Porto's architectural legacy has long been shaped by the weight of history and the clarity of form. From the work of Álvaro Siza to the dense network of studios emerging from the city's schools, Porto offers a unique blend of continuity and reinvention. Here, architecture is not only a matter of design but often one of endurance — of working within constraints, of drawing with precision, and of navigating a built environment marked by permanence and resistance to spectacle.
Yet within this persistent context, a new generation of architects has been reshaping the field with quiet determination. Often formed in shared spaces, these practices balance autonomy with collaboration and meticulous detailing with broader urban concerns. Their studios tend to reflect this ethos: modest in scale, defined by adaptive reuse, and rooted in the material reality of the city. In these workspaces, architecture unfolds as a process — sometimes speculative, sometimes grounded — but always reflective of a practice that is deeply local and increasingly global.
Nature Within Vacation Home - Section. Image Courtesy of Unformed Design
The change of the calendar year marked the culmination of several processes in the world of renowned architecture firms. Between December 2024 and February 2025, Gensler unveiled a rendering of a Manhattan redevelopment project, Foster + Partners released renderings of a new hotel and luxury residences in Brazil, and Herzog & de Meuron announced the completion date for the new Memphis Art Museum. International competitions revealed their results, highlighting the winning project of the young firm Unformed Design, as well as the collaboration between the Portuguese Fala Atelier and the Swiss Continentale on an educational architecture project. These projects showcase the broad scope of architectural design, from the detailing of a high-end project's relationship with nature to the urban renewal potential of a programmatic conversion project.
Educational and cultural centers serve as pivotal spaces where communities engage with knowledge, creativity, and shared experiences. As architectural programs, they offer unique opportunities to explore how physical environments can foster learning, cultural expression, and social interaction. The significance of these projects lies not just in their function but in how they reflect the values and aspirations of society. When established architecture firms take on these projects, their design choices become a lens through which we can examine contemporary approaches to space, place, and community, offering a glimpse into the evolving role of architecture in shaping educational and cultural landscapes.
Among this week's curated list of unbuilt projects submitted by established architecture practices,fala atelier’s project for a school in Broc, Switzerland, stands out with its sensitive integration of Alpine architectural elements; WXCA’s Xylopolis Centre in Poland reflects a deep contemplation on humanity’s relationship with nature, while KPF’s life sciences building in London and Jones Studio’s WaterEducation Center in Arizona further exemplify how architecture can address contemporary societal needs, from fostering innovation ecosystems to educating the public on critical environmental issues.
With a diverse and highly distinctive portfolio of projects, particularly notable for their innovative representations, the architecture office fala is marked by a bold, refined, and dynamic creative process. Established in 2013 by architects Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, and Ahmed Belkhodja, fala is headquartered in Porto, Portugal, and typically engages in projects across various scales, ranging from territories to birdhouses.
Unconstrained by the dogmas of established offices, new architectural practices can often challenge building norms and redefine living standards. The Young European Architecture Festival (YEAH!) is an event dedicated to highlighting these new and emerging practices and bringing their contributions to the built environment into focus. Many of these practices are challenging and redefining typologies of residential architecture. They are building upon ideas such as cooperative housing schemes, community-initiated developments, and circular economy. Others are exploring local identities and resources as a way to reinvigorate the profession while creating respectful and regionally relevant works of architecture.
fala - House with Three Gestures. Image Courtesy of fala
This week’s curated selection of Best Unbuilt Architecture highlights projects submitted by established firms. From a museum dedicated to Jewish history to a high-speed railway hub and a university student center, the following selection showcases a variety of concepts, design approaches, and programs developed by global architecture offices.
Featuring firms like KPF, Aedas, Fala Atelier, ADP Architecten, and Peter Pichler Architects, this week's selection of unbuilt projects explore architectural and urban interventions at different scales and at varying stages of their development. Whether conceptual works or ongoing, planned for execution, and even under construction, each project aims to offer an appropriate response to the spatial, functional, social, and environmental needs of its context.
