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Conéntrico is an International Architecture and Design Festival that proposes to reflect on the city of Logroño (Spain) through the revitalization of undervalued public spaces. Its latest edition, Conéntrico 04, takes place between April 27 and May 1, 2018, in the Historic Center of Logroño. The festival invites visitors to explore the city through installations, exhibitions, meetings, activities, and performances that connect venues, plazas, streets, courtyards, and hidden spaces that usually go unnoticed in daily life. Fernando Cruzado, Julia Días, Francisco Javier Fernández, and Ane Villaverde bring meaning to the landscape of La Rioja, highlighting its textures and rhythms to raise awareness of the territory.

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One of the most traditional festivals in Brazil's South region, Oktoberfest has launched a sustainability-focused initiative. In addition to serving thousands of liters of draft beer, the event's 2018 edition will support the environment by transforming plastic cups used during the 19-day festival into bricks and furniture for community gardens.

Dubbed "Oktober Consciente" (Conscious Oktoberfest), the initiative was created by the Instituto Gigantes da Ecologia (IGE), a non-profit civil association based in Blumenau, Santa Catarina. The project aims to raise awareness and promote environmental best practices among attendees of what is considered one of the largest German festivals in the world.

The Municipal Cultural Foundation of Belo Horizonte has launched a call for proposals to occupy the Casa do Baile, designed by Oscar Niemeyer in Pampulha. Submitted proposals must address the themes of architecture, urbanism, and design.

More than 50,000 people visited the Casa da Arquitectura – Portuguese Center for Architecture during its first year in the rehabilitated Real Vinícola block, in Matosinhos. To celebrate this first anniversary, the institution is organizing three days of free activities for everyone on November 16, 17, and 18.

Featuring guided tours, conferences, talks, presentations, book launches, and concerts, Casa da Arquitectura's anniversary program offers about 30 events for all audiences, including families and children. The block's outdoor space will also host various artistic performances. 

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Lake Verea is composed of Francisca Rivero-Lake Cortina (Mexico City, 1973) and Carla Verea Hernández (Mexico City, 1978). They have worked as a duo since 2005. Their practice focuses on experimenting with photographic techniques and formats to achieve a personal and intimate perspective. They live and work in Mexico City and around the world. Their research interests center on the portraiture of architecture and the architecture of portraiture, the search for modern ruins, and the emotional interpretation of the spatial journey.

Their latest contribution is a series commissioned by Gabriela Etchegaray for the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Featured in the Mexican Pavilion, “Echoes of a Land,” they conceive architectural portraits through an intimate approach, using fragments to compose a narrative where the architectural subject is personally reinterpreted.

Bamboo construction—locally known as guadua—is, without a doubt, one of the regional techniques that defines contemporary Colombian architecture. As an environmentally friendly resource, it serves as a highly functional and practical building material, easily sourced in Colombia due to its rapid growth.

Farmers, architects, and builders have adopted this "vegetable steel" in many of their projects, which blend seamlessly into the landscape. With proper treatment, it performs exceptionally well across the South American country's diverse altitudinal zones. In addition, it offers varying textures and color tones, bringing a brilliant yet subtle aesthetic to these buildings.

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Like any port city, Barranquilla, Colombia, has historically turned its back on the Magdalena River, a waterway of over 1,500 kilometers flowing down from the Andes Mountains to empty into the Caribbean Sea. Although its urban fabric overlooks the river, the road known as Vía 40 has been the city's true boundary. Between this highway and the river, industrial zones and vacant lots serve as buffers.

"For many years we had a wall blocking this view for 70 years," said Barranquilla Mayor Alejandro Char last February during the inauguration of the second section of the River Boardwalk, an urban project that seeks to restore the city's relationship with the river, which runs through 11 of Colombia's departments.

Prix Versailles is an international recognition promoted by UNESCO that addresses architecture and design—both interior and exterior—of commercial projects across four categories: shops, shopping malls, hotels, and restaurants. Its goal is to foster a better interaction between commercial and cultural spaces, highlighting the few examples that successfully achieve this.

This year, competing against numerous finalist projects from six major continental regions, the Porcelanosa Grupo showroom in Santiago, Chile, by Gonzalo Mardones V Arquitectos received the special prize for its exterior design in the shops category.

Discover the project in detail and read the architect's thoughts below.

Located on São Paulo's most iconic avenue, after eight years of construction, the new Sesc São Paulo unit will open its doors on April 29. With programming based on the triad of “Art, Body, and Technology,” the institution expects to welcome approximately 18,000 visitors per week.

On October 22, the winning design of the 1st Public Design Competition of Conde was announced. A total of 32 proposals were submitted from 11 states, featuring intervention plans for an area of approximately 14,266 m², with projects covering landscaping, urban planning, urban infrastructure, public facilities, and street furniture. The area designated for the competition contains the highest concentration of open spaces and public facilities within Conde's urban perimeter, such as a market, schools, plazas, churches, an open-air market, transit services, and public offices. Among these, the Pedro Alves and Antônio de Sousa Santos plazas, along with Domingos Maranhão and Nossa Senhora da Conceição streets, hold significant urban potential and host major social events in the city.

