Suspended in a gesture of near-defiance, Herzog & de Meuron’s CaixaForum Madrid doesn’t so much occupy its site on the Paseo del Prado as levitate above it.

Completed in 2008, the project reconfigures a relic of Madrid’s industrial past—the Central Eléctrica power station—into a cultural force field, one that actively pulls the public into its gravitational orbit. The gesture is bold: the brick shell of the former power station is surgically detached from its base, creating a shaded void beneath that becomes both plaza and portal. This architectural sleight of hand transforms mass into magnetism.

What once was a neglected parcel—complete with an incongruous gas station—is now a civic fulcrum. The demolition of the gas station was not mere site clearance but a strategic subtraction, carving out a plaza that opens the building to the city. This clearing becomes critical in a dense urban fabric, allowing the CaixaForum to breathe, to announce itself not with height or volume, but through urban choreography and spatial generosity. It is a rare instance where architecture manipulates ground and gravity to reveal its own intent.

The renovation hinged on a single preserved element: the brick façade. By lifting it, Herzog & de Meuron recast the historical structure not as a nostalgic shell but as an active protagonist in a new urban narrative. The resulting form is not mimetic but rather mimetically dissonant—it mirrors the irregular roofscape of surrounding buildings while remaining unmistakably other. This paradox of familiarity and alienness lends the building its charge.

Above ground, the CaixaForum unfolds as a sequence of spaces designed less for procession than for pause. Loft-like galleries offer a sense of expansiveness within the confines of the brick envelope, while the uppermost floor—housing a restaurant and offices—embraces a more sculptural spatial logic. Below ground, an auditorium and service spaces are embedded within the new plaza’s landscaped topography, rooting the building in infrastructural necessity without diminishing its weightless illusion.

CaixaForum Madrid resists easy classification. It is neither simply a renovation nor a new build, neither wholly object nor landscape. It operates somewhere between—part infrastructural choreography, part sculptural urbanism.

Plantea Estudio reimagines a former gemstone shop in Madrid as ACID’s third café—a restrained, textural composition that balances historical memory with an elegant sense of the present.

The project unfolds as a negotiation between preservation and reinvention. The patina of the past isn’t erased but reinterpreted with a clear, steady hand. The storefront, framed in green marble and wood, sets the tone inside: a simple exchange between craftsmanship and restraint.

Behind the curved display windows, the space moves from a bright service area to a dim lounge, holding on to its original dual structure. The decision to restore rather than replace speaks quietly. Parquet floors, wooden shelving and plaster friezes recall a slower era, now animated by the scent of coffee and bread.

Warm-grey limewash and black terrazzo ground the front, where vintage wood meets precise new interventions. Red shelving offers a muted pulse of colour, never louder than the room itself. Stainless-steel counters, sleek but understated, bridge eras through their quiet confidence.

At the back, the mood shifts. The lounge settles into a monastic calm. A long brushed-steel table anchors the room, surrounded by pared-back furniture. Blue-painted plywood floors and bare bulbs bring a cool, reflective stillness — a soft counterpoint to the street outside.

In Madrid’s Chamberí district, Isern Serra’s FUBA Bakery merges ancestral forms with futuristic precision, turning a simple bakehouse into an immersive meditation on time and material.

Conceived by chef Fabián Leon, FUBA—short for Future Bakery—embodies the balance between nourishment and design, between the instinctive and the futuristic. Serra’s spatial translation of Leon’s ethos results in a sensorial environment where the act of eating becomes inseparable from the architectural experience.

The space unfolds like a softly illuminated grotto, its walls sculpted and rounded as though eroded by time. A wash of lime covers every surface, muting light into a pale shimmer that feels almost geological. Serra’s treatment of texture—organic, irregular, imperfect—anchors the project firmly in the realm of the “origin,” a nod to Leon’s wish to recall the primitive act of baking. Yet these cave-like gestures are counterbalanced by moments of precision: cool stainless steel furnishings punctuate the roughness like markers of a technological present.

