The built environment has historically served humans as a mechanism of environmental control. Through our intellectual capacities and ability to organize, we have used buildings to actively influence and terraform the immediate context in which they are inserted, often treating geography, water, and ecosystems as resources to be extracted and managed. However, more and more, architecture is transitioning from exploiting physical and biological matter to actively collaborating with it. This shift demands that architects explore how buildings and their materials grow, transform, decay, and persist beyond human timelines. This thinking also serves as a starting point for the profession to reflect on how it influences the natural world, as well as the non-human species around it, creating networks and connections between humans, buildings, living organisms, and natural environments.
Best Presentation Award Winner. Image Courtesy of Buildner Unbuilt Award
In an industry defined by building codes, climate urgency, and the pressures of the real estate market, the architectural competition has quietly become one of the discipline's most generative spaces. Unburdened by budgets, clients, or city regulations, competition entries allow architects to think at the edge of what the built environment could be, and increasingly, that speculative work is being taken seriously as a cultural and intellectual contribution in its own right. Buildner's Unbuilt Award, now in its second edition, is one of those efforts, by treating the unbuilt project as a platform for architects and designers to share concepts that challenge boundaries and inspire future possibilities. In this way, competitions like this allow architecture professionals and students to showcase ideas and visions that, even without being constructed, reflect the spirit of exploration and ingenuity in architecture.
Every three years, the International Union of Architects' (UIA) World Congress lands in a different city, under a different theme set years in advance. A quick mapping of these host cities reveals a deliberate pattern: throughout the decades, the UIA has purposefully chosen a wide range of venues across all continents, rendering each edition a snapshot of what mattered in that specific place, at that exact moment. The result of this geographic rotation has been a diverse kaleidoscope of conversations, analyzing the profession from countless angles and adapting it to changing times. But 2026 is different; this time the UIA is repeating a host city for the first time: Barcelona, under the theme "Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition".
Concept : Living and Working on the Moon. Image Courtesy of NASA
After Artemis II's return to Earth, NASA unveiled a new phased plan to establish a Moon Base. Although most of the media's attention went to rockets, budgets, and geopolitical competition, a quieter question was lingering for architects in the background: How can a human being actually live on the surface of the Moon, and for how long? The establishment of a permanent human presence on the Moon marks a fundamental shift in space exploration that requires a new architectural paradigm. In their presentation, NASA officials suggested the strategy would drift away from highly constrained, vehicle-dependent environments toward autonomous, site-adaptive, and eventually permanently habitable structures.
The conversion of disused religious temples through cultural programs constitutes one of the most compelling adaptive reuse strategies in contemporary urban planning. This functional compatibility seems to be rooted in the specific characteristics of churches: their central naves offer large-scale, clear floor plans and monumental cross-sections that easily accommodate the volumetric requirements of museums, theaters, or community hubs. Furthermore, the acoustic properties inherent to their vaulted ceilings, combined with intentional natural lighting filtered through stained glass windows or domes, create the spatial conditions for activities ranging from the performing arts to the exhibition of cultural artifacts. By assuming a public and cultural role, these buildings not only avoid demolition or physical abandonment but also preserve their status as urban and identity landmarks within the city fabric, revitalizing their immediate surroundings without altering their historical significance.
Deep in western Honduras, within a valley near the Guatemalan border, lies the ancient Maya city of Copán. Flourishing during the Classic period between the fifth and ninth centuries CE, the city developed as a regional epicenter through trade networks, dynastic politics, and monumental architecture. Today, the site is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its extensive architectural remains, including stepped pyramids, sculpted stelae, and ceremonial core. Over a century of systematic archaeological research has documented its urban morphology, revealing distinct residential districts, civic spaces, and systems of movement and visibility.
This analysis examines the spatial organization of Copán through the framework of urban theorist Kevin Lynch and "The Image of the City". By applying Lynch's five structural elements — edges, districts, paths, nodes, and landmarks — it is possible to analyze how Copán functioned not only as a ritual center but as a legible urban landscape designed to reinforce political hierarchy and regulate collective movement. Historical data for this analysis was taken from books and articles linked throughout the text, and was possible thanks to the collaboration of historian Arnulfo Ramirez de la Costa, professor and coordinator of the History program in the Department of History at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) in Tegucigalpa.
Recent years have seen a shifting paradigm in multi-family residential architecture, as more and more new projects are being built with engineered wood, specifically Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) and glued-laminated timber (glulam). Because timber is lightweight, these systems can reduce dead load and ease foundation demands, which is especially useful on sites with limited bearing capacity or over existing infrastructure. From a sustainability standpoint, timber can store carbon over the life of the building and often reduces embodied carbon compared with conventional concrete-and-steel systems. In fire design, large timber members can be engineered to char at a predictable rate, allowing the structural core to remain protected for a defined period when detailed appropriately.