The jury comprised architecture and urban planning professionals, as well as a local representative. The winning proposal came from Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul) and met several key requirements, including local economic development, commerce, and the creation of public spaces for community gathering. The team consists of Bruno de Moraes Britto, Camila Bellver Alberti, Douglas Silveira Martini, Jean Michel Forte dos Anjos, and Mariana Mocellin Mincarone. See the winning entries below:

The ATRIO Towers —the tallest project in Colombia— reached a new milestone in Bogotá with the structural completion of its North Tower, the first of the development's skyscrapers, which has topped out at 201.6 meters and 46 stories.

During a ceremony held on Friday, August 24, on the rooftop of the North Tower, the final two steel beams—each 10 meters long and weighing 3.3 tons—were installed. The event symbolically marked the completion of 20 months of construction for the first phase of the skyscraper complex.

The Chilean City in the Press is a new section on ArchDaily en Español where we cover the key urban issues facing Chilean cities across the country. This is our editorial roundup of everything you need to stay up to date.

In this first edition, we cover the University of Chile's proposal to rehabilitate the Villavicencio Tower in Santiago, the National Monuments Council's interest in preserving the birthplace of the late poet Nicanor Parra, and urban news from Valparaíso, Concepción, and Valdivia.

"True love is a span, extending infinitely,
An immense monolith, our architecture."
- Gilberto Gil, Drão

Just over two years ago, the Casa da Arquitectura - Portuguese Centre for Architecture began a major effort to assemble a collection of significant works from the last 90 years of Brazilian architectural history. In addition to expanding the institution's already impressive archive—which includes, among other items, hundreds of original scale models by Souto de Moura—this collection of more than eight thousand documents of Brazilian architecture will form the core of the exhibition Infinito Vão, curated by Guilherme Wisnik and Fernando Serapião.

The Council for Architecture and Urbanism of Tocantins – CAU/TO has launched a design competition to select the best proposal for the construction of its headquarters in the city of Palmas. 

Summer break can be an excellent opportunity to pick up a new read or update a space in your home. With this in mind, we present a curated selection of books to inspire and deepen your understanding of wood.

Spanning architecture, games, and novels, this selection is geared toward both children and adults, with wood as the central theme. Additionally, all of these titles are available for purchase online.

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On Thursday, February 1, Solid Red opened, marking multidisciplinary artist Shuli Sade's first solo exhibition in Mexico. The show features various digitally altered photographic pieces and will remain open to the public until April 26, 2018.

The results of the various competitions held during the 13th edition of Semana de la Madera 2018 have recently been announced, covering the categories of Architecture, Design, and Engineering and Innovation.

Held in Santiago, Chile, the architecture competition awarded three projects that, according to jury director Tomás Villalón, "achieve a healthy symbiosis between the particularities of public space, its site, and material expression."

The DOCOMOMO SP Chapter has just launched its new official website, which will feature information on events, debates, meetings, seminars, and workshops organized by the group, as well as news relevant to the institution's core focus: the documentation and preservation of Modern Movement works in the architecture and urbanism of the State of São Paulo.

A bill introduced in late March of this year aims to repeal two paragraphs of Law 12,378 of December 31, July 2010, which regulates the professional practice of architecture and urbanism. The bill PL 9818/2018, proposed by Representative Ricardo Izar (PP/SP), repeals the prerogative of the Council of Architecture and Urbanism (CAU) to define exclusive fields of practice for architects and urbanists, as well as shared fields of practice.

In general terms, the bill strips CAU/BR of the power to define what only architects can do. The bill repeals paragraphs 1 and 2 of article three of the 2010 law, which read as follows:

The competition aimed to design an iconic 21st-century "public library" in Tokyo, Japan, and debate its role in the "digital age." Proposals were expected to address the library's frequently questioned vitality, enhancing and transforming its capabilities into a "knowledge-sharing prototype" to serve as a model for future libraries worldwide. Brazilian student Alexandre R. Biselli won first place with the proposal Ever-Fleeting Library.

Known for its public transit system, Curitiba is taking an interesting step toward active mobility. Since last week, the capital of Paraná has been testing a type of pavement that generates electricity from the vibrations created along its bike paths.

Installed on the Belém River bridge near the Palácio 29 de Março in the city's Civic Center, the pavement captures vibrations from bicycles and pedestrians, converting them into enough electricity to power signal lights along the path. 

Undoubtedly, the infographic presented by La Nación, "Buenos Aires, under construction: the projects that will transform the city," highlights significant upcoming changes in the port city.

As the article points out, as these projects move forward, a key question arises: are these designs suitable for a city of the future? 

The Eco Pavilion 2018 is the eighth edition of a competition that, since 2010, has served as a space for reflection on architecture through temporary construction inside the courtyard of the Museo Experimental el Eco. This year's edition was framed around the concept of "pure architecture," based on a premise proposed by architect Isaac Broid.

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On February 9, residents of Ciudad Bolívar (Bogotá) were able to see the progress of TransMiCable, the Colombian capital's first cable car line, in the sky: two cabins traveling between the future Juan Pablo II and El Tunal stations.

This was one of the technical tests that are part of the verification work led by the Institute of Urban Development (IDU), supervising “the proper functioning of the pulleys, sensors, grips, and the nearly 8-kilometer-long steel cable,” according to the Mayor's Office of Bogotá. Each cabin will have a capacity of 10 people, moving 3,600 passengers per hour over a route of nearly 4 kilometers. Traveling at a speed of 20 km/h, TransMiCable will reduce the current 50-minute travel time to just 14.