"My only concern is that my work must have a positive impact on the communities in which it is embedded," states Francis Kéré in his book Francis Kéré: Building Stories. His own life story, the context in which he was raised, and the experiences he has lived through all shape his approach to architecture. It is a commitment that extends to people and the places they call home—one that values materiality, collective learning, and the exchange of knowledge. Discovering the stories behind projects such as Primary School in Gando and Naaba Belem Goumma Secondary School inspires reflection on how to design spaces that truly serve humanity.
Francis Kéré's story begins in a village in sub-Saharan Africa and extends across many places. Gando was the setting of his first education, where he absorbed the essence and principles that later shaped the core values of his career alongside influences from other cultures. The structure of Gando is formed by different families who organize themselves, according to established customs, within courtyards scattered across the savanna. Growing up in this remote village in the Burkina Faso savanna fosters a strong sense of community, made tangible by the understanding that each resident of every courtyard is part of the life of the whole.
Located in Tomioka, Fukushima Prefecture, Sea of Time – TOHOKU is both an artwork by Tatsuo Miyajima and an architectural project commissioned by the artist. Designed by Japanese architectTsuyoshi Tane of Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects (ATTA), the project envisions a permanent museum to house Miyajima's artwork. Currently under development from 2024 to 2027, with an anticipated opening in spring 2028. Positioned on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the proposal brings together architecture and installation within a site shaped by the memory of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, framing both the landscape and its historical context as integral components of the design.
Ecuador's territory embraces a remarkable diversity of landscapes, ranging from the Pacific Coast to the peaks of the Andes, the vast expanse of the Amazon rainforest, and the volcanic Galápagos Islands. Each region of the country presents its own distinctive characteristics, reflected in its varied environmental, cultural, and social contexts. While Latin American architecture is rooted in rich ancestral traditions, native construction techniques, and local materials, contemporary Ecuadorian architecture expresses an evolving identity that blends these elements with actual demands. Tradition and innovation, local resources and modern techniques, along with social responsibility and aesthetics, interact with the natural environment, urban conditions, and social contexts.
Studio NEiDA operates at the intersection of architectural practice, research, and curatorial work, with a consistent focus on how buildings emerge from the material and cultural conditions of a place. Rather than treating materiality as a finishing language, the studio frames it as the beginning of an architectural narrative—starting from what is locally available, they look at what craft knowledge exists on the ground, and how those resources and skills situate a project within an architectural lineage. This approach foregrounds limitations and possibilities as productive forces, and positions design as an iterative process of aligning spatial intent with the realities of construction culture and vernacular intelligence.
Across their work, NEiDA's interests extend beyond form toward the socio-political and climatic contexts that shape how architecture is made and inhabited. They emphasize learning from non-authored, vernacular, and informal building practices as a way of establishing a shared grammar for intervention, and they describe an indoor–outdoor continuity not as a stylistic preference but as a response to local life and ventilation logics—where outdoor rooms can be as spatially defined and programmatically central as interior ones. Collaboration, in this framework, is not auxiliary: the studio highlights on-site exchange with craftspeople and builders as a core methodology, where projects evolve through collective intelligence and adaptive communication.
Ineza Clinic project outpatient unit and pharmacy exterior view render, 2026 . Image Courtesy of Kéré Architecture
Kéré Architecture has designed a new healthcare center in the Bubanza region of Burundi, about 40 kilometers north of the country's former capital, Bujumbura. Commissioned by the NGO Ineza Clinic, the project aims to improve access to healthcare for the region's rural population, complementing the services of the existing general hospital, with a focus on maternity and specialized surgical care. Francis Kéré's plan distributes the program across ten pavilions connected by a road that zigzags up the hillside toward a visitor center, forming a 3,000 m² complex. The project combines materials sourced from the surrounding region, traditional craftsmanship, and knowledge transfer, minimizing its carbon footprint, supporting the local economy, and strengthening local teams. Construction has already started, with the first phase scheduled for completion this year.
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.
In the mountainous regions of Vietnam, the borderlands of Thailand, and the rugged Western Ghats of India, building school projects remains a challenge defined by logistics. In areas where infrastructure and industrial supply chains are limited or distant, transporting each kilogram of material can significantly increase costs and logistical complexity. During 2025, several school projects in rural contexts in Asia showed how the architect's role often shifted from a designer of form to a strategist of procurement. The primary challenge was not merely aesthetic but a matter of durability: using locally available materials and protecting them from monsoon rains, high-velocity winds, and sometimes seismic instability.
The phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution describes how distant species can develop similar structures when confronted with comparable challenges. Dolphins and ichthyosaurs, for example, are separated by millions of years of evolutionary history, yet both evolved nearly identical hydrodynamic bodies. Architecture has its own parallels: A-frame structures emerged independently in both the European Alps and Japan, even without direct cultural exchange, as spontaneous responses to snow, wind, and material scarcity.
https://www.archdaily.com/1037027/converging-trends-in-2025-architecture-circularity-biomaterials-and-carbon-conscious-designArchDaily Team
Caochan na Creige, designed by Izat Arundell, has been announced as the winner of the RIBA House of the Year 2025 award. The timber-framed, stone-clad self-build is located in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, occupying a compact rural plot defined by exposed weather conditions and a distinct geological setting. Built by and for its architect owners, the house was selected for its clear response to site constraints, its material strategy, and the consistency between design intent and construction.
