Three projects have been chosen by the ArchDaily en Español community as the winners of the 2026 Obra del Año Award. Representing Peru and Ecuador, the winners were selected after three weeks of public voting from a pool of over 800 projects. The award recognizes the best of architecture in Latin America and Spain, as decided by its community.
p>Understanding play as a social catalyst and an influential factor in defining public space, urban life is shaped by diverse individuals of different ages, cultures, ideologies, interests, classes, and social groups. Thinking about how play inhabits cities means thinking about all generations, and about the need to build public spaces with urban equipment designed to last and be maintained over time.
The performance of play structures invites us to review the different stages of their life cycle alongside their impact on shaping the urban environment. Analyzing the life cycle of urban play equipment involves understanding everything from materials, durability, and maintenance to the role of certifications and technologies applied in their production process, within environments that are increasingly conscious of their environmental impact.
It is eight in the morning, and the car's dashboard display reads 36°C on the streets of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. The sky is almost clear: an intense blue with a few bright, drifting clouds. The air conditioning in the cars—all with tinted windows—makes you forget that upon stepping out, the warm, humid air will immediately weigh on your shoulders and break a sweat.
Puerto Cortés on the Caribbean coast is too far away for a quick dip, but in the neighborhood of Armenta, the eponymous river flows almost silently down from the Sierra del Merendón, running from west to east through gray stones. On the northern bank, tall, leafy trees along the upper edge of the ravine shade a long, dry, and dusty plaza, while thick, exposed roots give texture to the ground. The sun is less punishing.
The fourth season of the podcast Causa Común—a co-production between Fundación Lepe and Fundación Aldea for the OH! Stgo festival, held in mid-January in Santiago, Chile—explores the past, present, and future of the capital, alongside the role of its inhabitants in prioritizing the common good and collaborative ways of making, inhabiting, and imagining our shared home.
Directed and coordinated by Francisca Cordero, Soledad Díaz de la Fuente, Magdalena Novoa, and Trinidad Piriz, the six-episode season examines the everyday stories, communities, monuments, and public spaces we inhabit from new perspectives. Featured topics range from the multiple identities of a public square, female leadership in housing projects, and the construction of urban memory, to island hills as socio-environmental opportunities, Mapuche urban dwelling, and the GAM building as an exponent of architecture and social change.
"Lima La Impostergable" (Lima, Unpostponable) is an initiative by the Lima Regional Chapter of the College of Architects of Peru. It aims to establish a roadmap for priority issues to be addressed by the 2023–2026 municipal administration of Metropolitan Lima and Callao, built through a platform of citizen engagement.
“Architecture is embedded storytelling,” wrote Marco Frascari. Emphasizing the reciprocity between architecture and narrative throughout his career, this Italian architect, theorist, and educator saw stories as the key to creating a “nontrivial”—and therefore transcendent—architecture. It is from his ideas, writings, teachings, and studies that the reflection inspiring this text arises.
This article by Jheisson Joseph Lasso Imbachi was originally published under the title "Habitar tras el destierro: Desplazamiento forzado y retorno como configurador de nuevos hábitats en el Putumayo" in the 30th issue of Dearq journal on May 1, 2021 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq30.2021.05).
It explores migration processes in the south of the country, a consequence of extractive economies that have shaped territorial organization and caused exile, forced displacement, and two lesser-studied phenomena: the settlement and permanence of the population in a host territory and the return to their place of origin. To this end, documentary and testimonial sources were studied, analyzed, and interpreted, allowing a direct approach to the community displaced by violence, in order to analyze the diverse ways of living after displacement and conclude with some considerations for future rural housing proposals that are easily accessible to the victim population.
Below, we present it as part of a joint collaboration to contribute to the dissemination of research, analysis, and opinions developed by the national and international academic community on architecture, urban issues, and related fields.