San Diego, California. Photo by Samuel Ramos on Unsplash
Very close to the Mexican border, in the southwest corner of the United States, lies the city of San Diego. Its urban history began in 1769 with the arrival of a Spanish military expedition commanded by Gaspar de Portola, which marked the first permanent settlement in the territory that was known as Alta California. However, unlike the more formally urbanized administrative capitals and towns of Mexico and Central America, San Diego was conceived as a frontier outpost. Today, it has become the second-largest city in California, just after Los Angeles, and its urban grid tells a story about the Hispanic heritage that is intertwined with the contemporary cultural environment of the United States.
When Mexico City hosted the Olympics in 1968, it was the first time the Games had been awarded to a Latin American country as well as the first time for a Spanish-speaking nation to host them. This made the games a good opportunity to project Mexico and its culture internationally, thus prompting the government to constitute an organizing committee with prominent local talent. They appointed Pedro Ramírez Vázquez as its president, a Mexican architect who held significant influence over the state's mid-century building program. His approach was explicit: architecture as a synthesis of international modernist technique with Pre-Columbian references and local material culture. Under his direction, the committee would oversee the construction and adaptation of venues distributed across the southern districts of Mexico City, nearly all designed and built by local architects, engineers, and technicians.
Remediation areas. Image Courtesy of Ezequiel Lopez, Maria Victoria Echegaray, and Agustina Durandez
When people think of Argentina, they often picture landmarks like the Obelisk of Buenos Aires. Yet the country spans over 2,780,400 km², making it one of the largest in South America and home to a wide range of landscapes and realities that frequently go unnoticed. In fact, the province of Jujuy in northern Argentina lies within the Lithium Triangle: a high-altitude region shared with Bolivia and Chile that contains roughly 54% of the world's lithium reserves. Within this territory sits the Olaroz Salt Flat, a site where today two competing dynamics converge: the expansion of industrial lithium extraction and the preservation of ancestral culture and lands inhabited by Kolla and Atacama communities, creating a clash of high-capacity industrial extraction and traditional, low-impact agrarian practices.
In light of this problem, one of the winning teams of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards, made up of Ezequiel Lopez, Maria Victoria Echegaray, and Agustina Durandez, decided to look into the issue. This was done as part of their thesis project for the Bachelor's in Architecture program at the National University of Córdoba. Their work stems from an interest in engaging with territories that remain peripheral to architectural discourse, using the thesis as an opportunity for sustained, in-depth research. This allowed them to formulate informed design responses grounded in both territorial and socio-economic realities. Rejecting the binary between extraction and preservation, the project approaches the territory as a system where both can coexist through spatial and technical mediation.
Honduras is the second-largest country in Central America, both in territory and population. Today, its urban fabric remains heavily influenced by modernist principles from the 1970s that prioritised high-speed arterial corridors and automobile-dependent "point-to-point" mobility. In addition, the country faced many challenges regarding public safety during the 2010s, which contributed to creating an urban space characterised by blind facades, high perimeter walls, and gated enclosures designed to isolate the interior from the public realm.
We had the opportunity to talk to Alejandra Ferrera, a Honduran architect raised in Danlí, a city in eastern Honduras. With over 15 years of practice across Brazil, the Netherlands, and Australia, she argues that while the security-driven design was a functional necessity of its time, it has resulted in a fragmented urban experience where the street serves only as a transit void rather than a place for social encounter. She suggests that even though this isolation was a justified safety measure, it created detachment between the inhabitants and the city. She also argues that overall, the public safety situation contributed to the creation of a wounded national identity that often looks outward for quality, dismissing the potential of its own context.
Pico House, part of Los Angeles Plaza Historic District. Image by Daniel L. Lu - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
Today, the urban form of Los Angeles is characterized by 20th-century sprawl and extensive automotive infrastructure. However, the physical reality of the city's original core reveals a more complex history that is deeply rooted in Hispanic heritage. In fact, Los Angeles did not originate from the standardized American land system that defines most of the United States' territory. Instead, it is a product of the Spanish urban tradition in the Americas, which followed a structure repeated across major cities on the continent. The intersection of these systems created a layered urban geometry and history that remains visible in the city's contemporary street patterns.
When Los Angeleswas founded in 1781 as a pueblo by Felipe de Neve, it was an outpost of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. Viceroyalties were political divisions of the Spanish territories in America, and by the late 18th century, New Spain was vast. It stretched from southern Costa Rica, all the way north to Alta California, bordering the east at the Mississippi River and the newly independent United States of America. At this time, Mexico City functioned as the primary administrative and economic hub, leaving frontier regions like Alta California to rely on a specific triad of settlements: missions (religious), presidios (military), and pueblos (civilian).
