Tag: urban-exploration | ArchDaily

Curatorial Work as City-Making: Design Trust’s Marisa Yiu on Exhibitions and Spatial Agency

Jonathan Yeung — Thu, 28 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

In Hong Kong, where architecture is often driven by real estate logic, infrastructure, and accelerated development, the space for bodily-scaled civic experimentation can be surprisingly narrow. This is where Design Trust has become distinctive. As a grant-making and project-enabling platform, it supports spatial interventions that sit between architecture, research, and public programming—work that is often too modest, collective, or uncertain to fit conventional client–architect pipelines.

Coffee or Tea: Third Places, Kiosks, and the Retail Architecture of Duration

Jonathan Yeung — Sun, 24 May 2026 07:30:00 +0000

"Coffee or tea?" is one of those phrases that follows you across contexts: asked on airplanes, after a meal, in hotel lounges, and in meeting rooms. It sounds like a small question—mere preference, a quick fork in the service script. Yet it also carries a quiet cultural inheritance. Tea arrives with the long history of ritual and domestic pacing, tied to older geographies of trade and everyday etiquette. Coffee arrives with a different lineage of circulation, later industrialized into the modern café and its public-facing rituals. In both cases, the drink is never only a drink; it is a practiced relationship to time and space.

Urban Banquet at the Curb: Hong Kong’s Third-Space Dining

Jonathan Yeung — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Across cities worldwide, architecture unfolds continuously at the scale of people and community—not only through new buildings, renovations, or monumental works. "Third spaces" are especially revealing. Consider the street-side culinary realm: how seating, serving, and lingering occupy the edge of the street often discloses a city's cultural codes and spatial habits. What forms of dining and inhabitation have emerged in response to local climate, regulation, and social custom—and how have they evolved over time?

Unearthing the Ground: Architecture and the Politics of the Subterranean

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Beneath the visible surface of cities lies an invisible architecture. Subways, tunnels, water systems, data cables, and bunkers form a dense network that sustains urban life while remaining largely unseen. The ground beneath our feet is not a void but a complex territory that holds the infrastructures, memories, and anxieties of our age. In recent years, as land becomes scarce and climate pressures intensify, architects and urbanists have turned their gaze downward, rediscovering the subterranean as both a physical and conceptual frontier. To design underground is to engage with the unseen mechanisms that shape the world above.

From Ecologies to Everyday Life: Reflecting on Architectural Exhibitions in 2025

Daniela Andino — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 04:00:00 +0000

This past year marked a period of introspection for architecture. As 2025 unfolded, the discipline, confronted with evolving environmental and social realities, entered a broader turning point in how it understands its role and how users engage with it. Throughout the year, exhibitions shifted focus away from buildings as isolated objects toward a broader understanding of relationships between ecology, equity, everyday life, and collective imaginaries. Across institutions and cities, they operated less as showcases and more as discursive platforms: places where architecture was not only presented, but also imagined, questioned, and collectively redefined.

International Youth Day: Three Educational Initiatives for Community-Led Urban Change

Antonia Piñeiro — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 05:30:00 +0000

August 12, designated by the United Nations as International Youth Day since 1998, was conceived as an occasion to bring youth issues to the forefront of the international agenda and to celebrate the contributions of young people to today's global society. Each year, the observance focuses on a specific theme. In 2025, it is "Local Youth Actions for the SDGs and Beyond," emphasizing the role of youth in transforming global ambitions into community-driven realities. The aim is to highlight how young people help implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within local contexts and bridge the gap between policy and practice. In this spirit, we present three educational programs, in Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that empower youth to deepen their understanding of the built environment and envision a more sustainable, people-friendly urban future.

Seville Architecture City Guide: 21 Projects Tracing the Layers of an Andalusian City

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 07:30:00 +0000

Located in southern Spain, Seville unfolds as a layered city shaped by centuries of cultural intersections. As the former capital of Al-Andalus and a central port during the Spanish Empire's expansion, its built environment reflects a deep historical complexity. From Roman foundations to Islamic geometries, from Renaissance palaces to contemporary interventions, Seville presents a unique spatial narrative in which architecture directly reflects its political, religious, and social transformations.

Kunsthaus Graz: A Friendly Alien Among Historic Landmarks

Diogo Borges Ferreira — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 04:00:00 +0000

The Kunsthaus Graz, designed by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, boldly redefines contemporary architecture in a historic city. Completed in 2003 as a centerpiece of Graz's European Capital of Culture celebrations, its biomorphic form, nicknamed the "Friendly Alien", captured global attention. Amidst Baroque and Medieval surroundings, it bridges past and future, standing as a testament to the city's cultural ambitions.

Sensory Maps: What the Sense of Smell Can Reveal about Urban Environments

Maria-Cristina Florian — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 07:30:00 +0000

Every city is a complex environment, bringing together people, cultures, architecture, commerce, and even nature. While experiencing a city, a lot of attention is given to its appearance, but appearance is not everything. The theory of sensory design aims to go beyond vision and explore the richness of the built environment through textures, smells, and sounds. For city officials and planners, a lot of attention generally goes towards how a city looks and sounds, but in terms of smell, the focus is mainly on managing waste or cleaning unsanitary areas. Yet the sense of smell, so often overlooked, is strongly linked to the creation of emotional memories. It contributes to our understanding of the world; it reveals otherwise hidden cultural practices, and it rounds up the experience of an environment.

Through Bankruptcy and Boom: What's Really Happening in Detroit?

Dario Goodwin — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 09:30:00 +0000

After exiting bankruptcy at the end of last year, Detroit has suddenly become something of a boomtown in the eyes of the media. Discourse now talks about Detroit Rising, the "Post-Post-Apocalyptic Detroit". Rents are rising, private investment is flowing into the city, and institutions that left the city for the affluent suburbs are now relocating back into Detroit proper. Too long used only as a cautionary tale, the new focus on the reality of Detroit and free flowing money opens the door for architects and urban planners, not to mention the wider community, to begin thinking about how they want to rebuild Detroit, and who they want to rebuild it for.

Walkable Cities? Rooftoppers Want Climbable Cities

Dario Goodwin — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 01:00:00 +0000

“The city for the people!” is the familiar rallying cry of the reformist architect - but which people, exactly? That’s the question at the heart of rooftopping, a new and thrill seeking variant of Urban Exploration which has recently captured the attention of the media. Spreading via social media outlets such as Instagram, the stunts draw attention by design, but why has coverage of the form of Urban Exploration climbed to such great heights?