The 6th Arquia/Próxima Festival: Relevant Practices in Madrid has announced the winning projects of this edition. Aiming to provide visibility to Spanish architects during their first ten years of practice, the Arquia/Próxima cultural program focuses on disseminating, promoting, and highlighting their achievements and professional principles.

The biennial's theme, defined by its curator, Iñaki Carnicero, invited reflection "on the paradox produced by the international success of Spanish architecture, which does not correspond to the volume of architectural production in recent years, but nevertheless reflects work that is more relevant than ever," the organization explained.

The following awards were presented during the festival:

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The formal exploration of architecture offers several avenues for experimentation within design practice. Designing diverse forms, site layouts, and compositions is a strategy that gains significant depth when paired with material investigation. Glass, as a material, allows architects to engage with some of the core elements of architectural theory: natural light, the transparency and opacity of surfaces, the suspension of spatial boundaries, and the visual relationships established between different parts of a building.

When freed from its conventional role as a window, glass can be used strategically to address complex project conditions, enrich spatial quality, or serve as a balancing element between weight and lightness when combined with other materials such as steel, wood, and concrete.

A few weeks ago, we invited our readers to imagine a scenario: if the next Pritzker laureate were Portuguese-speaking, who would you bet on?

The landscape master plan to revitalize the western bank of the Magdalena River in Mompox—a Colombian city declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site—is the winner of the III Latin American Biennial of Landscape Architecture (BLAP).

Designed by the Colombian firm OPUS, the Revitalization of the Albarrada de Mompox is the grand prize winner of the competition organized by the Mexican Society of Landscape Architects (SAPM). The biennial also recognized works, proposals, and publications in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Chile across its six categories. Established in 2014, the BLAP seeks to highlight the role of landscape architecture in building habitats in Latin America, with a particular emphasis on the region's environmental and social challenges.

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Featuring a total of 53 proposals, the Council of Architecture and Urbanism of Brazil and the Institute of Architects of Brazil launched the “Open Letter to Candidates in the 2018 Elections for the Right to the City.” The issue of social housing is one of the highlights of the proposed “Solidary and Inclusive Urban Planning.” For these organizations, it is crucial to establish a housing policy consisting of diverse solutions rather than a single model based on the construction of massive housing complexes, typically on the outskirts of cities, as is currently the case.

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In late January, the Citizen Forum "Modern Landscape, Transforming Territories" took place in Chillán, offering three days of reflection on the cultural heritage of the newly designated capital of the Ñuble Region. The event began with a tribute to architect Osvaldo Cáceres, who was close to the architects involved in the reconstruction of Chillán and nearby cities following the 1939 earthquake.

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Engineers and architects looking to integrate structural design techniques into their architectural projects will find interest in this free online course: professors from the Department of Structural Engineering and Building Physics at the School of Architecture of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (ETSAM) are offering the course “Structural Design: Learning Through Case Studies” through the Ibero-American digital platform Miriadax.

The course offers case-study-based learning, allowing students to draw their own design conclusions. To do so, the curriculum explains the structural design process of ten buildings of increasing complexity, starting with residential and small institutional buildings and ending with more complex projects featuring structural solutions for large spaces.

A Point of View

This text was written for the French edition of the exhibition catalog The Universalists: 50 Years of Portuguese Architecture, an event organized by the Delegation of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris to mark its 50th anniversary, co-produced with the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine. The exhibition is now being presented, in 2018, in Portugal, at the Casa da Arquitectura in Matosinhos.

To facilitate reading, we have divided the text into two parts. The second part is available at this link.

Since 2016, Chile has been undergoing a gradual transformation of its building regulations thanks to the enactment of the historic Decree 50 of the General Ordinance of Urban Planning and Construction (OGUC). This decree mandates a national standard for universal accessibility, ratifying both the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2008) and Law 20,422 (2010), which establishes standards for equal opportunities and social inclusion for people with disabilities.

