Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

German architecture practice JSWD has been selected to design RIYMAR Towers, a proposed mixed-use development in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, following an international invited architecture competition organized by Malcolm Reading Consultants on behalf of RIYMAR Real Estate. Located near the intersection of King Fahd Road and Olaya Street, adjacent to the Riyadh Gallery complex, the project is planned as a new development combining residential, hospitality, office, retail, and leisure functions. The project is positioned within the broader urban transformation outlined by Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, which includes objectives related to tourism, cultural development, hospitality, and increased homeownership.

A new microlibrary project by Indonesian studio SHAU is under construction in Jakarta. The Microlibrary Taman Puring is part of the microlibraries initiative designed and organized by SHAU Rotterdam-Bandung (Florian Heinzelmann and Daliana Suryawinata), in collaboration with the City of Jakarta and the Microlibrary Foundation, a nonprofit initiative dedicated to expanding a network of sustainable, multifunctional community reading spaces across low-income neighborhoods in Indonesia. SHAU's first project, Kampung Mrican Phase 1, received the highest prize in the social architecture category of the Ammodo Architecture Award 2025, funding that made possible the realization of this second one.

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Sharjah, one of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates, has built its cultural profile on the preservation of its history and sustained support for the arts, research, and intellectual exchange. The Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT) is one expression of this commitment. Its third edition, Architecture Otherwise: Building Civic Infrastructure for Collective Futures, runs from November 14, 2026, to April 14, 2027.

Curated by Vyjayanthi Rao with Associate Curator Tau Tavengwa, the edition brings together 35 participants across sites that hold different layers of the emirate's history, from the Al Qasimiyah School and the Al Jubail Vegetable Market to the Al Madam Buried Village and the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization. Its six-day opening programme, from November 14 to 19, includes performances, participant-led tours, and film screenings. Among the films, works by Filip De Boeck, Sammy Baloji, and Cassim Shepard trace housing and urban development from Kinshasa to Mumbai. Conversations with Mabel O. Wilson, Paola Antonelli, and Edgar Pieterse lead into a two-day international conference on how knowledge about cities is produced and how local histories challenge dominant narratives of urban development.

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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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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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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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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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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 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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