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.
Second Prize Winner + Buildner Student Award: Silent Equilibrium
Buildner is pleased to announce the results of its Architect's Chair Competition Edition 4, an annual international competition that invites architects and designers worldwide to submit designs for a signature chair. Following in the footsteps of iconic figures like Charles and Ray Eames, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Arne Jacobsen, participants are tasked with creating custom chairs that reflect their unique design philosophies and visions.
New renderings released by WEISS/MANFREDI reveal updated plans for the ongoing transformation of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, a comprehensive redesign that integrates the museum, landscape, and active excavation areas into a continuous public and research-oriented campus. Alongside the design update, the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County (NHM) has announced the creation of the Samuel Oschin Global Center for Ice Age Research, a new initiative supported by the Samuel Oschin Family Foundation, which advances the site's long-term redevelopment. The transformation project is led by WEISS/MANFREDI as design lead for the museum and park, with Gruen Associates serving as executive architect and landscape architect, and Kossmanndejong (KDJ)responsible for exhibition design. Fundraising efforts are ongoing, with the project positioned for completion ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The recently inaugurated exhibition matière en résonance ("resonant matter") brings together a wide range of models and a curated selection of photographs to present sauerbruch hutton's ongoing exploration of timber. The exhibition starts from the premise that while the age of concrete defined the twentieth century, the early twenty-first century has seen a worldwide resurgence of timber, a much older building material. Timber is presented as offering "a different version of modernity" and as the subject of renewed interest that reawakens long-standing collective imaginaries. Over more than two decades, the Berlin-based architecture practice has explored the possibilities of timber construction, from façade elements to load-bearing structures and modular systems. The exhibition reflects the results of this sustained investigation, reinforcing both technical innovation and the embodied qualities of timber across a diverse range of European contexts. The exhibition will be on view from 3 to 28 February 2026 at the Galerie d'Architecture de Paris.
Invenção da cor by Hélio Oiticica. Image via Carlos Reis Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Many of the spatial ideas we now associate with contemporary architecture, collective use, and bodily experience did not originate in buildings alone. In Latin America, these ideas were often explored first through art, at a moment when artists were actively questioning how space could be occupied, shared, and experienced beyond traditional forms.
During the mid-20th century, the region underwent rapid urbanization and profound social change. Architecture was increasingly expected to respond to public life, collectivity, and new ways of inhabiting space. At the same time, art offered a more flexible ground for experimentation, one less constrained by function, regulation, or permanence. As a result, many spatial questions were tested through artistic practices before becoming part of architectural thinking.
In the picture: F128 PA Black Ambiance Granite, U590 PM/TM Deep Blue, U705 PM/TM Angora Grey, U755 PM/TM Havanna Grey, H1708 ST17 Brighton Chestnut. Image Courtesy of EGGER
Designing an interior is, in many ways, an exercise in orchestration. Just as a conductor coordinates instruments, timbres, rhythms, and intensities to compose a coherent piece, the architect brings together materials, color, light, texture, and proportion to define the spatial quality and atmosphere of an environment. None of these decisions operates in isolation: the choice of a surface influences how light is reflected; a given material can shape how a room ages over time; color, in turn, directly affects the perception of scale.
Wood-based materials such as decorative particleboards, MDF boards or laminates can therefore be understood as more than simple finishes. Industrially produced, they combine decor selection, surface texture, and technical substrate, defining both their appearance and the way a space responds to use, light, and time. Factors such as dimensional stability, ease of maintenance, and resistance to wear become integral to design decisions, particularly in interiors subject to intensive use.
Cities around the world share a common goal: to become healthier and greener, supported by civic infrastructure that restores ecosystems and strengthens public life. The question is how to reach this. Global climate targets, local building codes, and municipal standards increasingly guide designers and planners toward better choices. Still, many cities struggle to translate these frameworks into everyday, street-level comfort and long-term ecological protection. What happens if the city is no longer treated as a traditional city, but as a national park?
National parks operate through systems of protection that treat land as a network of ecological relationships rather than a collection of isolated sites. They establish a shared baseline for what must be preserved, maintained, and made accessible over time. When this logic is applied to the urban environment, success can inspire pride and a sense of shared responsibility among designers, policymakers, and residents, fostering a collective commitment to health, habitat, and civic infrastructure.
