Building Materials: The Latest Architecture and News

The Arts and Crafts movement is often remembered as an architectural style defined by handcrafted details, an intimate scale, natural materials, and a rejection of excess and industry. Its influence is frequently traced through visual characteristics that continue to appear in contemporary architecture and interiors, from exposed timber and crafted joinery to an emphasis on texture and permanence, yet reducing the movement to an aesthetic vocabulary overlooks its far more significant contribution. For William Morris, Philip Webb, John Ruskin, and their contemporaries, architecture was a question of how things were made, who made them, and whether the process of making could cultivate dignity, meaning, culture, and beauty.

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For millions of displaced children and young people, education unfolds amid conditions of forced mobility, administrative uncertainty, and prolonged precarity. Schools situated in borderlands, refugee settlements, and sites of climate-induced displacement therefore operate as more than educational facilities. They become spatial infrastructures that negotiate the contradictory demands of emergency and continuity, offering environments where learning persists despite the instability of legal status, living conditions, and the very feeling of being at home.

According to UNHCR, approximately 45 million of the world's 117.8 million forcibly displaced people were children under the age of eighteen at the end of 2025. As displacement increasingly results from armed conflict, political persecution, environmental crises, and economic instability, humanitarian architecture faces a growing challenge: not simply how to construct more schools rapidly, but how to create educational environments capable of supporting continuity, safety, and belonging amid uncertain futures.

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Bamboo is often praised before it is understood. It grows quickly, carries a long history of building cultures, and appears to offer architecture an immediate ecological language. In photographs, it can seem almost self-explanatory: light, natural, renewable, and already aligned with a more sustainable future. Yet this apparent clarity is also what makes bamboo difficult to discuss with precision. Once it becomes a symbol of environmental responsibility, the material itself can disappear behind the image it produces.

This is the risk of bamboo's contemporary revival. It can be imagined too easily as a green substitute for industrial materials, a regional atmosphere, or a softer alternative to the harder languages of steel and concrete. In each case, bamboo is admired before its conditions are understood. The more important question is not whether bamboo is sustainable in a general sense, but what kind of architectural culture it requires: what forms of knowledge, maintenance, regulation, labor, and time are needed for its sustainability to become real.

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In an industry defined by engineering tolerances and performance certainty, interior finishing still relies on a process that introduces variability into every project. Even experienced applicators often depend on judgement-based mixing—estimating water ratios and adjusting by feel until the material appears workable. While skill reduces variability, it does not eliminate it. The result is inherent inconsistency that transfers directly onto the finished surface.

Daryan Knoblauch's work sits at the intersection of architecture and live cultural production, with a focus on how space is made legible through tension and atmosphere. Rather than treating temporary work as a lesser category of architecture, Knoblauch approaches installations, stages, and event architectures as full disciplinary problems—where enclosure, stability, light, and movement must be resolved with the same seriousness as any building, often under tighter constraints and faster timelines.

Across projects, a consistent thread is the productive tension between high-modern precision and an intentionally raw clarity of assembly. Membranes and lightweight systems are not deployed as surface effects, but as structural and spatial instruments—tuned to wind, load, and occupation, and calibrated to produce a sublimity that is felt as much as it is seen. Here, ephemerality is not simply a duration, but a design condition: temporality makes forces—weather, wear, performance—more visible, and demands an ethic of making that is both exacting and adaptable.

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Studio NEiDA operates at the intersection of architectural practice, research, and curatorial work, with a consistent focus on how buildings emerge from the material and cultural conditions of a place. Rather than treating materiality as a finishing language, the studio frames it as the beginning of an architectural narrative—starting from what is locally available, they look at what craft knowledge exists on the ground, and how those resources and skills situate a project within an architectural lineage. This approach foregrounds limitations and possibilities as productive forces, and positions design as an iterative process of aligning spatial intent with the realities of construction culture and vernacular intelligence.

Across their work, NEiDA's interests extend beyond form toward the socio-political and climatic contexts that shape how architecture is made and inhabited. They emphasize learning from non-authored, vernacular, and informal building practices as a way of establishing a shared grammar for intervention, and they describe an indoor–outdoor continuity not as a stylistic preference but as a response to local life and ventilation logics—where outdoor rooms can be as spatially defined and programmatically central as interior ones. Collaboration, in this framework, is not auxiliary: the studio highlights on-site exchange with craftspeople and builders as a core methodology, where projects evolve through collective intelligence and adaptive communication.

