Residential Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

On June 24, 2026, a severe seismic event consisting of two major earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5 struck north-central Venezuela just 39 seconds apart. The widespread destruction was concentrated along the country's northern coast, heavily impacting the capital city of Caracas and the neighboring state of La Guaira, where fragile urban infrastructure and vulnerable housing stock led to the collapse or severe damage of thousands of residential structures. This disaster mirrors previous devastating events observed during other major seismic events, including the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake and 2011 landslides in Sichuan, the 2014 Ludian earthquake in Yunnan, and the 2017 earthquake across central Mexico. When high-magnitude natural disasters damage entire communities, architects have the opportunity to help by proposing post-disaster architecture with strategic recovery models. Rather than relying on generic, standardized emergency shelters, conscious architectural design can deliver low-cost, rapidly deployable residential infrastructure that preserves human dignity through culturally contextual and dignified spaces.

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The Martin, a residential building designed by OMA's David Gianotten and Mariano Sagasta, has been completed in Amsterdam's Bajes Kwartier. Located within the Central Cluster of the 7.5-hectare redevelopment, the project is the latest completed component of OMA's master plan to transform the former Bijlmerbajes prison complex, which operated between 1978 and 2016, into a mixed-use, energy-neutral neighborhood. The completion follows that of The Jay in 2025, while a third residential building, The Cardinal, is expected to be finished in 2030.

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Studio Libeskind, in collaboration with HJ Design Partners and Seoul-based SAMOO Architects & Engineers, has designed a new high-density residential development in Seoul, South Korea. The Daechi Ssangyong 1 Redevelopment Project replaces an existing five-building, 630-unit complex in Daechi-dong, Gangnam-gu, with six new residential towers up to 49 storeys tall and nearly 1,000 housing units. The project is being developed for the Daechi Ssangyong 1 Redevelopment Union by Samsung C&T, with construction expected to begin in 2027 and be completed in 2030.

As co-living becomes increasingly associated with students, young professionals, and other mobile residents, it raises a broader architectural question: if home is no longer tied to long-term residence, what should architecture expect the private dwelling to provide?

People move for school, for a temporary job, or for a career that keeps taking them somewhere new. Many now expect to spend a defined period in a place before leaving it. Housing built for them has to do more than provide shelter. It has to support the routines through which someone adapts to an unfamiliar place, in the short time they know they have there. A year in a city asks something different of an apartment than a lifetime does, even if the square meters look the same on paper.

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MVRDV has been selected to design Inaura, a mixed-use hotel and residential tower in Downtown Dubai, developed by Arada. The project will rise to 210 meters on a site located between Downtown Dubai and Business Bay, with views toward the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Fountain. Following the competition, MVRDV will continue its involvement as design guardian, while Dubai-based Dewan Architects + Engineers will act as lead consultant. The interiors will be developed based on a concept by MVRDV, aligned with the developer's focus on fitness, wellness, and lifestyle-related programs.

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Coastal landscapes often determine far more than views. Steep slopes, fragmented rock formations, dense vegetation, hidden coves, and limited accessibility can shape how privacy, movement, and occupation unfold before architecture enters the site. Their proximity to water and climate make coastal territories highly desirable for habitation, yet their ecological sensitivity and limited geography often place pressure on how development takes shape. Unlike cities, where density can support walkability, infrastructure, and collective urban life, coastal territories operate through more fragile relationships between land, vegetation, and water.

Along many coastlines, development tends to prioritize visibility and proximity to the sea, organizing land through concentrated occupation and expanded circulation networks. Yet certain sites can guide another approach in which geography itself becomes the primary organizing force. How can architecture occupy a landscape without dissolving the qualities that make the site distinct? Located on a secluded peninsula along the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, Gokce Gemile Private Bay explores this question through a low-density architectural approach shaped by geography, controlled access, and spatial distance.

The context of the ongoing war marks Ukraine's place in the international consciousness. Architecture, however, most often transcends the span of a human life and can therefore be a tool for imagining the future. The practice of architectural design, whether speculative, conceptual, or practical, serves as a means of bringing to life ways of living and interacting beyond our current realities. In this selection of conceptual projects submitted by ArchDaily readers, we see material, spatial, and symbolic strategies that seek to address contemporary contexts in the residential, educational, and commercial sectors.

As the line of conflict has been relatively static since late 2023, Ukrainian cities continue to be subject to new architectural and urban development projects. In this article, we have compiled a selection of unbuilt projects in the cities of Vinnytsia, Lviv, and Kyiv. The selection includes residential, commercial, and mixed-use architectural designs, as well as an educational complex. Two residential projects have also been designed as prototypes without a specific location, as a potential response to the loss of infrastructure and unstable conditions in the region.

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What makes a home resilient? Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly frequent around the world. From power outages, hurricanes, and earthquakes to wildfires, floods, and droughts, the world is experiencing a process of transformation and adaptation that requires collaboration among diverse disciplines. The role of architecture in the built environment reflects an opportunity to rethink how homes perform under changing environmental conditions—not only by anticipating the unexpected. Designing for resilience means thinking holistically, considering material choices, energy systems, landscaping, and construction details that anticipate disruption and help homes recover quickly. It involves creating architecture that evolves with the environment, is worth preserving, and endures for years and generations.

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Architectural schools usually leave lasting marks on their students, shaping their style and critical inquiry long after formal education has ended. For example, SCI-Arc, founded in 1972 and based in downtown Los Angeles, is an institution recognized for its culture of experimentation, critical investigation, and creative independence, building a reputation based on the idea that architecture should be understood as a field open to dialogue with art, technology, design, and contemporary culture. The diversity of trajectories of its alumni demonstrates how this environment can generate distinct professional approaches, but united by the same willingness to explore new possibilities.

