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When it comes to housing typologies, the term duplex –lends itself to multiple interpretations, often leading to ambiguous applications and uses. The definition of the concept depends primarily on the country or region in which it is used, generally allowing for two main interpretations. First, a duplex can refer to a two-story housing unit with levels connected by an internal staircase. This definition usually applies to apartments and residences in countries like Spain or Canada, which are typically found in urban centers. Alternatively, a duplex can describe a specific type of project where two homes are joined side-by-side, each having its own individual entrance but sharing a central wall. Generally, the design of these houses is defined by an intentional axial symmetry, functioning as twin homes with the same features and floor plan layout. This type of duplex housing is particularly common in Argentina, Bolivia, the United Kingdom, Australia, and parts of the United States.

With their proposal “1878-1880”, Spanish architecture firm GVG, a multidisciplinary team led by Daniel Galar Irurre, Josecho Vélaz Ballesteros, and Javier Gil Ayesa, has won the design competition for the renovation of the historic Madrid-Delicias Station, home of the Madrid Railway Museum since 1983.

The Santiago Metropolitan Park is currently conducting a survey on user mobility. If you visited Parquemet before the quarantine, you can help by responding here: https://www.parquemet.cl/ayudanos-a-mejorar-parquemet/.

The city as we know it is collapsing, incapable of offering new ways of living. The virus is forcing us to confront the exhaustion of the buildings that make up the city and the systems underpinning how the entire urban landscape was conceived. Basic activities separated by miles along untraversable streets; halls and galleries acting as closed, artificially climate-controlled shells that can no longer accommodate crowds (and are therefore no longer visitable); subhuman capsules stacked atop one another in towers devoid of open spaces, common areas, or nature, with virtually no contact with the outside world—these will only become more dysfunctional as time goes on.

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The fourth edition of the Hello Wood Argentina festival has concluded. Held during March in the Municipality of Ceibas, Entre Ríos Province, this creative, professional, and social program seeks to teach participants to think with their hands and learn through experience.

We invite you to participate in the 2020 Building of the Year award. In its twelfth edition, we ask you to recognize the projects making the greatest impact on the built environment. By nominating and voting, you are part of an independent and unbiased network that has consistently helped us celebrate architecture of all scales, purposes, and conditions, from countries large and small. There are only a few days left to nominate your favorite project, filtering 1,000 projects down to just 15.

Remember, registered users can nominate their favorite project once a day. Nominations close on Monday, March 23, 2020, at 11:59 PM (GMT-3). Thank you once again for helping us continue to democratize architecture.

Shortly after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19)—which began in Wuhan in December 2019—a pandemic, highlighting the disease's high rate of transmission and exposing global deficiencies in containment methods, most Latin American countries began implementing public health emergency measures to minimize spread and strengthen the response capacity of their healthcare systems.

The School of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires (FADU, UBA) has made a series of resources available for remote access, allowing students, faculty, researchers, and the general public to access a vast collection of literature and information on architecture (as well as other FADU disciplines). This initiative aims to promote scientific and academic dissemination and strengthen the sharing of knowledge, particularly during the 2020 virtual school year.

Cities are the synthesis of thousands of years of agreements—as fragile as we are, yet wonderfully adaptable to change. As a result, they remain the ultimate ecosystem for our lives to unfold. Thanks to density, they allow us to maximize the benefits of the infrastructure, services, and public spaces we have created to sustain the well-being to which we aspire.

At first glance, all of this is in crisis today as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, looking back at our history reveals far more lethal epidemics that ultimately brought substantial improvements to the way we live.  

Architect Javier Sánchez Gómez, founding partner of the firm MSGSSS—renowned for projects such as the ATC Argentina Televisora Color building—passed away on Sunday, February 9, at the age of 83.

The stigma of rudimentary architecture, combined with the idealization of high-tech technology, relegates Indigenous building knowledge to a prehistoric imaginary. This pattern, which points to a single, unequivocal direction of progress, reveals the so-called coloniality of knowledge—a concept by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano that exposes the hidden side of modernity: the creation of hierarchies among peoples, keeping Latin America, and particularly its Indigenous populations, in a subaltern position. In other words, we tend to assume that the knowledge representing the future is produced in other lands, namely the Global North.

This article is an excerpt originally published in Revista Cadernos de Pesquisa #7 of the Associação Escola da Cidade. It stems from the final graduation project “Three Bathrooms, Three Dances” by Manuella Ferreira Leboreiro, completed at Escola da Cidade in 2018, under the supervision of Professor Yuri Fomim Quevedo. This essay was also featured in the selection of works exhibited at CCSP as part of the 12th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo.

It is 12:11 PM on November 7 (2018). An "S" on the door indicates who this bathroom is supposedly for. I am in a bathroom located in a small building designed in the 1950s by Vilanova Artigas, the Brazilian modernist architect, in the Santa Cecília neighborhood. This is my second time inside, and to me, it is still a space slowly revealing itself. At first, what really caught my attention was the almost-purple blue cast by the blacklight, which tints every tone in the room toward that color. It brings a deep sense of serenity during the day.

