With over 80% of its population living in urban centers and a national density exceeding 500 people per square kilometer — soaring to over 15,000 in Seoul — South Korea faces intense competition for usable land. In response, contemporary Korean architecture offers compelling examples of mixed-use interventions that negotiate tight urban lots to blend public engagement with high-efficiency utility. By vertically stacking distinct programs, integrating public art centers, corporate headquarters, and commercial hubs alongside residential and other functions, these multi-layered developments transform spatial constraints into dynamic urban interfaces.
First Prize Winner: Below Shadows. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner has announced the results of its fourth annual Home of Shadows international architecture ideas competition. The competition series is designed to focus on the vital interplay between light and shadow in creating functional and inviting living spaces. It highlights the importance of natural light in home design, essential for creating comfortable, inviting, and practical environments.
Light is viewed as a language through which architects communicate emotions in their designs, with shadows playing an equally significant role in influencing the ambiance of a space. The balance between light and shadow allows for the creation of spaces with depth and texture, setting different moods for various purposes. Often, this balance can be achieved through the strategic placement of windows and doors.
The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) is presenting "The fortune of the city is that it has never been perfect," an exhibition dedicated to the urban work of Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza. On view in the institution's Main Galleries from May 21, 2026, to January 10, 2027, the exhibition examines Siza's approach to city-making through a selection of projects that engage with the historical, social, and physical conditions of existing urban environments.
Curated by Giovanna Borasi with Laura Aparicio Llorente as curatorial assistant, the exhibition explores how Siza's architectural practice extends beyond the design of individual buildings to encompass neighborhoods, public spaces, and broader urban structures. Rather than presenting the city as a fixed or idealized condition, the exhibition focuses on Siza's method of working with existing contexts, considering history, topography, infrastructure, and everyday life as fundamental components of the design process. Through this perspective, the exhibition reflects on questions surrounding urban transformation, the continuity of the built environment, and the relationship between architecture and planning.
UNESCO-UIA World Capital of Architecture is a title created jointly by UNESCO and the International Union of Architects (UIA). On 5 August 2026, Beijing was named World Capital of Architecture for 2029, a title awarded every three years to a city that hosts a year of architecture-focused programming timed to coincide with the UIA World Congress of Architects. The designation was made upon the recommendation of the Joint Committee for the World Capital of Architecture, chaired by architect Dominique Perrault. It follows the recent conclusion of the UIA World Congress of Architects 2026 in Barcelona, current World Capital of Architecture, and builds on the experience of Rio de Janeiro and Copenhagen.
The architecture of Birmingham reflects the city's history as one of the first industrial centers of England. The wealth generated in the city and the surrounding region led to the grandeur of the Victorian era in the nineteenth century. Heavy bombardment during the Second World War caused widespread destruction. This was followed by rapid reconstruction in the 1950s-70s, introducing rational modernism and brutalist ambition, which characterizes large parts of the city center today. A few decades later, erasure returned to Birmingham, with reconsideration of some of the decisions of the mid-twentieth century. Famously, the Bullring Centre and the Birmingham Library were torn down to make way for twenty-first-century redevelopments, adding new layers of richness to the city's built environment.
Architecture has long been understood as a discipline created by humans and for humans. But in We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley challenge that assumption, arguing that "microbes invented architecture." From this premise unfolds an alternative history of architecture that shifts the focus away from human exceptionalism and toward the microorganisms that have shaped life, environments, and the built world for billions of years.
The book explores the idea that architecture cannot be understood separately from the microbial worlds that shape it, suggesting that "architecture inhabits humans just as much as humans inhabit architecture." Rather than inert objects, buildings emerge as dynamic ecosystems that Colomina and Wigley go as far as describing as "an expanded gut shared with others," where microbes, materials, people, and countless other forms of life continuously coexist, exchange, and evolve.
Sliding doors are often discussed through efficiency. They save the swing radius of a conventional door, allow compact rooms to function more easily, and help small apartments borrow a few extra centimeters of usable space. Yet in many interiors, their more interesting role is not only spatial economy. Sliding partitions transform the reading of the room itself. A bedroom, study, guest room, dining area, or workspace can appear when a panel is closed, disappear when it is opened, and remain ambiguous when the boundary is translucent or partial.
