-
Architects: FORM / Kouichi Kimura Architects
- Area: 78 m²
- Year: 2025
Room 1101 / FORM / Kouichi Kimura Architects
https://www.archdaily.com/1038624/room-1101-form-kouichi-kimura-architectsMiwa Negoro
Preserving historic buildings requires simultaneously addressing technical, environmental, and regulatory demands while maintaining the material, cultural, and symbolic continuity of what already exists. As the understanding consolidates that the most sustainable building is the one that is already standing, and that preservation also involves construction knowledge, material traditions, and the social fabrics from which they emerged, these same buildings are increasingly confronted with more rigorous contemporary parameters. Energy efficiency, safety, carbon emission reduction, and regulatory compliance have become unavoidable references, placing architecture before a central tension: how to update what already exists without breaking the continuity that sustains its heritage value.
Following the release of seven shortlisted proposals in 2025 through an online gallery, the Foundation for the Development of the Lands Adjacent to the Baptism Site has announced the winner of the international design competition for the Museum of Jesus' Baptism at Bethany, Jordan. Managed by Malcolm Reading Consultants, the six-month invited competition brought together architect-led multidisciplinary teams to design a museum and landscape project responding to the sacred character of Al-Maghtas, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. After finalist interviews conducted by an international Advisory Panel, the team led by Níall McLaughlin Architects (NMLA) was selected as the competition winner.
The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics officially opened on Friday, February 6, with a ceremony staged across four locations in northern Italy. The main opening event took place at San Siro Stadium, one of Milan's most significant modernist landmarks, and combined dance and performing arts, referencing Italian culture with performances by international artists, including pop star Mariah Carey. Although several competitions had already begun on February 4, the opening ceremony marked the start of a broader programme of sporting, social, and cultural events distributed across Milan and the three Alpine host areas: Cortina d'Ampezzo, Valtellina, and Val di Fiemme. The Games are scheduled to run until February 22, concluding with a closing ceremony at the Verona Arena, ahead of the Paralympic Games, which will take place from March 6 to 15. As a large-scale international event, the Olympics place significant demands on sports infrastructure, transportation networks, accommodation, and tourism capacity, offering early indications of the longer-term urban, architectural, and territorial impacts the Games may leave behind.
Educational architecture remains an exploratory ground for unbuilt exploration, offering insight into how learning environments can evolve alongside changing social, ecological, and pedagogical values. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected projects bring together a range of proposals that examine schools, libraries, nurseries, and academic centers as spatial frameworks for care, knowledge, and collective growth. Rather than treating education as a fixed program housed within singular buildings, these projects approach learning spaces as adaptive environments shaped by landscape, climate, and human interaction.
Across varied geographies, from Mediterranean hillsides and Central European courtyards to tropical cities and distributed campus models, the proposals explore diverse architectural responses to contemporary education. They range from child-scaled kindergartens organized around trees and cloisters to libraries conceived as civic landscapes, biodiversity-centered academic buildings, and schools imagined as walkable urban systems.
Can architecture be built from food? Between the fire that warms, the smells that spread, and the bodies that gather around the table, the apparent banality of cooking and eating reveals itself as a choreographed dance of spatial appropriation and belonging. These gestures organize routines, produce bonds, and transform the built environment into lived place. The kitchen—domestic, communal, or urban—thus ceases to be merely a functional space and affirms itself as a territory of encounter.
