Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

In 1948, Robert Moses established the Fresh Kills Landfill on the western shore of Staten Island. The site, chosen for its remote marshland and cheap land value, was meant to be temporary, but by 1955 it was the largest landfill in the world, receiving up to 29,000 tons of refuse per day at its 1991 peak. By 2001, after more than fifty years of continuous operation, Fresh Kills covered 2,200 acres, roughly three times the area of Central Park, and was, unspectacularly, visible from space. When it started, Moses didn't expect to design a dump but, without calling it that, a new landform with four artificial hills rising up to sixty meters above sea level built entirely from the accumulated residue of eight million daily lives.

That landform is now, slowly, becoming a park. James Corner Field Operations won the international design competition launched by the city in 2001, producing a master plan called Lifescape that will take thirty years to complete. The landfill's four mounds are being capped, planted, and gradually opened to the public. Methane from decomposing waste is captured and fed into an energy system as the wetlands are being restored around the engineered hills. Evidence of New York's consumption transformed into a feat of ecological engineering and an act of institutional memory management (a way of making a city's most embarrassing landscape slowly look like something it was always meant to be).

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Art Omi and Limbo Museum have presented Limbo Engawa, a two-part site-specific installation by TAELON7, led by architect Juergen Benson-Strohmayer. First presented at Limbo Museum in Accra, Ghana, on March 12, 2026, the project was reconfigured for Art Omi's Sculpture & Architecture Park in Ghent, New York, where it opened on September 19, 2026. Developed as a joint commission between the two institutions, the project uses a modular architectural system to explore how spaces for gathering and exchange can respond to different landscapes, climates, and cultural contexts.

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The International Union of Architects designates the first Monday of October as World Architecture Day each year, aligning it with the United Nations' World Habitat Day. This year, both occasions are drawing attention to the global housing crisis as a fundamental element of human dignity, inclusion, and well-being. The UIA's motto reads: "Housing is a Human Right. Build It." The organization calls on architects to contribute to advancing equitable access to housing through design, research, and advocacy. From a holistic perspective, the crisis consists not only of a shortage of residential buildings, but of multiple, interconnected barriers to accessing an adequate place to live. The challenge calls on the dual nature of the architect's work: the capacity for abstract design thinking, and the practical knowledge to transform material reality. For architecture to make the right to housing a reality, both capacities must be put into practice: building new governance structures, different models of shared ownership, designs for alternative forms of cohabitation, and new, environmentally sustainable construction systems.

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The 13th edition of La Feria De Diseño Medellín, powered by idd cologne, highlighted an evolution extending far beyond scale: over three days, Plaza Mayor brought together design, architecture, interior design, business, and knowledge on an increasingly international platform. Welcoming over 18,500 visitors and more than 22,000 participants across the city's broader ecosystem, the fair connected professionals, brands, and buyers around new ways of designing, specifying, and inhabiting spaces.

In many Asian cities, the summer climate can increasingly be experienced from a distance. In Hong Kong, it is possible to move from an apartment tower through a podium mall, enter the Mass-Transit-Railway system (MTR), arrive beneath another commercial complex, and continue through enclosed footbridges or underground passages while encountering remarkably little of the atmosphere outside. Heat, humidity, rain, and seasonal variation remain present, but they can be largely bypassed through a continuous network of conditioned interiors.

Over several decades, air-conditioning has expanded from a technology for cooling individual rooms into an infrastructure capable of producing an alternative urban environment. This has been particularly visible in parts of East Asia and South East Asia, where transit-oriented development frequently combines railway stations, shopping centres, housing, offices, and other everyday services within interconnected complexes. The Railway plus Property model has helped institutionalize this relationship between transport and development, creating districts where movement through the city is often inseparable from movement through privately managed interiors.

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Contemporary Vietnamese residential architecture stands out for its deep sensitivity to local microclimates and context. Detailed studies of weather patterns consistently drive strategic design decisions, resulting in buildings that act as adaptive shelters. Facing conditions that range from scorching summers to dry, cold winters, along with frequent exposure to heavy rains, storms, and floods, architects adopt protective facade elements and multi-layered spatial configurations to shield interior spaces from harsh environmental factors.

