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For many communities across the Gulf, leaving home once formed part of inhabiting it. Families moved between desert pastures, coastal settlements, wells, fishing grounds, and pearling ports according to season and livelihood, returning repeatedly to places already known through use. In Qatar, historical accounts describe autumn and winter movement through al-barr, the desert, followed by a return toward coastal settlements as the summer pearling season began. The National Museum of Qatar represents this history through a yearly calendar of movement between desert and sea.

Home could extend between several places occupied at different points in the year. It extended across a larger geography of places that were left and returned to through the year. Many contemporary Gulf developments now attempt to bring contrasting climatic and spatial conditions into the same permanent urban system. 

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This article is part of "Thresholds", a special edition printed newspaper by Cobe Notes x ArchDaily.

Launched in September 2024, the Rediscovering Modernism in Africa series joined a growing worldwide interest in this topic. Previously underrepresented in architectural discussions, the work of architects and researchers on the continent and abroad has continued to tell the story of these high-quality modern works of architecture. These buildings represent designers striving to create locally suited architecture using global concepts and technologies, coinciding with huge political changes as most African countries gained their independence.

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At one point, Jakarta's future coastal defense took the form of a giant Garuda rising from the sea. The mythical bird, Indonesia's national symbol, gave form to a vast coastal intervention intended to protect the sinking capital from floods while creating new territory offshore. It was an extraordinary image: a seawall transformed into a city. The Great Garuda is revealing because it shows what happens when climate adaptation begins to overlap with urban development. Once protection infrastructure also creates valuable land, defending a city and remaking it can become difficult to separate.

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Some of India's most convincing architectural worlds have never existed outside a film set. Courtyards, palaces, streets and even entire neighbourhoods have been constructed, lit and framed for the camera, then dismantled when filming ends. Their images remain. For millions of viewers, these spaces become references for how cities look, how wealth is displayed and how particular neighbourhoods or versions of India are remembered. Cinema constructs spatial worlds, compressing complex histories into images that audiences can recognise almost instantly. Those images can later shape how physical places are understood.

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As Saudi Arabia's cities expand through increasingly ambitious cultural projects, Syn Architects has spent much of its practice looking at what predates that transformation. The practice's participation in the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale grew out of years spent documenting Najdi architecture, disappearing urban fabric, local materials and inherited forms of knowledge. For Syn, heritage becomes useful when it can be documented, tested and brought back into use.

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When African countries gained independence from European colonial rule during the mid-twentieth century, nation-building involved more than establishing new governments and political institutions. Newly sovereign states also needed to establish a built identity that could distinguish them from their colonial past, and architecture became an important tool in this process. Across the continent, monumental civic buildings, universities, conference centers, and cultural institutions were commissioned to embody progress and national unity. Yet this created a fundamental contradiction: many of these buildings adopted modernist and Brutalist architectural languages that had originated in Europe, while some were even designed by architects from former colonial powers. The Maison du Peuple in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, provides a particularly revealing example of how an architectural language associated with Europe could be appropriated and transformed into an expression of postcolonial independence.

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Across the Gulf, Bedouin heritage often enters architecture first as an image. Airport terminals recall tent silhouettes, visitor centres incorporate woven screens, and pavilions reinterpret traditional textiles as decorative façades. These references have become a familiar visual language for expressing regional identity. They also risk reducing one of the world's most sophisticated vernacular building traditions to an architectural motif. Long before the Bedouin tent became a cultural symbol, it was an environmental technology: a lightweight, adaptable structure capable of creating comfort in one of the planet's most demanding climates. What contemporary infrastructure may inherit is not the tent's silhouette, but the construction intelligence woven into it.

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There has never been a more celebrated moment for craftsmanship in architecture. Across magazines, awards, and international exhibitions, handmade brick, lime plaster, carved stone, woven bamboo, and rammed earth have re-emerged as symbols of environmental responsibility, cultural continuity, and architectural authenticity. Beyond these carefully documented projects lies another reality. The overwhelming majority of buildings constructed today, from apartment blocks and office towers to public housing and commercial developments, continue to rely on industrialized systems that leave little room for skilled artisans. Craft has become increasingly visible at the very moment it has become increasingly uncommon. In countries such as India, the contrast is difficult to ignore. Centuries-old building traditions continue alongside one of the world's fastest-growing construction industries. To reframe the question of why craftsmanship is returning, perhaps the intrigue is why it now appears primarily where construction budgets, timelines, and clients can afford it.

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A war can erase a skyline overnight. Roofs collapse, streets become impassable, and landmarks that once oriented everyday life are reduced to rubble. The most profound loss often remains invisible. Buildings can be surveyed, photographed, scanned, and, eventually, rebuilt. The knowledge that produced them is far more fragile. It survives in the hands of stonemasons who understand how a limestone vault carries its load, carpenters who know how timber joints respond to seasonal movement, plasterers who mix lime by memory rather than measurement, and residents whose everyday rituals keep these buildings in use. When these people are displaced, killed, or forced to abandon their trades, reconstruction inherits a problem that no drawing or digital model can solve. Stone can always be quarried again. Recovering the knowledge to shape it takes much longer.

