The results of the public design competition for the Santa Iria da Azóia Health Unit Project in Loures were recently announced. Organized by the Loures Municipal Council with technical support from the Southern Regional Section of the Order of Architects (OASRS), the team from LXM Studio, led by architect João Lisboa, was awarded first place. The jury, consisting of architects João Félix and Carlos Santos from the Loures Municipal Council and architect Victor Neves (appointed by OASRS), noted that of the 35 proposals evaluated, the winning entry stood out for its seamless integration with the surroundings, contributing to an effective visual and landscape revitalization of the adjacent space. The jury also noted that “the solution designed for the exterior openings is innovative and highly functional.”

Santa Iria de Azóia is a Portuguese town in the municipality of Loures, with an area of 7.52 km² and 18,240 inhabitants (2011 data). The site is located in the Pirescoxe area of Santa Iria da Azóia, where the built cultural heritage closest to the intervention area features two prominent buildings: the Pirescoxe Castle, classified as a Property of Public Interest, and the Pirescoxe Convent. The general objectives of the competition were:

Born in Slovakia in 1921, architect Hans Broos began his career in Brazil in 1953, after graduating in Germany in 1949. His brief European career was marked by the reconstruction of Germany, during which he worked alongside architect Egon Eiermann as his assistant at the Technical University of Karlsruhe. During this period, Broos came into contact with Le Corbusier and his principles of modern architecture. Aligned from the beginning with the architects of the Modern Movement, Broos developed his first works in Blumenau and Florianópolis, in the state of Santa Catarina, far from major Brazilian urban centers. Throughout his professional life, the architect addressed a wide range of programs—from residential and industrial to religious, commercial, and social projects—over a career spanning more than 50 years and nearly 400 projects. Of these, approximately 100 were built in various states, including Santa Catarina, São Paulo, Pernambuco, and Goiás. The architect passed away in 2011.

The challenge proposed by the competition, aimed at students, was to redefine the highway motel typology, creating a building that would engage with the Rio de Janeiro skyline and focus on design and entertainment for its guests.

According to the jury, “Many proposals focused on autonomous volumetric design, as if shifting volumes to meet a functional solution could account for the complexity required for urban integration. Therefore, the most critical evaluation criteria were program innovation, proper circulation planning, and the interaction between architecture and open spaces. In this regard, the proposals that managed to leverage the site's potential achieved the competition's objectives: the creation of an URBAN Motel.”

See the winners below.

The competition sought the urban, environmental, sociocultural, economic, and management design of a 514-hectare area in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. Located on flood-prone land along the Paraguay River near the Historic Center, the area features high environmental and social vulnerability, with thousands of families living in precarious settlements in high-risk zones. A total of 41 projects were submitted by participants from the United States, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Paraguay. The Brazilian team—composed of the firms TESE Tecnologia Arquitetura e Cultura LTDA and Oficina Urbana de Arquitetura (OUA)—received the only honorable mention.

The brief called for an urban design proposal, including the design of public spaces, aimed at connecting the area with the rest of the city and fostering the relationship between the city and the river, based on the principles and guidelines of the Master Plan for the Northern Coastal Fringe. The evaluation criteria focused on the need to recover and enhance the urban-environmental dimension of the intervention area, alongside developing a strategy for its connection to the city, strengthening its identity and potential, and providing physical and visual accessibility and permeability within an integrated urban intervention vision. See the overall competition results and the Brazilian team's project, along with their project description, below.

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The Agisa Todeschini Ideas Competition brought together architects and students of architecture and urbanism to select and award the three best free-design concepts utilizing one or more habitable modules as an interactive space for the beneficiary institution. In addition to a cash prize, the competition winner will design a furnished habitable module to be built and donated to Lar Infantil Sol Amigo—an organization supporting vulnerable children in Curitiba—to serve as an educational and interactive space.

Few neighborhoods possess a collection of modern residential architecture of such high caliber as Higienópolis. Works by Vilanova Artigas, Artacho Jurado, and Rino Levi, among many other prominent architects, coexist with historic mansions along its tree-lined streets. The planned subdivision was the first in São Paulo to feature gas lighting, street trees, streetcar lines, and water and sewage networks. Furthermore, because it is located mostly on higher ground, it did not suffer from flooding and was less prone to diseases such as yellow fever, typhus, and malaria. Originally settled by São Paulo's aristocracy, the neighborhood remains highly valued and sought-after today. Particularly between the 1940s and 1950s, numerous plots were developed with modern buildings characterized by outstanding design, construction quality, and generous spaces.

The illustrations were developed by Fabrizio Lenci, architect, illustrator, and partner at Vapor 324, for the newspaper *A quadra*, based on a selection curated by André Scarpa. Below, discover a brief history of each of the illustrated buildings:

The results of the competition for the Brazilian Pavilion at EXPO 2020 were announced today, November 12. The objective of the competition was to select a proposal and subsequently commission the complete Executive Project (Architectural Design, Complementary Engineering Projects, and Exhibition Design), construction supervision, consulting, and related services for the Brazilian Pavilion at the World Expo. The competition was promoted by Apex-Brasil (Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency) and organized by the Federal District Department of the Institute of Architects of Brazil (IAB/DF). 

According to the competition brief, “the Brazilian Pavilion should highlight diversity with the theme TOGETHER FOR DIVERSITY, sub-divided into nature, people, and tomorrow (Together for Nature, Together for People, and Together for Tomorrow). These are the starting points for the architects to showcase the diversity of fauna and flora, the ethnic, creative, and cultural multiplicity of our people, and present Brazil as a unifying country, as well as a key global actor in international sustainability issues. The keyword summarizing the Brazilian theme is sociobiodiversity—and the Brazilian Pavilion, from its conception, must reflect this unique characteristic of the country.”