At the center, a sweeping stainless steel table becomes both altar and workstation, resting delicately on one side atop a block of natural rock sourced from a nearby quarry. This striking juxtaposition—industrial polish meeting geological mass—captures the essence of FUBA’s concept: a conversation between the ancestral and the modern. Elsewhere, slender steel shelves nestle into carved wall niches, displaying loaves as sculptural objects rather than mere food.

Natural light is carefully simulated through a faux lightwell, creating the illusion that the space opens to the sky. The visual rhythm of curvature and shadow guides visitors through the bakery, toward glazed openings that reveal the kitchen beyond. This transparency—literally and metaphorically—underscores Leon’s philosophy of process and purity. Every loaf, every curve, seems to emerge from the same dialogue between nature, craft, and innovation.

In FUBA, Serra and Leon achieve an interior that transcends function. It feels both prehistoric and futuristic, a kind of time capsule where bread-making becomes ritual and design becomes memory. The result is a bakery that redefines the relationship between body, space, and sustenance.

Madrid’s Solo CSV isn’t just a new art venue—it’s an ever-shifting, shape-defying experience that reframes how we move through, perceive, and participate in contemporary culture.

The launch of Solo CSV, the latest iteration of the international arts project Solo, marks a new crescendo in this shift. Designed by Estudio Herreros, this enigmatic cultural node is as much a provocation as it is a venue—a place meant not just to be seen, but to be experienced in fragments, riddles, and slow reveals.

Solo CSV is situated in the Moncloa-Aravaca district, on a site steeped in both political and artistic residue. The building, a former printing press dormant for decades, has been transfigured into a 4,500-square-metre cultural labyrinth. Nearby once stood Goya’s Quinta del Sordo, infusing the area with a spectral weight. The new structure, wrapped in white plaster and configured through a blend of reinforced concrete and dry-assembled metalwork, feels like a respectful invocation of the old, transposed into a resolutely forward-looking spatial syntax.

Navigating the space, one quickly abandons linearity. There is no fixed route, no singular narrative arc. Instead, visitors stumble into moments—Aaron Johnson’s cosmic grotesqueries at Bowman Hal, David Altmejd’s crystalline bodies, Smack’s digital hallucinations—each installation a door to somewhere uncertain. Architect Juan Herreros describes the layout as a Möbius strip of interiors and exteriors, engineered to disorient and delight. There’s something theatrical in the pacing, as if the building were staging its own withholding.

Unlike Solo’s earlier venues, such as the appointment-only space at Plaza de la Independencia or the rural outpost of Solo Castanedo, CSV operates without a declared programme. It is less an institution than an evolving site of potential. ‘We want to build, step by step, what this space can mean,’ say founders Ana Gervás and David Cantolla. That ethos permeates the architecture: paneled windows that frame incidental glances, unmarked zones that may or may not open, and rooms that appear only under particular conditions.

Still, amid all its spatial opacity, Solo CSV is far from inward-looking. Initiatives like Movimiento 37—set to launch with a haunting multimedia suite by Koka Nikoladze—position the space as a node for international cross-pollination. The digital arm, ONKAOS, continues to expand its remit, while a dedicated conservation lab ensures the works remain in flux yet cared for. In this sense, CSV acts as the nerve centre of the broader Solo project, which now spans acquisitions, artist support, AI-driven commissions, and public interventions.

Madrid’s artistic present no longer lives solely in its palatial halls. Solo CSV captures the capital’s reinvention as a place unafraid of risk and refusal—a city where ambiguity is no longer a threat but a tactic. In Solo’s hands, the future of contemporary art in Spain seems not just assured, but thrillingly undefined.

Burr Studio’s design for Dr.You transforms the apothecary into a sanctuary, blending warmth, clarity, and sensory quiet to encourage visitors toward slower, more intentional forms of wellbeing.

