Construction: The Latest Architecture and News

Architectural prototypes are often used to test decisions before construction begins. But in some practices, prototyping begins while those decisions are still taking shape. Moving an idea from drawing into matter introduces questions that depend on making itself: how a material can be cut or joined, how much a piece weighs, how an assembly comes together, whether parts can be reused, or even what form the project should take.

TAKK, salazarsequeromedina, and Ensamble Studio each make physical experimentation part of their design process, but they ask different things of it. For TAKK, prototypes help test how materials and components come together as a construction system. For salazarsequeromedina, models and built systems remain open to dismantling, recombination, and later uses. Ensamble Studio uses physical experiments to generate geometry and construction knowledge that can move into engineering and full-scale building. What distinguishes these approaches is not simply that they prototype, but what each practice expects to learn through the prototype.

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Buildner has announced the results of its third edition Architect's Stair international architecture ideas competition. The event invited designers to reflect on one of architecture's oldest and most symbolic elements: the stair. Beyond its functional role as a connector of levels, the stair was positioned here as a medium of architectural storytelling—an invitation to explore ideas of procession, sequence, space, and form.

The recently opened David Geffen Galleries at LACMA are the result of more than a decade of effort across many fronts: the city, the county, the public, the architect, the engineers, the general contractor, and the many builders involved in translating an ambitious and visionary design into built form. The project has also been subject to unusually intense scrutiny, with responses ranging from admiration for its meticulous construction and architectural ambition to criticism of its scale, cost, concrete mass, and engineering complexity in earthquake-prone Los Angeles. Whatever one's position, the building remains an exceptionally sophisticated case study in how architecture is negotiated through construction.

This conversation approaches the David Geffen Galleries from the perspective of Clark Construction, the general contractor responsible for helping bring Peter Zumthor's design to completion. Carlos Gonzalez, Group President at Clark Construction, oversaw the construction process and shared with ArchDaily some of the technical, material, and logistical challenges behind the building. These range from its monolithic concrete structure and extensive post-tensioning system to the 56 seismic isolators that allow the building to move during an earthquake; from unpredictable ground conditions near the La Brea Tar Pits to the fabrication of solid bronze mullions and the integration of mechanical systems within the building's double-deck concrete structure.

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In many homes, the entry is treated as leftover space or a narrow strip transition before the living room begins. Yet in dense Asia-Pacific interiors, sometimes despite the small sizes, the entrance often performs far more work than its size suggests. It is the threshold that dictates the transition: street is filtered, body adjusts, shoes are removed, guests are received, privacy is negotiated, and domestic order begins. Before the living room became recognizable as interior, the entry sequence and space had already staged the first act of inhabitation.

The Japanese genkan is perhaps the most familiar version of this condition, but the logic extends far beyond Japan. Across apartments, terrace houses, public housing units, and compact urban homes, the entry threshold becomes a small but charged architectural device. It manages hygiene as well as spatial sequencing through various deliberate architectural elements. It can be a recessed floor, a thickened wall, a compressed corridor, a screen, or a small foyer between public circulation and private life. Its importance lies not in its size, but in the number of transitions it holds.

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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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Videos

Steel frame is a system composed of galvanized steel profiles, with a thickness between 0.80 mm and 3 mm, cold bent, and assembled as structural frames, with vertical and horizontal studs. To wrap the structural profiles, OSB, cementitious or plasterboard sheets are used, which can be finished and painted internally and externally. Inside the walls, insulating materials can be included, such as mineral, glass wool, or others, to increase the thermal acoustic insulation. In the steel frame system, all the electrical and hydraulic parts are installed before closing the panels, making the process more efficient and without breakage and material waste. Cleanliness of the work, efficiency and speed are key points in this constructive system that is widely spread around the world.

Across different climates and building cultures, many contemporary projects are working with local ways of building in new ways. Earth walls, bamboo structures, shaded thresholds, and collective construction processes are being reconsidered not as references, but as tools for the conditions architecture is facing now and will continue to face.

