Fallingwater, the iconic residence designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, has reopened to the public following the completion of a three-year preservation project. The reopening coincides with the building's 90th anniversary and the start of its 63rd tour season, marking a key moment in the ongoing conservation of one of the most widely recognized works of modern architecture. The intervention, led by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, focused on addressing structural and environmental challenges while maintaining the integrity of Wright's original design.
Between 2023 and 2024, photographers Francesco Russo and Luca Piffaretti documented architecture and landscapes across Ecuador's coast, the Andes Mountains, the Amazon rainforest, the Galápagos Islands, and cities such as Quito, Guayaquil, and Cuenca. The photographic documentation explores Ecuador's evolving identity through its contemporary architecture, examining how it engages with natural surroundings, urban conditions, and social contexts. The resulting archive includes more than 40 projects by renowned local practices such as Al Borde, Durán & Hermida, Emilio López, José María Sáez, La Cabina de la Curiosidad, MCM+A, Natura Futura, and RAMA Estudio, among many others. The selection demonstrates how architecture can create high-quality spaces that respond to contemporary demands for sustainability and environmental responsibility by combining creativity and technology with renewable resources, despite ongoing economic, climatic, and political challenges in Latin America and beyond.
The flood does not arrive as a surprise. It returns, following the same swollen rivers and monsoon skies, loosening the ground and entering homes that were never meant to resist it. Walls are untied before they are lost, materials are gathered before they drift, and structures are rebuilt with a familiarity that suggests this is not destruction, but sequence. In landscapes where water returns each year, survival is defined by the ability to begin again.
Across the floodplains of Bangladesh, the Brahmaputra basin, and the Mekong Delta, inundation is a seasonal certainty. Reports by institutions such as the World Bank and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change often frame floods through exposure and damage, measuring success through resistance and durability. Yet in territories that are submerged annually, such metrics only partially describe the problem. The ground itself oscillates between solid and liquid states. To build as if it were fixed is to design against the very condition that defines it.
