What happens to a building after the architecture is finished? For buildings intended to serve the public, their continued life depends on more than the physical conditions of their construction. It involves the activities that take place within them, the relationships they allow to develop, the people who occupy and shape them, and the institutional structures responsible for their upkeep. Yet these conditions are not always secured through the act of building itself. They are continually negotiated, often through forms of work that remain outside the conventional understanding of architectural practice.

The Drill Hall in central Johannesburg offers a way of examining this unfinished work. Its history is marked by changes in use, occupation and institutional responsibility, but also by repeated attempts to imagine what the building could offer the city.

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"Design a cultural center on a desert coastline, in the style of Alvar Aalto, wood structure, golden hour, aerial drone shot, photorealistic, 4K." Within seconds, a line like this returns a convincing image. What is less visible is the shift it demands. For centuries, architectural imagination relied on the body: the hand that sketches, the fingers that shape a model, or, more recently, the click of a mouse in computational tools. Words came afterward, to explain what had already taken form. Today, the order is increasingly reversed. Before an image can exist, it must first be described: its references named, its materials listed, its mood specified.

This translation is not trivial. Intuition rarely arrives as a written sentence, and much of what architects imagine resists description. Yet as words increasingly become the entry point to the image, they also shape what can be imagined. The vocabulary available to describe a space begins to define the space itself.

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Sharjah Design Centre (SDC), a new institution dedicated to design, material research, prototyping, and production, is scheduled to open in 2029 as part of the Sharjah Creative Quarter in the United Arab Emirates. Designed by Taller de Arquitectura – Mauricio Rocha in collaboration with architect Daniel Rosselló, the centre will bring together specialist laboratories, research facilities, production spaces, and public programmes within a purpose-built building. Under the leadership of H.E. Sheikha Hind bint Majid Al Qasimi, SDC aims to connect designers, manufacturers, researchers, and entrepreneurs through an integrated framework for material experimentation, fabrication, and knowledge exchange.

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The second edition of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards is now open for submissions, and this year we are proud to present it in partnership with Dropcity, a center for architecture and design in Milan. Together, we are asking students around the world one question: What can architecture enable in the city?

At ArchDaily, we believe the future of architecture takes shape today in classrooms, studios, and workshops around the world. Guided by our mission to empower architects and designers with tools, knowledge, and inspiration, the Student Project Awards recognize students who expand the definition of architecture, work across disciplines, and engage with the urgent challenges of our time.

Following a seven-year pause, Amman Design Week returned in 2026 under the theme "Accumulations," bringing together designers, makers, and cultural practitioners to reflect on the work shaping Jordan's design landscape. The fourth edition, held from October 2 to 17, 2026, marked a new chapter for the event, with architects Sarah Hejazin and Bisher Tabbaa, founders of the architecture and design practice FADAA, serving as co-directors. Their appointment also brought their research-driven approach to the event's broader program, which explored the relationships between daily practices, cultural memories, and material environments. During the event, we had the opportunity to speak with Sarah Hejazin and Bisher Tabbaa about the thinking behind this year's theme, their approach to material investigations, and how practicing in Jordan informs their work across architecture, objects, and public space.

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On October 31, World Cities Day 2026 will be observed under the theme "Regenerating the City: Adequate Housing for All." Hosted in Fuzhou, China, this year's global observance focuses on how urban regeneration can advance access to adequate housing by improving existing neighborhoods, infrastructure, and public spaces. According to the United Nations, up to 3.4 billion people worldwide lack access to adequate housing, secure tenure, basic services, or affordable living conditions. This challenge points to the need for approaches that consider housing alongside the wider conditions of urban life, including environmental resilience, connectivity, and access to essential services.

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The Human Shelter: Expedition into What Makes a Home is an exploration of the feeling of home. Directed by Boris Bertram and funded by IKEA, the film looks at present ways of living in Norway, Iraq, the United States, Nigeria, Japan, Uganda, and Iceland, interrogating the role of home in order to project it into the future. Through imagery and personal narratives, the documentary connects the concept of home with landscape, movement and settling, time, migration and security, vulnerability, and nature. How do displaced populations create a home? When does a shelter become a home? Portraits, stories, and shelters across four continents give viewers a glimpse of an answer to these big questions in a one-hour film tour.

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When the Ostrogoths besieged Rome in 537 AD, their first military act was to cut the aqueducts. Eleven gravity-fed channels supplied the city with up to a million cubic meters of water per day, more than enough to sustain a population of over a million, fill the public baths, and scour the sewers. Without the aqueducts, Rome became a fortified enclosure around a contaminated river, proving that water was essential to the city's existence.

Unlike land, which can be fenced off, or oil, which can be stored, water is a resource that nobody can fully own, yet everyone depends on. It moves through aquifers, across borders, and down rivers. The Romans were cognizant of this fact; as the aqueducts constituted public infrastructure, the water flowing into fountains was accessible to all. Frontinus, the administrator who oversaw Rome's water system in the first century AD, documented every allocation, every illegal connection, and every abuse of the system with the rigor of someone who understood that water management was a civic act. Architecture, in this sense, has always had the capacity to make water a common good, and equally, by the same means, a privilege.

