Urban playgrounds are evolving from simple swing sets and slides into dynamic, multi-faceted urban landscapes. These new designs are more than just places to play; they are thoughtfully integrated spaces that address urban challenges, promote community, and inspire creativity. A key trend is the intentional use of color and pattern. Designers are utilizing vibrant color zones to segment different functional areas, creating a visually dynamic experience that contrasts with natural surroundings. This approach can also be used to establish a cohesive urban identity, with thoughtful color palettes that complement the existing cityscape.
Facing an interconnected planetary climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion, regenerative design emerges as a pathway toward building resilient and ecologically attuned rural futures. At the intersection of architecture, agriculture, and local ecosystems, new models of resilient, self-sufficient agricultural practices are emerging. These projects are not grand industrial systems but small-scale, precise, and deeply contextual architectural interventions that create spaces that foster sustainable cultivation while respecting environmental rhythms, local materials, and community knowledge.
As part of the collateral events of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Institut Ramon Llull presents the project "Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architectures", bringing together the waters of Lleida, Girona, Tarragona, Barcelona, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and beyond to address the water crisis as an interconnected ecosocial, cultural, and political issue. Framing architecture as a tool for critical speculation and collective action, the project advocates for the imagining of future scenarios grounded in coexistence—interweaving the human and non-human, the natural and artificial, the technological and vernacular, the global and the local.
Scandinavian design has long been admired for its minimalist aesthetic and functionality, which places value in the simple things, deeply rooted in the concept of Hygge. This reverence goes beyond interior design and extends also to the natural world, resulting in high-quality architecture and landscape installation design that enhances human connection to untouched environments. Rather than imposing grand structures upon the environment, the Scandinavian approach is one of subtle and precise intervention. These projects are not meant to dominate but to enter into a dialogue with the existing landscape, using thoughtful design to potentiate its inherent shape, color, and texture. The goal is to complement and enhance, creating spaces that serve a functional purpose while simultaneously deepening the visitor's connection to their surroundings.
The Polish Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale presents Lares and Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture, an exhibition that explores how architecture continues to function as a form of protection in an age marked by uncertainty. Framed as an anthropological investigation, the project examines the emotional and rational dimensions of building practices. The exhibition is developed by a multidisciplinary team including curator and art historian Aleksandra Kędziorek, architect Maciej Siuda, and artists Krzysztof Maniak and Katarzyna Przezwańska. Rather than focusing on architecture from the designer's perspective, the team investigates how individuals inhabit space and construct a sense of safety, responding to deep-seated fears, desires, and needs.
The fifth edition of the London Design Biennale is taking place at Somerset House from 5 to 29 June 2025. The theme of this year's edition is "Surface Reflections," an invitation to explore "the dynamic interplay between internal experience and external influence." The curatorial proposal, set by British artist and designer Samuel Ross, encourages a focus on the underlying layers of the objects, systems, and spaces that shape our daily lives. The Biennale exhibition is a journey through 35 pavilions by countries, institutional design teams, and curators, presenting soundscapes, immersive experiences, and performances, as well as sculptural and evocative objects. To confront contemporary global challenges, topics include identity, memory, innovation, technology, craftsmanship, ecology, and belonging.
The 11th edition of Concéntrico, the International Festival of Architecture and Design, is currently taking place in Logroño, Spain, from June 19 to 24, 2025. This year's edition broadens the scope of the festival with a multifaceted programme that includes not only temporary installations but also permanent projects, exhibitions, educational initiatives, and traveling events. Through 24 urban interventions, Concéntrico 2025 explores themes such as material reuse and circular design, food as a collective practice, the recovery of water-related spaces, the activation of urban voids, and interspecies connections in the urban context, while emphasizing the need to imagine new ways of inhabiting the city, placing care, sustainability, empathy, and active listening at the core of public architecture.
Public space has long been central to architectural thought, often framed in terms of planning, infrastructure, and regulation. From Haussmann's Paris to contemporary masterplans, architects have worked to define and formalise collective life through spatial tools. Yet, outside of these frameworks, artists have continuously offered alternative ways of understanding and inhabiting public space—ways that rely not on construction or permanence, but on presence, perception, and participation. Through actions, objects, or atmospheres, artists engage the city as a site of friction and imagination. These gestures challenge architectural conventions and invite artists to reconsider public space not as a solved form, but as a contingent and open process.
In the productivity-driven dynamics of contemporary cities, playful interventions in public spaces offer an innovative way to reclaim urban environments. These interventions encourage new ways of thinking and acting, temporarily breaking the monotony of everyday life and redefining the concept of play. Once confined to childhood and separate from daily activities, play has begun to intertwine with routine paths, becoming an integral part of urban life even outside traditional leisure times. In this way, reintroducing the swing—the most iconic children's toy—becomes particularly significant. As a symbol of childhood, pleasure, and joy, the swing contrasts sharply with the rigid appropriations of most public spaces, inviting a more relaxed and playful engagement with the urban environment. On June 11th, the UN International Day of Play reminds us of the benefits of incorporating diverse activities into urban spaces, for both children and adults, fostering community, creativity, and well-being.
