Tag: latin-america | ArchDaily

Architecture in the Andes: How Altitude Shapes Design Decisions

Daniela Andino — Sat, 11 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.

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.

A Beating and Bleeding Heart: Bodies, Streets, and the Politics of Care in Bogotá

Sydney Coldren — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 07:30:00 +0000

This article is the winning entry of the Epistle Writing Prize 2025, an annual competition dedicated to recognizing outstanding writing on design, architecture, and the environment.

Building Public Life: How Bogotá and Mexico City Addressed Urban Inequality

Daniela Andino — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

In many Latin American cities, peripheral neighborhoods have historically had less access to the resources that make urban life more than just livable. Housing, transportation, and public services are the usual markers of that gap. But there is another gap that is harder to quantify: the absence of places where people can gather, learn, rest, and participate in collective life. When those spaces do not exist, the city not only fails to provide a service. It fails to acknowledge a presence.

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.

PREVI Lima and the Politics of Resident Authorship in Social Housing

Ananya Nayak — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Architects are accustomed to being credited for buildings long after construction ends. Names remain attached to projects through photographs, publications, and histories, often decades after the original drawings were produced. Buildings, on the other hand, rarely remain faithful to that narrative for long. Families grow, technologies change, businesses emerge, and daily life introduces demands that no plan can fully anticipate. Over time, architecture accumulates modifications, repairs, additions, and improvisations that gradually distance it from its original form.

Designed to Repeat, Forced to Adapt: The Parallel Architecture of Socialist Housing

Ananya Nayak — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

A housing block in New Belgrade appears orderly from a distance. Concrete slabs repeat with disciplined consistency, windows align into measured grids, and balconies stack with the confidence of a system certain of itself. However, proximity changes the reading. One balcony is enclosed in aluminum glazing, another softened with improvised shading. Insulation thickens part of a façade while laundry frames another edge like an accidental elevation study. The district still reads as planned, though occupation has made its order less uniform. Within that order, repetition has gradually been rewritten through occupation.

Brasília and Chandigarh: Two Modernist Utopias Separated by an Ocean

Camilla Ghisleni — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Between the 1950s and 1960s, two cities were built that would leave a lasting mark on the history of architecture and urbanism. Born of the same concept, yet separated by more than 14,000 kilometers, Brasília, in Brazil, and Chandigarh, in India—both steeped in modernist principles—were planned and built from scratch.

AD Classics: Palmas 555 / Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos

Natalia Yunis — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Palmas 555 is a building that stands out in the urban landscape of Mexico City due to its special volumetry and innovative design. This corporate office building was designed and constructed by Juan Sordo Madaleno together with José Adolfo Wiechers and José Ignacio de Abiega as Associate Architects in 1975.

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.

Beyond the Shell: Félix Candela’s Palacio de los Deportes for the 1968 Mexico Olympics

Moises Carrasco — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

When Mexico City hosted the Olympics in 1968, it was the first time the Games had been awarded to a Latin American country as well as the first time for a Spanish-speaking nation to host them. This made the games a good opportunity to project Mexico and its culture internationally, thus prompting the government to constitute an organizing committee with prominent local talent. They appointed Pedro Ramírez Vázquez as its president, a Mexican architect who held significant influence over the state's mid-century building program. His approach was explicit: architecture as a synthesis of international modernist technique with Pre-Columbian references and local material culture. Under his direction, the committee would oversee the construction and adaptation of venues distributed across the southern districts of Mexico City, nearly all designed and built by local architects, engineers, and technicians.

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.

Public Space in Use: Región Austral and the Architecture of Everyday Life

Daniela Andino — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Architecture is often evaluated through what gets built. But in many cases, what matters happens after: how spaces are used, adapted, and made part of everyday life. For Región Austral, winner of ArchDaily's 2025 Next Practices Awards, this is where design really begins. Working across many contexts, the practice approaches public space not as a single object, but as something that needs to be activated, negotiated, and sustained over time. Their projects focus less on defining form and more on creating the conditions for use, with design serving as the starting point.

Reclaiming the Street: Alejandra Ferrera on Architecture and Urban Life in Honduras

Moises Carrasco — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Honduras is the second-largest country in Central America, both in territory and population. Today, its urban fabric remains heavily influenced by modernist principles from the 1970s that prioritised high-speed arterial corridors and automobile-dependent "point-to-point" mobility. In addition, the country faced many challenges regarding public safety during the 2010s, which contributed to creating an urban space characterised by blind facades, high perimeter walls, and gated enclosures designed to isolate the interior from the public realm.

Contemporary Ecuadorian Architecture: Connecting Materials, Environment, and Culture

Agustina Iñiguez — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Ecuador's territory embraces a remarkable diversity of landscapes, ranging from the Pacific Coast to the peaks of the Andes, the vast expanse of the Amazon rainforest, and the volcanic Galápagos Islands. Each region of the country presents its own distinctive characteristics, reflected in its varied environmental, cultural, and social contexts. While Latin American architecture is rooted in rich ancestral traditions, native construction techniques, and local materials, contemporary Ecuadorian architecture expresses an evolving identity that blends these elements with actual demands. Tradition and innovation, local resources and modern techniques, along with social responsibility and aesthetics, interact with the natural environment, urban conditions, and social contexts.

40+ Contemporary Architectural Works Across Ecuador Captured by Francesco Russo and Luca Piffaretti

Antonia Piñeiro — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:30:00 +0000

Between 2023 and 2024, photographers Francesco Russo and Luca Piffaretti documented architecture and landscapes across Ecuador's coast, the Andes Mountains, the Amazon rainforest, the Galápagos Islands, and cities such as Quito, Guayaquil, and Cuenca. The photographic documentation explores Ecuador's evolving identity through its contemporary architecture, examining how it engages with natural surroundings, urban conditions, and social contexts. The resulting archive includes more than 40 projects by renowned local practices such as Al Borde, Durán & Hermida, Emilio López, José María Sáez, La Cabina de la Curiosidad, MCM+A, Natura Futura, and RAMA Estudio, among many others. The selection demonstrates how architecture can create high-quality spaces that respond to contemporary demands for sustainability and environmental responsibility by combining creativity and technology with renewable resources, despite ongoing economic, climatic, and political challenges in Latin America and beyond.

Who decides what deserves to be preserved? Power and heritage in Latin America

Camilla Ghisleni — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 08:30:00 +0000

When we enter a museum, walk through a historic center, or check a country's list of heritage sites, we rarely think about the process behind these choices. Who decided, on behalf of us all, that these objects, places, architecture, and heritage deserved to be conserved and shared, while others are discarded?

From the Courtyard to the Neighborhood: Latin American Lessons on the Collective Construction of Place

Camilla Ghisleni — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 08:30:00 +0000

In Latin America, encounters do not necessarily arise from grand architectural gestures or monumental urban plans. Instead, they emerge from the between, from intermediate spaces: the courtyard, the veranda, the sidewalk, and the shared corridor. These spaces, often considered residual or informal by traditional disciplines, are precisely where daily life builds connections.