Tag: landscape-architecture | ArchDaily

Architecture in the Andes: How Altitude Shapes Design Decisions

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

The Andes are often understood as a continuous mountain range, yet they encompass a wide range of climates and ecosystems. In Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Chile, páramos, dry highlands, temperate valleys, and snow-covered landscapes can exist within relatively short distances of one another. As elevation changes, so do temperature, solar radiation, humidity, wind, vegetation, and topography, producing environments that require different ways of building.

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?

Go East: What Tirana's Bread & Heart Festival Reveals About Architecture and Landscape

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Something has been happening in Tirana that the architectural world has not quite found the language for. In the space of a few years, a city of less than a million people in one of Europe's least-known countries has become the site of an extraordinary concentration of architectural ambition — a place where offices that rarely work in the same city, let alone the same decade, are building simultaneously, and where the questions that preoccupy contemporary architecture seem to arrive with an unusual urgency.

Island Logic: How Terrain Shapes Coastal Architecture

Kiana Buchberger — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 06:45:00 +0000

Coastal landscapes often determine far more than views. Steep slopes, fragmented rock formations, dense vegetation, hidden coves, and limited accessibility can shape how privacy, movement, and occupation unfold before architecture enters the site. Their proximity to water and climate make coastal territories highly desirable for habitation, yet their ecological sensitivity and limited geography often place pressure on how development takes shape. Unlike cities, where density can support walkability, infrastructure, and collective urban life, coastal territories operate through more fragile relationships between land, vegetation, and water.

Architecture Inspired by Birds: Fundación Cosmos and the Wetland Parks of Chile

Agustina Iñiguez — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

How can architectural design become an active tool for conservation? By considering nature as an inexhaustible source of inspiration, a harmonious connection with it frames the countless interrelationships that exist among humans, living organisms, and natural cycles. Designing with the landscape means learning to coexist with its temporal dynamics without controlling its processes. Traditions, ecology, and the past and present of a place all contribute to creating spaces that interpret their communities. Landscape architecture can draw inspiration from birds, plants, and other natural elements to shape the complex, dynamic network of ecosystems and human activities that make up the environment.

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.

From Passages to Shared Spaces: The Social Life of Circulation

Daniela Andino — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Most people rarely remember a passage. They remember the classroom, the apartment, the gallery, or the plaza at the end of it. Passages are usually designed to disappear into the background, guiding movement from one destination to the next. Yet some of architecture's most memorable experiences happen while moving through a place rather than arriving at it.

UNStudio Reveals River-Oriented Master Plan for Former Industrial Site in Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Reyyan Dogan — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:30:00 +0000

A former industrial site along the Someș River in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, is being transformed into a large-scale mixed-use district that reconnects the city with its waterfront. Designed by UNStudio in collaboration with Felixx Landscape Architects and Planners for developers IULIUS and Atterbury Europe, the RIVUS project combines urban regeneration, adaptive reuse, landscape design, and new public infrastructure within a single framework. Developed through a public participation process involving local residents, the proposal will transform the former Carbochim industrial platform into a river-oriented district organized around public space, mobility, and everyday urban activity.

Studio Gang Completes the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center for Hudson Valley Shakespeare in New York

Reyyan Dogan — Fri, 15 May 2026 06:30:00 +0000

Hudson Valley Shakespeare has opened the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center in Garrison, New York, marking the completion of a six-year project that establishes the company's first permanent home. The new campus, designed by Studio Gang in collaboration with Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, expands the organization's long-standing open-air performance model into a permanent cultural and educational facility integrated within the Hudson Valley landscape. Construction began in September 2024 following several years of planning and fundraising.

Kengo Kuma & Associates and Paul Raff Studio Selected to Design New Banff National Park Visitor Centre in Canada

Antonia Piñeiro — Fri, 15 May 2026 05:30:00 +0000

On May 13, 2026, Parks Canada, the federal agency responsible for protecting and managing Canada's natural and cultural heritage, announced the winning design for a reimagined visitor centre and community space in Banff National Park. The competition was organized in partnership with the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) as part of the 200-Block Banff Avenue Redevelopment Project. The proposal by Paul Raff Studio and Kengo Kuma & Associates was selected from a shortlist of five pre-qualified teams that also included EVOQ + Ryder, KPMB Architects, Revery Architecture, and Stantec Architecture. An independent jury assembled by the RAIC selected the design for its approach to landscape, sustainability principles, and its balance between conservation, heritage, Indigenous perspectives, and visitor experience, among other considerations.