This regulatory shift prompted the team at Corporación Ciudad Accesible to update their 14 “Accessible Fact Sheets,” now that compliance is a requirement rather than an option. "We want to achieve an accessible and universal vision where design envisions people beyond the traditional mold, so that those who do not move, see, hear, or understand the environment in conventional ways find the same opportunities and participation," explains their team.

In Mexico, INFONAVIT's Urban Redensification project aims to identify strategies to curb urban sprawl across various Mexican cities. This initiative seeks to reconfigure the urban fabric by repurposing underutilized land and abandoned housing, aiming to create compact, efficient cities that offer a better quality of life for their residents.

Do identical brick blocks confuse you? Are you unsure whether to turn at this corner or the next because all the perimeter-block buildings look exactly alike? Do you lose your way in the narrow, winding streets of the city center? As it turns out, this is a common challenge for many, which is why it is essential for cities to invest in wayfinding systems designed specifically for pedestrians.

The benefits are numerous. First, it is an excellent way to promote the cleanest form of transit: walking. The advantages of this include easing public transit congestion, reducing vehicular traffic, encouraging a deeper familiarity with the city, and revitalizing businesses on secondary streets—not to mention the positive impact on tourists and visitors. This is precisely what the #LeerMadrid project aims to achieve. The initiative is currently being developed by Paisaje Transversal in collaboration with Applied Wayfinding, Avanti Avanti, Urban Networks/CGR, and Dimas García Moreno.

This new competition, titled 'Young Architects in Latin America,' is one of the collateral events of the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018. It is organized by CA'ASI following the success of previous editions, such as 'New Chinese Architects' in 2010, 'Young Arab Architects' in 2012, and 'Young Architects in Africa' in 2014.

A few months ago, the call for entries was opened to young architects from Latin America, offering them an opportunity to establish a presence on the global architectural scene. The jury met in Paris in late March to announce the finalist projects, which will be invited to present their work in Venice as part of the 16th Architecture Biennale.

Read on for the complete list by country.

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The Bicentennial of Peru's independence, to be celebrated in 2021, represents not only a great opportunity to take stock of what we have built as a nation in two hundred years of existence, but also to reflect on the challenges for the next one hundred years—that is, on the road toward the tricentennial.

This year, Athos Bulcão, one of the most active artists working at the intersection of art and modern Brazilian architecture, would have turned 100. Bulcão dedicated a significant portion of his career to merging traditional tilework with modern architectural design—and succeeded. His work defines some of the most iconic buildings of Brazilian modernism, most notably in Brasília. 

In 2017, Ramboll Studio Dreiseitl and RSAA/Büro Ziyu Zhuang were commissioned by Guangdong Zhuguang Group Co., Ltd. to create an ecologically transformative urban design and waterfront landscape along the northern bank of the Pearl River in Guangzhou's CBD. The planning phase of the project spanned nearly a year.

From the Arquia Foundation Blog, architect Adrià Guardiet shares an article reflecting on three perspectives on unfinished architecture—projects where time and their occupants play a central role.

Certain architectures work with time as a design variable. Some are conceived as open, dynamic, growing structures. Others operate around the memory of the site. To name just two examples.

In these projects, time is often introduced as an entelechy—that is, as a specifically intellectual device. Yet time appears far more explicitly when architecture is pending completion, left unfinished due to economic, political, biological, or other reasons. These are what we have come to call meanwhile architectures: projects that find fertile ground for development in unstable contexts.

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Walking is the most common form of transportation in the world and a basic human right. It connects us directly with our surroundings, does not pollute the city, and offers numerous health benefits, such as reducing chronic diseases, obesity, and diabetes. This is the message that the ITDP and Streetfilms convey in the film The Right to Walk, released this year.

If walking is so beneficial, why is it so difficult to do in urban environments? Rapid urban growth and car-centric planning have increasingly restricted space and respect for pedestrians. Every year, 1.3 million people are killed in traffic, half of whom are pedestrians, cyclists, or motorcyclists. Furthermore, traffic accidents result in 20 to 50 million hospitalizations annually, making them the leading cause of physical disability worldwide. More than 90% of traffic fatalities occur in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil, which has the highest number of traffic deaths per capita in South America.