OMA has completed the Hangzhou Prism, a large-scale mixed-use development in Hangzhou's Future Tech City district, China, following a design and development process that began in 2016. Commissioned by Xinhu Real Estate Group and led by OMA Partner Chris van Duijn, with Michael Hadjistyllis serving as project architect, the project combines residential units, a hotel, offices, commercial spaces, and public amenities within a single building volume. Marking OMA's first completed project in Hangzhou, the development occupies a central site within one of the city's emerging innovation and business districts.

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When is a form still circular or rectangular? In twentieth-century modernism, this question was largely absent. Architecture was built on clarity, reduction, and formal purity. Influenced by architects such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, modernist design established a visual order based on rational geometry, industrial materials, and the rejection of ornament. Circle and square, function and expression, were kept strictly apart—a logic that dictated the rigid, modular layouts of traditional bathrooms for decades.

Most people rarely remember a passage. They remember the classroom, the apartment, the gallery, or the plaza at the end of it. Passages are usually designed to disappear into the background, guiding movement from one destination to the next. Yet some of architecture's most memorable experiences happen while moving through a place rather than arriving at it.

Circulation is often treated as one of architecture's most practical elements. Corridors connect rooms, galleries provide access, and walkways organize movement through a building. Their purpose seems straightforward: to help people get from one point to another. Because of this, circulation spaces have long been considered secondary to the programs they serve. Attention tends to focus on destinations, while the spaces in between remain largely unnoticed.

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How can the most structured elements in architecture give rise to unplanned forms of everyday life? "Spontaneous order" describes how structured systems can generate unplanned but coherent patterns of behavior. In urban discourse, it is often used to describe cities: frameworks of streets, plots, and buildings that are designed, while everyday life is not. Movement, encounters, routines, and informal uses emerge from simple spatial rules rather than explicit programming. In cities, this is visible in how sidewalks, stations, and thresholds operate. The structure is fixed, but the social order is fluid, setting conditions for behavior rather than defining it.

A similar logic can be observed in architectural micro-infrastructures such as locker systems. Like cities, lockers rely on structured frameworks that do not prescribe how life unfolds within them. A locker system is highly controlled in architectural terms: repetitive modules, strict grids, standardized dimensions, controlled access. Yet once in use, it produces spontaneous behaviors. People pause in corridors, return at irregular times, linger near locker zones, or briefly interact with others doing the same. What appears to be a strictly infrastructural storage system begins to generate informal social and spatial behavior.

For centuries, architecture has been defined by unmoving permanence. A building is assumed to be fixed, its walls and foundation immobile in space. A growing number of architects are now challenging this assumption by incorporating movement into the very fabric and tectonic structures of buildings.

When roofs hinge, walls slide, and entire structures respond to their occupants, something remarkable happens: the architectural spaces become an active component of daily rituals. These moments of opening, closing, shifting, and translating spaces ground buildings in the present moment and demand active engagement from users. The architecture becomes less of an object or a monument and more of a choreography of participation.

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Emerging in port cities and working-class neighborhoods throughout the nineteenth century, the shotgun house became a durable response to density, climate, and constrained urban parcels, becoming one of the defining domestic forms of the Southern United States. Its narrow footprint, sequential plan, and deeply shaded porches produced a spatial logic that was economical and environmentally responsive before either term became central to architectural discourse. From New Orleans and Mobile to Houston and Louisville, shotgun houses formed the physical fabric of neighborhoods shaped by migration, labor, community, and cultural life. Though often dismissed as ordinary, vernacular construction, the housing typology has long embodied sophisticated ideas about climate adaptation, social adjacency, and incremental urban growth, making it one of the most influential domestic forms in the history of the American city.

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What defines the atmosphere of a home? Beyond material palettes and natural light, sound plays a defining role in how spaces are perceived and inhabited. The reverberation of footsteps across stone, the muted calm of a textile-lined room, or the way music carries through an open-plan interior all shape the sensory identity of domestic space. Architecture is experienced not only visually, but acoustically.

The concept of the "soundscape" describes this relationship between people, sound, and the built environment. In residential architecture, sound is more than background noise or technical performance; it influences privacy, concentration, rest, and emotional comfort. Geometry and materiality act as the primary acoustic conductors: while concrete, glass, and stone reflect and amplify, timber and upholstery soften and absorb. Ceiling heights, circulation paths, and room proportions further shape how sound travels and settles across a space.

Casa Batlló in Barcelona has unveiled the restored Third Floor of the building, opening the last original residence preserved from Antoni Gaudí's 1904-1906 transformation of the property to the public for the first time. Led by restoration architect Xavier Villanueva and developed over three years through an archaeological-style conservation process, the intervention recovers a largely intact domestic environment that had remained inhabited by descendants of the Batlló family for more than a century. Adapted into a series of private rooms for gatherings, cultural events, and experiences, the restored apartment combines heritage preservation with a contemporary interior design intervention by Paola Navone – OTTO Studio, establishing a new program for one of Barcelona's most recognized architectural landmarks.

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The dogtrot house emerged across the South of the United States during the late nineteenth century as a direct response to humid climates, material availability, and patterns of rural habitation. Found throughout the Appalachian Mountains, coastal Carolinas, and lowlands of Louisiana, the dogtrot house appeared in numerous regional variations, yet its fundamental spatial logic remained remarkably consistent. Two enclosed living masses are separated by an open central passage and unified beneath a continuous roof, creating a dwelling that is simultaneously economical and responsive to long, hot summers. Although architectural historians continue to debate the precise geographic origins of the dogtrot, the typology represents a broader vernacular intelligence that emerged through the convergence of environmental necessity, local construction practices, and rural living.

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