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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Viewpoints are structures designed for observing the landscape from elevated vantage points. Situated in the midst of nature or within the urban landscape, they function as devices that organize the gaze and establish a direct relationship between the body and the territory. Along this boundary between observer and landscape, viewpoints can take on various configurations, from subtle gestures to monumental structures, always in response to their context. Regardless of scale, they are—to some extent—attempts to domesticate vastness: precise frames that render legible what might otherwise feel overwhelming without mediation.
Ambulance for Monuments is a first-aid initiative dedicated to safeguarding Romania's endangered built heritage, operating in a race against time to prevent collapse and irreversible loss. The project responds to the growing vulnerability of historic structures, from Saxon fortified churches and manor houses to wooden churches and rural landmarks, many of which no longer benefit from the community networks that once sustained them. In a country deeply affected by emigration since 1990, where nearly half the population still lives in rural areas, entire villages have lost the people, skills, and everyday care that once kept these monuments standing.
Built around a mobile intervention unit, an "Ambulance" equipped with tools, scaffolding, and on-site equipment, the initiative delivers urgent stabilization works that buy time for endangered buildings. Rather than replacing full restoration, these strategic interventions preserve historic fabric, ensure structural safety, and keep long-term conservation and adaptive reuse possible.
Symbols of technological development and urban density, tall buildings as we know them today emerged in the late 19th century, primarily in the United States, in response to rapid growth in urban commerce and the need to expand cities without consuming more land. The term skyscraper, for instance, was coined in the 1880s and originally referred to buildings of about 10 to 20 stories—an impressive height at the time.
However, the idea of building vertically is far older than steel-and-glass skyscrapers suggest. Long before the Industrial Revolution, several societies were already experimenting with vertical urbanization as a solution to spatial constraints, territorial defense, or environmental adaptation.
The relationship between architecture and gastronomy transcends the simple functionality of a dining space. It is a sensory symbiosis where the environment prepares the palate as much as the seasoning does. A dish's visual aesthetics can be understood through principles of volumetry, balance, contrast, and rhythm — concepts equally vital to architectural design. Likewise, restaurant architecture — its colors, lighting, and material choices — acts as an invisible ingredient that can elevate the dining experience or compromise the perception of flavor before the first bite. Both disciplines are dynamic and direct reflections of social behaviors and cultural trends that dictate how we occupy space and nourish our bodies.
Education and culture have long stood as strategic pillars for driving profound social transformation. In this context, the quality of physical infrastructure is not merely a functional matter, but a structuring element for the implementation of consistent public policies—particularly in areas marked by urban precarity, historical inequality, and institutional fragility. Against this backdrop, school architecture can take on a role that goes far beyond the classroom, becoming a catalyst for social transformation.
When positioning a house on its site, one of the first steps involves reading the surrounding territory, identifying its potential and tensions. In this process, we inevitably select, crop, hide, or enhance specific views, shaping the architectural experience according to the desired sensations.
Ultimately, this establishes a visual hierarchy that guides the eye, determining what should be seen, how, and with what emotional intensity, while defining how the user interprets their surroundings. In this context, design strategy goes beyond mere aesthetic choices, acting as a manipulation of the spatial phenomenological experience. By selecting a specific fragment of the horizon through a controlled opening, or dissolving the boundaries between interior and exterior with large glazed planes, architecture begins to operate as a lens. It can emphasize the smallness of the human scale against the vastness of the territory or, conversely, domesticate nature, incorporating it as a part of daily life.
Can architecture be built from food? Between the fire that warms, the aromas that spread, and the bodies that gather around the table, the apparent banality of cooking and eating reveals itself as a choreographed dance of spatial appropriation and belonging. These are gestures that organize routines, forge bonds, and transform the built environment into a lived place. The kitchen—whether domestic, communal, or urban—thus ceases to be merely a functional space, asserting itself instead as a territory for connection.
"Feeling at home" is more than just an expression—it is the sense of warmth and comfort that transforms a space into a true refuge. To achieve this, elements like color, texture, lighting, and materials play a crucial role in shaping an environment that fosters relaxation and well-being. Backed by research in environmental psychology and neuroscience, the connection between physical spaces and human behavior highlights how architecture can directly influence the atmosphere, turning chaos into tranquility.
In Latin America, encounters do not necessarily arise from grand architectural gestures or monumental urban plans. Instead, they emerge from the between, from intermediate spaces: the courtyard, the veranda, the sidewalk, and the shared corridor. These spaces, often considered residual or informal by traditional disciplines, are precisely where daily life builds connections.
This Latin American culture fosters a spatial logic in which daily life is organized in a relational and expansive way. Practices such as sitting at the front door, occupying the sidewalk, and playing in the street produce a lived city that extends far beyond the formal boundaries of design.
