Photographer: Jack Hobhouse | ArchDaily

Health, Habitat, and Civic Infrastructure: Designing the City as a National Park

Olivia Poston — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Cities around the world share a common goal: to become healthier and greener, supported by civic infrastructure that restores ecosystems and strengthens public life. The question is how to reach this. Global climate targets, local building codes, and municipal standards increasingly guide designers and planners toward better choices. Still, many cities struggle to translate these frameworks into everyday, street-level comfort and long-term ecological protection. What happens if the city is no longer treated as a traditional city, but as a national park?

Rewriting Modernism Through Materials

Eduardo Souza — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 07:30:00 +0000

Park Hill, a large social housing complex in Sheffield, stands out as one of the most ambitious examples of modernist architecture in post-war Britain. Designed in 1961 by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, its innovative concept of "streets in the sky" aimed to combine high-density housing with the community spirit of traditional neighborhoods. By the late 20th century, the complex had fallen into severe neglect, marked by social problems and structural degradation that undermined both its functionality and reputation. Gradually, Park Hill became synonymous with the failure of modernism, carrying a heavy social stigma and marginalizing its residents.

Brooklands Workplace Campus / Allies and Morrison

Pilar Caballero — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Brooklands is a new workplace campus in central Cambridge, containing the city's first major Net Zero Carbon* office building. It fills a gap in the Cambridge workspace market, meeting tenant expectations for high-quality space while at the same time offering sustainable, characterful buildings that contribute to the city. 6,000 sqm of flexible workspace is arranged across two buildings (B1 and B2) around a courtyard garden, linked by a colonnade. Brooklands aligns closely with the government's strategic growth agenda for Cambridge and its ambition to boost the knowledge economy. Growth in Cambridge is not limited to expanding the city's fringes; it also involves optimizing existing urban areas and bringing underused sites to life in a sustainable and sensitive way.

Cities Need Care, Not Perfection: Rethinking How We Build the Urban Future

Olivia Poston — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 07:30:00 +0000

What does optimism feel like in cities that can no longer rely on perfection as their ultimate ambition? Across the world, urban environments bear the weight of overlapping pressures: climate volatility, spatial inequality, political fragmentation, public distrust, and chronic infrastructural disinvestment. These realities render the idea of an ideal city increasingly detached from lived experience. Yet the hope for building better systems persists. While utopian visions may seem like an escape from the growing complexities of the modern world, the greater challenge for contemporary city-making is to confront those complexities rather than avoid them.

The Oren Retirement Development / Stanton Williams

Hadir Al Koshta — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 06:00:00 +0000

The Oren is a welcoming retirement development that seamlessly integrates architecture with its verdant setting on the edge of London's Hampstead Heath.

Internal Acoustics: Effective Noise Mitigation Techniques in Architecture

Mohieldin Gamal — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 05:00:00 +0000

The internal environment is the focus of this second article about designing for noise to improve well-being. According to several recent studies, noise in cities has become an increasing hazard to health. Environmental noise, that is, noise from traffic, industrial activities, or amplified music, which reaches internal spaces, is not merely an annoyance. It has been linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, dementia, and mental health issues. As the world urbanizes, more people are exposed to excessive levels of noise. In medium- and high-density housing, in office buildings, and in schools, noise pollution can emanate from internal as well as external sources.

School of Public Health / Allies and Morrison

Andreas Luco — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 03:00:00 +0000

The new School of Public Health at Imperial occupies a key site on the university's White City campus. Designed for academics, researchers, students and public health professionals, the building provides a mixture of teaching, research and community outreach space for the school's multidisciplinary work in healthcare, health policy and epidemiology. Advances in medical understanding derive from working partnerships, when practitioners and researchers can compare and validate data, test research findings and develop resources together. At the heart of the School of Public Health's design therefore is a drive to facilitate sharing and collaboration with spaces that can be shaped and reorganised to suit a range of functions, working practices and research groups.

80 Charlotte Street / Make Architects

Pilar Caballero — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Make Architects has completed Derwent London's largest-ever project, a mixed-use scheme with 321,000ft² of office space and 45,000ft² of residential accommodation including social housing. Located at 80 Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia, the project is inherently urban in its integration of the city and street context, both in its massing and composition. The inclusion of a small new public garden and retail add to this civic quality.