This makes the sliding partition especially useful in domestic contexts shaped by density, changing family structures, hybrid work, and climatic negotiation typical of regions like East and Southeast Asia. It allows privacy without permanence, enclosure without full separation, and openness without the loss of control. Unlike the fixed wall, it does not insist that a room has only one identity. Instead, it allows domestic space to respond to time: day and night, guests and family, work and rest, exposure and retreat.
This week, architecture's relationship with culture took center stage through exhibitions, public projects, and new cultural infrastructure that extend architectural discourse beyond the building itself. While major exhibitions from Australia, Shanghai, Barcelona, and Copenhagen examined themes of housing, landscape, and place through research and design, newly unveiled projects in China and Italy demonstrate how museums, performance venues, and mixed-use projects are increasingly conceived as open public landscapes rather than isolated institutions, while new exhibitions and construction milestones reflect ongoing experimentation in adaptive reuse, context-responsive design, and flexible urban environments.
The Grand Paris Express project consists of 200 kilometers of new, fully automated metro lines, 68 new stations, and four new orbital lines (15, 16, 17, and 18), in addition to the extension of Line 14. The network is being delivered in phases between 2024 and 2031: Line 14's 8 stations are fully operational following its 2024 extension, Line 18 is the most advanced of the new lines, with testing underway ahead of its first opening, and civil engineering is largely complete on many sections, with tracks, systems, architectural fit-out, and testing now progressing station by station. Each of the 68 stations is assigned to a specific architect or architectural team, sometimes in collaboration with landscape architects for above-ground elements.
In 1968, the furniture designer and RCA professor David Pye published The Nature and Art of Workmanship, a book built around a distinction between "workmanship of risk" and the "workmanship of certainty." Pye was not writing about architecture, and despite how the phrase gets used today, he was not really writing about hands versus machines either. He pointed out that a printing press, entirely mechanical, still depends on someone judging the ink and the register, while a woodturner working a lathe by hand can follow a template closely enough that almost nothing is left to chance.
Workmanship of risk, in Pye's definition, is any process where the outcome is not fixed in advance but depends on the judgment, dexterity, and attention the maker exercises while the work is still underway. Workmanship of certainty is the opposite condition, as the result is settled before production begins, locked into a jig, a mold, or a program, so that everything downstream is execution. Pye was careful to note that neither mode is inherently superior and that a numerically controlled machine, calibrated to leave room for drift, can sit closer to risk than a hand tool run to a fixed template.
As pillars of our cultural landscape, many masterpieces of the Modern Movement are often demolished, abandoned, or altered regardless of the context in which they are located. Preserving this architectural legacy highlights the role of architecture and design professionals in shaping built environments where continuity between the past and the present reinforces communities' sense of place. On Long Island, a coalition of advocates came together to save the A. Conger Goodyear House, which dates to 1938 and was designed by Edward Durell Stone. Considered one of the notable examples of the International Style in the United States, the house attracted significant attention throughout the 1940s, appearing in specialized journals, books, and popular publications.
Second Prize Winner: A stair, a spiral, or a park. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner has announced the results of its third edition Architect's Stair international architecture ideas competition. The event invited designers to reflect on one of architecture's oldest and most symbolic elements: the stair. Beyond its functional role as a connector of levels, the stair was positioned here as a medium of architectural storytelling—an invitation to explore ideas of procession, sequence, space, and form.
MVRDV Bihailou Art Village. Image Courtesy of MVRDV
Designed by MVRDV, Bihailou Art Village is a mixed-use cultural and commercial centre currently under construction in Shenzhen, China. Located in the Shatoujiao neighborhood near the Hong Kong border, the mixed-use project combines cultural, commercial, and public programs within a vertically stacked composition derived from the firm's "Vertical Village" concept. Designed to accommodate independently operating venues while maintaining publicly accessible circulation, the development reinterprets the scale and spatial character of the surrounding urban fabric through a series of distinct volumes.
MAD / Ma Yansong's Shenzhen Bay Culture Square exhibition hall and park project began in 2018, with the project completed in 2020. The 188,000 m² building sits on a site area of approximately 51,000 m² along the city's waterfront, at the heart of Houhai, Nanshan District, the headquarters hub of Shenzhen's Greater Bay Area. The masterplan for the site, which includes the Creative Design Hall, the Shenzhen Science and Technology Museum, and a vast public green space, was announced by MAD in 2020 and was expected to be completed in 2023. After eight years, the project, led by Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, and Yosuke Hayano, is now complete and is intended to serve as a cultural facility for design and cultural exchange.
