Walking into an electrical store can be intimidating. At first glance, all the lights are on, and the thousands of chandeliers and lamps are blinding. When you walk toward the shelves, you see dozens of options, shapes, colors, prices, and uses. On each package, informational tables display numbers that can seem confusing at first. Lumens, color temperature, wattage—there are many unfamiliar terms. Before defaulting to the cheapest option, only to find that it creates an uncomfortable or poorly balanced atmosphere, understanding a few key concepts can make a significant difference.
Lighting design plays a fundamental role in shaping how spaces are perceived and used, influencing comfort, atmosphere, and even productivity. Poorly designed lighting, on the other hand, can compromise these qualities. Rather than approaching lighting as a purely technical decision, it can be understood as an integral part of architectural design. To help clarify these choices, the following overview introduces the most common types of light sources and key concepts associated with them.
Artificial intelligence has made its way into almost every corner of professional workflows, prompting the architectural industry to rethink how it works. To adapt to this shift, firms are now facing the limits of a model that has changed very little over the past few decades.
What has shifted, and noticeably so, is the pressure on productivity. Today's studios are expected to deliver more work faster and with greater accuracy, while managing tighter budgets, complex regulations, and rising client expectations. In practice, this translates into compressed timelines and a constant demand for precision that leaves little room for error. Often, much of this pressure falls on a small group of individuals who hold critical project knowledge.
Modernism is often encountered through built form, photographed facades, canonical plans, concrete manifestos. For most people, its first encounter was far more immediate. It was a chair in an office, a shelf in a living room, a compact unit that reorganized how one sat, stored, or slept. Long before modern architecture could be widely commissioned, it was furniture that entered everyday space, carrying with it a new logic of living. Modernism's promise of transforming life was often delivered through these smaller, repeatable objects.
To understand this shift, furniture has to be read as a condensed form of architecture rather than decoration. Early twentieth-century designers treated it precisely this way. Le Corbusier described furniture as équipement de l'habitation (equipment of living), placing it within the operational system of the building rather than outside it. Similarly, the Bauhaus approached chairs and tables as industrial prototypes, embedding principles of standardization, efficiency, and mass production into their design. As architectural historian Beatriz Colomina has argued, modern architecture did not circulate only through buildings, but through media and objects that translated its ideas into everyday life. Furniture became architecture in miniature: portable, reproducible, and capable of reorganizing space without reconstructing it.
Today, interdisciplinary learning and exchange are more important than ever in addressing increasingly complex environmental, social, and urban challenges.
Each summer, the University of California, Berkeley's College of Environmental Design (CED) becomes an intensive laboratory for architectural, landscape, and urban exploration. Through two complementary programs—Design + Innovation for Sustainable Cities (DISC) and the Summer Institutes—Berkeley offers an immersive curriculum grounded in disciplinary rigor, intentional exchange, and a shared institutional culture. Together, these programs reflect CED's long-standing multidisciplinary structure, with architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, and urban design thriving and collaborating under one roof.
In Latin America, the ground is rarely just a surface to build on. It can be a river edge, a steep slope, a humid forest floor, a floodable landscape, or a territory under ecological pressure, and in many cases, it carries a history of communities that already knew how to respond to it, building on stilts, on platforms, over water, long before contemporary architecture asked the same questions.
These projects continue that conversation. They engage with conditions that move, absorb, erode, and grow, rather than treating the ground as something to level or control. Elevation allows architecture to adapt without fully taking over: water can pass below, vegetation can remain, and slopes can keep their original condition. In each case, the decision to rise is tied to something specific: water, humidity, topography, vegetation, or ecological recovery, and the knowledge of how to build within it and not against it.
"My only concern is that my work must have a positive impact on the communities in which it is embedded," states Francis Kéré in his book Francis Kéré: Building Stories. His own life story, the context in which he was raised, and the experiences he has lived through all shape his approach to architecture. It is a commitment that extends to people and the places they call home—one that values materiality, collective learning, and the exchange of knowledge. Discovering the stories behind projects such as Primary School in Gando and Naaba Belem Goumma Secondary School inspires reflection on how to design spaces that truly serve humanity.