Artist representation of Orion's lunar flyby. Image via NASA under license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
It was July 1969, and people on planet Earth were about to witness a historical moment for humanity: the first time a human being stepped on the surface of the Moon aboard the Apollo 11 mission. After this event, NASA landed five more times on the lunar surface, with the last one being Apollo 17 in 1972. Since then, humans have not attempted to return to the Moon until this year, 2026, when they will launch the Orion spacecraft as part of the Artemis II Mission. Planned to set off between February and April 2026, Orion will not yet land people on the Moon, instead it will make a flyby, in order to allow testing of the software and systems. This will set the base for an actual human landing on the Moon's South Pole as part of Artemis III sometime between 2027 and 2028, eventually opening a brand new era in Extraterrestrial architectural design.
Shou Sugi Ban is a traditional Japanese technique for wood preservation that involves charring the surface of timber to create a protective layer. While its origins are rooted in practical durability, the method has been widely adapted into the modern built environment and shapes a unique and distinctive aesthetic. It is a material of contradiction: it remains bold in its visual language due to its dark tones, yet it simultaneously borrows from and complements its natural surroundings, allowing houses to settle quietly into their sites.
The charred finish among the 22 residences featured here across Canada and the United States serves as a common thread for navigating extreme climates. From humid lakefronts to dense forests, the carbonized skin acts as a resilient shield against diverse conditions. Beyond mere protection, these houses demonstrate how the material's texture changes with exposure to light, transforming from a flat matte in the shade to a silver-flecked, shimmering surface in direct sun. These projects also showcase the technique's ability to define architectural volumes, using the dark cladding to create sharp, monolithic silhouettes or to highlight the voids in a building's mass, such as recessed entryways and sheltered terraces.
What matters more: looking to the past or to the future? Recognizing established trajectories or fostering paths still under construction? Perhaps this is not a question with a single answer. Traditionally, architecture awards have operated as devices of consecration, recognizing completed works, established careers, and already tested solutions, most often through a retrospective lens. But what would happen if recognition ceased to be an end in itself and instead began to operate as a catalytic agent, investing less in what has already been done and more in what is still yet to unfold?
Across history, the relocation of capital cities has often been associated with moments of political rupture, regime change, or symbolic nation-building. From Brasília to Islamabad, new capitals were frequently conceived as instruments of centralized power, territorial control, or ideological projection. In recent decades, however, a different set of drivers has begun to shape these decisions. Rather than security or representation alone, contemporary capital relocations are increasingly tied to structural pressures such as demographic concentration, infrastructural saturation, environmental risk, and long-term resource management. As metropolitan regions expand beyond their capacity to sustain population growth and administrative functions, governments are turning to spatial reconfiguration as a means of addressing systemic urban imbalance.
Zaha Hadid Architects has released images of its design for the redevelopment of the waterfront along the Zhedong Canal in Hangzhou's Xiaoshan District, China. The Qiantang Bay Central Water Axis project envisions a sequence of landscaped parklands, terraces, and gardens along the canal basin, proposing the transformation of former industrial areas into a green corridor extending toward the city center. The proposal adds to other recent design initiatives in the area, including Snøhetta's Qiantang Bay Art Museum, planned at the confluence of the Qiantang River and the Central Water Axis, as well as Zaha Hadid Architects' Grand Canal Gateway Bridge, a pedestrian bridge intended to connect the firm's 800,000-square-meter Seamless City masterplan on the east and west banks of the Grand Canal.
For decades, heritage has been easiest to recognize from the street. We protect facades, skylines, and monuments because they are visible, stable, and legible as cultural assets. Yet most of what we remember about living is how we eat together, withdraw, argue, care, and rest, which happen far from view. It happens inside rooms. As open plans quietly give way to thresholds, corridors, and enclosures, a deeper question emerges: what if cultural memory survives not in what architecture shows, but in how it is lived?
Coastal development in major cities has long been a terrain of opportunity and contention—shaped at once by the pursuit of capital (premium views, scarce land, and the promise of reclamation), by civic demands for public access and collective waterfront life, and by contemporary aspirations for sustainability and place-defining urban identity. Precisely because these agendas rarely align, extracting the full potential of waterfront sites is never straightforward.
