Articles

Liberation does not always begin with a monument. It may begin in a garden, a yard, a clearing, a field; in the occupation of land and the possibility of gathering there. Across histories shaped by colonialism and dispossession, space has been more than the setting in which liberation takes place. It has been one of its practices: cultivated, occupied, hidden within, moved through and collectively remade.

Wolff Architects' research Liberation Gardens offers the garden as one way of reading these spatial practices, not simply as planted ground, but as a space through which survival, nourishment and emancipatory imagination can be sustained. The garden in this sense is not defined by landscape design so much as by relationships between people and land, cultivation and knowledge, occupation and autonomy. It can hold cultural production alongside subsistence, and forms of collective life that emerge under conditions of violence and dispossession. Liberation, understood spatially, becomes as much about the possibility of inhabiting differently as it is about arriving at a final condition of freedom.

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In many Asian cities, the summer climate can increasingly be experienced from a distance. In Hong Kong, it is possible to move from an apartment tower through a podium mall, enter the Mass-Transit-Railway system (MTR), arrive beneath another commercial complex, and continue through enclosed footbridges or underground passages while encountering remarkably little of the atmosphere outside. Heat, humidity, rain, and seasonal variation remain present, but they can be largely bypassed through a continuous network of conditioned interiors.

Over several decades, air-conditioning has expanded from a technology for cooling individual rooms into an infrastructure capable of producing an alternative urban environment. This has been particularly visible in parts of East Asia and South East Asia, where transit-oriented development frequently combines railway stations, shopping centres, housing, offices, and other everyday services within interconnected complexes. The Railway plus Property model has helped institutionalize this relationship between transport and development, creating districts where movement through the city is often inseparable from movement through privately managed interiors.

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This article is part of "Thresholds", a special edition printed newspaper by Cobe Notes x ArchDaily.

There are two unique things about being human that made us survive the early years and spread over the whole planet: sweating and storytelling. Sweating helps cool down the body when running long distances. Stories help us collaborate in big numbers and share knowledge across groups and generations. As architects, we still rely on the same tools to make visions become reality.

As professor of stories Angus Fletcher points out in his book Primal Intelligence, there is a common misconception about the role of stories: when our "rational" brain has developed an idea that we fail to explain to a wider group, we pack it into a story, and suddenly everybody understands. Fletcher argues that it actually works the other way around: ideas come from stories, our brain works in stories, and stories form reality. Architects have a derogatory term for turning that process the wrong side up: "post-rationalisation", for example when diagrams are made to explain a design that is already decided.

For many communities across the Gulf, leaving home once formed part of inhabiting it. Families moved between desert pastures, coastal settlements, wells, fishing grounds, and pearling ports according to season and livelihood, returning repeatedly to places already known through use. In Qatar, historical accounts describe autumn and winter movement through al-barr, the desert, followed by a return toward coastal settlements as the summer pearling season began. The National Museum of Qatar represents this history through a yearly calendar of movement between desert and sea.

Home could extend between several places occupied at different points in the year. It extended across a larger geography of places that were left and returned to through the year. Many contemporary Gulf developments now attempt to bring contrasting climatic and spatial conditions into the same permanent urban system. 

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There is no shortage of ways to imagine what the world will look like after a climate catastrophe. Genres of movies and novels have been built around the question of what happens when contemporary safeguards fail, from dystopian fiction and post-apocalyptic literature to disaster films, graphic novels, and video games. Burning forests, submerged cities, abandoned infrastructure, resource scarcity, and mass displacement are a familiar visual and narrative vocabulary. We have become remarkably fluent in imagining the consequences of a world that fails to respond to climate change.

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A brick façade does more than define the façade of a house. When designed as a porous screen, it becomes an intermediary between inside and outside, shaping the atmosphere and environmental conditions of the spaces behind it. Across contemporary Indian residential architecture, brick jali — a perforated or lattice brick screen — has been reinterpreted with a contemporary sensibility, drawing on vernacular architectural elements.

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Wood and coastal architecture have always gone together. It's one of the defining materials of coastal structures. But creating that aesthetic in an environment where weather is a constant part of life demands more from the wood you choose.  

Rain isn't unique to coastal areas. What makes the coast different is the combination and frequency of exposure. Humidity, ocean winds, salt-laden air, direct sun, and frequent storms repeatedly take wood from wet to dry and back again. In many coastal regions, these aren't occasional weather events. They are simply part of the climate. That makes two characteristics especially important when selecting wood for coastal construction: durability and dimensional stability.

Some urban experiences are etched into our memory through a shift in pace. The postmodern city has often been described as an experience lived at the rhythm of motorized mobility, in contrast to the stroll, the promenade, or even the processions that preceded it. In a fast-paced urban culture, walkability is championed in urban planning not only as a factor of safety and social cohesion, but also as a path to a more sensory way of life. This selection of unbuilt projects submitted by ArchDaily readers showcases design examples that prioritize the experience of the environment through a pedestrian pace. Beyond respecting walking as a mobility choice, these conceptual proposals link the act of walking with contemplation of one's surroundings, respect for what already exists, and connection with other people.