Francis Kéré's story begins in a village in sub-Saharan Africa and extends across many places. Gando was the setting of his first education, where he absorbed the essence and principles that later shaped the core values of his career alongside influences from other cultures. The structure of Gando is formed by different families who organize themselves, according to established customs, within courtyards scattered across the savanna. Growing up in this remote village in the Burkina Faso savanna fosters a strong sense of community, made tangible by the understanding that each resident of every courtyard is part of the life of the whole.
Contemporary Japanese architecture continues to demonstrate how to adapt the evolving needs of modern residents to a rich building tradition and artisanal legacy. Wood has always been the soul of Japanese architecture. In many recent residential projects, this material transcends its structural role to become the primary finish for various surfaces — ranging from floors and ceilings to furniture and architectural elements. These environments strike a delicate balance between elegance and coziness.
The use of natural, unpainted finishes highlights the material's inherent honesty while also celebrating the unique character of each piece, its natural grain, and the diversity of the overall composition. While some houses feature sober, dark-stained timbers to create a grounded atmosphere, others utilize lighter woods like pine to foster a bright, airy, and ethereal feel. This versatility proves that wood can adapt to any aesthetic, from the rustic to the ultra-minimalist.
When Mexico City hosted the Olympics in 1968, it was the first time the Games had been awarded to a Latin American country as well as the first time for a Spanish-speaking nation to host them. This made the games a good opportunity to project Mexico and its culture internationally, thus prompting the government to constitute an organizing committee with prominent local talent. They appointed Pedro Ramírez Vázquez as its president, a Mexican architect who held significant influence over the state's mid-century building program. His approach was explicit: architecture as a synthesis of international modernist technique with Pre-Columbian references and local material culture. Under his direction, the committee would oversee the construction and adaptation of venues distributed across the southern districts of Mexico City, nearly all designed and built by local architects, engineers, and technicians.
Buildner has also announced the results of Buildner's Unbuilt Award 2025, the second competition in a series celebrating architectural design that has yet to be realized. With a generous 100,000 EUR prize fund, this initiative provides a global platform for architects and designers to showcase their most compelling unbuilt projects, whether conceptual, published, unpublished, or fully developed.
Southeast Asia is often narrated as a kind of architectural playground—an arena where modern and contemporary ideals have been tested at full scale through singular, iconic buildings. One can trace an easy lineage through names that have helped shape the region's skyline imagination: Paul Rudolph's Lippo Centre in Hong Kong and The Concourse in Singapore, I.M. Pei's OCBC Centre and Hong Kong's Bank of China Tower, Norman Foster's Supreme Court of Singapore and the HSBC Main Building in Hong Kong, Ron Phillips' Hong Kong City Hall, Moshe Safdie's Marina Bay Sands. Yet this familiar history—told through objects, colonialism, authorship, and signature forms—risks missing a deeper, more consequential layer of influence: the planning logics and infrastructural frameworks that have quietly structured how these cities expand, densify, and distribute everyday life.
The figure of Tithonus in Greek mythology offers a reflection on the paradox of permanence. In pleading with Zeus for immortality, he forgot to request eternal youth, resulting in a life of endless aging. Over time, his body deteriorates, turning immortality itself into a burden. The narrative suggests a fundamental contradiction: permanence, when detached from the capacity for change, ceases to be a desirable quality. Instead of stability, it produces accumulated decay without adaptation.
Historically, architecture has often fallen into the "Tithonus Trap." Materials are specified to resist time, systems are detailed to prevent change, and buildings are conceived as fixed images. Yet, this pursuit of the static rarely survives the reality of the elements. Between the moment of design—often associated with precise and controlled representations—and the lifespan of a building, surfaces inevitably weather, shift in appearance, and lose their initial finish. Aging is often interpreted as loss rather than as part of the architectural language.
