In most cases, the power of decision lies with specialized professionals—historians, museologists, architects, geographers. But on what basis are these decisions made? Can the complexity of history be reduced to a checklist? Or, more fundamentally, which version of history underlies these choices?
As the primary interface between interior spaces and the external environment, facades play a central role in both the performance and architectural expression of buildings. Increasingly, they are no longer seen as static envelopes, but as active mediators between climate, energy, use, and aesthetic. In dense urban contexts, however, they are also gaining relevance for another reason: while roof surfaces are often limited, fragmented, or already occupied by technical equipment, vertical envelopes remain largely underutilized in terms of energy production.
Architecture is often evaluated through finished forms, yet some practices operate in a different register, one where design unfolds through relationships, time, and use rather than through a single outcome. For CatalyticAction, participation is not a parallel social activity, but the means through which spaces are conceived, constructed, and sustained over time.
Based between Beirut and London, the practice has worked across the Middle East and Europe, developing public spaces, schools, playgrounds, and everyday urban infrastructures through long-term collaboration with local communities. Grounded in participatory research and collective decision-making, this approach was recognized through ArchDaily's 2025 Next Practices Awards, highlighting a mode of practice where architecture is understood as a shared, evolving process rather than a fixed object. In this context, architectural value is measured through continuity, use, and collective ownership, rather than through form alone.
Contemporary workplaces promise collaboration, yet they increasingly struggle to provide spaces for privacy. In an era dominated by open-plan layouts, small acoustic spaces like phone booths and focus pods have become essential for maintaining productivity and privacy. However, the paradox of "booking conflicts" alongside "underutilized spaces" has turned these areas into operational challenges. The question, then, is how workplaces can balance efficiency, productivity, and individualized user experiences within increasingly complex environments.
Bir Ettin Restoration / Bled El Abar Collective. Image Courtesy of Bled El Abar Collective
In some languages, the very word for building refers to its immovability. The discipline of engineering related to buildings is referred to as statics. Thus, architecture is closely related to the fixed and the immobile. And yet, for millions of nomadic people around the world, shelters must be of a light and distinctly movable structure, while home is the vast landscape in which they reside. Such lifestyles, which carry centuries of traditions, are constantly under threat from the pull factors of sedentary life in towns and cities. In Tunisia, one project acknowledges the risk of heritage loss and attempts to improve conditions for nomadic herders.
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.
To fully know a city's architectural heritage, one must look beyond its designated sites and iconic buildings. For many, understanding a city's urban fabric and what makes it tick also means discovering the smaller-scale, locally appreciated, conserved buildings and popular gathering spaces. This is especially true when considering bustling Vietnamese cities, with their peculiar architectural characteristics, which can only be appreciated when learning about their many inspirations and historic layers, combining traditional Vietnamese motifs, modernism, local materiality, and climatic design solutions, but mostly by learning about the site constraints that are addressed through the implementation of the narrow tube houses and low-rise buildings.
These key styles and architectural movements are often maintained and even highlighted, as architects give a second life to many rundown or abandoned buildings, transforming them into popular coffee joints. They are reviving smaller heritage sites by pushing for their restoration and regular use by the community, encouraging visitors to acknowledge the historic relevance of the space, as they covet it.
Some types of work only become visible when they are no longer done. They are discrete, repetitive, rarely celebrated, yet they quietly sustain the functioning of any operation. In architecture, this dimension rarely appears in the images that circulate. When we think about the discipline, we evoke seductive renderings, carefully lit perspectives, precise plans, drawings that promise possible or even utopian futures. Yet the layer that supports these formal gestures is not found in the image, but in specification, detailing, and documentation.
Since artificial intelligence moved to the center of architectural debate, the conversation has largely been driven by its ability to generate forms and atmospheres in seconds. Stylistic simulations, conceptual variations, and visual experimentation have come to symbolize technological advancement in the field. There is something understandable in this fascination: architecture has always engaged with representation as a way of imagining what does not yet exist.
A Gothic cathedral can take centuries to complete. A world exposition pavilion may stand for six months. A ritual structure in Kolkata rises and vanishes within five days. Yet each draws pilgrimage, shapes collective memory, and reorganizes urban life. If heritage has long been defined by what endures, architecture repeatedly shows that cultural authority can also belong to what gathers people.
For much of the twentieth century, conservation frameworks privileged permanence. The Venice Charter, adopted by the International Council on Monuments and Sites, focused on safeguarding monuments and their material authenticity. Cultural value was tied to physical fabric such as stone, brick, and timber. To protect heritage was to preserve what stood. The logic felt stable, even self-evident.
When Hong Kong's architectural story is told, it is often reduced to a handful of icons. Many people most readily name I.M. Pei—Pritzker Prize laureate and architect of the Bank of China Tower in Central (1990), as well as global works such as the Le Grand Louvre in Paris and the Miho Museum in Shiga. Looking elsewhere, one also encounters a long lineage of British and international architects whose imprints have shaped the city's institutional skyline: from Ron Phillips' civic works—most notably the former Murray Building (1969), now The Murray Hotel, and Hong Kong City Hall (1962)—to Norman Foster's infrastructural and corporate monuments, including the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Tower (1986) and Hong Kong International Airport (1998), and, more recently, Zaha Hadid Architects' The Henderson (2024).
Yet within the same period as Pei and Foster, local architects were also producing buildings of enduring significance—works that carried the legacies of Bauhaus, but translated them into a language distinctly calibrated to Hong Kong's climate, density, and civic life. These projects may not always read as commercially prominent icons, yet they often register a sharper sense of social responsibility and public agenda. Among the most important figures in this lineage is the late architect Tao Ho, whose work and public role formed a quieter—but no less foundational—strand in Hong Kong's modern architectural heritage.
First Prize Winner: A Thread Through Time. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner has announced the results of the Dubai Urban Elements Challenge, a landmark international design competition organized in strategic collaboration with Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority (RTA). With a total prize fund of 2,000,000 AED (approximately €500,000), the initiative represents one of the most significant publicly funded global design competitions focused on urban transformation.
The competition was conceived as a forward-looking procurement and innovation platform for one of the world's fastest-evolving metropolitan environments. Participants were invited to propose modular, climate-responsive urban elements—seating systems, shading devices, lighting infrastructure, wayfinding components, rest areas, and micro-retail structures—designed to enhance pedestrian life and strengthen Dubai's public realm identity.
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Villa Tai. Image Courtesy of ARK Architects
The single-family house remains one of the most complex territories in contemporary architecture. At once intimate and technical, everyday and symbolic, it concentrates debates around comfort, sustainability, landscape, and ways of living, while also serving as an instrument for projecting the identity of its inhabitants. It is within this field that ARK Architects operates. Based in Marbella and Sotogrande, the studio's work, under the creative direction of co-founder Manuel Ruiz Moriche, develops from a direct relationship between architecture, natural light, and environmental context.
On December 23, 1972, Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, was struck by a 6.3-magnitude earthquake. In a matter of minutes, its urban core, which for decades had functioned as a compact political and economic center, abruptly collapsed. In the reconstruction process that followed, the authorities sought not simply to rebuild but to reorganize. Their objective was to decentralize the city and prevent future paralysis by dispersing functions across multiple zones. Among the most significant architectural outcomes of this shift was the new Metropolitan Cathedral. Its modernist language symbolized both institutional continuity and urban transformation. In doing so, it embodied Managua's transition from a Spanish-style, centralized urban grid to a contemporary, decentralized metropolis.
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?
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.
