This guide covers a workflow that moves from project parameters to generated floor plans, 3D perspective views, exterior design exploration, and site context visualization, using AI tools in place of preliminary CAD and rendering work.

Writing for the ARKRIT Collective, architect Carmen Espegel presents an article that exemplifies how the home can serve as a simple refuge for the essence of life—defined by the survivor's austerity, voluntary renunciation, and a rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle.

Originally published as Collaborative Design of Public Space: The Triple Dimension, this new collaboration by Paisaje Transversal proposes a specific methodology for both evaluating the quality of public space and facilitating urban design "if we want to transform public space into a living fabric," the authors explain.

Public space is the fluid that unifies the city, the fabric that stitches buildings together and weaves social, economic, and environmental relationships. It shapes issues as crucial as mobility, coexistence, and a community's cultural exchange, as well as the environmental quality that directly impacts everyone's health.

Public space shapes our daily lives, either offering or depriving us of spaces for socialization. Consequently, it is a priority, both for the sustainability of the city and the lives of its inhabitants—a matter that demands the involvement of not only urban design professionals but also the general public. To achieve this, citizens must understand the factors that determine the livability and functionality of public space, just as they recognize the characteristics of decent housing.

How many children do we see daily playing in the streets, interacting with elements of urban spaces, running in parks or plazas, or riding their bikes? These scenes can say a lot about a city—not only about how it is caring for its younger generations, but also about the quality of life it offers families; which is to say, for everyone.

In their classic setup, with a classroom consisting of a blackboard, a standing teacher, and seated students, the interior spaces of a school can easily be mistaken for prisons. Now consider the outdoor, public areas of most educational institutions in Brazil: how often can a place be recognized as a school simply by looking at it from afar?

The team led by Oscar Luengo and Álvaro Parraguez won first place in the Pasarelas San Borja competition in Chile. The main objective of the competition was to recognize "the best urban design ideas that contribute to defining intervention criteria and generating proposals for the San Borja Neighborhood."

Titled Corredores San Borja, the winning proposal "proposes the walkways as connecting spatial corridors between towers, plazas, and peripheral activities, allowing for fluidity and articulation between the complex's disconnected interior and exterior spaces."

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Walking is the most common form of transportation in the world and a basic human right. It connects us directly with our surroundings, does not pollute the city, and offers numerous health benefits, such as reducing chronic diseases, obesity, and diabetes. This is the message that the ITDP and Streetfilms convey in the film The Right to Walk, released this year.

If walking is so beneficial, why is it so difficult to do in urban environments? Rapid urban growth and car-centric planning have increasingly restricted space and respect for pedestrians. Every year, 1.3 million people are killed in traffic, half of whom are pedestrians, cyclists, or motorcyclists. Furthermore, traffic accidents result in 20 to 50 million hospitalizations annually, making them the leading cause of physical disability worldwide. More than 90% of traffic fatalities occur in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil, which has the highest number of traffic deaths per capita in South America.

Popularly known as the Ciudad de las Cajas Reales (City of the Royal Coffers), Chucuito is a small Peruvian town located 20 kilometers from Puno at an altitude of over 3,800 meters above sea level. Boasting a privileged location on the shores of Lake Titicaca, it was once part of the ancient pre-Columbian Tiwanaku culture and served as the seat of government for the Lupaca kingdom. During the Spanish colonial era, it became a strategic tax collection center, and today it preserves a valuable architectural legacy throughout its streets.

Following our guide to Puno's must-see landmarks—on the occasion of the recent XV TSL Puno—we recommend seven sites in this town nestled in the Peruvian highlands. Due to the high altitude (and particularly at the San Bartolomé viewpoint), visitors are advised to tour these landmarks with a companion, walk at a measured pace, and chew coca leaves to prevent altitude sickness.

As you know, ArchDaily has joined forces with Spotify, the world's largest music streaming platform. From the very beginning, we have been sharing our own playlists for those key moments in the lives of all architects. At the same time, we have invited architects from Latin America and Spain to share the music that inspires them, or better yet, the sounds that have shaped their careers.

