Cities today are being reimagined as living, evolving organisms, combining digital intelligence, ecological systems, and new materials to shape radical futures. At Carlo Ratti's "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective." biennial, over 750 participants challenge established boundaries between architecture, landscape, and technology. Several conceptual projects showcased in the main exhibition challenge conventional boundaries between architecture, landscape, and technology. From bio-adaptive urban systems and Martian water-based settlements to immersive symphonies of satellite data, these works collectively envision new models for cohabitation, resilience, and planetary awareness.
This month's Unbuilt selection presents six speculative projects, presented as part of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibition, as provocations for rethinking the future of cities and human settlement. While some proposals transform architecture into self-sustaining, living infrastructures, others explore how data and sensory interfaces can redefine our relationship with natural and urban environments. Together, they offer a cross-section of how architects and designers are using unbuilt work to imagine new possibilities for life on Earth and beyond.
Architectural competitions have long offered a space for experimentation: platforms where ideas can be tested, typologies reimagined, and critical questions addressed through design. Freed from some of the constraints of commercial commissions, competition entries often reflect ambitious visions for how architecture can respond to environmental, cultural, and social challenges. Whether focused on future habitats, public institutions, or small-scale community infrastructure, these proposals give shape to the values and priorities driving architectural thinking today.
This month's Unbuilt selection brings together eight competition-winning projects submitted by the ArchDaily community. Each received first, second, or third place in recent local and international competitions. The featured proposals span a wide range of programs and geographies: a sustainable library in Lima, a Martian habitat exploring closed-loop systems, an adult orphanage designed for empowerment in India, a new French school in Athens, and a placemaking initiative in Singapore rooted in local folklore. While varied in scale and scope, they all highlight architecture's capacity to engage context, foster inclusion, and propose new ways of inhabiting space.
Space exploration isn’t merely a testament to human ambition or a quest for new territories and resources. Our ventures beyond Earth’s atmosphere are driven by a deeper purpose: to understand better our place in the cosmos and to pioneer innovations that can transform life on our home planet.
SpaceX founder and science-fiction fan Elon Musk is attempting to make the fiction of space travel a scientific reality. ‘In order to safeguard the existence of humanity,’ he explains, ‘we need to become a multi-planetary civilization.’ Musk says he’s laser-focused on ensuring we make a second home elsewhere in space, and has his sights set on Mars. He’s not alone, of course. NASA’s recently-released Moon to Mars Architecture Concept Review is a ‘study of the hardware and operations needed for human missions to the Moon and Mars,’ leading to long-term scientific discovery and human habitation in deep space.
But there’s a long way to go before we get there – and not just the 140 million miles (average distance to Mars). The biggest challenge to Mars habitation and eventual colonization is humanity itself, and our indecision. Many of us question why we should sink so much of our energy – both effort and resources – into such a task, when there are plenty of more pressing matters to address here on Earth?
A new award from NASA will support ICON in developing construction technology that could be used on the Moon and Mars. Image Courtesy of ICON/BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group
From inflatable and 3D-printed structures to entire habitats, architecture plays an unprecedented role in space exploration missions. As NASA plans for long-term human exploration of the Moon and Mars under Artemis and CHAPEA missions, new technologies are required to meet the unique challenges of living and working in another world. In response, figures like Buckminster Fuller, Foster + Partners, SOM, and BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, in collaboration with emerging businesses such as ICON and SEArch+, have nourished the architectural catalog in outer space.
In the latest update, NASA awarded Austin-based company ICON a contract to continue ICON's Olympus construction system in partnership with BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group. The project will help build infrastructures such as landing pads, habitats, capsules, and roads on the lunar surface and Mars, using extrusion-based additive construction technology (3D printing) and local materials like lunar regolith. The contract runs through 2028 and supports Artemis, a mission for long-term human exploration of the Moon.
NASA and AI Space Factory developed LINA (Lunar Infrastructure Asset), an in-situ 3D-printed outpost to protect astronauts and critical missions on the Moon. The project is part of the Relevant Environment Additive Construction Technology (REACT), a multi-year collaboration to develop technologies for lunar surface constructions within the timeframe of the Artemis Mission: humankind’s return to the Moon. LINA is a step in the effort to expand civilization to Earth’s natural satellite and explore it in a sustainable way that minimizes human disturbance.
