In a world facing ecological exhaustion and spatial saturation, the act of building has come to represent both creation and consumption. For decades, architectural progress was measured by the new: new materials, new technologies, new monuments of ambition. Yet today, the discipline is increasingly shaped by another form of intelligence, one that values what already exists. Architects are learning that doing less can mean designing more, and this shift marks the emergence of what might be called an architecture of restraint: a practice defined by care, maintenance, and the deliberate choice not to build.
The principle recognizes that the most sustainable building is often the one that already stands, and that transformation can occur through preservation, repair, or even absence. Choosing not to build becomes a political and creative act, a response to the material limits of the planet and to the ethical limits of endless growth. That Architecture moves beyond the production of new forms to embrace continuity, extending the life of structures, materials, and memories that already inhabit the world.
The Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt, Germany, has opened a new interactive exhibition, on view from October 25, 2025, to February 8, 2026, presenting 100 years of architectural construction kits. Developed in collaboration with graphic designer Claus Krieger, Professors Andreas Kretzer and Philipp Reinfeld from the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences (HFT), their students, and the wider DAM team, the exhibition brings together around 80 construction kits produced between 1890 and 1990. Many of these systems have been recreated at an enlarged scale so visitors can test their assemblies at eight central play stations. Additional digital features include VR model worlds programmed by HFT students. Dozens of completed models illustrate the range of architectural ideas represented across the kits, and the full collection is documented in an accompanying catalogue. The exhibition is accompanied by a public competition titled How Small Can Architecture Be?, which invites participants to submit miniature architectural models for display.
Public spaces remain some of the most dynamic sites for unbuilt architectural experimentation, revealing how cities and architects can imagine accessibility, gathering, and civic identity. In this curated Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected proposals examine parks, pedestrian corridors, cultural landscapes, and open-access urban environments that invite people to meet, move, rest, and participate in collective life. Rather than treating public space as leftover terrain, these projects position it as essential infrastructure—shaping urban health, memory, and social interaction.
In 1952, American composer John Cage presented his groundbreaking piece "4'33''" for the first time. In it, the orchestra produces no intentional sound for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. What can be heard instead are breaths, movements, and subtle noises that would normally go unnoticed, but here become part of the composition itself. With this work, Cage revealed that absolute silence does not exist. There is always sound, even when unplanned.
In the same way, every architectural space has its own soundscape. Sound moves, reflects, reverberates, and dissipates according to the materials, volumes, and surfaces it encounters. Hard walls and high ceilings can amplify echoes, while fabrics and porous panels soften them. Acoustics, therefore, is not merely a technical concern but a form of materialized listening, a science that operates at the boundary between perception and emotion. For this reason, it is also complex. Each typology, whether a museum, temple, studio, or theater, has its own sonic logic, and understanding these nuances is essential to creating spaces that embrace sound, voice, and silence with equal precision.
Cities bring together the best and worst of the human condition. They concentrate opportunities for work, social networks, and cultural production, but they also expose deep social inequalities. Among the many forms of urban exclusion are limited access to transportation, housing, leisure, or safety issues. One form that is rarely discussed is thermal inequality. In lower-income neighborhoods, where there are fewer trees, parks, and permeable surfaces, heat accumulates and thermal discomfort dominates, resulting in higher energy consumption and health risks. As concern about the climate crisis grows, this discussion becomes more urgent: extreme heat is no longer just a climatic phenomenon but also a spatial expression of inequality.
Coldefy, in collaboration with Relief Architecture, has completed the Robert Badinter Secondary School, the first timber-framed school in northern France. Designed to accommodate 650 students, the project is situated on a former railyard adjacent to the city's train station and within walking distance of the town center. The new school forms part of a wider urban renewal strategy aiming to consolidate transportation links and introduce new civic amenities to the area.
