What architecture leaves in the ground outlasts what it puts in the air. A demolished building disappears from the skyline in a matter of days, but its foundations remain embedded in the soil for generations. The contamination caused by an industrial complex does not clear when the complex is torn down. The legal boundaries inscribed across colonial territory do not dissolve when the colonial administration ends. The ground holds what architecture quickly forgets.
This is what makes soil so uncomfortable as a subject. The discipline tends to orient itself upward, toward the form, the façade, the spatial experience of inhabitation. The ground is where architecture begins and, in a certain sense, where it ends: the point at which building becomes geology, legal title becomes territorial claim, and construction becomes extraction. Treating soil as a medium rather than a datum means acknowledging that the acts of building carry consequences that run deeper than the visible object above grade.
Buildner has announced the results of its Museum of Emotions Competition Edition 7. The Museum of Emotions is an annual international design competition that tasks participants to explore the extent to which architecture can be used as a tool to evoke emotion.
The brief calls for the design of a conceptual museum with two exhibition halls: one designed to induce negative emotions; the other designed to induce positive emotions. Participants are free to choose any site of their liking, real or imaginary, as well as choose the scale of the project. The meaning of 'positive' and 'negative' is up for interpretation: What two emotions might a designer consider contrasting? How might an architect conceive spaces which elicit fear, anger, anxiety, love or happiness?
Moving from the drafting table to the computer screen, the digitization of drawings and documentation marked the first phase of digital transformation in architecture firms. The second introduced BIM, connecting project information through cloud platforms and collaborative workflows. Nowadays, a new phase is emerging, defined by artificial intelligence, automation, and more specialized software ecosystems. The paradox is that while previous phases were dominated by a small number of tools, today's landscape offers an abundance of highly specialized, AI-enabled, and often overlapping solutions competing for attention. While purchasing new software is often the easiest part of digital transformation, the greater challenge lies in changing established workflows and behaviors, which is why many new tools struggle to achieve lasting adoption.
The Icelandic Pavilion at the 20th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia will present SOAK: Rituals of Collective Belonging, an exhibition examining Iceland's bathing culture through the lens of architecture, public space, and social interaction. Commissioned by Halla Helgadóttir, Iceland Design and Architecture, the project is curated by Marcos Zotes, partner at Basalt Architects, and developed through a multidisciplinary collaboration between Basalt Architects, design studio Gagarin, and artist Rán Flygenring. SOAK marks the second Icelandic participation in the Architecture Biennale selected through an open call process, following Lavaforming by s.ap architects, which represented Iceland at the 2025 edition.
The Palace of Congresses renovation project. Terrace staircase render. Image Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron
On June 3, 2026, Herzog & de Meuron was selected to revitalize the Palace of Congresses building in Tirana, Albania. The project was designed along with collaborators Julian Beqiri, Marsela Demaj, Michel Desvigne Paysagistes (MDP), ARUP, LDK, Gentian Shkurti, SUEB Industries sh.p.k., The Space Factory Ltd, MBBM, and KLAR sh.p.k. The Palace of Congresses (or Pallati i Kongreseve) was built during the People's Socialist Republic of Albania and opened in 1986 to host the Congresses of the Party of Labour of Albania and other official activities. The International Competition for the Redevelopment of the Palace of Congresses, carried out by the Albanian government, called for a comprehensive transformation of the building while preserving its historical identity. The project should address serious infrastructural issues and bring the Palace to contemporary standards in terms of technology, functionality, and quality of spaces.
Siete Colores Observation Tower. Image Courtesy of Fundación Cosmos
How can architectural design become an active tool for conservation? By considering nature as an inexhaustible source of inspiration, a harmonious connection with it frames the countless interrelationships that exist among humans, living organisms, and natural cycles. Designing with the landscape means learning to coexist with its temporal dynamics without controlling its processes. Traditions, ecology, and the past and present of a place all contribute to creating spaces that interpret their communities. Landscape architecture can draw inspiration from birds, plants, and other natural elements to shape the complex, dynamic network of ecosystems and human activities that make up the environment.
What makes a home resilient? Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly frequent around the world. From power outages, hurricanes, and earthquakes to wildfires, floods, and droughts, the world is experiencing a process of transformation and adaptation that requires collaboration among diverse disciplines. The role of architecture in the built environment reflects an opportunity to rethink how homes perform under changing environmental conditions—not only by anticipating the unexpected. Designing for resilience means thinking holistically, considering material choices, energy systems, landscaping, and construction details that anticipate disruption and help homes recover quickly. It involves creating architecture that evolves with the environment, is worth preserving, and endures for years and generations.