In this installment of ArchDaily en Español + Spotify, we share our most popular playlist: Música para Maquetear (Music for Model Making). If you have to spend your day among cardboard and renders, this ten-hour playlist will keep you company during those long late-night sessions.

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From the Fundación Arquia Blog, architect Zaida Muxí brings us an article that provides basic clarifications on gender-perspective urbanism for beginners, exploring how to build cities from and for women, but not in an exclusive or exclusionary way.

To shape humanity in its truly comprehensive capacity within the dimension of gender, women's movements and feminist philosophical analysis have ethically exposed the alienation that over-identifies women with men and their symbols, while disidentifying men from women and their symbols.

It is time to say goodbye to 2018. Following our showcase of the best architecture of the year, we have gathered the Chilean projects that generated the most engagement on our social media platforms. Indeed, in the architectural field, understanding where design is heading requires looking at its key works and observing how the public has responded to them.

Goodbye 2018, hello 2019.

Most people today live in cities, which are growing rapidly. We are living in the age of urbanization, an era that began in the early 19th century when vast masses of people decided to be closer to one another rather than close to the land. There is no doubt that sooner or later the vast majority of us, humans, will be living in cities.

Working hand-in-hand with a wide range of product manufacturers and suppliers allows us to access valuable information to support design and construction processes using different types of materials.

To make this knowledge readily available, we have compiled a series of guides, manuals, and tips covering everything from working with laminated wood and installing cladding, to applying protective finishes and varnishes. Read 12 useful articles below.

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From the Arquia Foundation Blog, architect Adrià Guardiet shares an article reflecting on three perspectives on unfinished architecture—projects where time and their occupants play a central role.

Certain architectures work with time as a design variable. Some are conceived as open, dynamic, growing structures. Others operate around the memory of the site. To name just two examples.

In these projects, time is often introduced as an entelechy—that is, as a specifically intellectual device. Yet time appears far more explicitly when architecture is pending completion, left unfinished due to economic, political, biological, or other reasons. These are what we have come to call meanwhile architectures: projects that find fertile ground for development in unstable contexts.

“Ensuring, through built works, that those ideas explained with these words stand up will be the best proof that those ideas are valid and these words true.”
(Campo Baeza – “The Built Idea”).

The Mendoza Association of Architects CAMZA has announced a new edition of Architecture Month MDA2018 under the theme "The Built Idea," to be held from August 28 to 31 at the Nave Cultural in the city of Mendoza.

It was in Granada, specifically at the Alhambra Palace, where on October 14 and 15, 1952, a group of Spanish architects including Miguel Fisac, Secundino Zuazo, and Fernando Chueca met to reflect on and establish a new direction and foundation for modern Spanish architecture. The outcomes of that meeting were summarized in a document whose tenets remain remarkably relevant today, known as the Alhambra Manifesto [pdf].

Sixty-five years later, under vastly different historical, social, and cultural circumstances, architects from across Spain are gathering once again in Granada for the III National Congress on the Future of the Architect. Running from yesterday, Thursday, April 11, to tomorrow, Saturday, April 13, the event serves as a platform to share experiences, analyze the current state of the profession, and debate the future possibilities of this exciting field.

Fábrica Puigneró is a project by Santi Julià Xercavins and Bernat Pedro Planas, focusing on the adaptation of abandoned industrial infrastructure in towns that were once heavily dependent on industrial production.

For their final thesis project at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, the authors designed a comprehensive intervention for the former Hilados y Tejidos Puigneró textile mill in the town of Sant Bartomeu, Spain. "This transformation and retrofitting of the factory aims to generate a new livable framework, utilizing selective demolition and the integration of public space as its primary strategies," the authors explain.

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When developing an architectural project, regardless of scale or program, architects face a series of decisions regarding the construction method to adopt, considering various aspects—structural, economic, available labor, aesthetics, among others—in pursuit of the best solution.