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"After all, time is a key ingredient of my profession," states Francis Kéré in his book Francis Kéré: Building Stories. Architecture is constantly evolving and transforming over time. Bricks, doors, windows, walls, stairs, and other elements become the protagonists of a process that begins with a sketch and eventually takes shape as a built work.

Considering that architecture begins when its inhabitants start to make a space their own, Francis Kéré develops his projects progressively, continuing to work on the design even during the construction phase. As his architecture grows over time, integrates with its surroundings, adapts to the needs of its users, and responds to change in flexible and experimental ways, it seeks to become part of the lives of those who inhabit it.

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In most architectural projects, vertical circulation is expressed as a purely functional element, tucked away behind fire-rated doors or an elevator core. However, sometimes architects also use spirals when trying to resolve site elevation changes. Given the right scale, these elements allow for a more artistic formal expression that serves both utilitarian and aesthetic purposes without relying on mechanical lifts or stairwells. Structural systems like cantilevered steel trusses and reinforced concrete decks allow these spiral elements to extend outward as sheltered entry canopies or wind around open central atriums. Functionally, these circulation paths may be expressed in several ways: as stairs like the Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia, or as ramps, which can offer the possibility to reduce mobility barriers for visitors. In both cases, the spiral can provide smooth transitions across varied floor levels while maintaining an unobstructed line-of-sight throughout the program.

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Seamless surfaces and minimal joints have become a defining signature of contemporary architecture, prized for the clean lines, and uniformity they bring to a building's envelope. Yet in façade engineering, this pursuit is rarely just about appearance. Regardless of the material used, increasing panel dimensions can influence durability, material recyclability, performance against external factors, and other considerations such as impact resistance and long-term maintenance. By combining ease of installation and transportation efficiency with design flexibility, monomaterial façade systems use large-format panels while addressing practical challenges related to flatness, thermal movement, and structural support. Yet, what other material-related considerations behind large-format panels can make a difference in building envelope construction today? 

Unlike buildings, which are anchored to foundations and respond to climate from a fixed position, yachts are designed for constant movement and change. Interiors sway with the vessel, light changes by the minute, humidity is a permanent design condition, and every kilogram influences performance. Designing for the sea therefore requires architects, naval architects, engineers, and interior designers to solve questions that rarely exist on land: how can space remain calm while everything around it is in motion?

Despite being among architecture's oldest structural forms, domes continue to offer possibilities for creating large, column-free spaces and working with circular or free-form geometries beyond conventional rectangular building types. Their evolution has been closely tied to changes in materials, construction methods, and design tools. Today, digital platforms are adding another layer to this process, allowing some of the decisions traditionally developed later in a project to be explored much earlier.

There is no harder place to build than a high mountain, and none where a building feels more provisional. From the Andes to the Himalaya to the Alps, high-altitude construction strips architecture back to its most elementary transactions. The rock reads as permanence itself, yet a structure set near the limit of habitation exists in negotiation with almost everything around it: with wind that arrives without obstruction, with a ground too steep and too frozen to excavate, and with everything it needs arriving from far below. What can be carried up, what can be assembled by few hands, and what can sustain itself are some of the terms of the problem.

Those constraints have produced a remarkably consistent building culture across otherwise unrelated ranges. The refuge, the hut, the bivouac, and the observatory belong to a shared typology in which shelter is inseparable from logistics, and where lightness, prefabrication, and self-sufficiency were structural necessities long before they became virtues.

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As architectural projects grow more complex and requirements evolve, the ability to iterate quickly is increasingly important to the design process. For Bellway, one of the UK's largest homebuilders, faster design iteration and visualization have become key to meeting these demands. It is not just a way to present finished designs, but also a tool for testing ideas, communicating options, and making decisions earlier in the development process.

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.

Now in its second ASEAN edition, the program celebrates architectural projects that demonstrate excellence in design, innovation, sustainability, and the creative application of coated steel solutions. Under the 2026 theme, "Shaping Resilient Futures: Timeless Design with Coated Steel," the Awards highlight projects that respond meaningfully to their context while delivering enduring value for future generations.

Colonial violence in African cities bled through the political dimensions into the spatial realm. It is infused into street grids, land tenure systems, drainage infrastructure and residential zones that continue to organize inequality and displacement today. Kinshasa, Khartoum, and Kampala each carry this afterlife in their urban morphology, at once historical artifacts and an active structure; shaping who has access to services, who occupies flood-prone land, and catalyzing a deepening climate instability that forces this apparatus into entirely new dimensions - including geological ones.

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In 1961, when conceiving the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, in São Paulo, Vilanova Artigas and Carlos Cascaldi established a paradigm that continues to resonate throughout Brazilian university architecture: the building as a continuous territory, articulated by ramps, courtyards, and open spans, where the experience of learning extends beyond the classroom. The idea emerged at a moment of transformation in Brazilian higher education, which, over the following decades, would expand from serving a relatively restricted audience to reaching a much broader and more diverse population. If Brazil had approximately 226,218 undergraduate enrollments in 1960, by 2023 that number had approached 10 million.

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