Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism has announced that Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open to the public on December 11, 2026, on Saadiyat Island. The museum, designed by the late Frank Gehry, becomes the fourth institution in the Guggenheim's global network, joining outposts in New York, Venice, and Bilbao.
The project was first announced in 2006. Construction began in 2011, was suspended for several years amid economic strain and contract changes, and resumed in 2019. A 2025 completion date, set in 2021, ultimately slipped to this December.
MVRDV has won the international design competition organized by the social enterprise Shift to design the Shift Embassy, a new cultural destination planned for Rotterdam's developing Waterkant district. Conceived as a hybrid of architecture and landscape, the proposal, titled Rotterdam ROCKS! combines exhibition spaces, hospitality, education, public amenities, and ecological infrastructure within a publicly accessible building intended to support Shift's mission of engaging visitors with environmental and societal challenges. The project will form part of Waterkant, a large-scale urban development on the south bank of the Maas, planned to include 3,750 homes alongside schools, workplaces, cultural venues, and public spaces.
The Clark Art Institute, a prominent art institution located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, United States, has unveiled images of the design for the extension of its current facilities. The institution, opened in 1955, is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. The new wing, commissioned to Selldorf Architects in October 2024, will expand the current gallery and art storage space and connect the Museum Building and the Manton Research Center, previously renovated by the same firm. The new building will be complemented by a landscape design by Reed Hilderbrand, reinforcing the experience of the architecture, art, and surrounding Berkshire landscape.
In 2023, the School of Design Building at Shanghai Jiao Tong University opened its doors after a complete remodeling and adaptation of an existing structure. Designed by architect and scholar Xing Ruan, who also serves as Dean of the school, the building went on to receive two recognitions at the Prix Versailles: the World Title of the Most Beautiful Campus and the Special Prize for an Interior, one of the three major honors of the competition. Awards of this kind tend to generate their own momentum. Once a building is recognized, it is quickly placed within a convenient narrative — its materials, techniques, form, and spatial decisions all assigned meanings that make the project legible, categorizable, and easy to cite.
Yet what an award confirms is perhaps only that a building has been seen. What remains worth asking is why it exists in the way that it does — what problems it was made to address, what beliefs it refuses, and what it proposes about the discipline beyond the occasion of its construction. It was in the School of Design Building itself that the following interview took place, moving between architecture, scholarship, frugality, and the limits of what buildings can — and should — be asked to do.
South aerial view of Al Maha Island, 2026. Render . Image Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron
Al Maha Island is a 230,000 m² human-made island located off the coast of Lusail, Qatar. Built as an entertainment and leisure destination north of Doha, it opened in 2022, just ahead of the FIFA World Cup. In 2024, Qatar Museums released renderings of the future Lusail Museum, designed by Swiss architecture office Herzog & de Meuron and located on the southern tip of the island. Most recently, the firm revealed updated images of the island masterplan and the museum's exterior design. The new Lusail Museum will house a collection of Orientalist art, exploring the movement of people and ideas across the globe, past and present, and will offer opportunities for study and debate on contemporary global issues. It is expected to become the cultural anchor of Lusail City, in a building conceived by Jacques Herzog as "a vertically layered souk, or miniature city contained within a single building."
In June 2026, the refurbished Teatro Mauri reopened its doors on Cerro Bellavista in Valparaíso, formerly Chile's main port. The building forms part of Latin America's modernist legacy and stands adjacent to La Sebastiana, one of the renowned residences of the poet Pablo Neruda. It was designed by architect Alfredo Vargas Stoller, author of other icons of modern architecture in Valparaíso, such as the Edificio Cooperativa Vitalicia and the Conjunto de Viviendas Vargas in Viña del Mar. Teatro Mauri opened in 1951 as a venue for performances and cinema. Following a fire in the early 1990s, it fell into disrepair, serving only sporadically as a venue for local parties and events. In 2015, it was purchased by the Sociedad Chilena de Autores e Intérpretes (SCD), which commissioned its restoration from architects Laura Garrido and Gregorio Garretón.
Bamboo is often praised before it is understood. It grows quickly, carries a long history of building cultures, and appears to offer architecture an immediate ecological language. In photographs, it can seem almost self-explanatory: light, natural, renewable, and already aligned with a more sustainable future. Yet this apparent clarity is also what makes bamboo difficult to discuss with precision. Once it becomes a symbol of environmental responsibility, the material itself can disappear behind the image it produces.
This is the risk of bamboo's contemporary revival. It can be imagined too easily as a green substitute for industrial materials, a regional atmosphere, or a softer alternative to the harder languages of steel and concrete. In each case, bamboo is admired before its conditions are understood. The more important question is not whether bamboo is sustainable in a general sense, but what kind of architectural culture it requires: what forms of knowledge, maintenance, regulation, labor, and time are needed for its sustainability to become real.
