Multigenerational homes, educational buildings, and workplaces raise different questions about how architecture accommodates everyday life in India. Across the projects featured in Built99, these questions inform decisions about spatial organization, relationships with the landscape, daylight, and materials.

The guide presents 99 architecture practices through projects that reflect a range of approaches across the country. Courtyards, verandas, and perforated screens help negotiate privacy, daylight, and ventilation. Elsewhere, the adaptation of existing buildings and the incorporation of regional craftsmanship connect contemporary uses with local building traditions.

Sharjah, the captivating territory in the United Arab Emirates, is a cultural hub that blends tradition with contemporary modernity. Situated on the Arabian coastline, the city is known for its commitment to preserving its rich history, promoting the arts and culture, and providing a platform for creative and intellectual pursuits. In fact, the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT) will take place from November 11, 2023, to March 10, 2024, under the theme "The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability." The Triennial is curated by Tosin Oshinowo, exploring innovative design solutions emerging from conditions of scarcity in the Global South.

With a deep-rooted connection to its cultural heritage, the emirate is home to an array of museums that showcase a journey through multiple timelines, from Islamic civilization to traditional lifestyles. Now a hotspot for emerging designers, the city has taken a leading role as a patron of fine arts. In the contemporary city, attractions are designed by many architects, from Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects, 51-1 Arquitectos, to Hopkins Architects. In addition to this emerging cultural scene, old Sharjah is a valuable embodiment of historical tradition, having been transformed into useable attractions and art facilities. The old Sharjah also flaunts landmarks such as the modernist King Faisal Mosque, the Museum of Islamic Civilization, and the Sharjah Art Museum.

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When considering building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), the potential is clear: making the building envelope an active part of a building's energy strategy. Yet specifying these systems can be difficult when the process is unfamiliar. How much electricity can a facade generate? What will the system cost? Which orientations and areas are suitable? And how should the photovoltaic panels be integrated with the building's structural, electrical, and fire-safety requirements? Without clear answers, assessing feasibility, establishing budgets, and involving consultants and contractors can become difficult.

This week's stories focus on cultural architecture and the ways museums, art institutions, and public venues are being designed, expanded, and adapted. Across different cities, new projects bring together exhibition spaces, educational programmes, and areas for public activity, while existing buildings take on new cultural uses. From Sydney and Sharjah to Miami and Dubai, the projects reflect a range of approaches to creating and extending spaces for art and culture, with attention to their programmes, audiences, and connections to the surrounding urban environment.

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An artistic intervention opens today, November 12, 2026, at the Barcelona Pavilion. A modernist icon, the building was designed by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain, to represent modern Germany after World War I. The building was originally designed to be temporary and is now managed by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, created in 1983 by the Barcelona City Council to reconstruct it. Since its rebuilding, the pavilion has been open to visitors as an architectural landmark and is occasionally used as a venue for interventions by visual artists and short-term exhibitions. From November 12 to 22, 2026, "Pavilion-Labyrinth" by Ciro Najle and Josep Ferrando will lead visitors into a labyrinth made entirely of glass, transforming the perceived boundaries between the interior and exterior of the historic building.

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The contemporary kitchen is no longer just a space for food preparation; it has become one of the most dynamic areas of the home. Design decisions can redefine both spatial configurations and the arrangement of individual elements as kitchens become integrated with social areas, incorporate new technologies, and adapt to changing domestic habits. In this way, balancing functionality, comfort, durability, and aesthetics is closely tied to the selection of finishing materials. From countertop surfaces to cabinet opening systems, each design choice contributes to creating kitchen environments that accommodate different activities and ways of living.

The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern portion of Hispaniola, an island in the Greater Antilles of the Caribbean that it shares with neighbouring Haiti. On the Dominican Republic's southern coast, at the mouth of the Ozama River, stands Santo Domingo, the country's capital and the first permanent European settlement in the Americas. This distinction has earned Santo Domingo the title of "Ciudad Primada", or First City, as well as a UNESCO World Heritage listing, for being one of the earliest records of how Europeans first approached the organization of urban settlements in the New World.

The story of this city actually begins with Christopher Columbus himself. During his second voyage to America in 1493, Columbus learned that "Fuerte de la Navidad" (Nativity Fort), founded a year earlier, had been destroyed following a conflict with the local Taíno population. This led to the settlement's relocation to La Isabela, on Hispaniola's northeastern coast, in 1494. However, following the discovery of gold deposits along the island's southern coast, a new settlement was established in 1496: Santo Domingo, on the eastern bank of the Ozama River, founded by Columbus's brother Bartholomew Columbus.

