Today, February 17, the exhibition "Urban Transformation: Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos" opens at the Palacio de Cultura Citibanamex - Palacio de Iturbide in Mexico City. Organized in collaboration with the Banco Nacional de México, through Fomento Cultural Citibanamex, A.C., and the Fundación Sordo Madaleno A.C., the exhibition chronicles the firm's 85-year history. It constructs a narrative drawn from more than 450 projects, presenting a curated selection of 62 architectural works built in Mexico and abroad to serve a variety of programs.
Proper home insulation and selecting the right materials are fundamental when undertaking a construction project. These strategies enhance interior comfort and serve as a long-term cost-saving measure.
Today, Brazil celebrates Student Day. Established in 1927, the date marks access to a fundamental right for all citizens: education. Nearly a century later, new pedagogies and ways of looking at learning have emerged, bringing with them new architectures that embrace both pedagogical and technical advancements. With this in mind, we have gathered seven examples of Brazilian educational spaces designed after 2020. Through solutions that highlight key design aspects, these projects help outline a brief overview of contemporary references on the subject.
Intervention carried out on the street in front of 4 public schools. Photo: CoCriança Collection
Over the last few decades, cities have undergone profound and rapid transformations, which have also significantly impacted childhood. While cities grow larger and increasingly complex, the child population is facing a stark decline in urban quality of life. Children have lost their spaces in the city and are increasingly confined to enclosed, institutionalized environments.
The perception of the city as dangerous has grown stronger, establishing a self-reinforcing cycle: with fewer children on the streets, these spaces are dominated by speeding cars, which hinders public use of space, in turn fostering violence and further driving children—and everyone else—away from the streets. The rarity of children playing on streets and in other public areas of urban centers also makes this demographic largely invisible to adults and policymakers.
Increasingly robust and promising scientific evidence can assist architects and other designers seeking inclusive design by taking diverse minds into account—that is, creating built environments that engage with neurodiversity. Neurodiversity has always been a part of humanity. The term encompasses people with a wide range of neurological conditions and was coined by sociologist Judy Singer in 1999.
Each year, the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA), through the National System of Art Creators (SNCA), honors key figures of excellence in national culture through the Young Creators Program. By providing grants, the program supports the creative and educational development of young Mexican artists, fostering favorable conditions for the execution of original, meaningful, and positive creative projects. For this edition, the grant recipients in the “Architectural Design” category were Ruy Berumen, Diego González, Juan José Kochen, Ignacio Pérez, Elsa Ponce, Luca Salas, and Tania Tovar, who worked under the mentorship of tutors Elena Tudela Rivadeneyra, Rafael Ponce Ortiz, and Patricia Ivonne Álvarez De Anda.
Established in 1983, the Engineering Design Group of Zhejiang University of Technology is a leading engineering consulting enterprise that integrates design, construction, and research. Leveraging the robust faculty and academic disciplines of a comprehensive engineering university, the Group benefits from high-level scientific research capabilities and state-of-the-art technical equipment. Currently, the Group has over 1,000 full-time engineering and technical professionals, including more than 500 engineers with mid- and senior-level professional titles, and over 200 registered professionals, such as Class 1 Registered Architects and Class 1 Registered Structural Engineers. The team also includes high-level talents such as national and provincial Outstanding Young Architects, Engineering Survey and Design Masters, and Hangzhou Outstanding Young Architects.
In recent years, the Group has pioneered engineering practices and technological innovations in China in fields such as characteristic towns, future communities, smart cities, industrialized building, Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC), and whole-process engineering consulting. It has completed numerous major construction projects and provincial- and ministerial-level research tasks, accumulating rich practical experience and research outcomes. The Group has been awarded over 400 national, provincial, and municipal Outstanding Survey and Design Awards (Quality Engineering Awards), and more than 10 Provincial Science and Technology Progress Awards. It has chief-edited over 20 national and provincial codes and standard drawings, and holds over 100 national patents. Furthermore, the Group was selected as one of the first EPC pilot enterprises in Zhejiang Province, one of the first industrialized building demonstration enterprises in Zhejiang Province, and a National Prefabricated Building Industry Base. It has also received honors such as one of the national architectural design industry's first “Integrity Units,” one of China's Top 100 Architectural Design Institutes, and a National High-Tech Enterprise.
Adhering to its corporate mission of “Challenge, Innovation, Leadership, and Excellence,” the Group leverages the research, technology, and talent advantages of a university-affiliated design institute. It is committed to exploring high-quality, intensive development pathways, striving to become a premier, comprehensive engineering design and consulting firm in China.