In these projects, vernacular knowledge appears through practical decisions: how to cool a building without machines, how to build with what is nearby, how to make a structure easier to repair, and how to keep construction knowledge within the community that will use it. The conditions making this knowledge necessary are not coming. They are already here.

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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.

Twenty years after its ideation, Herzog & de Meuron's controversial Tour Triangle in Paris is reaching completion. The triangular, all-glass tower located in the city's 15th arrondissement topped out at 42 stories on April 24, 2026. The project's progress was marked by opposition, financial roadblocks, and legal disputes before construction began in 2022. The 180-meter tower is now the third-tallest building within Paris city limits, behind the 330-meter-tall Eiffel Tower, the 231-meter-tall The Link in La Défense, and the 210-meter-tall Tour Montparnasse. The building will retain this title indefinitely due to a skyscraper ban reinstated in 2023 by Mayor Anne Hidalgo, following persistent opposition to tall buildings in the city. The recent progress was documented by photographer Stefano Candito, ranging from an urban view of the building to a close-up look at its nearly completed structure.

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Heritage, in interiors, is increasingly rarer to be only a matter of preservation alone. More often it arrives as friction: the encounter between what a building already is—its plan logic, its scars, its structural inconsistencies—and what contemporary life demands of it.

Some of the most convincing projects today are not those that "restore" an interior back to a single moment, nor those that erase the past under a seamless new skin. They are the ones that stage a relationship between old and new—allowing contrast to do more than tell a story, and letting the clash become a pragmatic tool for construction, budget, and speed.

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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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OMA's Metropolitan Village, also known as Taipei Xinyi–Wenchang Residence, is a new high-rise residential tower located in Taipei's Xinyi Central Business District. The project, led by David Gianotten and Chiaju Lin, with HCCH & Associates Architects Planners & Engineers as local collaborator, provides 11,961 m² of residential floor area on a 736 m² site. The 95 m, 23-storey building follows the concept of a "vertical village," reflecting the increasingly fluid boundary between living and working identified by the architects in post-pandemic Taipei. Commissioned by Continental Development Corporation, the project broke ground in 2024 and is scheduled for completion in 2027. Recent images show construction progress, with the highest structural element now being installed.

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Videos

The Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival announces BuildFest: Acts of Construction, a three-year initiative that activates the historic grounds of the 1969 Woodstock festival through large-scale timber installations and multimedia experiences. Each year is organized around a single theme, inviting designers to collaborate on an interdisciplinary series of "acts" that build on one another to create an interconnected set of installations, activations, and performances. Act One: Staging is currently accepting proposals for adaptive art infrastructure designed to "set the stage" for future activations. It will be followed by Act Two: Choreography in 2027 and Act Three: Performance in 2028.

The final piece of the central tower of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia has been laid in place, bringing the church to its maximum height of 172.5 m. La Sagrada Familia, one of architectural history's most notorious unfinished buildings, became Antoni Gaudí's defining project in 1883, when he transformed a neo-Gothic design into one of the best-known structures of Catalan Modernisme. One hundred and forty-four years after construction began, the upper section of the 17-meter-high, four-sided steel and glass cross was winched into position at 11 a.m. on Friday, February 20, completing the tower dedicated to Jesus Christ. This milestone confirms the project's final stage of construction, which, back in March 2024, was announced as one of the most anticipated completions of 2026, commemorating the centenary of Antoni Gaudí's death.

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Videos

Construction continues on King Salman Park in Riyadh, a 16.9-square-kilometre public landscape taking shape on the grounds of the city's former airport. Led by Omrania as lead design consultant, in collaboration with Henning Larsen for master planning and urban design, the project reimagines the centrally located site as a large-scale green and cultural district. Conceived as a new civic core for the capital, the park combines ecological restoration, public programming, and mixed-use development. Initial phases are expected to open in late 2026, with substantial completion targeted for 2027, following a phased construction schedule currently underway.

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