Public space is often understood as belonging to no one in particular, collectively accessible yet institutionally maintained, yet a growing number of initiatives are challenging this assumption by testing shared management and distributed ownership models. In Paris, Adoptez un banc introduces a sponsorship-based approach, allowing individuals and groups to support temporarily and symbolically claim responsibility for historic public furniture without compromising its collective use. Elsewhere in the city, community gardens operating under the Main Verte framework demonstrate a self-managed model, in which public and private landowners retain ownership while delegating day-to-day control to citizen associations for food production and shared use. In New York, Common Corner represents a third pathway, based on institutional collaboration and participatory design, where public agencies, nonprofits, designers, and residents co-produce public space within a public housing context. Taken together, these three cases suggest that care, authorship, and responsibility can be distributed across citizens and institutions, producing more resilient, locally grounded urban environments.
MTM—Made to Measure designed by Herzog & de Meuron for UniFor, Creative Direction by Studio Klass . Image Courtesy of UniFor
What allows a single architectural principle to generate many different outcomes? The answer lies in the systems that organize architecture: geometry, proportion, structure, and construction. Together, these can establish a set of rules that can accommodate different programs, contexts, and spatial conditions while maintaining a coherent identity. A structural grid, for example, can organize a variety of uses, just as a single construction detail can be repeated throughout an entire building without producing identical spaces. Can the same way of thinking be translated into furniture design without losing its identity? MTM—Made to Measure, developed by Herzog & de Meuron for UniFor, explores this question. Instead of designing each piece independently, the collection grows from a single structural principle that can be extended, adapted, and repeated across different functions while maintaining its internal coherence.
Architecture often inherits a paradox. The buildings that come to define a place are rarely the only ones that shaped it. Instead, they become symbols, repeated through guidebooks, tourism campaigns, conservation agendas, and architectural histories until they stand in for an entire region. Over time, the richness of a built landscape is compressed into a handful of familiar images. What falls outside that frame rarely disappears. It simply slips from architectural discourse.
Few places illustrate this more clearly than Odisha. For decades, its architectural identity has been represented through the monumental stone temples of Bhubaneswar, Konark, and Puri. The sculptural sophistication of the Kalinga tradition has rightly earned international recognition, becoming one of India's most celebrated architectural legacies. Yet this prominence has also produced an unintended consequence. Odisha is frequently understood as a land of temples, leaving other architectural histories comparatively unexplored. Royal residences, administrative buildings, colonial encounters, vernacular settlements, and former capitals occupy a far smaller place in the architectural imagination despite revealing equally complex stories of governance, diplomacy, ecology, and cultural exchange.
MVRDV has won the international design competition organized by the social enterprise Shift to design the Shift Embassy, a new cultural destination planned for Rotterdam's developing Waterkant district. Conceived as a hybrid of architecture and landscape, the proposal, titled Rotterdam ROCKS! combines exhibition spaces, hospitality, education, public amenities, and ecological infrastructure within a publicly accessible building intended to support Shift's mission of engaging visitors with environmental and societal challenges. The project will form part of Waterkant, a large-scale urban development on the south bank of the Maas, planned to include 3,750 homes alongside schools, workplaces, cultural venues, and public spaces.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan United States Senate housing bill, automatically became law on 11 July 2026. Officially the "Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream (ROAD) to Housing Act," the bill has been called the most significant housing measure in the country since the National Affordable Housing Act in 1990, and "the most comprehensive housing legislation in decades." In a context of global housing crisis, the text revises federal housing programs and expands available financing options, provides grants for communities, targets regulatory requirements for construction, and addresses the concentration of ownership. This law contributes to worldwide initiatives for adequate housing, such as limits on short-term rentals, taxing unoccupied residential units, and the transformation and adaptive reuse of existing structures, with the dual objective of increasing the number of residential units and making existing ones available.
On the Caribbean coast of Honduras, lies the Leán valley, a narrow coastal strip lined by the Nombre de Dios Mountain Range to the South and the Caribbean Sea to the North. For a long time, this was the last frontier: dense jungle, swamps, no infrastructure, and difficult inland access. However, all of that started to change with the arrival of the Garífuna, who settled the area between the Danto and Cangrejal Rivers, setting the foundations of what would become the City of La Ceiba. An urban hub in the Honduran Caribbean whose history has been defined by migration waves: Central Americans, Afro-Caribbean people, Europeans, and corporate North America. These movements from all around the world did not merely contribute to economic growth, but actively produced the city's spatial logic, identity, and architectural form.
What does luxury mean when products are designed for quick obsolescence? Recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in cooperation with INDX|GLOBAL, the eighth episode of the Room For Dreams podcast brings together architects Priyanka Mehra, Simran Boparai, Ashmit Singh Alag, and Adreesh Chakraborty to dissect the evolving, often contradictory relationship between exclusivity, sustainability, and purposeful craftsmanship.