The city of Boston in The Last of Us. Image via Screenshot of "The Last of Us" (2023), HBO
Twenty years after the birth of cinema, audiences were already growing familiar with catastrophic, post-apocalyptic imagery. Cinema emerged at the end of the 19th century—specifically in 1896—with the demonstration of the cinematograph, a device capable of projecting moving images. For their debut, the Lumière brothers screened several short films, captivating the audience with movement projected onto a two-dimensional surface. Although there are records of brief recordings dating back months prior to this event, The Arrival of a Train at the Station, one of the shorts shown at the screening and filmed by the Lumière brothers themselves, is widely considered the world's first movie.
Zoning is the primary tool for urban regulation adopted worldwide. It consists of dividing urban territory into a series of zones, establishing permitted uses for each and setting parameters for the structures that can be built on each lot. In theory, zoning pursues two main objectives: preventing nuisances generated by specific uses and limiting development density to the capacity of existing infrastructure.
Over the centuries, the history of architectural visualization has undergone numerous shifts. Its intrinsic relationship with architecture itself has sparked movements and critiques that, beyond serving as tools to represent the inhabited world, directly shape our perception of it and influence the production of the built environment. At ArchDaily, we have explored the history and evolution of post-digital representation through various articles, a subject that has been deeply explored in Mexico specifically.
Across different climates and building cultures, many contemporary projects are working with local ways of building in new ways. Earth walls, bamboo structures, shaded thresholds, and collective construction processes are being reconsidered not as references, but as tools for the conditions architecture is facing now and will continue to face.
In these projects, vernacular knowledge appears through practical decisions: how to cool a building without machines, how to build with what is nearby, how to make a structure easier to repair, and how to keep construction knowledge within the community that will use it. The conditions making this knowledge necessary are not coming. They are already here.
An informal vendor selling balloons along La Séptima in the Plaza de Bolívar. "Bogota, Colombia" by szeke is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
This article is the winning entry of the Epistle Writing Prize 2025, an annual competition dedicated to recognizing outstanding writing on design, architecture, and the environment.
It's wet season, but this morning's downpour does little to deter the rhythm along La Carrera Séptima. Cyclists and pedestrians weave past ambulatory vendors with carts of avocados, ginger sweets, and phone cases. Toy cars, lightbulbs, and hand-beaded jewelry glisten with raindrops, arranged neatly on tarps that demarcate vendors' territories. Police officers approach a recycler gathering bottles; a tourist bargains for a jacket; two women find each other in the middle of the road, embracing as their coats grow heavy with rain.
La Séptima, or Bogotá's Seventh Avenue, is the most emblematic road in Bogotá, traversed by more than two million people every day. Along this single road — part marketplace, part protest route, part transportation hub — Bogotá's history unfolds. For nearly a year, I traced its rhythms as a pedestrian, commuter, inhabitant, and researcher. In all these moments and their historical incarnations, one image endured: the road is a living body. It is imagined as Bogotá's backbone, its vital artery, its heart. It bleeds, bears scars, and demands care.
Most of Europe's future housing already exists, yet renovation continues to happen too slowly to address climate, housing, health and resource challenges at the scale required. Re:Living explores how renovation can move from isolated projects to a scalable approach for transforming existing buildings. At the heart of the initiative is a new research project, The Housing We Need for the Future We Want, which examines how better use of the existing building stock can unlock new opportunities for architects, cities and communities.
Mexico City. Image by Eduardo Enriquez, via Unsplash
Mexico City is a sprawling metropolis of layered temporalities, where architecture operates as a continuous negotiation between deep-seated history and intense urban mutation. Built over the aquatic traces of Tenochtitlan, the city's fabric is an ongoing dialogue between eras: the monumental scale of the Pre-Hispanic Templo Mayor and the Viceroyalty architecture of the Catedral Metropolitana coexist with the modern and contemporary impulses that define its skyline. This dense juxtaposition creates a unique urban canvas where sacred geography, colonial imposition, and 20th-century ambition intersect.
The mid-century marked a definitive era of experimentation, forging a Mexican Modernism that masterfully synthesized international structural rationalism with local identity and materiality. This synthesis is epitomized by the sweeping, plastic integration of art and architecture at the Ciudad Universitaria, the structural poetry of Félix Candela's hyper-parabolic shells, and the raw, monumental brutalism of Teodoro González de León and Abraham Zabludovsky. Parallel to this, the intimate, introspective mastery of Luis Barragán and Juan O'Gorman redefined domestic space, experimenting with light, vernacular color, and tectonic honesty to create spaces of profound spatial stillness.
An experiential rebellion takes center stage in the fourth episode of the Room For Dreams podcast, hitting directly at the heart of today's screen-deep, image-obsessed design culture. Recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in cooperation with INDX|GLOBAL, host Claire Broadka sits down with four Indian architectural voices — Indrajit Kembhavi, Manish Gulati, Sanjay Singh, and Sidhartha Talwar — to explore a critical question: have we sacrificed the soul of architecture for the sake of a picture-perfect Instagram post?
