In recent decades, cities across the world have seen an increase in the demolition of elevated concrete freeways. Taipei, Seoul, Portland, and Boston, for example, have all seen the rise and fall of these infrastructures to give way to parks and new urban regeneration ideas. In other cases, like Montreal in Canada, some people opposed the freeways even before they were built, effectively rerouting viaducts, preserving heritage, and freeing waterfront views. For San Francisco, in the United States, the story of the Embarcadero Freeway is one of those narratives that serves as a case study of the city's mid-century infrastructural ambition, people's reaction to the project, and its eventual reversal in favor of urban connectivity.
Buildner has launched the Unbuilt Award 2026, the third edition of its annual competition, offering a €100,000 prize fund. At the same time, the results of the Unbuilt Award 2025 have been announced, marking the second competition in a series that celebrates architectural designs that have yet to be realized. The initiative provides a global platform for architects and designers to showcase their most compelling unbuilt projects—whether conceptual, published, unpublished, or fully developed.
Photographer Paul Clemence documented the Gateway Centre in West Kowloon, a mixed-use development by Zaha Hadid Architects in Hong Kong, as it approaches completion. The photo series captures the project at a stage where its overall massing, facade systems, and spatial organization are largely realized, while final works continue across public and interior areas. Clemence's close-range views highlight the vertical shading pleats, the curvature of the glazed envelope, and the transitions between structural and environmental elements, underscoring how the building's formal language is resolved through construction.
Across Europe and North America, pedestrianisation is increasingly being deployed as a context-specific urban strategy shaped by distinct economic, social, and spatial pressures. As cities continue to reassess the role of streets in the wake of economic shifts, climate pressures, and changing mobility patterns, pedestrianisation is emerging as a tool in current urban transformation efforts. Across London, New York, Houston, and Stockholm, ongoing pedestrian-first projects are testing different pathways toward more resilient and walkable cities, ranging from statutory planning and capital construction to research-driven visioning. London's Oxford Street is advancing through consultation and governance reform to address retail decline; New York's Paseo Park is moving from a temporary pandemic intervention into permanent infrastructure; Houston is accelerating the pedestrianisation of its downtown core in preparation for a global sporting event; and Stockholm's Superline is using design research to rethink the future of an inner-city motorway. These initiatives reveal how pedestrianisation is being actively negotiated, designed, and built today, adapting to local motivations while converging on a shared objective of streets that perform as resilient public spaces rather than traffic conduits.
Studio NEiDA operates at the intersection of architectural practice, research, and curatorial work, with a consistent focus on how buildings emerge from the material and cultural conditions of a place. Rather than treating materiality as a finishing language, the studio frames it as the beginning of an architectural narrative—starting from what is locally available, they look at what craft knowledge exists on the ground, and how those resources and skills situate a project within an architectural lineage. This approach foregrounds limitations and possibilities as productive forces, and positions design as an iterative process of aligning spatial intent with the realities of construction culture and vernacular intelligence.
Across their work, NEiDA's interests extend beyond form toward the socio-political and climatic contexts that shape how architecture is made and inhabited. They emphasize learning from non-authored, vernacular, and informal building practices as a way of establishing a shared grammar for intervention, and they describe an indoor–outdoor continuity not as a stylistic preference but as a response to local life and ventilation logics—where outdoor rooms can be as spatially defined and programmatically central as interior ones. Collaboration, in this framework, is not auxiliary: the studio highlights on-site exchange with craftspeople and builders as a core methodology, where projects evolve through collective intelligence and adaptive communication.
