2022 saw so many new construction projects finally reach completion as the further easing of pandemic restrictions around the globe continued to unclog backlogs and delays.
From the myriad of projects published on Archinect this year, we have picked some of the stand-out newly-opened buildings by noteworthy architects in New York, Taipei, London, Shenzhen, Sydney, Amsterdam, Quito, Sharjah, Los Angeles, Singapore, Paris, and more.
Foster + Partners had a heck of a year, making the Archinect news section 25 times with copious new commission announcements as well as (often record-shattering) completed projects worldwide, including the long-awaited 425 Park Avenue and 50 Hudson Yards towers in Manhattan; Varso Tower, the European Union's tallest building in Warsaw; Budapest's tallest structure; the new headquarters for drone maker DJI in Shenzhen; the Brompton Road Apple store in London; the pyramid-like Datong Art Museum in China; the adaptive-reuse retrofit of an old gas plant in Madrid; and the nearly-1,000-foot-tall headquarters for the National Bank of Kuwait.
No project roundup without plenty of BIG news: Bjarke Ingels' team celebrated the openings of Google's anticipated Bay View HQ campus (in collaboration with Heatherwick Studio) in Mountain View, California; the 51-story CapitaSpring skyscraper in Singapore’s Central Business District (together with Carlo Ratti Associati); and IQON, a 32-story mixed-use tower in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito; in addition to several European projects such as a cantilevering residential building on the Amsterdam waterfront; the new FLUGT Refugee Museum in Oksbøl, Denmark; and a lovely environmentally-friendly factory for outdoor furniture maker Vestre in Magnor, Norway. In the digital realm, BIG also unveiled their design for Vice's new virtual metaverse headquarters, 'Viceverse.'
OMA debuted several major projects in the U.S. and abroad, including the eccentric Audrey Irmas Pavilion for Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles; the stepped Eagle + West towers along the Brooklyn waterfront; and the quirky new Taipei Performing Arts Center.
MVRDV was on a roll in 2022! The Dutch studio completed the LEGO-like Radio Hotel and Tower "urban village" in Manhattan; the Gaîté Montparnasse block transformation in the heart of Paris; a post-pandemic interior redesign for Shopify in Berlin; the vibrant Rotterdam Rooftop Walk public installation; the NEXT500 Pavilion in Augsburg, Germany, examining the future of the social housing typology; as well as a number of residential and mixed-use high-rises featuring the firm's trademark jagged silhouette in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rennes.
In February, Diller Scofidio + Renfro celebrated the opening of their $600 million Columbia Business School design (in tandem with FXCollaborative) in Manhattan as well as the 84,000-square-foot Prior Performing Arts Center at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts later in the fall.
While Zaha Hadid Architects continued to make the usual headlines with new commissions and competition wins, only their headquarters for BEEAH Group in the desert of Sharjah, UAE — said to be one of Zaha Hadid’s final projects as a designer before her death in 2016 — was featured as a completed building on Archinect this year.
Besides a massive mixed-use development in Paris (the Danish firm's first French design), 3XN's standout project this year was their Quay Quarter Tower in Sydney, Australia, an inspiring transformation of an existing 46-story 1970s tower — described by the firm as the "world’s most comprehensive upcycling of an existing tower." The judges at this year's World Architecture Festival in Lisbon agreed and awarded the scheme the prestigious World Building of the Year title.
Staying in Sydney, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA completed their enormous $232 million Art Gallery of New South Wales expansion, one of the city's largest cultural developments in recent decades.
In October, another cultural institution inaugurated its brand-new building in Costa Mesa, California: The $94 million Morphosis-designed Orange County Museum of Art wrapped up years of complex construction work right before the opening — or, as the Guardian critic Oliver Wainwright wrote in December after visiting the site, hadn't actually been fully completed at all.
Four years after its 2018 groundbreaking, the 17,175-square-foot Rubenstein Commons at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, officially welcomed occupants to its Steven Holl-designed new digs.
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