On 1 September 2026, the Balearic Social Housing Model was announced as the recipient of the 2026 OBEL Award. The focus of this award's cycle was "Systems' Hack," calling on architecture to critically engage with the systems that underpin contemporary society and to examine how these interconnected networks might be reconfigured in response to accelerating global challenges. The Balearic Social Housing Model, created by economist and independent consultant Cris Ballester and architect and civil servant Carles Oliver, is a six-point approach to public housing developed between 2019 and 2023, providing additional value and comfort to traditional affordable housing by bringing procurement, architecture, materials, energy, tenure, public capacity and learning together as responses to current social, environmental and economic challenges. In this interview with ArchDaily, the model's creators discuss its origins, ambitions, and material challenges in making social housing a desirable place to live.
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"If You Build Ugly Social Housing, You Will Create Social Problems": An Interview with the OBEL Award 2026 Recipients
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VhLab Sessions: "From Space to Growth: Design as a Retail Strategy"
For decades, commercial space was primarily understood as the setting where a transaction took place. Today, faced with new forms of consumption and a distinct relationship between the physical and the digital, retail design is once again questioning what a space can offer beyond the product itself.
Kengo Kuma to Receive the 2027 Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award
Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has been selected to receive the Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2027 Créateurs Design Awards (CDA). The award, one of two Legacy Awards presented by the organization, recognizes a career that has influenced architecture and the built environment across generations and geographic contexts. Kuma will receive the honor during the CDA Awards Ceremony, which will take place at the Shangri-La Paris on January 16, 2027.
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Thinking Through the Hand: Atelier CRAFT on Design and Making
What narratives do materials carry, and how can the visible "traces" of artisans engage in a dialogue with manufacturing processes and industrialization? Between design and construction, the act of thinking through making can become a guiding principle for a design philosophy. Combining wood, industrial materials, and reused objects, Atelier CRAFT's approach is rooted in reversible architecture, guided by its manifesto: "Transform design through making." Based in Saint-Ouen, Paris, the practice explores the relationships between humans and materials, the act of making, and manufacturing processes.
The Balearic Social Housing Model Receives the 2026 OBEL Award
Amid growing economic, political, and climatic instability, the 2026 OBEL Award highlights the need for architectural approaches that rethink both existing and emerging infrastructures. The title for this edition is "Systems' Hack," where "systems" are understood as interrelated mechanisms governed by shared rules and "hacking" is framed as a strategic intervention that seeks to alter how these mechanisms operate. Within this framework, the OBEL Foundation has announced the Balearic Social Housing Model as the winner of this year's award, while also announcing a new cycle in 2027 under the same topic. The Balearic Social Housing Model is recognized for "transforming the role of social housing administration in the Balearic Islands between 2019 and 2023," proposing new approaches in response to an acute housing shortage and a critically limited public rental housing stock in Spain.
Wildfires in Algeria Highlight the Scale of the Global Fire Landscape
Severe late-August wildfires across northern Algeria have brought residential areas, agricultural lands, and critical transport corridors directly into the path of rapidly spreading flames. The destruction across Jijel, Béjaïa, and Tizi Ouzou claimed at least 12 lives and forced the emergency closure of major national highways. The latest outbreak follows a summer of repeated fires across the country, with authorities recorded nearly 2,000 fires nationwide in July, while fires in the northeastern province of Annaba at the end of the month forced more than 100 people to leave their homes and damaged nearly 150 houses. The current fires have again brought residential areas, roads and other infrastructure into the path of rapidly spreading flames. Forest fires occur regularly in northern Algeria during the summer, with increasingly frequent drought and periods of intense heat contributing to more severe fire conditions.
M+ Hong Kong Exhibition Traces Herzog & de Meuron's Design Process Across China
An exhibition tracing the vision behind Herzog & de Meuron's ten selected projects in China will open on September 12, 2026, at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong. The exhibition marks the museum's fifth anniversary; since opening, M+ has built its collection around visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The museum building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron between 2012 and 2021, is located in the city's West Kowloon Cultural District (WestK), a cultural hub spanning forty hectares alongside Victoria Harbour. "Herzog & de Meuron: In Focus" is curated by Ikko Yokoyama and Iris Ng and reviews projects dating from 2002 to 2021, including Tai Kwun in Hong Kong (2006–2018) and the National Stadium in Beijing (2002–2008).
Alcatraz on the Hill: The Rise and Afterlife of Trieste's Rozzol Melara
The courtyard at Rozzol Melara measures two hundred meters on each side, which makes it larger than any square in Trieste. Two L-shaped blocks of exposed concrete enclose it, one of them twice the height of the other, climbing from seven to fifteen stories as the ridge falls away toward the gulf four kilometers below. Concrete pylons spaced every fifteen meters carry the blocks down to a slope they never quite touch, opening porticoes deep enough to walk through, and above them the facades resolve into loggias at the scale of a single room. Seen from the coastal road, none of that is legible; one can only see a gray line drawn across the hills.
Inside the enclosure, the Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari of Trieste built the rest of a city. The 648 apartments account for less of the plan than the schools, the post office, the health center, the parish hall, the twenty-odd shops and the two-level garage, all reached through covered streets that run the length of the blocks and cross the court in a raised walkway, so that the route from a front door to a grocery or a classroom passes through collective space without ever going outdoors. Twenty-nine architects worked on it under the coordination of Carlo Celli, drawing on sociological studies commissioned before the project.
