Having explored adaptability at the city scale, we are now zooming in on the building itself—and, crucially, on practice. How can architects, developers, and consultants embed adaptability as a measurable, mainstream outcome? This question will be on the agenda at the Adaptable Building Conference (ABC) on January 22 at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, where architects, engineers, policymakers, and industry leaders will explore the potential of adaptable buildings—and how to deliver them at scale.
Reflecting on the modern city, Walter Benjamin described the flâneur, a figure who walks without a defined destination, attentive to details, chance encounters, and the narratives that emerge from urban space. This way of being in the city, shaped by observation and openness to the unexpected, has long been in tension with the rationalist and functionalist ideals that came to guide urban planning throughout the twentieth century. Streets designed primarily for efficiency and flow rarely leave room for detours, pauses, or the coexistence of different rhythms of life.
Jane Jacobs was also one of the voices that challenged this predominantly rationalist logic, arguing that truly vibrant streets are those capable of sustaining the diversity of everyday life, its informal exchanges, and the forms of care and natural surveillance that emerge from them. What these authors share is a fundamental insight: streets are not merely infrastructures for circulation, but social ecosystems, shaped by the relationships, uses, and encounters that take place within them.
In a balance of aesthetics, performance, and versatility, HIMACS shows a solid surface material of choice for many architects and designers. Taking a further step forward, the entire range of standard HIMACS sinks and basins is now officially SCS certified, containing a minimum of 8% pre-consumer recycled content. This certification enhances the material's technical and visual appeal by providing a more sustainable option without compromising quality or functionality.
From bathroom vanities with integrated basins to kitchen islands with flush-mounted sinks, HIMACS shapes offer a seamless balance of style and function. Each component integrates effortlessly with the surrounding HIMACS surface, creating a continuous, grout-free finish that is both elegant and easy to maintain.
Qalandiya Rendering. Image Courtesy of RIWAQ – Centre for Architectural Conservation
Qalandiya: the Green Historic Maze, developed by RIWAQ – Centre for Architectural Conservation, has been awarded the Grand Prize at the Holcim Foundation Awards 2025, recognizing its sensitive and deeply contextual approach to heritage conservation in Palestine, selected among the 20 winners of this year's edition. Located in Qalandiya, north of Jerusalem, the project reactivates a historic village center long affected by political fragmentation, neglect, and spatial disconnection. Through an incremental rehabilitation strategy, the project restores deteriorated structures using traditional knowledge, local stone masonry, and native materials, transforming abandoned fabric into active public spaces while reinforcing environmental resilience through passive climate strategies and landscape-based infrastructure.
Malabo served as the capital city of Equatorial Guinea from the country's independence from Spain on October 12, 1968, until January 2, 2026, when a decree issued by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo officially transferred the capital to Ciudad de la Paz ("City of Peace"), located in Djibloho Province. Obiang formalized the move as part of a long-planned territorial reorganization. While the former capital remains an important economic center on Bioko Island, Ciudad de la Paz was conceived as a planned capital on Africa's mainland. The initiative to relocate the capital dates back to 2008, with construction beginning in 2011. The new capital, also referred to as Djibloho, after the province, or Oyala, has been framed by the government as a decentralization effort aimed at improving national accessibility.
Cultural institutions represent an active field for unbuilt architectural exploration, reflecting how architects continue to question the role of public buildings in shaping urban life. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected proposals bring together a range of projects that engage with museums, exhibition centers, and diplomatic buildings as sites of public encounter. Rather than treating these programs as fixed types, these projects approach them as evolving spatial settings through which cities engage with history, knowledge, and representation.
Across varied geographies, from Wenzhou and Helsinki to Belgrade, Debrecen, Mexico City, and Nürnberg, the proposals explore different responses to contemporary cultural architecture. They range from adaptive reuse of industrial and ideological structures to new buildings embedded in waterfronts, parks, and residential neighborhoods. While some emphasize continuity with historical contexts, others experiment with lighter structures, environmental strategies, or new relationships between interior programs and the public realm. Together, they offer a snapshot of how cultural institutions are being reimagined in diverse urban conditions.
Throughout history, fish markets have played a singular role in mediating the relationship between city and sea. From the port agoras of antiquity, through medieval markets established along docks and estuaries, to the large covered structures of the 19th century, these spaces have been instrumental in shaping coastal cities. More than simple infrastructures for food supply, fish markets express cultural practices and modes of occupation rooted in proximity to water, consolidating themselves as intense and highly social public spaces. Within them, architecture, landscape, and social dynamics intertwine directly, revealing how the built environment can translate maritime traditions and reinforce the identity of coastal and port communities.
