Soporte oculto para vigas - CBH. Image Cortesía de Simpson Strong Tie
In the field of architecture, wood was one of the first materials used by humans for construction, evolving and facing various challenges over the years. From the integration of new technologies into industrial production processes to ancestral techniques and materials reinterpreted for contemporary times, timber construction continues to garner significant interest among architects and designers. Beyond its versatility, strength, appearance, and sustainability, cross-laminated timber, commonly known as CLT, presents a highly promising future for the industry.
Architecture often draws on the history of a place, translating local narratives into contemporary forms, materials, and spatial experiences. Located in the spa town of Bad Orb near Frankfurt, ALEA RESORT HIDEAWAY follows this approach, taking inspiration from the site's history of salt extraction.
Designed by PLAJER + FRANZ studio, the 5,200 m² hospitality project references the geometry of salt crystals through its architectural language while using lighting solutions from OLEV to shape the atmosphere of its interior spaces. In this interview, architect Alexander Plajer discusses the project's relationship to its context, the design process, and the role of lighting.
Kiaura Collection™ designed by Aaron DeJule for KI. Image Courtesy of KI Furniture
For decades, professionals have accepted an uncomfortable reality: hours spent at a desk often result in stiff backs, constant shifting, and creeping mental fatigue. While conventional ergonomic seating has sought to improve comfort through adjustable mechanisms, it has largely continued to assume that effective sitting depends on maintaining a stable posture. Growing understanding of the relationship between movement, physical well-being, and cognitive performance suggests a different approach, one in which motion becomes an integral part of the seating experience rather than something to be minimized.
Hudson's Detroit mixed-used development. Aerial view.. Image Courtesy of Bedrock
Urban planning is often confused with adjacent disciplines: urban design, environmental policy, civic strategy, local politics, or data analytics. Moreover, the overlap in training and responsibilities between planning and urban practices makes the field difficult to define clearly. In practice, it is often easier to recognize the consequences of bad planning than to articulate the outcomes of good planning. When planning is working well for residents, it should disappear altogether. It should remove friction from daily life so that people would not think to credit a discipline at all. At its core, urban planning is the relationship people have with their environments, and when that relationship is functioning, the mechanics of housing, transportation, affordability, access, and inclusion should feel ordinary and expected.
Underneath surfaces, behind structures, or within building services, numerous fastening systems and adhesives provide the necessary connections for building facades, finishes, and envelopes. As buildings age and design trends shift at an accelerated pace, modernizing structures requires addressing deterioration, maintenance, and performance optimization. Regardless of their installation methodologies, technologies, or tools, ventilated facade systems continue to transform how we approach building design and aesthetics.
Founded in 2013 in São Paulo, this young transdisciplinary practice focuses on architecture, urbanism, and fine arts. Influenced by visual arts, music, theater, and everyday urban life, the firm translates these lived experiences into projects across diverse scales, briefs, and contexts.
Named after a term with multiple meanings in Portuguese—in architecture, *vão* represents the void or span between structural elements, a space to be occupied and activated by social, political, artistic, and various other interactions—the firm was founded by Anna Juni, Enk te Winkel, and Gustavo Delonero. Throughout its nearly ten-year history, it has maintained a small team, alongside occasional collaborations with friends and colleagues on specific projects.
The accelerating rise of a homogenized, worldwide aesthetic is forcing creators to confront a critical reality: design trends are effortlessly transcending geography, but local identity is paying the price. The fifth episode of the Room For Dreams podcast tackles a head-on investigation into whether a boundaryless market is quietly erasing design diversity. Recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in cooperation with INDX|GLOBAL, host Claire Broadka of designboom sits down with Sachi Gupta, Shilpi Sonar, Krithika Subrahmanian, and Sumit Dhawan to map out the reality of the borderless creator.