Architects are accustomed to being credited for buildings long after construction ends. Names remain attached to projects through photographs, publications, and histories, often decades after the original drawings were produced. Buildings, on the other hand, rarely remain faithful to that narrative for long. Families grow, technologies change, businesses emerge, and daily life introduces demands that no plan can fully anticipate. Over time, architecture accumulates modifications, repairs, additions, and improvisations that gradually distance it from its original form.
Architectural schools usually leave lasting marks on their students, shaping their style and critical inquiry long after formal education has ended. For example, SCI-Arc, founded in 1972 and based in downtown Los Angeles, is an institution recognized for its culture of experimentation, critical investigation, and creative independence, building a reputation based on the idea that architecture should be understood as a field open to dialogue with art, technology, design, and contemporary culture. The diversity of trajectories of its alumni demonstrates how this environment can generate distinct professional approaches, but united by the same willingness to explore new possibilities.
OMA has completed the Hangzhou Prism, a large-scale mixed-use development in Hangzhou's Future Tech City district, China, following a design and development process that began in 2016. Commissioned by Xinhu Real Estate Group and led by OMA Partner Chris van Duijn, with Michael Hadjistyllis serving as project architect, the project combines residential units, a hotel, offices, commercial spaces, and public amenities within a single building volume. Marking OMA's first completed project in Hangzhou, the development occupies a central site within one of the city's emerging innovation and business districts.
It is afternoon in the summer, and the nave of the Sagrada Família is saturated with warm colors. Shafts of amber and crimson sweep across the stone floor, shift as a cloud passes over Barcelona, then deepen again. Around you, visitors slow without quite realizing it. Some raise their phones — not to capture the architecture, but to step into the light itself, positioning themselves in a pool of orange or gold as if the colours were something you could wear.
They are, without knowing it, doing exactly what Gaudí intended: surrendering, however briefly, to the sensation of being bathed in something larger than themselves.
Tell the Water What the Clay Kept Secret. Image Courtesy of Ola Hassanain
Ola Hassanain is a Sudanese architect and artist operating in the Netherlands, and will be exhibiting at the Pan-African Architecture Biennale in Nairobi, Kenya, later in 2026. All three locations tell stories of the built environment's relationship with water. These illustrate the continuous battles between the amorphous forces of nature that are the rivers and seas, and human attempts to shape and control them. In most cases, they are attempts at extraction. Catastrophes happen as a result of the overreach of these attempts or of their mismanagement, or both.
As the technical requirements of building envelopes have evolved, fire performance has become a key criterion in the design of ventilated facades. Given this situation, analyses no longer focus solely on the individual reaction of materials, but also on the joint response of the entire building envelope under possible scenarios of external fire propagation.
From June 10-12, 2026, 3daysofdesign returns to Copenhagen with a city-wide program of exhibitions, installations, talks, and showroom presentations organized around the theme "Make This Moment Matter." Taking place across eight Design Districts throughout the Danish capital, this year's festival brings together design brands, cultural institutions, studios, and practitioners to explore contemporary questions shaping design and the built environment. As part of the program, Cobe and ArchDaily will host the public launch of a guest-edited edition of Cobe Notes, under the theme Thresholds, at the Cobe Bookcafé, Nordhavn on June 10.
Australian artist, director, and BAFTA-nominated producer Liam Young creates imaginary worlds as a way of thinking through the futures we fear, desire, and are already making. As a creator and designer of atmospheres, he proposes speculative landscapes reflecting the possibilities of a world to come, whether ideal or truthfully unsettling. In his worldbuilding practice across the film, television, and video game industries, fiction becomes a tool for navigating the environmental urgencies of the present. He is considered a "futurist" working across design strategies, technological scenarios, and collective imaginations, grounded in his academic research yet reaching a wider audience in exhibitions such as "In Other Worlds" at the Barbican Centre in London and "Age of Nature" at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen. In February 2026, he was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner for Louisiana Channel, where he shares his visions of our future: from architecture consolidating as a boutique industry to the need for a new kind of planetary punk at the scale of the climate crisis.