The Croatian Pavilion presents "Intelligence of Errors" at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, an artistic and research-driven project that repositions spatial and policy-related errors as generative tools for design. Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the exhibition is curated by Ida Križaj Leko, a practicing architect and head of the interdisciplinary university specialist program Urban Studies at the University of Rijeka. In dialogue with the central Biennale theme,Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., the pavilion investigates how recognizing and analyzing errors can contribute to the development of collective intelligence under non-ideal conditions.
Expo 2025 officially opened its doors on April 13, 2025, on Yumeshima, a reclaimed island in Osaka Bay. Held under the theme "Designing Future Society for Our Lives," the event brings together over 150 countries and international organizations to address pressing global challenges through architecture, technology, and design. At the center of the Expo grounds stands the Grand Ring, a monumental circular structure designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto. Spanning approximately 2 kilometers in circumference and rising to 20 meters in height, the timber structure encircles the main exhibition area and was recognised by Guinness World Records as "The largest wooden architectural structure".
Titled "The People of the Ring," this photo series by Stéphane Aboudaram documents the Grand Ring at Expo 2025 Osaka from a user's perspective, capturing both the structure and the visitors engaging with it.
The Canada Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, hosted Picoplanktonics. A research that emerged as a radical rethinking of how architecture can become a platform that blends biology, computation, and fabrication to propose an alternative future, one where buildings don't just minimize harm, but actively participate in planetary repair. At its core lies a humble organism: marine cyanobacteria, capable of both capturing carbon and contributing to the material growth of the structure it inhabits. The project has been developed over 5 years by a group of researchers at ETH Zurich, led by Andrea Shin Ling and a group of interdisciplinary contributors and collaborators. Together, they formed the Living Room Collective, founded a year ago to build upon this work and showcase it at the Venice Biennale. The Core team members include Nicholas Hoban, Vincent Hui, and Clayton Lee. This conversation with the team behind the project shares the philosophy, technical challenges, and speculative horizons that animated their work from printing living sand lattices to maintaining microbial life in a public exhibition. Their aim is to inspire people to reconsider architecture not as a static object, but as a living, evolving process. One that requires care, patience, and a radical shift in mindset.
At the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, the Chinese Pavilion presents Coexist, an exhibition curated by Ma Yansong, founder of MAD Architects. The pavilion assembles ten interdisciplinary teams, spanning architects, scholars, students, scientists, and even social media participants, to collectively investigate the potential of architecture to reconcile contradictions between tradition and futurity, artificial and nature, technology and emotion. Rather than presenting a singular vision, Coexist aims to open space for responses to the diverse realities shaping contemporary architecture. While on site in Venice, ArchDaily's editors had the opportunity to discuss the ideas that shaped the Chinese Pavilion with the curator.
At the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, the Dicastery for Culture and Education presents "Opera Aperta", a project that positions architecture as a practice of collective care and responsibility. Curated by Marina Otero Verzier and Giovanna Zabotti, Opera Aperta is set within the Santa Maria Ausiliatrice Complex in Venice's Castello district. Designed by Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO and MAIO Architects, the project transforms the 500-square-meter site into a space for collaborative restoration and public engagement. Conceived as a work in progress rather than a finished installation, Opera Aperta functions as a platform for ongoing exchange, participation, and engagement rooted in the local context. This open and process-oriented approach was recognized during the opening events, where the Holy See Pavilion received the Golden Lion's Special Mention for National Participation.
Kabage Karanja, co-founder and director of Cave_bureau based in Nairobi, Kenya, and Kathyrn Yusoff, professor of Inhuman Geography at the University of London, are the curators of the British Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. Together, they form the UK-Kenya curatorial team behind GBR – Geology of Britannic Repair, an exhibition that rethinks the Pavilion as both a symbolic and material site. Their approach reflects on Britain's architectural legacy and its entanglement with histories of colonialism, geological extraction, and the urgency of the climate crisis. In recognition of their exploration of the relationship between Great Britain and Kenya, focusing on themes of reparation and renewal, the Pavilion curators and commissioner were awarded a Special Mention for National Participation by the Biennale jury. While on site in Venice, ArchDaily's editors had a chance to discuss with the curators about the ideas that shaped the British Pavilion.
The Canada Council for the Arts presents Picoplanktonics at the Canada Pavilion as part of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, which will run until November 23, 2025. Developed by the Living Room Collective, the installation engages with ongoing global ecological challenges through a speculative, research-driven approach to design, featuring 3D-printed architectural structures embedded with living cyanobacteria capable of carbon sequestration. Developed through a four-year collaboration led by Andrea Shin Ling and a group of interdisciplinary contributors, the project investigates the potential of co-constructing built environments with living systems.
