Cobe Notes x ArchDaily: The Latest Architecture and News

This article is part of "Thresholds", a special edition printed newspaper by Cobe Notes x ArchDaily.

Post–World War I modernism broke sharply with historicist and neoclassical traditions, stripping buildings of ornamentation and historical or religious reference to focus on priorities, clarity, and efficiency. Architecture embraced rationality and social reform, while art moved in the opposite direction, exploring self-expression, experimentation, and freedom from academic conventions.

This tension between objective order and subjective perception has defined a threshold between the arts evident in contemporary architectural practices, where personal intuition increasingly gives way to measurable facts. Is our pursuit of answers, facts, and truths distancing us from something fundamentally human: questions, doubt, and ambiguity? The answer may lie in public, building-integrated art, a practice that sits precisely at that threshold, and asks practitioners in architecture and urban design to trust values that resist direct measurement.

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The Human Shelter: Expedition into What Makes a Home is an exploration of the feeling of home. Directed by Boris Bertram and funded by IKEA, the film looks at present ways of living in Norway, Iraq, the United States, Nigeria, Japan, Uganda, and Iceland, interrogating the role of home in order to project it into the future. Through imagery and personal narratives, the documentary connects the concept of home with landscape, movement and settling, time, migration and security, vulnerability, and nature. How do displaced populations create a home? When does a shelter become a home? Portraits, stories, and shelters across four continents give viewers a glimpse of an answer to these big questions in a one-hour film tour.

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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.

This article is part of "Thresholds", a special edition printed newspaper by Cobe Notes x ArchDaily.

Architecture is most often represented as a stable object: a building captured at a moment of visual clarity, isolated from surrounding contingencies. Plans, sections, and photographs promise legibility by suspending time. Yet many of the world's most enduring public environments resist this mode of representation altogether. They are not designed to be read instantaneously, nor do they reveal their logic through form alone. Their spatial intelligence emerges gradually, through repetition, occupation, and duration.

The bazaar belongs firmly within this category. It cannot be understood through a single drawing or a finished elevation. Its organization is not fixed but rehearsed. What sustains it is not purely architectural composition, but shared timing, collective memory, and long-standing patterns of use. Togetherness in the bazaar does not arise from formal design decisions; it is produced through repeated encounters, negotiated proximities, and social familiarity accumulated over time.

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This article is part of "Thresholds", a special edition printed newspaper by Cobe Notes x ArchDaily.

Launched in September 2024, the Rediscovering Modernism in Africa series joined a growing worldwide interest in this topic. Previously underrepresented in architectural discussions, the work of architects and researchers on the continent and abroad has continued to tell the story of these high-quality modern works of architecture. These buildings represent designers striving to create locally suited architecture using global concepts and technologies, coinciding with huge political changes as most African countries gained their independence.

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This article is part of "Thresholds", a special edition printed newspaper by Cobe Notes x ArchDaily.

When we enter a museum, walk through a historic center, or check a country's heritage list, we rarely think about the process behind these choices. Who decided, on behalf of us all, that these objects, places, and architectures deserved to be preserved and promoted, while others are cast aside?

Generally, it is specialist professionals who hold the decision-making power—be they historians, museologists, architects, or geographers. But on what basis are these decisions made? Can the complexity of history fit into a checklist? Or, even more fundamentally, on which version of history are these decisions being based?

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This article is part of "Thresholds", a special edition printed newspaper by Cobe Notes x ArchDaily.

San Francisco is a city that has always remade itself under pressure. Its Victorian streetscapes have survived seismic retrofits and glass towers, its neighborhoods defined as much by change as by its resistance to change. But no force in the city's history has reshaped the built environment as completely, or as quickly, as the technology economy. What began in the postwar sprawl of Silicon Valley migrated north and inscribed its logic onto the skyline and the lives of residents. The result of this logic is an architectural culture of considerable technical refinement and refined material palettes, yet one that remains largely indifferent to the existing population.

The cost of indifference is measurable and mounting. San Francisco must accommodate more than 82,000 additional housing units by 2031 under California's Regional Housing Needs Allocation framework, in a city where median rent already ranks among the highest of any American metropolitan area. Teachers, healthcare workers, and service employees are actively displaced by a real estate market calibrated to a single sector's income levels rather than the city's largest workforce.

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This article is part of "Thresholds", a special edition printed newspaper by Cobe Notes x ArchDaily.

Beneath the ground lies a material that has quietly shaped the architecture of the modern world. Petroleum is rarely discussed within architectural discourse, yet the extraction, circulation, and consumption of oil have profoundly reorganized the spatial logic of territories. Pipelines, refineries, drilling platforms, ports, highways, and petrochemical complexes form a vast infrastructural landscape that sustains contemporary life, composing a dispersed architecture of energy.

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, oil became the material foundation of industrial society. It fueled transportation, powered factories, and supported the growth of cities whose spatial organisation depended on continuous energy flows. Yet the infrastructures that enable these flows rarely become objects of architectural inquiry. Attention remains largely directed toward form, typology, or urban density, while the material systems that sustain these environments tend to remain displaced within the discipline.

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Cobe and ArchDaily invite you to the launch of the guest-edited edition of Cobe Notes x ArchDaily, on June 10, 2026. Focused on the theme of Thresholds, the event will explore architecture as a condition of ongoing transition.

Hosted at the Cobe Bookcafé, the public launch will feature a live conversation with Christele Harrouk, Editor-in-Chief of ArchDaily, Mads Birgens, Head of Urbanism at Cobe, and Jacob Blak, Head of Sustainability, moderated by Kristoffer Lindhardt Weiss, CEO and Publisher of the Danish Architectural Press.