"Let us take a hard look at the facts." With this direct and hardly reassuring sentence, the director of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization opened The Family Fallout Shelter, a 32-page manual published by the U.S. government in 1959 amid Cold War tensions. The document taught families how to build shelters capable of protecting them from radioactive fallout after a possible nuclear attack and, through technical drawings and sketches, outlined solutions using concrete blocks, walls filled with earth or sand, underground structures, and ventilation systems. It was a survival manual that, in many ways, also functioned as a construction manual.
In many Asian cities, the summer climate can increasingly be experienced from a distance. In Hong Kong, it is possible to move from an apartment tower through a podium mall, enter the Mass-Transit-Railway system (MTR), arrive beneath another commercial complex, and continue through enclosed footbridges or underground passages while encountering remarkably little of the atmosphere outside. Heat, humidity, rain, and seasonal variation remain present, but they can be largely bypassed through a continuous network of conditioned interiors.
Over several decades, air-conditioning has expanded from a technology for cooling individual rooms into an infrastructure capable of producing an alternative urban environment. This has been particularly visible in parts of East Asia and South East Asia, where transit-oriented development frequently combines railway stations, shopping centres, housing, offices, and other everyday services within interconnected complexes. The Railway plus Property model has helped institutionalize this relationship between transport and development, creating districts where movement through the city is often inseparable from movement through privately managed interiors.
Water is life. Animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria all depend on it: water structures their cells, carries their nutrients, and hosts the chemistry that keeps them alive. Even the rare exceptions confirm the rule. Some seeds and spores can lose nearly all their water and enter a dormancy so deep that their metabolism almost stops, yet it is water that brings them back. In the most literal sense, water connects us.
But it also divides us. Every year, thousands of people leave North Africa in overcrowded boats bound for Lampedusa, seeking better living conditions in Europe; more than 30,000 have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014. Water draws borders and controls flows. Before the war on Iran began in February 2026, the Strait of Hormuz carried around 25% of the world's seaborne crude oil, with effects felt in fuel prices far from the Gulf. Water also sits at the center of the environmental debate, where its excess can be as lethal as its absence. Severe floods increasingly strike countries that have contributed least to global emissions, while the largest polluters remain better equipped to resist. If water is life, it can also mean death. Ultimately, water is political.
Architectural ornamentation has been a recurrent subject of debate across the industry for decades. A practice that was largely abandoned during the Modernist movement could now be standing on a platform that might, again, allow its resurgence, due to the current convergence of robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and digital fabrication. Technology has seemingly removed the primary obstacle to decorative detail: the high cost of skilled manual labor. However, this new technical capacity demands a critical examination: What does ornamentation truly represent, and what do we gain or lose by resurrecting it through algorithmic design?
Volcanic landscapes make geological change unusually visible. Lava hardens into new ground, and plants slowly take hold across it. Ash can remain in the landscape for years. Around active volcanoes, these processes are still underway, affecting where and how people build.
Yet these landscapes continue to attract houses and places of retreat. Their isolation and unusual terrain are often part of the appeal. Building there means bringing everyday life into a landscape that can still change.
Isivivane - Freedom Park, Pretoria, South Africa. Image by Shosholoza
Liberation does not always begin with a monument. It may begin in a garden, a yard, a clearing, a field; in the occupation of land and the possibility of gathering there. Across histories shaped by colonialism and dispossession, space has been more than the setting in which liberation takes place. It has been one of its practices: cultivated, occupied, hidden within, moved through and collectively remade.
Wolff Architects' researchLiberation Gardensoffers the garden as one way of reading these spatial practices, not simply as planted ground, but as a space through which survival, nourishment and emancipatory imagination can be sustained. The garden in this sense is not defined by landscape design so much as by relationships between people and land, cultivation and knowledge, occupation and autonomy. It can hold cultural production alongside subsistence, and forms of collective life that emerge under conditions of violence and dispossession. Liberation, understood spatially, becomes as much about the possibility of inhabiting differently as it is about arriving at a final condition of freedom.
This article is part of "Thresholds", a special edition printed newspaper by Cobe Notes x ArchDaily.
There are two unique things about being human that made us survive the early years and spread over the whole planet: sweating and storytelling. Sweating helps cool down the body when running long distances. Stories help us collaborate in big numbers and share knowledge across groups and generations. As architects, we still rely on the same tools to make visions become reality.
As professor of stories Angus Fletcher points out in his book Primal Intelligence, there is a common misconception about the role of stories: when our "rational" brain has developed an idea that we fail to explain to a wider group, we pack it into a story, and suddenly everybody understands. Fletcher argues that it actually works the other way around: ideas come from stories, our brain works in stories, and stories form reality. Architects have a derogatory term for turning that process the wrong side up: "post-rationalisation", for example when diagrams are made to explain a design that is already decided.
Home could extend between several places occupied at different points in the year. It extended across a larger geography of places that were left and returned to through the year. Many contemporary Gulf developments now attempt to bring contrasting climatic and spatial conditions into the same permanent urban system.
"After all, time is a key ingredient of my profession," states Francis Kéré in his book Francis Kéré: Building Stories. Architecture is constantly evolving and transforming over time. Bricks, doors, windows, walls, stairs, and other elements become the protagonists of a process that begins with a sketch and eventually takes shape as a built work.
Considering that architecture begins when its inhabitants start to make a space their own, Francis Kéré develops his projects progressively, continuing to work on the design even during the construction phase. As his architecture grows over time, integrates with its surroundings, adapts to the needs of its users, and responds to change in flexible and experimental ways, it seeks to become part of the lives of those who inhabit it.