House In Rua do Paraíso / fala. Image Courtesy of fala
Five emerging architecture studio profiles from Portugal, Spain, France, and the Czech Republic have been chosen by New Generations, a European platform that analyses the most innovative emerging practices at the European level, providing a new space for the exchange of knowledge and confrontation, theory, and production. Since 2013, New Generations has involved more than 300 practices in a diverse program of cultural activities, such as festivals, exhibitions, open calls, video-interviews, workshops, and experimental formats.
As architects rely heavily on imagery to convey abstract information to a broad audience, there is a recurrent conversation on the role of visualizations in architecture and how they impact the general perception of the built environment.
To avoid hyperrealistic renderings we have witnessed the emergence of other options for architectural representation which seduce the viewer, not for their overwhelming resemblance to reality but rather the opposite, its resemblance to everyday life's textures presented through unpretentious drawings inspired by collage, watercolor, and painting. Digital collage and other similar representation tools have gained more popularity when discussing how architecture can be communicated.
Their challenge was in considering the forms and ways that their selection "might extrapolate out from the cropped photographic frame into a spatial and lifestyle construction across a larger, horizontal site" – in this case, a field of plinths, the size and positioning of which is a direct reference to the footprint of Mies van der Rohe's 1947 plan for the IIT Campus in Chicago.
https://www.archdaily.com/880306/in-horizontal-city-24-architects-reconsider-architectural-interiors-at-2017-chicago-architecture-biennialAD Editorial Team
目前在纽约市的现代艺术博物馆（MoMA）展出的是建筑师扎哈哈迪德（Zaha Hadid）为她的开创性未建成项目香港太平山（The Peak in Hong Kong）所做的概念画作。本作品作于1991年，正处于3D CAD软件的普及为建筑制图的革命注入了一剂强心针的时期边缘。太平山（The Peak）画作出现于建筑制图因其自身原因的革新的末期，和旨在展示现实世界的可缩放，滚动，渲染时代的来临。只有这种新的图像创作软件在绘图功能上与以前的时代具有很大不同并且开创了新的制图风格，工具和过程通过对用户与他们的互动施加预定的议程来对设计进行约束。
在这个数字时代，像勒布贝斯·伍兹（Lebbeus Woods）和迈克尔·格雷夫斯（Michael Graves）这样的以手绘艺术而闻名的建筑师，推翻了建筑制图中占据主导地位的超级现实主义。 然而，根据 Sam Jacob 在“Metropolis”杂志上发布的最新文章，我们可能正在进入以“后数字”（post-digital）所代表的时代。 在后数字时期，建筑师重回传统制图时代，但是是通过创造新的方法论和重新评估过去数十年来最适合的数字工具。目前在建筑实践中还是大大倾向于拼贴技术，但是对于后数字制图的研究仍旧会在事务所和高等学府中继续。
James Welling, 8183, 2016 from the series Chicago, 2016-2017, Courtesy the Artist and David Zwirner, New York and London. Image Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial
The Chicago Architecture Biennial has announced the list of participants invited to contribute to the event’s second edition, which will be held from September 16 to January 7, 2018 in Chicago. More than 100 architecture firms and artists have been selected by 2017 artistic directors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, founders of Los Angeles–based Johnston Marklee, to design exhibitions that will be displayed at the Chicago Cultural Center and throughout the city.
“Our goal for the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial is to continue to build on the themes and ideas presented in the first edition,” explained Johnston and Lee. “We hope to examine, through the work of the chosen participants, the continuous engagement with questions of history and architecture as an evolutionary practice.”
This reconstruction is primarily of language. The architects draw from archives—mental, digital or printed on paper—distant from the typical parametric and highly schematic rationales that characterized the last thirty years of design in architecture. Within the theoretical system that drives architectural composition, these archives inevitably become homages, references, and quotes.
