For centuries, large-scale infrastructure operated in the background. Ports, power plants, and energy facilities were positioned at the edges of cities, designed primarily for efficiency, and rarely considered part of civic life. Their function was indispensable, yet their architectural presence remained secondary. These structures supported urban growth and global exchange while maintaining a spatial distance from everyday urban experience.
Today, this condition is gradually shifting. As global trade intensifies and energy systems expand in complexity, the buildings that coordinate and house these networks are becoming more visible within the urban landscape. Rather than remaining neutral containers for technical operations, they begin to assert spatial identity. Infrastructure is no longer only operational; it is increasingly institutional, symbolic, and urban. The architecture that supports these systems now participates in how cities project themselves.
Tadao Ando has joined forces with Cauny to design the newest watch in The Architects of TimeSeries. This is a collection of watches designed by some of the greatest architects of our time—an initiative that the nearly century-old brand launched in 2019 with none other than Álvaro Siza. From then until today, the collection has proven to be a Pritzker Prize–based tour de force: Siza, Rafael Moneo, Eduardo Souto Moura, and, this year, Tadao Ando.
Across South America, architecture endures through the materials it uses, those that persist over time. Bamboo, brick, wood, and concrete appear across regions, connecting climate, labor, and culture in ways that ensure their persistence through generations. Their continuity does not depend solely on preservation or heritage. It depends on use.
In this context, cultural memory does not reside primarily in monuments or images, but in practice. It survives in repeated gestures: laying bricks, tying guadua joints, assembling wood frames, casting slabs that anticipate another floor. These actions are transmitted less through manuals than through participation. Over time, they form systems of knowledge embedded in habit and necessity. Materials endure not because they symbolize the past, but because they continue to work.
Before the digital turn, architecture's memory was largely tangible. It lived in the weight of drawings, the patina of models, and the thickness of books. To preserve architecture meant to preserve its traces, the documents, sketches, and photographs through which buildings could be remembered long after their material form had changed or disappeared. The modern architectural archive, as it developed in the 20th century, was both a refuge and a device of legitimacy. Institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Casa da Arquitectura, or the Deutsches Architekturmuseum were built upon the conviction that to preserve architecture was to preserve its documents.
However, these archives didn't merely store knowledge. They determined what counted as architecture, who belonged to its canon, and how history would be told. To archive is to edit the past — to decide what enters, what is omitted, and how it will be interpreted. The archive, as theorised by Michel Foucault and later by Jacques Derrida, is never neutral; it is an instrument of power, a space that selects and excludes. In architecture, these dynamics are especially evident as they record the visible while silencing what falls outside their categories. The act of collecting has always been, implicitly, an act of judgment.
Far from the perception of the exhibition space as a sterile and untouchable, almost sacred place, the contemporary technology museum has emerged as a performative participant in the systems it seeks to document. The architecture of these institutions has become increasingly fluid and bold, often mirroring the velocity and complexity of the systems it houses. They operate as mediators between the human, the ecological, and the technological realms, transforming from encyclopedic warehouses into active educational engines. By spatializing complex scientific data through immersive rooms, these structures make the technological networks of our world accessible, engaging, and tangible.
First Prize Winner: Living on Groundwater. Image Courtesy of Buildner
In collaboration with building materials manufacturer Kingspan, Buildner has launched MICROHOME 2026, the eleventh edition of its annual competition, offering a €100,000 prize fund. This global competition invites architects, designers, and creative thinkers to redefine the concept of microhomes and develop cutting-edge, sustainable solutions for compact housing.
Founded in 2015 in Ahmedabad by Anand Sonecha, SEAlab is a practice shaped by a slow, contemplative engagement with place, proportion, and participation. Recognized as one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, the studio builds with simple materials and local techniques, pursuing environments that are experienced as much as they are seen. This ethos became particularly tangible in Gandhinagar, where the School for Blind and Visually Impaired Children did not begin as a purpose-built institution. The school had been operating from an existing primary school building, with classrooms stacked above dormitories and twelve children sharing a single room. Space was limited, and so were growth opportunities. The new academic building was required to expand capacity, improve living conditions, and support greater student independence.
