Prefabricated Building Viña del Mar by ELEMENTAL. Image Courtesy of ELEMENTAL
Displacement is usually understood through movement: the moment people are forced to move from one place to another. Yet from an architectural perspective, that movement is only the beginning of what comes next. A house may need to be rebuilt, an entire community relocated, or everyday life reestablished somewhere completely new. What is lost through displacement is not always something architecture can simply replace.
This question is particularly relevant in Latin America, where displacement has shaped communities under different circumstances and at different scales. What happens afterward depends on why people were forced to move, whether they can return, and what remains of the places they inhabited. Some communities rebuild within familiar surroundings. Others must establish everyday life somewhere new. These differences shape what architecture is being asked to do.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan United States Senate housing bill, automatically became law on 11 July 2026. Officially the "Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream (ROAD) to Housing Act," the bill has been called the most significant housing measure in the country since the National Affordable Housing Act in 1990, and "the most comprehensive housing legislation in decades." In a context of global housing crisis, the text revises federal housing programs and expands available financing options, provides grants for communities, targets regulatory requirements for construction, and addresses the concentration of ownership. This law contributes to worldwide initiatives for adequate housing, such as limits on short-term rentals, taxing unoccupied residential units, and the transformation and adaptive reuse of existing structures, with the dual objective of increasing the number of residential units and making existing ones available.
As co-living becomes increasingly associated with students, young professionals, and other mobile residents, it raises a broader architectural question: if home is no longer tied to long-term residence, what should architecture expect the private dwelling to provide?
People move for school, for a temporary job, or for a career that keeps taking them somewhere new. Many now expect to spend a defined period in a place before leaving it. Housing built for them has to do more than provide shelter. It has to support the routines through which someone adapts to an unfamiliar place, in the short time they know they have there. A year in a city asks something different of an apartment than a lifetime does, even if the square meters look the same on paper.
As Barcelona hosts the UIA World Congress of Architects for the second time in its history, thirty years after the 1996 edition, the city becomes a site for reflecting not only on architecture but also on the changing conditions under which it operates. Titled Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition, and developed by the six-member curatorial team of Pau Bajet, Maria Giramé, Mariona Benedito, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella, and Carmen Torres, the 2026 Congress expands the discussion beyond the city toward planetary questions, addressing architecture through ecological, social, political, and material systems rather than as an isolated discipline. During the opening day of the Congress, ArchDaily spoke with Mariona Benedito and Carmen Torres, two members of the curatorial team, about how this edition revisits Barcelona's architectural legacy, why uncertainty has become central to architectural thinking, and what they hope participants will take away from the event.
Organized by the Ministry of Housing and Territorial Planning of Uruguay (MVOT) and MEVIR, with the support of the Inter-American Development Bank (BID), the International Architecture Competition "Wood: Innovating Social Interest Architecture" involved submitting proposals for new types of wooden housing extensions. These could be either paired or standalone single-level structures, to be built by MEVIR in a demonstration set of 20 social interest houses within the town of Tranqueras, Rivera Department, Uruguay.
Barcelona is the first city in the history of the UIA World Congress of Architects to host the event twice. The 1996 edition, Present and Futures: Architecture in Cities, arrived at a charged moment, when the post-Olympic city was consolidating an urban model that would become one of the most studied and contested in contemporary urbanism, and when architecture was learning to think through the large metropolis as its primary site of inquiry. Thirty years later, the same city reopens the question under a different condition: one in which the built environment can no longer be understood as a self-contained object, but only through the wider ecological, material, and political systems that sustain it. The theme of the 2026 Congress — Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition — does not abandon the urban concerns of 1996; it reopens them from a planetary scale.
The curatorial team behind this edition, formed by Pau Bajet, Maria Giramé, Mariona Benedito, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella, and Carmen Torres, approaches architecture as a critical and transformative tool rooted in territory, working across practice, research, and teaching. Their program structures the Congress around six interconnected thematic lines (Becoming More-than-human, Becoming Circular, Becoming Embodied, Becoming Interdependent, Becoming Hyper-Conscious, and Becoming Attuned) and distributes it across three venues of very different characters — Les Tres Xemeneies del Besòs, the Disseny Hub at Glòries, and the CCIB — each chosen for what it represents as much as for what it can hold.
The New York City local government is one of the largest of its kind, with hundreds of city agencies and elected offices. The Mayor, city agencies, the city council, the comptroller, the public advocate, the borough presidents, and community boards organize to provide services and improve the quality of life in the biggest city in the United States and a primary tourist destination. Like other metropolises in the world, urban developers and authorities in New York are facing common challenges: the atmospheric effects and permanent consequences of the climate crisis, the saturation of transport systems, the lack of housing units, and barriers to accessing adequate housing. During June, the New York City mayor's office announcements addressed traffic and mobility, sports events, immigration, and extreme heat. In recent months, a series of policies have been announced to address a larger problem: ensuring access to housing for a greater number of people through government action.
Lorcan O'Herlihy, the Irish-born architect, educator, and founder of Los Angeles-based Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects (LOHA), has died at the age of 66. His death was confirmed by the firm on June 14, 2026. Over a career spanning more than three decades, O'Herlihy became known for advancing an architectural practice centered on housing, urbanism, and social engagement, helping shape conversations around density, affordability, and the civic role of design in contemporary cities.
The context of the ongoing war marks Ukraine's place in the international consciousness. Architecture, however, most often transcends the span of a human life and can therefore be a tool for imagining the future. The practice of architectural design, whether speculative, conceptual, or practical, serves as a means of bringing to life ways of living and interacting beyond our current realities. In this selection of conceptual projects submitted by ArchDaily readers, we see material, spatial, and symbolic strategies that seek to address contemporary contexts in the residential, educational, and commercial sectors.
