London: The Latest Architecture and News

In 2016, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan first expressed the intention to pedestrianize Oxford Street, located in the City of Westminster in central London. The original plan was to complete the project in 2020, but after two public consultations, the project was blocked in 2018. Resumed in 2024, it was followed by two public consultations that showed majority support among respondents. Final approval was granted in February 2026, and on Monday, October 26, almost a kilometer, from Orchard Street to Great Portland Street, became traffic-free. This milestone marks the first phase of the program: the section is now closed to private motorized vehicles, buses, taxis and private hire vehicles, cycles, scooters and pedicabs.

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CHYBÍK + KRIŠTOF has opened Building the Existing City, an exhibition at Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin that transforms the gallery into a working architecture studio. Running from October 23 to December 3, 2026, the exhibition centres on four architectural and urban design proposals for sites or urban situations in Berlin, selected through an open call. Over six weeks, visitors can follow the practice's research, discussions, and design work as the proposals develop, gaining insight into the processes through which architectural interventions are conceived in response to local conditions.

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When London's main drainage was completed north of the Thames in 1868, the Metropolitan Board of Works marked the occasion with a banquet held inside a sewage pumping station. Abbey Mills had been built over the previous three years by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette, working with the architect Charles Driver, laid out on a cruciform plan with eight beam engines, two on each arm. Its style has been read as Byzantine, Italian Medieval, Russian, Ruskinian Gothic and Moorish, and its twin ventilation chimneys, richly ornamented, rose more than sixty meters. The builder called it an elegant structure in a swamp and thought it might pass for a mosque or a temple.

Almost everything else Bazalgette built was buried, and the exception did not last the century. Steam gave way to electric motors at Abbey Mills in 1933, and the chimneys, redundant since then, were demolished in 1941 out of fear that a bomb strike would topple them onto the station. Sanitary engineering consolidated around criteria that could be measured, among them throughput, discharge quality and hydraulic gradient, and appearance registered in none of them. Treatment moved outward to floodplains, estuaries and municipal edges where land was cheap, and gravity did useful work.

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The RIBA Stirling Prize 2026 has been awarded to Lion Green Road, a housing development in Coulsdon, South London, designed by Mary Duggan Architects with RUFFARCHITECTS for Croydon Council. Comprising 157 homes across five residential blocks, the project combines privately owned and socially rented housing on a former car park. Presented annually by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Stirling Prize recognizes a building considered to make a significant contribution to the evolution of architecture and the built environment. The 2026 winner was announced at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London on October 15, marking the prize's 30th anniversary.

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London-based art, architecture, and design collective Assemble has recently announced a new workspace project in the English capital. Since its founding in 2010, the studio has built a community around craft and making by providing creative and light industrial spaces resilient to market forces, working as a platform for ecologically and socially engaged work. It recently secured a 25-year lease, with the option to buy, on Bromley Hall, an early Tudor-period manor house considered one of the oldest houses in London. The plan is to transform the site's three buildings, Bromley Hall (c. 1485), the Old Poplar Library (c. 1904–5), and the RedBox container building, into Assemble's largest workspace to date, adding 14,000 sq ft to its current workspace provision, with the site's long-term development plan set to double this figure. The practice's new project follows a dual objective: restoring a Grade II*-listed building and increasing stability for the creative industries community, through long-term rental agreements and a new space for collaboration.

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Elia Zenghelis, Greek architect, co-founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), and one of the most influential architectural educators of the late twentieth century, died on August 30, 2026, at the age of 89. His death marks the passing of a figure whose influence on architectural thought extended far beyond the buildings he designed, shaping the intellectual formation of several generations of architects through decades of teaching across Europe and the United States.

Born in Athens in 1937, Zenghelis studied architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, completing his studies in 1961. He joined the practice of Douglas Stephen and Partners, where he worked until 1971, while simultaneously beginning to teach at the AA in 1963. At the school, he became a prominent voice for a more radical, avant-garde architectural discourse, helping to transform the AA into a fertile ground for radical ideas.

Over the last decade, Uzbekistan has done what most post-Soviet countries still hesitate to do: it formally included dozens of modernist buildings constructed between 1960 and 1980 on its national cultural heritage list. Among them were the Panoramic Cinema, the Tashkent Circus, and the Palace of Peoples' Friendship—structures that, until just a few years ago, were viewed as routine, recent Soviet architecture lacking heritage status.

