Ana García, architect and founder of NeuronaLab, recently interviewed Aureli Soria-Frish from the company Starlab. They discussed how the latest technological advances are increasingly being used to objectify neural activity and the emotional states associated with architectural spaces. Below, she shares her key reflections.

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Mexican interior designer and artist Olga Hanono has been invited to present her latest exhibition, DREAMVILLE, at La Biennale de Venezia Modigliani Opera Vision, from May 1 to July 31, 2022. The collection is inspired by the human capacity to dream, reflecting on imaginary objects that might exist within a dreamscape, along with the variety of colors and shapes found in distant stars, planets, and galaxies. Hanono has created art pieces and furniture using unconventional, luxurious materials.

For the third time since its founding in 2002, Colombia will host the Latin American Social Workshop of Architecture Students under the name 'Tejiendo Paisajes: TSL Manizales 2022', marking the event's first edition since the start of the pandemic.

The Provincial Ideas and Preliminary Design Competition for the development of a prototype for Innovative Social, Urban, and Sustainable Housing (V.I.S.U.S.) was organized by the Architects' Association of the Province of Córdoba. Promoted by the Construction Cluster of the Province of Córdoba and supported by ADEC's Competitiveness Fund, the initiative seeks to address the growing housing deficit by fostering debate on how architects approach multi-family condominium housing as well as single-family social housing in Argentina.

The winning projects of the 2020-2022 edition of the Richard H. Driehaus International Architecture Competition have been announced, aimed at honoring architectural and urban planning practices rooted in the culture, materials, and resources of each territory. With three Spanish sites selected for this edition, the goal is to preserve and promote local traditions and identity, as well as the circular economy, craftsmanship, and the use of sustainable, reusable materials from the surrounding area.

This year we celebrate the fourteenth edition of the Obra del Año 2022 award—the highest recognition in the Spanish-speaking architectural world, where the winners are chosen by popular vote. Starting today, Tuesday, March 8, our readers will be responsible for determining which projects inspired us during 2021, faithfully representing the identity of our local contexts while shaping the way architecture is practiced around the world.

Over the next three weeks, the entire ArchDaily en Español network (Plataforma Arquitectura, ArchDaily México, ArchDaily Colombia and ArchDaily Perú) will serve as the platform to celebrate the best built architecture in Spanish-speaking America and Spain.

With nearly a thousand projects published in 2021, you can easily find your favorites by browsing through each category and using the search engine to filter projects by country and architecture firm. 

The 2022 Obra del Año Award is brought to you by Dornbracht, renowned for its design leadership in architecture, which can be found internationally in bathrooms and kitchens.

Twenty years after its first edition in Colombia, the Latin American Social Workshop returns to the South American country. In this edition, students from across Latin America, alongside architects from Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile, are intervening in three areas in the coffee-growing city of Manizales: a rural settlement in the middle of the mountain range, a self-managed park, and the slopes of an informal pedestrian neighborhood.

Here, we invite you to explore the progress made by the architectural teams participating in the 18th Latin American Social Workshop (TSL XVIII) in Manizales.

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CHINAS CHINAS is a research project conducted by FLORA. It maps a trajectory through the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, based on a typological analysis of Chinese supermarkets. Its objective is to recognize and explore the modes of appropriation and domestic micro-scales that occur within them, demonstrating that urban architecture is shaped by everyday banalities. Ultimately, architecture takes on meaning when living conditions are defined by the people themselves. Inhabiting—beyond mere functionality—is precisely about this.

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During the summer of 2021, the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, hosted the first edition of a new platform created to discuss, exhibit, and celebrate the national design scene. Mexico Design Fair was established with the primary goal of promoting the acquisition of contemporary Mexican design to strengthen its positioning, while understanding and transcending the dynamics of the international market. This inaugural event featured key figures from today's design scene, such as Proyector and Pablo Kobayashi, who created temporary installations along the coast of Puerto Escondido. Other activities included the "Designer of the Year" award ceremony, presented to Mexican designer Liliana Ovalle.

The fourth season of the podcast Causa Común—a co-production between Fundación Lepe and Fundación Aldea for the OH! Stgo festival, held in mid-January in Santiago, Chile—explores the past, present, and future of the capital, alongside the role of its inhabitants in prioritizing the common good and collaborative ways of making, inhabiting, and imagining our shared home.

Directed and coordinated by Francisca Cordero, Soledad Díaz de la Fuente, Magdalena Novoa, and Trinidad Piriz, the six-episode season examines the everyday stories, communities, monuments, and public spaces we inhabit from new perspectives. Featured topics range from the multiple identities of a public square, female leadership in housing projects, and the construction of urban memory, to island hills as socio-environmental opportunities, Mapuche urban dwelling, and the GAM building as an exponent of architecture and social change.

"Lima La Impostergable" (Lima, Unpostponable) is an initiative by the Lima Regional Chapter of the College of Architects of Peru. It aims to establish a roadmap for priority issues to be addressed by the 2023–2026 municipal administration of Metropolitan Lima and Callao, built through a platform of citizen engagement.

