Articles by Andreas Luco

The Van der Vlugt Residence, a highly acclaimed project by renow ned Miami-based firm S TRANG, has set a global benchmark for resilient modern architecture. Its status is cemented by significant, high-profile recognition, notably the AIA Florida Award of Excellence for New Work, AIA Miami Award of Excellence in Residential Architecture, and its selection as a World Architecture Festival Finalist. This prestige is further amplified by its selection as the subject of the pilot episode for Sarasota School: A Living Legacy, a new documentary series by Architecture Sarasota that will further convey the home’s status as a critical piece of 21st-century design.

Cabin Fever is an international summer school and festival launched by the Hungarian architecture studio Hello Wood, known for its design-build approach and community-focused, sustainable projects. Since its founding in 2010, Hello Wood has become a global platform merging hands-on education with socially engaged architecture. The 2025 edition, powered by VELUX, explored how light and space shape human experience — placing presence, intimacy, and connection at the centre of architecture. This dialogue with VELUX reflects a shared conviction: that the future of building lies in responsibility — in creating spaces with care, with awareness, and with light — offering meaningful alternatives in an overstimulated world. 2025 Concept, Location, Participants. From 23–31 July 2025, the festival took place in Česká Kamenice, Czech Republic, on the grounds of a former textile factory and wartime labour camp — a place that embodies both the weight of memory and the potential for transformation. Under the theme “Quality Time – Connection to Each Other”, participants were invited to explore how design can strengthen our relationships with each other and with the places we inhabit.

The Corten Houa project emerged from a contextual and site-specific response to the pre-existing conditions of the plot — a former timber factory, now in ruins, with only oxidized steel sheets remaining as traces of its industrial past. The architectural form and layout were meticulously defined in accordance with the site’s topography, employing a fragmented volumetry that aligns with the natural contours of the land, thereby minimizing the visual and physical impact of the intervention on the terrain and its surrounding landscape.

Renovation and Conversion into a Contemporary Orchestral Hall – The Concert Hall at Kiel Castle exemplifies the challenges faced by many cultural buildings of the post-war modern era, which today require functional and technical renewal while preserving their architectural identity. Between 2019 and 2025, a design team comprising gmp · Architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners and bbp: architekten developed the project as a conceptual continuation of the existing building. The aim of the design was to integrate a wide range of new requirements into an existing structure whose quality derives largely from the clarity and formal restraint of its architecture.

Renovation and Conversion into a Contemporary Orchestral Hall – The Concert Hall at Kiel Castle exemplifies the challenges faced by many cultural buildings of the post-war modern era, which today require functional and technical renewal while preserving their architectural identity. Between 2019 and 2025, a design team comprising gmp · Architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners and bbp: architekten developed the project as a conceptual continuation of the existing building. The aim of the design was to integrate a wide range of new requirements into an existing structure whose quality derives largely from the clarity and formal restraint of its architecture.

Background — The Noon Repose Pavilion is located on the bank of a rural river in Huizhou, a city in southern China, along the scenic route encircling Nankun Mountain and Luofu Mountain. Huizhou was once a place of exile for the Northern Song scholar Su Shi. During his years there, exile did not result in withdrawal from life, but rather intensified his attention to its everyday rhythms. In his writings, he identified what he called the “sixteen pleasures of life,” one of which he described as “resting at noon on a simple rattan pillow.” The pavilion takes its name from this phrase. It is not intended as a nostalgic reference, but as a way of anchoring contemporary experience to a different understanding of time—one that allows for pause, slackening, and repose. What is recalled here is not a historical figure, but a mode of living that remains possible in the present.