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The construction industry today faces an unavoidable paradox: the urgent need for sustainable solutions for the future of cities collides with the exhaustion of the term "sustainability" itself, often reduced to a hollow commercial label. In this scenario, Arquivo – one of the winners of ArchDaily's 2025 Next Practices Award – emerges as a facilitator and mediator between different stakeholders in the construction field through disassembly – or rather, de-construction – and the reuse of building elements. Etymologically, if "construction" derives from the Latin construere (to heap up, assemble), the prefix "de-" imposes a conceptual inversion: it is not about destroying, but about disassembling with intelligence to understand the logic of the parts.

While conventional demolition practices generate a vast volume of waste and energy consumption, Arquivo proposes reuse as a viable alternative for the circular economy. The company operates in the gap between disposal and new construction, guided by a clear premise: "Reuse is only fully realized when the material gains a new life."

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As a major driver of natural resource consumption, energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions, the construction industry has a significant impact on the environment, consuming 32% of global energy and contributing to 34% of global CO₂ emissions. Building materials play a crucial role in shaping the built environment. Through principles of circular economy, renewable and self-sufficient solutions, and technological innovations, analyzing the environmental performance of each material highlights the opportunity to review and assess the different stages of its life cycle.

By establishing a common framework for measuring and managing the environmental impact of building materials, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) emerges as a key approach. This methodology provides a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental impacts associated with products, processes, or activities throughout their entire life cycle. From raw material extraction, manufacturing, and transportation to construction, use, and end-of-life treatment, the analysis considers the environmental burdens linked to each stage. In the context of building materials, LCA offers a holistic and systematic approach to assessing environmental performance and identifying opportunities for design optimization, among other improvements. In this way, it quantifies impacts such as carbon emissions, energy consumption, water use, air pollution, waste generation, and ecosystem depletion.

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Chilean architect Smiljan Radić Clarke has developed a body of work that resists easy categorization. His buildings often seem both ancient and provisional, carrying a monumental presence while retaining an unexpected sense of fragility. Stone, concrete, timber, fabric, and fiberglass are combined in unexpected ways, producing architectures that hover between permanence and ephemerality. Rather than pursuing a stable formal language, the 2026 Pritzker laureate approaches architecture as an open field of experimentation, where material behavior and structural perception are constantly tested.

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Across South America, architecture endures through the materials it uses, those that persist over time. Bamboo, brick, wood, and concrete appear across regions, connecting climate, labor, and culture in ways that ensure their persistence through generations. Their continuity does not depend solely on preservation or heritage. It depends on use.

In this context, cultural memory does not reside primarily in monuments or images, but in practice. It survives in repeated gestures: laying bricks, tying guadua joints, assembling wood frames, casting slabs that anticipate another floor. These actions are transmitted less through manuals than through participation. Over time, they form systems of knowledge embedded in habit and necessity. Materials endure not because they symbolize the past, but because they continue to work.

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As environmental accountability becomes embedded in design culture, the building envelope is being reconsidered not just as a protective skin, but as an active energy-producing surface. Treating solar technology as a material rather than an attachment reshapes how architecture is conceived and detailed. Color, texture, rhythm, and assembly become inseparable from performance. Building-Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) operate within this expanded definition of materiality. By integrating solar technology into façades and rainscreens from the earliest project stages, architects can reduce redundancy, align energy goals with design intent, and rethink how envelopes are composed. Yet translating this ambition into buildable systems requires technical precision and construction intelligence.

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Architectural heritage is not only what a building was, but what it continues to become: a long process of building, rebuilding, and re-occupying over time. Where opportunities allow, this continuity produces a layered condition—one in which visitors can witness, experience, and feel the gradual shifting of a building's fabric, materiality, spatial order, and patterns of use, and occasionally even participate in that transformation.

Yet many projects—particularly those driven primarily by commercial imperatives—do not choose to value, or even to recognize, this slower work of adaptive reuse and heritage continuation. Developments governed by a numbers-only logic often opt for the easier path of demolition and rebuild: maximizing plot ratio, GFA, and rentable area with the efficiency of a clean slate. And still, every now and then, an opportunity surfaces that allows us to see—and to enjoy—the city's process of architectural "heritaging" in real time.

