Max Touhey

New Cultural Venues, Awards and Transformative Architecture From Ghana to New York: This Week’s Review

November 13, 2025

This week's architecture news highlights a diverse global landscape of design innovation, cultural investment, and adaptive reuse. Across continents, new museums and cultural venues are opening to foster dialogue around art, design, and community engagement. At the same time, major recognitions and project announcements underscore the growing importance of sustainable, socially conscious practices in shaping contemporary architecture. From adaptive transformations in New York, Tainan, and Milan, including preparations for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games, to new cultural landmarks in Ghana and Qatar, this week's overview features projects by leading firms such as Herzog & de Meuron, Snøhetta, and Mecanoo, alongside initiatives from emerging practices like Limbo Accra in West Africa.

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Touching the Past: When Architecture Becomes a Gesture of Continuity

Subscriber Access | May 29, 2025

There is a particular kind of architecture that does not begin with a blank page. It begins in silence, in ruins, in walls shaped by time. It begins by listening. Rather than imposing itself, it draws near, slowly, choosing to touch rather than overwrite. This is an architecture that engages with the past through the lens of the present, not to erase it or mimic it, but to offer it continuity.

Contemporary architecture increasingly recognizes that to build with the past is not to be held back by it. Heritage is no longer seen as a constraint but as an active ground for design. Within this shift, pre-existence becomes more than a physical condition — it becomes a narrative thread, a structural and symbolic presence that invites care. Rather than asserting dominance, many architects today choose to respond with gestures that are deliberate, quiet, and precise. These interventions frame rather than replace, protect rather than obscure. In doing so, they allow history to remain visible, not as a backdrop, but as a living layer of the architectural experience.

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