Lina Bo Bardi and Popular Making: Craft and Accessibility in Design
In an era where digital fabrication and automation are increasingly present in architectural practice, manual craft is often seen as a luxury item—restricted to high-end projects whose clients can afford extended deadlines and collaborative processes requiring constant dialogue with artisans. This scenario might have sounded contradictory a few decades ago, when Lina Bo Bardi denounced that a process of "deculturation" was underway and that an appraisal of "popular" Brazilian civilization was urgently needed to confront totalizing universalisms and *folklore*—the latter viewed by her as an instrument of state alienation designed to neutralize the subversive and transformative character of popular culture:
Latin America in Focus: This Month in Architecture, Environmental Design, Social Infrastructure, and Practice
Architecture across Latin America this month reflects an ongoing negotiation between environmental challenges, cultural heritage, and changing approaches to public and professional life. From Colombia's earthquake and its impact on historic architecture to new cultural projects in Argentina and environmentally responsive design in Ecuador and Medellín, recent developments highlight how architecture continues to respond to both regional conditions and broader global challenges. Questions of heritage and infrastructure also remained prominent, as UNESCO raised concerns over the impacts of the Tren Maya on Mexico's Calakmul World Heritage site, while new initiatives in Chile and Costa Rica explored ecological design and sustainable practice. The month's stories point to a regional architectural landscape shaped by resilience, adaptation, and the relationship between built environments and their wider social and natural contexts.
Himalayan Glacier Collapse Triggers Flash Floods and Infrastructure Destruction in Nepal
A lower section of a Himalayan glacier collapsed on Wednesday, August 26, creating an ice and rock avalanche down the Lhende River valley that triggered severe flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border. The floods destroyed entire villages, with at least 350 confirmed dead and more than 1,300 people still missing. Characterized by their sudden and violent nature, flash floods occur within the first six hours after heavy rainfall or another floodwater source. In this case, the event has been attributed to a glacier collapse higher in the Himalayas, linked, in some scenarios, to a heat wave in the area. The speed of the movement is also distinctive of this type of flood, whose path of destruction in this case follows the Trishuli River basin in Nepal. According to the International Federation of Red Cross, the most affected areas are the Nepalese Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts. A more detailed assessment is expected in the coming days as floodwaters recede; in the meantime, it is already possible to outline some of the evidence from a territorial point of view.
Building the Future: 6 Unbuilt Research Centers from the ArchDaily Community
Research is a structured and active process of analyzing, testing, interpreting, and solving, ultimately leading to knowledge that can be considered disruptive. The creative process behind research is an invitation to the imagination: to seek answers, solutions, and alternatives to the reality we know. To go beyond theory, the exercise moves away from books and computers and into spaces designed specifically to foster experimentation. In these six unbuilt projects, laboratories, workshops, observatories, gardens, auditoriums, and exhibition spaces are arranged as fertile ground for the imagination. These spaces must support collaborative work and creativity, so that curious minds and skeptics alike can find paths toward alternative futures.
The Opening of Powerhouse Parramatta and a New Open-Source App for Geolocated Reports: This Week’s Review
This week's news focused on how architecture engages with what already exists and communicates beyond the building itself. Several stories explored restoration and reuse, from the renewal of a historic university hall to the preservation of an artist's exhibition spaces and the incorporation of reclaimed materials into new construction. Elsewhere, architecture continued to serve as both subject and setting for exhibition, with new museum and cultural venue announcements examining architecture's broader social, technological, and ecological contexts. On the radar, three projects to watch: in Berlin, sauerbruch hutton has won the competition to extend the Federal Ministry of Defense's headquarters at the Bendlerblock; in Santa Barbara, SOM and Mithun have unveiled designs for a major new student housing complex at UC Santa Barbara; and, addressing a different kind of construction altogether, Paulo Tavares' practice Autonoma has launched Documental, an open-source platform that lets journalists, researchers, and civil organizations turn data, images, and satellite imagery into geolocated digital stories in defense of human and environmental rights.
Yayoi Kusama, Artist of Dots, Repetition and Infinity, Dies at 97
Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose seven-decade career encompassed painting, sculpture, installation, performance, literature and film, has died at the age of 97. Kusama died at a hospital in Tokyo on August 14, 2026, according to a statement from Yayoi Kusama Inc. and Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. Known internationally for her polka dots, pumpkins and Infinity Mirror Rooms, Kusama developed a distinctive artistic language around repetition, infinity, self-obliteration and the relationship between the individual and the world.
SEED 2026
SEED 2026 is a gathering for specialists, professionals, students, and those interested in exploring new relationships between territory, architecture, biomaterials, and regenerative systems.
Steven Holl Architects Selected to Renew Historic Ida Noyes Hall at the University of Chicago
Steven Holl Architects has been selected to lead the renewal of Ida Noyes Hall at the University of Chicago in Illinois. The project will upgrade the 111-year-old building's infrastructure, improve accessibility, and introduce new spaces for programs, events, and informal gathering while preserving its historic character. Designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge and completed in 1916, Ida Noyes Hall was originally conceived as a women's clubhouse and has since evolved into a broader campus gathering space. JLK Architects will serve as the historic preservation architect, with Workshop Architects leading student-life programming and operations planning.
