Vana Vasa Resort by MJ Kanny Architect, Steel Architectural Awards ASEAN 2024 Winner. Image Courtesy of NS BlueScope
The Steel Architectural Awards ASEAN 2026 is a regional architectural awards program presented by NS BlueScope to recognize built projects that demonstrate architectural excellence through the use of coated steel solutions. Under the theme Shaping Resilient Futures: Timeless Design with Coated Steel, the program highlights projects across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, progressing from the Country Awards to ASEAN-level recognition. This article explains how the two-stage pathway works, what categories are included, and how projects are assessed through Design Excellence, Innovation, and Sustainability.
Architectural visualization has long played a key role in communicating and shaping design ideas. Today, that role is expanding. With the rise of artificial intelligence, visualization is becoming more deeply embedded throughout the entire design workflow, supporting faster iteration and more informed decision making.
Sand, stone, and earth are among the most extracted materials on the planet—yet their removal is rarely pictured, let alone understood as foundational to the built environment. In the exhibition DOMINIO: An Unfinished Visual Archive of Architectural Extractivism, on view in the Newmark Gallery at Art Omi from March 21–May 31, 2026, architectural photographer Onnis Luque traces these often-invisible origins of construction back to the raw landscapes from which they are born.
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.
The World's Biggest And Most Influential Event For Cities. Urban Solutions. Real Impact.
Smart City Expo World Congress (Barcelona, November 3-5) is the world's biggest and most influential event for cities and urban innovation. The event is a premier venue where a diverse community of industry executives, government leaders, researchers, urban pioneers and entrepreneurs gather annually to address complex issues to move cities toward a brighter future. This year's event will welcome over 27,000 professional visitors from more than 130 countries around the globe, 1,190+ exhibitors, 600+ speakers, and representatives from nearly 1,000 cities.
Modernist Villages explores a distinctive trajectory within Swiss modernism: low-rise, high-density housing developments created between the 1950s and the 1980s. Through the analysis of eleven case studies, supported by archival research, interviews, and on-site investigation, this monograph reveals how pioneering architects reimagined urban form, domestic space, and modes of communal life. These projects synthesise the qualities of single-family dwellings within collective housing environments, where architecture, landscape, and social interaction are carefully interwoven. The book's threefold structure – comprising the main chapters Memory, Archive, and Theory – offers a layered approach through which these works are examined. Combining historical narrative, primary sources, and conceptual reflection, it explores how themes such as modularity, spatial depth, and the delicate equilibrium between built form and nature continue to be relevant for a critical dialogue with contemporary architectural discourse. Far from representing static artefacts of modernism, these projects resonate today as models for sustainable urban density and community-making opportunities. Modernist Villages will be of interest to architects, urbanists, historians, and all those interested in the future of housing and the evolving potential of low-rise, high-density living. The book combines a research synthesis and a travel journal focused on eleven case-study buildings of low-rise, high-density housing from the 1950s to the 1980s, designed by Atelier 5, H. U. Scherer / Metron, Itten + Brechbühl, and Spirig + Fehr.
The original impetus behind this project was the desire to document the extraordinary richness, variety, and quality of Havana's Art Deco architecture. Looking back at these photographs, he is still glad he made the decision to undertake that adventure, despite the fact that the result of that effort, due to a series of circumstances, lay dormant for decades in a drawer in his studio. There is no doubt that, the documentary value of the photographs remains intact or perhaps increased, since it is possible that over these thirty years some of the works portrayed have succumbed to successive cyclones and lack of maintenance. The valuable aesthetic and compositional charge of the images does not seem to have been compromised by the passage of time. Today, however, alongside with the worn beauty of the buildings portrayed, what captures the viewer is the life that has been encapsulated in these photographs. A life frozen in most cases accidentally.
Enter the Kinderspace: Architecture for Children's Development #4 Architecture Competition now! 10,000 € in prize money! Closing date for registration: October 28, 2026
Introducing the Kinderspace: Architecture for Children's Development competition / Edition #4, an architectural challenge dedicated to crafting innovative educational spaces that enhance early childhood learning. As young children navigate their formative years, the environment in which they learn plays a pivotal role in their cognitive, emotional, and social development. Traditional educational settings often do not fully cater to the dynamism of early childhood, potentially stifling creativity and exploration.
Over the past two decades, Mark Cavagnero Associates has been quietly making an Imprint on San Francisco's urban fabric. Born of the Modernist tradition of clean lines, abundant natural light, and functional, flowing open space plans, the firm's work expands on these values, encompassing a deep understanding of the city and Bay Area. Mark Cavagnero Architect surveys fifteen of the firm's foundational projects, ranging from cultural and civic buildings to recreational and educational facilities.
Arturo Mezzèdimi, AFRICA HALL A Monument to African History, ORO Editions, 2025
This book is a photographic journey on the origin and life of "Africa Hall" in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia-a building declared in 2015 "Monument to African History" and recently renovated-which was donated in 1961 by Emperor Haile Selassie to the United Nations. Africa Hall was designed by Arturo Mezzedimi, a young self-taught architect, to serve as the UN's continental headquarters and was the birthplace, In 1963, of the Organization of African Unity, now African Union.
Los Angeles: Lost and Found Essays on Identity, Place, and Belonging, ORO Editions, 2026
Los Angeles Lost and Found is a collection of essays and photographs that explores Los Angeles as a city of constant reinvention, where history is often buried beneath layers of change. Experience designer Margaret Chandra Kerrison uses the lens of narrative placemaking to examine how LA's physical spaces—its streets, neighborhoods, and landmarks—shape both individual and collective identity.
Halperin Park - Southern Gateway Deck Park - Photo Credit: SWA Group
The Dallas Architecture Forum, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing public education about architecture, design, public space and the urban environment, completes its 2025-2026 Panel Discussion Series on Wednesday, May 13, 2026. The Forum is pleased to present the Panel Discussion Halperin Park – Southern Gateway Deck Park. The panel will be held at the Angelika Film Center at Mockingbird Station. This program is FREE to the Public – There is no admission charge. Check-in and pre-Lecture Reception will begin at 6:15 pm in the lobby of the Angelika. The Panel will begin at 7:00 pm.
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.
Existing as it does on the brink of being overrun, urbanized or abandoned, rurality is contested. Even in the field of academia, it is often questioned or considered a minor subordinate appendix to urbanity. Since the ancient Greeks, conceptions of the rural have praised it as an idyllic and tranquil place where humans were closer to nature. Nowadays however, notions of the countryside are more complex, it is also a place in constant flux, a place defined and controlled by the urban. Can rurality continue to depend on the urban? Or will future scenarios recognize it for its potential to live truly 'closer to nature' and as the place to be? What can we learn from current counter-urbanization movements that have sprung up in the wake of changing geopolitical circumstances as well as geographical and social inequallity? Re-scaling the Rural aims to generate a broader understanding of contemporary rurality as it exists in different countries, seen by different disciplines in the context of different scales in space and time: Rurality may become the place that answers to the Anthropocene and its crises of pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, wars and rising inequalities. The publication combines conceptual and practical explorations, from the outside-in (urban viewpoints) and inside-out (departing from an unknown rurality).