Specificity has re-emerged as a central language in architectural discourse. In an increasingly globalized field, where projects often follow familiar models regardless of context, architects are now turning toward approaches rooted in the particularities of each site. This renewed attention to context reflects broader social, climatic, and political pressures: cities are facing extreme heat, ecological challenges, shifting demographics, and new forms of collective life that demand responses grounded in their immediate conditions.
Situated architecture describes this shift. It refers to design approaches in which form, program, and materiality emerge from the specific environment that produces them: its microclimates, cultural structures, and everyday rituals. Rather than beginning with universal templates, these practices start with observation, prototyping, and direct engagement with local dynamics. This logic is visible in the climatic and material experiments of TAKK in Spain, such as Portable Garden and 10k House, which operate as lightweight prototypes tuned to thermal and ecological gradients; in Studio Ossidiana's Art Pavilion M, shaped by layered soils and ecological cycles in the Netherlands; in Izaskun Chinchilla's reinterpretations of vernacular objects and her later experiments with 100 Sillas and 3 Salones Urbanos; in the narrative-driven domestic spaces explored by Common Accounts; and in Raumlabor's urban interventions that respond directly to the specificities of post-industrial Berlin.
The municipality of Cunha, located in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, is a region known for its inland landscape, hilly terrain, and, especially, a major production of nationally renowned ceramics. It is within this context that the office messina | rivas has been working since 2017, with a set of projects located on a farm. Their work, which integrates design and construction in an indissociable manner, results in interventions that reveal a sensitive approach to pre-existing conditions and their surrounding environment.
The relationship between the office, led by architects Francisco Rivas and Rodrigo Messina, and the site began with a small renovation of a guest house for hosting friends. The project resulted in the transformation of two existing bedrooms into suites and the creation of an external kitchen. Since then, growing demands and the need to adapt existing buildings have driven the design of other projects distributed across the same site.
Across South America, architecture is increasingly being understood as a collective act. Rather than imposing external views, many studios and designers are building with and for communities, learning from their local practices, materials, and ways of inhabiting. These projects are repositioning the architect's role from an author to a facilitator, transforming design into a participatory process that centers collaboration, care, and mutual respect.
What unites these efforts is not style or scale, but a shared belief: architecture emerges from collective dialogue, not imposition. From rural Ecuador to the urban peripheries of Brazil, Colombia, and Paraguay, these projects reveal how social engagement and local making produce spaces that are sustainable not only environmentally but also socially. They respond to inequality not through top-down solutions, but through co-authorship, offering spaces that reflect the needs, knowledge, and agency of the people who use them.
Bauhaus Earth is a Berlin-based non-profit organization working toward a systemic transformation of the built environment. Its mission includes transitioning to bio- and geo-based materials, reusing existing buildings, and restoring ecosystems. Together with the Bamboo Village Trust, a philanthropic financial vehicle, and Kota Kita, a participatory urban design organization, Bauhaus Earth has developed BaleBio, a bamboo pavilion designed by Cave Urban and rising above Mertasari Beach in Denpasar, Bali. The pavilion transforms a disused car park into an open community meeting space, offering a counterpoint to the city's tourism-driven coastal development. Designed as a regenerative building, BaleBio stores carbon instead of emitting it, challenging the extractive construction model that is replacing traditional wood and bamboo craftsmanship with concrete structures across the island.
With just a few days left before the six-and-a-half-month 19th Venice Architecture Biennale comes to an end, it is possible to look back on some of the most notable contributions within its thematic framework. Marked by the largest call for participants to date, the Biennale's diversity of topics and the range of installations on display go beyond easy recapitulation. As part of that reflection, several initiatives can be highlighted as illustrative of the principles reflected in the curatorial theme, "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective." The concepts interwoven in Carlo Ratti's title form a call to address the urgent need for substantial solutions amid the accelerating climate crisis, positioning the Biennale as a platform for diverse design proposals and experiments organized around three forms of intelligence: natural, artificial, and collective. Beyond the national pavilions and numerous collateral events held throughout Venice over the past six months, among the more than 700 participants are projects that, through practice, embody four shared intentions: opening conversations about the future, proposing systemic responses to local realities, placing technology at the center of design innovation, and pursuing material research rooted in local sensitivity.
Aristotle is credited with the proverb "One swallow does not make a summer." In nature, the arrival of these migratory birds often announces the change of seasons, a universal symbol of renewal and hope. Yet it is only when many take flight that the true warmth of summer begins. The same can happen in architecture: an isolated project, however exemplary, rarely changes a reality on its own. When, however, a work teaches, inspires, and can be replicated, it becomes the harbinger of something greater.
Initiatives that combine simple technologies, local materials, and participatory processes show how building can also be an act of learning. Structures and bricks shape places of mutual teaching, where architects and residents share knowledge and build together, multiplying skills and strengthening bonds. These projects point to the possibility of a collective summer, a future in which knowledge spreads as widely as the walls that shelter it.
Hormuz Island, located in Iran, was a strategically significant port in the Persian Gulf, characterized by its landscape of colorful mountains. Despite its tourist appeal, the island faces significant socio-economic problems, with the local population having historically faced economic hardship. In response, the Majara Complex by ZAV Architects was conceived not merely as a building but as a deliberate architectural intervention designed to give control, opportunity, and economic benefit directly to the local community. To do this, the project channeled investment into local human resources and prioritized accessible construction techniques, creating a pathway for localized wealth creation. This allowed the Majara Complex to be one of the recipients of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2025.
