In recent years, food has taken on a renewed role within architecture, not simply as a program or typology, but as a shared spatial practice. Beyond restaurants or dining design, communal eating spaces are increasingly understood as environments where presence, ritual, and time intersect, allowing people to gather, stay, and coexist. In these settings, eating does not just happen within space; it actively shapes it, temporarily transforming ordinary, borrowed, or improvised environments into places of exchange.

This shift is visible across a wide range of built projects, installations, and community spaces that use shared meals as a way of bringing people together. Initiatives such as Fondo Supper Club frame dining as a social platform, using food to connect artists, designers, and local communities through conversation and collaboration. Similarly, sit.feast, presented during Milan Design Week 2024, approached the table as a spatial installation, one where sitting and eating together became the primary means of collectively producing space.

+ 16

Created by California surfers who wanted to bring the lines of surfing onto asphalt, skateboarding soon outgrew its role as a simple alternative for flat days. It established itself as a practice that reads the city through a different logic, reinterpreting steps, handrails, walls, and interstitial spaces as possible lines, challenges, and opportunities. Over time, it evolved into a global urban culture, a way of inhabiting and transforming public space through movement. What was once marginal has become a catalyst for urban activation, community building, and new uses for overlooked spaces. At its core, skateboarding reveals how many cities coexist within the same city, depending on who moves through them and how each person is able to reinterpret their surroundings.

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.

+ 33

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.

+ 23

+ 20

The EUmies Awards are organized annually by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and the European Commission, with the support of the European Union's Creative Europe Programme. Based on the principle that "architecture is not merely a technical or aesthetic matter, but a cultural, environmental, and democratic issue," this 19th cycle of the Prize brings together 410 works from 40 countries and 143 regions across Europe. Beyond recognizing contemporary architecture projects, the Awards also aim to reflect European values such as cultural diversity, sustainability, democracy, and solidarity. This year, most nominated works (23%) are residential projects, including both collective and single-family housing, followed by cultural (13%) and educational (12%) programs. The selection shows a balance between transformations of existing buildings (44%) and new construction (56%), while 12% of the nominees are transnational works and 33% of the studios are 10 years old or younger, underscoring the growing visibility of emerging practices.

+ 17

Chimneys are among the most quietly persistent elements in architectural history. Yet their presence persists in nearly every cultural and climatic context, serving as a technical feature and a spatial, atmospheric, and symbolic device. It populates dense city skylines and anchors rural horizons alike, its vertical silhouette as ordinary as a window or a doorframe. This apparent ordinariness is deceptive. The chimney is one of the few architectural components that links the intimate scale of interior life with the expansive forces of the environment. For architects and designers, the necessity of the chimney presents a choice: to let it recede quietly into the building's functional fabric or to amplify it as a central, expressive element that shapes a project's identity.

+ 47

+ 16

+ 18

+ 14

+ 17

+ 15

Innovation is at the core of architecture, expressed through new approaches to design, material experimentation, and, of course, ways of living. As a result, the conception of buildings and indoor spaces is constantly evolving. This evolution is especially evident in regions with a rich cultural heritage, such as Spain, where innovation reinterprets traditional ways of relating to space. This attentiveness to memory and daily life extends into interiors, where each intervention has the potential to actively reshape how people experience a space and open new possibilities for living and interaction.

+ 10

Internalities: Architectures for Territorial Equilibrium is the title of the Spanish exhibition at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. Curated by Galician architects Roi Salgueiro Barrio and Manuel Bouzas Barcala, the project presented in the pavilion’s central hall aims to "explore key strategies for decarbonizing architecture in Spain."

+ 92

+ 21

+ 22

+ 30

+ 22