The role of heritage rehabilitation in the contemporary architectural landscape is shaped by a wide range of research, beliefs, memories, and efforts aimed at redefining and strengthening our built environment. When undertaking a transformation, renovation, or preservation project, architects can employ diverse strategies and tools to encourage a meaningful coexistence between what already exists and what is newly introduced. Together with three Madrid-based architecture practices—SOLAR, Pachón-Paredes, and BA-RRO—we set out to engage in conversation and explore their creative processes and ideals, recognizing the complexity and value of historic buildings as repositories of materials, structures, and construction techniques from other eras.
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Dornbracht Madison fittings for Brenners Park-Hotel & Spa in Baden-Baden. Image Courtesy of Dornbracht
During renovation projects, replacement is often preferred over refurbishment. Used fixtures are removed, new products specified, timelines secured. Particularly in hospitality projects, where closures are costly and operations are tightly scheduled, installing new components appears to be the most reliable solution. It is faster, easier to coordinate, and aligns with established workflows. Refurbishment operates differently. It requires careful dismantling instead of disposal, evaluation instead of substitution, and trust in the quality of what is already there. It introduces complexity into a process designed for efficiency.
The recent renovation of Brenners Park-Hotel & Spa in Baden-Baden demonstrates that under the right circumstances, this additional effort can become a deliberate architectural strategy for similar projects, especially when the original materials were never intended to be temporary.
A visual hierarchy is therefore established, guiding the eye and determining what should be seen, in what way, and with what emotional intensity, defining how the user interprets the surroundings. In this context, design strategy goes beyond aesthetic choice and begins to operate as a construction of the phenomenological experience of space. By selecting a specific fragment of the horizon through a controlled opening, or by dissolving the limits between inside and outside with large glazed planes, architecture begins to act as a lens. It can emphasize the smallness of the human scale in relation to the vastness of the territory or, conversely, domesticate nature, incorporating it into everyday life.
Does design guide usage, or does usage guide design? Students struggle to maintain focus, employees flinch under harsh lighting, and occupants withdraw from rigid spaces, often in response to environmental conditions that only become visible once a space is occupied. Light falling across a room, the resonance of sound, the texture of surfaces, or the rhythm of circulation can support focus, calm, or inspire creativity, but each can also inadvertently heighten stress and distraction. Architects and designers are exploring and questioning: how are design decisions informed, and whose knowledge is considered essential in shaping space?
Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games- Athletes Village (HARUMI FLAG). Image via Wikimedia Commons CC 2.0
With the Milano–Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics underway, it is worth looking back at how the Olympic Village has evolved from a purely functional solution into a strategic urban project. From improvised housing compounds to key pieces of urban regeneration, Olympic Villages have repeatedly functioned as large-scale experiments in how parts of the city can be built within a short period of time.
Designed under intense time pressure and for a highly specific population, these environments reveal shifting ideas about housing, collective life, and the urban legacy of mega-events. Across different editions, the Olympic Village reflects broader ways in which events, housing, and cities intersect under conditions of urgency.
Architectural heritage is not only what a building was, but what itcontinues to become: a long process of building, rebuilding, and re-occupying over time. Where opportunities allow, this continuity produces a layered condition—one in which visitors can witness, experience, and feel the gradual shifting of a building's fabric, materiality, spatial order, and patterns of use, and occasionally even participate in that transformation.
Yet many projects—particularly those driven primarily by commercial imperatives—do not choose to value, or even to recognize, this slower work of adaptive reuse and heritage continuation. Developments governed by a numbers-only logic often opt for the easier path of demolition and rebuild: maximizing plot ratio, GFA, and rentable area with the efficiency of a clean slate. And still, every now and then, an opportunity surfaces that allows us to see—and to enjoy—the city's process of architectural "heritaging" in real time.
Can architecture be built from food? Between the fire that warms, the smells that spread, and the bodies that gather around the table, the apparent banality of cooking and eating reveals itself as a choreographed dance of spatial appropriation and belonging. These gestures organize routines, produce bonds, and transform the built environment into lived place. The kitchen—domestic, communal, or urban—thus ceases to be merely a functional space and affirms itself as a territory of encounter.
Heritage sites constitute complex spatial archives in which architecture, history, and collective memory converge. They encompass a wide spectrum of contexts—from archaeological remains, ancient and historic townscapes, UNESCO-listed landscapes, to early modern civic structures and industrial infrastructures. Yet these environments confront challenges: climate change, urban transformation, disaster, shifting social needs, and the gradual erosion of material fabric. Revitalization and restoration projects respond to these conditions by positioning architectural and spatial practice as an active mediator between preservation and the contemporary topologies.