The 2026 Color of the Year selections show a shift toward nuanced, layered palettes and understated spatial calm, moving beyond the saturated earth tones of previous forecasts. Pantone's Cloud Dancer, a soft white, sets a foundation of clarity and simplicity, while Sherwin-Williams and C2 Paint highlight the versatility of mid-tone neutrals and soft ochres, emphasizing material authenticity and adaptability across different interior surfaces and lighting conditions. Benjamin Moore and Graham & Brown explore deeper, atmospheric hues that balance warm and cool undertones, and Behr, Valspar, and AkzoNobel introduce muted greens and blue-based tones aimed at creating restorative, composed, and visually engaging interiors.
New Manchester United Stadium aerial render. Image Courtesy of Foster + Partners
During 2025, several sports infrastructure projects were announced that remain on our radar, most of which are scheduled for completion between 2028 and 2030. Located across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North America, these projects reflect contemporary masterplan strategies for the transformation of large sports venues within their urban contexts. Many of the stadiums are planned as part of broader redevelopment frameworks that include new public spaces, mixed-use programs, event facilities, and mobility upgrades, rather than as isolated structures. Designs led by international offices such as Populous, Foster + Partners, Heatherwick Studio, OMA, Gensler, AFL Architects, and VUILD illustrate a range of architectural, urban, and infrastructural responses to the evolving role of large sports facilities.
The potential of existing buildings to shape cities and communities in flux through reuse and adaptation is the key focus of HouseEurope! and their activism: addressing the pressing challenge across much of Europe, where it is often easier, cheaper, and faster to demolish buildings than to renovate. For decades, construction policies, industrial practices, and market systems have favored new development, often undervaluing the cultural, social, and environmental significance of existing structures. For their work advocating systemic change in architecture, HouseEurope! received the 2025 OBEL Award under the theme "Ready Made." In a conversation with ArchDaily, collective members of HouseEurope! Alina Kolar and Olaf Grawert discussed the organization's approach to architecture, policy, and collective action.
In recent years, food has taken on a renewed role within architecture, not simply as a program or typology, but as a shared spatial practice. Beyond restaurants or dining design, communal eating spaces are increasingly understood as environments where presence, ritual, and time intersect, allowing people to gather, stay, and coexist. In these settings, eating does not just happen within space; it actively shapes it, temporarily transforming ordinary, borrowed, or improvised environments into places of exchange.
This shift is visible across a wide range of built projects, installations, and community spaces that use shared meals as a way of bringing people together. Initiatives such as Fondo Supper Club frame dining as a social platform, using food to connect artists, designers, and local communities through conversation and collaboration. Similarly, sit.feast, presented during Milan Design Week 2024, approached the table as a spatial installation, one where sitting and eating together became the primary means of collectively producing space.
Wonder Cabinet / AAU ANASTAS. Image Courtesy of AAU ANASTAS
Among the 2025 Aga Khan Award winners is AAU Anastas and their project, Wonder Cabinet in Palestine, whose central aim is to serve as a haven for culture and creativity and a bridge between design and production. Beyond this meaningful project, AAU Anastas—working from offices in Bethlehem, Palestine, and Paris, France—has built a broad portfolio since 2015. Notable works include Dar Al Majous, a restoration in Bethlehem that challenges the boundary between domestic and public realms; the Tulkarm Courthouse (2015), one of their first projects that redefined civicness and social gathering on a prominent corner site in Tulkarm; and The Flat Vault, a commercial intervention that adds a juxtaposed stone vault to an existing monastery shop associated with a church built in the 12th century by the Crusaders.
Among these compelling works, Wonder Cabinet likely drew the jury's attention not only for its refined execution and layered spatial complexity, but also for how it operates as a socially generative platform—dissolving the boundary between social infrastructure and architecture. Conceived to support culture, creativity, design, and production, the building aspires to host architects, designers, chefs, artisans, and sound and visual artists, among others. In no small way, it advances the spirit articulated by the 2025 judges, who characterized this cycle as a year of fostering resilience and optimism through design, by demonstrating how architecture can catalyze community and enterprise simultaneously.
The opening of the new Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris last October sparked renewed questions around the role, form, and future of museums. As cultural institutions continue to proliferate worldwide in this digital era, the museum itself appears increasingly in need of redefinition. Rather than offering a single model or solution, Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums, written by architectural historian and curator Béatrice Grenier, argues for a more contextual and plural understanding of what a museum can be: an institution shaped by its environment, its public, and the specific cultural questions it seeks to address.
ArchDaily had the opportunity to discuss these ideas with the author against the backdrop of the Fondation Cartier's newly inaugurated home on Rue de Rivoli. Housed within a restored Haussmannian building that once accommodated the Grands Magasins du Louvre, the space has been radically reimagined by Jean Nouvel as a dynamic, transformable architecture.
The making of a place is not a difficult thing in principle; it is enough for people to come together in a regular set location for a purpose or activity, and a space becomes. This does not disregard the fact that a physical element needs to accompany this gathering for a space to become sheltering, accommodating, and alluring. This idea of the space that emerges from intent can most definitely be seen in one of the most ancient of functions, which is food or produce markets.