In November 2022, Augusta Park celebrated its first anniversary of reopening to the public. The park reached maximum capacity on its opening day and, today, has welcomed over 1.5 million visitors. The site went through a long journey before reaching consolidation. The nearly 50-year struggle for the park deserves to be highlighted, and public participation in its creation must be recorded and shared so it can inspire new campaigns for public spaces across the city.
https://www.archdaily.com/1132482/the-history-of-parque-augusta-citizen-participation-and-mobilizationIngrid Bisterzo, Isabella Maria Davenis Armentano, Lucas Lavecchia de Gouvea e Paula Hori
The built environment has historically served humans as a mechanism of environmental control. Through our intellectual capacities and ability to organize, we have used buildings to actively influence and terraform the immediate context in which they are inserted, often treating geography, water, and ecosystems as resources to be extracted and managed. However, more and more, architecture is transitioning from exploiting physical and biological matter to actively collaborating with it. This shift demands that architects explore how buildings and their materials grow, transform, decay, and persist beyond human timelines. This thinking also serves as a starting point for the profession to reflect on how it influences the natural world, as well as the non-human species around it, creating networks and connections between humans, buildings, living organisms, and natural environments.
When we think of the residential designs of Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi, the immediate image that comes to mind is her private residence in São Paulo (1951)—more precisely, the image of its glazed social pavilion, captured from a low angle. This perspective further dramatizes the contrasting relationship between that light, suspended orthogonal volume and the steep natural slope of the terrain.
I would venture to say that no other work of Brazilian architecture is as well-known from a single photograph. This image, which has illustrated nearly every publication on the architect since the building's completion nearly 70 years ago, and which indeed justifies its famous moniker, the “Glass House,” exposes the unequivocal modern condition of this project—or, at least, the portion revealed by the angle of this celebrated photograph: a transparent, prismatic volume suspended on slender pillars set back from the edge of the floor slab and, consequently, free-standing within the elevated space.
Statue of Bandeirante Borba Gato on fire, São Paulo. Photo: Reproduction/Twitter
On August 17, Brazil celebrated National Heritage Day, 21 days after a protest set fire to the statue of Bandeirante Borba Gato in the southern zone of São Paulo. This contradiction opens up an important discussion: how are we constructing memory in our cities? What are we valuing as our country's heritage?
The term historical and cultural heritage refers to the tangible and intangible creations of a given culture within society. What defines a cultural asset as heritage is its historical and social relevance, which can be linked to collective and individual memory, as it is through these memories that we understand the past. From an architectural perspective, the term heritage is constantly associated with historic buildings that typically embody Catholic religious values or the bourgeois lifestyle of the elite.
At the helm of architectural discourse on sacred architecture, attention almost always settles on the monument. Temples, mosques, monasteries, and churches dominate architectural histories, design criticism, and photography alike, becoming the physical symbols through which faith is understood. For millions of pilgrims across India, the most consequential architectural experience begins long before the shrine comes into view. It unfolds across mountain roads, river ghats, shaded streets, temporary camps, queue systems, bridges, water kiosks, medical stations, and countless ordinary pieces of infrastructure through which pilgrimage actually takes place. The architectural work of pilgrimage may lie less in the shrine itself than in the environments that allow millions of people to reach it.
First Prize Winner: Seeds in Forgotten Soil. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner has announced the results of its Re-Form: New Life for Old Spaces, second edition, an international ideas competition examining the adaptive reuse of small-scale existing buildings. The competition invited architects and designers to propose transformations of used, abandoned, or overlooked structures with an approximate footprint of 250 square meters, located anywhere in the world. With no fixed site or program, participants were encouraged to explore alternatives to demolition and new construction through reuse strategies grounded in contemporary social and environmental concerns.
A successful interior design must be paired with a proper lighting design. It is responsible for ensuring that the quantity and wattage of the bulbs are suited to the space based on its dimensions and use.
In this installment, as part of the series of articles by Nikos A. Salingaros, David Brain, Andrés M. Duany, Michael W. Mehaffy, and Ernesto Philibert-Petit, we examine the importance of design sequences and generative codes in social housing in Latin America. Explore all previous publications and the new article below.
https://www.archdaily.com/1120725/social-housing-in-latin-america-design-sequenceNikos A. Salingaros, David Brain, Andrés M. Duany, Michael W. Mehaffy & Ernesto Philibert-Petit
According to the executive branch's plans, more than 500 schools will be built in Peru this year to close the infrastructure gap affecting the sector. This represents an investment of 30 billion soles, which also serves as an incentive for the construction industry across the country's various regions.