Reading the Territory: The Landscapes of Estudio Ome

Valentina Díaz — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Based in Mexico City, Estudio Ome, founded by Susana Rojas Saviñón and Hortense Blanchard, is an architectural and landscape practice working across forests, volcanic terrains, urban fragments, and former industrial sites. Winner of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, the studio develops projects through sustained observation of ecological and territorial conditions, where design decisions arise directly from the behavior of soil, water, vegetation, and ground.

Mastering Interdisciplinary Architecture and Sustainable Urbanism at UC Berkeley

Rene Submissions — Mon, 11 May 2026 01:30:00 +0000

Today, interdisciplinary learning and exchange are more important than ever in addressing increasingly complex environmental, social, and urban challenges.

Kengo Kuma & Associates and Field Operations to Renovate Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art

Antonia Piñeiro — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:30:00 +0000

The Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art, located near Philadelphia, is dedicated to promoting the natural and cultural connections between the region's landscape, historic sites, and artists. The Conservancy protects land and waterways throughout the Brandywine Valley and other priority conservation areas, while the Museum houses a collection of American art, with particular strengths in landscape and still life painting, portraiture, and illustration. On May 6, 2026, the institution announced a project to transform its 15-acre campus, including the renovation of the historic museum building, a new museum building by Kengo Kuma & Associates, and conservation and landscape interventions by Field Operations that will create a publicly accessible 325-acre reserve with ten miles of trails.

7 Unbuilt Houses Shaped by Site, Climate, and Constraints

Nour Fakharany — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Residential architecture continues to offer a productive ground for unbuilt exploration, revealing how architects respond to site, climate, and constraint at the scale of the domestic. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected projects bring together a range of proposals that reconsider the house not as an isolated object, but as a spatial system shaped by its environment. These works position architecture as a framework that negotiates between ground, material, and inhabitation, often emerging directly from the conditions of the site.

The Built Path: Pilgrimage and Architectural Sequence on the Camino de Santiago

Olivia Poston — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Pilgrimage is one of the oldest and most persistent cultural practices, a spatial expression of humanity's search for meaning that has taken form across geographies and religions. While traditionally tied to formal belief systems, its definition has expanded in recent decades, reflecting new understandings of what is sacred and where meaning can be found. This shift reveals something fundamental: the act of moving through space remains central to how people construct meaningful experience. Yet most built environments constructed today are designed to be approached at speed from roads, transit corridors, airports, and optimized urban cores. The Camino de Santiago stands as a sustained counterargument to this condition. It is a piece of distributed architecture, refined over centuries, that remains a sophisticated example of design organized around the moving human body.

Cultural Centers Beyond the Building: 6 Unbuilt Projects Integrating Landscape

Nour Fakharany — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Cultural centers continue to serve as a productive ground for unbuilt architectural exploration, reflecting how architects are rethinking the role of public institutions in relation to landscape, experience, and program hybridity. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected projects bring together a range of proposals that expand the definition of the cultural center beyond a singular building. These works position architecture as a spatial framework that mediates between research, exhibition, retreat, and public life, often embedded within or distributed across natural and urban contexts.

Cities of the Dead: 10 Projects Exploring Burial Architecture

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Death is a certainty, but its architecture has never been stable. Every period and culture has invented a different way of placing the dead in the world (close or far, visible or screened, monumental or almost anonymous), and those choices have always carried social and political weight. Cemeteries are where that weight becomes legible in space, turning belief and regulation into boundaries, paths, and names.

Obama Presidential Center in Chicago's Jackson Park Set to Open on Juneteenth 2026

Reyyan Dogan — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 06:30:00 +0000

The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago is scheduled to open to the public on June 19, 2026, coinciding with Juneteenth. Located within Jackson Park on the city's South Side, the 19.3-acre campus was designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects in collaboration with Interactive Design Architects, with landscape architecture by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. Opening events organized by the Obama Foundation are planned between June 18 and June 21, beginning with a dedication ceremony at John Lewis Plaza, followed by the public opening of the campus and museum the following day.