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.
Belo Monte Dam and Hydropower Plant Construction in Brazil. Image by burakyalcin, via Shutterstock
Some of the most significant transformations of South American landscapes have been produced not by cities, but by large infrastructures built to extract and distribute natural resources. Mining operations, energy systems, and transport networks have connected remote landscapes to broader economic structures while transforming rural territories and urban settlements throughout the continent. These infrastructures do not simply occupy space; they reorganize it. They have not only supported economic growth but also reconfigured territories in ways that continue to generate political, environmental, and social debate across the continent. From this perspective, territories can be understood not as fixed geographic areas but as socio-ecological systems shaped by cultural, environmental, and political relations, a point emphasized by anthropologist Arturo Escobar in his work on territorial thinking in Latin America.
Infrastructure has long defined the backbone of cities by linking people, landscapes, and economies through systems that often go unnoticed until they fail. Today, as global challenges demand more adaptive and human-centered responses, architects are rethinking what infrastructure can be: not just a framework for movement and utility, but a catalyst for ecological restoration, cultural continuity, and civic imagination. The following unbuilt projects, submitted by the ArchDaily community, explore this expanded role of infrastructure, where airports, bridges, industrial parks, and pedestrian networks become architectural expressions of connection and care.
As part of the collateral events of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Institut Ramon Llull presents the project "Water Parliaments: Projective Ecosocial Architectures", bringing together the waters of Lleida, Girona, Tarragona, Barcelona, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and beyond to address the water crisis as an interconnected ecosocial, cultural, and political issue. Framing architecture as a tool for critical speculation and collective action, the project advocates for the imagining of future scenarios grounded in coexistence—interweaving the human and non-human, the natural and artificial, the technological and vernacular, the global and the local.
Swimmable Cities is an alliance of 153 signatory organizations across 59 cities in 22 countries, supporting the global movement for swimmable urban waterways. In the context of increasing urbanization, climate change, and biodiversity loss, the initiative aims to reclaim rivers and harbors as public spaces for communities to enjoy and benefit from bathing. It advocates for urban waterways to be made safe, healthy, and accessible for both swimmers and wildlife, calling for cross-border collaboration to develop improvement strategies and collect data to evaluate "swimmability." This call becomes especially relevant amid rising global temperatures and growing inequalities in access to public infrastructure in major cities. The movement's 10-point charter begins with the affirmation of "the right to swim," celebrating urban swimming culture and recognizing the historical significance of water.
Every June, the Spanish city of Logroño transforms into a space of architectural dialogue, opening its streets, plazas, riverbanks, and traffic islands to temporary structures that redefine how cities are inhabited. For ten editions, Concéntrico has worked not as a specialized fair or an architecture biennale, but as a portable museum — a curatorial gesture that brings a dispersed collection of contemporary architecture into public space. Set in a city suspended between arid plains and distant mountains, far from the circuits of capital cities and cultural institutions, Concéntrico presents itself as a temporary promise. It's a reminder that even cities that are often overlooked can host architecture that is current, diverse, and speculative. In this sense, the festival is less about celebration and more about activation.
But beyond its curatorial logic, Concéntrico operates as a political structure. In the ancient sense of polis, it invites citizens, architects, and institutions to reassess what public space can be. The interventions offer speculative proposals for urban life that reveal what is missing, what is possible, and what should be questioned. A temporary pool over a fountain, a bathhouse in a roundabout, or a shared meal on a major avenue are not just spatial gestures — they are political statements, asking how urban infrastructure might be redirected from control to care, from efficiency to encounter. In that way, the festival becomes not just a reflection of the city, but an instrument for its transformation.
Friends of + POOL has announced the next steps in the realization of New York City's first water-filtering floating swimming pool, to be installed at Pier 35, north of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. The project seeks to provide safe public access to swimming in the city's rivers by integrating a custom-designed filtration system into a floating pool structure. Installation at Pier 35 is scheduled for May 2026, when the pool will enter its final phase of evaluation. Public access will be contingent on the successful completion of large-scale filtration testing and the full build-out of the facility for safe public use.
