Antoni Gaudí | Kazumasa Yamashita | Ala Tannir | Charles and Ray Eames | Jorge Castillo Blanco | Atelier Tho.A | Tuckey Design Studio | ICADA | Fernanda Canales Arquitectura | OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen | Atelier About Architecture
‘A building’s afterlife may matter more than its original intent,’ Daniel Tudor Munteanu writes about the 51-year‑old Face House in Kyoto. Included in this issue are five houses that have new things to say. On the seafront of Beirut, a 1920s building is resisting demolition in the face of real‑estate speculation, while Jorge Castillo Blanco’s 1970s experimental family home outside Caracas, which reimagined the traditional single-family house as a small village, is now in desperate need of repair.
Gaudí’s Casa Batlló, on the other hand, is benefiting from ‘Gaudímania’ and enjoying state-of-the-art preservation, funded by a plethora of commercial opportunities, from premium ‘night visits’ to branded merchandise. Rafael Gómez‑Moriana explains how ‘the building has become a genuine cash cow’. The Eames House, a much-loved emblem of US mid-century modernism, narrowly escaped the Eaton and Palisades fires earlier in 2025. Mimi Zeiger reports from its reopening, asking what the house can teach us about lightness and resilience today.
The following pages also feature six houses commended in the AR House awards, including the reinvention of the Vietnamese ‘tube house’, material experiments in rammed earth and live-sawn wood, and the adaptive reuse of a suburban house in Beijing– as well as innovative houses in rural Mexico and Sweden. Every house has a story to tell.
1527: AR House
cover (above) Demas Rusli
Completed in 1974, Kazumasa Yamashita’s anthropomorphic house in Kyoto remains instantly eye-catching, even though it has over the years been dwarfed by its new younger, but taller, neighbours
folio (lead image)
Jorge Castillo Blanco’s drawings of his family home outside Caracas unfold the elevations of its four pavilions around a schematic ground floor plan. The AR’s critic finds that the house creates ‘a sort of intimate family urbanism’
revisit
Casa Batlló by Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, Spain
Rafael Gómez‑Moriana
revisit
Face House by Kazumasa Yamashita in Kyoto, Japan
Daniel Tudor Munteanu
revisit
Eames House by Charles and Ray Eames in Pacific Palisades, US
Mimi Zeiger
revisit
Small Old House by the Sea by Ala Tannir in Beirut, Lebanon
Nadi Abusaada
revisit
Casa El Amarillo by Jorge Castillo Blanco in Caracas, Venezuela
Adam Štěch
AR House awards 2025
winner
Lá-Sách House by Atelier Tho.A in Hô Chí Minh City, Vietnam
Hiêu Y and Vuong An Nguyên
highly commended
Rammed Earth House by Tuckey Design Studio in Wiltshire, UK
Kristina Rapacki
highly commended
Live Sawn House by ICADA in Saitama, Japan
Erika Sawaguchi
commended
Casa 720° by Fernanda Canales Arquitectura in Reserva Peñitas, Mexico
Suleman Anaya
commended
25 Columns by Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen in Dalarna, Sweden
Malin Zimm
commended
House M by Atelier About Architecture in Beijing, China
Jaime Chu