Modernism in architecture was perhaps the first truly global building design philosophy. Established at the beginning of the twentieth century, its early proponents were heavyweights from Europe, such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. In 1923, Le Corbusier published his seminal written work, usually translated into English as Towards a New Architecture. Newness, and a rejection of history, was one of the central tenets of modernism. This manifested itself in the use of new materials such as steel and concrete, which gave rise to an unprecedented freedom of formal expression.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Modernism was adopted across the world by countries recovering from the Second World War and overcoming the legacy of colonialism. It became the language of reconstruction and of nation-building, reinforced by its rejection of the past. Its emphasis on technology suited this brave new world of industry, large-scale development, and new building types. Fast-forwarding to a century after its birth, Modernism itself has become the legacy. As buildings progressively become obsolete or reach the end of their design lives, there is an appreciation of the heritage value of these structures, both as designed items and as symbols of the spirit of the age in which they were built. Here, we look at five Modernist buildings from five regions going through adaptive reuse proposals. Where form once followed function, here, the function must follow the form.
Even the most distracted passerby is captured by the monumental presence of this structure in Valencia’s established Benimaclet neighborhood. Before it, any attempt at rational apprehension quickly dissolves. Its constructive logic seems to escape comprehension as the space unfolds through tensions and deviations, where nothing is immediately given. Between masses of concrete and the insurgent force of vegetation, an almost choreographic play of planes, angles, and rotations emerges. In the vertigo of this encounter, one realizes that the building was not made to be understood, but to be experienced.
Bolete Lounge BIO® by Andreu World x Patricia Urquiola. Image Courtesy of Andreu World
When walking into a large living space, a hotel lobby, or an open-plan workplace, the first thing that can be noticed is not what divides the space, but what holds it together. There are rarely clear boundaries, no obvious rooms, no strict partitions, yet the space still feels organized. Some areas invite a pause; others dictate movement; others foster community. The transitions are subtle, but legible.
At the same time, these interiors are expected to do more. They must accommodate constant change, withstand intensive use, and respond to environmental pressures by reducing waste, extending lifespans, and avoiding frequent replacement. The question is not only how a space looks, but how it performs over time. What is actually doing the heavy lifting?
What happens when you choose reuse over demolition? In Østbirk, Denmark, a 30-year-old timber warehouse has been transformed into a 14,000-square-meter world-class innovation hub for nearly 500 VELUX employees. This article explores how the LKR Innovation House project challenges conventional building practices, preserves material legacy, and offers practical lessons for architects working with existing structures. A new book documents the process through essays, interviews, and photographs.
Architectural drawings operate through abstraction. Plans, sections, and elevations condense spatial, constructive, and dimensional information into a set of codes that make sense within the discipline, but are not always immediately legible to those unfamiliar with this language. In some projects, this condition can create a recurring tension between what is designed and what can be understood. This intensifies when the tools used do not correspond to the scale and complexity of the design. In contexts such as single-family homes, renovations, or additions, overly complex software can introduce noise, delays, and unnecessary dependencies, making proposals harder to develop and convey.
The image is familiar, a façade layered with brise-soleil, light softened into a patterned shadow, interiors kept cool without machines. It appears as intelligence made visible, architecture that understands the sun. This image is rarely examined closely. The same devices that temper heat also organize access, distribute comfort, and depend on particular forms of labor. What looks like a climatic response is also a decision about who gets relief from heat, and how. Tropical modernism, often reduced to a visual language of shade and porosity, emerges instead as a set of situated practices where climate, labor, and power are negotiated differently across contexts.