It has been nearly three weeks since one of California's most devastating wildfires began, triggering an immense effort to combat the blaze and mitigate further damage. As firefighters work to contain the remaining flames, the city braces for its first significant winter rainfall, raising concerns about flooding and landslides that may exacerbate the already extensive destruction.
Amid these challenges, the wildfire has spurred widespread reflection at local and global levels. Discussions have emerged on topics such as the insurance system, firefighting infrastructure, water resources, global warming's role in high-wind fire conditions, and the impact of landscape design, particularly the use of non-native vegetation.
The Danish Architecture Center (DAC) will open its new exhibition, "Water is Coming" in October 2024, remaining open until March 12, 2025. The exhibition addresses the escalating global water crisis, prompted by melting polar ice, rising groundwater levels, and increasingly frequent and intense flooding. It acknowledges the reality of rising sea levels and extreme weather events, shifting the focus from mitigation to adaptation. The exhibition aims to foster a deeper understanding of our complex relationship with water, exploring its vital role as both a life-giving resource and a potential threat to human settlements.
Cheongye Stream, known as Cheonggyecheon (청계천) in Korean, runs eastward through the heart of Seoul, passing through 13 neighborhoods in four districts of the capital of South Korea. Throughout its history, the stream played different roles in the city until it was covered by an elevated highway in the 1970s. For over 30 years, this natural artery remained hidden. It was not until 2003 that the city government launched a restoration project to reintegrate this urban waterway into the city fabric, revitalize the local economy, and revive the area's history and culture. The revitalization efforts were led by Mikyoung Kim Design. Since the project's completion in 2005, it quickly became one of Seoul's most visited tourist attractions. Moreover, it has become a focal point for ample urban research, with many studies offering positive assessments of the impact it had on Seoul's urban, economic, and ecological context.
Located in Mexico City, the municipality of Iztapalapa has some of the most densely populated areas within the metropole. Serving a population of 1,800,000 people, many of them with lower incomes, the municipality struggles to provide sufficient public spaces and amenities. In an effort to correct this, the administration set out to take underutilized and abandoned plots of land and transform them for public use. Utopia Estrella is one of these initiatives. Located near Mexico City’s largest water treatment plant, the project combines a socially engaging architectural program with a pedagogical approach to the role of water infrastructures in the larger ecosystem. Designed by Cano Vera Arquitectura, the project has been recognized as the Gold Prize Winner of the Holcim Awards 2023 for Latin America. In a video interview for ArchDaily, Juan Carlos Cano of Cano Vera Arquitectura discusses the impact of this project, its goals, and the unique conditions that led to its development.
Following the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, construction group WeBuild, in collaboration with design office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati and engineer Michel Virlogeux, has revealed an updated design for a replacement bridge. The new cable-stayed design aims to redefine the entrance to the Baltimore Harbor and offer an improved version of this symbol of the city.
MASSLAB has just won the competition for the new roof of Bragança's Water Treatment Plant in Portugal. Integrating public use of this infrastructure, which until now only serves a functional purpose, the project showcases adding value to existing infrastructure by rethinking them. Blending architecture, landscaping, and urban design to transform this structure into a vibrant public space, MASSLAB seeks to change the perception of water treatment facilities in urban settings. By reimagining the roof as a livable infrastructure, the project transforms the purely functional roof into an engaging and integral part of the urban fabric.
The urban heat island effect occurs when pavements, roads, and buildings absorb the sun's heat and radiate it back, causing the temperature to increase and preventing the city from cooling down. With the growing reliance on cars in cities, the number of urban car park spaces is also increasing to accommodate buildings. This has resulted in the conversion of large areas of pervious land covered with vegetation into impervious hard surfaces for more car parks. The use of materials like asphalt, combined with the lack of shade, reflective steel surfaces of parked cars, and loss of greenery in these extensive car parks, contributes to the amplification of high-temperature effects and extreme heat events, making urban spaces uncomfortable. This transformation is impacting the climate of car-dependent regions and calls for collaborative ideas and efforts to mitigate the negative effects of rising heat.
