Observed annually on April 7, World Health Organization's World Health Day draws attention to global health priorities while situating them within broader environmental and societal contexts. Established following the first World Health Assembly in 1948 and observed since 1950, the day has evolved into a platform for addressing the shifting conditions that shape health, from local systems of care to planetary-scale challenges. The 2026 edition, held under the theme "Together for health. Stand with science," calls for renewed engagement with scientific knowledge as a basis for collective action. The year-long campaign emphasizes collaboration in protecting the health of people, animals, plants, and the planet, foregrounding the One Health approach as a framework for understanding their interdependence.
Architecture has long been drawn upward. In Air and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard writes about an imagination shaped by movement; by the urge to rise, to drift, to escape the pull of the ground. Air, for him, invites imagination to distort, to invent, to go beyond what is given rather than simply reproduce it. In that sense, lightness is not only a physical condition, but a feeling: a desire to transcend the weight of the earth and move toward something less tangible. This impulse can be traced across architecture's enduring attempts to lift itself, from pilotis and long spans to suspended systems and tensile membranes. To build lightly, then, is not only a technical ambition, but also a cultural one – a way of reaching toward the sky.
Today, this pursuit of lightness takes on renewed urgency. As environmental concerns, climate risks, and technological advancements reshape the built environment, building lightly is no longer only an aesthetic or structural ambition; it is increasingly framed as an ecological and ethical imperative.
Death is a certainty, but its architecture has never been stable. Every period and culture has invented a different way of placing the dead in the world (close or far, visible or screened, monumental or almost anonymous), and those choices have always carried social and political weight. Cemeteries are where that weight becomes legible in space, turning belief and regulation into boundaries, paths, and names.
In that sense, a cemetery behaves like a piece of city-making. It needs access, limits, and an internal order that can grow without losing clarity. It depends on ground and water management as much as on symbolism, and on administration as much as on form. But its real architectural problem is how to make a large, evolving territory readable while preserving the intimacy of a visit. Names must be locatable; routes must remain legible; trees grow, paths shift, stones weather, records accumulate. What looks fixed is, in practice, a living system designed to be used and revisited, long after the first grief has passed.
Trees are often the first things to vanish when construction starts. Clearing a site has long been one of architecture's most immediate acts, removing what already exists to make room for something new. When vegetation is preserved, it is typically treated as a secondary layer, added back as landscape rather than shaping the project itself.
However, some projects begin elsewhere. Instead of starting from a blank site, they work with what is already there. Trees remain in place, not as elements to frame, but as conditions that influence how space is organized, how light enters, and how architecture takes form.
In recent years, earthen construction has gained renewed attention in architecture. Materials such as adobe, rammed earth, and compressed earth blocks, once mainly associated with vernacular traditions, are increasingly being explored by contemporary architects. Rather than representing a simple return to the past, this renewed interest reflects a broader reconsideration of how architecture engages with materials, local resources, and environmental conditions.
For centuries, building with earth was part of everyday construction across many regions of the world. Techniques such as adobe, rammed earth, cob, and other soil-based systems developed gradually through adaptation to climate, available resources, and local construction practices. These methods responded directly to environmental conditions while shaping cultural ways of building. This knowledge circulated through collective practices rather than formal architectural education, allowing techniques to evolve through continuous experimentation.
House with Seven Gardens / Civil Architecture. Image Courtesy of Civil Architecture
For centuries, domestic architecture throughout the Gulf has been organized around the courtyard. Houses presented thick exterior walls and limited openings to the street, turning inward toward a shaded garden that structured everyday life. This spatial arrangement responded to both climate and culture. The courtyard brought daylight into deep plans, enabled cross-ventilation, and provided a protected outdoor environment within dense urban fabrics. In the House with Seven Gardens, in Diyar Al Muharraq, Bahrain, the Bahrain-based practice Civil Architecture, one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, revisits this spatial tradition through the conditions of contemporary suburban housing. Rather than reproducing the courtyard house as a historical model, the project reinterprets its environmental logic within the regulatory frameworks and spatial conditions that shape much of today's urban development in the Gulf.
