Tag: ecological-design | ArchDaily

Beyond Human: Architecture as a Participant in Living Systems

Moises Carrasco — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

The built environment has historically served humans as a mechanism of environmental control. Through our intellectual capacities and ability to organize, we have used buildings to actively influence and terraform the immediate context in which they are inserted, often treating geography, water, and ecosystems as resources to be extracted and managed. However, more and more, architecture is transitioning from exploiting physical and biological matter to actively collaborating with it. This shift demands that architects explore how buildings and their materials grow, transform, decay, and persist beyond human timelines. This thinking also serves as a starting point for the profession to reflect on how it influences the natural world, as well as the non-human species around it, creating networks and connections between humans, buildings, living organisms, and natural environments.

Dreaming in the Ruins: How a Sleeping Ritual in Logroño Proposes a New Civic Architecture

Olivia Poston — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Cities are increasingly designed to mitigate risk, and by doing so, need to collect data on climate, infrastructure, biodiversity, and social fragmentation so that the language of resilience becomes a fixture of planning. Yet the underlying conditions that produce polarization, civic disengagement, and ecological breakdown often remain unquestioned. The tools that dominate urban practice tend to address only one register of human experience, while the emotional and imaginative dimensions of transformation are not treated as reliable solutions.

What Can Architectural Practice Learn From Botany?

Agustina Iñiguez — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

While human life depends heavily on plants for the medicines, building materials, and fuel they provide, they also play a vital role in many ecological processes. From climate regulation through carbon dioxide absorption to soil fertility and the purification of air and water, plant diversity offers opportunities to address some of the most pressing challenges of this century, including food security, energy availability, climate change, and habitat degradation. In this context, botanical gardens act as living refuges that foster innovation, adaptation, and human resilience. But what can architectural practice learn from botany and its methods?

The Ecological Intelligence of Sacred Landscapes

Ananya Nayak — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Architecture often speaks about ecological design as though it were a recent discovery. Biodiversity corridors, regenerative landscapes, sponge cities, and more-than-human urbanism are presented as emerging responses to contemporary environmental crises. Across India and the SWANA region, landscapes shaped through religious practice have long organized relationships between people, water, vegetation, and animals. Long before ecological performance became a design metric, temple tanks stored monsoon water, sacred groves protected biodiversity, and oasis settlements sustained life in some of the world's most arid environments. Few of these places emerged from explicit environmental agendas. They emerged through cultural and spiritual practices. Their environmental logic remains highly relevant today. Many of the conditions now discussed through more-than-human design have existed for centuries within landscapes architects rarely study as ecological infrastructure.

Swiss Pavilion Examines Water as Resource, Subject, and Legal Entity at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale

Reyyan Dogan — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 06:30:00 +0000

Architect and urbanist Paola Viganò has been selected by Pro Helvetia to curate the Swiss Pavilion at the 20th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Chosen following a unanimous recommendation from the selection jury, Viganò's proposal explores water as a territorial, ecological, and political condition, taking Switzerland's role as "Europe's water tower" as its conceptual point of departure. Developed with StudioPaolaViganò and an interdisciplinary team, the project examines water not only as a resource but also as a subject, a legal entity, and a force that shapes landscapes, infrastructures, and the built environment.

Designing for Stray Cities: Architecture Beyond the Human

Ananya Nayak — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Architecture continues to draw cities as though humans occupy them alone. Plans trace circulation routes, zoning maps assign functions, and buildings are evaluated according to human comfort, safety, and efficiency. Walking through cities across India and Southwest Asia reveals something much more complex. Dogs sleep beneath market stalls, monkeys move across rooftops, birds nest in temple towers and mosque façades, and insects pollinate urban landscapes hidden in plain sight. These species are woven into daily urban life as consistently as human occupants. Streets, courtyards, roofs, drainage systems, markets, and vacant lots are already occupied by multiple species simultaneously. Architectural thinking has been slower to account for this reality.

Heat as a Design Partner: Trees, Soil, and Wind Corridors as Cooling Infrastructure

Jonathan Yeung — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

"By 2050, almost every child in the world — nearly 2.2 billion children — will be exposed to frequent heat waves." UNICEF's warning is often read as a public health forecast, but it is also a challenge to architecture and the way cities are built. As extreme heat intensifies across Asia, Europe, and beyond, thermal comfort should not be reduced to merely an indoor service delivered by machines. Air-conditioning has become a life-support system for many cities, especially in dense, humid, and rapidly urbanizing regions. Yet to rely on it as the default answer is to treat heat as something that can simply be moved elsewhere (and in the process generating extra heat) — expelled from interiors into streets, service alleys, energy grids, and the atmosphere. Its expansion increases energy demand, produces waste heat, and reinforces unequal access to comfort.

Transspecies Architecture: ArchDaily’s June Editorial Focus

Romullo Baratto — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 05:00:00 +0000

Western philosophical tradition has long placed culture in opposition to nature. This dual thinking has shaped the canon of the sciences and humanities, and architecture was not left aside. Under that logic, everything that is not human exists to be exploited by them and is named "natural resource". This extractivist mindset has shaped the development of many parts of the world in the last centuries, leaving deep—sometimes irreparable—marks on the planet. Nevertheless, other ways of living have always existed. From West-African religious practices based on animism to the herbal sciences of the masters of the Sacred Jurema in Brazil; from indigenous communities in India whose life rhythm mirrors the monsoons, to the Arctic's Inuits who can see dozens of shades of white: humans and nature bear no distinction, what exists is life.

