building hanging from a pine tree consists of an aluminium frame structure covered with a mirrored surface multiplying the contours of the forest, and dissolving the construction into its surroundings.
The cubic volume for events and concerts, set in the desert landscape of a wadi, features a lightweight structure supporting a continuous reflective glass enclosure. The homogeneous external surfaces reflect the sky, sand and rock walls, transforming the building into an exhibition of camouflage: from a distance it appears as a mirage, up close as a reflective sculpture that blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior.
An old disused quarry is transformed into a cultural space with a library and areas for studying the Chinese language, with the aim of enhancing the area's rich mining heritage and imprinting new forms of sociality. The project shapes the new elements according to the original topography, leading visitors
along the paths and terraces historically excavated by quarry workers, now redeveloped as platforms for reading and cultural activities.