Thisispaper Magazine

Roughly 5 by 6.7 metres, stacked over four levels within the Longjing tea fields of Hangzhou, L Hermit House II is where Common Wonder takes the old idea of the hermit’s retreat and turns it inward.

The parts that usually disappear under a chair, its frame and joints and legs, carry the argument of Strut Collection, three aluminium pieces that Istanbul studio YET.

Inside Tranen in Hellerup, north of Copenhagen, Louis Morlæ builds Walls at the World’s End, three robotic walls that roll into new formations on carts driven by live data pulled from the internet.

On a hilltop at the industrial edge of Penafiel, Portugal, Nuno M.

On a steep vineyard slope above the Eisacktal valley on South Tyrol’s Ritten plateau, Andreas Gruber Architects sets Val Mira, two monolithic towers cast in raw exposed concrete.

In the inland of Sardinia, far from the coast and the tourists, Florence-and-Berlin duo succco made An Island Within the Island, chasing what survives of a folk medicine once kept mostly by women.

Sustainability is also a question of how much gets built, and on Sjællands Odde in Denmark Studio Furö makes the case with Stenkløvervej Vacation House, one rectangular volume where the local habit is two.

For Addresses Without Names at max goelitz in Munich, Germany, Ju Young Kim rebuilds the fittings of airplanes and waiting rooms in leaded and fused glass, an overhead bin remade as a lit stained-glass panel.

The floor beyond the entrance, the gap between two pieces of furniture: for Lying on the floor, Eunkyung Lee of Seoul practice StudioFA casts those unintended resting places into aluminum that keeps the marks of a hand.

A 1980s horse stable in rural Rhode Island, stripped of its cupola and eaves and wrapped roof and walls in black asphalt sheets, now works as a studio for Kara Walker and Ari Marcopoulos.

In the dense woodland of La Primavera in Zapopan, Jalisco, Ana Victoria Pérez-Gil and Saúl Figueroa set PRM39, a house fragmented into volumes threaded by courtyards, gardens and walkways above a ravine.

In Northwood on the western edge of London, Will Gamble Architects turns a Grade II listed cottage into Muttram Veedu, a family home built around a planted courtyard from Sri Lankan house typology.

At Moita Santa de Cima, a village in the municipality of Ansião in central Portugal, Atelier Espaço P2 sets House in Cerrado into the slope as a white plastered volume under a single chimney.

At Warsaw’s Zachęta, the National Gallery of Art, Jura Shust builds Żywica* Solar Plexus around a felled spruce, its severed roots sealed in tree resin on a raised metal platform.

In the garden of a family home in Olot, Girona, Jordi Hidalgo Tané sets Prefab Pavilion Facing a Centuries-Old Cedar, a 120 m2 room of prefabricated concrete built like the industrial buildings nearby.

Moving between his family home in the highlands of northeast Tennessee and the Kansas heartland where his wife was born, Shawne Brown makes See the Elephant, a series along the margins of the American Bible Belt.

Beyond the river at Veade in northern Portugal, Parto Atelier sets Casa de Souvinha behind thick walls of rammed earth, three buildings pushed down a slope held by oaks and cork oaks.

In Yerevan, designer Shushana Khachatrian of Studio Shoo builds The Woman's Chair, a sculptural seat on three stainless-steel legs whose angled backrest refuses to let anyone recline.

In Le Marais, a few minutes north of Place des Vosges in Paris, Rodaa Studio shapes DAARK, a coffee shop on rue de Turenne that treats specialty coffee as culture rather than commodity.

On a former garden plot above Broc, in Switzerland's Gruyère valley, Charly Jolliet Architecte raises Plywood House on timber piles, its two low volumes split between sleeping under an oak and living toward the valley.

In a landslide warning zone in a Kamakura valley, Japan, Teitakusubako, Yusuke Igarashi Architects build Konkuri-an, a three-mat teahouse that rebuilds the sōan in high-pressure washed reinforced concrete.

In the hillside town of Coudoux, in Provence, atelier EGR gathers a rehabilitated stone sheepfold and a new landmark building around an old well, reviving the public square.

At Cukrarna’s Parterre Gallery in Ljubljana, Yein Lee stages Accomplice, five sculptures and a ground-based pool installation that hold form and matter in a state of continual negotiation.

On the Falsterbo Peninsula near Höllviken, where southwestern Sweden narrows between the Baltic and the Öresund, Daniel Berg Arkitekter settles Villa P into the pine and heather under a single zinc roof.

At Innenkreis on Herluf Trolles Gade 28 in Copenhagen, Lasse Sylvest Lilleør stages Extrude, Bridge, Fill, four 3D-printed works that behave less like furniture than like creatures consenting to be used.