For a market to become, the architectural element can be as simple as a light roof, which would harbor merchants and offer a non-spoken boundary to the place, or it can be as resourceful as adaptively reusing an existing building or site to fit new needs. Finally, it can be a temporary and lightweight structure pitched for certain events or needs and then removed to be used elsewhere, or for other means.
Set to open on January 19, 2026, the Sydney Fish Market marks the first completed project within the broader renewal of Blackwattle Bay on Sydney's inner harbour. Designed by 3XN in collaboration with BVN and Aspect Studios, and delivered by Multiplex, the purpose-built facility replaces the former market with a contemporary structure that combines an operating wholesale fish market with retail, dining, and publicly accessible waterfront spaces. Positioned approximately one mile southwest of Sydney's central business district, the project reframes one of the world's largest fish markets by volume as both working infrastructure and a civic destination.
Every architectural project is the result of deliberate choices. Beyond form and function, buildings embody technical, political, and cultural decisions that shape their relationship with both their surroundings and the people who inhabit them. ArchDaily’s AD Narratives series explores these processes by bringing together accounts that trace projects from initial conception to built realization. In parallel, the AD Classics series turns to works of historical significance, presenting not only the stories behind these buildings but also technical drawings that allow for a deeper, more informed reading of their architecture.
Indian modernism is often narrated through a narrow lens: a handful of iconic institutions, master architects, and formally radical experiments that came to symbolize the nation's post-Independence aspirations. Yet this version of history overlooks the far larger body of modernist architecture that quietly shaped everyday life across the country. Beyond celebrated campuses and canonical buildings exists a vast, dispersed landscape of housing blocks, offices, hostels, hospitals, markets, and townships — structures that were designed to function and endure.
Taking a deeper look at the interplay of light and shadow in architecture seems to be a recurring topic on the agenda of many professionals in the field. Spaces of light and darkness are conceived to enhance circulation and spatial directionality, as well as to highlight the colors, textures, and forms of specific architectural elements. That said, the impact of natural light on building facades reveals the need to develop strategies that support energy savings, improve the thermal and visual comfort of interior spaces, and promote the reduction of carbon emissions. Considering light as another material in architecture, in what ways could its power contribute to the architectural experience?
The past year marked a defining moment in ArchDaily's evolution: a year of recalibration, intention, and renewed editorial purpose.
In an increasingly fast-moving and saturated media landscape, we took the opportunity to ask the fundamental questions: What does architectural media need to be today? What responsibilities do we carry as a global platform? And how can we contribute meaningfully to a profession navigating social, environmental, and cultural transformation?
And by engaging deeply with these reflections, we stepped fully into our role, bringing greater definition to who ArchDaily is and how it operates.
This week's news compilation brings together current discussions around public and collective space, cultural infrastructure, and long-term urban transformation across diverse geographic contexts. From shared management models redefining public space ownership in cities such as Paris and New York, to large-scale event-driven initiatives linked to Milano Cortina 2026 and the World Urban Forum in Baku, the selected projects and initiatives highlight how governance, culture, and infrastructure intersect in contemporary practice. These themes are further developed through a mix of strategic planning processes, including international test planning efforts in Northern Lviv, and built projects spanning education, culture, and temporary architecture, from a new dental teaching facility in Blantyre, Malawi, to restored and newly opened cultural venues in the United States and Taiwan, and adaptive reuse interventions showcased at the ChicagoArchitecture Biennial. The international examples outline an architectural landscape shaped by reuse, public engagement, and the evolving role of design in responding to social, cultural, and institutional frameworks.
Courtesy of [applied] Foreign Affairs, Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Long before architecture took the form of walls, roofs, or cities, it gathered people around fire. The simple fire pit was one of humanity's earliest spatial devices: a place for warmth, food, storytelling, and ritual. Around it, space took shape through proximity rather than enclosure, through shared presence rather than prescribed use. The fire organized bodies in a circle, fostered alliances, and turned survival into collective life. Today, this ancestral logic persists: architecture has the potential of bringing people together not by commanding how they gather, but by creating the conditions that make togetherness possible.
This month, ArchDaily explores Coming Together and the Making of Place, a topic that examines architecture as a framework for inclusion, care, and belonging. The theme aligns with the first edition of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards, which approach care from a collective perspective by focusing on spaces that nurture better ways of living together. Looking beyond iconic gathering spaces, the coverage considers everyday environments, from food markets, communal tables, and neighborhood plazas to third spaces, domestic settings, and digital or hybrid environments of remote togetherness. Rather than treating togetherness as a fixed program, it asks how spatial design can support openness, diversity, and collective life without enforcing uniform ways of gathering.
