"Design a cultural center on a desert coastline, in the style of Alvar Aalto, wood structure, golden hour, aerial drone shot, photorealistic, 4K." Within seconds, a line like this returns a convincing image. What is less visible is the shift it demands. For centuries, architectural imagination relied on the body: the hand that sketches, the fingers that shape a model, or, more recently, the click of a mouse in computational tools. Words came afterward, to explain what had already taken form. Today, the order is increasingly reversed. Before an image can exist, it must first be described: its references named, its materials listed, its mood specified.

This translation is not trivial. Intuition rarely arrives as a written sentence, and much of what architects imagine resists description. Yet as words increasingly become the entry point to the image, they also shape what can be imagined. The vocabulary available to describe a space begins to define the space itself.

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The second edition of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards is now open for submissions, and this year we are proud to present it in partnership with Dropcity, a center for architecture and design in Milan. Together, we are asking students around the world one question: What can architecture enable in the city?

At ArchDaily, we believe the future of architecture takes shape today in classrooms, studios, and workshops around the world. Guided by our mission to empower architects and designers with tools, knowledge, and inspiration, the Student Project Awards recognize students who expand the definition of architecture, work across disciplines, and engage with the urgent challenges of our time.

Water is life. Animals, plants, fungi, and bacteria all depend on it: water structures their cells, carries their nutrients, and hosts the chemistry that keeps them alive. Even the rare exceptions confirm the rule. Some seeds and spores can lose nearly all their water and enter a dormancy so deep that their metabolism almost stops, yet it is water that brings them back. In the most literal sense, water connects us.

But it also divides us. Every year, thousands of people leave North Africa in overcrowded boats bound for Lampedusa, seeking better living conditions in Europe; more than 30,000 have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014. Water draws borders and controls flows. Before the war on Iran began in February 2026, the Strait of Hormuz carried around 25% of the world's seaborne crude oil, with effects felt in fuel prices far from the Gulf. Water also sits at the center of the environmental debate, where its excess can be as lethal as its absence. Severe floods increasingly strike countries that have contributed least to global emissions, while the largest polluters remain better equipped to resist. If water is life, it can also mean death. Ultimately, water is political.

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What makes a building worth preserving? Age is the most common answer, but not always the best one. A building from the 1950s or 70s may carry as much historical significance as a medieval cathedral; it simply demands a different framework, one that weighs political context, cultural meaning, and architectural innovation over the mere passage of time. This is especially true for modernist architecture across the so-called Global South, where the movement took on unique forms of expression.

It is precisely this conversation that ArchDaily and World Monuments Fund are now opening together. WMF brings on-the-ground conservation expertise across the world, and ArchDaily brings the editorial capacity to contextualize that work and connect it to a global audience. The goal is to do both at once: preserve places and tell their stories, shaping how modernist heritage is understood far beyond the field of preservation itself.

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This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.

For centuries, most of the world has looked at itself through a 16th-century instrument of spatial representation. On September 4, the United Nations General Assembly voted to change that, adopting a resolution that asks governments, schools, media organizations, and technology companies to retire the Mercator projection wherever the relative size of countries actually matters, in favor of equal-area alternatives like the 2018 Equal Earth projection. The vote passed 164 to 1. The United States was the sole vote against.

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Since its launch in 2020, the ArchDaily Next Practices Awards have spotlighted forward-thinking architecture practices that are redefining the boundaries of the discipline. Over five editions, the initiative has recognized 105 practices from 44 countries, amplifying voices from around the world and fostering a global conversation about architecture's evolving role in society. Across the winning practices, recurring values emerge: contextual sensitivity, sustainable material use, co-creation with communities, experimental and interdisciplinary approaches, memory and heritage, social responsibility, and human-scale interventions.

The program reflects what is next: the ideas, practices, and projects that should be brought forward. 'Next' embodies practices that find solutions to today's urgent challenges while anticipating the needs of tomorrow. By spotlighting these practices, we hope to illuminate the paths that can lead to a more meaningful and resilient future for architecture and beyond.

Applications for this year are now closed. 

ArchDaily was born within a university, founded by two architecture students who believed that architectural knowledge should reach further than it did at the time. Eighteen years later, that conviction remains unchanged — but perspectives, tools, and opportunities have grown. We launched the Student Ambassador Program to give the next generation of architects a direct role in bridging their universities with the global architectural conversation.

