Buenos Aires is a city of rich history and distinct atmospheres. There are many reasons to explore its architecture: the city is the result of a complex interplay of cultural factors shaped by a multitude of architectural styles and trends. Its streets and heterogeneous buildings define its inhabitants, reflecting an identity forged by its history.
Beyond its historic and heritage buildings, the city offers a remarkable diversity of modern and contemporary architecture. Indeed, its architectural highlights are easily discovered on foot, framed by its prominent and beautifully designed green spaces. Below is a list of 31 sites that every architect should visit.
Scaffolding is perhaps one of architecture's most familiar temporary structures. It accompanies buildings through construction, maintenance, and renovation, only to disappear once its work is complete. Yet its apparent impermanence conceals a different kind of longevity. Scaffolding systems are designed to be assembled, dismantled, transported, and reused, with standardized components robust enough to withstand repeated handling and changing site conditions. Their temporary character lies less in the material itself than in the duration of each assembly.
This logic is not unfamiliar in furniture design. Dieter Rams's 606 Universal Shelving System, designed for Vitsœ in 1960, established a modular approach in which shelves, cabinets, and other components could be rearranged, expanded, or transported as circumstances changed. Similarly, IKEA's modular storage systems popularized and demonstrated how furniture can be understood as a collection of interchangeable parts rather than a singular, finished object. Although different in material and intended lifespan, these systems share an important principle: longevity can be achieved through adaptability rather than permanence of arrangement.
As cities struggle to provide adequate and affordable housing, examining built examples of collective housing can help inform decisions about what to build and how. These projects offer opportunities to assess solutions, understand their limitations, and consider what might be applied elsewhere. In Paris, two recent examples combine apartments of different sizes with access to gardens, courtyards, and other outdoor spaces, working with structures already in place.
Dowonjeong modular pavilion project in Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea. Image Courtesy of Studio SMA
In architecture, the word "pavilion" can describe an endless variety of structures. It might be defined as a principle and a typology, a freestanding structure, a temporary intervention, a gathering place in the city, or a space for experimentation. This last quality is what unites the six unbuilt projects featured here, all designed and submitted by ArchDaily readers. Here, the definition lies in their sculptural qualities and formal exploration, while their permanence and location vary according to each structure's purpose. The proposals also demonstrate another quality inherent to the pavilion: the intention to symbolically represent a stance. Their exploration of form and material thus also reflects a search for a sense of boundary, wonder, or a shared future.
About an hour's drive from New York, the Corwin House sits in hilly woodland high above the Saugatuck River. Completed by Richard Neutra in 1956, it is one of only three houses the architect built in Connecticut. Architectural designer Aziz Osko has updated the house, revisiting details from Neutra's original design that were never built.
The commission began when Betty and Henry Corwin asked Neutra whether he could recommend an East Coast architect working in a similar style. Neutra was so taken with the wooded site above the river that he took on the commission himself.
Seaside House / Koistinen Hellborg Architects. Image Courtesy of Randers Tegl
Brick and wood can establish a dialogue between architectural permanence and the textures of coastal environments. In Höllviken, on the southern coast of Sweden, Seaside House by Koistinen Hellborg Architects explores how materiality, light, and spatial organization can shape a home in relationship with its natural surroundings. Located among sandy terrain, heathland, moss, and pine trees, and within walking distance of the sea, the house responds to a landscape defined by subtle color variations, seasonal changes, and a strong connection to the outdoors.
In Uruguay, small-scale residential projects increasingly occupy rural and coastal landscapes, from the hills of Villa Serrana to the maritime forests along the Atlantic coast. Building in these areas often requires structural materials that balance durability, thermal efficiency, and transport feasibility. In these environments, projects rely heavily on materials such as engineered timber framing, steel structural members, exterior wood cladding, or offsite fabrication. These design choices not only help to reduce the weight of raw materials that must be transported over unpaved access roads, but also make construction more feasible in remote locations. The context of the projects in this collection also seems to have played a limiting role regarding floor areas, which were kept at 60 m² or less to reduce structural material requirements and the impact on the terrain.
Wellbeing is no longer confined to exclusive resorts, spas, or hospitality settings. Today, it has become an essential part of contemporary living, inspiring homeowners to create private spaces dedicated to relaxation and personal care. Collections such as LEMI's Home Spa Collection explore this growing interest in residential wellness through a selection of massage beds and relaxation loungers.