An increasing number of disciplines are engaging with the right to housing. Whether in the realms of architecture, law, economics, urban planning, geography, or political science, diverse voices have sought to identify the obstacles to its fulfillment, especially within increasingly hostile urban environments. Yet, while we all talk about the right to housing, we are not speaking of the same thing.
Valladolid is a town of just under 50,000 inhabitants, located in eastern Yucatán. It sits halfway between Cancún and Mérida, about 40 minutes from the Chichén-Itzá archaeological zone. Initially, the tourists who visited did so as a stopover during their travels across the peninsula. However, its gastronomy and architecture transformed it from an involuntary rest stop into a tourist destination in its own right.
Peru is a country with an extensive, rich, and deeply significant archaeological heritage. Unfortunately, the passage of time has brought severe deterioration. In their article, "Captura de datos 3D para virtualizar el patrimonio cultural" (3D Data Capture to Virtualize Cultural Heritage), authors Norma León Lescano, Yann Barnet, and Alvaro Racchumi outline the method they used to capture a three-dimensional replica of the Palace of Puruchuco. By doing so, they aim to provide the necessary information to guide and promote the virtualization of this remarkable cultural heritage, expanding its reach, appreciation, and preservation.
One of the defining features of cities is their undeniable capacity to bring together creative talent through multiculturalism and transdisciplinarity. Today, it is increasingly vital to generate spaces and platforms within these urban environments that serve as creative laboratories—places not only to share but, above all, to reflect on contemporary practice, viewing design not as a decontextualized entity, but as an integrated concept that bridges diverse disciplines.
In the mountain range of the Andes in Peru, at over 3,700 meters above sea level, lies the Q'eswachaka suspension rope bridge, declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. The hand-woven bridge, which connects both sides of a gorge over the Apurímac River, has become the last remaining Inca bridge in use to survive modern times. This has been made possible through the transmission of Inca culture and engineering across generations, which renew the bridge every year to ensure its preservation.
Rodrigo Lagos Vergara and Macarena Paz Barrientos Díaz originally published the article titled "Architecture Education in Chile, 1999-2019: Ecological Potential and Collective Political Meaning of Design Practices" in Revista [i2]: Investigación e Innovación en Arquitectura y Territorio, from the Department of Graphic Expression, Composition, and Architectural Projects of the Universidad de Alicante, on January 1, 2022.
Below, they present some of the most important points of their publication: three pedagogical actions in Chile that understand teaching as a central practice through the academic exercise of the design project.
Anderson Marín Vidal and Juan Sebastián García, from the research group on Sustainable and Applied Emerging Technologies (T.E.S.A.), present an analysis of the primary impacts expected from the designs for the Río Molino Waterfront (Malecón del Río Molino). Created by the architecture firm Celeste & Piedra, the project won first place in a competition organized by the Mayor's Office of Popayán and Findeter.
In the second half of the twentieth century, driven by the mass adoption of the automobile and exponential population growth, cities around the world expanded at an accelerated pace. Santiago, Chile, was no exception, characterized by an extensive and fragmented urban sprawl that has led to a heavy reliance on cars, environmental degradation, and the loss of agricultural land. Without planning and policies aimed at sustainable urban development, the result is a more polluted and less green city—an alarming scenario considering the climate crisis we face.
Proximity, understood as an urban quality that facilitates the management and pursuit of daily life, has for decades been a key tenet of feminist and gender-responsive urbanism. In the 1970s, academics from various disciplines began analyzing the link between the configuration and use of space and gender relations and roles. Since then, a robust critique of the androcentric configuration of the city has emerged, alongside proposals and criteria to rethink spaces from a gender perspective.
Cooperative housing, or co-housing, is a residential model that promotes access to housing in cities. This model first developed in countries like Denmark and Uruguay, and it is becoming increasingly popular throughout Europe. Indeed, it arrived in Barcelona several years ago and has since steadily expanded throughout the region, spreading beyond the boundaries of the Catalan capital. Below, we explore the cooperative housing model in Barcelona and how it contributes to a more democratic architecture for its citizens.
