METRO Arquitetos: The Latest Architecture and News

The relationship between architecture and gastronomy goes beyond the simple function of providing a place to eat. It is a sensory symbiosis in which the environment prepares the palate as much as seasoning does. The visual composition of a dish can be understood through principles such as volume, balance, contrast, and rhythm — concepts that are equally fundamental to architectural design. In the same way, a restaurant’s architecture — its colors, lighting, and material choices — acts as an invisible ingredient, capable of elevating the dining experience and shaping the perception of flavor even before the first bite. Both disciplines are dynamic, directly reflecting social behaviors and cultural trends that influence how we occupy space and how we nourish ourselves.

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As the year culminates, it's once again time for the ArchDaily team of curators to reflect on the best-performing projects of 2025 and consider what readers were most interested in. Through this diverse overview, we assess the cross-continental similarities and differences in trends and construction development. This year brought us many grand cultural and public spaces by Lina Ghotmeh, BIG, Zaha Hadid Architects, DnA, and Serie Architects, who populated events like Expo Osaka and the Venice Biennale, as well as a surprising number of museums and public or landscape works in China and the rest of the Asian continent. However, while these were sought-after projects, the leading works remained, unsurprisingly, residential projects.

More specifically, the houses that were most viewed on the ArchDaily global site were concrete houses that bore considerable injections of greenery and landscape focus. They propose layouts highlighting voids and double heights, as well as inner courtyards or large openings to the exterior. While some references did suggest traditional or vernacular elements, modernist revivals were still predominant. Material trends are much more tame, with a recurrence of raw concrete use, as wood and stone were common accent elements. Still, the more interesting thing about the works this year is the efforts brought by architects in situating and setting the projects within their surroundings, bringing special attention to landscape and how projects merged with nature.

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With one of the most varied performances of contemporary architecture in São Paulo, Metro Arquitetos has built its legacy varying between different scales, from design to urban planning.

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Videos

The Museum of Art of São Paulo - MASP will soon expand its facilities to include an annex next to the iconic project by Lina Bo Bardi. The 14-story Dumont-Adams building, which has been inactive for decades, has 7800 square meters and will be renovated to house exhibition wings, a café, a restaurant, and a restoration laboratory.

Forty-seven years after their first appearance, Lina Bo Bardi's iconic glass easels have returned to the gallery at São Paulo's Museum of Art (MASP), displaying some of the museum's most valuable paintings, spanning from the medieval to the modern, in an exhibition on the second floor of the museum.

Removed from display in 1996, the concrete pillars, wood and glass easels were reviewed by METRO Arquitetos, who became part of MASP's curatorial team -- in charge of exhibition design -- last December. Having carried out various exhibitions this year at the museum - such as Brazilian Art Through the 1900s - METRO Arquitetos decided to end the year by bringing back the easels, in an exhibition similar to the original one conceived by Lina, which almost five decades later, continues to impress with its innovative way of exhibiting art in museums.

We had the opportunity to visit the exhibition montage and speak with architect Martin Corullon about the return of the easels and the process of recovering the space as conceived by Lina for the museum. Read the complete interview below.

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In honor of International Museum Day we’ve collected twenty compelling museum projects. In this round up you’ll find a truly global selection; from Wang Shu's Ningbo Historic Museum in China and Tod Williams + Billie Tsien's Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia to Monoblock's Contemporary Art Museum in Buenos Aires, see all of our editors’ favorites after the break!