Architects can shape detailed buildings in minutes with Forma Building Design to easily test how different options work on their site.
For many architects, schematic design is defined by a familiar tension. It is the phase of open-ended exploration—where multiple ideas are tested, challenged, and refined for clients to define a project's direction. In essence, it's where the design magic happens. The challenge is rarely a lack of ideas, but the effort required to test and evaluate those ideas properly under time-, resource-, and budget constraints. It is an especially acute challenge for architects as early design work must balance creativity with client needs and commercial feasibility.
A building still being adjusted, repaired, and debated is declared World Heritage. Another, equally influential, must survive five centuries before anyone considers protecting it. This is not an anomaly in the heritage system; it is the system. Across the world, architecture does not age at the same pace because time itself is not neutral. It is cultural, political, and deeply uneven. What we call "heritage" is not simply old architecture; it is architecture that has reached the right moment in a particular place.
From the large industrial roofs and galleries of the 19th century to the contemporary atriums of museums and public buildings, glass has been a recurring material in shaping large and monumental interior spaces. More than a technological or engineering solution, these horizontal glazed planes introduce a distinct luminous quality: light that comes from above. Unlike lateral daylight entering through façades, zenithal light is more evenly distributed, reduces harsh shadows, and lends spaces a sense of continuity and openness that is difficult to achieve otherwise.
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Highlighted Submissions: Common Spaces. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner, in collaboration with the City and County of Denver and AIA Colorado, has announced the winners of the Denver Affordable Housing Challenge, an international ideas competition exploring how affordability and design excellence can reinforce one another within the specific urban, social, and environmental context of Denver.
As the nineteenth edition in Buildner's Affordable Housing Challenge series, the competition invited architects and designers from around the world to respond to Denver's housing crisis through proposals operating at architectural, urban, and systemic scales. The brief did not prescribe a single site or typology but, rather, encouraged flexible strategies capable of addressing affordability, climate resilience, and community impact while contributing positively to Denver's urban identity.
Two weeks and over 85,000 nominations later, the finalists of this year's Building of the Year Awards are in. The selection is much like the ArchDaily audience that chose it: diverse in geography, generous in ideas, and precise in intent. With projects from 46 countries, in a variety of typologies and scales, they present a beautiful snapshot of the current architectural moment.
We invite you to sit back, browse, and vote for your ultimate favorites. Below, you will find all of the 75 finalists in their respective categories. Voting is open until February 18th at 18:00 EST. Thank you—your participation is key to making this the world's largest community-driven architecture award.
Perched above the cliffs of Crimea, the Druzhba Thermal Sanatorium appears less as a building than as a landed spacecraft. Its circular forms, suspended decks, and spiraling ramps evoke a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), where architecture and psychology merge into a single landscape. Built between 1978 and 1985 by Igor Vasilevsky, the complex was conceived as a thermal resort for workers of the oil industry, part of the Soviet Union's extensive network of sanatoria dedicated to health and recreation.
Beyond its function as a place of recovery, Druzhba, meaning "friendship", embodied a broader political and aesthetic ambition. It sought to merge technological prowess with the restorative ideals of socialist modernity, translating collective well-being into concrete form. Rising from a steep coastal slope overlooking the Black Sea, its massive structure defies gravity, supported by a central concrete core from which radial wings extend like the blades of an enormous gear. Seen from a distance, it feels simultaneously mechanical and organic, a hybrid of infrastructure and landscape.
In the coastal and jungle regions of Costa Rica, high humidity and intense solar radiation dictate an architectural strategy centered on permeability rather than enclosure. Unlike the airtight envelopes required in cold climates to retain heat, Costa Rican architecture uses the building envelope as a climatic filter to maximize air exchange. The primary mechanism for managing these thermal gradients seems to be the oversized roof overhang. By extending the roof plane significantly beyond the floor plate, architects create a permanent buffer of deep shade that reduces solar gain and lowers the ambient temperature before air enters the structure. This strategy, combined with permeable or non-existent walls, allows for constant airflow. This is a critical technical requirement for humidity control and the prevention of material degradation through mold and rot.
What if industrial leftovers weren't waste, but the start of architectural design? At Rieder's headquarters in Maishofen, Austria, over 1,300 cubic meters of timber, 180 ceiling elements, and hundreds of upcycled glassfiber-reinforced concrete fragments come together in a building shaped as much by reuse as by planning. The new production hall, designed by Kessler² Architecture, treats material leftovers as a design resource. Developed as part of a long-term investment in sustainable manufacturing, the timber-concrete hybrid building introduces a facade technique that inverts conventional architectural workflows: instead of designing first and producing components afterward, the building envelope is generated from the material remnants already available on site establishing a new language for industrial architecture.
