Asia: The Latest Architecture and News

Amid the transformation of Uzbekistan's cities, ARC Architects develops an architecture that seeks to connect past and present. Founded in 2017 by Bobir Klichev, the studio emerged from Bukhara's architectural community and remains closely connected to the country's cultural and climatic particularities. With offices in Tashkent and Bukhara, ARC combines minimalism and ethnic references to develop a contemporary language rooted in its context.

Rather than reproducing a traditional image of Uzbek architecture, the studio seeks to understand how this heritage can be reinterpreted today, an exercise that necessarily engages with the overlapping historical layers across the country. For centuries, cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara were important commercial and cultural centers of Central Asia. Their architecture developed around inner courtyards and narrow streets, forming urban fabrics in which buildings and collective spaces are inseparable.

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In many Asian cities, eating has never belonged entirely to the private home. It spills into markets, hawker centers, street stalls, and wholesale districts embedded within larger buildings or areas. These are places where the city exchanges information and watches other people pass through. They are not restaurants in the conventional sense, nor are they simply markets. In some way, their vibrancy and usage reflect the society's conditions at that moment. They are public kitchens: shared infrastructures where domestic routines are partially transferred into collective space.

Hong Kong's Municipal Services Buildings and curbside dining are where food is understood not only as culture, but as urban organization. The cooked-food center in the city folds eating into a larger civic machine of wet markets, libraries, and sports halls. The dai pai dong and street-side table, meanwhile, transform the curb into a temporary dining room. Looking beyond Hong Kong, similar questions emerge across the region. How do cities make room for social eating? Where does cooking happen when domestic space is limited? What kind of architecture supports the mess and heat of everyday food?

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The Pyramid of Tirana opened as a museum to Enver Hoxha in October 1988, three years after his death and three years before the regime collapsed. In the decades that followed, it served as a radio station, a conference venue, a nightclub, and a base for NATO during the Kosovo war. In 2023, MVRDV reopened it as a park and technology school, adding steps to the façades so that the building could be walked over. The inauguration was timed to the Western Balkans Summit on 16 October, a date that some critics pointed out was Hoxha's birthday. Two projects of national self-definition, thirty-five years apart and built on opposite political premises, have used the same structure.

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In the heart of Ahmedabad's Navrangpura district in India sits the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium. More than just a cricket ground, the stadium stands as one of India's earliest experiments in modernist public architecture. Built in the decades following the country's independence, the structure has not only become an engineering landmark, but also a major public space within Ahmedabad's urban fabric. Despite the building's architectural and historical significance, as well as its deep involvement in daily community life, it has suffered significant physical degradation as a result of decades of poor maintenance and lack of funding. That fragility is precisely why it has drawn international attention. In 2020, the World Monuments Fund (WMF) placed the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium on its World Monuments Watch, a global list highlighting cultural heritage sites facing urgent preservation challenges.

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Craftsmanship carries the traces of those who shaped it, revealing how materials respond to different techniques and even offering clues about the tools used to create them. Within the architectural experience, however, craftsmanship can be expressed not only through materials and structures but also through space itself. Seeking to deepen and learn from the connections between design and execution, amass studio has explored the translation of informal, everyday construction methods into spatial systems across several of its projects. By integrating mechanisms, materials, structures, and furniture, the studio creates new spatial narratives in which the dialogue between the handcrafted and the industrial becomes mutually reinforcing. Beyond craftsmanship itself, then, why not make visible the processes that bring it into being?

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With over 80% of its population living in urban centers and a national density exceeding 500 people per square kilometer — soaring to over 15,000 in Seoul — South Korea faces intense competition for usable land. In response, contemporary Korean architecture offers compelling examples of mixed-use interventions that negotiate tight urban lots to blend public engagement with high-efficiency utility. By vertically stacking distinct programs, integrating public art centers, corporate headquarters, and commercial hubs alongside residential and other functions, these multi-layered developments transform spatial constraints into dynamic urban interfaces.

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Sliding doors are often discussed through efficiency. They save the swing radius of a conventional door, allow compact rooms to function more easily, and help small apartments borrow a few extra centimeters of usable space. Yet in many interiors, their more interesting role is not only spatial economy. Sliding partitions transform the reading of the room itself. A bedroom, study, guest room, dining area, or workspace can appear when a panel is closed, disappear when it is opened, and remain ambiguous when the boundary is translucent or partial.

This makes the sliding partition especially useful in domestic contexts shaped by density, changing family structures, hybrid work, and climatic negotiation typical of regions like East and Southeast Asia. It allows privacy without permanence, enclosure without full separation, and openness without the loss of control. Unlike the fixed wall, it does not insist that a room has only one identity. Instead, it allows domestic space to respond to time: day and night, guests and family, work and rest, exposure and retreat.

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Over the last decade, Uzbekistan has done what most post-Soviet countries still hesitate to do: it formally included dozens of modernist buildings constructed between 1960 and 1980 on its national cultural heritage list. Among them were the Panoramic Cinema, the Tashkent Circus, and the Palace of Peoples' Friendship—structures that, until just a few years ago, were viewed as routine, recent Soviet architecture lacking heritage status.

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"?

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For most of the twentieth century, architecture has learned to read cities through roads. Street hierarchies define urban plans, intersections organize movement, and buildings are understood by the façades they present to sidewalks. Roads appear so fundamental to urban life that they are often mistaken for a universal condition. Across much of Southeast Asia, cities developed according to an entirely different spatial logic. Long before automobiles reordered urban landscapes, rivers served as streets, marketplaces, civic spaces, and public infrastructure. Movement occurred primarily by boat, commerce unfolded along waterfronts, and architecture addressed water rather than asphalt. Reading these cities through their waterways changes how architecture itself is understood. Infrastructure, in this case, is not the road but the river.

