Designed by OPEN Architecture and sited along the Chinese coast near Beijing, this building complex is a mysterious maze of fluid concrete shells, all of which will be reburied under sand when construction is complete, restoring the appearance of the beach.

The monumental and cavernous Dune Art Museum is meant to evoke primal imagery, tying modern experiences back to ancient human cave-dwelling (and cave-drawing) ancestors.

Below ground, the spaces are designed to fit different programs, including gallery, studio, cafe and bookstore areas. The entry is a long, dark tunnel, further heightening the sense of removal from the surface (punctuated by light from skylights above).

Museums naturally need a lot of protection from natural light to control aging, making an underground one an obvious choice in a lot of ways. Some spaces not requiring this isolation, however, will have views out to the sky and Bohai Bay beyond where they can watch the tides roll in.

has released the latest construction photos of the Dune Art Museum topping out in a Chinese coastal city near Beijing. The art museum manifests itself as a complex of interconnected concrete shells, which in the next and final stage of construction, are to be buried in sand and shrubs to restore the natural silhouette of the dunes on the beach.

“The Dune Art Museum is the first installment of the project, Dialogue by the Sea. The second installment will feature the Sea Art Museum, a dock-like structure to be constructed offshore. The two museums will be connected by a narrow stone passage, accessible only at low tide.

“While construction has not yet begun for the second installment of the project, the Dune Art Museum is expected to be completed this year.”

Street artist Thrashbird has gone off the beaten track to transform huge stone blocks at an abandoned concrete factory into enormous designer handbags.

Like Banksy, LA-based Thrashbird prefers to be known by his working name while jealously guarding his personal privacy. Nothing petty about it – street art isn’t always accepted by authorities with the power to arrest, fine or both. That said, Thrashbird has begun to make a name for himself and he’s moving beyond his home turf to do it. In the case of his “Valley of Secret Treasures“, he’s gone all the way to Lime, Oregon, where an abandoned concrete & cement plant provided an unlikely canvas for some very unique street art.

Nowadays a ghost town, Lime got its name from the region’s abundant natural limestone deposits that, beginning in 1916, were exploited by a series of companies producing plaster, cement and concrete. The last of these firms – Oregon Portland Cement Company – closed in 1980 when all of the nearby limestone had been mined out.

“Everyday we pass abandoned condemned  buildings, I see an opportunity to breathe beauty into the breakdown,” explained the artist after visiting Lime in the summer of 2014. “All around us are the forgotten decaying structures of the Industrial Age. I want to bring those places to life again by adding some color and ideas.”

Thrashbird was particularly intrigued by the many squat, blocky, rebar-festooned concrete extrusions scattered about the old factory’s grounds. Possibly they were testing sites for varieties of cement but the artist saw something else: an opportunity to “make a great statement about sustainability and our attachment to high-priced objects.”

With the heavy lifting already done, Thrashbird didn’t need much material to transform the huge concrete blocks into jumbo versions of some of the fashion world’s most expensive accessories. Some discarded rope, scraps of wood, and old car tires (all available on site at no cost) provided the artist with everything needed to realize his vision.

Not that creating the Valley of Secret Values was a simple thing, mind you… summer days on the Oregon-Idaho border can be brutally hot and natural spring water is in short supply. Even with the use of stencils to create some of the artworks’ repeating patterns, it took a full day on average to complete each humongous handbag.

This smartly-produced video from international architectural illustrator and graphic designer Julia Mozheyko profiles Thrashbird’s creation of the Valley of Secret Values, accompanied by an evocative musical soundtrack. The video was posted to YouTube in September of 2017, shortly after the art installation was finished.

“The “Thrashbird’s Valley of Secret Values” project is part cautionary tale, part beautification project, and very introspective for me personally,” stated the artist, seen above on-site in July of 2017 with fellow street artist Provolotus. “It highlights my own personal struggle with ego and grandiosity, hence the scale of it. We grapple for status and purpose in society. Consuming possessions to showcase how successful we are and fill us with purpose, with complete disregard for the people and the planet affected by our careless over-consumption of ephemeral consumer goods. Our measure of success has been skewed.”

“We have come to a place in society where ‘things’ and social status have become more important than our connection to each other,” he added. “Very few people will ever come across these pieces of art in real life; there is something special within that. There is more to this story, but I’ll save it for later.” And we know just the bag to save it in.

A new housing project in Beirut uses flexible wall dividers in an unconventional way, allowing huge steel panels to slide into and out of the structure itself, animating the facade while partitioning space on demand.