Stepping into Dr.You feels less like entering a retail space and more like crossing a threshold into a distilled version of wellbeing. Burr Studio has choreographed an interior that resists the pharmacy’s traditional rhythm of haste, replacing it with something closer to a whispered pause. The exterior already signals a deviation: a glowing cubic sign, understated to the point of abstraction, introduces the project’s guiding principle of reduction. Inside, that ethos unfolds with disarming clarity.

The front room is washed in soft, milky light, anchored by a monumental circular counter in warm walnut. It behaves almost like a hearth for contemporary care rituals. Instead of functioning as a service desk, it invites lingering—half sculpture, half communal landing point. The custom knitted lamp overhead, a glowing orb by Kauani, casts a gentle and enveloping illumination that neutralizes any trace of clinical harshness. Sparse shelving lines the wall with a quiet discipline, holding exactly enough product to convey intention without slipping into display fatigue.

A threshold marked “Look Inside” leads to a darker, more introspective chamber. Here, Burr Studio leans into saturation and shadow, crafting a sensorial counterpoint to the bright antechamber. It reads like a listening room or a meditation pod—walls in deep browns, softened acoustics, and a soundscape by Bloom Island that draws the visitor inward. The stainless-steel cabinetry and carefully edited objects maintain continuity with the front space, but the psychological temperature shifts. If the first room is the body, this one is the mind.

Throughout, the architecture mirrors the story at the project’s core. Juanjo and Andrea’s Ecuadorian upbringing—one shaped by their parents’ Natural Vitality pharmacies—filters into the space not through nostalgia, but through a deeply felt respect for slowness. The interior avoids tropes of “wellness minimalism” and instead cultivates a domestic tactility: wood that feels held rather than polished, light that behaves like a natural cycle, and materials that insist on presence over performance.

This attention to nuance extends to how Dr.You frames its products. Only the essentials are visible, each supplement or tool positioned with the same discretion as a well-chosen book on a home shelf. The result is an environment where products do not shout; they breathe. The visual identity by 3TG Studio supports this attitude with typography and labeling that read as calm, contemporary, and human-scaled. Even the digital platform mirrors the physical logic: education over urgency, clarity over noise.

Dr.You signals a shift in how urban wellness spaces might evolve—neither clinic nor boutique, but a hybrid sanctuary calibrated for self-awareness. It’s an architecture of attunement, built on the belief that health is not an errand but an encounter.

Beneath Madrid’s Royal Palace, Mansilla & Tuñón craft a vast subterranean museum that redefines monumentality through restraint, merging landscape, structure, and heritage in seamless dialogue.

Conceived as an inhabited retaining wall beneath the Royal Palace, the museum reconciles monumental weight with spatial subtlety. Rather than compete with the Palace or the Almudena Cathedral, it completes them—anchoring the western edge of the city with a stoic, subterranean presence that amplifies the grandeur above through its own invisibility.

Built over nearly two decades, the 40,000-square-meter museum unfolds across fourteen floors, though much of it remains hidden within the topography. Its sheer length and precision—the showrooms extending over 100 meters—establish a rhythm of structure and void, a tectonic choreography of granite pillars, shadows, and air. Mansilla & Tuñón’s approach is one of disciplined order: flexibility achieved through clarity, richness derived from repetition.

Inside, the architecture dissolves into its functions—three exhibition levels house tapestries, paintings, and carriages, each conceived as vast warehouses of cultural memory. The rhythm of beams and columns generates a visual cadence where light becomes as structural as stone. Between these massive granite lattices, the museum opens discreetly to the Campo del Moro gardens, allowing the outside world to punctuate the otherwise introspective sequence of galleries.

This blurred relationship between structure, illumination, and space defines the museum’s poetics. It is a building that operates between opposites: heavy yet buoyant, opaque yet transparent. Every threshold between solid and void, interior and exterior, becomes a negotiation—a reminder that architecture here is not an object, but an interface. From the Royal Palace above, the museum reads as landscape; from within, it reads as horizon.

Mansilla & Tuñón’s Royal Collections Museum is not merely a container for heritage but a quiet continuation of it. The architects have constructed a building that heightens awareness—of material, history, and place—by concealing its own ambition.