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The recently inaugurated exhibition matière en résonance ("resonant matter") brings together a wide range of models and a curated selection of photographs to present sauerbruch hutton's ongoing exploration of timber. The exhibition starts from the premise that while the age of concrete defined the twentieth century, the early twenty-first century has seen a worldwide resurgence of timber, a much older building material. Timber is presented as offering "a different version of modernity" and as the subject of renewed interest that reawakens long-standing collective imaginaries. Over more than two decades, the Berlin-based architecture practice has explored the possibilities of timber construction, from façade elements to load-bearing structures and modular systems. The exhibition reflects the results of this sustained investigation, reinforcing both technical innovation and the embodied qualities of timber across a diverse range of European contexts. The exhibition will be on view from 3 to 28 February 2026 at the Galerie d'Architecture de Paris.

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Which materials have taken center stage in the architectural discourse of 2025? Which projects have rediscovered new construction practices and methods through material innovation? While the future of building materials still appears uncertain, year after year, experimentation and research continue to reveal diverse practices, initiatives, and efforts dedicated to understanding their value and responsibility within the built environment. From agricultural waste that reduces carbon footprints to recycled plastics given new life, and living materials that engage with emerging technologies while reconnecting with nature, 2025 has highlighted and strengthened the role of architects as mediators between materials, disciplines, knowledge, and interests from diverse origins.

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In much of China, concrete remains the dominant construction material. Despite growing concerns over its environmental impact, concrete continues to align with the priorities of many developers and clients—it is fast, cost-effective, and highly durable. As a result, most building types in China still rely heavily on concrete. This reliance is further reinforced by China's position as the world's largest producer of Portland cement. A deeply entrenched supply chain, rooted in raw material manufacturing and economic infrastructure, ensures that concrete remains the default choice in the construction industry.

Yet historically, Chinese architecture was built upon a rich tradition of timber construction. The Forbidden City is a prime example: not only is it emblematic of China's architectural heritage, but it also remains one of the largest and best-preserved collections of ancient wooden structures in the world. This legacy prompts an important question: does timber construction have a meaningful future in China's contemporary building industry?

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Architecture has always played a key role in providing shelter and protection for human beings. In prehistoric times, we sought refuge in caves, taking advantage of rock structures for protection against the natural elements and predators. Over time, shelters began to be made from materials found in nature, such as branches, leaves, and animal skins, evolving into more permanent and complex homes, with walls made of stone, bricks or wood, roofs to protect against rain and sun, and doors to control access. As we developed more advanced building skills, we used materials such as wood, stone, and clay and architecture evolved significantly, with the construction of temples, palaces, and fortifications that provided not only shelter but also symbolized power, status, and cultural identity. Even so, our buildings can continue to be seen as shells that protect us from the outside world. 

From the massive stones of Greek temples to glazed skyscrapers, we work with a range of possibilities and thicknesses to separate what we consider internal and external. This article seeks to explore this diversity of thicknesses in architecture, from simple materials to complex construction techniques, highlighting how this variation not only provides protection but also influences our perception and interaction with the built environment.

Videos

Louisiana Channel, a web TV platform based at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, is launching a new film titled Søren Pihlmann: Make Materials Matter. Over the course of 54 minutes, Marc-Christoph Wagner and Simon Weyhe offer a glimpse into the work and mind of the founding architect of Pihlmann Architects, presenting his vision of Danish architecture, the practice of architecture itself, and, in particular, his sensitivity to materials. The film provides a behind-the-scenes look at the process and thinking behind the Danish exhibition at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. Led by Søren Pihlmann, the team used the opportunity to renovate and conduct material research on Denmark's permanent building in the Giardini, transforming it into a material laboratory and experimental construction site. The result is a process exhibition that highlights how rethinking and reusing existing structures and materials can address critical architectural challenges. As of today, November 20, the documentary is available to watch online for free.

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Hormuz Island, located in Iran, was a strategically significant port in the Persian Gulf, characterized by its landscape of colorful mountains. Despite its tourist appeal, the island faces significant socio-economic problems, with the local population having historically faced economic hardship. In response, the Majara Complex by ZAV Architects was conceived not merely as a building but as a deliberate architectural intervention designed to give control, opportunity, and economic benefit directly to the local community. To do this, the project channeled investment into local human resources and prioritized accessible construction techniques, creating a pathway for localized wealth creation. This allowed the Majara Complex to be one of the recipients of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2025.

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