In November 2021, the ADUS Award in the "Professional Urban Design (Project)" category was presented to the team from Signare Estudio, composed of architects Isabel Loredo Pecho and Juan José Quiun Montes, for their project "Plaza Cultural de la Danza" in Lircay, Peru.

The award aims to highlight architectural projects that lead to a more sustainable world, based on the premise that architecture drives sustainable trends and improves the quality of life in our cities and the habitat as a whole.

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The project “Moray, the lost territory – Experiencing Muyus” was developed as part of AAVS Nanoturismo, an experimental teaching, research, and development program by the AA Visiting School of the Architectural Association, School of Architecture in London, United Kingdom. It was carried out by a multidisciplinary team in 2019 in Maras, Cusco, Peru.

Nanotourism reconsiders traditional tourism, shifting it toward a critical, creative, and local perspective. Accordingly, the study utilized the PAR (Participatory Action Research) method, which, through participation, action, and research, identified key “hidden” aspects within this context.

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As part of the cultural program for Art Week and as a response to the pandemic crisis, a new space has opened its doors in Mexico City to reimagine our current situation and rethink our relationship with public space and the Chapultepec Forest. From the roots of change generated by this crisis emerged the opportunity to recover and repurpose the iconic building known as "Restaurante Lago"—inaugurated on October 24, 1964, and designed by architect Alfonso Ramírez Ponce—giving it a new purpose: "to transform the private into public, the exclusive into inclusive, the social into cultural. To peel back the layers of history and return the present to its origin, rediscovering an icon of 1960s modern architecture."

An increasing number of disciplines are engaging with the right to housing. Whether in the realms of architecture, law, economics, urban planning, geography, or political science, diverse voices have sought to identify the obstacles to its fulfillment, especially within increasingly hostile urban environments. Yet, while we all talk about the right to housing, we are not speaking of the same thing.

On Route 104, km 4.5 in Manantiales, Uruguay, stands the new Atchugarry Museum of Contemporary Art (MACA), located on the grounds of the Pablo Atchugarry Foundation. Open to the general public, the building designed by architect Carlos Ott aims to promote the development of national artists while placing Uruguay on the map of major international exhibitions.

"Every person has the right to decent and adequate housing that allows for the free development of personal, family, and community life," states the provision that advanced to the draft of Chile's new Constitution. The draft is being prepared by the Constitutional Convention—a 155-member political body tasked with drafting and approving the proposal for a new agreement for the Republic, which was enabled by the October 2020 plebiscite and driven by the social protests that took place in the country in October 2019.

“Architecture is embedded storytelling,” wrote Marco Frascari. Emphasizing the reciprocity between architecture and narrative throughout his career, this Italian architect, theorist, and educator saw stories as the key to creating a “nontrivial”—and therefore transcendent—architecture. It is from his ideas, writings, teachings, and studies that the reflection inspiring this text arises.

Cooperative housing, or co-housing, is a residential model that promotes access to housing in cities. This model first developed in countries like Denmark and Uruguay, and it is becoming increasingly popular throughout Europe. Indeed, it arrived in Barcelona several years ago and has since steadily expanded throughout the region, spreading beyond the boundaries of the Catalan capital. Below, we explore the cooperative housing model in Barcelona and how it contributes to a more democratic architecture for its citizens.

The team led by Mathias Klotz and Sebastián Mundi of the architecture firms Klotz and SML has been unanimously selected in the open call for the heritage reconversion of the former CCU Brewery in Limache, the Chilean company announced today in a press release.

This project seeks to preserve the brewing heritage represented by the iconic building founded in 1883, through a museum open to the public. 

More than a decade ago, a new initiative emerged to redefine the architectural pedagogical system. With an influence that today spans countries like Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Venezuela, Guatemala, and the United States, the Virtual Workshop of the Americas (TVA) successfully and synergistically brings together education, collectivity, and virtuality. Architects Nahuel Salcedo and Celeste Gómez Lahoz are part of the coordination team driving this project forward year after year. Here, they explain the initiative in greater detail.

Manuel Bouzas and Santiago del Águila, the authors of La catenaria y el arco in the courtyard of Can Balaguer (by architects Flores & Prats) in Palma de Mallorca, present their urban installation ‘Lucerna,’ created for the A Cel Obert ephemeral architecture festival in Tortosa in October 2021.

This monumental lamp, standing over 6 meters tall and covering an area of 55 square meters, hangs from the main courtyard of the Purissima Concepció monastery, radically transforming this 17th-century building through light and color.

In the second half of the twentieth century, driven by the mass adoption of the automobile and exponential population growth, cities around the world expanded at an accelerated pace. Santiago, Chile, was no exception, characterized by an extensive and fragmented urban sprawl that has led to a heavy reliance on cars, environmental degradation, and the loss of agricultural land. Without planning and policies aimed at sustainable urban development, the result is a more polluted and less green city—an alarming scenario considering the climate crisis we face.

Proximity, understood as an urban quality that facilitates the management and pursuit of daily life, has for decades been a key tenet of feminist and gender-responsive urbanism. In the 1970s, academics from various disciplines began analyzing the link between the configuration and use of space and gender relations and roles. Since then, a robust critique of the androcentric configuration of the city has emerged, alongside proposals and criteria to rethink spaces from a gender perspective.