Author: Diogo Borges Ferreira | ArchDaily

Go East: What Tirana's Bread & Heart Festival Reveals About Architecture and Landscape

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Something has been happening in Tirana that the architectural world has not quite found the language for. In the space of a few years, a city of less than a million people in one of Europe's least-known countries has become the site of an extraordinary concentration of architectural ambition — a place where offices that rarely work in the same city, let alone the same decade, are building simultaneously, and where the questions that preoccupy contemporary architecture seem to arrive with an unusual urgency.

Feeding the Land: What We Eat Built the World We Inhabit

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

There is a standard way of telling the history of architecture and food. It begins with the human decision to cultivate, to store, to distribute, to consume, and ends with the building that decision produced. In this version of events, food is the occasion and architecture is the response.

Unearthing the Ground: Architecture and the Politics of Soil

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

What architecture leaves in the ground outlasts what it puts in the air. A demolished building disappears from the skyline in a matter of days, but its foundations remain embedded in the soil for generations. The contamination caused by an industrial complex does not clear when the complex is torn down. The legal boundaries inscribed across colonial territory do not dissolve when the colonial administration ends. The ground holds what architecture quickly forgets.

Thick Walls and Deep Openings: When Architecture Rediscovers Mass

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

For much of the twentieth century, architectural culture was shaped by the pursuit of lightness. Steel structures and curtain walls reduced the building envelope to a thin layer separating interior from exterior, while façades became smooth, continuous surfaces where windows were cut as precise openings within an abstract plane. But for centuries, buildings were conceived as bodies of mass; walls possessed depth, windows were recessed within thick masonry, and space was often experienced as something carved from the solidity of construction. In recent years, several contemporary projects appear to revisit this older spatial logic, reintroducing thickness as an architectural condition through deep openings, monolithic volumes, and heavy envelopes.

Tirana Architecture City Guide: Negotiating Identity Between Socialism and Urban Reinvention

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Mon, 25 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Located at the intersection of Adriatic landscapes and Balkan geopolitics, Tirana has undergone one of the most accelerated urban transformations in Europe over the last three decades. Once defined by rigid socialist planning and political isolation, the city has progressively reoriented itself through a combination of informal growth, international investment, and strategic urban interventions that seek to redefine its public image and spatial structure.

Architecture and Ideology: How Political Systems Shaped 20th-Century Design

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Tue, 19 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Architecture is often presented as the visible expression of its time, its desires, its faith in progress, its idea of order. Yet this reading tends to flatten the conditions under which buildings are produced. It suggests that architecture follows history when, in many cases, it actively participates in it. Few periods make this more evident than the twentieth century, when architecture became deeply entangled with political programs, economic systems, and competing visions of how collective life should be organized.

Designing a Brand: How Apple Built an Architectural Language of Glass and Order

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

In 2026, Apple marked fifty years since its founding. Over the past two decades, Apple has developed a consistent architectural language that extends its brand into the built environment, transforming stores, workplaces, and public-facing spaces into active components of its identity. These environments guide movement, frame interaction, and condition the ways in which users encounter both products and the company itself.

Baku Architecture City Guide: 15 Projects Reframing Azerbaijan’s Capital

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Tue, 05 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Some cities grow through continuity, others construct themselves through moments of acceleration. Baku, in Azerbaijan, seems to operate somewhere in between. Its historic core, the Icherisheher, still holds a spatial logic that resists expansion: dense, enclosed, defined by proximity and repetition. But just beyond its walls, the city begins to shift. Scale increases, distances expand, and the relationship between buildings becomes less about continuity and more about visibility.

Designing with Air: Rethinking Architecture Beyond the Wall

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Sat, 02 May 2026 07:30:00 +0000

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.