Grand Stade Hassan II in Morocco by Populous and Oualalou + Choi. Image Courtesy of Oualalou + Choi
The conclusion of the FIFA World Cup 2026 marks the end of the tournament's largest edition to date. Hosted across Canada, Mexico, and the United States, the competition expanded to 48 national teams and brought together sixteen host cities distributed across three countries. For decades, FIFA World Cups have served as catalysts for architectural production. Each edition has generated a distinct collection of stadiums, transportation investments, public spaces, and urban interventions that often remain part of their host cities long after the tournament concludes. While recent competitions have become associated with landmark stadium projects and ambitious national building programs, the 2026 edition followed a different trajectory, relying primarily on existing venues adapted to FIFA's technical and operational requirements.
The Clark Art Institute, a prominent art institution located in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, United States, has unveiled images of the design for the extension of its current facilities. The institution, opened in 1955, is both an art museum and a center for research, critical discussion, and higher education in the visual arts. The new wing, commissioned to Selldorf Architects in October 2024, will expand the current gallery and art storage space and connect the Museum Building and the Manton Research Center, previously renovated by the same firm. The new building will be complemented by a landscape design by Reed Hilderbrand, reinforcing the experience of the architecture, art, and surrounding Berkshire landscape.
In 2023, the School of Design Building at Shanghai Jiao Tong University opened its doors after a complete remodeling and adaptation of an existing structure. Designed by architect and scholar Xing Ruan, who also serves as Dean of the school, the building went on to receive two recognitions at the Prix Versailles: the World Title of the Most Beautiful Campus and the Special Prize for an Interior, one of the three major honors of the competition. Awards of this kind tend to generate their own momentum. Once a building is recognized, it is quickly placed within a convenient narrative — its materials, techniques, form, and spatial decisions all assigned meanings that make the project legible, categorizable, and easy to cite.
Yet what an award confirms is perhaps only that a building has been seen. What remains worth asking is why it exists in the way that it does — what problems it was made to address, what beliefs it refuses, and what it proposes about the discipline beyond the occasion of its construction. It was in the School of Design Building itself that the following interview took place, moving between architecture, scholarship, frugality, and the limits of what buildings can — and should — be asked to do.
Courtesy of Escola da Cidade and the Kamayurá People
Anyone expecting the following words to offer a discourse on materiality, sustainable building techniques, ways of carving wood, or methods of weaving straw is mistaken. Instead, this article seeks to shift our gaze beyond the aspects that frequently define the debate on Indigenous peoples' culture when it comes to "architecture."
In a worldview where the very term "architecture" is foreign, approaching their structures—if indeed that word can adequately name them—from an exclusively material or technological standpoint remains an attempt to frame their ways of producing space within Western categories. This reduces a complex cosmology to a set of measurable attributes, as if it could be transformed into a checklist applicable to any architecture, thereby erasing the very thing that distinguishes it: the relationships between territory, body, and memory.
Every building begins somewhere else. The sand in its concrete, the stone on its façade, the lithium that may one day power its systems. It arrives, already stripped from a mountain, a riverbed, or a salt flat thousands of kilometers away, having passed through a chain of trucks, ships, and customs declarations that erase almost everything about where it came from. Architecture tends to treat material as a starting condition, something simply available, but extraction is where construction actually begins.
The global trade in construction sand alone now moves on a scale that rivals the illegal markets in timber, gold, and fish combined, run through networks violent enough to have cost reporters and activists their lives. A single mountain in Tuscany has yielded more marble in the past few decades than in the two thousand years before them, hollowed out by a workforce whose own history of revolt has been almost entirely forgotten. Beneath the salt flats of three South American countries and the copper belt of Central Africa, the minerals that will supposedly power a cleaner future are pulled from ground that Indigenous communities have inhabited for generations and that children, in some cases, mine by hand. Each of these is sold as ordinary commerce; each is also a territorial transaction whose terms were set somewhere far from where the material was taken.
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA)has announced the six shortlisted projects for the 2026 RIBA Stirling Prize, marking the award's 30th anniversary. Established in 1996, the Stirling Prize recognizes the building considered to have made a contribution to the evolution of architecture in the United Kingdom. This year's shortlist spans a broad range of typologies, including a new public square above one of London's busiest transport interchanges, the adaptive reuse of a 1970s theater into a cultural venue, a high-density residential development, two projects for Cambridge colleges, and a family home set on the edge of Epping Forest. The winner will be announced on October 15 at Old Billingsgate in London.