Building Autonomy: Latin American Communities Bringing Life’s Systems Into Architecture

Daniela Andino — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Before a building can be inhabited, many other things need to happen. Water has to arrive, energy has to be generated, food has to be grown or transported, and waste has to go somewhere. These processes are usually treated as something outside architecture, even though they shape the most basic conditions of everyday life.

Above Water, Slope, and Forest: Elevated Architecture in Latin America

Daniela Andino — Sun, 10 May 2026 07:30:00 +0000

In Latin America, the ground is rarely just a surface to build on. It can be a river edge, a steep slope, a humid forest floor, a floodable landscape, or a territory under ecological pressure, and in many cases, it carries a history of communities that already knew how to respond to it, building on stilts, on platforms, over water, long before contemporary architecture asked the same questions.

Rethinking Architecture at the Scale of Planetary Systems

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Architecture has traditionally been described as a discipline concerned with space, form, and material presence. Yet this understanding becomes increasingly limited when confronted with the conditions that shape contemporary construction. Buildings no longer emerge from a stable relationship between site, program, and material. Instead, they are produced within a dense web of technological systems that operate across territorial, ecological, and temporal scales. Energy networks, data infrastructures, extraction processes, and global logistics shape architecture as decisively as climate or urban context.

Farewell to Masters: Remembering the Architects We Lost in 2025

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 07:30:00 +0000

Every year brings new ideas, projects, and shifts in architectural culture, but it also marks the loss of voices that have shaped the discipline across decades. Architecture moves forward, but it also advances through absence. When figures who helped articulate its language and its ambitions disappear, they leave behind more than completed works or influential texts. Their absence becomes a threshold, a moment in which the discipline pauses to understand what remains, what evolves, and what continues to guide us. These moments of loss remind us that architecture is a long, collective construction, carried not only by those shaping the present but also by those whose visions continue to orient how we think about cities and landscapes.

Local Knowledge and Ecological Context: City Making Lessons from Chicago’s Wild Mile

Olivia Poston — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 04:00:00 +0000

For more than a century, residents of growing American cities reshaped their rivers to serve industrial and manufacturing needs. Waterways were straightened, deepened, paved, or buried to support shipping routes and to move materials efficiently across regions. These transformations created an urban landscape in which rivers were treated as productive infrastructure rather than as living ecological systems.

The Architecture of Restraint: When Choosing Not to Build Becomes Design

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:30:00 +0000

In a world facing ecological exhaustion and spatial saturation, the act of building has come to represent both creation and consumption. For decades, architectural progress was measured by the new: new materials, new technologies, new monuments of ambition. Yet today, the discipline is increasingly shaped by another form of intelligence, one that values what already exists. Architects are learning that doing less can mean designing more, and this shift marks the emergence of what might be called an architecture of restraint: a practice defined by care, maintenance, and the deliberate choice not to build.

Beyond Human-Centered Architecture: Designing Spaces with Other Species

Daniela Andino — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 04:00:00 +0000

As architecture moves beyond human-centered design, new practices are rethinking coexistence as an ethical and ecological framework. From political infrastructures to habitats, these approaches invite us to imagine architecture as a shared living system.

Consciously Driven: In Conversation with VOID, the Costa Rican Studio Shaping Regenerative Architecture

Valentina Díaz — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 07:30:00 +0000

The conversation with VOID emerges within the framework of the 2025 Latin American Architecture Biennial, offering an opportunity to explore a practice that listens, cares, and accompanies. Their work unfolds as an act of mediation: through interdisciplinary research and attention to the plurality of natural and social factors, they seek to understand the many natures of a place. Since its beginning in 2012, this process has evolved, consolidating a stance that seeks to design architecture from and for the place—caring for it, healing it, and regenerating it—opening spaces where territories sustain and unfold their own adaptive processes.

Time-Space to Read, Gather, and Care: 7 Community Libraries in Remote and Peripheral Settings

Miwa Negoro — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 06:30:00 +0000

In many parts of the world, remoteness is not only defined by distance. It may describe a mountain settlement far from infrastructure or an urban and suburban neighborhood on the margins of visibility and opportunity. Across these diverse contexts, the library has been one of the most vital typologies—a space where architecture embodies the modes of accessibility, inclusivity, and community care.

Shifting Sediments: Rivers as an Architectural and Cultural Catalyst

Olivia Poston — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 04:00:00 +0000

Rivers generate a distinct typology of architecture bound by design threads of material practice, environmental adaptation, cultural symbolism, and imagination. Each river system produces a unique ecosystem where water, soil, vegetation, and settlement converge to form a living network. Designing within this environment requires a capacity to read movement rather than resist it, to build on uncertain ground, and to understand permanence as a balance in motion. Unlike the fixed horizon of the sea, the river is never still. It teaches architects to think in gradients rather than boundaries, and to design as part of an evolving landscape.