In Bogotá, CEMEX Colombia hosted the 12th edition of the 2018 CEMEX Building Award (Premio Obras CEMEX), celebrating the best of Colombian architecture and construction—projects "capable of creating solutions that promote the social and economic development of countries and, of course, contribute to protecting the environment," explained Ricardo Naya, president of CEMEX Colombia, during the ceremony held at the C. Vilar Auditorium.

Composed of Carlos Campuzano, Rafael Esguerra, Eduardo Rocha, Francisco de Valdenebro, Argelino Durán, and Lorenzo Castro, the jury presented awards in four categories—with the Infrastructure category declared vacant—along with three special prizes for outstanding achievements in Sustainable Building, Construction Innovation, and Social Value. The universal accessibility category was also declared vacant.

The winning architects in each category will travel to Mexico in November to represent Colombia at the international CEMEX Building Award ceremony.

What does it mean for an architecture biennial—especially a Pan-American one—to have reached more than 20 editions? Clearly, it represents a significant accumulation of participants, speakers, coordinators, and projects that over the years have not only showcased the sheer volume of regional production, but have also consistently reminded us of the potential of keeping both Latin American and global debate and exchange active.

For this reason, it is worth highlighting key figures and milestones. Both serve as empirical evidence of the historical development and reach of the Quito Architecture Biennial, helping us answer this initial question and understand why it is considered one of the most important architectural events in the Americas.

Writing for the ARKRIT Collective, architect Carmen Espegel presents an article that exemplifies how the home can serve as a simple refuge for the essence of life—defined by the survivor's austerity, voluntary renunciation, and a rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle.

Originally published as Collaborative Design of Public Space: The Triple Dimension, this new collaboration by Paisaje Transversal proposes a specific methodology for both evaluating the quality of public space and facilitating urban design "if we want to transform public space into a living fabric," the authors explain.

Public space is the fluid that unifies the city, the fabric that stitches buildings together and weaves social, economic, and environmental relationships. It shapes issues as crucial as mobility, coexistence, and a community's cultural exchange, as well as the environmental quality that directly impacts everyone's health.

Public space shapes our daily lives, either offering or depriving us of spaces for socialization. Consequently, it is a priority, both for the sustainability of the city and the lives of its inhabitants—a matter that demands the involvement of not only urban design professionals but also the general public. To achieve this, citizens must understand the factors that determine the livability and functionality of public space, just as they recognize the characteristics of decent housing.

In their classic setup, with a classroom consisting of a blackboard, a standing teacher, and seated students, the interior spaces of a school can easily be mistaken for prisons. Now consider the outdoor, public areas of most educational institutions in Brazil: how often can a place be recognized as a school simply by looking at it from afar?

With 333 registered teams from 180 schools of Architecture and Urbanism representing 24 Brazilian states, the results of the 11th edition of the Competition for Architecture Students, organized by the Brazilian Center for Steel Construction (CBCA), were announced on August 22. For the 2018 edition, the proposed theme was a Pavilion with a Greenhouse for a Botanical Park.

The city of Paraty, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, had its bid for World Heritage status accepted by UNESCO last week. While this is not the first time the city has been considered for the organization's list, having been nominated on two previous occasions, it is the first time it is running as a Natural and Cultural Landscape.

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One of the world's most renowned architecture festivals, the World Architecture Festival (WAF), has announced the finalists for its eleventh edition, taking place in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from November 28 to 30. The World Architecture Festival is dedicated to celebrating, sharing, and inspiring outstanding architecture. It is the only architecture event where keynote speeches from the industry's most influential figures coincide with live presentations from over 500 award finalists, global networking opportunities, and an international product exhibition.

Mexican architecture continues to make a strong showing on the global stage, which is why we present the complete list of projects in Mexico nominated for the 2018 World Architecture Festival awards, ranging from cultural, healthcare, housing, and residential projects to mixed-use developments. Read on to discover the projects.

Simply moving through Brazilian cities, wasting hours in traffic jams or waiting for overcrowded buses or subways—or ones that don't even exist!—is enough to see that they are far from functioning at a reasonable standard. And even those who, supposedly protected by walls, rarely come into contact with the precarious housing conditions of millions of families are shocked by the growing number of people living on the streets or by stark reminders of this precarity when a tragedy, such as the fire in the Wilton Paes de Almeida Building, hits the headlines. One would expect, therefore, that urban issues—housing and transportation in particular—would be prominent in the government platforms of the presidential candidates.

How many children do we see daily playing in the streets, interacting with elements of urban spaces, running in parks or plazas, or riding their bikes? These scenes can say a lot about a city—not only about how it is caring for its younger generations, but also about the quality of life it offers families; which is to say, for everyone.

Working partners and friends for over four decades, Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura have won two Pritzker Prizes and a host of other awards, earning the admiration and respect of any architecture professional. In a conversation moderated by Isabel Lucas and published in the Portuguese newspaper Público.pt, the duo discusses the early days of this long partnership which, over time, has evolved into a close bond that allows them to sketch over each other's drawings in a process they refer to as "osmosis."

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The renowned architecture firm Zaha Hadid Architects has announced its first exhibition in Latin America, which will take place at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). The exhibition, titled Design as Second Nature, will showcase several projects by architect Zaha Hadid through models, audiovisual materials, paintings, and photographs, exploring the creative process of her practice and highlighting the importance and complexity of design as the central axis connecting form and construction in her work.

The team led by Oscar Luengo and Álvaro Parraguez won first place in the Pasarelas San Borja competition in Chile. The main objective of the competition was to recognize "the best urban design ideas that contribute to defining intervention criteria and generating proposals for the San Borja Neighborhood."

