Historic and trendy structure don’t come collectively too usually. Despite the fact that they’re seen as vastly totally different, however nonetheless equally vital, our constructed atmosphere is usually outlined by distinctly separate previous and new buildings. Historic structure has its personal attraction and wonder—take into consideration lasting palaces like Versailles or historical temples internationally—and it’s no secret that, at its greatest, trendy structure conjures up: Many buildings designed by figures similar to Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Santiago Calatrava, and Frank Gehry, amongst others are some examples.

Older buildings can inform us in regards to the tradition, historical past, and values of the previous; new ones, very similar to a pressure of nature, have the flexibility to rework a neighborhood (virtually at all times for the higher). Many seek advice from this because the Bilbao impact, a time period coined after a Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim museum helped flip across the Spanish metropolis’s financial system.

Financial enhance apart, what occurs when these trendy marvels are constructed on or inside the current buildings themselves? Though it’s not the norm, there are occasions when architects determine (primarily attributable to preservation) that as a substitute of constructing round or rather than historic buildings, it’s higher to construct in or atop the unique basis. When these two worlds of previous and new come collectively, the consequence will be awe-inspiring. From Zaha Hadid’s extension to the Port Home in Belgium, which seems to be as if a spaceship have been hooked up to a Nineteenth-century constructing, to Daniel Libeskind’s lovely conflict of recent and previous in Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum, AD lists the 19 greatest examples of when historic and trendy structure come collectively to supply one thing higher than the sum of their elements.