In May 2018, BLOX, a mixed-use building in Copenhagen designed by OMA, was festively inaugurated by the Danish Queen. BLOX is home to the Danish Architecture Center (DAC) and includes exhibition spaces, offices, a café, a bookshop, a fitness center, twenty-two apartments, and an underground car park.
Located on the Aubergenville plateau overlooking the Seine shortly before Mantes-la-Jolie, the Vincent Van Gogh high school is located not far from the city center between fields, a suburban area, and a large social housing complex. It was designed by architect Jean-François Laurent and inaugurated in 1991.
Inherited from ancestral techniques, dealing with natural stone as a building material is, historically, linked more to the structure of a building than to the finishing stage. With the development of construction, natural stones as a structure were replaced by more efficient and cheaper systems, such as reinforced concrete or even metallic structures and structural masonry, opening space for the use of stones as finishes and coatings.