When we think of façades, we rarely think of them as habitats. We see them as the elements that separate interior from exterior, regulate temperature, reduce noise, and protect buildings from external conditions. They give architecture its visual language, but they are also expected to keep the outside world at a distance. In doing so, façades have often been understood as barriers: surfaces that define where human comfort begins and where the environment is meant to remain outside.
But the outside of a building is never empty. For centuries, architecture has unintentionally created opportunities for other forms of life. Birds nested beneath roof tiles, insects occupied cracks in masonry walls, and mosses or plants took root along ledges, gutters, and rough stone surfaces. These conditions were rarely designed with other species in mind, but they created small opportunities for life to inhabit them.
For much of the twentieth century, architectural culture was shaped by the pursuit of lightness. Steel structures and curtain walls reduced the building envelope to a thin layer separating interior from exterior, while façades became smooth, continuous surfaces where windows were cut as precise openings within an abstract plane. But for centuries, buildings were conceived as bodies of mass; walls possessed depth, windows were recessed within thick masonry, and space was often experienced as something carved from the solidity of construction. In recent years, several contemporary projects appear to revisit this older spatial logic, reintroducing thickness as an architectural condition through deep openings, monolithic volumes, and heavy envelopes.
This shift does not imply a rejection of modern construction technologies, nor does it represent a nostalgic return to historical forms. Instead, it reflects a renewed interest in the fundamental relationship between material, mass, and void. By reintroducing thickness into the architectural vocabulary, these buildings reconnect contemporary practice with long-standing traditions in which space was inseparable from the weight and depth of construction.
A housing block in New Belgrade appears orderly from a distance. Concrete slabs repeat with disciplined consistency, windows align into measured grids, and balconies stack with the confidence of a system certain of itself. However, proximity changes the reading. One balcony is enclosed in aluminum glazing, another softened with improvised shading. Insulation thickens part of a façade while laundry frames another edge like an accidental elevation study. The district still reads as planned, though occupation has made its order less uniform. Within that order, repetition has gradually been rewritten through occupation.
Emerging during a period of profound political and social transformation, when many nations sought to redefine their capitals as symbols of progress, both cities assumed a strategic role. Through their architectural language, they reinforced ideological and national narratives closely tied to state power.
These were cities conceived in the abstract, guided by a utopian vision. They were intended to be avant-garde urban centers, free from the deficiencies that plagued mid-twentieth-century cities, embodying aesthetic principles aligned with progressive political ideals and embracing new technologies—most notably the automobile.
Yet this promise of the future also generated significant challenges. While these difficulties undoubtedly reflect the social and economic realities of their respective countries, they were also shaped by a modernist vision that is increasingly being reassessed today.
In an industry defined by engineering tolerances and performance certainty, interior finishing still relies on a process that introduces variability into every project. Even experienced applicators often depend on judgement-based mixing—estimating water ratios and adjusting by feel until the material appears workable. While skill reduces variability, it does not eliminate it. The result is inherent inconsistency that transfers directly onto the finished surface.
As Europe experiences one of its earliest and most intense heatwaves in recent years, World Environment Day 2026 arrives amid renewed discussions about climate adaptation, urban resilience, and the capacity of cities to respond to increasingly extreme temperatures. Across Portugal, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, temperatures have surged well above seasonal averages, prompting heat alerts, school closures, emergency planning measures, and growing concerns about the performance of buildings and public infrastructure under prolonged heat stress. The convergence of these highlights a reality that is becoming increasingly worldwide: climate change is no longer solely an environmental concern but an issue that is fundamentally reshaping the spaces where people live, work, and gather.
BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group is nearing completion of the EVE Music Hall in Čepin, eastern Croatia, designed in collaboration with SIRRAH projekt and Theatre Projects. The 10,000 m² project contains a live music venue, congress facilities, exhibition spaces, a café, and rooftop event spaces. The venue is expected to host concerts, conferences, exhibitions, and cultural activities, accommodating nearly 4,000 guests indoors and up to 25,000 outdoors. The new cultural building marks the office's first project in Croatia and is expected to become its first completed music performance venue in early 2027.
What happens when a city’s industrial past becomes the raw material for its future? In Copenhagen, Nordhavn transforms the old harbor into a living laboratory of sustainable urbanism, where warehouses and docks give way to independent districts, small islands, and canals that redefine what it means to inhabit the city.