To address the many questions that arise during design development regarding the choice of structural systems, we have prepared a practical guide to the main types of cast-in-place and precast concrete slabs that designers should know, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Learn more below:

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The news spread quickly that Wednesday afternoon. Chilean architect Eduardo Castillo, a partner of Smiljan Radic, was in critical condition following a car accident earlier that day in Santiago. The local architectural community barely had time to react before his unexpected passing at the age of 45 was confirmed the following morning, Thursday, October 5, 2017.

Originally titled "FairBnB or how to prevent Amsterdam from becoming a hotel," in this article, City Makers co-founder and member of Amsterdam's Fair City platform, Sito Veracruz, delves into the urban dilemma facing the Dutch city due to tourist pressure driven by platforms like Airbnb and the subsequent rise in housing costs for actual residents.

Amsterdam is one of the few cities where renting apartments through Airbnb and similar platforms is legal and regulated. Here, it is possible to rent an entire apartment for up to 60 days a year without registration. It is also legal to rent out one or two rooms in a home with no time limit, which only requires meeting certain conditions and notifying City Hall.

Amsterdam ranks in the top ten cities with the most listings on Airbnb, with 17,000 apartments, and can boast of being one of the few cities in the world that derives a direct financial return from these rentals. The agreement signed between Amsterdam and Airbnb in 2014 obliges the company to collect a tourist tax (5% of the total booking amount), which generated 5.5 million euros in revenue for City Hall last year.

En Reserva, Peru's pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018, aims to reveal an ancient layer hidden within the city of Lima, showcasing its urban and architectural generosity across different scales.

The exhibition, curated by architects Marianela Castro de la Borda and Janeth Boza, and journalist Javier Lizarzaburu, presents a large volume with a perimeter path, inviting visitors to reconstruct the links between past and present, before imagining the future.

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In recent decades, architecture and the built environment professions have maintained an insular attitude, separating them from relevant conversations and preventing them from identifying opportunities and new territories to conquer. The future will require leaders with a broad and refreshing vision of our field: leaders, both men and women, with the sharpness and skills to identify real problems across a wider spectrum of fields than ever before, capable of transforming them into innovative, high-impact business opportunities that connect better with society and generate greater value.

The omnipresence of technology, demographic pressure, exponential urban growth, and various environmental threats are transforming how we plan, understand, and interact with space—in short, our way of life. To face this landscape, we must evolve faster than our context. As architecture and design professionals, we possess exceptional talent as a group. We have the capacity to think in systems, naturally combining creative and proactive approaches with strong analytical skills, and we are capable of integrating highly disparate factors into a long-term vision, making us excellent strategists. Leveraging this talent from a much broader professional perspective does not mean discarding our traditional roles, but it does require questioning the status quo: like a tree, the higher we aim to reach, the deeper our roots must grow.

Keeping the following ideas in mind can serve as a valuable guide in this compelling process of redefinition:

We are witnessing a historic moment, standing at the dawn of an inevitable epochal shift. The economic, social, energy, and ecological crises in which we are immersed are some of its most evident symptoms. However, we must confront this bleak context from an optimistic perspective, viewing it as an opportunity to subvert the old paradigms that have led us to this dramatic situation.

But how do we prepare to face the urban challenges of a future that begins today? We certainly cannot do so by relying on outdated frameworks and tools; as Einstein famously said, “We need new ways of thinking to solve the problems created by old ways of thinking.”

The waters of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, New York, still do not smell good, although the problem was once much worse. They carry the remnants of years of industrial pollution and untreated sewage.

The area, which in the 19th and 20th centuries was primarily industrial, has undergone revitalization in recent years through federal investment (see here). New green spaces were created, and service-oriented businesses moved into the neighborhood. Residential property prices also rose, ultimately displacing long-time residents.

Today, companies seek to connect different generations and leverage their unique contributions to the workplace. They aim to maximize innovation through the synergy generated by combining the drive of younger generations with the experience of older workers. Given the specific characteristics of each age group—including differing values, experiences, styles, activities, and expectations—both the workspace and the way we work are being rapidly redefined.