Sustainable Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

The landscape and scattered settlements of Ireland carry a reputation for wildness. Rugged cliffs meet the Atlantic, green fields roll across the interior, and rain and wind change the scene by the hour. A closer look reveals a worked terrain as historic stone walls divide agricultural fields, roads and paths connect towns to the coast, and castle ruins alongside cottages record centuries of occupation. Change is the expected condition of the island, shaped as much by human hands as by geology and weather, and the practice of treating the existing context as material to adapt and modify runs deep.

Ireland has a large inherited building stock, from vernacular cottages and farm compounds to Georgian and Victorian urban terraces, while a growing share of it sits vacant or derelict as housing remains scarce and expensive. Planning and heritage protections shape what can be altered, while growing attention to embodied carbon makes demolition increasingly difficult to justify. Under these pressures, design strategies for renovation are one of the most inventive areas of contemporary Irish design. Architects cut into old structures to admit light, set new materials against aged ones, and redesign buildings for contemporary lives and routines.

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Buildner has announced the results of the Iceland Slow Sauna architecture competition, developed in partnership with Slow Travel Mývatn. Set beside Þúfa – Private Homestay in the volcanic landscape of Lake Mývatn in northern Iceland, the competition invited architects and designers to create a compact retreat combining a sauna and greenhouse within a single architectural experience. Rooted in the Icelandic tradition of bathing as a ritual of stillness and renewal, the brief asked participants to explore how heat, light, vegetation, and landscape could shape an intimate place of recovery and connection to nature.

In many Asian cities, the summer climate can increasingly be experienced from a distance. In Hong Kong, it is possible to move from an apartment tower through a podium mall, enter the Mass-Transit-Railway system (MTR), arrive beneath another commercial complex, and continue through enclosed footbridges or underground passages while encountering remarkably little of the atmosphere outside. Heat, humidity, rain, and seasonal variation remain present, but they can be largely bypassed through a continuous network of conditioned interiors.

Over several decades, air-conditioning has expanded from a technology for cooling individual rooms into an infrastructure capable of producing an alternative urban environment. This has been particularly visible in parts of East Asia and South East Asia, where transit-oriented development frequently combines railway stations, shopping centres, housing, offices, and other everyday services within interconnected complexes. The Railway plus Property model has helped institutionalize this relationship between transport and development, creating districts where movement through the city is often inseparable from movement through privately managed interiors.

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

There are two unique things about being human that made us survive the early years and spread over the whole planet: sweating and storytelling. Sweating helps cool down the body when running long distances. Stories help us collaborate in big numbers and share knowledge across groups and generations. As architects, we still rely on the same tools to make visions become reality.

As professor of stories Angus Fletcher points out in his book Primal Intelligence, there is a common misconception about the role of stories: when our "rational" brain has developed an idea that we fail to explain to a wider group, we pack it into a story, and suddenly everybody understands. Fletcher argues that it actually works the other way around: ideas come from stories, our brain works in stories, and stories form reality. Architects have a derogatory term for turning that process the wrong side up: "post-rationalisation", for example when diagrams are made to explain a design that is already decided.

There is no shortage of ways to imagine what the world will look like after a climate catastrophe. Genres of movies and novels have been built around the question of what happens when contemporary safeguards fail, from dystopian fiction and post-apocalyptic literature to disaster films, graphic novels, and video games. Burning forests, submerged cities, abandoned infrastructure, resource scarcity, and mass displacement are a familiar visual and narrative vocabulary. We have become remarkably fluent in imagining the consequences of a world that fails to respond to climate change.

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There is no harder place to build than a high mountain, and none where a building feels more provisional. From the Andes to the Himalaya to the Alps, high-altitude construction strips architecture back to its most elementary transactions. The rock reads as permanence itself, yet a structure set near the limit of habitation exists in negotiation with almost everything around it: with wind that arrives without obstruction, with a ground too steep and too frozen to excavate, and with everything it needs arriving from far below. What can be carried up, what can be assembled by few hands, and what can sustain itself are some of the terms of the problem.

Those constraints have produced a remarkably consistent building culture across otherwise unrelated ranges. The refuge, the hut, the bivouac, and the observatory belong to a shared typology in which shelter is inseparable from logistics, and where lightness, prefabrication, and self-sufficiency were structural necessities long before they became virtues.

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3rd International Seminar on Territory, Urbanism, and Architecture Research – SIITUA III

Sustainability in architecture is often discussed as though it were a universal standard—and, in principle, it should be. Buildings are increasingly evaluated through energy performance, embodied carbon, certification systems, material efficiency, biodiversity, and whole-life impact. Yet the rules determining what must actually be done remain highly local. A project designed in London, New York, or Copenhagen may be shaped by stringent energy codes, environmental review, disclosure requirements, planning controls, and increasingly ambitious carbon targets. The same practice working elsewhere may encounter a very different regulatory landscape.

This creates a difficult question for international architecture: when sustainability is not enforced to the same degree by law, what standards should architects carry with them?

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What can a textile do that glass, wood, concrete, or metal cannot? Architectural composite fabrics don't replace conventional building materials. Instead, they can complement them and often add another layer of performance to the building envelope. Their application changes with context. A composite membrane can become an exterior shading system for a tropical conservatory, an interior skin that shapes acoustics and spatial experience in a museum, or part of a facade strategy that improves the environmental performance of an existing building.

ArchDaily is proud to announce the winners of the 2026 Next Practices Awards, recognizing 20 emerging and forward-thinking practices expanding the possibilities of architecture today.