From building codes to mobility restrictions and new diplomatic roles within city governments, climate policy is increasingly being shaped at the local level through a widening range of legislative and institutional tools. Cities as varied as Sydney, Boston, New York, Paris, Miami, and dozens across Latin America are adopting targeted strategies that reflect their distinct environmental pressures and governance structures. These initiatives range from all-electric and net-zero construction requirements, to traffic-control measures designed to curb the social costs of private vehicle use, to emerging forms of urban diplomacy that coordinate responses to rising temperatures and biodiversity loss. Together, these approaches illustrate how territorial management is evolving in response to the accelerating climate crisis, and how local governments are experimenting with regulation and collaboration to confront challenges that are at once global and deeply place-specific.
Founded in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 2007 by Johanna Hurme and Sasa Radulovic, and shortly afterward joined by its third partner, Colin Neufeld, 5468796 Architecture was established as an architecture firm whose early work explored the current state of housing in North America. The Canadian studio operates as a collaborative group of approximately 20 designers, where they prioritize the collective value of ideas over individual authorship.
Jurong Lake Gardens is one of Singapore's newest national gardens, a 90-hectare urban oasis for the community. Elevate’s PondGard EPDM membrane was used to waterproof the pond. Image Courtesy of Holcim
The future of urban planning and architecture is promising if the world, collectively, looks beyond the concept of mere sustainability and instead embraces a nature-positive approach. As global population growth drives rapid urbanization—requiring humanity to build the equivalent of a city the size of Madrid every week for decades to come—the construction sector faces a defining challenge: how to build durable, energy-efficient, and resilient urban environments in harmony with natural ecosystems.
Giardino delle Sculture / Carlo Scarpa. Image by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra [Flickr under license CC BY-NC 2.0]
When we think of Venice, familiar images come to mind: Piazza San Marco, winding canals, and the reflection of Byzantine domes on still waters. Few, however, imagine that among those reflections lies a discreet chapter of Italian modernity — the architecture of Carlo Scarpa.
This international competition invited architects, artists, and designers to create visionary public sculptures that reflect Saudi Arabia's rich cultural heritage and forward-looking ambitions. As the Kingdom undergoes a profound transformation under Vision 2030, this initiative—organized in partnership with the Mujassam Watan Initiative—called for works that engage with both history and future, tradition and innovation, within the public realm.
Aerial shot of The Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum, 2025. Image Courtesy of Qatar Foundation
On November 28, 2025, Qatar Foundation will launch Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum, a new addition to Qatar's cultural landscape dedicated to the life and work of artist Maqbool Fida Husain. The museum will be the world's first institution to trace Husain's artistic journey from the 1950s to his death in 2011, offering an immersive experience in a building drafted by the artist himself. The permanent exhibition will include paintings, films, tapestry, photography, poetry, and installations, presented through multimedia storytelling. Covering more than 3,000 square meters, the museum aims to foster creativity and dialogue, serving as a new space for learning and exploration within Qatar Foundation's Education City in Doha. The initiative adds to a campus that houses educational and research institutions designed by architects such as Arata Isozaki, Rem Koolhaas, and Antoine Predock, as well as firms like Legorreta + Legorreta and Mangera Yvars Architects.
As architecture moves beyond human-centered design, new practices are rethinking coexistence as an ethical and ecological framework. From political infrastructures to habitats, these approaches invite us to imagine architecture as a shared living system.
Modern architecture has long been written through an anthropocentric lens, placing the human at its center and rendering other species invisible. Yet this paradigm continues to shift, as architects and researchers redefine the role of design in more-than-human worlds. Studios such as Office for Political Innovation, Studio Ossidiana, and Husos Architects are questioning human-centered narratives and reframing design as a shared practice between species. In this context, architecture is no longer a tool of control but a medium for coexistence, a discipline that mediates between species, environments, and cultures.
Across South America, architecture is increasingly being understood as a collective act. Rather than imposing external views, many studios and designers are building with and for communities, learning from their local practices, materials, and ways of inhabiting. These projects are repositioning the architect's role from an author to a facilitator, transforming design into a participatory process that centers collaboration, care, and mutual respect.