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Architecture has long been defined by permanence. Buildings are celebrated because they endure, cities because they establish permanence against uncertainty, and monuments because they resist the passage of time. Some of humanity's oldest urban traditions emerged in landscapes where permanence alone could never guarantee survival. Across the deserts of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, oasis settlements developed not as isolated refuges from an empty wilderness, but as carefully maintained pauses within landscapes already shaped by movement. Long before highways and airports connected continents, caravans, pilgrims, pastoralists, and merchants traversed these territories through networks of wells, irrigation systems, cultivated groves, and market towns. The oasis was never the end of a journey. Wells, shaded palm groves, irrigated fields, and caravan markets allowed the next stage of the journey to begin.

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Architecture often inherits a paradox. The buildings that come to define a place are rarely the only ones that shaped it. Instead, they become symbols, repeated through guidebooks, tourism campaigns, conservation agendas, and architectural histories until they stand in for an entire region. Over time, the richness of a built landscape is compressed into a handful of familiar images. What falls outside that frame rarely disappears. It simply slips from architectural discourse.

Few places illustrate this more clearly than Odisha. For decades, its architectural identity has been represented through the monumental stone temples of Bhubaneswar, Konark, and Puri. The sculptural sophistication of the Kalinga tradition has rightly earned international recognition, becoming one of India's most celebrated architectural legacies. Yet this prominence has also produced an unintended consequence. Odisha is frequently understood as a land of temples, leaving other architectural histories comparatively unexplored. Royal residences, administrative buildings, colonial encounters, vernacular settlements, and former capitals occupy a far smaller place in the architectural imagination despite revealing equally complex stories of governance, diplomacy, ecology, and cultural exchange.

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For most of the twentieth century, architecture has learned to read cities through roads. Street hierarchies define urban plans, intersections organize movement, and buildings are understood by the façades they present to sidewalks. Roads appear so fundamental to urban life that they are often mistaken for a universal condition. Across much of Southeast Asia, cities developed according to an entirely different spatial logic. Long before automobiles reordered urban landscapes, rivers served as streets, marketplaces, civic spaces, and public infrastructure. Movement occurred primarily by boat, commerce unfolded along waterfronts, and architecture addressed water rather than asphalt. Reading these cities through their waterways changes how architecture itself is understood. Infrastructure, in this case, is not the road but the river.

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At the helm of architectural discourse on sacred architecture, attention almost always settles on the monument. Temples, mosques, monasteries, and churches dominate architectural histories, design criticism, and photography alike, becoming the physical symbols through which faith is understood. For millions of pilgrims across India, the most consequential architectural experience begins long before the shrine comes into view. It unfolds across mountain roads, river ghats, shaded streets, temporary camps, queue systems, bridges, water kiosks, medical stations, and countless ordinary pieces of infrastructure through which pilgrimage actually takes place. The architectural work of pilgrimage may lie less in the shrine itself than in the environments that allow millions of people to reach it.

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A building material rarely begins where architecture encounters it. By the time concrete reaches a construction site, its limestone has already been quarried, processed, and transformed. Timber arrives long after the forest. Glass appears detached from the sand from which it was made. By the time materials enter construction, much of the landscape and industry that produced them has already disappeared from view.

Across India and the SWANA region, another material supply chain is becoming visible. Rice husks, coconut fibres, sugarcane bagasse, and date palm residues, once treated as agricultural leftovers, are increasingly entering architecture as insulation, composite panels, fibreboards, and cement substitutes. Rice mills, coconut plantations, sugar factories, and date farms are increasingly becoming part of the architectural supply chain.

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Architecture often speaks about ecological design as though it were a recent discovery. Biodiversity corridors, regenerative landscapes, sponge cities, and more-than-human urbanism are presented as emerging responses to contemporary environmental crises. Across India and the SWANA region, landscapes shaped through religious practice have long organized relationships between people, water, vegetation, and animals. Long before ecological performance became a design metric, temple tanks stored monsoon water, sacred groves protected biodiversity, and oasis settlements sustained life in some of the world's most arid environments. Few of these places emerged from explicit environmental agendas. They emerged through cultural and spiritual practices. Their environmental logic remains highly relevant today. Many of the conditions now discussed through more-than-human design have existed for centuries within landscapes architects rarely study as ecological infrastructure.

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Architecture continues to draw cities as though humans occupy them alone. Plans trace circulation routes, zoning maps assign functions, and buildings are evaluated according to human comfort, safety, and efficiency. Walking through cities across India and Southwest Asia reveals something much more complex. Dogs sleep beneath market stalls, monkeys move across rooftops, birds nest in temple towers and mosque façades, and insects pollinate urban landscapes hidden in plain sight. These species are woven into daily urban life as consistently as human occupants. Streets, courtyards, roofs, drainage systems, markets, and vacant lots are already occupied by multiple species simultaneously. Architectural thinking has been slower to account for this reality.

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Who has the right to the city? Henri Lefebvre's writings question the structures that control urban space and, instead, put the citizens at the center of decision-making. His ideas have influenced the way architecture and urban design are practiced, bringing about community participation and co-design. These have been some of the most prominent themes at Utopian Hours 2026, the festival of city-making, the first part of which was held in the Dutch city of Rotterdam to mark its tenth anniversary edition.

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After Artemis II's return to Earth, NASA unveiled a new phased plan to establish a Moon Base. Although most of the media's attention went to rockets, budgets, and geopolitical competition, a quieter question was lingering for architects in the background: How can a human being actually live on the surface of the Moon, and for how long? The establishment of a permanent human presence on the Moon marks a fundamental shift in space exploration that requires a new architectural paradigm. In their presentation, NASA officials suggested the strategy would drift away from highly constrained, vehicle-dependent environments toward autonomous, site-adaptive, and eventually permanently habitable structures.

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