Founded in 2002, Solis Colomer Arquitectos has established a strong reputation over the past two decades, designing and constructing projects with both social and commercial impact across Latin America. With over 200 completed works, the firm specializes in institutional architecture with social impact and user-centered commercial architecture. Its mission is clear: to use architecture as a tool to dignify the human experience, especially for those in greatest need.
Creating an educational setting is a specific and sensitive task. Merging children's safety and learning optimization requirements with an aesthetic appeal and solid concept can birth some of the most beautiful, unique projects around. One common configuration is the elliptical or circular school. A circular, more specifically ringlike educational setting can suggest a sense of protectiveness and safety with the construction of the embracing surrounding membrane. It is also a practical setup that envelopes multiple functions while linking them, consequently allowing interactive instances through the central courtyard.
Cities today are being reimagined as living, evolving organisms, combining digital intelligence, ecological systems, and new materials to shape radical futures. At Carlo Ratti's "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective." biennial, over 750 participants challenge established boundaries between architecture, landscape, and technology. Several conceptual projects showcased in the main exhibition challenge conventional boundaries between architecture, landscape, and technology. From bio-adaptive urban systems and Martian water-based settlements to immersive symphonies of satellite data, these works collectively envision new models for cohabitation, resilience, and planetary awareness.
This month's Unbuilt selection presents six speculative projects, presented as part of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibition, as provocations for rethinking the future of cities and human settlement. While some proposals transform architecture into self-sustaining, living infrastructures, others explore how data and sensory interfaces can redefine our relationship with natural and urban environments. Together, they offer a cross-section of how architects and designers are using unbuilt work to imagine new possibilities for life on Earth and beyond.
The first edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale took place in 1980, immediately revealing its role as a platform for images and ideas that would become essential references in contemporary architectural theory and practice. This disruptive character was embodied from the very beginning by the strangely familiar floating structure designed by Aldo Rossi, titled Teatro del Mondo. At once temporary and archetypal, the project introduced central themes that would shape Italian architectural discourse in the years that followed. To this day, it continues to inspire reflections on timelessness, imagination, and the memory embedded in cities.
For over five decades, Swiss photographer Thomas Mayer has developed a serene, emotional, and documentary language for architecture. His lens captures the random and memorable moments of our built environment - reflections in the rain, long blue hours in Nordic summers, and the quiet darkness of sacred spaces. Recognized by ArchDaily as one of the top architectural photographers, Mayer carries an abundant fascination for light and space.
Lighthouses have stood along the margins of continents and islands for centuries as points of light in vast maritime territories. Rising in solitude from rocky cliffs, reefs, and headlands, these towers were tools for navigation and instruments of spatial clarity, shaping coastlines and marking the boundary between land and sea. Built to guide, warn, and locate, they constituted a global network of visibility long before the advent of digital mapping. Yet as maritime technologies evolved, many of these structures lost their original purpose. The typology, once essential, now stands at the edge of obsolescence. What remains is not merely an architectural relic, but a powerful spatial form — resilient, symbolic, and increasingly open to reinterpretation.
At the Steirereck am Pogusch restaurant, architecture and gastronomy seem to speak the same language: that of the sensitive transformation of raw materials. Local ingredients, like leaves, roots, and flowers, are turned into surprising dishes, where simplicity is elevated to the extraordinary. Likewise, the building, far from being a static structure, offers a unique tactile and visual experience. One of the most intriguing elements is the use of stabilized foamed aluminum panels that, rather than evoking the coldness and rigidity often associated with metal, have been manipulated to transcend their conventional characteristics. They seem to breathe, with their porous, textured surfaces absorbing and reflecting light, creating a play of shadow and brightness that evokes the lightness and organic quality of natural materials.
How many software tools and platforms are involved today in developing a contemporary project? From designing a single-family house to a public library, relying on just one or two programs is no longer common. Instead, multiple tools combine, overlap, and interact throughout various stages, including analysis, design, rendering, coordination, and construction. This widespread use of software in the virtual world reflects not only the technical complexity of today's practice but also a more subtle yet equally significant shift: software has become less a specific tool and more an environment that accompanies and even challenges the process.
In high-end architectural design, traditional access panel fasteners like visible screws and magnetic closures often disrupt aesthetics and functionality. These outdated methods can loosen over time, lack durability, or require visible frames, making them unsuitable for premium spaces. Whether you need to access electrical systems, HVAC components, or plumbing, choosing the right installation method is crucial for a seamless integration into your space.