Yet in New York City and Hong Kong, we can trace each city's ambitions—despite differing strategies, priorities, and political logics—through a set of keystone projects that anchor their coastlines. Read together, these projects reveal not only what each city chooses to value, but also what it is willing to trade off in order to build at the edge.
The European Commission and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe have announced the seven finalist projects for the 2026 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Awards, supported by the European Union's Creative Europe programme. The selection follows the announcement of 410 nominated works in November and a shortlist of 40 projects revealed in early January. Of the seven finalists, five have been selected in the Architecture category and two in the Emerging category. According to the jury chaired by Smiljan Radić, the finalist projects are exemplary contributions to the future of European architecture, demonstrating how the discipline can respond simultaneously to specific local conditions and broader social, cultural, and environmental challenges. The selected works range from interventions in former industrial sites, small villages, and peripheral urban areas to carefully calibrated projects within larger cities. Across these varied contexts, the projects show how architecture can transform overlooked or ordinary settings into inclusive, high-quality spaces for living, learning, and social exchange.
Tagaytay City Hall / WTA Architecture and Design Studio. Image Courtesy of WTA Architecture and Design Studio
This week's architecture news brings together a series of announcements that reflect how the discipline is engaging with larger structural and institutional frameworks. The OBEL Foundation's introduction of Systems' Hack as the theme for its 2026 cycle foregrounds architecture's relationship to the systems that organize contemporary life, from infrastructure to resource flows. At the scale of the design industry, Salone del Mobile.Milano's outline of its 2026 framework, including OMA's involvement in the Salone Contract master plan, signals an evolving understanding of major fairs as long-term cultural and economic infrastructures rather than standalone events. Running alongside these agenda-setting developments, the final days of nominations for the 2026 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards underscore the role of collective evaluation and public participation in shaping contemporary architectural discourse.
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Architectural heritage is often described as what survives time. Yet survival does not explain why certain buildings are preserved while others disappear. Many works now protected as cultural heritage were once criticized, contested, or openly rejected; they were accused of being socially misguided, materially flawed, or symbolically excessive. Over time, however, these same shortcomings have become central to their meaning as heritage emerges as a slow and unstable process of interpretation.
Contemporary architecture operates under intense scrutiny, pressured by environmental responsibility, social equity, economic volatility, and accelerated technological change. Buildings are expected to perform ethically, efficiently, and symbolically, often simultaneously. As a result, architectural failure is no longer an exception but an increasingly common condition. Projects age faster, materials reveal limitations sooner, and urban strategies quickly fall out of sync with shifting political, social, and environmental realities.
Tsuyoshi Tane is a Japanese architect born in 1979 in Tokyo and based in Paris, where he founded ATTA – Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects in 2006. Working across cultural, institutional, and landscape-related projects, Tane has developed an architectural approach that positions memory as a fundamental design driver. In his interview with Louisiana Channel, filmed in his Paris studio, Tane reflects on architecture as a discipline of observation and thought, arguing that meaningful design emerges from carefully reading the traces embedded within a site. For him, architecture is not produced on a blank slate but begins with an inquiry into what already exists, physically, culturally, and emotionally, beneath the surface of a place.
Sordo Madaleno, in collaboration with építész stúdió and Buro Happold, has been selected to design the 43,000-square-meter New Debrecen Collection Center for the Hungarian Museum of Natural History. Debrecen, Hungary's second-largest city, is currently the focus of significant urban and university-related development, including plans to relocate the Hungarian Museum of Natural History from Budapest to the edge of Debrecen's Great Forest. The proposed Collection Center is conceived as a facility dedicated to the controlled storage and study of more than 11 million objects, drawing conceptual inspiration from traditional Hungarian clay vessels, structures historically used to protect and preserve. The project would mark the first European cultural commission for the Mexican architecture practice, which operates studios in London and Mexico City.
There's only one week left to nominate your favorite projects for the 2026 Building of the Year Awards! This is your chance to recognize the best architecture from around the world in 15 categories, from housing to educational projects, offices, interiors and more.
https://www.archdaily.com/1038334/last-days-to-nominate-for-the-2026-archdaily-building-of-the-year-awardsDaniela Porto
