If elevated networks reveal a city that increasingly walks above the street, the podium–tower is the typology that often makes that condition feel inevitable. Across Southeast Asia, podium–tower projects have become one of the dominant languages of metropolitan growth: a system that concentrates housing, jobs, retail, and transit connections into highly legible and managed parcels. From an urban planning perspective, the model can be remarkably effective—absorbing congestion, formalizing circulation, and delivering density quickly. Yet as it spreads, the typology also raises a quieter question: what does it optimize for, and what does it erode—especially at the level of the street, where urban life is meant to be negotiated rather than curated?
At its simplest, the podium–tower is a hybrid structure consisting of a high-coverage, low-rise podium supporting one or more slender vertical towers. The podium typically carries the logistical and commercial weight of the development—retail, parking, loading, drop-offs, back-of-house services, and often amenity decks—while the tower stacks private programs above, whether residential, office, hotel, or mixed use. The promise is twofold: maximize urban density while maintaining a "human-scaled" street wall, and separate the messy logistics of city life from the quieter domain of living and work.
Honduras is the second-largest country in Central America, both in territory and population. Today, its urban fabric remains heavily influenced by modernist principles from the 1970s that prioritised high-speed arterial corridors and automobile-dependent "point-to-point" mobility. In addition, the country faced many challenges regarding public safety during the 2010s, which contributed to creating an urban space characterised by blind facades, high perimeter walls, and gated enclosures designed to isolate the interior from the public realm.
We had the opportunity to talk to Alejandra Ferrera, a Honduran architect raised in Danlí, a city in eastern Honduras. With over 15 years of practice across Brazil, the Netherlands, and Australia, she argues that while the security-driven design was a functional necessity of its time, it has resulted in a fragmented urban experience where the street serves only as a transit void rather than a place for social encounter. She suggests that even though this isolation was a justified safety measure, it created detachment between the inhabitants and the city. She also argues that overall, the public safety situation contributed to the creation of a wounded national identity that often looks outward for quality, dismissing the potential of its own context.
Architectural history often advances through iconic gestures or technological breakthroughs, yet some works remain influential precisely because they resist spectacle. Built between 1972 and 1974 in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium, the Van Wassenhove Residence stands as one of those quiet but decisive projects. Conceived as a single, continuous concrete volume set within a wooded landscape, the house challenges conventional ideas of domestic comfort, privacy, and spatial hierarchy. Its presence is direct and uncompromising, yet it avoids monumentality, positioning itself instead as a lived structure shaped by everyday rituals and long-term inhabitation.
The house was designed by Juliaan Lampens, a figure who operated largely outside the dominant architectural narratives of his time. Working mostly in Flanders and often on private commissions, Lampens developed a body of work centered on radical spatial reduction, material honesty, and an almost ethical approach to construction. The Van Wassenhove Residence is frequently described as his most complete work, not because it introduces new ideas, but because it consolidates many of the principles that run consistently through his career.
Using massive s plates, often several centimeters thick and weighing tons, Richard Serra's sculptures convey an almost improbable sense of lightness. This effect does not result from a reduction of mass, but from how that mass is organized: large curved surfaces tilt, narrow passages compress the body, and seemingly unstable elements create a constant sense of imbalance. Serra transforms weight into a dynamic spatial experience.
In architecture, lightness has occupied a central role at least since the modern period. While earlier traditions, such as Greek and Roman architecture, were closely associated with stability, and large churches with monumentality, the twentieth century introduced a decisive shift in how matter is handled, particularly through the separation of structure and enclosure.
A perforated screen is often treated as an afterthought, something applied to soften light, to decorate a façade, or to add texture where a wall might otherwise feel flat. It is photographed as a surface, drawn as a pattern, and discussed as a craft. But in many buildings across the Indian subcontinent and the Islamic world, the screen was never an addition. It was the wall itself. Remove it, and the building does not simply change in appearance; it loses its ability to regulate heat, move air, and mediate between inside and outside.
This misreading reveals more about contemporary habits than about the screen itself. Architectural thinking has long separated structure from envelope, performance from expression. Within that framework, elements like the jaali or mashrabiya are easy to categorize as ornamental, visually rich but technically secondary. Yet these screens were conceived as integrated systems, where geometry, material, and climate operate together. Their intelligence lies in what they do.
European City Context. Image Courtesy of ReGreeneration
The ReGreeneration project, a Horizon Europe project led by Inetum and supported by C40 Cities, ARUP, Placemaking Europe, and several others, operates as an active collaboration with local governments, private companies, academia, and civil society organizations at the intersection of urban regeneration, green public spaces, and neighborhood-scale design. Its premise addresses how European cities are built and maintained and how they experience a changing climate, arguing that cities must fundamentally change to remain livable under accelerating climate pressures.
