You could almost call these buildings archeotecture, or perhaps archeolitecture, because though all three were built recently, they look and feel profoundly archeological. All of them have the mute, mysterious quality of monumental ancient ruins and they produce – for me, anyway – that weird, quiet, prickling-the-back-of-the-neck sensation you sometimes get when viewing something impossibly old. The Ningbo Museum (at bottom) is actually an archeological museum, so it’s not surprising that it mimics an unearthed stone structure, but the other two buildings have no immediate connection to archeology: one is a house in Peru, the other an office in Spain. The building above is the Pachacamac House in Peru by Longhi Architects. The room in the third photo is the master bedroom. The house is a beautiful building, almost an earthwork, extremely sensitive to its environment, and one among many intelligently-thought-out buildings appearing lately in South America. 

The building above is the SGAE Central Office in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, by the Spanish architectural firm Ensamble Studio. “The great stone wall can be thought of as a monumental sculpture, constructed by the superposition and repetition of prehistoric orders adapted to a Renaissance broken composition. The Mondariz Grey stone facade components appear in one of their purest forms, as irregular ashlars of variable geometry and size, selected directly from the quarry overage, and ordered in permeable strips that manipulate the South light breaking it on the inside. This sculptural content causes the disintegration of the building as such, going beyond its mere symbolic and functional dimension…” 

Above, the Ningbo Historic Museum was designed by Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio. Photos by Iwan Baan. 

Maybe these forms and materials – the simple monumentality, the stone – are a reaction against recent architectural glitz and excess, or maybe they’re the unconscious product of an increasingly apocalyptic environmental imagination that already imagines every building a ruin, or maybe it’s all just coincidence. I’m certain there must be earlier examples of this, but I can’t think of them at the moment. All three buildings were found on the superb archdaily.

Museum designed and built as if by archeological time. The Ningbo Historic Museum was designed by Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio. Photos by Iwan Baan, via archdaily.

Selgas Cano is a Spanish architecture firm, and this long glass tube in a little wooded ravine is the Madrid office they’ve built for themselves. The shutters over the clear roof are retractable (see the photo of the pulleys at bottom). The building seems to have inspired some wildly varying reactions from those who either find it beautiful and inspiring or who feel it’s a cramped, claustrophobic, unventilated bunker or train car – see the archdaily link to see what I mean. The superb photos are by architectural photographer Iwan Baan. Via archdaily via kenmat and maxchad. PS Both fans and detractors of this space may want to read a recent Scientific American article on the neuroscience of how room design affects work, creativity and mood. Two relevant points are that low ceilings facilitate detail work while high ceilings facilitate abstraction; and that views of nature improve creativity, focus and memory. This space offers all of those advantages – natural views, as well as ceilings that are both low and high, depending on the retraction of the roof and on which part of the room you’re in.