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Every large dam divides as much as it connects, and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is no exception. A monumental feat of architecture and engineering, the mega-dam has brought everyone together, for better or worse, to interrogate who gets to declare sovereignty over the riches of the river, be it water or momentum, and to challenge colonial-era Nile treaties.

Inaugurated in September 2025, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, or GERD, is a grand concrete structure on the Blue Nile, Abay, in western Ethiopia within the Benishangul-Gumuz region, just 30 kilometers upstream along the river and east of the border with Sudan. It is built as a major source of hydroelectric power, generating an estimated 51.5% of total national output in 2025/26, and symbolizes Ethiopia's national sovereignty, rise to exponential economic development, and technological self-determination. So, why has it become the center of a protracted dispute over regional water security and international law between Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt?

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The concept of "eyes on the street" is perhaps the most famous within architectural and urban literature when it comes to urban security. Jane Jacobs uses this expression to refer to people who - consciously or unconsciously - use public spaces or observe them from their homes, generating natural surveillance. A movement that, within our discipline, is encouraged both through quality public spaces and through the powerful relationship between the public and private created through building facades. Advocating for this daily control, Jacobs believes in a way of making architecture and cities that condemns excessive verticalization, reinforced by isolated buildings and single-use ones that deny contact with the street.

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After a seven-year pause, Amman Design Week returned to Jordan with a premise that feels closely tied to the city itself: that nothing is ever entirely new. Under the theme "Accumulations," the fourth edition of the biennial event brought together more than 220 designers, makers, architects, and collectives across exhibitions, public interventions, talks, workshops, and performances from October 2 to 17. The premise was particularly relevant to Amman, a city whose architecture has been shaped by waves of construction, migration, adaptation, and reuse, where accumulation is not simply a metaphor.

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"Architecture must return to its essence." With this statement, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu establish the central premise of their curatorial vision for the 20th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, taking place from May 8 to November 21, 2027, across the Giardini, the Arsenale, and throughout Venice. Titled "Do Architecture – For the Possibility of Coexistence Facing a Real Reality", the exhibition calls for a return to the physical act of making architecture, at a time when, according to the curators, the discipline has become increasingly disconnected from lived reality through excessive abstraction, commercialization, and digitalization.

Rather than focusing on what architecture might become, the curators propose a renewed engagement with the present, questioning what it means to practice architecture today through materials, construction, local knowledge, and direct experience. This approach builds on ideas that have long informed the work of Amateur Architecture Studio, founded by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu in 1997, particularly their exploration of traditional building techniques, material reuse, and the relationship between architecture and place.The exhibition also places the question of coexistence at its center, exploring how architecture can bring together seemingly opposing conditions, from technology and craftsmanship to urban and rural ways of building, while remaining grounded in the specific realities of each place.

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On Tarkwa Bay, off the coast of Lagos, the transformation of an abandoned building offers a way to consider how architecture might emerge from the materials, relationships and conditions already present in a place.

Architecture is often encountered at the end, when the uncertainties of making have been resolved into a building, a surface, a space. Less visible are the conditions that allow these outcomes to exist, the movement of materials, the availability of labour, the knowledge held by people and places, and the negotiations through which an idea becomes possible. On Tarkwa Bay, an island off the coast of Lagos accessible only by boat, these conditions are difficult to separate from the act of building itself.

The crossing from the Lagos mainland introduces a different relationship to access. People, tools and materials move across water; some resources are readily available, others less so. Materials move across water; reclaimed elements carry histories from elsewhere; salt and sun alter the behaviour of surfaces; and the availability of local artisans influences how work unfolds. These are not necessarily prohibitions; rather, they make visible the dependencies that building elsewhere can allow us to overlook.

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Where rivers, reservoirs, and rainfall can no longer be relied upon consistently, water is increasingly being sought in the atmosphere. Fog, atmospheric humidity, and condensation each offer different ways of collecting it. When architecture begins to collect water from the air, surfaces, structures, and open spaces become part of the water system.

According to UNICEF, Jordan's National Water Strategy estimates that each person has access to only about 61 cubic meters of renewable water per year, far below the 500 cubic meters commonly used as a threshold for absolute water scarcity. Around half of the population receives piped water only once a week, while groundwater is being extracted faster than many aquifers can naturally recharge.

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What do architects do? This age-old question reveals the perennial dichotomy between two aspects of building–how to construct, and why to build. Despite its ancient origins and its name deriving from Ancient Greek, the profession is one that has transformed over the centuries. Its present-day form, usually dated to the Italian Renaissance, makes a distinction between the act of building and the intellectual and aesthetic decision-making behind it. However, we may be in the midst of another nascent transformation. The commissioning of architecture has historically remained separate from the practice, but as can be seen in the work of MASS and projects like the Moving Windmills Innovation Center, this distinction is beginning to blur.

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