On a steep bedrock plot in Stavanger, Norway, Knut Hjeltnes Architects, with collaborator Francesca Iarrusso, sets a white timber house in a U around a piazzetta whose fourth wall is a maple and an apple tree.

In Vancouver, &Daughters builds Jeju, a 44-seat Korean restaurant that turns the jeongnang, the three-pole gate of Korea's Jeju Island, into a working sign staff raise and lower to open and close the room.

In Cork City, Trestle stages settle, a temporary public interior of furniture pieces drawn from Irish vernacular furniture, recast to host gatherings across a programme of events.

On a plot of roughly 33 square metres in Kagurazaka, one of Tokyo's dense wooden districts, Takumi Wakui and Riho Wakui build House in Kagurazaka, a machiya raised into four vertical storeys for their own home.

On a sloping woodland clearing above Lake Geneva in Evian, PCA-Stream has completed La Source Vive, a partially buried chamber music hall clad in pre-patinated copper tiles.

At MAC in Santiago, Chilean artist Paulina Mellado floods the museum with fountains, aquariums, panels and sculptures, an immersive territory that models a planet tipping into ecological crisis.

In a small valley outside Xoane, in the Galician province of A Coruña, Spain, NULA.STUDIO and FCA fuse a cluster of gabled houses into Goians Community Center, a single oxide-red volume.

In Faro, in the south of Portugal, Corpo Atelier reworks a house around a pillar that carries no load and a series of cuts that open the white room to the wooden structure above it.

On a 21-square-mile island, Bermudian artist Nicola Muirhead builds Descendants of Summer from portraits, landscapes, archival interventions and oral histories, taking its title from the colonial name Summer Isles.

In Mérida, on the Yucatán peninsula, TÁNAT is building Casa Ínsula together with PEMO and Carlos García Noriega, a single elongated volume whose window openings hold no glass, no frames and no sills.

On a hillside above Gijón in Asturias, Madrid practice HANGHAR assembles Casa Guadalupe, a 120-square-metre steel house whose main frame rose on site in under 48 hours.

Legs splayed like a figure caught mid-stride, Ruby sets slack suede slings against high-gloss lacquer in oxblood, greige and espresso, a family of counter stools from Shanghai studio NOVSEP.

In a former lamp factory on Rotherstraße in Friedrichshain, Berlin, Studio Inhalt_ builds Nichigetsu, a sushi counter where light maple dissolves the line between furniture and room.

Below the ramparts of the Corte citadel in Corsica, France, Orma Architettura rebuilds Office Orma Architettura on the footprint of a decayed pagliaghju, a gabled stone volume on a square plan.

Inside the disused Church of Sant Feliu in Lladó, the gallery Spiritvessel stages KIN TOO, a second gathering of artists whose work turns negative space, discards and imprints into a shared language of kinship.

Above the church in Carballeda de Avia, a hill village in Ourense, FIRM and BASED anchor the Muimenta Multipurpose Social Center to a house left in ruins by the 2018 fires and the stone terraces around it.

In the commercial zone of Contone, a village in Ticino, WDMRA sets down Urs Hauser Winery, a three-storey cube clad in laser-perforated Corten steel that stands beside a restaurant without crowding it.

In Kortrijk, Belgium, Abby stages Coup de Théâtre.

In Finsbury Circus, a City of London garden dating to 1606, London studio Studio Weave sets the Parks Office low into the planting, a clay-render volume housing a working base for the City Gardens team.

From Rīga, Studio Sija brings Soft Tensions to Collectible in Brussels, a chair whose solid walnut seat, carved to a soft scoop, is cradled by a rigid frame of welded stainless steel.

In the Marmilla hills of Sardinia, at Bannari on the edge of Villa Verde, Carlo Atzeni, Silvia Mocci, Maurizio Manias and Franceschino Serra arrange a parish complex around one hollow basalt wall running east to west.

In the Czech village of Panoši Újezd, Lenka Milerová turns a derelict pigsty into Panoši Újezd Summer House, a 32-square-metre seasonal dwelling that keeps its stone walls and inserts board-formed concrete.

At Tulum's urban edge, with the jungle running to the horizon behind it, V Taller wraps Babel around a courtyard, two curved wings of arches and vaults drawn inward so the centre stays open, planted and shared.

On rue Molitor in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, Corinne Callies and Jean-Marie Duthilleul set the altar of Église Saint-François de Molitor at the centre of an ellipse inscribed in a cube.

In the Domain Precinct beside the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, MORQ has built 49 Walsh Street, ten apartments for Neometro across four levels, ringed by a planted buffer.