As the world spins deeper into the third year of a global pandemic with no sign of abating, a new space race is forming over our heads. Entry is open to all, and the tickets are literal. The Architect's Newspaper's Jonathan Hilburg explores how the world's richest men are charting new paths for the human species, and how the public are reacting to the future of private space tourism.
The Apollo 11 Mission, departed Earth on July 16, 1969, and touched down on the moon 4 days later. This moment marked a milestone for humanity and, to this day, makes us reflect on how technological progress is bringing us ever closer to life beyond planet Earth.
With the help of 3D printers, highly developed and fully automated constructive technology, we have compiled a selection of 15 architectural projects that demonstrate that life on the moon and beyond is closer than we've ever imagined.
Bjarke Ingels Group has collaborated with NASA and ICON to create Mars Dune Alpha, a 3D-printed research habitat that will provide long duration habitation for astronauts on missions to Mars. The 1,700 sq.ft. structure, which is currently located at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, is designed by the award-winning architecture firm, 3D printed by construction developers ICON, and will soon be home to NASA's future crew.
February 2021 has been a historical month for Mars exploration. While humans have been exploring the red planet for well over 50 years, first landing on its surface in 1971 and then launching the first successful rover in 1997, this year has seen several firsts, namely the first time that three countries (China, United States, and the UAE) have launched three simultaneous probes.
Architecture is defined by its context. This holds especially true when buildings are located in harsh climates and must respond to natural conditions. This week’s curated selection of the Best Unbuilt Architecture focuses on designs located at the intersection of nature and the built environment. Drawn from all over the world, they represent proposals submitted by our readers.
The article features a range of building types and locations, including many coastal proposals, from a regeneration plan on the South Coast of England and a proposal to link the famous Turku archipelago, to a dockside timber tower in Dublin. Also included are more extreme ideas, from an overlook on the Algarve coast to a vertical city with greenhouses located along a cliff on Mars.
Space has long captured our imaginations. Looking to the ocean above us, writers, scientists and designers alike have continuously dreamed up new visions for a future on distant planets. Mars is at the center of this discourse, the most habitable planet in our solar system after Earth. Proposals for the red planet explore how we can create new realms of humanity in outer space.
Up until now, space architecture has been mainly focused on engineering, centered on projects like orbital space stations or Martian exploration convoys, commissioned by world space agencies such as ESA (Europe) or NASA (USA). But in recent years, an increasingly broader spectrum of professionals (e.g. architects, sociologists) as well as entrepreneurs and investors (not all well intentioned) have joined the challenge of designing extraterrestrial built environments, the new space race of the 21st century.
The fast development of technology, the increase of world population and the climate change crisis create the perfect setting to think about life outside of our planet, and as these trends continue to evolve and converge, new opportunities to explore options beyond our traditional limits appear (NEOM), as well as new organizations which support this research (like SATC, SICSA). Even though no one is currently on Mars, many ongoing projects and simulations (MARS-ONE, Mars City Science) are already exploring how we will design, build and inhabit the new realms of humanity in outer space.
By 2050, the world’s population is expected to have exceeded 10 billion people, making overcrowded cities one of the most pressing issues of the present. Data analysis, machine learning, transportation developments, and the rapid development of new social technologies are increasingly changing the needs of people and communities, which will have a direct impact on the issue of overcrowding and on our built environment more largely.
Bjarke Ingels Group has been working on the Mars Science City project after the United Arab Emirates announced the initiative in 2017. The $140 Million USD (AED 500 million) research city aims to serve as a “viable and realistic model” for the simulation of human occupation of the martian landscape. The project is designed with a team of Emirati scientists, engineers and designers from the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center.
Designers Warith Zaki and Amir Amzar have imagined a project that seeks to find alternatives to traditional construction material in order to build the first settlements on Mars. In fact, they opted for a natural earthy element that competes with wood, brick and concrete, and drafted a project that uses bamboo.
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.jpg?1605991358 "Nüwa City on Mars. Image Courtesy of ABIBOO Studio")
.jpg?1605991377 "Nüwa City on Mars. Image Courtesy of ABIBOO Studio")