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Carla Chávez, Carolina Rodas, and Felipe Donoso began collaborating while studying architecture in Quito, Ecuador, and went on to found RAMA Estudio, one of the winners of the ArchDaily Next Practices Awards 2026. For more than a decade, their practice has moved between housing, public spaces, adaptive reuse, and community initiatives. Their work is guided by an understanding of architecture as a service. For them, a project begins with the circumstances of a place and extends to the people who will build it and those who will live with it for years.

That idea has taken the architects into parts of a project that architects rarely reach. They have lived in a house to understand its neighborhood before transforming it, built with local craftspeople using earth dug from the site, and returned to an island community years after finishing their first homes there. In each case, their involvement continued long after construction ended.

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The Elie Khouri Art Foundation (EKAF) has appointed Sumayya Vally of Johannesburg- and London-based practice Counterspace to design its permanent home in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Scheduled to open in late 2028, the institution will occupy a repurposed villa in the Jumeirah 1 district, transforming the existing residential property and its surrounding grounds into a space for contemporary art exhibitions, education, and public programming. The appointment forms part of EKAF's plans to establish a permanent platform for contemporary art in Dubai, with architecture and curatorial programming developed in parallel.

Egypt's New Administrative Capital (NAC), located about 45 kilometers east of Cairo, is one of two major urban development projects under construction near the Egyptian capital, along with New Cairo, a satellite city east of Cairo's Ring Road that dates back to the 2000s. To date, Cairo remains the official capital of the country, but various government functions have been moved to the purpose-built city. The new capital in Egypt's Eastern Desert recalls the iconic modernist initiative of Brasília and adds to similar recent projects in countries such as Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia and South Korea. Manuel Álvarez Diestro's photographic work offers a glimpse of this endeavor from the perspective of a pedestrian approaching the urban landscape.

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Beyond their buildings, infrastructure, and streets, cities can be understood as territories shaped by materials, resources, and processes of transformation that define their physical environments. As drone technology becomes increasingly integrated into architectural documentation and urban analysis, aerial imagery offers new opportunities to examine these different layers at multiple scales. As Jane Jacobs once suggested, "Cities are the mines of the future."

From documenting building surfaces and identifying patterns in material distribution to observing how construction systems and urban landscapes evolve over time, drones can provide valuable information to architects, engineers, surveyors, urban planners, and researchers, supporting their work and informing their workflows. When combined with photogrammetry, thermal imaging, geographic information systems (GIS), and automated image processing, aerial observation is no longer limited to a single discipline or field of application. Instead, it opens up broader discussions about surface conditions, environmental performance, and material resources.

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At a time when public support for the arts is under pressure in many countries, Darat al Funun — literally "House of the Arts" — stands by its long-standing mission to champion artists. "Artists are witnesses of their time," affirms Suha Shoman, its founder. "Maybe Art does not operate change, but it does record it […] it points fingers. At the same time, it speaks of, even if it's so difficult and at times so violent, it speaks of beauty as well."

A place where the past remains present, Darat al Funun spreads in the hills of Jabal al Luweibdeh, on a rugged terrain overlooking the eye of downtown Amman, Jordan. Its landscape is warmly inviting and accessible to the public, with a lower entrance in the south and an upper one in the north. Across its cascading terraces, the site is visually permeable as well, demonstrating the foundation's core tenet: art is a civic necessity and a vessel for history.

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Grimshaw has begun the reconstruction of 70 Mulberry Street, a historic community center in Manhattan's Chinatown, originally built as Public School 23 in the late nineteenth century. The building later became home to several of the neighborhood's cultural and nonprofit organizations before a fire in January 2020 destroyed its upper three floors and displaced five tenants. Led by the New York City Department of Design and Construction (DDC), the project will preserve portions of the historic building while providing a renewed home for the displaced organizations.

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) has unveiled a new memorial in Freetown, Sierra Leone, honoring more than 900 members of the Sierra Leone Carrier Corps who died in the First and Second World Wars. Designed by Lagos-based Oshinówò Studio, the intervention was unveiled on November 7 and commemorates the Carrier Corps individually by name for the first time. The design was first revealed in May 2025.

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Since the earliest civilizations, the sky has shaped calendars, agriculture, and navigation. It has played a fundamental role in developing human knowledge and shaping our understanding of our place in the universe. To pursue this knowledge, people have created instruments and spaces to interpret the cosmos, linking the positions of celestial bodies, the passage of time, and life on Earth. In architecture, this enduring fascination takes shape in buildings that not only facilitate observation but also heighten our awareness of the vastness that surrounds us.

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This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.

In 2022, Tokyo's Nakagin Capsule Tower was demolished, bringing an end to one of modern architecture's most recognizable experiments in adaptability. Designed by Kisho Kurokawa and completed in 1972, the building consisted of 140 prefabricated capsules attached to two concrete cores. Its architectural proposition was radical: individual capsules could be replaced as needs evolved, allowing the building to renew itself without dismantling its principal structure. Yet over five decades, the proposed replacement system was never realized. Despite various preservation efforts, deteriorating building services and difficulties in collective decision-making eventually led to its demolition.

