Where are the contemporary pyramids?

The museum in the form of an inverted pyramid, completely without openings and only lit by light coming from above, was to stand on a ridge like a monolithic anti-gravitational sculpture, looming boldly over the neighbourhood of Colinas de Bello Monte. The project remained a visionary dream.

The university complex designed by Takamasa Yoshizaka, protégé of Le Corbusier, includes several buildings housing classrooms, accommodation, services and recreational spaces. The main four-storey building, one of which is a basement, with its unusual brutalist-style inverted pyramid shape in reinforced concrete, symbolises the wedge of knowledge stuck in the earth. 

The building towering over the artificial lake along the pass between France and Italy looks like a concrete tent. The building houses a chapel and a museum dedicated to the memory of Mont Cenis, which is one of the highest museums in Europe (located at an altitude of 2,100 m).

The church fits into its context by openly detaching itself from the surrounding residential buildings thanks to its marked upward movement. The front, doubled in the image reflected by the pool in front, is formed by a single elongated exposed-concrete triangle, pierced by coloured windows, and is reminiscent on the one hand of Gothic spires, suggesting on the other the idea of a tent pitched in the neighbourhood. The structure consists of reinforced concrete walls with steel beams supporting the roof, today clad in porcelain aluminium sheet. Next to the church, the parish buildings and clergy residences are distributed in a semicircle around a garden. 

The building in the shape of an upside-down pyramid, a landmark in the urban landscape, includes the radio offices and a concert hall for more than 500 seats. By using a steel structure, it was one of the first buildings to diverge from the Social Realism dominating the region at the time, which prescribed the use of prefabricated reinforced concrete elements.

The four glass pyramids, distributed rigorously around a common courtyard, that compose the Edmonton Botanic Garden are an iconic landmark in the context. The complex houses numerous plant species distributed in three of the four pyramids, designed according to different bioclimatic conditions (temperate, tropical and arid climate); the fourth includes exhibition spaces.

The building was conceived as a manifesto of a post-independentist enthusiasm for the capital being transformed into a modern, cosmopolitan city. Set in the Plateau, the area of Abidjan presumed to become an Ivorian Manhattan, it was conceived as a multifunctional building on a Western model, with a shopping centre, offices, a panoramic restaurant, a nightclub and a supermarket. The reference to the local building tradition lives on in the overall sloping outline, in response to heavy rainfall, and in the sunshades that protect against the equatorial climate. Today, the building is in an advanced state of disrepair.

The iconic building on Avenida Paulista consists of a monolithic truncated-pyramidal volume resting on a massive concrete structure. The work was renovated in 2016 by Paulo Mendes da Rocha, who reorganised programmes and flows to reconcile the building's activities with the new urban life on the avenue.

The iconic pyramid in the centre of Napoleon's courtyard serves as a light-flooded atrium for the museum complex. Its geometry and choice of materials (steel structure, aluminium frames and super-transparent glass panes), unusual for the location, position the work within the context as belonging to a natural process of historical stratification that confronts the past while retaining its clear contemporary identity. 

The construction of the imposing 330 m concrete pyramid building, standing out in the Pyongyang skyline as the tallest structure in North Korea, began in 1987 and was suspended in 1992 due to geopolitical tensions. The building remained unused until 2008, when a financial contribution from foreign investors enabled the completion of the building's exterior. In 2012, the opening of a hotel was announced but the programme is currently suspended.

The Pyramid, specially built to host the congress of the 200 delegates of the world's major religions, gathering here every three years, houses not only specific sections dedicated to different confessions but also a 1,300-seat opera house, a museum of national history, a library of religious literature, a research centre and rooms for conferences and exhibitions. The building, clad in stone with enamelled inserts, was constructed using precast concrete technology to speed up the construction process, and is designed to withstand the area's harsh temperature variations.

The Courtscraper, the glass-and-steel residential and commercial building overlooking the banks of the Hudson River in Manhattan, wth its warped-pyramid shape, is a fusion of two building types: a high-density tower and a courtyard building. The irregular extrusion of the geometry ensures that all flats can enjoy the view of the river, not just those on top floors.

The self-celebrating monument of a dictator has been converted into a public place of culture and sociality with a playful and irreverent approach. The reuse project has preserved the pyramidal volume and reinforced concrete structure, on which brightly coloured blocks are distributed to house cafeterias, start-ups, incubators, studios, laboratories and education rooms. Stairways on the sloping fronts of the building allow citizens to literally walk on the former political manifesto.