As a consequence of the COVID-19 health emergency, the way we understand urban transportation is likely to change. While concerns regarding fossil-fuel vehicles already carried significant weight before the outbreak—primarily due to their environmental impact—and sustainable transportation had already become a key issue on the urban agenda, the need for social distancing to halt the spread of the coronavirus has accelerated debates around mobility. As a result, the bicycle quickly emerged as a viable alternative for safer transit during the COVID-19 pandemic in cities worldwide.
Today, the availability of information and data has vastly expanded our ability to analyze, interpret, and understand life in our cities. In urban planning, some of the most valuable and highly sought-after data for analyzing urban mobility dynamics comes from the use of the SUBE system (the Unified Electronic Ticket System, used in Argentina to pay for public transit). By gathering this information, millions of digital footprints can be aggregated and visualized, allowing us to interpret and anticipate citizen transit behavior. This, in turn, helps us understand urban trends based on the time of day and the day of the week.
Ficciones is a graphic experiment created by the architectural visualization and communication studio Pinxcel. Set in highly diverse backdrops—mostly in the city of Quito, Ecuador—these explorations alter the built environment through digital methods to propose, via a fictional visual narrative, an alternative reading of the city.
The winners of the National Ideas Competition "Emerging Habitats" in Argentina have been announced. Organized by the national government through the Ministry of Territorial Development and Habitat and the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, the call invited university students, faculty, and researchers across the country to submit design proposals for environmentally efficient housing that can be built during emergencies.
With an average of 12 square meters of green space per inhabitant, the city of Rosario was declared Argentina's "greenest" urban enclave in a recent report published by the Inter-American Development Bank's (IDB) Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative. This figure aligns with the standards set by the WHO, which recommends between 10 and 15 square meters of green space per person to ensure a decent quality of life for all citizens. The creation of new parks in recent years, combined with the upgrading of over 70 existing ones through the addition of amenities and technology, highlights the significance of green spaces for the people of Rosario.
The winners of the Ideas Competition for the San Francisco Regional Cultural Recreational Space 2 have been announced. This public, province-wide call invited participants to design a building dedicated to community gathering, recreation, socialization, exchange, education, outreach, and civic participation.
The Javier Alzamora Valdez building, designed by Peruvian architect Enrique Seoane Ros between 1951 and 1956 and conceived as the headquarters of the Ministry of Education, has been declared a Monument and part of the Cultural Heritage of the Nation. It stands as clear testament to the public civil architecture built during the Modern Movement in Peru, serving as a tangible and representative manifesto of mid-20th-century construction trends, when large government buildings were constructed for public administration as part of the urban renewal of Lima's Historic Center.
Directed by Gerardo Panero, the documentary narrates the life and work of architect Amancio Williams, a key figure of the Modern Movement in Argentina. Amancio played an undeniable role in renewing the country's architectural ideals, gaining global recognition for his ideas and projects. Among these is the famous Casa sobre el arroyo (House on the Brook), designed in collaboration with his wife Delfina Gálvez de Williams between 1943 and 1946 in the city of Mar del Plata. Although many of his proposals were never built, his ideals and explorations brought about significant changes in the understanding of ways of living, technique, and aesthetics, leaving a valuable legacy for future architects.
While brick is one of the preferred construction methods within the architectural culture of several Latin American countries, Uruguay's unique history with this material has been deeply shaped by the contributions of the renowned engineer Eladio Dieste. His work pushed brick to its ultimate lightness, creating curved surfaces through a pioneering technology he termed reinforced ceramics. In doing so, Dieste offered the country—and the world—a new perspective on the structural possibilities of brick, strengthening its role in local identity and inspiring further exploration and design with the material.
Observing the reality of our built environment allows us to recognize that certain identities are not represented by existing models and scales. Unsurprisingly, these voices have been conspicuously absent from the planning and construction processes of cities and their architecture. Their desires, ways of being, and modes of inhabiting the world have been excluded and rendered invisible. This prompts us to rethink: Which voices are legitimized in urban debates, and for whom is the city designed?
The winners of the Allen Bus Terminal Preliminary Project Competition (TOA) have been announced. This regional call was promoted by the Municipality of the City of Allen (General Roca, Río Negro, Argentina), organized by Section 2 and Section 4 of the Colegio de Arquitectos de la Provincia de Río Negro (CARN), and sponsored by the Argentine Federation of Architects' Associations (FADEA). The competition invited architects to submit proposals for a new passenger transport terminal, boosting architectural creativity and intervening at an urban scale.
The winners of the Ideas Competition for the Casa de la Cultura, Former Governorate of the Department of Santa Cruz have been announced. Promoted and organized by the Municipality of Santa Cruz, the initiative invited Chilean students and architects to develop architectural proposals to convert the old Santa Cruz governorate building into the future Casa de la Cultura, highlighting the value of the property, which is considered of high heritage significance as the city's last remaining early 20th-century architectural vestige.
Proyecto Taller is a documentary series that aims to debate, reflect on, and examine architectural teaching and learning methods, seeking to define their points of contact and overlap with professional practice. Within this ambiguity between making and teaching how to make architecture, many architects have managed to integrate their careers as designers with their work as educators in academic environments, where they teach students how to design.
Similar in nature to silos and granaries, the barn is an essential building typology within agricultural storage processes. Their designs are typically simple and functional. Serving specifically as facilities to store large volumes of raw materials, they are characterized by high ceilings, wide spans, and relative flexibility. These structures protect agricultural products—such as cereals, fruits, grains, straw, and hay—from the sun, rain, moisture, and pests.
FRAM arquitectos is an Argentine architecture firm founded in 2011 in the city of Buenos Aires. With a body of work focused on small- and medium-scale single-family homes designed and built in both Buenos Aires and the province of Río Negro, they have explored the complexities of domestic living, engaged in material research of various kinds, and tackled challenging commissions with minimal dimensions and tight budgets. Alongside this, they have actively participated in consecutive provincial and national competitions, seeking to expand their design scope and deepen their study of larger-scale programs.
The winners of the Urban Architectural Design Ideas Competition for the Health Innovation Center (CIS) in Ecuador have been announced. Organized by the University Health Company (EUS EP) and the University of Cuenca, the competition invited architecture professionals and students to generate innovative solutions in the medical field to link academia, research, and teaching. The initiative frames health as a set of preventive actions and highlights the importance of social issues, such as comprehensive support for patients with chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, and arthritis.
Alarcia Ferrer is an Argentine architecture firm based in Córdoba, founded in 2009. Focused on medium-scale private residential projects in suburban and rural settings, they have worked for over a decade in close dialogue with the province's landscape, constantly reflecting on the tensions and interactions between nature and artifice. Each project can be read as the result of a material and spatial exercise that serves as a prompt to rethink deeper issues such as permanence, authenticity, and simplicity.
In recent months, Legado Lima 2019 has become one of the key organizations collaborating in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic in Peru. Thanks to hosting the Pan American and Parapan American Games in 2019, the country was able to apply lessons learned in infrastructure, equipment, protocols, and operations to combat COVID-19, repurposing and transforming modern infrastructure—originally built to host the continent's largest multi-sport event—to confront the pandemic.
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