Where rivers, reservoirs, and rainfall can no longer be relied upon consistently, water is increasingly being sought in the atmosphere. Fog, atmospheric humidity, and condensation each offer different ways of collecting it. When architecture begins to collect water from the air, surfaces, structures, and open spaces become part of the water system.
According to UNICEF, Jordan's National Water Strategy estimates that each person has access to only about 61 cubic meters of renewable water per year, far below the 500 cubic meters commonly used as a threshold for absolute water scarcity. Around half of the population receives piped water only once a week, while groundwater is being extracted faster than many aquifers can naturally recharge.
Architect: Tina Hočevar. Image Courtesy of VELUX Group
What happens to the space beneath a roof? In many houses, the answer is simple: it becomes an attic, a storage space, or a largely unused volume between the upper floor and the roof. Yet the same space can become a bedroom, home office, playroom, or additional living area if the roof and the room beneath it are considered together.
This potential matters in both existing buildings and residential architecture. Converting an attic can add usable space without extending the building's footprint, while designing a new house with a usable roof space in mind can make it more adaptable over time. The question is therefore not only how to convert an attic, but how to recognize the architectural potential of underused space created by a sloped roof.
This week, questions about housing, safety, and the future of cities came into focus, from the impact of natural hazards to architecture's role in shaping more inclusive urban environments. The International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, observed on October 13 under the theme "Resilience Starts at Home," highlighted these questions just days after a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck Panama, damaging buildings and prompting evacuations nationwide. Beyond disaster preparedness, the week's developments also reflect broader efforts to address housing needs, give existing buildings new purposes, and create spaces that support education, culture, and public life.
Portuguese architecture and urbanism practice OODA has released new images of an urban design project in Prague, Czech Republic. The design transforms an existing building block into a permeable site with municipal social housing, commercial units, and a landscaped central plaza. The project, titled Kodaňská 1441, prioritizes walkability, green mobility and public space. In addition to opening new connections between the existing building and the urban fabric, it includes a landscape and water management system that increases the permeable surfaces of the courtyard by 21.5%. The project is an example of urban renewal that incorporates contemporary concerns such as communal spaces, a regulated relationship with public space, planted environments, and the sustainable use of natural resources.
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.
Regenerative Salt Landscapes, winning entry of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards 2026. Image via ArchDaily Student Project Awards
On paper, entering an architecture competition is one of the most challenging things an architecture student can do. What draws students to them is the chance to experiment, approaching a loosely defined program that leaves room to test unconventional ideas and unfamiliar tools outside the rhythm of the semester. That distance from assessment is a relatively recent development, as competitions were once central to architectural education.
At the École des Beaux-Arts, teaching was split between the atelier, where students developed projects under a practising architect, and the competition, where a jury of professors judged the students' work without having followed its development. This model was later brought to schools such as MIT, Penn, and Cornell by French-trained instructors. Over time, most schools held on to the atelier, which became the design studio, and pushed the competition to the edges of the curriculum.
Breidablikk Gården / Asplan Viak and Facade Cladding by SolarLab. Image Courtesy of SolarLab
Solar panels are often treated as equipment added to a building. What happens when they become part of the architecture itself? Once integrated into the envelope, photovoltaics can generate energy while also influencing the building's form, construction, and environmental performance.
Roofs are often the most obvious location for photovoltaic panels, yet other parts of the building can generate power while performing additional architectural functions. Facades can provide shading, louvers can control sunlight, and ventilated rainscreens can combine weather protection with energy generation. Their orientation, position, and integration into the building envelope therefore become part of the architectural design rather than a separate technical decision.
This month's Brazil in Focus looks at how architecture and urban development intersect with questions of housing, education, public space, and mobility across the country. This month's selection includes an indigenous settlement in Maricá recognized by UN-Habitat for its approach to adequate housing, editorials examining university campuses and planned cities as frameworks for collective life, and projects ranging from a timber-structured airport expansion to a commercial building that engages São Paulo's public realm and a residence shaped by its landscape. Also on the radar are the winning proposal for Itaú Cultural's new headquarters on Avenida Paulista, international recognition for two Brazilian landscape architecture projects, and a national diagnosis highlighting persistent gaps in pedestrian infrastructure and road safety.
