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The Arts and Crafts movement is often remembered as an architectural style defined by handcrafted details, an intimate scale, natural materials, and a rejection of excess and industry. Its influence is frequently traced through visual characteristics that continue to appear in contemporary architecture and interiors, from exposed timber and crafted joinery to an emphasis on texture and permanence, yet reducing the movement to an aesthetic vocabulary overlooks its far more significant contribution. For William Morris, Philip Webb, John Ruskin, and their contemporaries, architecture was a question of how things were made, who made them, and whether the process of making could cultivate dignity, meaning, culture, and beauty.

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The Türkiye Pavilion has announced "Spolia Futures" as its official exhibition for the 20th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, which will take place from May 8 to November 21, 2027. Commissioned by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), the exhibition will be curated by ba-be commons, a research collective composed of Başak Eren, Asya Ece Uzmay, Beril Sarısakal Erkent, and Ece Yetim. The proposal was selected through an open call and two-stage evaluation process to represent Türkiye at the 2027 edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale. The proposal examines spolia, traditionally understood as the reuse of architectural elements, as an evolving architectural method rather than solely a historical practice.

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Every year on August 9, and since 1994, UNESCO has commemorated the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples. The United Nations has not yet adopted an official definition for the term 'Indigenous peoples,' but considers, for social recognition, self-identified non-dominant groups of society, with distinct language, culture, and beliefs, organized in separate social, economic, and political systems. From a territorial perspective, the UN understands the term through historical continuity with pre-colonial or pre-settler societies, and the group's strong links to territories and surrounding natural resources. The persistence in maintaining and reproducing ancestral environments and systems is also recognized as an element of identity, encompassing other designations such as first peoples/nations, aboriginals, or ethnic groups. Following the occasion's aim to raise awareness, in this article we present contemporary reflections, regional cases, and interviews about ancestral constructive knowledge and how it can build the future.

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In 2021, the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) released a survey regarding the number of cultural and social facilities in Brazil's cities. The findings were alarming: only 29.6% of Brazilian municipalities had cultural and social facilities such as museums, while theaters and concert halls were present in only 23.3% of cities. This overview speaks volumes about the scarcity of such spaces in Brazilian cities. In this context, when a women's cooperative in Maranhão or a volunteer group in Bahia decides to build their own cultural and community facility, the gesture not only fills a material gap but reclaims, on their own initiative, a right that should be guaranteed by public policy.

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Architecture has long been understood as a discipline created by humans and for humans. But in We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley challenge that assumption, arguing that "microbes invented architecture." From this premise unfolds an alternative history of architecture that shifts the focus away from human exceptionalism and toward the microorganisms that have shaped life, environments, and the built world for billions of years.

The book explores the idea that architecture cannot be understood separately from the microbial worlds that shape it, suggesting that "architecture inhabits humans just as much as humans inhabit architecture." Rather than inert objects, buildings emerge as dynamic ecosystems that Colomina and Wigley go as far as describing as "an expanded gut shared with others," where microbes, materials, people, and countless other forms of life continuously coexist, exchange, and evolve.

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