Industrial activity can end long before its effects disappear from the land. Factories close, buildings are demolished, and former industrial districts gradually become part of new residential developments. Yet the soil beneath them may still contain traces of their previous use, sometimes requiring extensive intervention before construction can begin.

Redeveloping these sites raises a question about how much of the existing ground can remain and what it takes to build housing above it. The extent of contamination affects what must happen before construction begins, while the cost of preparing the land can influence the development itself. Much of this work eventually disappears beneath the completed buildings, leaving little indication of the site's previous condition.

+ 17

Walk along a river in almost any Latin American city and you will find stretches that have been straightened, lined with concrete, buried beneath roads, or pushed behind industrial areas and residential neighborhoods. Throughout the twentieth century, urban expansion gradually occupied riverbanks and former floodplains, while waterways were redirected or confined within infrastructure intended to control them. Yet the water continued to return. For decades, flooding has been the most frequent natural disaster in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.

Some cities have begun to reconsider what happens along these edges. Across Chile, Mexico, and Brazil, parks are being developed within riverbeds, drainage channels, and other territories exposed to flooding. These spaces accommodate water during heavy rainfall while providing areas for recreation, circulation, and gathering throughout much of the year. Their design also changes how surrounding neighborhoods access territories previously associated with flooding, pollution, or limited public use.

+ 17

A different social order is easier to imagine when it sits far from the one that already exists. In Latin America, that distance has often been territorial. Parts of the region have repeatedly been treated as places where another world could begin. These places were never empty.

For architects, this idea has a familiar starting point: the plan. Seen from above, a territory can look like a clean sheet, ready for an axis or a grid. At eye level, the same ground is already full of people and the paths they use.

+ 5

Volcanic landscapes make geological change unusually visible. Lava hardens into new ground, and plants slowly take hold across it. Ash can remain in the landscape for years. Around active volcanoes, these processes are still underway, affecting where and how people build.

Yet these landscapes continue to attract houses and places of retreat. Their isolation and unusual terrain are often part of the appeal. Building there means bringing everyday life into a landscape that can still change.

+ 17

Cities depend on systems that already exist around them. When architects design on water or beyond Earth, those systems are no longer available. Without fixed ground or nearby networks for energy, water, transport, and waste, architecture has to take on functions the larger city would normally provide.

The reason for moving beyond familiar ground also changes from one project to another. In the Maldives, building on water responds to the vulnerability of existing land. In Busan, floating development creates another direction for urban expansion. On the Moon, the challenge is more absolute: there is no existing infrastructure to connect to at all.

+ 9

What happens to a house when the life it was designed for ends? In Casa sobre el Arroyo, the answer developed gradually as the building changed use, ownership, and condition over nearly eight decades. Even as these conditions changed, the structure, circulation, and relationship to the site remained central to how the house was understood and, eventually, restored.

Designed by Amancio Williams and Delfina Gálvez Bunge de Williams beginning in 1943 for Amancio's father, Alberto Williams, Casa sobre el Arroyo grew directly from the conditions of its site in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Rather than treating the Las Chacras stream as something to work around, the project uses it to organize the house itself. A reinforced concrete arch crosses the water and lifts the living spaces above it, turning the stream into part of the experience of moving through and inhabiting the house.

+ 3

A greenhouse is a building designed to create one climate inside another. By controlling sunlight, heat, and ventilation through its enclosure, it produces conditions that differ from those outside. Traditionally, that controlled environment was designed around plants. In housing, the same principle is increasingly being used to shape spaces for people.

Bringing greenhouse construction into a house offers more than additional enclosure. It can create sheltered spaces without conditioning them like conventional interior rooms, capture solar heat when it is useful, provide ventilation when temperatures rise, and extend the periods of the year when certain areas of the home remain comfortable to occupy.

+ 11

Water management, air quality, and heat mitigation are usually planned through systems much larger than the spaces where people actually experience them. Drainage networks sit below the street. Air pollution is measured across entire cities. Yet these conditions are felt much closer to the body: while waiting for a bus in the sun, walking through a flooded street, crossing an exposed plaza, or looking for somewhere to sit when the air itself feels difficult to breathe.

Heat makes this question especially urgent. As cities become warmer, streets, parks, transit areas, and other public spaces are increasingly becoming sites where design can reduce exposure through shade, planting, airflow, and water. For architecture, that brings part of climate adaptation into the spaces people use every day.

+ 24

Architects are trained to choose materials, compare their properties, and decide how they should be used. Some practices are taking on a different task: developing the material itself.

For Material Cultures, BC architects, and Studio Ossidiana, this can begin with hemp grown for construction, earth excavated from building sites, or mixtures of concrete, pigment, stone, and shells. Their work connects material research with processing, fabrication, and construction.

+ 25

Architectural prototypes are often used to test decisions before construction begins. But in some practices, prototyping begins while those decisions are still taking shape. Moving an idea from drawing into matter introduces questions that depend on making itself: how a material can be cut or joined, how much a piece weighs, how an assembly comes together, whether parts can be reused, or even what form the project should take.