Titled Corredores San Borja, the winning proposal "proposes the walkways as connecting spatial corridors between towers, plazas, and peripheral activities, allowing for fluidity and articulation between the complex's disconnected interior and exterior spaces."

During the design process of a building, design professionals from various disciplines are called upon to propose solutions that ensure client requirements and expectations are met.

Design decisions, which until the 1980s were often not grounded in objective criteria, have gradually become more evidence-based. This shift aims to reduce design and execution errors, material waste, and operational inefficiencies, while also systemically recognizing best practices.

By Qian Qinyang

Created by the Ecuadorian firm ENSUSITIO, the Con Lo Que Hay Workshop is a course taught separately to architecture students at the Universidad Tecnológica Indoamérica (UTI) and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE), offering them the opportunity to work on their first real commission. As a result, students must navigate not only the design itself, but also engage with communities, clients, budgets, and, of course, their own peers.

"We do not see architecture as a product," write Enrique Villacís alongside Cynthia Ayarza and Lorena Rodríguez, co-founders of ENSUSITIO, who serve as the workshop's tutor and professional advisors, respectively. "It is an organic process built day by day alongside its inhabitants, from diagnosis to use and maintenance, including the *minga*—collective construction. Everything is built under the principles of 'what is available'—materials, local wisdom, and our own contributions that value ancestral knowledge within a contemporary context," they add.

On this occasion, we present three projects developed on the periphery of Quito: a collection center, a dining hall for an evangelical congregation, and an outdoor therapy space.

On Wednesday, December 5, the winning project of the Paulista Para Todos Ideas Festival was announced. An initiative of Esquina.net.br, the competition featured four teams of São Paulo-based architecture firms (FGMF + Erê Lab, Königsberger Vannucchi Arquitetos Associados + Mauricio Alito, Nitsche Arquitetos + Petro Fontes, and Paulo Mendes da Rocha + Nadezhda Rocha). They were evaluated by a jury comprising Carlos Leite (urban planner, PhD, professor at FAU Mackenzie, director of Stuchi & Leite Projetos e Consultoria, and former director of São Paulo Urbanismo), Sol Camacho (curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale and director of the Lina Bo Bardi/Casa de Vidro Institute, a graduate of the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico with a Master in Urban Design from Harvard University), and Renato Schermann Ximenes de Melo (partner at Mattos Filho, Veiga Filho, Marrey Jr e Quiroga Advogados).

The text below presents a brief summary of the past editions of the International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo, coinciding with the announcement of the curatorial team for the 12th edition. If you are looking for a research source on the first ten editions of the event, we suggest the book Arquitetura em Retrospectiva: 10 Bienais de São Paulo, by Elisabete França, which offers an excellent overview of the paths taken by the exhibitions and shows how the architecture biennials became the preferred venue for promoting Brazilian production, ultimately joining the official calendar of events for the city of São Paulo.

“Progress” is certainly a word that symbols what the 1940s represented for the city of São Paulo. As developments flourished in the fields of art and architecture, new landmarks materialized from the fusion of these two disciplines, such as the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM)—an institution inaugurated in 1948 that showcased the height of what was then considered modern.

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An island is, by definition, a piece of land entirely surrounded by water; in this sense, the element of water serves as a limit, a boundary, and, at the same time, a place.

Hotel Punta Caliza, designed by Estudio Macías Peredo Arquitectos, employs these very concepts so that this naturally salty, aquamarine liquid itself becomes an island—acting as both center and surface, bounded by the built structure to form a cohesive whole that surrounds, contains, and shapes the water.

Launched in 2013, the initiative to establish an Architecture Prize presented a wealth of challenges for the Instituto Tomie Ohtake and its partner AkzoNobel. Its primary objective was to map contemporary Brazilian architecture, focusing specifically on the work of emerging professionals. This ambitious and unprecedented goal set it apart from traditional architectural competitions, not only by encompassing a broader spectrum of categories but also by championing a niche distinct from the output of already established, award-winning firms.

Fábrica Puigneró is a project by Santi Julià Xercavins and Bernat Pedro Planas, focusing on the adaptation of abandoned industrial infrastructure in towns that were once heavily dependent on industrial production.

For their final thesis project at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, the authors designed a comprehensive intervention for the former Hilados y Tejidos Puigneró textile mill in the town of Sant Bartomeu, Spain. "This transformation and retrofitting of the factory aims to generate a new livable framework, utilizing selective demolition and the integration of public space as its primary strategies," the authors explain.

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Videos

São Paulo, like so many other Brazilian cities, has a standardized, monotonous, and gray architecture, with its aesthetic defined by real estate developers and builders, offering very little architectural value.

To be sure, there are highly significant buildings—including historical downtown classics like the Martinelli Building, modernist examples by Rino Levi and Artacho Jurado in Higienópolis, and contemporary experiments in Vila Madalena designed by Isay Weinfeld and Triptyque. Unfortunately, these examples are few, dwindling to almost zero as we move toward the outskirts.

I am obsessed with the idea that we can change this reality by hacking existing buildings, fostering a new urban identity, boosting civic pride, improving quality of life, and promoting innovation and sustainability at viable costs.

Architecture does not illustrate or imitate ideas born from philosophy, literature, painting, or any other form of artistic representation; rather, it constitutes a mode of thought in its own right: architectural thought. This way of thinking and making requires its own tools as the only means of translating these ideas into something concrete, something real, capable of communicating on its own. One of these tools—perhaps the most indispensable—is drawing.

From the desk of Rogelio Salmona, with a wonderful view of Torres del Parque in Bogotá, we present our selection of the best Colombian architecture photography, captured by the followers of ArchDaily Colombia on Instagram.

Remember to tag your Colombian architecture photos on Instagram with the hashtag #ArchDailyCo for a chance to be featured in our upcoming roundups.