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The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) has appointed Gensler to lead the renovation and expansion of its second building in Miami's Design District, with the project scheduled to open in late 2027. Acquired by the museum in 2024, the building is located on the same block as its existing facility and will add 30,000 square feet of space, doubling ICA Miami's facilities. The expansion will introduce new galleries, educational spaces, and venues for public programming, establishing a multi-site campus intended to extend the museum's exhibition and community activities.

The United States' contribution to the 20th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia will explore the relationship between the country's architecture, landscapes, and the people who shape it. Titled Earth Craft, the exhibition will be commissioned, organized, and curated by a team from the University of Miami School of Architecture (U-SoA). The lead curator, Professor Germane Barnes, conceived the exhibition as a representation of the United States "through its makers and not through its icons," recognizing that celebrated buildings were raised by anonymous builders who dug, shaped, and fired architectural legacy. Vyta Pivo, assistant professor, curator, and historian of Earth Craft, adds a contemporary approach by translating inherited knowledge of soil, water, and heat into computational design, conceiving craftwork and robotic fabrication as complementary. The exhibition will occupy the United States Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale between May 8 and November 21, 2027, tracing earthen materials from the ground to finished buildings.

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A new capital is usually introduced through its principal buildings: the assembly, the secretariat and the ceremonial spaces that give a seat of government its public image. In Amaravati, India's Andhra Pradesh, that image of a new capital sits within an older landscape of cultivated fields, villages and established routes. Before the capital project, the region was already occupied by agricultural villages, local roads and settlements connected to the Krishna River and its water systems. The capital project is reorganizing this agrarian territory into a planned administrative city, bringing existing settlements and land ownership into the process of urban development. Its architectural identity will depend on how the new buildings, infrastructure, and public spaces relate to the settlements and landscapes already there.

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What happens to a building after the architecture is finished? For buildings intended to serve the public, their continued life depends on more than the physical conditions of their construction. It involves the activities that take place within them, the relationships they allow to develop, the people who occupy and shape them, and the institutional structures responsible for their upkeep. Yet these conditions are not always secured through the act of building itself. They are continually negotiated, often through forms of work that remain outside the conventional understanding of architectural practice.

The Drill Hall in central Johannesburg offers a way of examining this unfinished work. Its history is marked by changes in use, occupation and institutional responsibility, but also by repeated attempts to imagine what the building could offer the city.

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From the end of Mere Boulevard in Tallinn, Linnahall appears as a long, low mass of limestone and concrete laid between the Old Town and the bay, kept deliberately beneath the line of the medieval silhouette so that the spires remain visible from the water. Broad stairways climb its flanks to a roof paved as a public square, and from there a sequence of terrace steps down toward a small pier, a helicopter pad and the open Gulf of Finland. Under that surface sit an amphitheater for 4,200 people, a foyer of 6,000 square meters, an ice hall, cafés, a bowling alley and a recording studio.

The building opened in the summer of 1980 as the V. I. Lenin Palace of Culture and Sport, in time for the sailing regatta of the Moscow Olympics, which Tallinn hosted on behalf of a capital with no coastline. It was one of more than 120 projects planned under the city's Olympic program, alongside the yachting center in Pirita, the TV Tower, Hotel Olümpia and a new airport terminal.

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The idea of transportation infrastructure tends to be more hostile than interesting: spaces of transit, of constant encounters with strangers, places that no one seems to claim. These structures organize movement and provide spaces that often operate around the clock. The unbuilt projects below push back against this notion of a no-man's-land, proposing infrastructure as an object of architecture. Located in Iran, Montenegro, the Canary Islands, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, and South Korea, these project ideas offer a look at the culture and image of their surroundings. Designed for trucks, cars, planes, and pedestrians, they provide not only a structure but also an atmosphere for service, waiting, or encounter. Along the way, they offer fresh images for spaces that often go unnoticed.

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The New Mexico Literacy Institute (NMLI), a 31,000-square-foot educational center designed by Multistudio in collaboration with Albuquerque-based Design Plus Architects, is scheduled to open in December 2026. Located in New Mexico, the project is a legacy initiative of Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and is intended to provide a statewide facility for literacy education, serving learners of different ages and abilities. The design brings together educational, recreational, and community spaces, approaching literacy as a process that extends beyond conventional classroom settings.

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The SCI-Arc Resilient Futures Task Force was created to rethink standard rebuilding methods after the January 2025 fires in Los Angeles exposed deep weaknesses in Southern California's default residential standards. Bringing together teachers, researchers, and students, the initiative gives displaced homeowners direct, practical help with building safety, soil toxicity, emergency funding, and insurance claims through public community meetings.