This week, architecture's relationship with culture took center stage through exhibitions, public projects, and new cultural infrastructure that extend architectural discourse beyond the building itself. While major exhibitions from Australia, Shanghai, Barcelona, and Copenhagen examined themes of housing, landscape, and place through research and design, newly unveiled projects in China and Italy demonstrate how museums, performance venues, and mixed-use projects are increasingly conceived as open public landscapes rather than isolated institutions, while new exhibitions and construction milestones reflect ongoing experimentation in adaptive reuse, context-responsive design, and flexible urban environments.
The Grand Paris Express project consists of 200 kilometers of new, fully automated metro lines, 68 new stations, and four new orbital lines (15, 16, 17, and 18), in addition to the extension of Line 14. The network is being delivered in phases between 2024 and 2031: Line 14's 8 stations are fully operational following its 2024 extension, Line 18 is the most advanced of the new lines, with testing underway ahead of its first opening, and civil engineering is largely complete on many sections, with tracks, systems, architectural fit-out, and testing now progressing station by station. Each of the 68 stations is assigned to a specific architect or architectural team, sometimes in collaboration with landscape architects for above-ground elements.
In 1968, the furniture designer and RCA professor David Pye published The Nature and Art of Workmanship, a book built around a distinction between "workmanship of risk" and the "workmanship of certainty." Pye was not writing about architecture, and despite how the phrase gets used today, he was not really writing about hands versus machines either. He pointed out that a printing press, entirely mechanical, still depends on someone judging the ink and the register, while a woodturner working a lathe by hand can follow a template closely enough that almost nothing is left to chance.
Workmanship of risk, in Pye's definition, is any process where the outcome is not fixed in advance but depends on the judgment, dexterity, and attention the maker exercises while the work is still underway. Workmanship of certainty is the opposite condition, as the result is settled before production begins, locked into a jig, a mold, or a program, so that everything downstream is execution. Pye was careful to note that neither mode is inherently superior and that a numerically controlled machine, calibrated to leave room for drift, can sit closer to risk than a hand tool run to a fixed template.
As pillars of our cultural landscape, many masterpieces of the Modern Movement are often demolished, abandoned, or altered regardless of the context in which they are located. Preserving this architectural legacy highlights the role of architecture and design professionals in shaping built environments where continuity between the past and the present reinforces communities' sense of place. On Long Island, a coalition of advocates came together to save the A. Conger Goodyear House, which dates to 1938 and was designed by Edward Durell Stone. Considered one of the notable examples of the International Style in the United States, the house attracted significant attention throughout the 1940s, appearing in specialized journals, books, and popular publications.
Second Prize Winner: A stair, a spiral, or a park. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner has announced the results of its third edition Architect's Stair international architecture ideas competition. The event invited designers to reflect on one of architecture's oldest and most symbolic elements: the stair. Beyond its functional role as a connector of levels, the stair was positioned here as a medium of architectural storytelling—an invitation to explore ideas of procession, sequence, space, and form.
MVRDV Bihailou Art Village. Image Courtesy of MVRDV
Designed by MVRDV, Bihailou Art Village is a mixed-use cultural and commercial centre currently under construction in Shenzhen, China. Located in the Shatoujiao neighborhood near the Hong Kong border, the mixed-use project combines cultural, commercial, and public programs within a vertically stacked composition derived from the firm's "Vertical Village" concept. Designed to accommodate independently operating venues while maintaining publicly accessible circulation, the development reinterprets the scale and spatial character of the surrounding urban fabric through a series of distinct volumes.
MAD / Ma Yansong's Shenzhen Bay Culture Square exhibition hall and park project began in 2018, with the project completed in 2020. The 188,000 m² building sits on a site area of approximately 51,000 m² along the city's waterfront, at the heart of Houhai, Nanshan District, the headquarters hub of Shenzhen's Greater Bay Area. The masterplan for the site, which includes the Creative Design Hall, the Shenzhen Science and Technology Museum, and a vast public green space, was announced by MAD in 2020 and was expected to be completed in 2023. After eight years, the project, led by Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, and Yosuke Hayano, is now complete and is intended to serve as a cultural facility for design and cultural exchange.
