This guide covers a workflow that moves from project parameters to generated floor plans, 3D perspective views, exterior design exploration, and site context visualization, using AI tools in place of preliminary CAD and rendering work.

This book was born from a fascination with and admiration for the architecture that shapes the landscape of the Lake Llanquihue basin. Its forms, scale, and relationship with the natural environment, as well as its construction techniques, materials, history, and the story of its colonization, are undoubtedly the primary catalysts for the efforts behind this editorial project.

Combining art, nature, and architecture, Barcelona-based practices Mendoza Partida (Héctor Mendoza and Mara Partida) and BAX studio (Boris Bezan) have joined forces to design Art-Sauna, an experience conceived as a continuation of the emotional journey at the Gösta Serlachius Museum of Contemporary Art in Mänttä, Finland. With a subtle, intimate, and domestic scale, this new space joins the complex, harmonizing the dialogue between these three variables and integrating the building into the journey by merging it with the terrain and making it part of the landscape.

On November 21, we celebrate World Television Day, a communication tool that has transformed social relations since its invention in the late 19th century and its industrial widespread adoption beginning in the 1920s. Since then, television programs—inheriting theatrical genres—emerged, evolved, and multiplied, taking center stage in daily life and sparking widespread curiosity about how they work. Among their various aspects, we explore the set designs and present the logic behind television environments. 

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To explain the passage of time, the ancient Greeks relied on two gods: Chronos and Kairos. While the former is represented as ruthless, like a clock that never stops, Kairos evoked the opportune moment for action. In other words, while Chronos is quantitative, Kairos has a qualitative and permanent nature. Indeed, humanity's relationship with the passage of time is not always an easy one. 

Buildings are no different. In his seminal work The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), John Ruskin argued that only ruined buildings could preserve our past perceptions and, at the same time, allow us to confront our own mortality. In this sense, the marks of time and rubble were crucial witnesses to architectural aging, which, in his view, achieved an aesthetic somewhere between the sublime and the picturesque. Although this is a somewhat controversial perspective, the idea of considering how a building will endure over time has been gaining traction. It is well known that some materials age better than others: while a plastered white wall quickly shows cracks and stains, a stone wall seems to improve with age, blending into its surroundings, for example. Time brings new nuances, tells the story of what has passed, and lends authenticity to surfaces.

Cities have never been more engaged in climate action. At the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), more than 1,100 cities representing a quarter of global CO2 emissions joined the Cities Race to Zero initiative. By doing so, these municipalities committed to ambitious, inclusive, and equitable actions to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C. In November of this year, at COP27, these cities presented their progress and shared how they plan to deliver on their commitments.

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Mired in a housing crisis for about a decade, New Zealand has modified its zoning laws to allow more medium-density housing to be built in the nation's largest municipalities.

The initiative comes in response to a shortage of housing units, soaring property values and rents, and is aimed at narrowing the widening “chasm” between household incomes and housing costs, as detailed in a report by The Guardian.

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The second edition of the Forêt Monumentale will open in June 2024. Twelve ephemeral monumental works will be installed along a 4km route in the Roumare forest, in the municipality of Canteleu, near Rouen, France.

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‘The City and Invention: Encounters between Architecture, Anthropology, and Art’ was a research workshop curated by Adolfo Estalella and Pablo Arboleda in collaboration with Tamara Arroyo, held at the facilities of Intermediæ – Matadero Madrid Contemporary Creation Center between March and June 2022.

Among the various problems stemming from the excessive use of cars in large and medium-sized cities, traffic congestion and time lost in transit are undoubtedly those that receive the most attention from the media and society.

Drivers tend to overlook other issues, however severe, such as traffic fatalities and tragedies, air pollution, the stressful noise generated by motorized vehicles, urban sprawl—which makes cities dysfunctional, expensive, and far-flung—or the hydrological problems caused by the excess of asphalt and concrete dedicated to cars. Generally, these issues are ignored or seen as inevitable, whereas gridlock is highly visible, instantly perceived as a nuisance demanding immediate solutions.

Archiplan S.A. has won the Industrialized Social Housing Competition organized by Chile's Ministry of Housing and Urbanism. Part of the government's Housing Development Plan, the initiative includes the construction of 60 homeownership units in the Lo Espejo district and 103 fair-rent housing units in the Renca district.

Young people from the Quebrada Agroecógica collective received the ImaGen Ventures award during COP-27, the world's largest climate change summit, held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The collective brings low-cost mini-cisterns to informal settlements and low-income communities.

The illustration above is a famous image by the artist Imperial Boy (帝国少年), who works in the anime industry. I sometimes claim that the entire *solarpunk* genre was inspired by this image. That is an exaggeration, of course—some people have thought very seriously about *solarpunk* design principles—but the influence and appeal of Imperial Boy's design are undeniable. Moreover, other *solarpunk* art, though often lovely, tends not to immediately resemble the kind of cities you would actually want to build; it is either an image of a high-tech farm, or some variation of "slap a tree on the side of every building."

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Systems change. Transformation. Deep transition. These terms are used so frequently that they risk becoming buzzwords, obscuring their actual meaning.

Yet, to curb rising global temperatures, conserve nature, and build a fairer economy that benefits everyone, we indeed need deep change across all aspects of our economies—at a pace and scale never seen before.