On a hot afternoon in May, when the air over western India turns metallic with heat, no one remembers façade composition. They remember where the shade falls. They remember which corridor breathed. They remember the house that was cooler than the street. What stays in memory is comfort beyond the form. Repeated thermal preference stabilizes into spatial configuration, and over time, those configurations become building types.
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For many architects, schematic design is defined by a familiar tension. It is the phase of open-ended exploration—where multiple ideas are tested, challenged, and refined for clients to define a project's direction. In essence, it's where the design magic happens. The challenge is rarely a lack of ideas, but the effort required to test and evaluate those ideas properly under time-, resource-, and budget constraints. It is an especially acute challenge for architects as early design work must balance creativity with client needs and commercial feasibility.
Across South America, environmental comfort is understood not as an interior condition, but as one shaped through space. In regions marked by heat, humidity, intense sunlight, and seasonal variation, architecture has long relied on spatial decisions to moderate climate and support daily life. Comfort emerges from how interiors are opened, shaded, ventilated, and inhabited over time.
Rather than isolating interior spaces from their surroundings, many contemporary projects across the region cultivate comfort through depth, porosity, and intermediate zones. Light is filtered rather than maximized, air is guided through aligned openings and voids, and thresholds become active spaces of use rather than residual edges. These strategies do not seek uniform environmental control, but produce interiors that remain temperate, adaptable, and closely attuned to changing climatic conditions. In this context, environmental comfort becomes inseparable from spatial experience.
As the solstice marks the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, it also draws attention to something architecture has long negotiated but often overlooked: time. Beyond form or function, buildings and spaces are continuously shaped by cycles of light and darkness, seasonal shifts, and environmental rhythms that affect how they are inhabited.
In recent years, a growing number of architectural projects have begun to work explicitly with these cycles. Rather than designing spaces to function in a single, fixed way, architects are creating environments that change throughout the day, across seasons, or in response to natural phenomena such as the sun's path, lunar phases, wind patterns, or circadian rhythms. These projects operate in dialogue with time, appearing, transforming, and activating differently depending on environmental conditions.
Scandinavia is shaped by environmental conditions that test both human endurance and architectural ingenuity, with long winters defined by limited daylight, low sun angles, deep snowfall, and cold winds that transform everyday movement, gathering, and habitation into deliberate acts. In this context, architecture is never neutral, and hospitality is never incidental. Buildings that welcome visitors across cities, forests, and coastlines must respond directly to darkness and cold, not by denying them, but by creating interior worlds that offer orientation, warmth, and psychological relief. The act of welcoming in Scandinavia is therefore inseparable from the climate, grounded in the understanding that shelter, light, and human presence are fundamental resources in Arctic environments.
As architecture moves beyond human-centered design, new practices are rethinking coexistence as an ethical and ecological framework. From political infrastructures to habitats, these approaches invite us to imagine architecture as a shared living system.
Modern architecture has long been written through an anthropocentric lens, placing the human at its center and rendering other species invisible. Yet this paradigm continues to shift, as architects and researchers redefine the role of design in more-than-human worlds. Studios such as Office for Political Innovation, Studio Ossidiana, and Husos Architects are questioning human-centered narratives and reframing design as a shared practice between species. In this context, architecture is no longer a tool of control but a medium for coexistence, a discipline that mediates between species, environments, and cultures.
Chimneys are among the most quietly persistent elements in architectural history. Yet their presence persists in nearly every cultural and climatic context, serving as a technical feature and a spatial, atmospheric, and symbolic device. It populates dense city skylines and anchors rural horizons alike, its vertical silhouette as ordinary as a window or a doorframe. This apparent ordinariness is deceptive. The chimney is one of the few architectural components that links the intimate scale of interior life with the expansive forces of the environment. For architects and designers, the necessity of the chimney presents a choice: to let it recede quietly into the building's functional fabric or to amplify it as a central, expressive element that shapes a project's identity.
