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Carla Chávez, Carolina Rodas, and Felipe Donoso began collaborating while studying architecture in Quito, Ecuador, and went on to found RAMA Estudio, one of the winners of the ArchDaily Next Practices Awards 2026. For more than a decade, their practice has moved between housing, public spaces, adaptive reuse, and community initiatives. Their work is guided by an understanding of architecture as a service. For them, a project begins with the circumstances of a place and extends to the people who will build it and those who will live with it for years.

That idea has taken the architects into parts of a project that architects rarely reach. They have lived in a house to understand its neighborhood before transforming it, built with local craftspeople using earth dug from the site, and returned to an island community years after finishing their first homes there. In each case, their involvement continued long after construction ended.

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The Elie Khouri Art Foundation (EKAF) has appointed Sumayya Vally of Johannesburg- and London-based practice Counterspace to design its permanent home in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Scheduled to open in late 2028, the institution will occupy a repurposed villa in the Jumeirah 1 district, transforming the existing residential property and its surrounding grounds into a space for contemporary art exhibitions, education, and public programming. The appointment forms part of EKAF's plans to establish a permanent platform for contemporary art in Dubai, with architecture and curatorial programming developed in parallel.

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Egypt's New Administrative Capital (NAC), located about 45 kilometers east of Cairo, is one of two major urban development projects under construction near the Egyptian capital, along with New Cairo, a satellite city east of Cairo's Ring Road that dates back to the 2000s. To date, Cairo remains the official capital of the country, but various government functions have been moved to the purpose-built city. The new capital in Egypt's Eastern Desert recalls the iconic modernist initiative of Brasília and adds to similar recent projects in countries such as Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia and South Korea. Manuel Álvarez Diestro's photographic work offers a glimpse of this endeavor from the perspective of a pedestrian approaching the urban landscape.

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Beyond their buildings, infrastructure, and streets, cities can be understood as territories shaped by materials, resources, and processes of transformation that define their physical environments. As drone technology becomes increasingly integrated into architectural documentation and urban analysis, aerial imagery offers new opportunities to examine these different layers at multiple scales. As Jane Jacobs once suggested, "Cities are the mines of the future."

From documenting building surfaces and identifying patterns in material distribution to observing how construction systems and urban landscapes evolve over time, drones can provide valuable information to architects, engineers, surveyors, urban planners, and researchers, supporting their work and informing their workflows. When combined with photogrammetry, thermal imaging, geographic information systems (GIS), and automated image processing, aerial observation is no longer limited to a single discipline or field of application. Instead, it opens up broader discussions about surface conditions, environmental performance, and material resources.

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