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Iñaki Abalos and Juan Herreros founded their practice over twenty years ago and, as a consequence of their teaching and editorial, research and design activities, have created their own identity as architects, demonstrating commitment to the contemporary world and concern for the urban context of new buildings. Their pragmatic approach to architecture is typified by their interest in the skyscraper, which dates back to the exhibition they designed early in their careers (1987) on the skyscrapers of Le Corbusier. They have gone on to build their own examples with the Barcelona apartment block, the Woermann Tower in Las Palmas and Sociopolis, the Torre Solar in Valencia (all completed in 2005).

The work of Abelos and Herreros avoids any easy stylistic category. It is based on a playful engagement with context. The architects take something from the place and usually bring something unexpected from elsewhere; a material, a pattern or a way of making. They are committed to a clear tectonic articulation of constructional form but they always bring a marvellous quality of lightness. There is a sense that the building is only just there and might disappear or fade at any moment. The buildings are often made of ordinary things, but they are somehow transformed by the idea.

Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer have been working together for nearly two decades and have become a fixed point of reference for younger Swiss architects. Early success came with their exemplary contribution to Swiss museums and they have since consolidated their architectural approach with international competition projects, housing and public buildings. Despite their apparent simplicity their buildings are highly considered, inventive solutions, sometimes appearing to de-materialise into the surroundings, such as their 1992 Kirchner Museum Davos, the 1995 Erweiterung Kunstmuseum in Winterthur or the 1998 Sammlung Oskar Reinhart, Römerholz also in Winterthur; sometimes concerning themselves with materiality with the use of titanium family house in Graubünden (2007), the corten archeological Museum and Park Kalkriese in Osnabrück (2002) or using iron-pigmented concrete on the signal box in Zürich (1999).

The blind wall at the front of the Villa am Romerholz is made of concrete. It faces you as you come up the driveway. When the concrete was poured they mixed in copper grounds. They have caused the surface to go a cool grey-green. Above, a copper roof discharges its water directly onto the vertical surface of the wall. The copper carbonate flowing off the upper surface deposits fine layers of patina onto the face. On a wet day, this layering upon and within the surface causes the wall to glow with a lacquer-like lustre. Time and rain and weathering do not damage the architecture, they actually bring it into being.

In Davos, the Sports Centre is like a battered piece of hockey kit. The weathered wood face covers blocks of acid-hued graphic colour. It is at once utilitarian and celebratory. The architecture plays a knowing game between the materials that weather and those that stay bright and sharp. The thing seems unforced.

Gigon and Guyer manage to achieve striking, even theatrical effects, without appearing to have tried. It is a fine balancing act between reserve and showiness. Their work constantly provides us with a sense of epiphany. It shows consistent control of the materials of architecture. It appears at once matter-of-fact and glorious.

Kengo Kuma established his practice in 1990, with the aim to utilize materials in an expressive manner and to recover the traditions of Japanese buildings, reinterpreting them for the 21st century. He has become well known for his use of glass, wood and stone in works as diverse as private residences, Buddhist temples, and art museums.

His buildings blur their outlines and blend into their particular landscapes, be they in the country such as the house Great (Bamboo) Wall, and Nakagawa-machi Bato Hiroshige Museum of Art (which also uses structural timber); or in the city such as in the sleek urban monument of the Suntory Museum in Tokyo or the Fukusaki Hanging Garden offices in Osaka.

Kuma was born in Japan and graduated from the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, continuing his studies in New York at Columbia University and the Asian Cultural Council. Following this he founded the ‘spatial design’ studio and in 1990 Kengo Kuma & Associates. Between 1998 and 1999 he was a Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Information at Keio University. In 1997 he won the prestigious Architectural Institute of Japan Award.

Kuma shows an acute sensitivity to maximizing a building's setting, whether urban or rural and has created such celebrated structures as the Tokyo headquarters of Louis Vuitton, adobe housing for an ancient wooden Buddha, and an observatory that is sunk into a seaside hill. Among his most memorable works are One Omotesando, a Tokyo building used by high-profile design firms, which interacts harmoniously with the tree-lined avenue it occupies, and the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, whose interplay of reflected light and transparency is mirrored in the water of the canal flowing through the museum. Other recent works include the Hanging Garden at Fukusaki and the Nagasaki Art Museum, the design for the restructuring of the headquarters of NTT in Tokyo and the Murai Masanari Art Museum.

The Paris-based practice that Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal founded together aims to create buildings which are generous in space and spirit. The duo work at ‘the edge of architecture’ on social issues and are keen to create a better living environment through social housing that incorporates ‘freespace’ that residents can use as they wish. The same principles apply to all their work, large and small., from their single dwellings, such as the flexible living space of Latapie House, Floriac (1993) which incorporates a large greenhouse-style living space with moving wall panels and flexible floor plans, to the large scale of their Nantes School of Architecture (2008) in which a big proportion of the space is unassigned.