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Following its last edition in 2019, Amman Design Week returns from October 2-17, 2026, bringing more than 220 designers and participants together across exhibitions, installations, public-space projects, talks, workshops, and performances in Jordan. The fourth edition unfolds across Ras El Ain, Jabal Al Lweibdeh, Jabal Amman, Iraq Al Amir, and, for the first time, Aqaba. Founded by Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah in 2016, the event returns under the theme "Accumulations," looking at how materials, memories, knowledge, labor, and everyday practices gather over time and become part of the places people inhabit. The theme also gives the 2026 edition a clear relationship with the city itself.

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Xu Tiantian is the founding principal of DnA_Design and Architecture, an interdisciplinary practice that addresses both the physical and social dimensions of the contemporary living environment, across scales. Born in 1975 in Fujian, China, she received a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a bachelor's degree in architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Her recent work focuses on rural revitalization through a strategy she describes as "architectural acupuncture," understood as small-scale, site-specific interventions designed to activate local culture, agriculture, and tourism. These interventions, primarily concentrated in China's rural regions, have been recognized by UN-Habitat as a global model for urban–rural integration. In this interview with Louisiana Channel, she reflects on the role of the architect, questions architecture itself and the concept of beauty, explains her working methodology, and emphasizes the spatial dimension of nature.

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The most innovative and impactful design projects arise from the intersection of different fields. The architecture community has always borrowed from, or been inspired by, other forms of cultural production such as film, photography, literature, and theatre. In the theatricality of Baroque churches and the cinematic sequences of contemporary museums, architects have looked beyond the building itself to understand how space can shape a story and construct an experience.

Worldbuilding takes this one step further. Instead of designing only the architecture of a place, it asks architects to establish the social rules, narratives, technologies, economies, atmospheres, behaviors, and relationships that make that place believable. Rather than beginning with, "What should this building look like?", worldbuilding suggests beginning with, "In what kind of world would this building make sense?"

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What makes a building worth preserving? Age is the most common answer, but not always the best one. A building from the 1950s or 70s may carry as much historical significance as a medieval cathedral; it simply demands a different framework, one that weighs political context, cultural meaning, and architectural innovation over the mere passage of time. This is especially true for modernist architecture across the so-called Global South, where the movement took on unique forms of expression.

It is precisely this conversation that ArchDaily and World Monuments Fund are now opening together. WMF brings on-the-ground conservation expertise across the world, and ArchDaily brings the editorial capacity to contextualize that work and connect it to a global audience. The goal is to do both at once: preserve places and tell their stories, shaping how modernist heritage is understood far beyond the field of preservation itself.

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Architecture this week reflects on how buildings and cities adapt to changing cultural, social, and environmental conditions. From the expansion of established institutions and the preservation of architectural archives to new approaches to housing and the use of domestic space, several stories consider how architecture negotiates between existing contexts and future needs. These questions extend beyond individual buildings, touching on the role of public space, infrastructure, energy, and collective memory in shaping the built environment. At the same time, new projects and cultural programs across different contexts demonstrate how architecture can respond to local histories, urban transformation, and resource constraints while establishing new relationships between buildings, landscapes, and the communities that use them.

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The origins of the Copenhagen Architecture Biennial trace back to the establishment of the CAFx yearly festival in 2014, which was renamed Copenhagen Architecture Forum in 2024 to lead new projects focused on architecture and urbanism, such as the shift from festival to biennial, with a first edition in 2025. Today, the details of the second edition are being announced: it will take place from September 9 to October 15, 2027, under the theme "Elements." After the Biennial's inaugural call to Slow Down, the event is turning its attention to the planetary elemental forces that architecture has sought to master and prepare to inhabit, questioning one of modernity's most persistent promises: control over the environment. Activities will be dedicated to and organized around each of the four elements: fire, earth, air, and water, including an open call for pavilions, exhibitions, and a symposium.

