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.
Aulets Arquitectura en Corto invites you to the Espacio Arquia in Madrid (c/ Tutor, 16) on Thursday, September 17, at 7:00 PM for the screening of the short film Amarar. The title refers to a traditional Mallorcan technique of treating wood by immersing it in water to increase its durability. This term has become the name of a sustainable design project that transforms native pine trees into contemporary furniture of high artisanal value. In collaboration with the University of the Balearic Islands, the project also researches the use of this wood in construction. The initiative is led by Francisco Cifuentes and Sebastián Martorell, founding partners of the Palma de Mallorca-based firm Aulets Arquitectes. "We have a vast forest mass on the islands," explains Cifuentes, "but 95% of the forests are abandoned. At the same time, we are importing 70,000 tons of wood for construction. Architects must build with materials that can regenerate local ecosystems. A change in the model is necessary." Directed by Marc Hierro, the short film presents several solutions proposed by Aulets Arquitectes and other project collaborators to promote responsible forest management and utilize wood as a durable, recyclable material with full traceability. Following the screening, a discussion will feature Francisco Cifuentes, Sebastián Martorell, and Albert Cuchí, author of the article "Construir el territorio," recently published in the El Croquis monograph dedicated to the architectural work of Aulets Arquitectes. "What Aulets pursues," asserts Cuchí, "is the recovery of the territory as the authentic field of action for architecture, maintaining an appropriate relationship with resources, ensuring the renewability of extraction processes, and weaving construction together with other social activities to build an ecological society."
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.
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.
August 2023; An aerial perspective captures the sprawling scale of the horizontal construction sequence as the structure begins taking its organic shape across the site.. Image Courtesy of Clark Construction
The recently opened David Geffen Galleries at LACMA are the result of more than a decade of effort across many fronts: the city, the county, the public, the architect, the engineers, the general contractor, and the many builders involved in translating an ambitious and visionary design into built form. The project has also been subject to unusually intense scrutiny, with responses ranging from admiration for its meticulous construction and architectural ambition to criticism of its scale, cost, concrete mass, and engineering complexity in earthquake-prone Los Angeles. Whatever one's position, the building remains an exceptionally sophisticated case study in how architecture is negotiated through construction.
This conversation approaches the David Geffen Galleries from the perspective of Clark Construction, the general contractor responsible for helping bring Peter Zumthor's design to completion. Carlos Gonzalez, Group President at Clark Construction, oversaw the construction process and shared with ArchDaily some of the technical, material, and logistical challenges behind the building. These range from its monolithic concrete structure and extensive post-tensioning system to the 56 seismic isolators that allow the building to move during an earthquake; from unpredictable ground conditions near the La Brea Tar Pits to the fabrication of solid bronze mullions and the integration of mechanical systems within the building's double-deck concrete structure.
This week was marked by recognition and major announcements for the cultural industry. Amid international reports of both deliberate and natural destruction, UNESCO added 25 new sites of Outstanding Universal Value to its World Heritage List, protecting a diverse range of places that includes funerary landscapes and landmark works of modern architecture. Beyond heritage, contemporary architectural practice also received renewed recognition through Alejandro Aravena and Smiljan Radić, while new developments were announced for cultural projects across the United Arab Emirates, Ecuador, China, India, and the United States. Recent updates include the restoration of a landmark cinema in Los Angeles, a new museum dedicated to innovation and entrepreneurship in Bengaluru, and the topping out of a 39-story hybrid timber tower in Sydney.
In a slim volume with a yellow-edged cover, recently published by the Porto-based imprint Circo de Ideias, the architect Paulo Martins Barata (a founding partner of Promontório) makes a deceptively bold claim that the architecture produced in Europe since the Great Recession belongs to neither of the two camps that structured the twentieth century's fiercest disciplinary debate.
The Language of Metamodern Architecture borrows its title, with evident irony, from Charles Jencks' 1977 The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, the book that famously declared modern architecture dead at 3:32 pm on July 15, 1972, with the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe. His wager is that another death, never officially certified, occurred somewhere around 2008, and that architecture has been living, mostly unaware, in what grew up around the grave.
The UNESCO World Heritage Committee has announced 25 new inscriptions to the World Heritage List during its 48th session, expanding the international register with sites that reflect a wide range of architectural, cultural, and natural heritage. The 2026 additions include 19 cultural properties, five natural sites, and one mixed property, alongside approvals for two significant boundary modifications and one revision to the criteria of an existing inscription. Spanning every inhabited continent, the newly recognized places range from archaeological landscapes and historic urban centers to modernist architecture and industrial heritage, underscoring the diversity of the built environment and the evolving scope of heritage conservation.