Lacaton and Vassal are interested in the intrinsic qualities of a place and the circumstances that surround the act of construction. They know that certain kinds of architecture can be detrimental to the unforced natural order of a situation. “Why, more often than not, do things become fixed, freeze up, when architecture is installed?” they ask. Their work is undogmatic, but they have a strong commitment to the given and the imperfect. They tell us that they do not wish to address the whole issue of perfection. Their work has no virtuosity of a conscious kind. Instead, they possess a kind of indifference, a desire to avoid any self-conscious architectural form. They prefer buildings in a raw state, unadulterated, as though construction is somehow unfinishable.

Their real passion is lightness. This could be the space beneath the broad sky, but really it means the skill, available to few designers, to do just enough or even to do nothing at all. It requires extraordinary judgement and tact to work in this way. This is architecture closely tuned to the music of what actually happens.

Eduardo Souto de Moura produces architecture that achieves harmony and balance between the natural and the man-made. Buildings such as the Braga Stadium, Braga, Portugal, the interiors of the Siza’s Portuguese Pavilion at Expo 98 and his other work with Alvaro Siza such as the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2005 have attracted attention both within and outside of Portugal, not only because of his capacity for reducing formal means but also his sensitive treatment of situational factors and his ability to demonstrate a complex view of things.

Souto de Moura is a Professor at the University of Oporto’s Faculty of Architecture and has been a visiting Professor at the architectural schools of Geneva, Paris-Belleville, Harvard, Dublin, ETH Zurich and Lausanne. He studied architecture at the School of Fine Arts in Oporto and from 1974 to 1979 worked with Alvaro Siza at his practice. He started his professional career designing houses and achieving consistency and control of design by emphasizing adaptation to the site, reinforcing the idea that typology remains unchanged and universal, while materials and building systems are the elements of change.

His focus has always been on the harmonious coexistence of the site and architecture through tension, an approach with roots in contemporary American sculpture and the work of artists such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Sol Le Witt. Like them, Souto de Moura is concerned with making discreet, precise but convincing gestures so that his interventions generate a new balance that rearranges the components and imposes a new order upon them.

Souto de Moura’s use of materials creates a fusion of monumentality, luxury, sustainability and contextual appropriateness which demonstrates the value he places on local traditions and appropriate solutions. His early work is more open and transparent, and the current work increasingly closed, while always being an elegant reinterpretation of mid-century modernism.

Juhani Pallasmaa is one of the most distinguished and influential architectural thinkers in the world. His voluminous production of articles and several books have increasingly identified him as a powerful advocate of the understanding of architecture as something that is appreciated by all the senses, meaning that architects need to design with more than just a visual criteria in mind.

Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin – Architecture and the Senses is a set book in many architectural schools throughout the world and is the classic analysis of the phenomenological understanding of architecture. Other books have included discussions of the relationships of the cinema to architecture, and the unconscious work of animals and birds as architects.

Pallasmaa is not only a fine writer and a very approachable proponent of a most important theoretical and critical architectural position, but a distinguished practising exponent of it as well, with project credits as diverse as the Helsinki Old Market Hall renovation, the Institut Finlandais in Paris (with Roland Schweitzer), the urban landscaping of the Ruoholahti housing scheme, the bank of Finland Museum in Helsinki and his contribution to the redevelopment of the Kamppi Centre, a new major part of the of the heart of the Finnish capital. He is an exquisite exhibition designer, whose thoughtful shows have illuminated many aspects of architecture.

Pallasmaa has shown himself to be an influential teacher in several countries as well as Finland, where he was until recently professor at the Helsinki University of Technology: as a young man he taught in Ethiopia and he remains visiting professor at Washington University in St Louis. He is an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and a member of the International Committee of Architectural Critics.

Ben van Berkel & Caroline Bos co-founded their practice, UN Studio, in 1999, an international architectural practice with extensive experience in the fields of urbanism, infrastructure, and public, private and utility buildings. The practice strives to make a significant contribution to the discipline of architecture and to continually develop its quality of design and technology.

At the basis of UNStudio are a number of long-term goals, which are intended to define and guide the quality of our performance in the architectural field. We see as mutually sustaining the environment, market demands and client wishes that enable our work, and we aim for results in which our goals and our client’s goals overlap.’

Van Berkel’s early projects profoundly affected his understanding of the role of the architect today and constituted the foundation of his collaborative approach to practising, leading to the foundation of UN Studio. Recent projects, which reflect his longstanding interest in the integration of construction and architecture, are the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and Arnhem Central. He is currently Professor of Conceptual Design and Head of Architecture at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt.

As an analyst, Bos has been involved in all UN Studio projects. Her observations and synthesis on different programmatic issues has become integral with the work of the different project teams. With van Berkel she was editor of Forum (1985-86) and the ANY publication Diagram Works (1998). Her interest in the concept of the architect is reflected in the books she has co-written with Ben Van Berkel, including Delinquent Visionaries (1990), Mobile Forces (1994), Move (1999), Unfold (2003) and Design Models (2006).