1. Thomas Willson’s Primrose Hill Pyramid A verified aerial view placing the necropolis accurately on Primrose Hill, with the London skyline showing its scale. Image Courtesy of Gendo
Some architectural projects only survive as drawings, competition entries, or models in archives. Others were built, but not as first imagined, and the completed building gradually replaced the original proposal in collective memory. Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral is familiar to many, but less well known is his Warrant Design, the spire-topped proposal approved in 1675 that he subsequently reworked as construction progressed. London was also once offered a very different monument: Thomas Willson's vast pyramid-shaped necropolis for Primrose Hill, designed to accommodate millions of burials and dominate the city's skyline.
"We can really bring a hospitality look into a workplace, which is something that our clients have been asking for, for many years," says Mark Harder, a design director at Gensler. The warmth of wood, the texture of leather, and the tactile surfaces found in hotels and restaurants are also sought in offices, airports, and shared corridors. Bringing these qualities into different settings, however, requires considering how materials will respond to everyday use.
The parliament building in Belmopan, the capital city of Belize. Image by belizediversity via Shutterstock
Located on the Caribbean coast of Central America, Belize is a small country with an intriguing history. It is bordered by Mexico to the north and Guatemala to the west and south, with the Caribbean Sea along its eastern edge. Known as British Honduras for most of its past, it was formally made into a British colony in 1862, long after its Central American neighbors had won their independence from Spain. As the territory transitioned toward independence, it adopted two symbols of its emerging identity: a new name, Belize, and a new capital, which was built not just to govern the new nation, but also as a way to prevent hurricanes from putting the country's institutional stability at risk.
A floor that feels solid may still be moving. Vibrations travel through the ground and across buildings, often at levels too small for people to notice. Most have little effect on everyday activities, but in some research laboratories, instruments measuring matter at the nanoscale can register movements this small, and even traffic several miles away can interfere with an experiment.
Other experiments place different demands on the spaces around them. Equipment and the ducts and services above it often need more height than a conventional floor provides. Certain processes require continuous ventilation, while equipment generates heat that must be removed. The systems supporting this work occupy space of their own, and some of them produce the very vibrations that sensitive experiments need to avoid.
Move a wall in Revit and every plan, section and schedule follows. Change a material, though, and the team is often back in specifications, spreadsheets and drawings, checking that they all describe the same choice.
For Dave Lemont, who led Revit Technology before Autodesk acquired it, that gap is BIM's unfinished work. Now Executive Chairman of Acelab, he is focused on a Material Intelligence Model: one structured product record, connected to every document where that selection appears. It is also something architects can now try for themselves, since Acelab has opened Material Hub search to anyone, no account required.
The architecture biennial exhibition Time Space Existence returns for its 8th edition with more than 200 participants, from established global firms to emerging studios and academic institutions. Their work will be presented across three historic venues in Venice: Palazzo Mora, Palazzo Bembo and the Marinaressa Gardens. Many have already been confirmed, and the curatorial team is finalising the line-up.
Building on the previous edition's focus on Repair, Regenerate, and Reuse, the 2027 edition explores architecture as a practice that embraces change rather than resisting it. It lives in the space between what has been built, what is changing, and what remains to be understood.
What happens to a building after the architecture is finished? For buildings intended to serve the public, their continued life depends on more than the physical conditions of their construction. It involves the activities that take place within them, the relationships they allow to develop, the people who occupy and shape them, and the institutional structures responsible for their upkeep. Yet these conditions are not always secured through the act of building itself. They are continually negotiated, often through forms of work that remain outside the conventional understanding of architectural practice.
The Drill Hall in central Johannesburg offers a way of examining this unfinished work. Its history is marked by changes in use, occupation and institutional responsibility, but also by repeated attempts to imagine what the building could offer the city.
Background image: El Nido de Quetzalcóatl / Javier Senosiain. Courtesy of Javier Senosiain
"Design a cultural center on a desert coastline, in the style of Alvar Aalto, wood structure, golden hour, aerial drone shot, photorealistic, 4K." Within seconds, a line like this returns a convincing image. What is less visible is the shift it demands. For centuries, architectural imagination relied on the body: the hand that sketches, the fingers that shape a model, or, more recently, the click of a mouse in computational tools. Words came afterward, to explain what had already taken form. Today, the order is increasingly reversed. Before an image can exist, it must first be described: its references named, its materials listed, its mood specified.