Elevation is often framed as progress, lifting movement above the friction of the city and smoothing circulation into uninterrupted flow. Every act of lifting produces a secondary condition in its wake. Beneath flyovers, metro lines, and railway viaducts, a second ground emerges as shaded, ambiguous, and rarely planned with the same intent as what moves above. These spaces are not incidental leftovers. They are the spatial consequence of a design decision that privileges speed, clearance, and efficiency, redistributing value and visibility across the city in the process.
What lies below is not empty. It is structured, constrained, and defined by infrastructure, left without a clear role. Studies on elevated highways consistently describe these undercroft zones as residual spaces, formed when transport systems are conceived independently of the ground they pass through. An Arup report on spaces beneath viaducts notes how they often disrupt pedestrian continuity while remaining outside formal planning frameworks. Similarly, recent academic reviews of under-flyover environments highlight that these areas are rarely integrated into urban design strategies at all. The result is a peculiar condition: space that is physically present and structurally determined, but programmatically undefined.
Residential architecture continues to offer a productive ground for unbuilt exploration, revealing how architects respond to site, climate, and constraint at the scale of the domestic. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected projects bring together a range of proposals that reconsider the house not as an isolated object, but as a spatial system shaped by its environment. These works position architecture as a framework that negotiates between ground, material, and inhabitation, often emerging directly from the conditions of the site.
Across varied geographies, from Kerala and Cartagena to Amman, Tromsø, and Zwolle, the projects demonstrate diverse responses to domestic architecture. They include compact urban dwellings organized through vertical layering, courtyard houses partially embedded within the ground, residences adapted to sloping terrains, and typological transformations shaped by regulatory constraints. Some projects explore linear spatial sequences rooted in traditional proportions, while others organize domestic life around atria or excavated voids that mediate light, ventilation, and privacy. Together, these proposals examine how the house can be structured through section, material, and environmental performance rather than formal expression.
In 2012, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook offered one of the clearest documentations of a condition that many residents experience intuitively but rarely name: Hong Kong's dependence on elevated, second-storey urbanism. Through drawings and careful mapping, the book captured how the city's pedestrian networks are routinely lifted above the street—separating people from traffic, extending commercial frontage beyond ground level, and negotiating a hilly topography where "flat" circulation is often an engineered achievement. Since its publication, these systems have only grown in prominence—not only for their sheer spatial complexity, but for the way they recast public space as something continuous yet selective, connective yet curated.
This fascination, however, has always carried a parallel unease. Elevated passages can be generous and effective, offering sheltered movement and reliable connectivity. Yet they also raise persistent questions: where do these routes lead, who gets to connect, and what kinds of programs are invited—or excluded—by this "privileged" level of circulation? The second-storey city does not simply bypass vehicles; it can also bypass the street as a civic stage. Over time, it risks shifting architectural attention away from ground-level public life, relieving designers from having to negotiate pedestrian scale, frontage, and the messy reciprocity of the street. In its worst moments, the result is a landscape of podium clusters and sealed megastructures—buildings that perform connectivity at Level 2 while remaining indifferent to the neighborhood at Level 0.
Pico House, part of Los Angeles Plaza Historic District. Image by Daniel L. Lu - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
Today, the urban form of Los Angeles is characterized by 20th-century sprawl and extensive automotive infrastructure. However, the physical reality of the city's original core reveals a more complex history that is deeply rooted in Hispanic heritage. In fact, Los Angeles did not originate from the standardized American land system that defines most of the United States' territory. Instead, it is a product of the Spanish urban tradition in the Americas, which followed a structure repeated across major cities on the continent. The intersection of these systems created a layered urban geometry and history that remains visible in the city's contemporary street patterns.
When Los Angeleswas founded in 1781 as a pueblo by Felipe de Neve, it was an outpost of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Viceroyalties were political divisions of the Spanish territories in America, and by the late 18th century, New Spain was vast. It stretched from southern Costa Rica, all the way north to Alta California, bordering the east at the Mississippi River and the newly independent United States of America. At this time, Mexico City functioned as the primary administrative and economic hub, leaving frontier regions like Alta California to rely on a specific triad of settlements: missions (religious), presidios (military), and pueblos (civilian).
What do lightweight materials bring to public space with an ethical, ecological, and non-extractive design principle? Various textile textures offer a point of entry, being closer to the body than heavy conventional structural materials. Through its flexibility and responsiveness, it enables a form of soft enclosure rather than a fixed boundary in architectural space. Responding to minimal environmental stimuli, the fabric brings continuous movements into space. When layered or assembled, it produces gradations of density, depth, and enclosure, while recent innovative fabrication technologies extend the possibilities of its form and structural durability.
Semi-transparent materials further mediate the conditions of visual permeability and bodily experience of the space. By transmitting and filtering light, they blur clear separations between interior and exterior, solid and void, creating thresholds that are neither fully open nor fully enclosed, but constantly in negotiation. Reinterpreting structure in urban space through lightweight, translucency, and softness opens up alternative modes of spatial perception and bodily engagement.
