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Accessibility is one of the most important considerations in architecture, ensuring that the built environment caters to people of all abilities. However, popular conceptions of what disability and accessibility look like remain limited, and often encompass only physically disabled people such as wheelchair users. Among architectural designers especially, it is common to visualize accessibility as adding ramps, wide corridors, and elevators. However, disability can take many different forms, some less visible than others; accordingly, accessibility in architecture means much more than accommodating just wheelchair users. For the visually impaired, incorporating specific tactile elements in architecture and urban design can vastly improve the navigability of a foreign space. In this article, we talk about tactile paving specifically, including its different forms, its history, and its means of implementation.

Hotel Magdalena, the latest from Bunkhouse Group, a Texas-based hospitality company known for the highly Instagrammed El Cosmico in Marfa, Texas, is an 89-room hotel that plays on Austin‘s music culture and love for lakeside living. Named after Mary Magdalene, the hotel is part of the group’s hotels that are named after Saints, neighboring the popular Hotel Saint Cecilia and Saint Cecilia Residences, which are currently under construction.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has just announced the winners of the 2020 President’s Medals. The annual awards for the world’s best student architecture projects, gathered in this edition, the highest number ever of entries with 336 nominations from 118 schools of architecture located in 32 countries.

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The Magazzino Italian Art museum is expanding its campus in Cold Spring, NY with a new pavilion by Spanish architects Alberto Campo Baeza and Miguel Quismondo. Following the museum's public opening in 2017, the new pavilion will be dedicated to special exhibitions and public and educational programs. The free-standing structure will feature flexible programming to enable the nonprofit museum to support its growing program and better serve its visitors.

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Today more than ever, architects are facing high expectations for the design, function and performance of a project. Careful building design takes the regional influences of climate into account, material origin, perhaps cultural building traditions. These are ways to lower the ecological footprint. But what do architects do to further enhance the building performance? That is an exciting element to explore. Finding out that today digital technologies are implemented in buildings in every region of the world is an interesting fact to discover!

The Leonel Brizola National Library, designed by Oscar Niemeyer —a building that integrates the Cultural Complex of the Republic, a cultural center located along the Eixo Monumental, in the city of Brasília, Brazil— is covered in cracks. The lack of preventive maintenance has caused several cracks throughout the building, according to an article published in the newspaper Metrópoles.

The cracks were identified by local firefighters on November 19th and have spread all over the building, especially on the walls of the elevator machine room and the roof. The library receives an average of 102,000 visitors per year, and the building administration has been notified of the problem. An inspection was carried out to determine whether there is any structural damage to the building.

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“When there is a convergence of crises, like we have now, there needs to be a convergence of solutions,” argued Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), at the 2020 GreenBuild conference. These solutions need to be net-zero in terms of energy and greenhouse gas emissions, regenerative, and reconnect humanity to nature. And while progress towards these solutions is now “irreversible,” we need to move much faster towards a net-zero world.

The COVID-19 Pandemic is a disruptive moment for our world, and it’s poised to spur transformative shifts in design, from how we experience our homes and offices to the plans of our cities. The webcast series Design Disruption explores these shifts—and address issues like climate change, inequality, and the housing crisis— through chats with visionaries like architects, designers, planners and thinkers; putting forward creative solutions and reimagining the future of the built environment.

Kjellander Sjoberg has revealed plans to transform the historical building Gjuteriet into an innovative, open public meeting place. Located in the Varvstaden district, a new sustainable neighborhood in Malmö, Sweden, the project will become a contemporary and versatile work environment. Fitting 300 workspaces across 4,600 sq. m., the building also includes meeting rooms, open lounges, conference rooms, a conservatory, studios, exhibition spaces, a test kitchen, and wellness facilities.

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Zaha Hadid Architects has unveiled the design for the new Shenzhen Science & Technology Museum in Guangming Science City, China. Designed to become a landmark institution in the city, the project is made for the Guangzhou–Shenzhen Science Technology Innovation Corridor. The museum aims to be a key destination to explore science and technology as part of the region's World Class Science City.

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On November 20, the 2020 Panamerican Architecture Biennial of Quito (BAQ 2020) announced the winners of the present edition. Every other year, the BAQ "invites to discuss contemporary production of the built environment, aiming to improve the practice of our profession" in the Americas.

Proven and effective construction methods are not static, instead they're always improving. In Quebec, Canada, light wood frame and modular manufacturers are always pushing the limits of innovation. Their craft is now linked to building systems on a bold scale with offsite light wood frame construction.

Henning Larsen’s proposal for Seoul Valley was selected as the winner of the Central Seoul Development Competition. Seeking to become a new home for the public in the center of the city, the mixed-use development “merges Seoul’s global commercial profile with an ecological return to downtown pedestrian life”. Other entries included schemes by MVRDV and SOM.

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Liu Yihuan, Zhang Xingwang and Lin Zichun from the Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen have won the Covid-19 Community Memorial Design Competition. DesignClass hosted the competition to create a local memorial that honors the individuals and families affected by the virus. 145 designers entered from dozens of countries.

In recent years, with the accelerated urban development of public spaces in China, public washrooms have been assigned numerous new roles. Designers have come up with a variety of proposals which suggest turning public washrooms into a place where social gathering can be redefined, and temporary stay can be more engaging. Although the scale of public washrooms is significantly smaller than that of any other type of architecture, Chinese architects have been working innovatively on fitting the public washrooms into the changing social contexts. Below are a few examples that demonstrate some current architectural experiments with public washroom design in China.

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During the 20th century, Miami Beach reinvented itself several times, from Gilded Age mecca to Art Deco capital, to glamorous 1950s destination, only to become a faded has-been resort by the 1970s. The preservation movement that began in the 1970s and 1980s became its saving grace. By the 1990s Miami Beach, especially its South Beach neighborhood, was one of the hippest communities in the United States, drawing notable European residents like Gianni Versace.