TAKK, salazarsequeromedina, and Ensamble Studio each make physical experimentation part of their design process, but they ask different things of it. For TAKK, prototypes help test how materials and components come together as a construction system. For salazarsequeromedina, models and built systems remain open to dismantling, recombination, and later uses. Ensamble Studio uses physical experiments to generate geometry and construction knowledge that can move into engineering and full-scale building. What distinguishes these approaches is not simply that they prototype, but what each practice expects to learn through the prototype.

+ 54

Founded in Quito in 2017 by Martín Real and Florencia Sobrero, Taller General works across housing, rehabilitation, exhibitions, and community projects. What ties them together is less a type of building than a way of building: architects, builders, craftspeople, students, organizations, and communities move in and out of the process, and each project takes shape from whatever is already there.

This approach grew from direct experience with construction. Before Taller General was formally established, Real and Sobrero became involved with Actuemos Ecuador, one of the civil society initiatives formed in response to the earthquake that affected Ecuador's coast in 2016. Working within the realities of building connected architectural decisions to materials, budgets, available labor, and local knowledge, this established a relationship with construction that has remained central to the practice.

+ 20

The center of a plan is never simply empty space. Once rooms and routes begin to organize around it, the center starts to structure the entire plan. It may contain a courtyard, a stair, a garden, or a shared room. It can also preserve something already present on the site or support a process that architecture does not fully control. What occupies this position determines how the surrounding spaces are arranged, connected, and used.

In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein describe shared spaces as most effective when they sit at the center of gravity of everyday life and remain connected to the routes people use most. Their argument suggests that a center matters not because it occupies the geometric middle, but because the surrounding rooms, paths, and activities give it spatial weight. The projects included here extend that idea beyond communal space, showing how the center can organize circulation, collective use, environmental systems, and the relationship between architecture and what already exists on the site.

+ 31

Displacement is usually understood through movement: the moment people are forced to move from one place to another. Yet from an architectural perspective, that movement is only the beginning of what comes next. A house may need to be rebuilt, an entire community relocated, or everyday life reestablished somewhere completely new. What is lost through displacement is not always something architecture can simply replace.

This question is particularly relevant in Latin America, where displacement has shaped communities under different circumstances and at different scales. What happens afterward depends on why people were forced to move, whether they can return, and what remains of the places they inhabited. Some communities rebuild within familiar surroundings. Others must establish everyday life somewhere new. These differences shape what architecture is being asked to do.

+ 16

The announcement of the winning proposal for Ecuador's new National Museum (MuNA) sparked one of the country's most significant architectural debates in recent years. The public response has since reshaped the competition itself while also raising broader questions about how a national museum gives architectural form to an interpretation of a nation. While the discussion began with a single design, it exposed a challenge that extends far beyond Ecuador.

National museums are not simply asked to represent a nation. They are asked to give it architectural form. Yet identity cannot be built directly. Before it becomes architecture, it must first be interpreted and translated through architectural decisions.

+ 17

As co-living becomes increasingly associated with students, young professionals, and other mobile residents, it raises a broader architectural question: if home is no longer tied to long-term residence, what should architecture expect the private dwelling to provide?

People move for school, for a temporary job, or for a career that keeps taking them somewhere new. Many now expect to spend a defined period in a place before leaving it. Housing built for them has to do more than provide shelter. It has to support the routines through which someone adapts to an unfamiliar place, in the short time they know they have there. A year in a city asks something different of an apartment than a lifetime does, even if the square meters look the same on paper.

+ 15

The Andes are often understood as a continuous mountain range, yet they encompass a wide range of climates and ecosystems. In Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Chile, páramos, dry highlands, temperate valleys, and snow-covered landscapes can exist within relatively short distances of one another. As elevation changes, so do temperature, solar radiation, humidity, wind, vegetation, and topography, producing environments that require different ways of building.

Unlike many mountain regions where cold is the defining environmental condition, high-altitude environments in the Andes combine several climatic conditions at once. As elevation increases, solar radiation becomes more intense. Some regions remain humid throughout the year, while others experience prolonged dry seasons. In many places, steep terrain, snow, and changing weather patterns become additional factors that influence how buildings are designed.

+ 12

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.

+ 17

In many Latin American cities, peripheral neighborhoods have historically had less access to the resources that make urban life more than just livable. Housing, transportation, and public services are the usual markers of that gap. But there is another gap that is harder to quantify: the absence of places where people can gather, learn, rest, and participate in collective life. When those spaces do not exist, the city not only fails to provide a service. It fails to acknowledge a presence.

In recent decades, a growing number of projects have tried to address that absence directly. Rather than focusing only on physical infrastructure, they invest in spaces designed to support education, culture, recreation, and community, often merging several of those functions within a single building in neighborhoods where those spaces are otherwise limited.

+ 19