What does it mean for an architecture biennial—especially a Pan-American one—to have reached more than 20 editions? Clearly, it represents a significant accumulation of participants, speakers, coordinators, and projects that over the years have not only showcased the sheer volume of regional production, but have also consistently reminded us of the potential of keeping both Latin American and global debate and exchange active.

For this reason, it is worth highlighting key figures and milestones. Both serve as empirical evidence of the historical development and reach of the Quito Architecture Biennial, helping us answer this initial question and understand why it is considered one of the most important architectural events in the Americas.

Writing for the ARKRIT Collective, architect Carmen Espegel presents an article that exemplifies how the home can serve as a simple refuge for the essence of life—defined by the survivor's austerity, voluntary renunciation, and a rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle.

Originally published as Collaborative Design of Public Space: The Triple Dimension, this new collaboration by Paisaje Transversal proposes a specific methodology for both evaluating the quality of public space and facilitating urban design "if we want to transform public space into a living fabric," the authors explain.

Public space is the fluid that unifies the city, the fabric that stitches buildings together and weaves social, economic, and environmental relationships. It shapes issues as crucial as mobility, coexistence, and a community's cultural exchange, as well as the environmental quality that directly impacts everyone's health.

Public space shapes our daily lives, either offering or depriving us of spaces for socialization. Consequently, it is a priority, both for the sustainability of the city and the lives of its inhabitants—a matter that demands the involvement of not only urban design professionals but also the general public. To achieve this, citizens must understand the factors that determine the livability and functionality of public space, just as they recognize the characteristics of decent housing.

In their classic setup, with a classroom consisting of a blackboard, a standing teacher, and seated students, the interior spaces of a school can easily be mistaken for prisons. Now consider the outdoor, public areas of most educational institutions in Brazil: how often can a place be recognized as a school simply by looking at it from afar?

Simply moving through Brazilian cities, wasting hours in traffic jams or waiting for overcrowded buses or subways—or ones that don't even exist!—is enough to see that they are far from functioning at a reasonable standard. And even those who, supposedly protected by walls, rarely come into contact with the precarious housing conditions of millions of families are shocked by the growing number of people living on the streets or by stark reminders of this precarity when a tragedy, such as the fire in the Wilton Paes de Almeida Building, hits the headlines. One would expect, therefore, that urban issues—housing and transportation in particular—would be prominent in the government platforms of the presidential candidates.

How many children do we see daily playing in the streets, interacting with elements of urban spaces, running in parks or plazas, or riding their bikes? These scenes can say a lot about a city—not only about how it is caring for its younger generations, but also about the quality of life it offers families; which is to say, for everyone.

The team led by Oscar Luengo and Álvaro Parraguez won first place in the Pasarelas San Borja competition in Chile. The main objective of the competition was to recognize "the best urban design ideas that contribute to defining intervention criteria and generating proposals for the San Borja Neighborhood."

Titled Corredores San Borja, the winning proposal "proposes the walkways as connecting spatial corridors between towers, plazas, and peripheral activities, allowing for fluidity and articulation between the complex's disconnected interior and exterior spaces."

During the design process of a building, design professionals from various disciplines are called upon to propose solutions that ensure client requirements and expectations are met.

Design decisions, which until the 1980s were often not grounded in objective criteria, have gradually become more evidence-based. This shift aims to reduce design and execution errors, material waste, and operational inefficiencies, while also systemically recognizing best practices.

By Qian Qinyang

Created by the Ecuadorian firm ENSUSITIO, the Con Lo Que Hay Workshop is a course taught separately to architecture students at the Universidad Tecnológica Indoamérica (UTI) and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE), offering them the opportunity to work on their first real commission. As a result, students must navigate not only the design itself, but also engage with communities, clients, budgets, and, of course, their own peers.

"We do not see architecture as a product," write Enrique Villacís alongside Cynthia Ayarza and Lorena Rodríguez, co-founders of ENSUSITIO, who serve as the workshop's tutor and professional advisors, respectively. "It is an organic process built day by day alongside its inhabitants, from diagnosis to use and maintenance, including the *minga*—collective construction. Everything is built under the principles of 'what is available'—materials, local wisdom, and our own contributions that value ancestral knowledge within a contemporary context," they add.