"Antarctica is known through narratives," states Victoria Nuviala Antelo during the lecture on Inhabiting the Extreme: An Architectural Biography of Antarctica, presented at the Buenos Aires International Architecture Biennial. Indeed, throughout architectural history, numerous stories, experiences, ways of inhabiting, and building practices have often been excluded from official narratives. Buried beneath thick layers of ice, the history of Antarctic architecture tells a story of impermanence. The ice surrounding the continent expands and contracts each year, doubling its surface area, while the species that inhabit it migrate and return according to their life cycles. Ice covers structures as katabatic winds erase the traces of more than 200 years of human presence. Explorations, settlements, architectural interventions, and ways of inhabiting remain concealed within one of the most extreme landscapes on the planet.
The Social Playful Concept Restaurant. Image Courtesy of Livit Design
From November 17 to 19, 2026, interihotel MAD26 will bring together architects, interior designers, hospitality operators, and specialized brands at IFEMA Madrid. Organized by AMBIT Living Spaces Cluster, the event is expected to welcome more than 14,000 professionals, 350 exhibiting brands, and over 200 international speakers. Under the theme Creative Rebellion, it will combine talks, workshops, five specialized forums, and full-scale experimental spaces to explore new approaches to hotel and restaurant design.
After a seven-year pause, Amman Design Week returned to Jordan with a premise that feels closely tied to the city itself: that nothing is ever entirely new. Under the theme "Accumulations," the fourth edition of the biennial event brought together more than 220 designers, makers, architects, and collectives across exhibitions, public interventions, talks, workshops, and performances from October 2 to 17. The premise was particularly relevant to Amman, a city whose architecture has been shaped by waves of construction, migration, adaptation, and reuse, where accumulation is not simply a metaphor.
When London's main drainage was completed north of the Thames in 1868, the Metropolitan Board of Works marked the occasion with a banquet held inside a sewage pumping station. Abbey Mills had been built over the previous three years by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette, working with the architect Charles Driver, laid out on a cruciform plan with eight beam engines, two on each arm. Its style has been read as Byzantine, Italian Medieval, Russian, Ruskinian Gothic and Moorish, and its twin ventilation chimneys, richly ornamented, rose more than sixty meters. The builder called it an elegant structure in a swamp and thought it might pass for a mosque or a temple.
Almost everything else Bazalgette built was buried, and the exception did not last the century. Steam gave way to electric motors at Abbey Mills in 1933, and the chimneys, redundant since then, were demolished in 1941 out of fear that a bomb strike would topple them onto the station. Sanitary engineering consolidated around criteria that could be measured, among them throughput, discharge quality and hydraulic gradient, and appearance registered in none of them. Treatment moved outward to floodplains, estuaries and municipal edges where land was cheap, and gravity did useful work.
"Architecture must return to its essence." With this statement, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu establish the central premise of their curatorial vision for the 20th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, taking place from May 8 to November 21, 2027, across the Giardini, the Arsenale, and throughout Venice. Titled "Do Architecture – For the Possibility of Coexistence Facing a Real Reality", the exhibition calls for a return to the physical act of making architecture, at a time when, according to the curators, the discipline has become increasingly disconnected from lived reality through excessive abstraction, commercialization, and digitalization.
Rather than focusing on what architecture might become, the curators propose a renewed engagement with the present, questioning what it means to practice architecture today through materials, construction, local knowledge, and direct experience. This approach builds on ideas that have long informed the work of Amateur Architecture Studio, founded by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu in 1997, particularly their exploration of traditional building techniques, material reuse, and the relationship between architecture and place.The exhibition also places the question of coexistence at its center, exploring how architecture can bring together seemingly opposing conditions, from technology and craftsmanship to urban and rural ways of building, while remaining grounded in the specific realities of each place.
Industrial activity can end long before its effects disappear from the land. Factories close, buildings are demolished, and former industrial districts gradually become part of new residential developments. Yet the soil beneath them may still contain traces of their previous use, sometimes requiring extensive intervention before construction can begin.
Redeveloping these sites raises a question about how much of the existing ground can remain and what it takes to build housing above it. The extent of contamination affects what must happen before construction begins, while the cost of preparing the land can influence the development itself. Much of this work eventually disappears beneath the completed buildings, leaving little indication of the site's previous condition.
IFC Model / KUBUS360. Image Courtesy of Vectorworks
Building Information Modeling has made it possible to attach an enormous amount of information to each element of a design. A wall can carry its fire resistance class and its cost group, and later even the maintenance information a facility manager will need. That possibility creates a temptation: if the model can hold more data, it should. In the process, an important question of efficiency can get lost: does the project actually need this information, and does it need it now?
For architects, BIM is often described as a "single source of truth." Every additional property, however, adds work, coordination, and maintenance, and information entered too early or without a clear purpose can quickly become outdated. What matters is having the right information for the decisions being made at each stage of the project. The Stuttgart-based firm KUBUS360 made that question central to its work on an administrative complex in Baden-Württemberg (Germany).
