When Francis Kéré set out to build a school in his home village of Gando, Burkina Faso, he chose clay, a material his own community associated with scarcity, not architecture. To prove it could hold, he built test bricks and submerged one in water for five days before showing his neighbors it hadn't failed. Then he trained the villagers themselves to raise the walls, rather than bringing in a construction crew from the city. More than 200 people from Gando have since worked as builders because of that choice. The school carries something a materials list alone cannot: the trace of the hands that will go on living in the village long after the scaffolding came down.
In a slim volume with a yellow-edged cover, recently published by the Porto-based imprint Circo de Ideias, the architect Paulo Martins Barata (a founding partner of Promontório) makes a deceptively bold claim that the architecture produced in Europe since the Great Recession belongs to neither of the two camps that structured the twentieth century's fiercest disciplinary debate.
The Language of Metamodern Architecture borrows its title, with evident irony, from Charles Jencks' 1977 The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, the book that famously declared modern architecture dead at 3:32 pm on July 15, 1972, with the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe. His wager is that another death, never officially certified, occurred somewhere around 2008, and that architecture has been living, mostly unaware, in what grew up around the grave.
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.
Pedestrian view of BCIE headquarters in Tegucigalpa. Image Courtesy of Banco Centroamericano de Integración Económica (BCIE)
Central America's nations occupy a narrow land bridge between Mexico and Colombia, but they were not born as separate countries. They emerged from a single entity: the Federal Republic of Central America in 1823. That federation collapsed, yet the ideal of a unified region never fully died. In 1951, the governments signed the Charter of San Salvador, creating ODECA, the Organization of Central American States. Four decades later, the 1991 Protocol of Tegucigalpa replaced it with SICA, the Central American Integration System, the framework guiding regional cooperation today. Within this integration process, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE) was founded in 1960 by Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, establishing its headquarters in Tegucigalpa. On the surface, it is a conventional late-20th-century office complex, but look closer at its façade, and the building becomes an argument about identity. One written in pink quarry stone from the very hills that surround the Honduran capital.
Antarctica has no government, no permanent population, and no economy. It also, since 1959, has had no legally recognized owner as the Antarctic Treaty freezes every territorial claim on the continent. On paper, this makes Antarctica the closest thing on Earth to a true commons. In practice, close to thirty countries currently operate more than seventy research stations there, several of them within a short flight of one another, and one of those stations has a school, a chapel, a cemetery, and a civil registry office that has recorded eleven births since 1978.
None of that architecture is accidental, and very little of it is explained by science alone. A research station costs millions of dollars to build and supply in one of the most logistically hostile places on the planet; a country does not commit to that expense purely to measure atmospheric ozone it could, in several cases, measure somewhere closer. What a station does, reliably, is stake a claim to a territory that legally forbids exactly that.
MVRDV has won the international design competition organized by the social enterprise Shift to design the Shift Embassy, a new cultural destination planned for Rotterdam's developing Waterkant district. Conceived as a hybrid of architecture and landscape, the proposal, titled Rotterdam ROCKS! combines exhibition spaces, hospitality, education, public amenities, and ecological infrastructure within a publicly accessible building intended to support Shift's mission of engaging visitors with environmental and societal challenges. The project will form part of Waterkant, a large-scale urban development on the south bank of the Maas, planned to include 3,750 homes alongside schools, workplaces, cultural venues, and public spaces.
Every building begins somewhere else. The sand in its concrete, the stone on its façade, the lithium that may one day power its systems. It arrives, already stripped from a mountain, a riverbed, or a salt flat thousands of kilometers away, having passed through a chain of trucks, ships, and customs declarations that erase almost everything about where it came from. Architecture tends to treat material as a starting condition, something simply available, but extraction is where construction actually begins.
The global trade in construction sand alone now moves on a scale that rivals the illegal markets in timber, gold, and fish combined, run through networks violent enough to have cost reporters and activists their lives. A single mountain in Tuscany has yielded more marble in the past few decades than in the two thousand years before them, hollowed out by a workforce whose own history of revolt has been almost entirely forgotten. Beneath the salt flats of three South American countries and the copper belt of Central Africa, the minerals that will supposedly power a cleaner future are pulled from ground that Indigenous communities have inhabited for generations and that children, in some cases, mine by hand. Each of these is sold as ordinary commerce; each is also a territorial transaction whose terms were set somewhere far from where the material was taken.
Marina Opatija and the Kvarner Bay shoreline from above. Image Courtesy of Smart & Sustainable Marina Rendezvous
M3 Monaco's Smart & Sustainable Marina Rendezvouscompetition returns for its sixth edition with an open-architecture Call for Ideas centered on Marina Opatija, on Croatia's Kvarner Bay. This article sets out what the competition asks of designers: a focused, high-impact intervention built around three required buildings, the pillars and sustainability criteria behind the brief, the key dates leading to the August 2026 deadline, and how to enter, free of charge, for professionals and students alike, with the top finalists pitching their work at the Yacht Club de Monaco.
