Tag: environmental-design | ArchDaily

Designing Quietly: Rethinking Architecture’s Overlooked Surface

Kiana Buchberger — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 06:09:40 +0000

The ceiling is one of the largest continuous surfaces in a space, yet why is it rarely the first architectural element people notice? Often perceived as the plane that conceals structure and building services, it quietly recedes into the background while facades, materials, structural systems, and furniture define a building's architectural identity. Yet few architectural elements influence the experience of a space as consistently as this one. The ceiling shapes how sound travels, how light is reflected, how air moves through a room, and ultimately how architecture is experienced, bringing together technical performance and architectural expression through a single continuous surface.

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.

New Life for Old Spaces: Buildner Reveals Re-Form Winners as Edition 3 Opens

Rene Submissions — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 06:45:00 +0000

Buildner has announced the results of its Re-Form: New Life for Old Spaces, second edition, an international ideas competition examining the adaptive reuse of small-scale existing buildings. The competition invited architects and designers to propose transformations of used, abandoned, or overlooked structures with an approximate footprint of 250 square meters, located anywhere in the world. With no fixed site or program, participants were encouraged to explore alternatives to demolition and new construction through reuse strategies grounded in contemporary social and environmental concerns.

Building Forward: How Vernacular Knowledge Is Shaping Contemporary Architecture

Daniela Andino — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Across different climates and building cultures, many contemporary projects are working with local ways of building in new ways. Earth walls, bamboo structures, shaded thresholds, and collective construction processes are being reconsidered not as references, but as tools for the conditions architecture is facing now and will continue to face.

Foster + Partners Reveals Agricultural City Master Plan in Southern Oman

Reyyan Dogan — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:30:00 +0000

Foster + Partners, in collaboration with Dar Al-Handasah, has revealed the master plan for Al Najd Agricultural City in Dhofar, southern Oman. Covering approximately 54 million square feet, the development is conceived as a self-sustaining agricultural and urban settlement designed to respond to the region's environmental conditions and agricultural landscape. Commissioned by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Water Resources, the project forms part of the objectives outlined in Oman Vision 2040, which seeks to strengthen food security, diversify the national economy, and support sustainable development initiatives.

Paris as a Living Laboratory: Proximity, Inclusion, and the School as Climate and Social Infrastructure

Olivia Poston — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

ReGreeneration is a Horizon Europe-awarded project working across nine cities to advance urban regeneration through nature-based solutions, participatory governance, and integrated approaches to climate resilience and social equity. The nine cities in the project portfolio span a range of urban typologies, scales, and planning traditions, forming a living laboratory for rethinking sustainable urban transformation in practice. Each city brings distinct challenges and ambitions to the collaboration, and this series of articles explores what each city is doing and what the broader design community can learn from it.

Designing for Chickens: Rethinking How Humans and Animals Share Space

Olivia Poston — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

For centuries, chickens have lived alongside people in settlements of every scale, from rural farms and village compounds to dense urban neighborhoods. Across much of the world, keeping a flock has been part of everyday life, providing eggs and meat to residents, or pest control for the surrounding agricultural land. The structures built to house chickens varied according to local materials, climate, and cultural practices, yet they shared a common purpose: to create a space where chickens and humans could coexist. The chicken coop is not a new architectural typology nor a contemporary response to urban living. Instead, it is a form that has continually adapted to changing social, environmental, and spatial conditions.

The Architecture of Mold: What Buildings Cannot Control

Daniela Andino — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Contemporary architecture has learned to celebrate living matter. Mycelium panels, algae systems, living walls, life is now welcomed into buildings, framed as innovation. Yet the same discipline that celebrates these organisms treats mold as contamination. Both are biological. Both respond to moisture, temperature, and material conditions. The difference is not scientific. It is about which forms of life architecture is willing to accept, and which it prefers to remove.