Early hidden solutions like French cleats and Z-clips improved appearance but introduced new challenges. These systems require sequential panel removal and extra clearance, making maintenance difficult—especially in areas needing frequent access. The unavoidable gap that appears at the top of panels also compromises the aesthetic appeal, as well as cutting out sections of panel for wall sockets.
By the mid-nineteenth century, American universities began to distinguish architecture from civil engineering and the applied sciences formally. Architecture was emerging as a discipline defined by both technical competence and conceptual inquiry, spatial imagination, and cultural agency. As this disciplinary identity evolved in the postwar decades, its built expression coalesced into the emerging architectural language of Brutalism.
Ebenezer Howard's verdant visions for cities have spread eastwards, far beyond his British roots. In the 1900s, city planning welcomed the Garden City Movement as a champion of good design - a response to Western industrial urbanization. Soon, Asian cities conceived their archetypes, juggling local constraints in climate and density. Designs and development, from colonial-era experiments to contemporary mega-projects, have embraced and reinvented Howard's vision well into the 21st century.
In modern architecture, materials must meet a range of functional, aesthetic, technical, and environmental demands. Gres Aragón offers ceramic tile solutions that respond to all aspects of a project—from façades and interiors to exteriors, pools, staircases, and industrial spaces—while maintaining a consistent design language.
With more than 80 years of experience and deep expertise in the extruded tile manufacturing process, Gres Aragón has established itself as a trusted partner for architects and interior designers. Its product offerings are based on four core principles: visual continuity, extreme durability, high-tech performance, and a strong commitment to sustainability.
In certain parts of the world, construction is still dominated by wet systems—concrete, masonry, and cementitious materials that are poured, cured, and fixed in place. While this has long been considered the norm in some south-east Asia countries, such as Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and China, in most of these regions, they typically share a common trend where labor is relatively inexpensive. This serves as one of the reasons to make concrete more easily available, as one of the typical downside of concrete is its intensive labour cost - this further differentiates concrete as a cheaper and more efficient material system to be building out of.
However, not enough considerations in the region are given to the sustainability aspect when using these wet construction materials,often overlooking the significant drawbacks of its material lifecycle and the difficulty to recycle it without downcycling - making it one of the more unsustainable materials available to be built out of.
Situated in one of the fastest-developing regions over the past decade—the southern part of China, including Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area—urban growth has been driven by an overwhelming wave of commercial ambition. Projects here are often designed for maximum density, height, and efficiency, resulting in developments of enormous scale that can easily span several acres. Prioritizing transit-oriented development, these complexes frequently take the form of sprawling malls built directly above major transportation hubs. Designed to disorient and prolong foot traffic to encourage economic activities, these mega-structures have become commonplace in cities like Hong Kong and Shenzhen.
While this typology of megastructures offers clear advantages—economic efficiency, high development returns, and convenience for transit users—it almost invariably ignores its urban context and environment. These developments often turn a blind eye, deliberately so, to their environmental footprint and the city's walkability. At such overwhelming scales, the human walking experience is diminished, if not outright neglected. Pedestrians become interiorized—trapped within the insulated world of these complexes.
Amid coasts, rivers, lakes, and mountain ranges, Spain’s natural environment encompasses a wide variety of climates, topographies, and vegetation species. Aiming to raise global awareness of the impact of construction on the environment and the importance of addressing climate change through new ways of creating architecture, several architectural practices and research teams are exploring the design of cabins or small-scale lodging prototypes. While capable of integrating harmoniously with their surrounding natural context, they also demonstrate strategies for self-sufficiency, resource utilization, and space maximization, as well as broad applications of innovative technologies and material solutions adapted to each region.
Thatching is a traditional building technique that has been reinterpreted in different ways in contemporary projects, allowing its value to continue to endure over time. As well as being a culturally and historically valuable technique, given its presence in humanity for centuries, it also has a number of other constructive advantages, such as its great environmental value, as it is an accessible renewable material.
The technique consists of grouping, intertwining, and overlapping dry vegetation, creating light surfaces with excellent thermal and sound insulation and which are cheap and relatively simple to build. In addition, flexibility is one of the technique's most prominent features, and it is particularly popular in roofing applications.
