Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

If elevated networks reveal a city that increasingly walks above the street, the podium–tower is the typology that often makes that condition feel inevitable. Across Southeast Asia, podium–tower projects have become one of the dominant languages of metropolitan growth: a system that concentrates housing, jobs, retail, and transit connections into highly legible and managed parcels. From an urban planning perspective, the model can be remarkably effective—absorbing congestion, formalizing circulation, and delivering density quickly. Yet as it spreads, the typology also raises a quieter question: what does it optimize for, and what does it erode—especially at the level of the street, where urban life is meant to be negotiated rather than curated?

At its simplest, the podium–tower is a hybrid structure consisting of a high-coverage, low-rise podium supporting one or more slender vertical towers. The podium typically carries the logistical and commercial weight of the development—retail, parking, loading, drop-offs, back-of-house services, and often amenity decks—while the tower stacks private programs above, whether residential, office, hotel, or mixed use. The promise is twofold: maximize urban density while maintaining a "human-scaled" street wall, and separate the messy logistics of city life from the quieter domain of living and work.

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Milan reactivates its role as a global design capital this week as Milan Design Week 2026 has began on April 20, followed by the opening of the 64th edition of Salone del Mobile.Milano on April 21 at Fiera Milano, Rho. Rather than a single event, the week unfolds as a layered system in which the fair and the city operate through different temporalities and spatial conditions. From early openings across urban districts to the formal start of the fairgrounds program, the staggered calendar reinforces a continuous flow of activity that extends across institutions, infrastructures, and public space.

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Using massive s plates, often several centimeters thick and weighing tons, Richard Serra's sculptures convey an almost improbable sense of lightness. This effect does not result from a reduction of mass, but from how that mass is organized: large curved surfaces tilt, narrow passages compress the body, and seemingly unstable elements create a constant sense of imbalance. Serra transforms weight into a dynamic spatial experience.

In architecture, lightness has occupied a central role at least since the modern period. While earlier traditions, such as Greek and Roman architecture, were closely associated with stability, and large churches with monumentality, the twentieth century introduced a decisive shift in how matter is handled, particularly through the separation of structure and enclosure.

A perforated screen is often treated as an afterthought, something applied to soften light, to decorate a façade, or to add texture where a wall might otherwise feel flat. It is photographed as a surface, drawn as a pattern, and discussed as a craft. But in many buildings across the Indian subcontinent and the Islamic world, the screen was never an addition. It was the wall itself. Remove it, and the building does not simply change in appearance; it loses its ability to regulate heat, move air, and mediate between inside and outside.

This misreading reveals more about contemporary habits than about the screen itself. Architectural thinking has long separated structure from envelope, performance from expression. Within that framework, elements like the jaali or mashrabiya are easy to categorize as ornamental, visually rich but technically secondary. Yet these screens were conceived as integrated systems, where geometry, material, and climate operate together. Their intelligence lies in what they do.

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The ReGreeneration project, led by C40 Cities and supported by ARUP, Placemaking Europe, Climato Sfera, Inetum, and many others, operates at the intersection of urban ecology, public health, infrastructure, and neighborhood-scale design. Its premise addresses how European cities are built and maintained and how they experience a changing climate, arguing that cities must fundamentally change to remain livable under accelerating climate pressures.

The European Commission launched Horizon Europe in 2021 as its most ambitious research and innovation program to date, committing over 95 billion euros to accelerate scientific discovery and address the defining challenges in European cities. Among the initiatives that Horizon Europe funds is ReGreeneration, a transnational consortium uniting nine cities, their governing bodies, leading research institutions, and technology partners in the region.

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Elevation is often framed as progress, lifting movement above the friction of the city and smoothing circulation into uninterrupted flow. Every act of lifting produces a secondary condition in its wake. Beneath flyovers, metro lines, and railway viaducts, a second ground emerges as shaded, ambiguous, and rarely planned with the same intent as what moves above. These spaces are not incidental leftovers. They are the spatial consequence of a design decision that privileges speed, clearance, and efficiency, redistributing value and visibility across the city in the process.

What lies below is not empty. It is structured, constrained, and defined by infrastructure, left without a clear role. Studies on elevated highways consistently describe these undercroft zones as residual spaces, formed when transport systems are conceived independently of the ground they pass through. An Arup report on spaces beneath viaducts notes how they often disrupt pedestrian continuity while remaining outside formal planning frameworks. Similarly, recent academic reviews of under-flyover environments highlight that these areas are rarely integrated into urban design strategies at all. The result is a peculiar condition: space that is physically present and structurally determined, but programmatically undefined.

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