The Steel Architectural Awards ASEAN 2026, presented by BlueScope, has announced the 12 finalist projects selected to advance to the ASEAN-level appraisal. Representing outstanding achievements in architecture across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, the finalists were selected through the Country Awards programs and now move forward to regional evaluation by an international judging panel.
ArchDaily is proud to announce the winners of the 2026 Next Practices Awards, recognizing 20 emerging and forward-thinking practices expanding the possibilities of architecture today.
In compact homes, the kitchen is rarely only a room for cooking. It often operates as an edge: a service wall or a boundary between domestic work and social life. Its importance lies not only in food preparation, but in how it organizes the rest of the home, particularly due to limitations of plumbing and ventilation requirements. Before a living room can feel open, the kitchen often has to absorb the practical intensity of daily life: water, heat, smell, appliances, groceries, and storage.
In many Asian cities, eating has never belonged entirely to the private home. It spills into markets, hawker centers, street stalls, and wholesale districts embedded within larger buildings or areas. These are places where the city exchanges information and watches other people pass through. They are not restaurants in the conventional sense, nor are they simply markets. In some way, their vibrancy and usage reflect the society's conditions at that moment. They are public kitchens: shared infrastructures where domestic routines are partially transferred into collective space.
Sliding doors are often discussed through efficiency. They save the swing radius of a conventional door, allow compact rooms to function more easily, and help small apartments borrow a few extra centimeters of usable space. Yet in many interiors, their more interesting role is not only spatial economy. Sliding partitions transform the reading of the room itself. A bedroom, study, guest room, dining area, or workspace can appear when a panel is closed, disappear when it is opened, and remain ambiguous when the boundary is translucent or partial.
Examining the evolution of dwelling throughout history reveals that concepts of space, time, identity, and home extend far beyond architecture itself. From the early twentieth century to the present, human development has been shaped by accelerating economic, social, cultural, and technological transformations. Advances in information and communication technologies have fostered a world of constant connectivity, a phenomenon that can, at times, disconnect individuals from the physical spaces they inhabit. Amid an ever-growing flow of stimuli, interactions, and digital platforms, shared living across multiple architectural scales and programs presents both a challenge and an opportunity to reconnect people with their surroundings through design strategies that support the freedom of movement and flexibility demanded by contemporary life.
In many homes, the entry is treated as leftover space or a narrow strip transition before the living room begins. Yet in dense Asia-Pacific interiors, sometimes despite the small sizes, the entrance often performs far more work than its size suggests. It is the threshold that dictates the transition: street is filtered, body adjusts, shoes are removed, guests are received, privacy is negotiated, and domestic order begins. Before the living room became recognizable as interior, the entry sequence and space had already staged the first act of inhabitation.
For most of the twentieth century, architecture has learned to read cities through roads. Street hierarchies define urban plans, intersections organize movement, and buildings are understood by the façades they present to sidewalks. Roads appear so fundamental to urban life that they are often mistaken for a universal condition. Across much of Southeast Asia, cities developed according to an entirely different spatial logic. Long before automobiles reordered urban landscapes, rivers served as streets, marketplaces, civic spaces, and public infrastructure. Movement occurred primarily by boat, commerce unfolded along waterfronts, and architecture addressed water rather than asphalt. Reading these cities through their waterways changes how architecture itself is understood. Infrastructure, in this case, is not the road but the river.
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.
The flood does not arrive as a surprise. It returns, following the same swollen rivers and monsoon skies, loosening the ground and entering homes that were never meant to resist it. Walls are untied before they are lost, materials are gathered before they drift, and structures are rebuilt with a familiarity that suggests this is not destruction, but sequence. In landscapes where water returns each year, survival is defined by the ability to begin again.