As artificial intelligence continues to disrupt sectors of the economy and reshape entire industries, institutions and individuals alike are bracing—and rapidly adapting—to the changes that machines seem to hold over our heads. Yet the more precise pressure is not simply AI altering the way people work and live, but the business models and investment logics of the companies developing these systems: the concentration of capital, the new requirements for compute, the race for compartmentalized talent, and the infrastructural footprint needed to sustain it. In the Greater Bay Area—anchored by Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong—this dynamic is especially pronounced. Government-led initiatives are actively accelerating the industry's growth, with policy and planning mechanisms beginning to translate an ostensibly intangible field into physical form: zoning updates, earmarked land, and the emergence of AI-oriented building types, from research laboratories to large-scale data centers.
The Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival announces BuildFest: Acts of Construction, a three-year initiative that activates the historic grounds of the 1969 Woodstock festival through large-scale timber installations and multimedia experiences. Each year is organized around a single theme, inviting designers to collaborate on an interdisciplinary series of "acts" that build on one another to create an interconnected set of installations, activations, and performances. Act One: Staging is currently accepting proposals for adaptive art infrastructure designed to "set the stage" for future activations. It will be followed by Act Two: Choreography in 2027 and Act Three: Performance in 2028.
Diagram of the services in Barba Jupiter. Image Courtesy of Géométral
Founded in 2022 by Clément Masurier and based in Paris, France, Géométral is an architectural practice defined by design strategies that are linked to the landscape, which it treats as a primary determinant of form. The studio, one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, approaches each project as a small universe that combines program, atmosphere, and spatial narratives. Rather than a single signature style, they focus on crafting moods and situations tailored to each context and user.
In its early stages, the studio lacked a built portfolio and responded by developing "fictional architectures" situated on real topographies. This exercise was not merely an aesthetic pursuit but a methodological anchor, as it allowed the firm to establish a rigorous process of site analysis and typological testing before receiving physical commissions. By treating imaginary projects with the same technical scrutiny as real ones, the studio developed a library of formal responses to environmental constraints that now dictate their built work.
Not long ago, recent enough to feel current, architecture entered a moment in which buildings became legible as products. The framing offered discipline and a refreshed perspective to an industry that often deems novelty more precious than operational clarity. Nudging exercises of "form" towards repeatability, user experience, performance, and scalability prepared buildings to be a "product" that could now be evaluated. Architecture is more answerable to how well it works, how clearly it communicates its use, and how consistently it delivers its intended experience.
The discipline of product design refreshes the perspectives of architects designing for a changing future. Along with offering a new vocabulary and a rubric for design, the field brings in accountability: a product must perform reliably across time and context. It must hold together as a system of decisions rather than a collection of parts. Quality, therefore, is no longer measured solely by uniqueness, but by consistency and by the ability to produce a predictable experience for its occupants.
Much more than merely as a protective skin, the building envelope functions as a thermal regulator that influences operational energy demand, indoor comfort, and long-term efficiency. And before renewable systems or mechanical strategies are introduced, performance begins in section. The way walls, roofs, windows and floors are layered determines how much heat is lost in winter, gained in summer, and ultimately how much energy a building consumes. At the center of this evaluation lies a fundamental metric: the thermal transmittance, or U-value. Understanding how to calculate it is essential for assessing whether an envelope conserves energy or allows it to escape.
Conceptually, thermal transmittance relates heat flow to both surface area and temperature difference. It expresses how much energy crosses one square meter of envelope for each degree of thermal gradient between its two faces.
If we divide 1 m2 of our envelope by the temperature difference between its faces, we will obtain a value that corresponds to the thermal transmittance, also called U-Value. This value tells us a building's level of thermal insulation in relation to the percentage of energy that passes through it; if the resulting number is low we will have a well-isolated surface and, on the contrary, a high number alerts us of a thermally deficient surface.
In January 2026, the World Monuments Fund/Knoll Modernism Prize was awarded to Australian firm Architectus for their conservation of the Africa Hall in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The award recognizes that Modernist buildings, once seen as a vanguard of architecture, are falling into disrepair and are underappreciated by the public. The situation in Africa is typical of this global sentiment, and this was the first time a building on the continent was graced with this award. The prize also spotlights Ethiopia's rich Modernist inventory, which marks its continental role in the mid and late twentieth century.
In most cases, the power of decision lies with specialized professionals—historians, museologists, architects, geographers. But on what basis are these decisions made? Can the complexity of history be reduced to a checklist? Or, more fundamentally, which version of history underlies these choices?