On this occasion, we present three projects developed on the periphery of Quito: a collection center, a dining hall for an evangelical congregation, and an outdoor therapy space.

The text below presents a brief summary of the past editions of the International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo, coinciding with the announcement of the curatorial team for the 12th edition. If you are looking for a research source on the first ten editions of the event, we suggest the book Arquitetura em Retrospectiva: 10 Bienais de São Paulo, by Elisabete França, which offers an excellent overview of the paths taken by the exhibitions and shows how the architecture biennials became the preferred venue for promoting Brazilian production, ultimately joining the official calendar of events for the city of São Paulo.

“Progress” is certainly a word that symbols what the 1940s represented for the city of São Paulo. As developments flourished in the fields of art and architecture, new landmarks materialized from the fusion of these two disciplines, such as the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM)—an institution inaugurated in 1948 that showcased the height of what was then considered modern.

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An island is, by definition, a piece of land entirely surrounded by water; in this sense, the element of water serves as a limit, a boundary, and, at the same time, a place.

Hotel Punta Caliza, designed by Estudio Macías Peredo Arquitectos, employs these very concepts so that this naturally salty, aquamarine liquid itself becomes an island—acting as both center and surface, bounded by the built structure to form a cohesive whole that surrounds, contains, and shapes the water.

Launched in 2013, the initiative to establish an Architecture Prize presented a wealth of challenges for the Instituto Tomie Ohtake and its partner AkzoNobel. Its primary objective was to map contemporary Brazilian architecture, focusing specifically on the work of emerging professionals. This ambitious and unprecedented goal set it apart from traditional architectural competitions, not only by encompassing a broader spectrum of categories but also by championing a niche distinct from the output of already established, award-winning firms.

Fábrica Puigneró is a project by Santi Julià Xercavins and Bernat Pedro Planas, focusing on the adaptation of abandoned industrial infrastructure in towns that were once heavily dependent on industrial production.

For their final thesis project at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, the authors designed a comprehensive intervention for the former Hilados y Tejidos Puigneró textile mill in the town of Sant Bartomeu, Spain. "This transformation and retrofitting of the factory aims to generate a new livable framework, utilizing selective demolition and the integration of public space as its primary strategies," the authors explain.

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São Paulo, like so many other Brazilian cities, has a standardized, monotonous, and gray architecture, with its aesthetic defined by real estate developers and builders, offering very little architectural value.

To be sure, there are highly significant buildings—including historical downtown classics like the Martinelli Building, modernist examples by Rino Levi and Artacho Jurado in Higienópolis, and contemporary experiments in Vila Madalena designed by Isay Weinfeld and Triptyque. Unfortunately, these examples are few, dwindling to almost zero as we move toward the outskirts.

I am obsessed with the idea that we can change this reality by hacking existing buildings, fostering a new urban identity, boosting civic pride, improving quality of life, and promoting innovation and sustainability at viable costs.

Architecture does not illustrate or imitate ideas born from philosophy, literature, painting, or any other form of artistic representation; rather, it constitutes a mode of thought in its own right: architectural thought. This way of thinking and making requires its own tools as the only means of translating these ideas into something concrete, something real, capable of communicating on its own. One of these tools—perhaps the most indispensable—is drawing.

It was in Granada, specifically at the Alhambra Palace, where on October 14 and 15, 1952, a group of Spanish architects including Miguel Fisac, Secundino Zuazo, and Fernando Chueca met to reflect on and establish a new direction and foundation for modern Spanish architecture. The outcomes of that meeting were summarized in a document whose tenets remain remarkably relevant today, known as the Alhambra Manifesto [pdf].

