A wooden silhouette of a port crane, a theatre resembling a curtain in the wind, an underground museum dome, a sugar factory turned hotel — today’s #projects_of_the_week explore how metaphor becomes a way to reinvent familiar typologies.
For the first time in this column, a Russian project is featured — "Fyodor's Lighthouse": a 23 m² tower in the spirit of Nikola-Lenivets overlooking Kola Bay, created for the "Live in the North" program. The pavilion references Murmansk’s port cranes and lighthouses, but translates their silhouettes into wood. The lower level features a terrace with benches, while the upper level offers a viewing platform with panoramic bay views.
The final part of ARoS museum’s underground expansion — artist James Turrell’s hundredth Skyspace, a dome spanning around 4000 m². A circular opening, light, and shifting colors transform the space into a camera for observing the sky. The project shows almost nothing in the conventional museum sense: the viewer looks not at an object, but at their own perception of light.
Winner of an international competition to reconstruct an early 20th-century hospital campus with a radial layout. A team of seven firms won with CareRing — a ring over a kilometer long around the existing complex. The project is notable for treating the hospital as part of the urban fabric: with routes, gardens, and public life. Construction begins in 2028.
A former sugar factory in the Guangxi mountains has been transformed into a resort hotel. The industrial past — old brick buildings, concrete structures, and traces of production — remains part of the architectural narrative. New hotel volumes are carefully integrated between the river, mountains, and factory ruins, while the former cane dock now holds a pool overlooking mountain peaks.
A 19th-century building has been converted into a theatre centre. The project’s main gesture is a diagonal cut through the historic structure: it connects two sides of d’Youville square and turns the building into a public urban passage. Inside are a 625-seat hall, a studio, and public spaces. The blank stage façade is clad in concrete with a photo-engraving of a non-existent 1878 wing that appears and disappears throughout the day.
On Abu Dhabi’s "Cultural Island," next to the Guggenheim Museum branch, construction has begun on another temple of art — this one focused on performance and events. In a single complex resembling a pale curtain in the wind will be an opera, theatre, ballet, and jazz venues. A transparent façade will allow rehearsal views from the street; total capacity is 6000 people. Opening is scheduled for 2030.