This decision, however, points to a challenge shared by almost every heritage system worldwide: how to legally protect architecture that has not yet reached the minimum age—formal or informal—to be considered "historic"?

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The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the six shortlisted projects for the 2026 RIBA Stirling Prize, marking the award's 30th anniversary. Established in 1996, the Stirling Prize recognizes the building considered to have made a contribution to the evolution of architecture in the United Kingdom. This year's shortlist spans a broad range of typologies, including a new public square above one of London's busiest transport interchanges, the adaptive reuse of a 1970s theater into a cultural venue, a high-density residential development, two projects for Cambridge colleges, and a family home set on the edge of Epping Forest. The winner will be announced on October 15 at Old Billingsgate in London.

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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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The original Museum of London building at London Wall permanently closed to the public in December 2022 to prepare for its relocation. Despite community claims to preserve the modernist building, demolition plans for the brutalist landmark were approved in 2024 to make way for the London Wall West redevelopment project. The Museum of London was then officially rebranded as the London Museum and relocated to the historic General Market in Smithfield. The decade-long restoration project of the new location was carried out by Stanton Williams and Asif Khan, alongside conservation architect Julian Harrap. The official opening of the Museum's new permanent galleries is scheduled for November 28, 2026.

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Heatherwick Studio and SPPARC have unveiled the first phase of the transformation of Olympia, a historic exhibition complex in West London, into a mixed-use cultural destination. Originally opened in 1886, the Victorian landmark is undergoing a large-scale redevelopment that aims to reconnect the 14-acre site with the surrounding city through new public spaces, cultural venues, hospitality programs, and commercial facilities. The opening is marked by the completion of a new public canopy, which introduces elevated pedestrian circulation and serves as a gateway into the broader master plan while framing new views across Olympia's historic roofscape. The intervention forms part of a broader master plan that will be implemented through 2026 and 2027.

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The 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, titled "a serpentine," designed by Mexico City-based architecture studio LANZA atelier, will open to the public on 6 June 2026 at Serpentine South in London. Newly released preview-days images show the completed structure ahead of its seasonal activation, which will run through 25 October 2026 and include Serpentine's annual programme of public events. Now in its 25th edition, the Serpentine Pavilion marks a milestone for the annual commission first launched in 2000 with Zaha Hadid's inaugural project. To commemorate the anniversary, Serpentine Galleries will also collaborate with the Zaha Hadid Foundation and the Architectural Association on a parallel programme reflecting on the Pavilion's legacy and its role in contemporary architectural discourse.

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Mexican architecture practice LANZA atelier has unveiled new details for the 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, titled "a serpentine," which will open to the public on 6 June 2026 at Serpentine South. Designed by studio founders Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, the project reinterprets the historic serpentine or crinkle-crankle wall through a lightweight brick structure integrated into the landscape of Hyde Park. Marking the 25th edition of the annual commission, the pavilion will remain on view through October 2026 and serve as a venue for Serpentine's public programme of performances, talks, screenings, and community events.

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The Barbican Centre has announced In Other Worlds, a major immersive exhibition by speculative architect, filmmaker, and artist Liam Young, opening from May 21 through September 6, 2026. Occupying three distinct locations within the Barbican complex, the Silk Street Entrance, The Curve gallery, and Car Park 5, the exhibition will transform the Brutalist cultural landmark into a sequence of cinematic environments examining architecture, infrastructure, climate futures, and planetary urbanism. Developed in collaboration with writers, scientists, filmmakers, musicians, and performers, the project brings together large-scale projections, LED installations, sound environments, graphic narratives, costumes, and speculative artifacts to explore how fiction and spatial storytelling can shape conversations around environmental and technological change.

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Architecture is traditionally chronicled through the persistence of the solid. We define the discipline by the weight of the lintel, the mass of the pier, and the resistance of the wall. Even when lightness is invoked, it is usually understood as a subtractive act, the thinning of a section or the precarious reduction of a load. Yet there is a parallel history, less visible and harder to isolate, in which the primary material of construction is not what occupies space, but what moves through it.

To treat air as a medium is to move past the binary of the envelope. The boundary between the interior and the world ceases to be a line of absolute separation and becomes, instead, a site of filtration and pressure. We begin to see the building as a thermal valve, a series of gradients where moisture, velocity, and heat are not merely background "conditions" to be mitigated by mechanical systems, but are the very substances being shaped.

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