On Tarkwa Bay, off the coast of Lagos, the transformation of an abandoned building offers a way to consider how architecture might emerge from the materials, relationships and conditions already present in a place.
Architecture is often encountered at the end, when the uncertainties of making have been resolved into a building, a surface, a space. Less visible are the conditions that allow these outcomes to exist, the movement of materials, the availability of labour, the knowledge held by people and places, and the negotiations through which an idea becomes possible. On Tarkwa Bay, an island off the coast of Lagos accessible only by boat, these conditions are difficult to separate from the act of building itself.
The crossing from the Lagos mainland introduces a different relationship to access. People, tools and materials move across water; some resources are readily available, others less so. Materials move across water; reclaimed elements carry histories from elsewhere; salt and sun alter the behaviour of surfaces; and the availability of local artisans influences how work unfolds. These are not necessarily prohibitions; rather, they make visible the dependencies that building elsewhere can allow us to overlook.
What happens when structure is treated not as something added to architecture, but as something the architecture itself provides?
Throughout architectural history, form has provided structure. Arches, trusses, and other structural geometries used the arrangement of material to achieve strength, often allowing individual elements to serve multiple functions. Today, however, building envelopes often rely on a hierarchy of separate elements: a primary frame carries loads, secondary supports hold panels in place, brackets connect the pieces, and additional layers provide enclosure or finish. Together, these components require added material, weight, fabrication steps, and on-site coordination.
Aerial view of Mumbai’s coast. Image via Shutterstock
Along India's coast, the boundary between land and sea is not always a line of concrete. In places, it is a forest of tangled roots, tidal channels, and sediment, a landscape that changes character with the water. Mangroves influence how water moves, how shorelines evolve, and how coastal communities experience flood risk. Their role in coastal protection depends on the width and condition of the forest, the movement of tides, and the accumulation of sediment.
Selecting a material during the design process involves more than defining an appearance. Its behavior in response to light, sound, touch, and the passage of time can transform how a space is perceived and used. At the same time, factors such as durability, strength, recyclability, and the environmental impact associated with its production introduce new variables into architectural decision-making. For Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen, cofounders of Vancouver-based design and production studio molo, these considerations have led to an exploration of paper and its potential to shape flexible, sensory spaces.
The concept of "eyes on the street" is perhaps the most famous within architectural and urban literature when it comes to urban security. Jane Jacobs uses this expression to refer to people who - consciously or unconsciously - use public spaces or observe them from their homes, generating natural surveillance. A movement that, within our discipline, is encouraged both through quality public spaces and through the powerful relationship between the public and private created through building facades. Advocating for this daily control, Jacobs believes in a way of making architecture and cities that condemns excessive verticalization, reinforced by isolated buildings and single-use ones that deny contact with the street.
Where rivers, reservoirs, and rainfall can no longer be relied upon consistently, water is increasingly being sought in the atmosphere. Fog, atmospheric humidity, and condensation each offer different ways of collecting it. When architecture begins to collect water from the air, surfaces, structures, and open spaces become part of the water system.
According to UNICEF, Jordan's National Water Strategy estimates that each person has access to only about 61 cubic meters of renewable water per year, far below the 500 cubic meters commonly used as a threshold for absolute water scarcity. Around half of the population receives piped water only once a week, while groundwater is being extracted faster than many aquifers can naturally recharge.
Vivos xPoint, USA. Image by VigilanteScout, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Inverting the conventional narrative, this story begins at the end. The day after the world's collapse. While almost the entire population struggles to survive flames and solar storms, a tiny fraction is greeted by a heavily armed guard at the entrance to the Survival Condo Project, a former missile silo in Kansas converted a few years ago into luxury apartments.
Forget, then, the hermit who stockpiles canned food in his basement or the end-times prophet. In recent years, survivalism has expanded into wealthier circles, taking root in Silicon Valley among technology executives and hedge fund managers. What could once be seen merely as an eccentricity has also become a way of thinking about the future and, for some, an investment.
As one walks along the beachfront of Barcelona, the shoreline feels like it has always been there: sand, palm trees, a long promenade, restaurants, shops and modern hotels, when the reality is that it has not always been this way. Until the 1980s, Barcelona's seafront was a working barrier of railway lines, factories and informal housing, and wastewater ran straight into the Mediterranean. Starting in 1987, Barcelona has continuously created large promenades and passages between the city and the sea, creating an environment that today many might read as previously empty space, but is actually the result of decades of infrastructure and social complexity, along with a municipal effort to transform the city's territory and its relationship to the water. Following that transformation raises three questions that frame this article: who was displaced to open the waterfront, who governs it today, and who keeps it standing?
