Author: João Santos | ArchDaily

Alienation and Narrative Space in the Apple TV+ Series "Severance"

João Santos — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:06:00 +0000

One of the most highly acclaimed television productions of recent times, “Severance,” the Apple TV+ sci-fi series released in 2022, establishes an intriguing premise: employees of the mysterious Lumon Industries volunteer to participate in an experiment that creates a definitive separation between their personal and professional lives in their brains, so that memories of work and private life no longer intersect. This procedure thus generates an intermittent alter ego, mutually unaware of the other self and hyper-focused on its respective dimension. The skillful direction of Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle, coupled with the finely tuned performances of the cast,

Public fountains as zones of relief from urban heat

João G. Santos — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:54:00 +0000

A direct result of global warming, the phenomenon of heatwaves has proven increasingly devastating and frequent with each passing summer. The most recent of these has been raging across Europe for days, worsening in western countries, such as Belgium and the United Kingdom. The melting runway surface at Luton Airport and the fires in the village of Wennington, in London, and in Calatayud, in southwestern Spain, are just a few of the incidents that illustrate the critical dimensions of the problem.

Where does a city begin and where does it end?

João G. Santos — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:54:00 +0000

The title-question of this article stems from the deduction that if cities — in their modern form — are spatial entities possessing an originating and demarcating point of development, then they also possess an equivalent point (or line) of finitude. This question could be immediately resolved by turning to cartography. From an administrative and organizational perspective, maps allow us, in a way, to define the extent of any and all urban agglomerations. However, the boundaries dictated by scalar representation frameworks fall short of dismissing this reflection, as our apprehension of the city is far more complex. As Ferrão (2003) elaborates, in a statement that encompasses the sociopolitical dimension of the matter beyond geography and architecture: the city is an “object of increasingly invisible contours.”

Suppression of rights on the construction site: parallels between Brasília and Qatar

João G. Santos — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:36:00 +0000

Sixty-two years separate the inauguration of Brasília and the opening of the 22nd edition of the FIFA men's World Cup, hosted in Qatar in 2022. Of course, it is not only their place in time and space that differentiates these two historic occasions: we must also add the geopolitical context, the character, the actors, and the interests surrounding each. What, then, remains as a connection between the two?