After reading and compiling all the submissions received—from construction professionals and students to architecture enthusiasts—it is now time to present the key perspectives. Thank you very much for sharing your opinions!
NUS School of Design & Environment / Serie Architects + Multiply Architects + Surbana Jurong. Image Courtesy of Serie Architects + Multiply Architects + Surbana Jurong
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
Before architecture students become authors of space, they are subjected to one. For years, they work inside a building that teaches without announcing itself as a teacher. It organizes their exhaustion, their ambition, their visibility, their solitude, their friendships, their sense of scale, and their relationship to judgment. Long before a student can articulate a position on architecture, the school has already offered one in its implicit built environment.
This is not to suggest that buildings determine architects. The influence is slower and less complete than that. A school building operates more like a hidden curriculum: a spatial discipline that works alongside faculty, syllabi, institutional culture, and student life. It teaches through access and obstruction, program adjacencies, daylight exposures, and scale. It produces habits of attention before it produces explicit beliefs.
As part of a new collaboration between Mexican firms Dellekamp Arquitectos and Rojkind Arquitectos, Casa Roca is presented in Puerto Los Cabos, San José del Cabo, Mexico. Inspired by the rock formations at the site's summit, the project features a radial layout carefully organized in response to its topography. Sited on a 5,000 m² lot, the 1,200 m² house organizes its program along the natural landscape, minimizing its footprint and establishing a close relationship with nature as the core living experience.
Historically, architecture is a discipline that for many years was a male-dominated territory, until in 1939, María Luisa Dehesa became the first Mexican female architect. Yet, despite the perception that gender parity has been achieved in the education of architects in Mexico, the concept of masculinity (which can be exercised by both men and women) continues to permeate architecture. This is reflected in design processes, in the figure of the "unreachable architect," in a sense of competitiveness, in hierarchical structures, and, in the most unfortunate cases, in the notion that women design interiors while men design *real* architecture.
Have you ever wondered how an exhibition design is conceived? Or how it coordinates the staging of the displayed content?
Historically, what we know today as a museum began as a place to gather pieces and objects organized by typology. This is evident when looking at images of the so-called cabinets of curiosities or wonder rooms, which organized a vast array of rare objects and species (animal, plant, and mineral) brought back from the great explorations of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Centuries later, these collections began to gain traction, and former palaces transformed their hallways into long, continuous galleries, to which only their guests and residents had access. Later, in the 19th century, the emergence of pavilions dedicated primarily to the display of artifacts brought us closer to the modern concept of museums. We regularly publish various museum projects. But beyond their architecture, have you ever noticed the crucial role that exhibition design plays? Below, we outline some of the key concepts of exhibition design.
In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of the concept of “citizen participation,” particularly in the political sphere. As is often the case, this surge is not without controversy and carries inherent risks. Much like what occurred with the term “sustainability,” participation can be relegated to a smoke screen used to conceal specific types of political despotism. A clear example of this can be found in the Netherlands; in September 2013, King Willem-Alexander announced “the transition to a participatory society” to justify dismantling the welfare state through neoliberal policies and some of the harshest budget cuts the country has ever faced.
Clearly, urbanism and urban planning have not been immune to this trend. While the development of statutory urban planning instruments (General Plans, Partial Plans, Special Plans, etc.) is legally required to incorporate public participation mechanisms, the reality is that these are often reduced to public comment and exhibition periods. Consequently, actual participation is replaced by mechanisms that belong strictly to the realm of communication and information sharing.
La Casa Ensamble Chacarrá / Ruta 4. Image Cortesía de Ruta 4
As a subspecies of bamboo, guadua has been used as a construction material from the Spanish conquest to the present day. Its strength, lightweight nature, and flexibility offer numerous structural advantages and applications. Since it is native to the forests of Colombia and Ecuador, it has been widely used in local building projects. Additionally, its ease of cultivation and processing makes it a highly sustainable material.
This selection highlights six projects where guadua has been used as both a structural and aesthetic resource.
Modern and surreal, yet without compromising on functionality and comfort, the bathrooms designed by emerging architects and designers at the current Casa FOA interior design exhibition in Santiago, Chile, seek to rethink a traditional space within an innovative context, aiming to trigger a different experience for both users and spectators.
