Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp has been named the recipient of the 2025 Soane Medal, becoming the first UK-based female artist to receive the award since its launch in 2017. A co-founder of Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Vriesendorp is widely recognized for her surrealist and humorous visual language that has shaped how modern and postmodernarchitecture is represented and understood. Her work, which blends playfulness with critical thought, has provided architecture with vivid, memorable imagery that continues to influence generations of architects.
Hudson's Detroit mixed-used development. Aerial view. Image Courtesy of Bedrock
Detroit-based Bedrock development group has announced the completion of the first phase of its Hudson's Detroit mixed-use project in the city center. The project was first unveiled in 2017, when the company presented plans for a 1.2-million-square-foot development designed by SHoP Architects to be built on one of downtown Detroit's long-abandoned sites, formerly occupied by the J.L. Hudson's Department Store. Once the tallest department store in the world and a central gathering place for the city throughout much of the 20th century, the site has now been reimagined as a contemporary urban destination. After nearly a decade of planning and construction, Hudson's Detroit aims to bring new activity and public space to a location emblematic of the city's commercial and cultural past.
Across geographies and generations, architects are rethinking the idea of home, balancing personal expression, contextual sensitivity, and material clarity. These contemporary residential proposals, submitted by the ArchDaily community, reveal how the house continues to evolve as both an architectural statement and an intimate landscape for living. From the sculptural and futuristic to the grounded and vernacular, they explore how built form balances between identity, environment, and lifestyle in an increasingly complex world.
Gothenburg's New Arena Quarter. Image Courtesy of White Arkitekter
This week, architectural conversations were shaped by themes of resilience, equity, and cultural relevance, brought into focus by World Architecture Day. Across global contexts, the discipline continues to expand its understanding of strength, not only as structural endurance but as a framework for inclusive, adaptable, and environmentally conscious design. From strategies for gender-equitable public space to new commissions grounded in memory and reconciliation, recent developments reflect how architecture is increasingly positioned as a tool for social engagement and long-term stewardship in the face of ongoing global challenges.
There are places in the world where temperatures already exceed fifty degrees, and others where water levels rise meters above expected levels. Meanwhile, in the heart of São Paulo, architects, researchers, artists, and communities come together to ask: how can we inhabit the Earth in times of extremes? This question drives the 14th International Architecture Biennial of São Paulo, held at the Oca in Ibirapuera Park, focusing on the theme Extremes: Architectures for a Hot World. More than an exhibition, it is a call to confront the climate crisis, social inequality, and the urgent need to reinvent ways of living.
Unlike previous editions, which were spread across multiple locations in the city, curators Clevio Rabelo, Jera Guarani, Karina de Souza, Marcella Arruda, Marcos Certo, and Renato Anelli chose to concentrate this year’s edition under a single roof, allowing the curatorial narrative to unfold clearly and directly. The entire journey is there, organized into sections that weave together ancestral practices and emerging technologies, material experiments and critical perspectives, local projects and global debates. The Oca thus becomes a crossroads: a space where diverse architectural visions overlap, offering a platform for collective reflection on society and the environment.
Uzbekistan's architectural and artistic heritage reflects a layered history shaped by centuries of cultural exchange along the Silk Road. From the monumental ensembles of Samarkand and Bukhara to the scientific and educational institutions of the Timurid era, architecture has long been a vessel of identity and knowledge across the region. In the twentieth century, Tashkent emerged as a new urban laboratory, where modernist ideals met local craft traditions and environmental pragmatism. The city's reconstruction following the 1966 earthquake became a defining moment, fusing Soviet urbanism with regional aesthetics to produce a distinctly Central Asian expression of modernity, one that translated cultural continuity into concrete, glass, and light.
Adolescent Girls Co-Design and Build their Public Spaces in Beirut June 2024. Image Courtesy of CatalyticAction
Make Space for Girls (MSFG) is a London-based charity that campaigns for public spaces and parks in the United Kingdom to be more inclusive of teenage girls. The organization conducts research on how public spaces are used and designed, raises awareness about perceived inequalities in their use, and collaborates with public and private institutions to promote the representation of teenage girls in the planning and design of outdoor environments. Their research indicates that their exclusion from the design of parks and public spaces often leaves them without places where they feel welcomed or valued, and that parks and public spaces for older children and teenagers are currently designed for the default male. From 8 to 15 October, the organization is running a fundraising campaign to support the implementation of its new three-year strategy aimed at promoting more inclusive public spaces.
Every act of building begins with the transformation of raw materials, energy, and land, and this inevitably entails environmental impact. This encompasses all the changes a process triggers in the natural world: from resource extraction to pollutant emissions, from energy consumption to biodiversity loss. Measuring this is complex, as it spans multiple dimensions. Carbon has emerged as the common metric, translating these effects into greenhouse gas emissions (CO₂ equivalent) directly linked to global warming. This standardization has made it omnipresent and comparable across materials, systems, and sectors. Reducing carbon emissions, therefore, means addressing the root of global warming, which is a particularly urgent task in the construction industry, responsible for about 39% of global emissions. In response to this challenge, MVRDV NEXT, the innovation and digital tools division of the Dutch architectural firm, launched CarbonSpace, a free, open platform that brings carbon accounting to the architect's desk, right at the napkin sketch stage.
India carries an ancient lineage of tradition that has long shaped the very conception and crafting of its cities. Vastu Shastra is one such tradition, more a science than a belief, intimately woven into the principles of architectural design. The practice remains widespread and highly regarded, with 93% of homes designed to align with Vastu principles. As India urbanizes at an unprecedented pace, projected to add 416 million city dwellers by 2050, Vastu Shastra continues to influence billions of real estate decisions amid the trials of modern city living. How might an 8,000-year-old spatial science evolve to guide the design of cities housing millions?
Today, on the first Monday of October, we celebrate World Architecture Day. This year, the International Union of Architects (UIA) has set the theme "Design for Strength," a powerful call to action that resonates deeply with the UN's focus on urban crisis response. In a world facing unprecedented environmental and social disruptions, this theme challenges us to move beyond temporary fixes. It asks: How can our buildings and cities not only withstand shocks but also foster equity, continuity, and resilience?
While the concept of strength in architecture can easily evoke images of reinforced concrete and steel, a more profound interpretation is emerging, one that defines strength not as mere rigidity, but as a holistic capacity to endure and adapt. This includes many facets, from ecological resilience and stewardship to long-lasting concepts of social resilience or the long-lasting conservation of existing urban structures, all contributing to a built environment more able to respond to the multitude of crises faced by cities worldwide.
New Casa Sud Train Station by OUALALOU+CHOI . Image Courtesy of OUALALOU+CHOI
OUALALOU+CHOI has won the international competition for the design of the new Casa Sud Train Station in Casablanca, Morocco. Based in Paris and Casablanca, the architecture and urban design practice led by Tarik Oualalou and Linna Choi is recognized for its work exploring the relationship between architecture, infrastructure, and public life. The winning proposal envisions the new station as both an infrastructural hub and a civiclandmark, addressing the needs of a rapidly expanding metropolis while contributing to the urban and social fabric of Morocco's economic capital.
As countries in Africa emerged from colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, many expressed their independent identities through architecture. This process continues several decades later, exemplified by several new museums in West Africa, recently completed or in planning. Although varying in purpose and form, they have some common goals: addressing the need for restitution of many artifacts taken during colonialism and mostly kept in European museums; and defining a museum with local identity as opposed to a non-contextual import.