Now in its sixth edition, Next Practices continues to look beyond conventional definitions of the profession to identify the people, ideas, and methodologies driving the discipline. The 2026 edition is our strongest and most globally representative to date, bringing together different approaches, scales, and contexts that broaden our understanding of how and by whom architecture is being practiced.

From extreme climates to rural communities, informal cities, and territories affected by displacement and environmental vulnerability, this year's selection engages with a wide range of realities. Drawing from engineering, ecology, digital fabrication, material research, vernacular and Indigenous knowledge, advocacy, and critical research, these practices reflect what is "next": the capacity to respond to specific conditions and actively shape the world around them.

Stefano Boeri Architetti has won the competition launched by Spain's Entidad Estatal de Vivienda, Casa 47, for a new affordable housing development in Ibiza. Named "Sa Casa," the project proposes approximately 190 below-market-rate rental apartments distributed across four residential volumes. The scheme combines a prefabricated timber construction system with adaptable housing layouts and shared open spaces, with the design organized around the relationship between the residential buildings, landscape, and public areas.

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How can daylight tackle global challenges? This question lies at the heart of Light of Tomorrow by VELUX, a global student competition that encourages architecture students to explore the future potential of daylight in the built environment. In its 12th edition, the competition received hundreds of responses from around the world, culminating in eight finalist projects presented to an international jury at the UIA World Congress of Architects in Barcelona. The 2026 global winner, Sun the Quilt, developed by students from Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology in China, was chosen for its strong concept, design thinking, and innovative use of daylight that transforms an everyday domestic ritual into an innovative facade system shaped by daylight, climate, and care.

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

Beneath the ground lies a material that has quietly shaped the architecture of the modern world. Petroleum is rarely discussed within architectural discourse, yet the extraction, circulation, and consumption of oil have profoundly reorganized the spatial logic of territories. Pipelines, refineries, drilling platforms, ports, highways, and petrochemical complexes form a vast infrastructural landscape that sustains contemporary life, composing a dispersed architecture of energy.

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, oil became the material foundation of industrial society. It fueled transportation, powered factories, and supported the growth of cities whose spatial organisation depended on continuous energy flows. Yet the infrastructures that enable these flows rarely become objects of architectural inquiry. Attention remains largely directed toward form, typology, or urban density, while the material systems that sustain these environments tend to remain displaced within the discipline.

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The spatial consequences of urban form are revealed when health outcomes are mapped over neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that support walking, daily errands, social interaction, and access to essential services create opportunities to incorporate physical activity into routine tasks. Places that are organized around long distances and automobile travel suppress this opportunity. Physical activity and the motivation to incorporate it into daily life are shaped by the distance to a grocery store, the safety of a pedestrian crossing, the frequency of public transportation, the width of a sidewalk, and the quantity of services within walking distance.

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Nairobi's architectural identity was transformed by Kenya's independence in 1963. As the new nation sought to define itself, the city became a testing ground for a modern architecture that could embody progress while responding to African culture, climate, and local conditions. This opened a period of architectural experimentation, with different approaches emerging to the relationship between modernity, identity, and place.

The Kenyatta International Convention Centre is perhaps the clearest expression of this moment. Its architecture brought together modernist principles with references to African forms, establishing a distinctive response to the ambitions of a newly independent nation. Around it, Kenyan and international architects developed other interpretations of modernism, from the sun-shading facades of Reinsurance Plaza to the sculptural silhouette of Nation Centre, alongside religious, educational, and civic projects that expanded the architectural vocabulary of the city.

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Mexico's rapid urban growth over recent decades has left many cities struggling with fragmented neighborhoods, high crime rates, and severe shortages of quality public spaces. In many low-income urban areas, informal development occurred alongside raw infrastructure like drainage canals, rail lines, and steep ravines, dividing communities and creating hazardous vacant zones. To address this spatial segregation and lack of civic amenities, public agencies and architects across Mexico are intervening in these abandoned buffer zones to construct public parks. By converting former physical barriers into accessible pedestrian corridors, these projects rejoin separated neighborhoods, re-establish safe visual sight lines, and provide spaces for community gathering and daily recreation.

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Architects are trained to choose materials, compare their properties, and decide how they should be used. Some practices are taking on a different task: developing the material itself.

For Material Cultures, BC architects, and Studio Ossidiana, this can begin with hemp grown for construction, earth excavated from building sites, or mixtures of concrete, pigment, stone, and shells. Their work connects material research with processing, fabrication, and construction.

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The ceiling is one of the largest continuous surfaces in a space, yet why is it rarely the first architectural element people notice? Often perceived as the plane that conceals structure and building services, it quietly recedes into the background while facades, materials, structural systems, and furniture define a building's architectural identity. Yet few architectural elements influence the experience of a space as consistently as this one. The ceiling shapes how sound travels, how light is reflected, how air moves through a room, and ultimately how architecture is experienced, bringing together technical performance and architectural expression through a single continuous surface.

Danish architectural theorist Steen Eiler Rasmussen observed in his book Experiencing Architecture that ceilings shape the character of a room through rhythm, proportion, light, and atmosphere. Rather than simply enclosing space, they help organize it, defining areas and guiding movement without the need for additional walls. As buildings became larger, more open, and more dependent on integrated building services, architecture began asking more of this overlooked surface. The ceiling gradually shifted from a concealed building component into an active architectural system in which acoustics, lighting, ventilation, thermal comfort, and technical infrastructure could converge on a single plane.