The results of the National Public Architecture Competition for the Memorial to the Victims of Kiss were announced this Tuesday morning (April 10) in a ceremony held in Santa Maria. The project unanimously awarded first place was by the firm Motta e Zene Engenharia e Arquitetura, from São Paulo (SP), represented by architect Felipe Zene Motta. The ceremony also recognized the five ranked projects and the five that received honorable mentions.

According to the jury, the proposal stands out for its appropriate urban integration and placement at the average level of the terrain, its symbolic character, and the delicacy of placing its focal point in a flower garden at the center of the exhibition. The project reinforces the emotional significance of the site of memory, while offering the city a narrative of the event that contributes to healing. Ease and simplicity of construction and maintenance are supported by the spatial organization of functions on a single level.

See the full results below:

The IABsp Awards, one of the most anticipated and competitive honors in Brazilian architecture, revealed yesterday, December 7, the 2018 winners across 14 categories. Over the years, since its first edition in 1968, the IABsp awards have established themselves as an important platform for critique, recognition, and dissemination of national architecture and urbanism, promoting the exchange of ideas and new solutions among Brazilian architects.

In addition to the category awards, the Rino Levi Prize was awarded for lifetime achievement. This year, the honor went to Rosa Kliass for her lifetime body of work in landscape architecture.

Discover the winners in each category below:

Foundations are certainly not the structural elements on which architects spend the most time during the design process. Since they are typically underground and serve a strictly technical purpose, this decision is usually left to structural engineers. However, foundations play a crucial role in construction, as they are the structural elements that transfer building loads to the ground.

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The official results for the National Competition for the Requalification of the Public Space of the Monumental Axis of Maringá have been released. This central urban area lies between Cathedral Square (Praça da Catedral) and the Vila Olímpica sports complex. Totaling approximately 169,000 square meters, the Monumental Axis includes gardens, public spaces, parking areas, and perimeter paving along the building facades. Due to the site's vast scale, proposals had to be presented in seven sectors to facilitate phased bidding and construction. The winning project was designed by a team comprising Pedro Paes Lira, Manoela Muniz Machado, Julia Marini, Laura Figueiredo, and Juliette Tellier from the firm Natureza Urbana, with landscape consulting by Bianca Vasone, Gabriella Ornaghi, and Lilian Dazzi, and engineering consulting by Alexandre Horiye Ferreira and Felipe Macedo Barbosa.

The jury, composed of architects and urban planners Haroldo Pinheiro, José Gilberto Purpur, Mario Figueroa, Orlando Busarello, and Renato Leão Rego, selected the following winners:

The Housing Development Company of the Federal District (CODHAB/DF) continues to release the results of design competitions, establishing itself as a benchmark for institutions across the country by holding competitions to ensure high-quality construction through a clear and democratic selection process for the most qualified technical, scientific, or artistic proposals. This latest edition features the National Public Urban Planning and Architecture Design Competition for the QNR 06 Housing Sector, in the Administrative Region of Ceilândia.

Most of Europe's future housing already exists, yet renovation continues to happen too slowly to address climate, housing, health and resource challenges at the scale required. Re:Living explores how renovation can move from isolated projects to a scalable approach for transforming existing buildings. At the heart of the initiative is a new research project, The Housing We Need for the Future We Want, which examines how better use of the existing building stock can unlock new opportunities for architects, cities and communities.

Videos

An experiential rebellion takes center stage in the fourth episode of the Room For Dreams podcast, hitting directly at the heart of today's screen-deep, image-obsessed design culture. Recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in cooperation with INDX|GLOBAL, host Claire Broadka sits down with four Indian architectural voices — Indrajit Kembhavi, Manish Gulati, Sanjay Singh, and Sidhartha Talwar — to explore a critical question: have we sacrificed the soul of architecture for the sake of a picture-perfect Instagram post?

One of the defining qualities of contemporary interiors is flexibility. Offices, education facilities, hotels, and cultural venues need to be adaptable. They require spaces that can expand, divide, open, and close according to different activities, without sacrificing comfort, or accoustics. How a space is subdivided, then, is no longer a secondary decision, but a central component of architectural performance.

In 1743, a small cabin suspended by ropes was installed in a courtyard of the Palace of Versailles for the private use of King Louis XV. Manually operated by servants hidden from view, the so-called "flying chair" allowed movement between floors without stairs, and unknowingly introduced one of the central questions of modern architecture: how to move people vertically in a way that is efficient, safe, and integrated into the building.

The mechanization of this principle, with the introduction of a safety elevator in the early 1850s, paved the way for an unprecedented urban transformation. Without the elevator, the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York in the 1880s would have been unfeasible not because of structural limitations, but because of access. The elevator made it possible to build higher, and it also defined the logic of how these buildings would operate, where their cores would be placed, how their lobbies would be organized, and who could reach which spaces.

Set on the banks of the Sava River in Belgrade, Serbia, the site of a former cement factory became the starting point for the 21st edition of the Saint-Gobain Architecture Student Contest. Organized in cooperation with the World Green Building Council, OneClick LCA, the City of Belgrade, the Academic Yachting Club Belgrade, the Serbia Green Building Council, and the Green & Blue Corridors Association, invited students to imagine a new Sports and Recreation Hub capable of transforming an industrial waterfront into a year-round public destination. More than 200 universities from 34 countries participated in this 21^stedition of the Architecture Student Contest.

Videos

The third episode of the Room For Dreams podcast confronts one of the most pressing dilemmas in modern urban planning: how to breathe in new life into old structures without erasing their history. Recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in cooperation with INDX|GLOBAL, this dynamic session gathers a panel of architects — Kiran Gala, Vivek Gupta, and Carl Bhesania — to unpack the complex realities of adaptive reuse.