As the line of conflict has been relatively static since late 2023, Ukrainian cities continue to be subject to new architectural and urban development projects. In this article, we have compiled a selection of unbuilt projects in the cities of Vinnytsia, Lviv, and Kyiv. The selection includes residential, commercial, and mixed-use architectural designs, as well as an educational complex. Two residential projects have also been designed as prototypes without a specific location, as a potential response to the loss of infrastructure and unstable conditions in the region.
Most people rarely remember a passage. They remember the classroom, the apartment, the gallery, or the plaza at the end of it. Passages are usually designed to disappear into the background, guiding movement from one destination to the next. Yet some of architecture's most memorable experiences happen while moving through a place rather than arriving at it.
Circulation is often treated as one of architecture's most practical elements. Corridors connect rooms, galleries provide access, and walkways organize movement through a building. Their purpose seems straightforward: to help people get from one point to another. Because of this, circulation spaces have long been considered secondary to the programs they serve. Attention tends to focus on destinations, while the spaces in between remain largely unnoticed.
Architecture is often presented as the visible expression of its time, its desires, its faith in progress, its idea of order. Yet this reading tends to flatten the conditions under which buildings are produced. It suggests that architecture follows history when, in many cases, it actively participates in it. Few periods make this more evident than the twentieth century, when architecture became deeply entangled with political programs, economic systems, and competing visions of how collective life should be organized.
What is commonly grouped under the label of Modernism is often described as a coherent project, defined by formal clarity, technological optimism, and a break with historical styles. But this apparent coherence dissolves when we look beyond its canonical centres. The same spatial principles (standardization, functional zoning, industrial production) were adopted in political and economic contexts that differed significantly in their structures and objectives. A static movement unfolded as a flexible system continuously reoriented according to the priorities of each regime. What appeared as a shared language was, in practice, a set of tools applied to distinct agendas.
Southeast Asia is often narrated as a kind of architectural playground—an arena where modern and contemporary ideals have been tested at full scale through singular, iconic buildings. One can trace an easy lineage through names that have helped shape the region's skyline imagination: Paul Rudolph's Lippo Centre in Hong Kong and The Concourse in Singapore, I.M. Pei's OCBC Centre and Hong Kong's Bank of China Tower, Norman Foster's Supreme Court of Singapore and the HSBC Main Building in Hong Kong, Ron Phillips' Hong Kong City Hall, Moshe Safdie's Marina Bay Sands. Yet this familiar history—told through objects, colonialism, authorship, and signature forms—risks missing a deeper, more consequential layer of influence: the planning logics and infrastructural frameworks that have quietly structured how these cities expand, densify, and distribute everyday life.
Netherlands-based, nature-inspired architecture practice ORGA has completed the design of a carbon-negative neighborhood in Marknesse, a village in the Dutch province of Flevoland. The project comprises 12 affordable rental homes built with a high percentage of biobased materials. Its main objective is to develop scalable housing solutions that minimize CO₂ emissions and reduce reliance on fossil resources. The design reinterprets the traditional Dutch brick house, known as the "Delft Red" typology, characterized by red brick facades and orange-red roof tiles, while introducing wooden chimneys that double as habitats for bats. Commissioned by housing association Mercatus, the prototype was built in the first half of 2025 and is intended for first-time buyers and low-income households.
Saint-Denis is a commune in the northern suburbs of Paris, France, known for the Gothic Basilica of Saint-Denis and the Stade de France. At one corner of Place Jean-Jaurès in its historic center, adjacent to the Basilica, stands the Îlot 8 housing complex, a Brutalist landmark designed by architect Renée Gailhoustet. Built between 1975 and 1986 to provide workers' housing in the city center, countering the trend of relegating social housing to peripheral areas, the project is now at the center of a controversial redevelopment plan. Often referred to as "residentialization" and restructuring, the proposal involves the demolition of significant parts of its original design. This reconversion is part of the French Nouveau Programme National de Renouvellement Urbain (NPNRU) and is justified by concerns over structural deficiencies, safety, and maintenance.
Rotterdam-based firm MVRDV has announced a new milestone in the development of its Tour & Taxis Towers, a mixed-use project in Brussels, Belgium. The design was commissioned by real estate investor and developer Nextensa in 2021, within the framework of a site-specific land use masterplan also designed by MVRDV. The two-tower project combines offices, housing, and public amenities across 58,000 m², forming a landmark in the neighbourhood and reaching 126 metres at its highest point. Recently granted construction permission, the project is designed to reduce embodied carbon through the use of a hybrid structure and lightweight façade elements, aiming to minimize the use of concrete in both the structure and foundations. From the early stages, the firm has employed its CarbonSpace software to guide these decisions.
Establishing thermal comfort once demanded a far more deliberate and calibrated architectural intelligence—an interplay of orientation, massing, material behavior, ventilation potential, shading, and the ways daylight and surfaces absorb and release heat. This was not simply a matter of taste, but of necessity. When many of Hong Kong's post-war modernist buildings were constructed in the late 1960s and 1970s, forming a substantial portion of the city's public housing and broader residential stock, air-conditioning was not yet a ubiquitous, default service. Cooling, where present at all, was limited and unevenly distributed; comfort had to be negotiated through passive means, through section, façade depth, operable openings, and climatic detailing. It was only later, particularly through the 1970s and 1980s, as air-conditioning became increasingly standardized across the region, that mechanical cooling began to displace this earlier matrix of architectural decision-making.
Did air conditioning negatively affect architectural space, particularly in Hong Kong and the nearby region? The more precise claim is that widespread reliance on AC has profoundly rearranged the incentive structure of building design.
