The concept of "eyes on the street" is perhaps the most famous within architectural and urban literature when it comes to urban security. Jane Jacobs uses this expression to refer to people who - consciously or unconsciously - use public spaces or observe them from their homes, generating natural surveillance. A movement that, within our discipline, is encouraged both through quality public spaces and through the powerful relationship between the public and private created through building facades. Advocating for this daily control, Jacobs believes in a way of making architecture and cities that condemns excessive verticalization, reinforced by isolated buildings and single-use ones that deny contact with the street.

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Scaffolding is perhaps one of architecture's most familiar temporary structures. It accompanies buildings through construction, maintenance, and renovation, only to disappear once its work is complete. Yet its apparent impermanence conceals a different kind of longevity. Scaffolding systems are designed to be assembled, dismantled, transported, and reused, with standardized components robust enough to withstand repeated handling and changing site conditions. Their temporary character lies less in the material itself than in the duration of each assembly.

This logic is not unfamiliar in furniture design. Dieter Rams's 606 Universal Shelving System, designed for Vitsœ in 1960, established a modular approach in which shelves, cabinets, and other components could be rearranged, expanded, or transported as circumstances changed. Similarly, IKEA's modular storage systems popularized and demonstrated how furniture can be understood as a collection of interchangeable parts rather than a singular, finished object. Although different in material and intended lifespan, these systems share an important principle: longevity can be achieved through adaptability rather than permanence of arrangement.

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When London's main drainage was completed north of the Thames in 1868, the Metropolitan Board of Works marked the occasion with a banquet held inside a sewage pumping station. Abbey Mills had been built over the previous three years by the engineer Joseph Bazalgette, working with the architect Charles Driver, laid out on a cruciform plan with eight beam engines, two on each arm. Its style has been read as Byzantine, Italian Medieval, Russian, Ruskinian Gothic and Moorish, and its twin ventilation chimneys, richly ornamented, rose more than sixty meters. The builder called it an elegant structure in a swamp and thought it might pass for a mosque or a temple.

Almost everything else Bazalgette built was buried, and the exception did not last the century. Steam gave way to electric motors at Abbey Mills in 1933, and the chimneys, redundant since then, were demolished in 1941 out of fear that a bomb strike would topple them onto the station. Sanitary engineering consolidated around criteria that could be measured, among them throughput, discharge quality and hydraulic gradient, and appearance registered in none of them. Treatment moved outward to floodplains, estuaries and municipal edges where land was cheap, and gravity did useful work.

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"Architecture must return to its essence." With this statement, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu establish the central premise of their curatorial vision for the 20th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, taking place from May 8 to November 21, 2027, across the Giardini, the Arsenale, and throughout Venice. Titled "Do Architecture – For the Possibility of Coexistence Facing a Real Reality", the exhibition calls for a return to the physical act of making architecture, at a time when, according to the curators, the discipline has become increasingly disconnected from lived reality through excessive abstraction, commercialization, and digitalization.

Rather than focusing on what architecture might become, the curators propose a renewed engagement with the present, questioning what it means to practice architecture today through materials, construction, local knowledge, and direct experience. This approach builds on ideas that have long informed the work of Amateur Architecture Studio, founded by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu in 1997, particularly their exploration of traditional building techniques, material reuse, and the relationship between architecture and place.The exhibition also places the question of coexistence at its center, exploring how architecture can bring together seemingly opposing conditions, from technology and craftsmanship to urban and rural ways of building, while remaining grounded in the specific realities of each place.

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The Shanghai Grand Opera House, designed by Snøhetta in collaboration with East China Architectural Design & Research Institute (ECADI), Theatre Projects, and Nagata Acoustics, officially opened on October 17, 2026, along the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. The opening marks the completion of a cultural project selected through an international design competition in 2016 and developed over the following decade. Located in the Expo Houtan district, the 146,786-square-meter building brings together three performance venues, production facilities, and publicly accessible spaces as part of the ongoing transformation of Shanghai's waterfront.

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On paper, entering an architecture competition is one of the most challenging things an architecture student can do. What draws students to them is the chance to experiment, approaching a loosely defined program that leaves room to test unconventional ideas and unfamiliar tools outside the rhythm of the semester. That distance from assessment is a relatively recent development, as competitions were once central to architectural education.

At the École des Beaux-Arts, teaching was split between the atelier, where students developed projects under a practising architect, and the competition, where a jury of professors judged the students' work without having followed its development. This model was later brought to schools such as MIT, Penn, and Cornell by French-trained instructors. Over time, most schools held on to the atelier, which became the design studio, and pushed the competition to the edges of the curriculum.

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