This translation is not trivial. Intuition rarely arrives as a written sentence, and much of what architects imagine resists description. Yet as words increasingly become the entry point to the image, they also shape what can be imagined. The vocabulary available to describe a space begins to define the space itself.
Linnahall in Tallinn, Estonia. Image by Hrleophotos, via Wikimedia Commons. License CC BY-SA 4.0
From the end of Mere Boulevard in Tallinn, Linnahall appears as a long, low mass of limestone and concrete laid between the Old Town and the bay, kept deliberately beneath the line of the medieval silhouette so that the spires remain visible from the water. Broad stairways climb its flanks to a roof paved as a public square, and from there a sequence of terrace steps down toward a small pier, a helicopter pad and the open Gulf of Finland. Under that surface sit an amphitheater for 4,200 people, a foyer of 6,000 square meters, an ice hall, cafés, a bowling alley and a recording studio.
The building opened in the summer of 1980 as the V. I. Lenin Palace of Culture and Sport, in time for the sailing regatta of the Moscow Olympics, which Tallinn hosted on behalf of a capital with no coastline. It was one of more than 120 projects planned under the city's Olympic program, alongside the yachting center in Pirita, the TV Tower, Hotel Olümpia and a new airport terminal.
Furniture waste is not always the result of physical damage that renders a product unusable. Chairs, sofas, and tables are often discarded because they no longer fit an interior concept, are perceived as outdated, or are replaced during a renovation. In many cases, their structures remain functional, even when upholstery is worn, or the surrounding space has changed. The result is a cycle of replacement in which usable products become waste, while new resources are extracted and processed to manufacture their successors.
Wide doorways, properly designed ramps, and elevators are essential to a building's accessibility. But whether people can actually use its spaces also depends on the sensory conditions they offer. For some neurodivergent people, this is critical, as bright lights, overlapping sounds, or confusing circulation routes can prevent them from staying in a space and participating in activities.
Jack Chaffin, a partner at Johnston Architects, draws attention to these barriers in an interview with ArchDaily: "A building may therefore comply with accessibility codes and still be functionally inaccessible to someone who becomes overwhelmed, disoriented, or exhausted by it."
Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, 05/07/2024 - General photos of floods, Av Loureiro da Silva, CAFF and region. Photos: Gustavo Mansur/ Piratini Palace. Flickr user licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic
In May 2024, the floods that hit Rio Grande do Sul exposed a contradiction common to contemporary cities. Many were built alongside rivers and shaped by their presence, yet spent decades trying to control water without incorporating its dynamics into urban planning. Extreme weather events will intensify that vulnerability. More than two years later, reconstruction in the Brazilian state has progressed, infrastructure has been restored, and new protection strategies are taking shape. But are these cities rebuilding their relationship with water, or only restoring the systems that failed?
The occupation of flood-prone areas, soil sealing, ecosystem degradation, and reliance on aging drainage systems have increased municipalities' vulnerability. The disaster was not merely hydrological; it also resulted from decades of urban planning decisions that urgently need reconsideration.
To facilitate the design of high-quality interior concepts, EGGER has expanded its portfolio of PerfectSense lacquered surfaces. Image Courtesy of EGGER
Whether in residential interiors, workplaces, hospitality environments, or public spaces, the relationship between aesthetic intentions and technical performance can redefine how surfaces are used and how they perform. A material selected for its specific color, texture, or finish must remain visually coherent when applied to furniture fronts, cabinetry, countertops, and other interior elements. Yet how can architects and designers create visually distinctive and tactilely engaging interiors while preserving their original design intentions across different applications?
Cocinas de exterior Nedra, un diseño de Fran Silvestre Arquitectos para Gandía Blasco con mobiliario de Gamadecor. Image Cortesía de Porcelanosa
Outdoor kitchens are no longer just an exclusive accessory; they have become a natural extension of the home. Gardens, terraces, and porches are transforming into spaces where cooking and, above all, entertaining can take place without having to step inside. In addition to offering convenience, this solution increases property value and responds to a lifestyle that is increasingly connected to the outdoors.
This article is part of "Thresholds", a special edition printed newspaper by Cobe Notes x ArchDaily.
Post–World War I modernism broke sharply with historicist and neoclassical traditions, stripping buildings of ornamentation and historical or religious reference to focus on priorities, clarity, and efficiency. Architecture embraced rationality and social reform, while art moved in the opposite direction, exploring self-expression, experimentation, and freedom from academic conventions.
