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Celebrating 125 Years: The Past

RECORD’s Top 125 Buildings: 101-125

Top 125 Buildings

BMW Welt | 2007 | Munich | Coop Himmelb(l)au

Photo © Duccio Malagamba, courtesy Coop Himmelb(l)au 

Top 125 Buildings

Oslo Opera House | 2007 | Oslo | Snøhetta

Photo © Erik Berg, courtesy Den Norske Opera & Ballett

Top 125 Buildings

Olympic Sculpture Park | 2007 | Seattle | Weiss/Manfredi

Photo © Benjamin Benschneider, courtesy Seattle Art Museum 

Top 125 Buildings

Limoges Concert Hall | 2008 | Limoges, France | Bernard Tschumi Architects

Photo courtesy Bernard Tschumi Architects 

Top 125 Buildings

Ningbo Historic Museum | 2008 | Ningbo, China | Amateur Architecture Studio

Photo © Wikimedia user Siyuwj/Creative Commons

Top 125 Buildings

Iberê Camargo Foundation | 2008 | Porto Alegre, Brazil | Alvaro Siza

This may be Siza’s absolute masterpiece. The tension between continuous movement—the dream of so much modernist museum design, as in the Guggenheim—and the need for orthogonal rooms is resolved in one of the richest museum experiences anywhere: interconnected yet restful. The ramping corridors that link one floor to the next are expressed on the facade as distinct elements and are works of intense visual experience. The entrance sequence for the museum is ingeniously engineered into an impossible site, between the riverside highway and a cliff. —Barry Bergdoll

Photo © Felipe Neves/Creative Commons

Top 125 Buildings

Cathedral of Christ the Light | 2008 | Oakland | Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

Photo © Cesar Rubio, courtesy SOM

Top 125 Buildings

Beijing Capital International Airport, Terminal 3 | 2008 | Beijing | Foster + Partners

Photo © Nigel Young/Foster + Partners

Top 125 Buildings

Herning Center of the Arts | 2009 | Herning, Denmark | Steven Holl Architects

Photo © Thomas Mayer, courtesy Steven Holl Architects

Top 125 Buildings

Neues Museum | 2009 | Berlin | David Chipperfield Architects

Photo © Ute Zscharnt/courtesy David Chipperfield Architects

Top 125 Buildings

MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts | 2010 | Rome | Zaha Hadid Architects

Photo © Iwan Baan

Top 125 Buildings

Aqua Tower | 2009 | Chicago | Studio Gang

Photo © Stephen Hall/Hedrich Blessing, courtesy Studio Gang

Top 125 Buildings

North Carolina Museum of Art | 2010 | Raleigh | Thomas Phifer and Partners

Photo courtesy North Carolina Museum of Art

Top 125 Buildings

Poetry Foundation | 2011 | Chicago | John Ronan Architects

Photo © Steven Hall/Hedrich Blessing, courtesy John Ronan Architects

Top 125 Buildings

Burj Khalifa | 2010 | Dubai | Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

More than six years after its opening, SOM’s Burj Khalifa remains the world’s tallest completed skyscraper. The 2,717-foot-high, 163-story building has a tri-lobed plan that makes the tower appear like a stalagmite that grows naturally out of the earth. But the shape is also the product of the integration of architecture and structure: the three wings buttress the central concrete core. This gives way to an internal steel structure at the 156th floor that carries the mostly unoccupied spire to its tip. —Joann Gonchar

Photo courtesy SOM/© Nick Merrick/Hedrich Blessing

Top 125 Buildings

International Commerce Centre | 2011 | Hong Kong | Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates

Photo © Tim Griffith,  courtesy KPF

Top 125 Buildings

Barnes Foundation | 2012 | Philadelphia | Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

Photo © Tom Crane, courtesy Barnes Foundation

Top 125 Buildings

CCTV Headquarters | 2012 | Beijing | OMA

Photo © Ian A Holton/Creative Commons

Top 125 Buildings

Heydar Aliyev Centre | 2013 | Baku, Azerbaijan | Zaha Hadid Architects

Here Hadid had a project with enough scope to prove her long-evolving theses about architecture as a topographical field and about the interaction of the building with the ground around it. The building grows from a field highly articulated with ramps, gardens, and pools. By verticalizing its curving plan, the building becomes a mountainous topography of fluid form and space. The design also realizes the promise of the computer as an agent of architectural liquefaction, bending even the technology of the standard space frame into enveloping curves. —Joseph Giovannini

Photo © Helene Binet, courtesy Zaha Hadid Architects

Top 125 Buildings

Shenzen Bao’an International Airport, Terminal 3 | 2013 | Shenzhen, China | Studio Fuksas

Photo courtesy Archivo Fuksas/Studio Fuksas

Top 125 Buildings

Novartis Building 337 | 2013 | East Hanover, New Jersey | Rafael Viñoly Architects

Photo courtesy Rafael Viñoly Architects

Top 125 Buildings

GL Events Headquarters | 2014 | Lyon, France | Studio Odile Decq

Photo © Studio Odile Decq/Roland Halbe

Top 125 Buildings

The High Line | 2014 | New York | James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Photo © Studio Dubuisson

Top 125 Buildings

Matmut Atlantique Stadium | 2015 | Bordeaux, France | Herzog & de Meuron

Photo courtesy Herzog & de Meuron Basel

Top 125 Buildings

Shanghai Tower | 2015 | Shanghai | Gensler

Photo courtesy Gensler

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September 1, 2016

To commemorate Architectural Record’s 125th anniversary, our editors have chosen to honor 125 of the most important works of architecture built since the magazine’s founding in 1891. This was not an easy task. We started by polling a group of distinguished critics and scholars for nominations, but the final list is ours. While many inclusions are obvious, others may be surprising, or a little controversial—as are some omissions. And, we know, all 125 might not make the list at RECORD's next big birthday: time inevitably changes not only our tastes, but how we understand history.

Click through the slideshow above, and visit the pages below, to see all the buildings on our list.


1-25    26-50    51-75    76-100

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