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The "Single-Family Housing" Architectural Design Workshop, organized by the architecture firm Cota Paredes Arquitectos, concluded its fourth edition, inviting graduated architects and upper-level architecture students to develop a Single-Family Housing Project over four weeks in either an In-Person or Online format. Discover the selected projects below:

The project brief consisted of designing a single-family home for a family of six within a residential development in Zapopan, Jalisco. The selected design had to comply with the building regulations of the subdivision (Valle Imperial), addressing all necessary and fundamental aspects to achieve a home utilizing the concepts of introspective architecture.

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This week, the latest edition of Concéntrico, the Logroño Architecture and Design Festival in Spain, came to a close. For the second consecutive year, we have participated in this initiative, which invites residents and visitors to discover and rediscover spaces of interest in the city's historic center. Over five days, a series of temporary installations by creators from around the world became resting places for pilgrims, urban stages for enjoying a glass of wine, and adventure playgrounds for local children.

Cube Design has won the international design competition for the Dalang Sports Center and Culture and Art Center, securing the first-place bid. The winning proposal focuses on the relationship between architecture and the city, exploring everyday user scenarios to create a public space integrated into community life. With a clear strategy and a clean, concise design language, the scheme successfully balances the building's various urban interfaces while organizing and distributing diverse public activity areas under high-density requirements. Spanning an area of 58,500 square meters, the project is set to become an influential civic hub and landmark in Shenzhen's Longhua District, representing a key cultural milestone for the area.

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The Ruin Experience project, developed by architect Sergio Navarro García, proposes an intervention in the ruined buildings scattered across the countryside of Lorca, Murcia (Spain), where the local population gradually abandoned these robust houses to move to the city. The project offers an alternative approach to intervention, engaging directly with the environment and leveraging its resources to create sensory complexes where people interact with nature through architecture.

El Mesillo, the site selected for the intervention, is a unique, hidden enclave in the municipality of Lorca, defined by a direct and deep-seated relationship between its inhabitants and nature through agriculture. Historically, this bond was even closer, giving rise to the creation and use of entirely natural creams and treatments. Water, soil, air, sun, essential oils, homemade lotions and concoctions, fruits, vegetables, and, of course, a proper siesta, served as home remedies for minor ailments and daily stress.

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Eleven years ago, ArchDaily was born with a mission in mind: to democratize architectural information around the world and empower our readers to foster inclusive discussions that positively transform our cities. By providing inspiration, knowledge, and tools to the architects currently facing the challenge of designing the future, we hope to help improve the quality of life of those who inhabit our world's urban centers.

At the ArchDaily Mexico offices, August 3rd is a special day:

Today our local site turns 6 years old!

On December 20, the final curatorial review for the first edition of the National Essay and Research Competition, Arquitectura Escrita 2017, took place at the national headquarters of the Colegio de Arquitectos de Chile.

Organized by Grupo Arquitectura Caliente and co-organized by Ediciones ARQ, the competition awarded the 20 best essays out of 87 submissions in the undergraduate and graduate categories, representing 18 architecture schools across 9 different Chilean cities.

The competition was directed by Gabriela García de Cortázar, with a jury committee made up of 30 prominent academics and professionals.

Below is the research essay by Pontificia Universidad Católica student Francisco Cardemil, winner in the Undergraduate Category.

This week concluded the series of meetings and conferences convened by the Venice Biennale to introduce Freespace, curated by artistic directors Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara. Venice, Paris, Berlin, and New York. The Irish architects presented the list of 71 participants making up the curatorial proposal, which features five Latin American participants: Elemental (Chile), Rozana Montiel Estudio de Arquitectura (Mexico), Barclay & Crousse (Peru), Carla Juaçaba (Brazil), and Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Brazil).