The concept of the museum has historically prompted reflections on identity, representation, and institutional frameworks. At present, museums are conceived as increasingly complex spaces, combining exhibition areas with other cultural and educational functions, prompting civic engagement, artistic experimentation, and archival responsibility. Throughout this year, numerous museum projects have been announced and advanced across multiple regions, with completion timelines largely extending from 2026 to 2030. Added to this variety is the wide range of concepts developed within the realm of ideas, proposals, and speculations. It is within this realm that this selection of projects submitted by ArchDaily readers finds its place: projects whose designs can expand the boundaries of our imagination.
This week belonged to the arts, with cultural architecture dominating headlines across the globe. Landmark buildings for major institutions advanced through important construction and design milestones, from the Shanghai Opera House to Abu Dhabi's new performing arts center, while two new museum commissions were announced following international competitions. Architecture also took centre stage as a subject of exhibition itself, with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial revealing its participant list and Austria unveiling its proposal for the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale. Beyond these developments, this week's news compilation includes three upcoming urban design projects: in Seoul, South Korea, a new riverside neighbourhood in the Apgujeong district weaves residential towers around parkland connecting the city to the Han River; in Cardiff, Wales, a pedestrian and cycle bridge over the River Taff links waterfront neighbourhoods to new housing along the water's edge; and in Bengaluru, South India, the Museum of Art and Photography is expanding its public campus, adding new civic and cultural facilities alongside a major new sculpture park set within a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in Tamil Nadu.
When Buda and Pest joined in 1873, the two parts formed a capital whose identity has since been tied to this balance between geography and urban order. From the riverbanks and thermal baths to imperial monuments and infrastructural works, Budapest's architecture carries the traces of these overlapping histories.
That layered condition continues to shape Hungary's capital today. Alongside its historic fabric, Budapest has seen a steady accumulation of contemporary projects, from cultural institutions in City Park to new educational buildings, sports facilities, adaptive reuse works, and large-scale developments along the Danube. Often working through inherited structures rather than apart from them, these projects add new layers to a city shaped as much by continuity as by change.
A new space dedicated to contemporary art on the Île Seguin, in the Greater Paris area, is opening in October 2026. The new cultural institution, named "Large," will be housed in a building designed by Catalan architects and Pritzker Prize recipients RCR Arquitectes, the studio's first project in Paris. It is situated on La Pointe des Arts, a large-scale redevelopment of the Île Seguin's former industrial area into a mixed-use complex spanning more than 53,000 m² and focused on arts and culture. The project's architectural massing follows the stratification concept set out in the masterplan by Ateliers Jean Nouvel. The institution will open with the exhibition "Imaginary Engine: From Masterpieces of the Collection Renault to Artists of Today," bringing together 55 artists from 23 countries to explore the relationship between humanity and machines, in tribute to the site's industrial history and Renault's decades-long collaboration with artists.
At the helm of architectural discourse on sacred architecture, attention almost always settles on the monument. Temples, mosques, monasteries, and churches dominate architectural histories, design criticism, and photography alike, becoming the physical symbols through which faith is understood. For millions of pilgrims across India, the most consequential architectural experience begins long before the shrine comes into view. It unfolds across mountain roads, river ghats, shaded streets, temporary camps, queue systems, bridges, water kiosks, medical stations, and countless ordinary pieces of infrastructure through which pilgrimage actually takes place. The architectural work of pilgrimage may lie less in the shrine itself than in the environments that allow millions of people to reach it.
Dar al Funoon Abu Dhabi project by Frank Gehry. Image Courtesy of Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi
Dar al Funoon Abu Dhabi, the new performing arts institution designed by the late architect Frank Gehry, is among his final works. Translating to "House of the Arts," the landmark building, commissioned by Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism, was designed as a global hub for the performing arts and is expected to open in 2030. The project adds to Gehry's work in the emirate, which also includes the upcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and follows the city's designation as a UNESCO Creative City of Music in 2021.
Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has unveiled new images of the National Juneteenth Museum, offering a closer look at the design of the 72,000-square-foot institution planned for Fort Worth, Texas. Designed in collaboration with Alligood Song Architecture and architect of record KAI Enterprises, the project is scheduled to begin construction in fall 2026 and will serve as a national center dedicated to preserving the history and legacy of Juneteenth. Led by activist Dr. Opal Lee, widely recognized as the "Grandmother of Juneteenth," the museum combines exhibition spaces with community-oriented programs intended to support both cultural preservation and neighborhood revitalization.
When the New Museum's original SANAA-designed building, a stack of shifted opaque boxes wrapped in a metal mesh skin, opened in 2007, it already seemed destined for some form of expansion to relieve the vertical pressure created by its constrained circulation and limited footprint. In March, the museum unveiled its long-anticipated addition, designed by OMA's Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas. The angular and slightly set-back companion building doubles the museum's exhibition capacity while reshaping the institution's relationship to the city and to the original SANAA structure by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.
At the building's press opening, Koolhaas described the project "not simply as an extension but as a complement or counterpart." Shigematsu later elaborated: "We thought about designing a pair composed of two distinct and yet highly connected buildings. One is more vertical and introverted. The other is more horizontal and extraverted."
