The era when Le Corbusier's Modulor—the perfect man—was the only one “allowed” to occupy our cities and architecture is long gone. Decades ago, it became clear that environments were being designed as ideological representations that failed to reflect actual demand and its rich diversity of social class, gender, race, age group, and sexual orientation, among other factors. Planning and design were often disguised as “neutral” concepts, while in reality they reproduced the perspective of a middle-class white man. Ultimately, the time has come for the city to move past this flawed assumption of universal appropriation and instead materialize in its spaces the specific needs of every citizen.

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The year was 1969. Lina Bo Bardi wandered through the São Paulo neighborhood of Bixiga, which at the time resembled a war zone. The clearings and piles of rubble were the result of a violent urbanization cutting through the region in the shape of São Paulo's East-West expressway complex.

Against this backdrop, Lina collected personal objects found in the debris, picking up "the most sordid items," as Zé Celso, director and creator of Teatro Oficina, stated in an interview. There was a clear reason for this undertaking: to compose the set for the play In the Jungle of Cities (Na selva das cidades), designed by the architect herself. In it, a stage shaped like a boxing ring was fashioned from the rubble of the demolitions taking place around the theater. The play was divided into 11 rounds, in each of which an institution is destroyed until the ring itself is demolished. At the end, the actors remove even the theater floor to reach the bare earth.

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Almost certainly, everyone has their own ritual when entering a pool. There are those who dive in without hesitation, those who start with their toes, those who swim for sport, and those who submerge themselves for pure pleasure. Private or shared, intense or contemplative, every experience with water takes place within an environment carefully constructed to receive it.

Architecture and water are of opposing natures. While one delimits and contains, the other insists on spreading, and it is from this tension between solid and liquid that aquatic centers emerge. In these buildings, the presence of water transforms everything around it. Light fragments into shimmering reflections, sound acquires a distinct reverberation, and temperature and humidity define the atmosphere of the spaces, while materials and structural systems are constantly put to the test. Yet their uniqueness is not merely technical.

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You are likely familiar with the story of a man who received a divine command to build an ark to shelter his family and animals of every species, saving them from a great deluge. This flood narrative, known as the story of "Noah's Ark," is found not only in the Bible but also in the Quran and many other cultures—with the Sumerian "Epic of Ziusudra" being the oldest known flood myth, dating back to 2000 BCE. These examples show that the forces of nature, by taking center stage in religious teachings, were already recurring concerns that inspired both fear and respect in early civilizations.

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Designated by the United Nations (UN), June 17 was established as the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, a date that serves to raise awareness about these phenomena while promoting initiatives to address them. Broadly speaking, desertification refers to the process of land degradation in arid regions, caused primarily by human activities and climatic variations. This phenomenon leads to the loss of vegetation cover, soil erosion, and reduced agricultural productivity, among other negative consequences. Drought, on the other hand, is a prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall resulting in water scarcity, which can have severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture, and human livelihoods.

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For some time now, it has become common to wonder where the things we consume come from. We check labels, seek out local producers, and investigate supply chains in an attempt to understand the impact of our habits, whether on our own health or on the planet.

In the field of architecture, however, this question remains relatively marginal. We often know who designed a building, its finishes, the manufacturer of its frames, the brand of its wall coverings, and even its energy performance, but we almost never ask where the tons of material that made its existence possible actually came from.

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The land-water interface has always played a fundamental role in the formation and development of cities. From ancient commercial ports to today's multifunctional waterfronts, maritime and riverfront areas represent spaces of immense economic and social potential. Within this context, contemporary nautical complexes increasingly serve as strategic urban amenities capable of integrating diverse activities, fostering a reconnection between city and water, and revitalizing often underutilized landscapes.

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In 2025, the global animal health market reached approximately 70 billion dollars, and this figure is projected to double by 2033. Behind this figure, however, lies a quiet transformation within the built environment, with veterinary hospitals serving as a prime example. This typology, which for decades occupied the backrooms of improvised clinics and pet shop annexes, has increasingly developed its own architectural language and identity. It represents the architectural consolidation of a bond that has lasted for over 15,000 years.

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Between the 1950s and 1960s, two cities were built that would define the history of architecture and urbanism. Born of the same concept but separated by more than 14,000 kilometers, Brasília in Brazil and Chandigarh in India, steeped in modernist principles, were planned and built from scratch.

Emerging in a context of profound political and social transformations, where several countries sought to reshape their capitals as symbols of progress, both cities assumed a strategic role. Through their adopted architectural language, they reaffirmed ideological and identity narratives linked to state power.

These were cities created in the abstract, following a utopian vision. They were to be avant-garde cities, free from the deficiencies afflicting mid-20th-century urban centers, exemplifying aesthetic principles that would reflect progressive political ideologies and embrace new technologies—most notably the automobile.