At the scale of the element, tropical modernism begins as a technical problem. In hot climates, solar radiation is not incidental but constant, requiring buildings to mediate light, heat, and air before they reach the interior. Architects like Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew approached this with a level of precision that resists any reading of these elements as decorative. Shading devices are calibrated according to solar angles, orientation, and seasonal variation. Brise-soleil are dimensioned to block high-angle sun while admitting diffuse light; overhangs extend just enough to prevent direct gain at peak hours; openings are aligned to encourage cross-ventilation. Mid-century research further tested these strategies, measuring temperature reductions and airflow improvements. In this sense, the language of tropical modernism is not symbolic. It is performative: each projection, void, and screen is part of an environmental system.
Architecture is often understood as a matter of enclosure. Walls define space, separating interior from exterior and establishing clear limits. Yet across many projects in Latin America, this distinction becomes less precise. Rather than operating as closed objects, buildings often remain open, allowing air, light, and movement to pass through them.
This condition is tied to more than form. Across the region, architecture has long responded to climates marked by heat, humidity, strong solar exposure, and seasonal rainfall, as well as to building cultures shaped by adaptation, collective labor, and direct engagement with the environment. In these contexts, fully sealed interiors are not always the most effective response. Space is often organized through shade, ventilation, and intermediate zones that regulate rather than isolate.
Blur Building, Lake Neuchatel, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, 2002. Image Courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro
Architecture is traditionally chronicled through the persistence of the solid. We define the discipline by the weight of the lintel, the mass of the pier, and the resistance of the wall. Even when lightness is invoked, it is usually understood as a subtractive act, the thinning of a section or the precarious reduction of a load. Yet there is a parallel history, less visible and harder to isolate, in which the primary material of construction is not what occupies space, but what moves through it.
To treat air as a medium is to move past the binary of the envelope. The boundary between the interior and the world ceases to be a line of absolute separation and becomes, instead, a site of filtration and pressure. We begin to see the building as a thermal valve, a series of gradients where moisture, velocity, and heat are not merely background "conditions" to be mitigated by mechanical systems, but are the very substances being shaped.
"The story of architecture is not wrong," argued Lesley Lokko in her introduction to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, "but it is incomplete." For most of the 20th century, architectural history spoke in one tongue: a singular, dominant narrative centered on a handful of movements, names, and cities, whose reach and influence appeared universal precisely because alternative voices were rendered inaudible. Design movements, however, rarely traveled intact across borders. They were frequently absorbed, resisted, reinterpreted, and transformed depending on geography, politics, economy, climate, and available materials. What arrived in one place as doctrine became, somewhere else, something entirely different.
This month, ArchDaily explores 20th Century Design in Flux: A Global Reinterpretation of Architectural History, a topic that traces the century's design languages not as a single canon but as a constellation of evolving, intersecting, and continually reinvented trajectories. The theme challenges the assumption that regional and non-Western architectures were merely derivative — positioning them instead as sites of active reinterpretation, where global ideas were filtered through local materials, climates, labor, and cultural practices to produce something entirely distinct.
Each year, the ArchDaily Next Practices Awards highlights emerging studios that are expanding the scope of architecture through new methods, materials, and ways of working. Selected from a global pool, these practices reflect a shift away from singular definitions of the discipline, engaging instead with broader questions of construction, environment, and social impact. Rather than operating within fixed categories, many of these studios position themselves across fields, combining design, research, and production to respond to contemporary conditions.
Named one of the winners of the 2025 edition, Hand Over is a Cairo-based practice operating across design, construction, and research. Founded by Radwa Rostom, a civil engineer with over fifteen years of experience in development and sustainability, the studio works through an integrated design-build model, engaging with earth construction, local materials, and community-based processes.
At the turn of the 20th century, parallel, yet connected movements around the world ushered in a new style and architectural era. From the Arts and Crafts in England, Art Nouveau, then Art Deco in France, or the Jugendstil in Germany/Austria, these design and artistic developments spread around the world and took on different forms depending on their context. The basis remained similar, though, with a focus on artisanal value and craftsmanship; the use of wood, glass, and various metals; the integration of organic forms into the exterior facade and interior structure; and the refined incorporation of ornamentation as an architectural element, often as vegetation or geometric patterns.