In recent decades, cities across the world have seen an increase in the demolition of elevated concrete freeways. Taipei, Seoul, Portland, and Boston, for example, have all seen the rise and fall of these infrastructures to give way to parks and new urban regeneration ideas. In other cases, like Montreal in Canada, some people opposed the freeways even before they were built, effectively rerouting viaducts, preserving heritage, and freeing waterfront views. For San Francisco, in the United States, the story of the Embarcadero Freeway is one of those narratives that serves as a case study of the city's mid-century infrastructural ambition, people's reaction to the project, and its eventual reversal in favor of urban connectivity.
In our current cities, urban density and rising land values often force a choice between large-scale civic buildings and open public space. Traditionally, plazas have been treated as areas surrounding a building's footprint, but this strategy was modified when pilotis were introduced by the early 20th-century modernist movement. While the original intent was to create a sense of lightness that would allow circulation and light to flow beneath a structure, contemporary requirements for seismic loads, fire egress, and heavy occupancies render thin columns insufficient for the needs of current large-scale civic projects.
However, the pursuit of architectural lightness is not a strictly contemporary phenomenon. Following the modernist introduction of pilotis, several mid-century projects began experimenting with the illusion of suspension to achieve civic transparency. In 1953, the National Congress of Honduras in Tegucigalpa, designed by Mario Valenzuela, applied these principles to a legislative setting. The building consists of a solid assembly chamber elevated on a series of slender columns. Because the site sits on a terrace at the end of a sloping street, the resulting void does more than just provide circulation; it frames views of the city, creating the impression that the heavy legislative mass is lightly suspended above the urban fabric.
In temperate and cold climates, architecture typically begins with a defensive gesture. The building envelope is a sealed boundary designed to resist the exterior environment through insulation, vapor barriers, and mechanical control. In cold countries like Canada, where winter temperatures can plunge well below freezing, airtightness is not a luxury. In this context, buildings must resist the exterior environment entirely to maintain interior comfort. However, in Central America, a region spanning from Belize to Panama, architectural logic shifts from exclusion to negotiation. In this region, the envelope is not a wall of defense but a specialized filter.
Costa Rica is a small country in Central America, internationally renowned for its tourism, biodiversity, and tropical climate. Given this context, tropical design strategies for hotel design are often more studied, but residential cabin projects can represent a more surgical approach to understanding the landscape. Often situated in remote forest or jungle locations, these cabins, apart from the common tropical design strategies, have to prioritize long-term durability and low-maintenance costs, particularly in regions where access for repairs is logistically difficult. This necessitates a design philosophy that favors both structural and climatic resilience.
Building in this context requires precise design responses to two primary environmental stressors: extreme precipitation and high humidity. Costa Rica's tropical climate, while varying by altitude, generally delivers an average monthly rainfall exceeding 150 mm in many regions. This constant water load can create a "wet-bulb" effect, where stagnant, saturated air accelerates interior material degradation and creates physiological discomfort for the inhabitants. To design effectively under these conditions, contemporary cabin architecture employs a three-fold strategy of minimal site invasion, the creation of thermal gradients, and passive climate mitigation.
Rendering of the Gateway via Flickr under license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Image Courtesy of NASA
The concept of the technosphere provides a framework for understanding the scale of human impact on Earth. The term was coined by Peter K. Haff, and it is defined as the global network of human-made artifacts: a physical layer of infrastructure, buildings, vehicles, and machinery that functions alongside the biosphere and atmosphere. Currently estimated at 30 trillion tons, this human-constructed mass is dominated by the built environment. In this context, architecture serves as the primary interface, shaping how technology interacts with local ecologies. However, it seems that soon, the Technosphere will no longer be confined to the terrestrial surface. Through NASA's Artemis program, this network of human-made mass is expanding beyond Earth's atmosphere and is looking to establish new orbital infrastructure that represents the first permanent off-world extension of this man-made system.
Diagram of the services in Barba Jupiter. Image Courtesy of Géométral
Founded in 2022 by Clément Masurier and based in Paris, France, Géométral is an architectural practice defined by design strategies that are linked to the landscape, which it treats as a primary determinant of form. The studio, one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, approaches each project as a small universe that combines program, atmosphere, and spatial narratives. Rather than a single signature style, they focus on crafting moods and situations tailored to each context and user.
In its early stages, the studio lacked a built portfolio and responded by developing "fictional architectures" situated on real topographies. This exercise was not merely an aesthetic pursuit but a methodological anchor, as it allowed the firm to establish a rigorous process of site analysis and typological testing before receiving physical commissions. By treating imaginary projects with the same technical scrutiny as real ones, the studio developed a library of formal responses to environmental constraints that now dictate their built work.