On July 13, 2026, Tbilisi City Hall issued a permit to dismantle Rike Park's tube-shaped Music Theater & Exhibition Hall. The complex, designed by the Italian firm Studio Fuksas, was never officially opened since its completion in 2012, around the same time as the firm's Tbilisi Public Service Hall. The design has been a source of controversy between authorities and citizens since its commission in 2011, when it was built during the government of the United National Movement (UNM), and was suspended after the change of government in 2012. The two structures, often referred to as the "Rike Tubes," were originally intended to house a music theater and exhibition space but remain to this day without any official use.
National Museum of Ecuador Proposal (MuNA). Image Courtesy of Studio Campo Baeza
The announcement of the winning proposal for Ecuador's new National Museum (MuNA) sparked one of the country's most significant architectural debates in recent years. The public response has since reshaped the competition itself while also raising broader questions about how a national museum gives architectural form to an interpretation of a nation. While the discussion began with a single design, it exposed a challenge that extends far beyond Ecuador.
National museums are not simply asked to represent a nation. They are asked to give it architectural form. Yet identity cannot be built directly. Before it becomes architecture, it must first be interpreted and translated through architectural decisions.
Tactile paving tiles are designed to ensure that everyone can fully utilize urban spaces, navigating all the architectural and everyday variables present in contemporary cities. The "Tactile Path for the Visually Impaired," presented below, was specially designed for people with visual impairments.
An architect's training requires a wide range of knowledge. Various disciplines, such as art, mathematics, history, and sociology, enrich their cultural background, providing the tools and knowledge necessary to make the world around us a better place. Books are an essential resource for this learning process, and thanks to the internet, there are no longer any excuses to stop expanding our knowledge base.
We have searched the web to curate a unique selection of architecture books in Spanish that you can read on your computer or download directly to a tablet. The list includes classics of Vitruvian architecture, drawing manuals, and universal accessibility design guides, along with references to the work of inspiring architects.
We hope you enjoy reading these books!
https://www.archdaily.com/1182690/28-architecture-books-in-spanish-to-download-and-read-onlinePola Mora
In our ongoing commitment to highlight the important academic work being done at universities, we launched an open call last September inviting Mexican architects to share their graduation projects with us. We were looking for academic theses and research addressing issues of significance to the Mexican context—projects that usually remain on paper but deserve international recognition. This open call in Mexico joins the recognition already granted to architects in Colombia and Argentina.
From 60 submissions representing 22 cities and 36 architecture schools in Mexico, our editorial team conducted an extensive and detailed evaluation, selecting a list of the 15 best projects designed by Mexican students. These works stand out both for their formal solutions and the clarity of their architectural discourse, as well as their understanding of the context and their users.
Featuring themes such as the architectural regeneration of abandoned infrastructure to provide new services, urban interventions on the outskirts of Mexico City, flexible rural housing, and rethinking the public spaces that borders can offer, we present the 15 most outstanding graduation projects.
On June 24, 2026, a severe seismic event consisting of two major earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5 struck north-central Venezuela just 39 seconds apart. The widespread destruction was concentrated along the country's northern coast, heavily impacting the capital city of Caracas and the neighboring state of La Guaira, where fragile urban infrastructure and vulnerable housing stock led to the collapse or severe damage of thousands of residential structures. This disaster mirrors previous devastating events observed during other major seismic events, including the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake and 2011 landslides in Sichuan, the 2014 Ludian earthquake in Yunnan, and the 2017 earthquake across central Mexico. When high-magnitude natural disasters damage entire communities, architects have the opportunity to help by proposing post-disaster architecture with strategic recovery models. Rather than relying on generic, standardized emergency shelters, conscious architectural design can deliver low-cost, rapidly deployable residential infrastructure that preserves human dignity through culturally contextual and dignified spaces.
Architecture this week looked as much to the past as to the future. Across museums, restored landmarks, and large-scale urban redevelopments, the featured stories explored how architecture is continually reinterpreted through new cultural, political, and urban lenses. From reconsidering the architectural legacy of post-independence West Africa to transforming former prisons into energy-neutral neighborhoods and restoring twentieth-century cultural landmarks, the projects demonstrate how existing buildings and histories remain active participants in contemporary discourse. Alongside these interventions, the announcement of the World Architecture Festival shortlist and renewed attention to global urban growth provide a broader picture of a profession negotiating heritage, environmental responsibility, and rapidly changing cities.
During July and until August 19, Aedes – Architecture and Space in Berlin will be showcasing the exhibition "A Structure of Feeling: On a New Generation of Architects in China." Aedes is a non-profit cultural institution founded in 1980. Focusing on the intersections of architecture, the city, and society, its continuous public program has presented around 600 exhibitions over more than four decades of work. In 2001, the space presented TUMU, an exhibition bringing a generation of young independent Chinese architects to international attention. Twenty-five years later, "A Structure of Feeling" showcases the work of a new generation working under changed conditions. Nine practices are represented in twelve projects transforming the existing urban fabric, rural development, and contemporary forms of spatial production.
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