Van Wassenhove Residence: Living the Radical Continuity of Juliaan Lampens

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Architectural history often advances through iconic gestures or technological breakthroughs, yet some works remain influential precisely because they resist spectacle. Built between 1972 and 1974 in Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium, the Van Wassenhove Residence stands as one of those quiet but decisive projects. Conceived as a single, continuous concrete volume set within a wooded landscape, the house challenges conventional ideas of domestic comfort, privacy, and spatial hierarchy. Its presence is direct and uncompromising, yet it avoids monumentality, positioning itself instead as a lived structure shaped by everyday rituals and long-term inhabitation.

What Lies Beneath: 10 Projects Reshaping the Ground Level

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Architecture has long been drawn to the idea of lightness. From early modernist experiments that sought to preserve landscapes, elevating buildings has been understood as a way to preserve the ground while maintaining continuity across the terrain. Volumes are lifted on columns, infrastructures detach circulation from the surface, and entire programs are suspended above the ground.

Imported Futures: Global Architecture Shaping Albania’s Urban Transformation

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 04:00:00 +0000

In recent years, Albania has undergone a rapid and visible transformation, emerging as one of the most active urban environments in Southeast Europe. This growth is not only reflected in the expansion of its built fabric but also in the scale and ambition of new architectural interventions that seek to redefine the country's image. Across its territory, a series of large developments, cultural institutions, and infrastructural projects are being introduced as part of a broader effort to reposition Albania and its capital, Tirana, within regional and international networks.

Cities of the Dead: 10 Projects Exploring Burial Architecture

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Death is a certainty, but its architecture has never been stable. Every period and culture has invented a different way of placing the dead in the world (close or far, visible or screened, monumental or almost anonymous), and those choices have always carried social and political weight. Cemeteries are where that weight becomes legible in space, turning belief and regulation into boundaries, paths, and names.

Unearthing the Ground: Architecture and the Politics of Oil

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Beneath the ground lies a material that has quietly shaped the architecture of the modern world. Petroleum is rarely discussed within architectural discourse, yet the extraction, circulation, and consumption of oil have profoundly reorganized the spatial logic of territories. Pipelines, refineries, drilling platforms, ports, highways, and petrochemical complexes form a vast infrastructural landscape that sustains contemporary life, composing a dispersed architecture of energy.

Rethinking Architecture at the Scale of Planetary Systems

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Architecture has traditionally been described as a discipline concerned with space, form, and material presence. Yet this understanding becomes increasingly limited when confronted with the conditions that shape contemporary construction. Buildings no longer emerge from a stable relationship between site, program, and material. Instead, they are produced within a dense web of technological systems that operate across territorial, ecological, and temporal scales. Energy networks, data infrastructures, extraction processes, and global logistics shape architecture as decisively as climate or urban context.

Setbacks as Courtyards: How Civil Architecture Reimagines the Gulf House in Bahrain

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 07:30:00 +0000

For centuries, domestic architecture throughout the Gulf has been organized around the courtyard. Houses presented thick exterior walls and limited openings to the street, turning inward toward a shaded garden that structured everyday life. This spatial arrangement responded to both climate and culture. The courtyard brought daylight into deep plans, enabled cross-ventilation, and provided a protected outdoor environment within dense urban fabrics. In the House with Seven Gardens, in Diyar Al Muharraq, Bahrain, the Bahrain-based practice Civil Architecture, one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, revisits this spatial tradition through the conditions of contemporary suburban housing. Rather than reproducing the courtyard house as a historical model, the project reinterprets its environmental logic within the regulatory frameworks and spatial conditions that shape much of today's urban development in the Gulf.

Error 404: Architectural Memory in the Age of Algorithms

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Before the digital turn, architecture's memory was largely tangible. It lived in the weight of drawings, the patina of models, and the thickness of books. To preserve architecture meant to preserve its traces, the documents, sketches, and photographs through which buildings could be remembered long after their material form had changed or disappeared. The modern architectural archive, as it developed in the 20th century, was both a refuge and a device of legitimacy. Institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Casa da Arquitectura, or the Deutsches Architekturmuseum were built upon the conviction that to preserve architecture was to preserve its documents.

The Machine in the Age of Collective Practice

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 07:30:00 +0000

This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.