Thick Walls and Deep Openings: When Architecture Rediscovers Mass

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

For much of the twentieth century, architectural culture was shaped by the pursuit of lightness. Steel structures and curtain walls reduced the building envelope to a thin layer separating interior from exterior, while façades became smooth, continuous surfaces where windows were cut as precise openings within an abstract plane. But for centuries, buildings were conceived as bodies of mass; walls possessed depth, windows were recessed within thick masonry, and space was often experienced as something carved from the solidity of construction. In recent years, several contemporary projects appear to revisit this older spatial logic, reintroducing thickness as an architectural condition through deep openings, monolithic volumes, and heavy envelopes.

World Environment Day 2026 Coincides with Record Heatwaves, Renewing Focus on Climate Adaptation in Cities

Reyyan Dogan — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 06:30:00 +0000

As Europe experiences one of its earliest and most intense heatwaves in recent years, World Environment Day 2026 arrives amid renewed discussions about climate adaptation, urban resilience, and the capacity of cities to respond to increasingly extreme temperatures. Across Portugal, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, temperatures have surged well above seasonal averages, prompting heat alerts, school closures, emergency planning measures, and growing concerns about the performance of buildings and public infrastructure under prolonged heat stress. The convergence of these highlights a reality that is becoming increasingly worldwide: climate change is no longer solely an environmental concern but an issue that is fundamentally reshaping the spaces where people live, work, and gather.

Design as Repair: How Architecture Is Advancing Environmental Justice

Olivia Poston — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Environmental justice confronts a simple but uncomfortable truth: the benefits and burdens of the environment are not shared equally. Marginalized communities bear a disproportionate share of polluted air, unsafe water, toxic land uses, extreme heat, and the accelerating risks of climate change in cities around the world. These are the consequential products of decades of policy decisions, investment patterns, exclusionary planning practices, and planning choices that have consistently favored certain communities over others.

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.

In Other Worlds by Liam Young Reimagines Cities, Landscapes, and Climate Futures at the Barbican Centre

Reyyan Dogan — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:30:00 +0000

The Barbican Centre has announced In Other Worlds, a major immersive exhibition by speculative architect, filmmaker, and artist Liam Young, opening from May 21 through September 6, 2026. Occupying three distinct locations within the Barbican complex, the Silk Street Entrance, The Curve gallery, and Car Park 5, the exhibition will transform the Brutalist cultural landmark into a sequence of cinematic environments examining architecture, infrastructure, climate futures, and planetary urbanism. Developed in collaboration with writers, scientists, filmmakers, musicians, and performers, the project brings together large-scale projections, LED installations, sound environments, graphic narratives, costumes, and speculative artifacts to explore how fiction and spatial storytelling can shape conversations around environmental and technological change.

Climate and Collective Use: Architectural Permeability in Latin America

Daniela Andino — Sun, 03 May 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Architecture is often understood as a matter of enclosure. Walls define space, separating interior from exterior and establishing clear limits. Yet across many projects in Latin America, this distinction becomes less precise. Rather than operating as closed objects, buildings often remain open, allowing air, light, and movement to pass through them.

Designing with Air: Rethinking Architecture Beyond the Wall

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Sat, 02 May 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Architecture is traditionally chronicled through the persistence of the solid. We define the discipline by the weight of the lintel, the mass of the pier, and the resistance of the wall. Even when lightness is invoked, it is usually understood as a subtractive act, the thinning of a section or the precarious reduction of a load. Yet there is a parallel history, less visible and harder to isolate, in which the primary material of construction is not what occupies space, but what moves through it.

The Courtyard as Architecture’s Lightest Cooling System

Ananya Nayak — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 07:30:00 +0000

The courtyard is often remembered as a figure from the past, an inward-looking space of nostalgia, culture, and domestic ritual. But this framing misses its primary role. Before it was symbolic, the courtyard was operational. It organized air, moderated light, and absorbed heat. It did not decorate architecture; it made it habitable. In contemporary housing, these functions are normally delegated to mechanical systems, applied after form is fixed. In courtyard houses, they are resolved spatially, before a wall is even built.

Ideology of Performance: Sustainability and the Limits of Efficiency

Olivia Poston — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 07:30:00 +0000

This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.