However, this promise of the future ultimately generated significant challenges. These difficulties, of course, reflect the social and economic struggles of their respective countries, but they are also "seasoned" by a modernist vision that is highly contested today.

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What happens when a city’s industrial past becomes the raw material for its future? In Copenhagen, Nordhavn transforms the old harbor into a living laboratory of sustainable urbanism, where warehouses and docks give way to independent districts, small islands, and canals that redefine what it means to inhabit the city.

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Unlike many industrial programs traditionally concealed behind neutral facades and hermetic spaces, contemporary distilleries often showcase their production processes as an essential part of the architectural experience. The heat of the stills, the vapors of distillation, or the path of the raw materials cease to be mere technical operations, instead taking center stage within the space.

While they produce different beverages, the projects selected below share similar architectural challenges. All must organize industrial workflows, control specific temperature, ventilation, and storage conditions, and reconcile technical areas with visitor routes. At the same time, each distillery establishes its own response to its territory, revealing different ways of connecting production and landscape.

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The architecture of cultural and community centers in rural areas around the world has become a rich field for experimentation, where tradition and innovation intersect. Rather than replicating standardized urban models, these projects embrace contemporary approaches tailored to local realities, blending bold design, sustainable technologies, and collaborative processes. Often developed in close partnership with local communities, they draw on regional materials and cultural symbols to create spaces that do more than host activities: they express a collective identity and a profound sense of belonging. By reimagining vernacular knowledge through a modern lens, these buildings support and inspire new ways of living in the countryside.

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Before any drawing or formal decision, a space in constant motion was already pulsing where the Market Square at Realengo Park stands today in Rio de Janeiro. Improvised stalls, informal gatherings, music, children running, and adults gathered under makeshift shelters made up a living landscape, shaping an ephemeral architecture.

Within this context lies the work developed by Carlos Zebulun, Helena Meirelles, Larissa Monteiro, Rodrigo Messina, Francisco Rivas, and Juliana Ayako, one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards. Project management, urban planning, and landscape design were carried out by Ecomimesis Soluções Ecológicas, winners of the bidding process held by the City of Rio de Janeiro in 2023.

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Even the most distracted passerby is captured by the monumental presence of this structure located in the established Valencian neighborhood of Benimaclet. Before it, any attempt at rational comprehension dissolves. The constructive logic seems to slip away as space unfolds in tensions and detours where nothing is immediately revealed. Between masses of concrete and the insurgency of vegetation, an almost choreographic play of planes, angles, and rotations emerges. In the vertigo of this encounter, one realizes that the building was not designed to be understood, but to be experienced.

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There is an ancestral gesture in shaping the earth. Long before architecture was established as a discipline, clay was already shaped by human hands and transformed by fire, turning raw material into domestic utensils and cultural objects. In the history of this craft, ceramic factories marked the transition from manual craftsmanship to mass production, expanding their scale without entirely breaking from their material origins. Scattered across diverse territories, these structures record the relationship between technique, landscape, and time. Over the decades, however, many of them eventually lost their original function, replaced by more advanced technological processes or swallowed up by surrounding urban development, leaving them in an intermediate state between permanence and obsolescence.

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In 1962, architect Buckminster Fuller envisioned a floating city that would free humanity from its dependence on Earth. The hypothetical project consisted of massive, airborne geodesic spheres that would naturally levitate on warm, sun-heated air, anchored to mountain peaks. Designed to house thousands of people, Fuller's Cloud Nine structures aimed to ease land ownership politics, address housing shortages, and help preserve nature.

More than half a century later, we remain far from realizing Fuller's vision. Creating a truly floating structure on the Earth's surface remains, for now, an unattainable ideal. While structural supports remain a necessity, we manipulate their position, intensity, and quantity, performing architectural acrobatics to at least approximate the idea of defying gravity—a desire that has long fascinated humanity.

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Architecture can no longer be thought of as an isolated object, detached from the technical networks that sustain contemporary life—a scenario that demands different readings and approaches. Against this backdrop, in March, ArchDaily's monthly topic focused on The Technosphere: Architecture at the Intersection of Technology, Ecology, and Planetary Systems, a broad and inevitably complex topic. Stemming from the concept of the technosphere, coined by geologist Peter Haff to describe the collective artifacts produced by humanity, a panorama emerges in which contemporary life is deeply intertwined with machines, data, and energy grids.

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At a time when satellites orbit the planet, undersea cables support the global flow of data, and algorithms organize daily life, a question emerges within the field of architecture: at what scale are we actually designing today?

While design was once primarily shaped by local or regional conditions, today it is intertwined with supply chains that begin with resource extraction, move through industrial systems, and extend across planetary infrastructures—systems that are often invisible, operating continuously and interdependently.

Within this shift, architecture begins to operate as a mediator of a much larger field: the technosphere.

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