A monument is usually the most conservative building a state will commission. It is expected to stabilize memory, to make history legible, and to give public form to a shared narrative. Eastern Europe's twentieth century produced an entire body of work from the Baltic to the Balkans that resisted precisely those expectations, challenging the conventional relationship between monument, memory, and representation. Commonly grouped under the name spomeniks, these architectural exercises are perhaps the best-known examples of a much broader landscape of memorial architecture that emerged across the region. These were societies emerging from occupation, civil conflict, or revolution, and none of them possessed a single symbolic language capable of accommodating the complexity of their histories. Rather than searching for new heroes or new icons, many architects and artists turned to space itself as the medium through which remembrance could be constructed.
These monuments occupy an unusual position between sculpture and architecture. At one scale, they read as deliberate abstract compositions arranged with the clarity of a drawing by Kandinsky. At another, they seem less resolved, as if testing the limits of a spatial language still in formation. Their forms often appear caught between certainty and experimentation, the same monument readable as a controlled geometric object and as an open-ended search for how collective memory might inhabit space. But these readings coexist and give many of these works their enduring ambiguity.
One of the defining qualities of contemporary interiors is flexibility. Offices, education facilities, hotels, and cultural venues need to be adaptable. They require spaces that can expand, divide, open, and close according to different activities, without sacrificing comfort, or accoustics. How a space is subdivided, then, is no longer a secondary decision, but a central component of architectural performance.
Every twelve years, the banks of the Ganges at Prayagraj become one of the largest cities on Earth — and then disappear. The Maha Kumbh Mela draws over 400 million pilgrims across six weeks, requiring the construction of a full urban infrastructure: pontoon bridges, field hospitals, kilometers of temporary roads, a grid of tent cities visible from space. When the festival ends, it is dismantled entirely. No gathering in human history produces a more complete architecture of movement; built for arrival, engineered for transience, and designed to leave no permanent trace. The Kumbh Mela is exceptional in scale, but not in condition: movement has become a defining spatial problem of the century.
This month, ArchDaily explores Architectures of Movement: Land, Borders, and the Politics of Belonging, a theme that examines how mobility reshapes architecture's relationship to territory, ownership, and identity. The topic does not treat movement as a crisis to be managed, but as a fundamental lens through which to reconsider what buildings, cities, and borders actually do: who they accommodate, who they exclude, and what they make permanent.
A building material rarely begins where architecture encounters it. By the time concrete reaches a construction site, its limestone has already been quarried, processed, and transformed. Timber arrives long after the forest. Glass appears detached from the sand from which it was made. By the time materials enter construction, much of the landscape and industry that produced them has already disappeared from view.
In 1743, a small cabin suspended by ropes was installed in a courtyard of the Palace of Versailles for the private use of King Louis XV. Manually operated by servants hidden from view, the so-called "flying chair" allowed movement between floors without stairs, and unknowingly introduced one of the central questions of modern architecture: how to move people vertically in a way that is efficient, safe, and integrated into the building.
The mechanization of this principle, with the introduction of a safety elevator in the early 1850s, paved the way for an unprecedented urban transformation. Without the elevator, the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York in the 1880s would have been unfeasible not because of structural limitations, but because of access. The elevator made it possible to build higher, and it also defined the logic of how these buildings would operate, where their cores would be placed, how their lobbies would be organized, and who could reach which spaces.
Guangzhou Yunxi Botanical Garden / AECOM + Architectural Design & Research Institute of SCUT + Guangzhou Landscape Architectural Design & Research Institute. Image Courtesy of Yunxi Botanical Garden
While human life depends heavily on plants for the medicines, building materials, and fuel they provide, they also play a vital role in many ecological processes. From climate regulation through carbon dioxide absorption to soil fertility and the purification of air and water, plant diversity offers opportunities to address some of the most pressing challenges of this century, including food security, energy availability, climate change, and habitat degradation. In this context, botanical gardens act as living refuges that foster innovation, adaptation, and human resilience. But what can architectural practice learn from botany and its methods?
In the field of architecture, however, this question remains relatively marginal. We often know who designed a building, its finishes, the manufacturer of its frames, the brand of its wall coverings, and even its energy performance, but we almost never ask where the tons of material that made its existence possible actually came from.
Set on the banks of the Sava River in Belgrade, Serbia, the site of a former cement factory became the starting point for the 21st edition of the Saint-Gobain Architecture Student Contest. Organized in cooperation with the World Green Building Council, OneClick LCA, the City of Belgrade, the Academic Yachting Club Belgrade, the Serbia Green Building Council, and the Green & Blue Corridors Association, invited students to imagine a new Sports and Recreation Hub capable of transforming an industrial waterfront into a year-round public destination. More than 200 universities from 34 countries participated in this 21stedition of the Architecture Student Contest.