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The Steel Architectural Awards ASEAN 2026 is a regional architectural awards program presented by NS BlueScope to recognize built projects that demonstrate architectural excellence through the use of coated steel solutions. Under the theme Shaping Resilient Futures: Timeless Design with Coated Steel, the program highlights projects across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, progressing from the Country Awards to ASEAN-level recognition. This article explains how the two-stage pathway works, what categories are included, and how projects are assessed through Design Excellence, Innovation, and Sustainability.

Throughout 2025 and early 2026, numerous museum projects were announced, advanced, or broke ground across multiple regions, with completion timelines largely extending from 2026 to 2030. Located across Asia, Europe, North America, and Central Asia, these developments reflect ongoing shifts in the role of cultural institutions within contemporary cities. Increasingly, museums are conceived not only as exhibition venues but as public-facing environments that accommodate education, research, and civic engagement. This expanded programmatic scope is often accompanied by architectural strategies that respond to urban conditions, spatial continuity, and the integration of cultural infrastructure into broader city-making processes.

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This week has been marked by the deliberate, rampant, and unjust destruction of war in Southeast Asia. As one of the most damaging manifestations of human abuse of power, we have witnessed the destruction of places that hold memories and sustain culture, as well as the loss and irreparable harm to the human lives that lend them their identity. With the expectation of offering brighter and more constructive scenarios in the future, we present, in contrast to this reality, a scenario of progress in the gender gap that characterizes architecture and its paths forward, a group of landmark projects of public and community interest moving forward from Türkiye to Mexico, and three major multimodal transport infrastructure projects improving the way we circulate and inhabit public space in Europe and the United States.

On February 5, 2026, Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest metropolis, was officially declared the host city of the 2029 Asian Winter Games. The Host City Contract was signed between the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) and the National Olympic Committee of the Republic of Kazakhstan during a ceremony in Milan, Italy, one of the host cities of the ongoing Winter Olympics. Established in 1986 in Sapporo, Japan, the Asian Winter Games will mark their tenth edition in 2029 and are held approximately every four years. The announcement follows an earlier decision to postpone the Games, which were originally scheduled to take place in the Trojena ski resort, masterplanned by LAVA and currently under construction as part of the NEOM mega-project in Saudi Arabia.

As 2025 concludes, we look ahead to 2026, a year scheduled to deliver a diverse range of significant architectural projects across the world. The year is particularly notable for the completion of new infrastructure and cultural buildings, including long-term projects. Europe will be in the spotlight of the new year with the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. This event will feature projects such as the Olympic Village by SOM and the Winter Olympics Arena by David Chipperfield Architects. Also in Milan, BIG is set to complete construction of the City Wave project as part of a new business district in the city. At the same time, after more than 140 years of its establishment, the architects around the world will also be watching for the long-awaited completion of Antoni Gaudí's La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, announced for 2026.

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While adaptive reuse has been increasingly acknowledged as a vital architectural strategy worldwide, its discourse and implementation in Asia are still expanding—driven by growing ecological awareness and a shifting understanding of architectural knowledge. Rather than accelerating a developmentalist model centered on demolition and new construction, architects today are confronted with a different approach to the built environment: treating the existing structure as a resource—an archive of materials, spatial organizations, and informal histories.

Adaptive reuse is often associated with the preservation of historic buildings and culturally significant heritage. Yet the vast field of seemingly 'less-valued' structures—abandoned houses, standard yet old dwellings, non-conforming office buildings, and overlooked urban voids—has become ground for experimentation. These sites challenge architects and designers to reconsider prevailing standards of efficiency and market-driven development, and to imagine spatial and ecological practices that avoid the continual loss of embodied material and cultural knowledge inherent in constant rebuilding.

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The Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction has announced the Grand Prize Winners of the 2025 Holcim Awards, selecting one project from each global region to represent the most impactful approaches to sustainable design in this cycle. This edition marks the introduction of the Grand Prize format, replacing the previous tiered distinctions to better acknowledge diverse regional contexts and avoid hierarchical rankings. Evaluated by juries chaired by Sou Fujimoto (Asia Pacific), Kjetil Trædal Thorsen (Europe), Sandra Barclay (Latin America), Lina Ghotmeh (Middle East and Africa), and Jeanne Gang (North America), the winning projects reflect the Foundation's principles of holistic, transformational, and transferable design.

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Watch live the Holcim Foundation Awards 2025 Ceremony on November 20, broadcast from Venice, Italy, during the closing week of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, to discover the regional Grand Prize winners. The Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction has announced the 20 winning projects of this cycle, selected across five regions: Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and North America. This edition introduces a new Grand Prize format, replacing the Gold, Silver, and Bronze distinctions to highlight excellence without comparison and reflect the varied contexts in which sustainable design operates.

The second edition of the Ammodo Architecture Award has recognized 26 recipients for their contributions to socially and ecologically responsible design. Selected from 168 submissions spanning over 60 countries, the laureates represent a wide range of practices, from established offices to emerging collectives and community-led initiatives. Each recipient receives a grant ranging from €10,000 to €150,000 to support the continued development of their projects. Beyond recognition and financial support, the Ammodo Architecture initiative also functions as a knowledge platform, connecting awardees across regions and facilitating the exchange of ideas on key themes identified by the advisory committee.

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