Ecca collection

AV College

Look at one side of the AV College Helsinki and you appear to be studying a pixellated image of ... well, you can’t tell what, and that is a deliberate strategy on the part of the architects. Ark-House Architects, also based in Helsinki, used six different off-the-shelf colours of prepainted metal to create an almost entirely windowless facade that makes reference to the digital techniques that are happening inside this college, dedicated to audiovisual education. The practice’s Pentti Kareoja says that they considered putting in a definite image, such as a face, but decided to leave it abstract – a wise decision. ‘Now people can find their own images,’ said Kareoja.

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IT Fornebu

You can’t miss the portal building at IT Fornebu. Set between four intelligently designed but monochrome office blocks on the site of the former Oslo airport in Norway is this brilliant shock of orange, a building that manages to be arresting without being garish, to stand out without seeming incongruous.

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Centre Pompidou-Metz

As the first regional offshoot of France’s biggest modern art space and a national cultural institution, the new Centre Pompidou-Metz is already helping to boost the economy of a struggling region. It has already become, according to several reports, France’s most visited cultural venue outside Paris.

Images courtesy of Centre Pompidou Metz - Photos by Didier Boy de la Tour

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