Some of the world's most innovative regional architecture never makes the headlines simply because no one is telling its story. For the sixth episode of the Room For Dreams podcast, recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in cooperation with INDX|GLOBAL, host Claire Brodka of designboom dissects this exact bottleneck with architects Niroop Reddy, Sujit Nair, and Aman Aggarwal, tracing how a historic lack of architectural storytelling has obscured a massive design revolution taking place across the Indian subcontinent.
Hudson's Detroit mixed-used development. Aerial view.. Image Courtesy of Bedrock
Urban planning is often confused with adjacent disciplines: urban design, environmental policy, civic strategy, local politics, or data analytics. Moreover, the overlap in training and responsibilities between planning and urban practices makes the field difficult to define clearly. In practice, it is often easier to recognize the consequences of bad planning than to articulate the outcomes of good planning. When planning is working well for residents, it should disappear altogether. It should remove friction from daily life so that people would not think to credit a discipline at all. At its core, urban planning is the relationship people have with their environments, and when that relationship is functioning, the mechanics of housing, transportation, affordability, access, and inclusion should feel ordinary and expected.
Barcelona is the first city in the history of the UIA World Congress of Architects to host the event twice. The 1996 edition, Present and Futures: Architecture in Cities, arrived at a charged moment, when the post-Olympic city was consolidating an urban model that would become one of the most studied and contested in contemporary urbanism, and when architecture was learning to think through the large metropolis as its primary site of inquiry. Thirty years later, the same city reopens the question under a different condition: one in which the built environment can no longer be understood as a self-contained object, but only through the wider ecological, material, and political systems that sustain it. The theme of the 2026 Congress — Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition — does not abandon the urban concerns of 1996; it reopens them from a planetary scale.
The curatorial team behind this edition, formed by Pau Bajet, Maria Giramé, Mariona Benedito, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella, and Carmen Torres, approaches architecture as a critical and transformative tool rooted in territory, working across practice, research, and teaching. Their program structures the Congress around six interconnected thematic lines (Becoming More-than-human, Becoming Circular, Becoming Embodied, Becoming Interdependent, Becoming Hyper-Conscious, and Becoming Attuned) and distributes it across three venues of very different characters — Les Tres Xemeneies del Besòs, the Disseny Hub at Glòries, and the CCIB — each chosen for what it represents as much as for what it can hold.
Best Presentation Award Winner. Image Courtesy of Buildner Unbuilt Award
In an industry defined by building codes, climate urgency, and the pressures of the real estate market, the architectural competition has quietly become one of the discipline's most generative spaces. Unburdened by budgets, clients, or city regulations, competition entries allow architects to think at the edge of what the built environment could be, and increasingly, that speculative work is being taken seriously as a cultural and intellectual contribution in its own right. Buildner's Unbuilt Award, now in its second edition, is one of those efforts, by treating the unbuilt project as a platform for architects and designers to share concepts that challenge boundaries and inspire future possibilities. In this way, competitions like this allow architecture professionals and students to showcase ideas and visions that, even without being constructed, reflect the spirit of exploration and ingenuity in architecture.
The premier episode of the Room For Dreams podcast series, produced in collaboration with INDX|GLOBAL, features an engaging panel discussion centered on materializing the future through the lens of Indian architecture and design. Recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 and moderated by Claire Broadka of designboom, the conversation brings together three visionary architects: Rachna Agarwal, custodian of Studio IAAD and Zoera; Vaibhav Dimri, founding partner of Anagram Architects; and Dinesh Panwar of Urbanscape Architects.
When we think of façades, we rarely think of them as habitats. We see them as the elements that separate interior from exterior, regulate temperature, reduce noise, and protect buildings from external conditions. They give architecture its visual language, but they are also expected to keep the outside world at a distance. In doing so, façades have often been understood as barriers: surfaces that define where human comfort begins and where the environment is meant to remain outside.
But the outside of a building is never empty. For centuries, architecture has unintentionally created opportunities for other forms of life. Birds nested beneath roof tiles, insects occupied cracks in masonry walls, and mosses or plants took root along ledges, gutters, and rough stone surfaces. These conditions were rarely designed with other species in mind, but they created small opportunities for life to inhabit them.
Tell the Water What the Clay Kept Secret. Image Courtesy of Ola Hassanain
Ola Hassanain is a Sudanese architect and artist operating in the Netherlands, and will be exhibiting at the Pan-African Architecture Biennale in Nairobi, Kenya, later in 2026. All three locations tell stories of the built environment's relationship with water. These illustrate the continuous battles between the amorphous forces of nature that are the rivers and seas, and human attempts to shape and control them. In most cases, they are attempts at extraction. Catastrophes happen as a result of the overreach of these attempts or of their mismanagement, or both.
