Ho Chi Minh City: The Latest Architecture and News

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In many Asian cities, eating has never belonged entirely to the private home. It spills into markets, hawker centers, street stalls, and wholesale districts embedded within larger buildings or areas. These are places where the city exchanges information and watches other people pass through. They are not restaurants in the conventional sense, nor are they simply markets. In some way, their vibrancy and usage reflect the society's conditions at that moment. They are public kitchens: shared infrastructures where domestic routines are partially transferred into collective space.

Hong Kong's Municipal Services Buildings and curbside dining are where food is understood not only as culture, but as urban organization. The cooked-food center in the city folds eating into a larger civic machine of wet markets, libraries, and sports halls. The dai pai dong and street-side table, meanwhile, transform the curb into a temporary dining room. Looking beyond Hong Kong, similar questions emerge across the region. How do cities make room for social eating? Where does cooking happen when domestic space is limited? What kind of architecture supports the mess and heat of everyday food?

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The Graham Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2026 Grants to Individuals program, awarding a total of $506,000 to 54 projects that investigate architecture through exhibitions, films, publications, and research initiatives. Selected from more than 600 submissions to the Foundation's September 2025 application cycle, the grants support work by 86 architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, scholars, and writers, reflecting a broad range of interdisciplinary approaches to the built environment and its cultural, social, and political dimensions.

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Videos

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To fully know a city's architectural heritage, one must look beyond its designated sites and iconic buildings. For many, understanding a city's urban fabric and what makes it tick also means discovering the smaller-scale, locally appreciated, conserved buildings and popular gathering spaces. This is especially true when considering bustling Vietnamese cities, with their peculiar architectural characteristics, which can only be appreciated when learning about their many inspirations and historic layers, combining traditional Vietnamese motifs, modernism, local materiality, and climatic design solutions, but mostly by learning about the site constraints that are addressed through the implementation of the narrow tube houses and low-rise buildings.

These key styles and architectural movements are often maintained and even highlighted, as architects give a second life to many rundown or abandoned buildings, transforming them into popular coffee joints. They are reviving smaller heritage sites by pushing for their restoration and regular use by the community, encouraging visitors to acknowledge the historic relevance of the space, as they covet it. 

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Educational architecture remains an exploratory ground for unbuilt exploration, offering insight into how learning environments can evolve alongside changing social, ecological, and pedagogical values. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected projects bring together a range of proposals that examine schools, libraries, nurseries, and academic centers as spatial frameworks for care, knowledge, and collective growth. Rather than treating education as a fixed program housed within singular buildings, these projects approach learning spaces as adaptive environments shaped by landscape, climate, and human interaction.

Across varied geographies, from Mediterranean hillsides and Central European courtyards to tropical cities and distributed campus models, the proposals explore diverse architectural responses to contemporary education. They range from child-scaled kindergartens organized around trees and cloisters to libraries conceived as civic landscapes, biodiversity-centered academic buildings, and schools imagined as walkable urban systems.

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