The center of a plan is never simply empty space. Once rooms and routes begin to organize around it, the center starts to structure the entire plan. It may contain a courtyard, a stair, a garden, or a shared room. It can also preserve something already present on the site or support a process that architecture does not fully control. What occupies this position determines how the surrounding spaces are arranged, connected, and used.
In A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein describe shared spaces as most effective when they sit at the center of gravity of everyday life and remain connected to the routes people use most. Their argument suggests that a center matters not because it occupies the geometric middle, but because the surrounding rooms, paths, and activities give it spatial weight. The projects included here extend that idea beyond communal space, showing how the center can organize circulation, collective use, environmental systems, and the relationship between architecture and what already exists on the site.
A war can erase a skyline overnight. Roofs collapse, streets become impassable, and landmarks that once oriented everyday life are reduced to rubble. The most profound loss often remains invisible. Buildings can be surveyed, photographed, scanned, and, eventually, rebuilt. The knowledge that produced them is far more fragile. It survives in the hands of stonemasons who understand how a limestone vault carries its load, carpenters who know how timber joints respond to seasonal movement, plasterers who mix lime by memory rather than measurement, and residents whose everyday rituals keep these buildings in use. When these people are displaced, killed, or forced to abandon their trades, reconstruction inherits a problem that no drawing or digital model can solve. Stone can always be quarried again. Recovering the knowledge to shape it takes much longer.
Photographer Paul Clemence has unveiled a new photo series documenting Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France. The collection revisits one of the 20th century's most influential works of religious architecture through an exploration of light, materiality, and atmosphere, highlighting the sculptural qualities of the chapel and the changing relationship between its concrete surfaces and natural illumination. Combining black-and-white exterior photographs with color interior images, the series presents a new documentation of a building that continues to shape architectural discourse more than seven decades after its completion.
The idea of a "Great Green Wall" designates a large-scale reforestation initiative undertaken specifically to halt desertification. Currently underway in Africa to prevent the advancement of the Sahara Desert and in China around the Gobi Desert, it is a landscape, agriculture, economic, and social development project in reaction to the rise of global temperatures, over-farming, and unsuitable land management. Both projects, currently underway, are intersectional initiatives involving governments from different countries, civil society organisations, and both individual volunteers and organised groups, guided by the idea of a unified response to global environmental issues through wildlife restoration. It is a large-scale, infrastructural application of a 'green' or 'wildlife corridor': a linear strip of vegetation or natural landscape that connects fragmented ecosystems and wildlife populations separated by human development on a continental scale.
While pyramidal geometry appears in monumental historical structures, its contemporary application remains limited. The primary constraint is the sloping envelope, which contracts the building's floor area as it ascends and reduces usable interior volume compared to orthogonal or cylindrical forms. However, from a structural standpoint, the geometry offers lateral stability against wind and seismic loads due to its broad base, central mass distribution, and self-bracing triangular faces. Nonetheless, applying this shape at a residential scale introduces several layout constraints. These slanted walls limit vertical wall surfaces, which complicates the placement of standard windows, doors, and floor partitions. At the same time, the low clearance along the perimeter also creates unusable floor area at the edges of the room.
When Francis Kéré set out to build a school in his home village of Gando, Burkina Faso, he chose clay, a material his own community associated with scarcity, not architecture. To prove it could hold, he built test bricks and submerged one in water for five days before showing his neighbors it hadn't failed. Then he trained the villagers themselves to raise the walls, rather than bringing in a construction crew from the city. More than 200 people from Gando have since worked as builders because of that choice. The school carries something a materials list alone cannot: the trace of the hands that will go on living in the village long after the scaffolding came down.
Museum of Art Pudong (MAP) in Shanghai is presenting "Jean Nouvel: Without the Artist, Architecture Disappears" until August 31, 2026. Marking the museum's fifth anniversary, the exhibition is dedicated to the work of Pritzker Prize laureate Jean Nouvel and represents the first time the French architect has staged a solo exhibition inside a building of his own design. Organized by the Museum of Art Pudong in partnership with Ateliers Jean Nouvel, the exhibition brings together architectural models, films, archival documents, installations, and a reconstruction of the architect's Paris studio to examine more than fifty years of architectural practice.
This decision, however, points to a challenge shared by almost every heritage system worldwide: how to legally protect architecture that has not yet reached the minimum age—formal or informal—to be considered "historic"?