On October 11, 2026, Donald Insall Associates announced the passing of its founder, Sir Donald Insall. Describing him as "a man of great tact, charm and humour," the practice recognized his contribution to the structures, institutions, and tools of heritage preservation in England, as well as his practical knowledge and application of the craft of restoration. An architect, conservationist, planning consultant, author, and teacher, he led one of Britain's leading conservation practices for four decades after founding it in 1958. His practice undertook the renovation of William Morris's Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire and Robert Adam's Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, the conservation of Chester's historic center, and the restoration of Windsor Castle following the 1992 fire, among other British landmarks.
Using shipping containers as the basis for a structure—also known as "cargotecture"—seems like a simple approach to building. Perhaps deceptively so. While it's true that containers are a quick, cost-effective, and often low-effort building material, and that they're durable and customizable, container conversions also bring their challenges. Without careful planning, the build process can be painful and the results underwhelming.
To understand whether containers are the right choice for a construction project, it's important to look past their industrial allure to the realities and constraints of steel boxes as a building material.
Walk along a river in almost any Latin American city and you will find stretches that have been straightened, lined with concrete, buried beneath roads, or pushed behind industrial areas and residential neighborhoods. Throughout the twentieth century, urban expansion gradually occupied riverbanks and former floodplains, while waterways were redirected or confined within infrastructure intended to control them. Yet the water continued to return. For decades, flooding has been the most frequent natural disaster in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the Inter-American Development Bank.
Some cities have begun to reconsider what happens along these edges. Across Chile, Mexico, and Brazil, parks are being developed within riverbeds, drainage channels, and other territories exposed to flooding. These spaces accommodate water during heavy rainfall while providing areas for recreation, circulation, and gathering throughout much of the year. Their design also changes how surrounding neighborhoods access territories previously associated with flooding, pollution, or limited public use.
Created by California surfers who wanted to bring the lines of surfing onto asphalt, skateboarding soon outgrew its role as a simple alternative for flat days. It established itself as a practice that reads the city through a different logic, reinterpreting steps, handrails, walls, and interstitial spaces as possible lines, challenges, and opportunities. Over time, it evolved into a global urban culture, a way of inhabiting and transforming public space through movement. What was once marginal has become a catalyst for community building and new uses for overlooked spaces. At its core, skateboarding reveals how many cities coexist within the same city, depending on who moves through them and how each person is able to reinterpret their surroundings.
Laab Is More / Sifah Studio. Thailand. Image Courtesy of NS BlueScope
While architecture often responds to a specific program of uses, taking into account areas, contexts, and various economic and technical conditions, buildings rarely remain the same throughout their lifespan. Programs, spatial dynamics, and users' needs change, as do environmental, economic, and technological conditions, requiring interventions that were likely not anticipated at the beginning of a project. Steel structures make it possible to envision architecture capable of growing, transforming, being disassembled, and reassembled. Their dimensional precision, industrialized components, and potential for mechanical connections enable the design of open systems prepared for future interventions.
Every year on October 13, the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction (IDDRR) draws attention to the ways communities can reduce exposure and vulnerability to hazards. Established by the United Nations in 1989, the day provides an opportunity to consider how governments, communities, and professionals can strengthen preparedness and resilience before disasters occur. For its 2026 edition, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) has selected "Resilience Starts at Home" as its theme, placing housing at the center of this year's campaign.
Construction has begun on the Frank Liu Jr. Academy for Music and Arts (FLAMA) in Houston, Texas, designed by OMA, led by partner Jason Long, with RDLR Architects as architect of record and SWA Group for landscape design. The project is an adaptive reuse of Houston's historic 1930s J. A. Folger & Co. coffee plant, converted into an educational space for the arts. The 6,050 m² facility will be an open-enrollment, tuition-free public charter school for pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade students. The building is located along Houston's Buffalo Bayou East corridor, directly across from Turkey Bend, a landscape project by Reed Hilderbrand with NADAAA and Rogers Partners that reimagines the former industrial waterfront as a network of public spaces and flood-adapted landscapes. The conversion of the former coffee plant is part of a larger transformation of the area and is expected to open in August 2027.