The center of a plan is never simply empty space. Once rooms and routes begin to organize around it, the center starts to structure the entire plan. It may contain a courtyard, a stair, a garden, or a shared room. It can also preserve something already present on the site or support a process that architecture does not fully control. What occupies this position determines how the surrounding spaces are arranged, connected, and used.
In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein describe shared spaces as most effective when they sit at the center of gravity of everyday life and remain connected to the routes people use most. Their argument suggests that a center matters not because it occupies the geometric middle, but because the surrounding rooms, paths, and activities give it spatial weight. The projects included here extend that idea beyond communal space, showing how the center can organize circulation, collective use, environmental systems, and the relationship between architecture and what already exists on the site.
Photographer Paul Clemence has unveiled a new photo series documenting Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France. The collection revisits one of the 20th century's most influential works of religious architecture through an exploration of light, materiality, and atmosphere, highlighting the sculptural qualities of the chapel and the changing relationship between its concrete surfaces and natural illumination. Combining black-and-white exterior photographs with color interior images, the series presents a new documentation of a building that continues to shape architectural discourse more than seven decades after its completion.
The idea of a "Great Green Wall" designates a large-scale reforestation initiative undertaken specifically to halt desertification. Currently underway in Africa to prevent the advancement of the Sahara Desert and in China around the Gobi Desert, it is a landscape, agriculture, economic, and social development project in reaction to the rise of global temperatures, over-farming, and unsuitable land management. Both projects, currently underway, are intersectional initiatives involving governments from different countries, civil society organisations, and both individual volunteers and organised groups, guided by the idea of a unified response to global environmental issues through wildlife restoration. It is a large-scale, infrastructural application of a 'green' or 'wildlife corridor': a linear strip of vegetation or natural landscape that connects fragmented ecosystems and wildlife populations separated by human development on a continental scale.
While pyramidal geometry appears in monumental historical structures, its contemporary application remains limited. The primary constraint is the sloping envelope, which contracts the building's floor area as it ascends and reduces usable interior volume compared to orthogonal or cylindrical forms. However, from a structural standpoint, the geometry offers lateral stability against wind and seismic loads due to its broad base, central mass distribution, and self-bracing triangular faces. Nonetheless, applying this shape at a residential scale introduces several layout constraints. These slanted walls limit vertical wall surfaces, which complicates the placement of standard windows, doors, and floor partitions. At the same time, the low clearance along the perimeter also creates unusable floor area at the edges of the room.
When Francis Kéré set out to build a school in his home village of Gando, Burkina Faso, he chose clay, a material his own community associated with scarcity, not architecture. To prove it could hold, he built test bricks and submerged one in water for five days before showing his neighbors it hadn't failed. Then he trained the villagers themselves to raise the walls, rather than bringing in a construction crew from the city. More than 200 people from Gando have since worked as builders because of that choice. The school carries something a materials list alone cannot: the trace of the hands that will go on living in the village long after the scaffolding came down.
Museum of Art Pudong (MAP) in Shanghai is presenting "Jean Nouvel: Without the Artist, Architecture Disappears" until August 31, 2026. Marking the museum's fifth anniversary, the exhibition is dedicated to the work of Pritzker Prize laureate Jean Nouvel and represents the first time the French architect has staged a solo exhibition inside a building of his own design. Organized by the Museum of Art Pudong in partnership with Ateliers Jean Nouvel, the exhibition brings together architectural models, films, archival documents, installations, and a reconstruction of the architect's Paris studio to examine more than fifty years of architectural practice.
This decision, however, points to a challenge shared by almost every heritage system worldwide: how to legally protect architecture that has not yet reached the minimum age—formal or informal—to be considered "historic"?
Prefabricated Building Viña del Mar by ELEMENTAL. Image Courtesy of ELEMENTAL
Displacement is usually understood through movement: the moment people are forced to move from one place to another. Yet from an architectural perspective, that movement is only the beginning of what comes next. A house may need to be rebuilt, an entire community relocated, or everyday life reestablished somewhere completely new. What is lost through displacement is not always something architecture can simply replace.