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Architectural ornamentation has been a recurrent subject of debate across the industry for decades. A practice that was largely abandoned during the Modernist movement could now be standing on a platform that might, again, allow its resurgence, due to the current convergence of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital fabrication. Technology has seemingly removed the primary obstacle to decorative detail: the high cost of skilled manual labor. However, this new technical capacity demands a critical examination: What does ornamentation truly represent, and what do we gain or lose by resurrecting it through algorithmic design?

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The landscape and scattered settlements of Ireland carry a reputation for wildness. Rugged cliffs meet the Atlantic, green fields roll across the interior, and rain and wind change the scene by the hour. A closer look reveals a worked terrain as historic stone walls divide agricultural fields, roads and paths connect towns to the coast, and castle ruins alongside cottages record centuries of occupation. Change is the expected condition of the island, shaped as much by human hands as by geology and weather, and the practice of treating the existing context as material to adapt and modify runs deep.

Ireland has a large inherited building stock, from vernacular cottages and farm compounds to Georgian and Victorian urban terraces, while a growing share of it sits vacant or derelict as housing remains scarce and expensive. Planning and heritage protections shape what can be altered, while growing attention to embodied carbon makes demolition increasingly difficult to justify. Under these pressures, design strategies for renovation are one of the most inventive areas of contemporary Irish design. Architects cut into old structures to admit light, set new materials against aged ones, and redesign buildings for contemporary lives and routines.

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A jury of arts and architecture professionals recently announced the selected curatorial proposal for the Luxembourg Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2027. The exhibition will be curated by housing expert Céline Zimmer and architects Bùi Quý Sơn and Paul-Antoine Lucas, co-founders of the critical spatial practice Exutoire, one of the winning practices of the ArchDaily 2026 Next Practices Awards. The proposal is titled "Excess! On the Overconsumption of Living Space" and addresses the inequitable distribution of living space as a reflection of "broader habits of excess that contribute to the current housing and ecological crises." The issue will be illustrated through a dialogue between the realities of Luxembourg and Vietnam to reflect on spatial consumption. The Luxembourg Pavilion is located on the first floor of the Sale d'Armi in the Arsenale, which will open to the public for the Biennale on May 8, 2027.

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For the past twenty years, Albania has been one of the most active construction territories in Europe. Dozens of international architects have been working there on projects that promise to alter the drawing, the structure, and the cities of a country still recovering from the regimes of the last century. To acknowledge that growth, and those changes in the landscape, is also to acknowledge that behind every form there is a story, and that there are files that tell us more than architecture itself.

Edited by Anneke Abhelakh and published by Lars Müller Publishers, with a foreword by Prime Minister Edi Rama, The Albanian Files has compiled two decades of work of sixty international architecture offices working in Albania into a dense publication whose format, color, and sheer presence amount to a statement in the reading of the country's recent history. The publication works as an extended document, a cartography of what these processes left behind. Much of what takes shape across its pages describes structures of power, patterns of commissioning, and positions whose consequences have proved controversial. Revealing is a sign of transparency, but it is also a sign that some things should never have been hidden in the first place. Albania, more than ever, with its aspirations to open a territory and its growing wish to engage with the world (through tourism and the prospect of EU membership), needs this clarity.

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Volcanic landscapes make geological change unusually visible. Lava hardens into new ground, and plants slowly take hold across it. Ash can remain in the landscape for years. Around active volcanoes, these processes are still underway, affecting where and how people build.

Yet these landscapes continue to attract houses and places of retreat. Their isolation and unusual terrain are often part of the appeal. Building there means bringing everyday life into a landscape that can still change.

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Farshid Moussavi has been awarded the 2026 Soane Medal for her contributions to architectural practice, history, and theory. The Iranian-born architect and educator, who founded Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA) in 2011, will receive the medal at the Royal Academy in London on November 24, 2026, where she will also deliver a public lecture. The annual award, established by Sir John Soane's Museum in 2017, recognizes individuals whose work has contributed to a broader understanding of architecture and its role in society.