What unites these efforts is not style or scale, but a shared belief: architecture emerges from collective dialogue, not imposition. From rural Ecuador to the urban peripheries of Brazil, Colombia, and Paraguay, these projects reveal how social engagement and local making produce spaces that are sustainable not only environmentally but also socially. They respond to inequality not through top-down solutions, but through co-authorship, offering spaces that reflect the needs, knowledge, and agency of the people who use them.
The ultimate accolades of World Building of the Year supported by GROHE, World Interior of the Year, Future Project of the Year and Landscape of the Year were announced today as hundreds of architects from across the world convened at a grand finale Gala Dinner at Miami Beach Convention Center in Florida. A host of Special Prizes, including the American Beauty Prize supported by the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, were also announced at the closing event to celebrate the eighteenth edition of the festival. The announcement follows the final day of WAF, in which prize winners across all 43 categories have been competing for the winning titles.
https://www.archdaily.com/1036083/world-building-of-the-year-and-interior-of-the-year-revealed-at-world-architecture-festival-2025Enrique Tovar
Adaptive reuse is shifting from simple preservation to active revitalization, a process of structurally rescuing and reprogramming architectural typologies whose original functions are no longer relevant. The obsolescence of architectural spaces occurs for varied reasons: sociological shifts, leaving spaces uninhabited; technological advances, phasing out specific machinery; and economic changes, making centralized functions necessary. The strategy of repurposingfocuses on achieving spatial and functional longevity through minimal interventions, allowing the original structure to serve as the memory anchor of the project.
This wave of adaptive reuse treats the historic shell as a limited resource, prioritizing structural permanence over surface aesthetics. Designers are engaging in a sort of archaeological process by exposing the original structural essence: the heavy timber, raw concrete, or monumental masonry. Interventions are confined to meeting new programmatic needs, often appearing as an independent insertion within the ancient envelope. This contrast redefines the building's lifespan not as a singular narrative but as a layered story of continuous events.
In contemporary bathroom architecture, the drain has evolved from a purely functional component into a design element that guides layout, accessibility, and long-term performance. When drainage, slope geometry, and waterproofing are designed as one system, the tiled surface achieves both visual refinement and reliable function—qualities that are critical for hotels, spas, and residences. Schluter® establishes the essential drain-to-waterproofing connection in a controlled factory setting, rather than relying on field assembly.
BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group has been selected as the winner of the international competition to design the new Hamburg State Opera, a major cultural project planned for the Baakenhöft peninsula in HafenCity, Hamburg, Germany. The building will consolidate the city's opera and ballet companies under one roof, introducing new performance spaces, production facilities, and public amenities along the Elbe. The project replaces the mid-20th-century opera house on Dammtorstraße, responding to the city's call for a venue that reflects contemporary standards in acoustics, stagecraft, and audience experience.
Since August 2025, debate has intensified in Dallas, United States, over the future of one of its modern landmarks: I.M. Pei & Partners' Dallas City Hall. This month, the Dallas City Council will continue weighing whether to repair, sell, or demolish the 47-year-old building, following growing concerns over long-deferred maintenance and the need for major investment. In late October, council members began public listening sessions and committee meetings to gather resident input. Preservationists and some council members urged a full study of repair options and historic landmarking, while others emphasized fiscal and operational concerns.
Supporters of preservation stress the building's civic and architectural significance, while those advocating for demolition point to high maintenance costs and the redevelopment potential of the centrally located site. A petition to "Save Dallas City Hall," calling on council members to halt demolition plans and commission a transparent renovation study, remains open for signatures. Meanwhile, the mayor has said he wants to review all the facts before taking a position on whether the city should relocate or invest in repairs. The case adds to the growing list of modernist icons worldwide facing uncertain futures, sparking broader cultural debates about civic heritage and public infrastructure.
In total, the three-day festival will see over 460 live pitches from the 2025 finalists, presented to more than 160 international judges. Today has seen shortlisted projects from around the world compete for 21 award categories within Completed Buildings, Future Projects, and Interiors. Award winners include OMA, Sordo Madaleno, Studio Arthur Casas, and NIKKEN SEKKEI.
https://www.archdaily.com/1036039/world-architecture-festival-2025-day-two-winners-announcedEnrique Tovar