This question is particularly relevant in Latin America, where displacement has shaped communities under different circumstances and at different scales. What happens afterward depends on why people were forced to move, whether they can return, and what remains of the places they inhabited. Some communities rebuild within familiar surroundings. Others must establish everyday life somewhere new. These differences shape what architecture is being asked to do.
Imagine a corridor. Concrete walls two meters apart, a low ceiling, artificial lighting with neither shadow nor gradation. At the far end, a bulletproof glass window, and on the other side, a uniformed officer. You are at a port of entry. It could be in Calais, El Paso, or Lampedusa. An anonymous space, yet far from neutral. Designed so that anyone can understand: passage is not a right; it is a concession.
Yet, this corridor is no exception; rather, it is the expression of an architectural language repeated across contemporary borders. Labyrinthine airports, screening stations, walls—architectures that turn hostility into a defining element of space, demonstrating that it transcends the stern expression of the person behind the glass.
For millions of displaced children and young people, education unfolds amid conditions of forced mobility, administrative uncertainty, and prolonged precarity. Schools situated in borderlands, refugee settlements, and sites of climate-induced displacement therefore operate as more than educational facilities. They become spatial infrastructures that negotiate the contradictory demands of emergency and continuity, offering environments where learning persists despite the instability of legal status, living conditions, and the very feeling of being at home.
According to UNHCR, approximately 45 million of the world's 117.8 million forcibly displaced people were children under the age of eighteen at the end of 2025. As displacement increasingly results from armed conflict, political persecution, environmental crises, and economic instability, humanitarian architecture faces a growing challenge: not simply how to construct more schools rapidly, but how to create educational environments capable of supporting continuity, safety, and belonging amid uncertain futures.
An architecture degree provides the foundations of the discipline, but the transition into professional practice often extends well beyond the classroom. Building experience, developing a portfolio, and navigating the realities of architectural offices are challenges that many graduates face in their first years of practice.
Museo Nacional del Ecuador (MuNA) by SANAA, Estudio A0, Caá Porá Arquitectura, Jerome Haferd Studio, Taller Capital Landscape. Image Courtesy of Jerome Haferd Studio
Architecture across Latin America this month reflects a growing emphasis on adaptation, whether responding to environmental risks, rethinking cultural institutions, or extending the life of existing buildings. Recent developments reveal a regional conversation shaped by resilience, heritage, and public space, where architecture is increasingly understood as part of broader urban, social, and environmental systems. From the aftermath of major earthquakes in Venezuela to the debate surrounding Ecuador's future National Museum, the month's stories highlight how design is intertwined with questions of identity, civic life, and long-term sustainability.
Parlour Gardens exhibition at Barcelona's Botanical Garden. June to October 2026. Image Courtesy of Marina Cervera
As part of the official programme for Barcelona as the UNESCO-UIA World Capital of Architecture, the Jardí Botànic de Barcelona is hosting "Parlour Gardens: Dreams from the Rooftop," a display of ceramic installations proposing a journey through landscape architecture. Curated by Marina Cervera (Barcelona International Landscape Biennial, CEO of NablaBCN), James Hayter (former president of IFLA, Oxigen), and José Luis Cortés (former president of the UIA), the exhibition marks a century since the 1926 invention of the jardinets de saló (living room or parlour gardens), miniature ceramic landscape worlds created originally by Nicolau M. Rubió i Tudurí, Llorenç Artigas, and Raoul Dufy. Installations by 14 global landscape architects will be scattered across the botanical grounds, grouped by homoclimatic zones to pair each design with fitting regional plant life, through 4 October 2026.
Contemporary housing architecture faces the pressing demands of the global housing deficit and growing urban populations. In architectural practice, we see recurring experimentation with new forms of collective living, taking on the task of offering spaces for personal, family, and community development. The six unbuilt projects presented here show us different facets of the decision to densify: the relationship with pre-existing and planned nature, the availability of urban or suburban land, the development of complementary intermediate spaces that support collective life and ease the experience of density, the replicability of densification models, and the relationship with the neighborhood that accommodates population growth.
Beyond the structural grids lies a layer of design that dictates how a room feels the moment someone crosses the threshold. Recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in partnership with INDX|GLOBAL, the final episode of the Room For Dreams podcast covers the unseen atmospheric energy that gives architecture its emotional weight.