Conceptual map collage of Kampala, Khartoum and Kinshasa. Illustration by Maisa Elamein via Wikimedia Commons and Public Domain sources.
Colonial violence in African cities bled through the political dimensions into the spatial realm. It is infused into street grids, land tenure systems, drainage infrastructure and residential zones that continue to organize inequality and displacement today. Kinshasa, Khartoum, and Kampala each carry this afterlife in their urban morphology, at once historical artifacts and an active structure; shaping who has access to services, who occupies flood-prone land, and catalyzing a deepening climate instability that forces this apparatus into entirely new dimensions - including geological ones.
UN-Habitat and Oceanix Reveal Prototype for the World's First Sustainable Floating City. Image Courtesy of Oceanix and BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group
Cities depend on systems that already exist around them. When architects design on water or beyond Earth, those systems are no longer available. Without fixed ground or nearby networks for energy, water, transport, and waste, architecture has to take on functions the larger city would normally provide.
The reason for moving beyond familiar ground also changes from one project to another. In the Maldives, building on water responds to the vulnerability of existing land. In Busan, floating development creates another direction for urban expansion. On the Moon, the challenge is more absolute: there is no existing infrastructure to connect to at all.
Howl's Moving Castle. Image Courtesy of Studio Ghibli
Every evening when we get home, without ceremony, we perform a small rite. We arrive at a door, we open it, and we step through into a space that belongs to us in a way no other space does. It is such a mundane act that we rarely notice it has a structure at all, and yet philosophers and anthropologists have written entire books describing these psychological structures. Interestingly, visual works such as the animated worlds of Studio Ghibli seem to reflect this dynamic to create worlds which contain architecture and layouts that provide a path to escape by tapping into our memories in a legible yet enchanted form.
Obsolete buildings. Image Courtesy of Matt Van der Velde
Sustainability in architecture is often discussed as though it were a universal standard—and, in principle, it should be. Buildings are increasingly evaluated through energy performance, embodied carbon, certification systems, material efficiency, biodiversity, and whole-life impact. Yet the rules determining what must actually be done remain highly local. A project designed in London, New York, or Copenhagen may be shaped by stringent energy codes, environmental review, disclosure requirements, planning controls, and increasingly ambitious carbon targets. The same practice working elsewhere may encounter a very different regulatory landscape.
This creates a difficult question for international architecture: when sustainability is not enforced to the same degree by law, what standards should architects carry with them?
Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, sits at over 2,300 meters above sea level on a plateau at the edge of the Great Rift Valley escarpment. Although situated in a country not known for large visitor numbers, the city has gained fame for its unique architecture. In July 2017, it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed as "Asmara: A Modernist African City," the first modernist urban site anywhere to be listed in its entirety, and Africa's first explicitly modernist World Heritage Site. Its heritage value came about as a result of a complex convergence of two aspects of Eritrea's history: an intense period of colonial construction as Italy pursued its imperial ambitions in Africa, and a long period of relative isolation that insulated the city from redevelopment.
The Continuous Monument- 1969. Image Courtesy of Superstudio
Ask an architect what the hardest problem in the discipline is right now. The block of unmaintained postwar housing two streets from their office rarely comes up. What comes to their mind is the pressure differentials on Mars, or the tensile loads on a floating platform; because unclaimed ground has no one to negotiate with, no history to answer to, no tenant to remember the last renovation, which makes it considerably easier to design for.
Architects think of themselves as solving a harder problem than the one next door. A project, like The Line, a 170-kilometer city meant to house nine million residents, with a site with no prior claimant, is not architecturally harder than a site with a hundred years of tenancy, contested ownership, and a planning department that remembers the last three developers who used the word "community" and meant something else. It is, considerably, easier. No one to persuade, no history to answer to, no argument to lose. Which raises the question of whether the harder problem is sitting two streets from the office, unsolved, and the easier one is the one getting the renderings and the funding rounds; then 'ambition' is the wrong word for what is happening. Something is being avoided, and we need to start thinking about what.
A cave in Maharashtra can now be entered without travelling to it. Through a virtual reality experience developed around Ajanta, visitors can move through a digitally reconstructed version of the caves from somewhere else entirely. The project raises an architectural question: if architecture is experienced through movement, scale, sequence and perception, what happens when those experiences can be recreated outside the physical site? IITM Pravartak's Digital Ajanta project uses 3D scanning, filming, modelling and virtual reality to document the caves and translate that record into an immersive experience.
Historically, the way we design has been closely linked to the way we build. Architecture moved through physical testing, trial and error, projection drawings, mock-ups, and physical models: each introducing a new layer of abstraction, but still remaining tied to material, scale, and construction. The introduction of CAD significantly changed this dynamic. At first, it was largely understood as the computerization of precise geometry for construction. Over time, however, digital tools moved earlier into the design process, replacing sketching, physical trial and error, model-making, and other forms of thinking that had once kept scale and material close at hand.
The lineage of architectural design can therefore be understood, in part, as an evolution of abstractions. Some have been extraordinarily productive. Plans and sections, for example, isolate particular dimensions of architecture while still allowing the mind to reconstruct the whole. They flatten, cut, and reduce, but they do not abandon the building. Through the combination of drawings, one can understand rooms, circulation, structure, openings, and spatial relationships without becoming lost in the complexity of the project. Their abstraction is disciplined because it remains tied to an architectural reality that must eventually be measured, built, and inhabited.
