As members of a young generation of architects in Slovenia, dekleva gregorič arhitekti have already attracted considerable attention at an international level, and won various prizes for their work. They have realized projects in Slovenia but also Italy, Portugal and on Hawaii. Tina Gregorič and Aljoša Dekleva have an investigative, analytical approach to their work combined with a love of experimentation, an approach that could be summed up as: Challenging the obvious! more

They won the 2009 German Timber Prize, were celebrated in the FAZ newspaper and nominated “Young Architect(s) of the Year” in Great Britain: Tobias Kraus and Timm Schönberg commute between London and Konstanz but are skeptical about the British building culture. With their Wooden Crystal, a residential building in Hamburg, they have catapulted themselves into the upper echelons of the international architecture scene which does not, however, prevent them from setting up office in view of the current building site so as, together with the developers, to achieve the best possible result. Their sense for reshaping the way residents co-habit through spatial experimentation is more strongly developed than their need to design cool outer sheaths. more

Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro have no intention of making a decision between art and architecture – they are researchers, their studio is a laboratory for alternative construction concepts and at the same time a field of experimentation for media art. The three architects are currently primarily working on major projects such as the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, the conversion of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, and the High Line Park in Chelsea. more

In Abu Dhabi they are planning a museum made of earth, in Bangladesh a school featuring a storey made of bamboo, and in Neuseddin in Brandenburg, Germany, a fire station made of timber. For Ziegert Roswag Seiler Architekten Ingenieure, an architects' studio in Berlin, ecological building means a blend of engineering skills, sensitive craftsmanship and sound communication skills. Prizes and contracts from outside Germany are acknowledgement of this approach. more

Different approaches and questioning assignments - this is how the Viennese architectural group querkraft tackles a design, a work process. The name says it all, whether we are talking about a building assignment on the scale of large corporate headquarters such as the Adidas Brand Center, or the recent museum for the industrialist Herbert W. Liaunig’s considerable contemporary art collection in the southern Austrian town of Neuhaus. more

Caroline Bos and Ben van Berkel have been producing astonishing architecture for over 20 years now: For just over ten years they have gone by the name of UNStudio – which can be read as “United Network” just as much as “Un-Studio”. In other words this is a new type of architecture studio, which relies strongly on networking by means of computer. This involves in the design phase using computers to translate the 3D function diagrams into complex spatial contexts as well as to organize the entire internal and external communication. This produces a construction process on and with the 3D model, from which ambiguous buildings such as the Erasmus Bridge and the Möbius House have emerged. The most recent buildings – the Mercedes-Benz Museum, the Agora Theater in Lelystad and the musical theater in Graz – reveal a new level of functionalism, which are indifferent to stylistic features such as “blob” and “box”. At UNStudio the blob is in the box. more

There are probably not many architecture studios that attracted as much attention with their first projects as Plasma Studio. One could almost say their spectacular designs not only promote a totally new sense of spatial perception, but that their architecture turns all convention upside down – an infinite architectural experiment. more

Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture’s projects demonstrated early on that architecture can be far more than just a physical presence. They are couple, both professionally and in private, and in their New York studio Asymptote work on the overlap of real and virtual space. Whereas their designs were initially still far removed from a concrete construction assignment, they are now planning a number of major projects around the globe. And they have no problem whatever switching from the dimensions of a skyscraper to those of a wrist watch. more

They are better known in the art scene than among architects. No surprise, they think like artists: Johannes Kuehn, Wilfried Kuehn und Simona Malvezzi. The series of their conversions in art environments includes the foyer of the Schirn in Frankfurt, rooms for the Manifesta in the Italian town of Trento, a viewable storage area in Vienna, galleries, art museums, exhibitions. Wahtall the projects have in common is that they have the magnitude to withdraw, they are unflustered and precise. more

Clear lines, restrained shapes and a pronounced appreciation of special materials surround Piero Lissoni's designs with a subtle simplicity.

For over 20 years now the Milan architect has been working at the interface between architecture and design, alongside new products also designing entire hotels, apartment blocks, company headquarters, and yachts - from the façade down to the faucet. more

For the brothers Jan and Tim Edler, one thing is certain: Buildings communicate with their surroundings. They prove this by means of totally different pieces of work, which they themselves refer to as architecture tuning. more

Delugan Meissl's buildings are sharp, flying, and white. But the Viennese architects cannot be pigeonholed that easily. Dynamic they are, but not exclusively. Dynamism is just the "icing on the cake". more

Anyone looking for good architects in Dresden will invariably consider Knerer Lang . And anyone walking through downtown Dresden will invariably pass buildings they have created. Between the Baroque curves and post-War drabness they certainly catch the eye : with a few key elements, smooth surfaces and surprising colors. more

A plastic house, a stone church, a concrete office. Florian Nagler, who recently turned 40 and is based in Munich, is capable of just about anything, apart from off-the-peg buildings, that is. Anybody observing his work encounters everything architects have ever wanted to design. All that's actually still missing is a museum.

Prizes galore, and still not a trace of vanity. Nagler moves on from one success story to the next. Though at one point things did look pretty bleak. At the very beginning. Having won the competition for the German Pavilion at EXPO 2000 he then backed out. more