At a moment when architects across the globe are revisiting earthen construction, reassessing vernacular technologies, and forging visceral connections between communities and the land beneath their feet, others are sketching habitats for the Moon and designing the built environments of a Martian colony. Architecture firms, engineers, and space agencies are investing serious intellectual effort into structures that would need to be raised from scratch on another world. Two impulses, one returning to the soil, the other reaching for the stars, are unfolding simultaneously within the same discipline. And the tension between them raises an uncomfortable question: what, exactly, are we trying to escape?

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ArchDaily is looking for Social Media Collaborators to join our content team. Our Social Media Teams transform ArchDaily's content into engaging, high-performing digital formats for various social media channels.

Your role involves hands-on content creation and repackaging, as well as a high degree of collaboration and creativity to amplify architectural ideas to a global audience.

Elia Zenghelis, Greek architect, co-founder of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), and one of the most influential architectural educators of the late twentieth century, died on August 30, 2026, at the age of 89. His death marks the passing of a figure whose influence on architectural thought extended far beyond the buildings he designed, shaping the intellectual formation of several generations of architects through decades of teaching across Europe and the United States.

Born in Athens in 1937, Zenghelis studied architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, completing his studies in 1961. He joined the practice of Douglas Stephen and Partners, where he worked until 1971, while simultaneously beginning to teach at the AA in 1963. At the school, he became a prominent voice for a more radical, avant-garde architectural discourse, helping to transform the AA into a fertile ground for radical ideas.

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.

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Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism has announced that Guggenheim Abu Dhabi will open to the public on December 11, 2026, on Saadiyat Island. The museum, designed by the late Frank Gehry, becomes the fourth institution in the Guggenheim's global network, joining outposts in New York, Venice, and Bilbao.

The project was first announced in 2006. Construction began in 2011, was suspended for several years amid economic strain and contract changes, and resumed in 2019. A 2025 completion date, set in 2021, ultimately slipped to this December. 

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Barcelona has just become the first city in the history of the UIA World Congress of Architects to host the event twice. Thirty years separate the two editions, and the distance between them says as much about architecture's changing self-understanding as anything spoken from a stage. In 1996, the congress placed the city at the center of the debate, consolidating a post-Olympic urban model that would go on to be studied and contested for decades.

In 2026, under the theme "Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition," Barcelona hosted a very different conversation. The congress's curatorial team — Pau Bajet, Mariona Benedito, Maria Giramé, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella, and Carmen Torres — organized the program around six thematic lines: Becoming More-than-human, Becoming Circular, Becoming Embodied, Becoming Interdependent, Becoming Hyper-Conscious, and Becoming Attuned. As they told ArchDaily ahead of the opening, the premise behind this structure was that most architectural decisions are, in practice, very specific — which material is used, what is demolished or preserved, how much water or energy a building consumes — yet those specific decisions carry planetary implications.

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The archive of more than 40 years of professional activity by architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça will be integrated into Casa da Arquitectura, reinforcing the national scope of the institution's collection. The signing ceremony will take place this Saturday, February 15, at 3:30 p.m., at the CA Archive premises.

Registration is now open for the 7th edition of the Saint-Gobain Architecture Award – Sustainable Habitat. Professionals and students may submit their architectural projects until November 11 via the website www.premiosaintgobain.com.br

Fernando Guerra, one of the most prolific photographers in the field of architecture, is set to be the subject of a documentary directed by Sara Nunes and produced by Portugal's Building Pictures. The Flying Photographer, the film's working title, is drawn from a dedication by Álvaro Siza, an architect whose works and life Guerra has been extensively documenting.

A massive fire caused the collapse of a 22-story skyscraper in downtown São Paulo overnight. Located at the intersection of Avenida Rio Branco and Largo Paissandu, near Vale do Anhangabaú, the building previously served as the headquarters of the Federal Police and was occupied by about 90 families from a housing movement.

According to residents, the fire started around 1:30 a.m. following an explosion on the fifth floor and quickly spread throughout the structure, also affecting neighboring buildings, such as the Martin Luther Church located on the square and another high-rise facing the collapsed structure.

Videos

The open course Arquitetura Paulistana, organized by Marco Artigas, took students to visit the Congonhas Airport Pedestrian Bridge project, designed by Estúdio Artigas in partnership with the firm H2C Arquitetura. Begun in 2014, the project took four years to complete and featured the participation of Nitsche Arquitetos, who were responsible for the project's visual communication.