Sixty-five years later, under vastly different historical, social, and cultural circumstances, architects from across Spain are gathering once again in Granada for the III National Congress on the Future of the Architect. Running from yesterday, Thursday, April 11, to tomorrow, Saturday, April 13, the event serves as a platform to share experiences, analyze the current state of the profession, and debate the future possibilities of this exciting field.

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Over the last twenty years, the world has never been so connected. At the turn of the century, the digital realm seems to have invaded analogue layers, redefining standards, lifestyles, interactions, and the way we connect and use spaces. This social redefinition is strongly attributed to Generation Z—the cohort born during the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, between the 1990s and 2010s. But do you know the defining characteristics of this group?

Following two weeks of enthusiastic voting, ArchDaily readers have narrowed down more than 300 nominees to the top 10 finalists of the year.

During the nomination phase, we witnessed how this award highlights the collective progress and evolving boundaries of architecture. These shortlisted projects represent the most inspiring, impactful, and resonant works chosen by our readers.

The finalists showcase a diverse spectrum of practice, spanning established industry leaders alongside emerging boutique firms with highly distinct design voices. Collectively, these projects also highlight architecture's profound capacity to improve our built environment.

On Friday, December 22, 2017, the inaugural MUGAK Basque Country International Architecture Biennial opened the exhibition "The City We Lost: Urban Heritage Management in San Sebastián, 1950-2017" at the Santa Teresa Convent in San Sebastián, Spain. The exhibition showcases recognizable local buildings that have disappeared over the last few decades. 

Curated by the Áncora association, the exhibition traverses San Sebastián's neighborhoods to examine a city that now exists only in collective memory—specifically, buildings lost over the past seven decades. Stretching from Martutene to Igeldo, and including Alza, Amara, El Antiguo, and Ibaeta, the survey goes beyond the city's iconic heritage, looking past San Sebastián's most prominent areas to highlight other architectural works.

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Born in Artigas, Uruguay, in the second decade of the twentieth century, Eladio Dieste became an exceptional builder, with most of his work located in Montevideo, the capital of his home country, and its adjacent cities. However, his work gained broader international recognition posthumously, after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) celebrated it in 2005 through the theoretical work of Stanford Anderson. Trained as an engineer, his relationship with the construction site and in situ experimentation allowed him to push materiality and structural possibilities to their absolute limits.

With a practice deeply connected to the relationship between materiality and the construction site, he developed a rich architectural output based on studies of thin ceramic shells, which he termed reinforced ceramics. Alongside this construction technique, Dieste found that ceramic bricks offered the essential structural resolution he sought. The material possessed excellent structural properties—highly resistant to compression, quick to build with, and easy for local labor to handle—while the addition of steel reinforcement allowed it to resist tension and bending. Consequently, he found in brick the ideal medium for the plasticity and structural design he envisioned, enabling him to span large distances with slender self-supporting structures anchored only at their ends. Free of central supports, these structures unified walls, floors, and ceilings into a single cohesive body.

But what makes Eladio Dieste such a remarkable builder?

Since the mid-20th century, the Castagnino Museum has established itself as one of Argentina's most important cultural spaces. The historic building by the architectural firm Hérnandez Larguía-Newton (1937) was built in a privileged setting, conceived as the gateway to the city—a condition that will be further emphasized by the new intervention.

There is nothing personal against the color yellow, but let us be honest: we were saturated by the monotony.

We love yellow, but not when it is used tastelessly and to mask corruption. We like the yellow that is natural to Lima, like the one in the header image—that earthy tone, the tone of every sunset, the one that shines like the sun. In recent years, our city has been forcibly invaded by this color: yellow staircases, yellow bridges, yellow walls, yellow railings... perhaps too much. And even if certain works were not yellow themselves, the intentions behind them carried a distinct whiff of that hue.

Architect Antonio Miranda, writing for the ARKRIT Collective, invites us to reflect in this article on romantic subjectivism in criticism, presenting a simple example in defense of the objective criticism of the object, which speaks to us much more honestly and sincerely than the author of the work themselves. He puts this assertion to the test by comparing two famous buildings in Madrid's Plaza de España: the Edificio España and the Torre de Madrid.