This tension between objective order and subjective perception has defined a threshold between the arts evident in contemporary architectural practices, where personal intuition increasingly gives way to measurable facts. Is our pursuit of answers, facts, and truths distancing us from something fundamentally human: questions, doubt, and ambiguity? The answer may lie in public, building-integrated art, a practice that sits precisely at that threshold, and asks practitioners in architecture and urban design to trust values that resist direct measurement.
At Bishan–Ang Mo Kio Park in Singapore, a river does not occupy a fixed boundary. Under ordinary conditions, water moves through a naturalized channel bordered by grass, planting, and paths that bring visitors close to the river. During heavy rainfall, water spreads into the surrounding park, which is designed to accommodate flows beyond the capacity of the narrower channel. What appears to be a public landscape is also working infrastructure. Singapore's approach retains drainage engineering while assigning a wider role to the land around it.
For decades, Singapore's network of concrete canals has been central to managing stormwater in a densely developed city exposed to intense tropical rainfall. Their hard surfaces and defined channels were designed to convey water efficiently. These channels moved stormwater efficiently, but offered limited space for public access, planting, or other uses along the water's edge. Through its Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters (ABC Waters) Programme, launched in 2006, Singapore began integrating waterways with parks, ecological systems, and public spaces. The programme links stormwater management with the design of parks, waterways, and public spaces.
Architecture has treated water either as a backdrop or a problem: a view to be framed, a hazard to be drained, or a utility to be connected. In contemporary India, a more consequential relationship takes shape. Water remains a shared ecological resource, yet the land and infrastructure around it are increasingly financed and defended as economic assets. Coastlines are extended to carry traffic and lake edges become lucrative development zones. The decision to do so passes through multiple institutions with different vocabularies, thereby challenging who determines how water and its surroundings are used, and who faces the consequences.
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Courtesy of Mindhub for Intelligent Artificial Worlds (MIAWS), ETSAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
AI has become a consumer product faster than it has become a discipline. Each week brings new models and more information than anyone can absorb, and the easy response is uncritical consumption. Architecture needs a different strategy, built on criticism and method. AI is now acquiring spatial intelligence, the capacity to understand how physical space behaves, and architects can test a project against its environment while they design it. Used with judgment, AI can bring architects closer to nature and its complexity, and make them better builders. We simulate the world to learn how to inhabit it.
Last October 24th marked the centenary of the birth of Brazilian architect Francisco de Assis Couto Reis (1926–2011), who lived and built most of his work in the city of Salvador, Bahia. Assis Reis, as he was better known, had a career shaped not only by the buildings he designed but also by his urban renewal proposals, his design for the Brazilian Pavilion at the World Expo in Osaka, Japan (unbuilt), and the Scale Model of the City of Salvador, landmarked in 2020. His vast and diverse body of work belongs to a specific moment of modern expression in Brazil, when architects of this "second generation" were particularly concerned with adapting to local climatic, geographical, and cultural conditions.
Direct contact with a material allows one to appreciate textures, compare finishes, and observe how its appearance changes under different lighting conditions. At an exhibition, these possibilities are complemented by exchanges with manufacturers and professionals, helping to understand applications and resolve questions about their use. This relationship between material exploration and architectural practice was one of the central pillars of the seventh edition of Obra Blanca, which drew more than 23,000 professionals to Expo Santa Fe in Mexico City.
Balsa Crosetto Piazzi is an architecture practice founded in 2015, based in Córdoba, Argentina, and Boston, USA. Led by architects Juan Manuel Balsa, Rocío Crosetto Brizzio, and Leandro Piazzi, the core of their work is the material side of architecture. For them, a building is not just a finished object, but rather a way to organize everything that goes into making it. Their work is shaped by a slow process; during the construction and design stages, they pay attention to where the materials come from, who does the work, what skills those people already have, and what's actually available nearby. This allows their built work to become a platform that serves as a starting point, bringing all of these pieces together. In that sense, they also describe their projects as opportunities to "deconstruct entrenched conditions."
An opening between two rooms shapes how people move through a building, what they see from one space to another, and whether an area feels connected or separate. Although doors are among the most frequently used interior architectural elements, their impact on the interior organization is often considered late in the design process. Yet their movement and relationship to surrounding surfaces influence circulation, furniture placement, and the perception of space.
In residential renovations, these decisions are particularly important. Existing walls, structural elements, building services, and ceiling heights can limit options, while new layouts often balance open-plan living with the need for privacy. In new construction, architects have greater freedom to coordinate wall cavities, suspended ceilings, and door mechanisms from the outset.