Designed by Fouad Samara Architects, these duplex ‘Modulofts’ units in the capital of Lebanon were modeled after a combination of classic open urban lofts and cozy contemporary homes, hence the spatial flexibility.

Each unit has a pair of rooms overlooking a main living and dining area which can be opened up by day, the steel partitions serving as shades, and closed at night for privacy, or reconfigured for dinners and parties.

The adaptable interior can be configured in sixteen different ways, explain the architects, via a combination of four sliding walls that divide the bedrooms as well as separate living and dining, study and television spaces on the lower level.

Divisions aren’t exclusively binary, either — partitions can be slid out partway to create essentially infinite variations. Raw slate is designed to reference traditional Lebanese homes, and steel to conjure NYC loft aesthetics.

A series of elaborately curved houses designed for Eindhoven will rest like large boulders in the Dutch landscape, illustrating the complex forms made possible by new and evolving 3D-printing technologies.

The first single-story house will be around 1,000 square feet and allow for process refinements for the multi-story units to follow – research and innovation are part of the mandate of the Eindhoven University of Technology and other project partners.

The goal, in part, is to optimize for quality, comfort and cost, with each phase building on the previous iteration, a marriage of experimentation and architectural creation.

Construction will begin this year and the first unit should be occupiable sometime next year. While the ideas are bigger than creating a single small neighborhood of homes, having them be functional in the end is also a key aim of the project.

Brutalism may be concrete architecture’s highest historic form, but the material is as versatile as we make it, and it’s got a lot more tricks up its sleeves. Though we may think of it as cold, heavy and solid, these 10 projects ranging from rocky pavilions and airy sculptural memorials to museums that look like they’re made of folded paper show off just how sculptural concrete can be in the hands of an innovative designer.

Crinkled Texture: High School by Wiesflecker Architecture

Set outside a historic high school in Austria, this new, independent building by architect Johannes Wiesflecker stands out for a number of reasons, including the way its modern form contrasts with the older complex behind it. But most eye-catching of all is its dramatic ‘crinkled’ shear wall, hanging about 8 feet in front of a glass facade. The wall is actually a three-dimensional structure in itself, almost like a sculpture that stretches from the roof down to the first floor, and can be viewed from inside as well as out.

Dynamic Angles: Simple House by Moon Hoon

For a home on a windy island in Korea where “weather is the ruler,” architect Moon Hoon needed materials that would provide bunker-like security while also offering a welcoming space to get away. Though his first solution was to sink the home into the ground, the clients wanted something more showy and extravagant. The final design stacks volumes of concrete in a criss-crossed fashion and attaches them together with slim concrete connectors, allowing the wind to flow through the structure. The result feels surprisingly dynamic for a material often associated with heavy, static solidity.

Surprising Shapes & Airy Textures: Shui Cultural Center by West-Line Studio

A latticed formwork of concrete acts as the base of a single zig-zagged roof enclosing the Shui Cultural Center in China, celebrating one of the country’s minority ethnic groups. Its shape pays homage to their language, following the shape of the character for ‘mountain,’ while the pattern of the perforated bronze steel plates of the roof takes inspiration from the Shui’s traditional characters. Architecture firm West-Line Studio wanted the thin metal sheathing to contrast with the heaviness of the concrete, which reveals itself in the building’s interiors.

Thin, Curving Walls: Museo International del Barroco by Toyo Ito & Associates

The thin, curving concrete walls of Toyo Ito’s Museo International del Barroco almost look like they’re made of paper, a quality rarely seen in this material. The firm worked with the Mexican company DANSTEK, which specializes in precast concrete, the develop the concrete walls and slabs which are precast on the exterior and cast in-situ on the interior. Those walls aren’t just decorative, either. They’re load-bearing, and integrated into a structural strategy that gives the building earthquake resistant qualities.

Carved Concrete Designs: Commercial Building by Jorge Urias Studio

Once you get a look at this low-cost commercial concrete structure in Juarez, Mexico, you wonder why we don’t see designs embedded into similar buildings more often. It seems sort of obvious, doesn’t it? Yet decorative and artistic touches are typically left off in favor of fast and simple unadorned surfaces. Jorge Urias Studio carved the tilt-up concrete panels of this building with a bold geometric pattern, giving it a lot more personality than it would have otherwise.

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Cool Concrete 10 Structures Taking A Refreshing Approach To This Raw Material