Mexico City. Image by Eduardo Enriquez, via Unsplash
Mexico City is a sprawling metropolis of layered temporalities, where architecture operates as a continuous negotiation between deep-seated history and intense urban mutation. Built over the aquatic traces of Tenochtitlan, the city's fabric is an ongoing dialogue between eras: the monumental scale of the Pre-Hispanic Templo Mayor and the Viceroyalty architecture of the Catedral Metropolitana coexist with the modern and contemporary impulses that define its skyline. This dense juxtaposition creates a unique urban canvas where sacred geography, colonial imposition, and 20th-century ambition intersect.
The mid-century marked a definitive era of experimentation, forging a Mexican Modernism that masterfully synthesized international structural rationalism with local identity and materiality. This synthesis is epitomized by the sweeping, plastic integration of art and architecture at the Ciudad Universitaria, the structural poetry of Félix Candela's hyper-parabolic shells, and the raw, monumental brutalism of Teodoro González de León and Abraham Zabludovsky. Parallel to this, the intimate, introspective mastery of Luis Barragán and Juan O'Gorman redefined domestic space, experimenting with light, vernacular color, and tectonic honesty to create spaces of profound spatial stillness.
A color has a biography. A color can have an origin, but it can also transform. It can move between materials and disciplines, from a local practice into architecture, from something ordinary into something symbolic. It can lose one association and acquire another, or persist without anyone consciously thinking of it as cultural. Its life unfolds through the conditions in which it is produced, used, repeated, and inhabited. As these conditions change, so do the meanings a color can carry.
The interior is a place where these histories converge. A color inside a room can carry traces of a territory, a material practice, a climate or a history of inhabitation. Its presence does not necessarily depend on an intention to represent any of these things.
Color can become part of a place through the continuity of materials and ways of living, acquiring significance beyond the surface on which it appears.
Tsuyoshi Tane is a Japanese architect born in 1979 in Tokyo and based in Paris, where he founded ATTA – Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects in 2006. Working across cultural, institutional, and landscape-related projects, Tane has developed an architectural approach that positions memory as a fundamental design driver. In his interview with Louisiana Channel, filmed in his Paris studio, Tane reflects on architecture as a discipline of observation and thought, arguing that meaningful design emerges from carefully reading the traces embedded within a site. For him, architecture is not produced on a blank slate but begins with an inquiry into what already exists, physically, culturally, and emotionally, beneath the surface of a place.
The second part of the Utopian Hours 2026 international city-making festival will be held in Turin on October 16 and 17. After a first chapter in Rotterdam, the festival is marking its tenth anniversary edition by returning to its hometown in Italy. The event's lineup and cultural program are designed to explore how cities can respond creatively to the social, environmental, and political challenges of the 21st century. The Utopian Hours festival has been organized since 2017 by Stratosferica, a nonprofit cultural association dedicated to producing and sharing urban knowledge through content on the evolution of cities, urban communication strategies, events, community building and placemaking.
Vivos xPoint, USA. Image by VigilanteScout, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Inverting the conventional narrative, this story begins at the end. The day after the world's collapse. While almost the entire population struggles to survive flames and solar storms, a tiny fraction is greeted by a heavily armed guard at the entrance to the Survival Condo Project, a former missile silo in Kansas converted a few years ago into luxury apartments.
Forget, then, the hermit who stockpiles canned food in his basement or the end-times prophet. In recent years, survivalism has expanded into wealthier circles, taking root in Silicon Valley among technology executives and hedge fund managers. What could once be seen merely as an eccentricity has also become a way of thinking about the future and, for some, an investment.
Heat waves are becoming more and more frequent worldwide, prompting architects to reconsider how building envelopes are conceived and designed. The focus is no longer solely on limiting heat loss during the colder months, but also on controlling how much heat enters buildings during periods of intense solar radiation. By understanding solar shading as a design decision rather than a decorative or interior-conditioning element, it becomes part of passive energy-efficiency strategies that can contribute to thermal and visual comfort while reducing cooling demand.