Portlands Place East Village / Hawkins\Brown

Bianca Valentina Roșescu — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 17:00:00 +0000

The new build-to-rent scheme - named Portlands Place - completes the primary axis of East Village – an anchor within the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park masterplan. Designed by Hawkins\Brown and constructed by Mace, it provides 524 homes with a focus on communal spaces and social interaction within a brightly colored facade that distinguishes it from its neighbors.

68-86 Farringdon Road Building / Sheppard Robson

Valeria Silva — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 12:00:00 +0000

68-86 Farringdon Road’s complex and constrained site – previously a multi-story car park – informed a bold design language for a new hotel and office building that celebrates the area’s eclecticism. Situated between Bowling Green Lane and Vineyard Walk along Farringdon Road, the mixed-use development is formed of a new 180-key hotel for Whitbread’s hub by Premier Inn brand that neighbors a speculative office building for CLI Dartriver. Animating the streetscape of this bustling London thoroughfare are retail spaces, the hotel's café, and the office’s reception at ground floor level.

The Technology Partnership (TTP) / Sheppard Robson

Valeria Silva — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Set within the rural landscape of Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, the new campus for TTP has been shaped around the company's values of non-hierarchical, collaborative working by Sheppard Robson and its interior design group, ID: SR. The design evolved into a series of buildings, with each element optimized to address a specific part of the brief, while designed with agility in mind. This approach resulted in three primary buildings embedded within their setting: the Exchange, the Hive, and the Tech Barn.

Beyond Red: Architecture With Gray and Black Bricks

Eduardo Souza — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 07:30:00 +0000

Pink Floyd's song “Another brick in the wall” criticizes an alienating and demotivating educational system. People, or children, are portrayed as bricks due to their homogeneity, whether in the way of living or thinking in a society that is not very fond of opposition. Bricks work very well in this comparison, having changed very little throughout history and around the world in their rectangular shapes. But that's not true of their colors. Although we tend to think of red when we talk about bricks, there are infinite possibilities of shades, depending on the composition and manufacturing process of the pieces.

Angel Yard / Jan Kattein Architects

Valeria Silva — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Enfield Council and Jan Kattein Architects have transformed a set of derelict garages in Angel Edmonton into warm, generous, affordable spaces for community and young enterprise. Upper Edmonton residents currently experience incomes among the lowest 10% in England, exacerbated by a poor living environment and high barriers to education, training, and employment. In time, major developments nearby in Tottenham and Meridian Water will bring new opportunities.

Hoola London / CZWG Architects

Pilar Caballero — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 11:00:00 +0000

CZWG’s mixed-use Hoola London scheme is located on Tidal Basin Road, Royal Victoria Docks in London. The elegant 23- and 24-story towers, which comprise 360 studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, are a shining example of CZWG’s ability to create striking architecture while optimizing the building's footprint through efficient design.

The Stones House / CZWG Architects

Pilar Caballero — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

The site is located adjacent to the sand dunes between Dungeness and Greatstone-on-Sea in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It lies at a bend in the long seafront road at the end of a strip of beachfront detached houses dating from the mid-20th century to today.

24 Indoor Pools: Bringing the Tranquility of Water to Interior Spaces

Martita Vial della Maggiora — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 07:30:00 +0000

Within architecture, water evokes sentiments of calmness and wellbeing. The element has influenced design through its dynamic and fluid nature. With recent technological advances, architects have created some of the most strategic, innovative, and unexpected intersections of design and H2O.

Taming Exterior Greenery: Landscape Design for Houses in Natural Environments

Paula Pintos — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 07:30:00 +0000

A healthy environment that is also visually appealing in our homes has become increasingly sought when it comes to designing houses and residential spaces, especially during the world’s current context. One of the most successful ways of achieving this is through a thoughtful design of the landscape that complements the built project. The art of landscaping is the arrangement of nature’s raw material elements, like vegetation and planting, combined with nonliving elements, such as exterior structures, paving, and decking, in order to create site-specific solutions that enhance the exterior spaces of a project.

The JJ Mack Building / Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands

Andreas Luco — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

An office for the future. The JJ Mack Building (33 Charterhouse Street, Smithfield Market, London), designed by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands for Helical plc and Ashby Capital, is a handsome stone-clad building that will facilitate new hybrid ways of working and help lure and retain top talent. Located within a three-minute walk of Farringdon Station (Elizabeth Line, Thames Link, and London Underground), it offers an easy journey to a quintessential London neighborhood with cultural locations on its doorstep and great restaurants and cafés for lunch or drinks after work in a lively scene.