Architecture has long been drawn to the idea of lightness. From early modernist experiments that sought to preserve landscapes, elevating buildings has been understood as a way to preserve the ground while maintaining continuity across the terrain. Volumes are lifted on columns, infrastructures detach circulation from the surface, and entire programs are suspended above the ground.
This was formalised in the early twentieth century through Le Corbusier's concept of the pilotis, which proposed the liberation of the ground floor from enclosure. By raising buildings on columns, architects sought to maintain continuity with the terrain, allowing movement, vegetation, and collective use to unfold beneath constructed volumes. The building would occupy the air, while the ground would remain open, accessible, and shared.
Ecuador's territory embraces a remarkable diversity of landscapes, ranging from the Pacific Coast to the peaks of the Andes, the vast expanse of the Amazon rainforest, and the volcanic Galápagos Islands. Each region of the country presents its own distinctive characteristics, reflected in its varied environmental, cultural, and social contexts. While Latin American architecture is rooted in rich ancestral traditions, native construction techniques, and local materials, contemporary Ecuadorian architecture expresses an evolving identity that blends these elements with actual demands. Tradition and innovation, local resources and modern techniques, along with social responsibility and aesthetics, interact with the natural environment, urban conditions, and social contexts.
Lineadacqua bathroom system by antoniolupi. Image Courtesy of antoniolupi
What if the most advanced elements in a bathroom were the ones you could barely see? In spaces where walls, ceilings, and floors form uninterrupted surfaces, fixtures retreat, and water itself becomes the primary material shaping experience. The careful placement of fixtures in bathrooms, such as sinks, taps, showerheads, and shower drains, each asserting their presence as both an object and a function. But what happens when these elements begin to disappear?
Instead of adding mounted elements to a bathroom's design, some approaches work through subtraction. The bathroom is no longer composed of visible objects, but understood as a continuous surface. Fixtures recede into walls and ceilings, allowing water, light, and atmosphere to take precedence. What takes shape is a form of minimalism and something more: an architecture that absorbs its technical systems entirely, allowing fixtures to disappear, leaving only their effects. The experience itself becomes the protagonist, no longer mediated by visible objects, but shaped directly through water, light, and space.
Chilean Atacama Desert. Image by European Southern Observatory with known IDsCC-BY-4.0European Southern Observatory Images ESO files uploaded by OptimusPrimeBot licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Architecture can no longer be conceived as an isolated object, detached from the technical networks that sustain contemporary life — a condition that calls for new readings and approaches. It is within this context that, in March, ArchDaily’s monthly theme focused on The Technosphere, a topic both broad and inherently complex. Drawing on the concept of the technosphere, coined by geoscientist Peter Haff to describe the totality of human-made artifacts, a landscape emerges in which contemporary life is deeply intertwined with machines, data, and energy networks.
How does an architectural installation express the identity of a region? How can a building material connect with the essence of a nation? Throughout its history, Spain has been shaped by a wide range of cultures and civilizations, including Muslim, Phoenician, Roman, Greek, Carthaginian, and Visigothic influences. From flamenco to ceramic tiles adorning façades and historic monuments, each region of Spain embraces its own customs and traditions, reflected in its architecture, history, art, and design. During Milan Design Week 2026, Tile of Spain presents Spanish Design as a Souvenir at the Fuorisalone—an installation that transforms ceramic tile into a narrative medium through a series of sculptural objects reinterpreting everyday icons of Spanish life.
Set within the mountainous landscape of Zabbougha, Lebanon, Capsule Retreat by EAST Architecture Studio is shaped through the process of its making. The project unfolds through material decisions, on-site adjustments, and evolving conditions, allowing construction itself to guide its spatial logic.
The construction process played a central role in defining the project. Built during a period marked by economic collapse, material shortages, and ongoing disruption in Lebanon, the house developed through continuous adaptation. With no general contractor, the architects took on an expanded role, coordinating craftsmen, testing ideas directly on site, and responding to changing constraints. In this context, sociopolitical conditions became not only a challenge but a catalyst for rethinking design. "We were constantly testing ideas on site", say the architects and founders of EAST Architecture Studio, Charles Kettaneh and Nicolas Fayad, "tailoring these decisions economically while exploring what local craft could offer."
Twenty meters tall and four thousand years old, the Western Deffufa towers over the adjacent date orchards and ancient city remains in the desert. It is a former religious and administrative building near the modern-day Sudanese town of Kerma. Its significance is not only in its age and size, but also in that it is one of the oldest mud brick buildings in the world. And as the nearby mud brick houses also attest, earth is a material of continuous use from ancient times to the present. Yet, conversations around contemporary building systems have largely ignored this essential material. Some architects on the continent of Africa, however, are changing that.