Eighteen years ago, two architecture students decided that they had a project worth pursuing. It wasn't a built structure, but a digital project that ended up revolutionizing the way people around the world consume architectural content. This was how ArchDaily was founded, and it still guides our work to this day. The future of architecture is continuously being shaped in classrooms, studios, and workshops around the world, and we want to continue supporting the students who are actively participating in this evolution. Recognizing the creativity and vision of students who are redefining architectural discourse around the world is what led us to create the Student Project Awards.
We are now pleased to present the longlisted projects for this first edition of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards. With hundreds of projects submitted from around the world, our in-house team of architects and editors carefully combed through every single entry, narrowing them down to 104 longlisted projects. The students who participated represent the diversity of the architectural landscape itself, with submissions from every continent, all levels of study, and in various scales and typologies.
https://www.archdaily.com/1039110/explore-the-longlist-of-the-archdaily-student-project-awardsDaniela Porto
In the architectural history of the Mexican territory, the built environment has functioned not merely as a human stage, but as a biological infrastructure designed to organize proximity between species. The resulting spatial logic is not a solo performance, but a negotiated coexistence between human and animal bodies. To examine this heritage today is to shift the analytical focus away from stylistic authorship and toward a more fundamental phenomenon: the persistence of spatial practices that emerged to sustain shared forms of life.
Many of the architectural features now interpreted as cultural or aesthetic markers — oversized thresholds, expansive patios, and durable surfaces — can be understood instead as material traces of an interspecies contract. For centuries, horses, mules, and livestock were not external to architecture but essential inhabitants whose physical presence shaped scale, circulation, and material choices. Their bodies left measurable imprints in space, from the height of entrances that accommodated mounted riders to paving systems designed to withstand hooves, friction, and biological wear. Nowhere was this contract more visible than at the ground level of the colonial house.
On a hot afternoon in May, when the air over western India turns metallic with heat, no one remembers façade composition. They remember where the shade falls. They remember which corridor breathed. They remember the house that was cooler than the street. What stays in memory is comfort beyond the form. Repeated thermal preference stabilizes into spatial configuration, and over time, those configurations become building types.
Azm / Samu by Hassan Qureshi. Image Courtesy of Riyadh Art
For centuries, sculpture has been associated with the materialization of religious values, the celebration of heroic achievements, or the consolidation of political power. Today, it also operates as a critical instrument and an urban mediator. Many contemporary works interrogate the present, challenge scale, engage with movement and circulation, and reshape perceptions of public space. Sculpture is no longer conceived as an isolated object, but as part of broader processes of urban transformation.
Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, exemplifies a city undergoing intense expansion and restructuring. Particularly under the Vision 2030 agenda, it has invested in upgrading public spaces, diversifying its cultural landscape, and consolidating an urban identity that brings together tradition, infrastructure, and global projection. Within this context, cultural production plays a structuring role, contributing to the redefinition of everyday urban experience and expanding the city's symbolic references.
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In Hong Kong, where interiors and small buildings are routinely caught between two extremes—high-gloss "luxury" finishes on one end, and budget-cautious industrial roughness on the other—a third attitude has emerged through the calibration of both: a uniquely precise, relevant, and materially honest execution that is not dependent on price point. This is calibrated rawness. Calibrated rawness describes an architecture that retains the directness of matter and materiality—concrete, metal, blockwork, exposed structure, visible services—while subjecting it to rigorous control.
The "raw" is not a costume, and the "refined" is not polished; it is a discipline of precise execution, producing spaces that feel balanced and considered, yet never "made up" or overworked. Studio 1:1 demonstrates this attitude consistently across its work—and its upcoming publication, Architecture under the Radar: Three Projects in Asia (with a foreword by Nader Tehrani), offers a timely frame through which to read this ethos as more than an aesthetic, but as a repeatable architectural method.
Porous City / MVRDV and The Why Factory. Image Courtesy of Frans Parthesius, MVRDV and The Why Factory
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
Every architectural epoch has been defined by its instruments. The compass, the drawing board, the camera, and the computer have each altered how architects think and produce. Yet the current moment feels qualitatively different. As artificial intelligence and generative systems enter daily workflows, tools cease to be passive extensions of the architect's hand and begin to operate as semi-autonomous agents. They propose, optimize, and simulate, producing outcomes that are, at times, beyond the author's full anticipation.