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Architect Severiano Mario Porto passed away today, December 10. At 90 years old, the architect died at 11 a.m. this Thursday from coronavirus. The burial will take place tomorrow, December 11, at the Parque da Colina cemetery in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. In compliance with social distancing guidelines, the wake will be open only to the family.

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La serie titulada Agua, minería y éxodo forma parte de una investigación visual llevada adelante por el fotógrafo Marcos Zegers que explora las tensiones culturales y las alteraciones territoriales derivadas de las actividades mineras y extractivas en el desierto de Atacama.

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In Latin American countries, the most common method for distinguishing rural areas from urban spaces is based on analyzing the number of residents in a given zone, classifying as "rural" any locality with a population under 2,000. In these contexts, low density and scattered development typically allow the natural landscape to predominate over the built environment.

Originally published as "El espacio público en asentamientos de origen informal: una construcción colectiva del espacio social" in the third edition of Revista CLEA —an annual publication of the Latin American Coordinator of Architecture Students (CLEA)—, this article argues that the most important aspect of public space is the opportunity it offers to build ourselves as citizens.

The production and meaning of public space in informal settlements are driven by the people who inhabit them. Consequently, the process of forming the concept of publicness is forged from the moment of occupying a void that lacks municipal services (Hernández, 2011). This stems from the fundamental need for shelter, which shapes this void through housing as the primary objective of the individual.

Isaac Michan Daniel of Michan Architecture, as well as Luis Beltrán del Río García and Andrew Sosa Martínez of the Mexican firm VRTICAL, have been recognized with the 2020 Architectural League Prize. Established in 1981 to recognize exemplary and provocative work by young practitioners, the Architectural League Prize is an annual competition organized by The Architectural League and its Young Architects + Designers Committee. This year's jury was comprised of the Young Architects + Designers Committee—Kutan Ayata, Mira Henry, and Kevin Hirth—alongside Lucia Allais, Paul Lewis, Anna Puigjaner, and Nanako Umemoto.

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In the architecture of Peru, concrete took center stage during the development of the Modern Movement. In pursuit of a new urban geography, many architects set out to renew their architectural languages. As a result, new concrete buildings—residential, office, and commercial towers—began to emerge across the city, leaving behind the Neocolonial and Republican styles that had long characterized Lima's architecture. Today, the structural advantages, versatility, expressiveness, and aesthetic value of concrete continue to make it a preferred choice for many architects, keeping exploration around the material highly relevant.

One thing that unites all human beings is that during the first years of our lives, we absorb our surroundings to develop as we grow. Consequently, education plays an irreplaceably important role. In early childhood, however, learning differs from more theoretical methods, as young children assimilate knowledge through continuous experience, developing their motor skills and their sense of dimension and space in relation to their own scale and body.

On July 23, the prequalification meeting for the international tender of the full-process design of the Guiwan Unit 4 Nine-Year Consistent School Project was successfully held. The jury was composed of renowned domestic architects and educational architecture experts. As Qianhai's first nine-year consistent public school, the project is a crucial pillar for establishing Qianhai as an educational hub and an effective practice in exploring full-process design management models. After carefully reviewing the conceptual proposals and commercial bids of the 76 registered applicants, the jury ultimately selected 5 shortlisted firms to proceed to the next stage.

The main source of spread—and likely the origin—of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), first detected in December 2019, is believed to be the Wuhan seafood market in China. From the facility's workers and vendors, the virus began to spread, initially affecting the local population and subsequently reaching more than 200 territories and countries worldwide. Today, three months after the WHO's declaration characterizing the disease as a pandemic, traditional wholesale and retail markets have come under scrutiny as potential contagion hotspots. How can food access be guaranteed for a population without posing a risk to distributors, vendors, and buyers?

One of the largest exhibitions dedicated to Brazilian architecture held outside of Brazil, Infinito Vão arrives in São Paulo. Conceived by the Casa da Arquitectura - Portuguese Center for Architecture in 2018, the exhibition is curated by Guilherme Wisnik e Fernando Serapião and will open on November 25 at Sesc 24 de Maio.

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Active since 2006, the São Paulo-based practice 23 SUL, composed of partners Gaú Manzi, Ivo Magaldi, Luís Pompeo, Luiz Ricardo Florence, Moreno Zaidan, Tiago Oakley, and André Sant’Anna da Silva, features a portfolio across a wide range of scales, spanning from the domestic to the urban sphere, with projects developed for both private clients and the public sector.

"La Ciudad como Texto" (The City as Text) was the theme of the Arqfilmfest panel discussion, where designer Carola Ureta detailed her project focusing on public space and its transformations: facades, historical figures, and walls serving as a canvas to immortalize the social sentiment following Chile's October 2019 social uprising.