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.
Situated along the historic Silk Road in Central Asia, Tashkent is a city with a long history spanning thousands of years. Its historic architecture is known for its courtyards, domes, and blue ceramics, typical of its Timurid heritage. The capital of Uzbekistan today, it was absorbed into the Russian Empire in the 19th century, before becoming a Soviet republic. While part of the Soviet Union, the city became an example of modernization, celebrating socialist achievements in Asia. A devastating earthquake in 1966 accelerated this modernization as the city was reconstructed, leading to many of the modernist monuments for which Tashkent is known today.
Commissioned in 2012 following an international design competition, Snøhetta's Busan Opera House is under construction on the city's North Port waterfront, with major works scheduled for completion in late 2026 and an opening planned for 2027. Conceived as the first opera house in South Korea's second-largest city, the project redefines the traditional opera house as an open and inclusive civic institution. Rather than operating solely as a venue for performance, the building is envisioned as a public destination that supports everyday use, collective experience, and long-term cultural engagement within Busan's evolving urban landscape.
The Pritzker Prize is the most important award in the field of architecture, awarded to a living architect whose built work "has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity through the art of architecture." The Prize rewards individuals, not offices, as happened in 2000 (when the jury selected Rem Koolhaas instead of his firm OMA) or in 2016 (with Alejandro Aravena selected instead of ELEMENTAL); however, the Prize can also be awarded to multiple individuals working together, as was the case in 2001 (Herzog & de Meuron), 2010 (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa from SANAA), and 2017 (Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta from RCR Arquitectes).
"We know we are not born to die," often said Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha. "We are born to continue." In architecture, this idea of continuity lies at the heart of heritage, not as a static inheritance, but as something that endures, transforms, and is constantly reinterpreted. Yet what continues, and what is allowed to disappear, is never neutral. Decisions about preservation are shaped by power, memory, and value, raising a fundamental question for contemporary practice: who defines what is worth carrying forward, and for whom?
"In various regions of the planet, nature imposes adverse conditions on the human body. In these places, designing a building is almost like creating a garment: an artifact that protects and offers comfort. This challenge requires technological performance that must be combined with aesthetics. Making human beings feel good involves more than just meeting notions of comfort and safety; it's also a question of working with spaces in their symbolic and perceptual dimensions." This is the beginning of the description for the design of the Brazilian Antarctic Station in Antarctica, by Estúdio 41, located on the Keller Peninsula, where the surrounding sea freezes for around six to seven months of the year, where everything and everyone arrives by plane or ship and the nearest hardware store is days away. If designing a building in normal circumstances already presents numerous complexities, it's not hard to imagine the additional challenges when developing something in an extreme environment, such as locations with very high or low temperatures, or in places susceptible to corrosion, radiation, and more. In this article, we will explore the difficulties, the main solutions and the materials used in these contexts.
"Feeling at home" is more than just an expression—it is the sense of warmth and comfort that transforms a space into a true refuge. To achieve this, elements like color, texture, lighting, and materials play a crucial role in shaping an environment that fosters relaxation and well-being. Backed by research in environmental psychology and neuroscience, the connection between physical spaces and human behavior highlights how architecture can directly influence the atmosphere, turning chaos into tranquility.
Observed annually on February 2, World Wetlands Day marks the adoption of the Ramsar Convention in 1971 and provides an international framework for recognizing the role of wetlands in environmental protection and sustainable development. The 2026 edition is held under the theme "Wetlands and traditional knowledge: Celebrating cultural heritage," drawing attention to the long-standing relationships between wetland ecosystems and the cultural practices, knowledge systems, and governance structures developed by communities over centuries. The theme highlights how inherited ecological knowledge, often embedded in rituals, seasonal calendars, land-use practices, and spatial organization, has shaped resilient interactions between human settlements and water-based landscapes.
The 10th edition of the DAM Preis 2026 has been awarded to Peter Grundmann Architekten for the ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics, an adaptive reuse project in Berlin, Germany. The project transforms a former single-story warehouse at a freight station in Berlin-Moabit into a cultural meeting place. The jury recognized the practice's transformative approach, highlighting the use of an above-average amount of manual labor and a modest budget to encase the existing hall in a lightweight steel-and-glass structure and add an additional floor. Developed in close collaboration with the non-profit association KUNSTrePUBLIK e. V., the project supports a wide-ranging public program established at the former freight station since 2012, including exhibitions, performances, artist residencies, repair workshops, neighborhood markets, and public viewings. Peter Grundmann Architekten was selected through a Europe-wide tender process and commissioned to build the acclaimed extension in 2019.
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Across South America, environmental comfort is understood not as an interior condition, but as one shaped through space. In regions marked by heat, humidity, intense sunlight, and seasonal variation, architecture has long relied on spatial decisions to moderate climate and support daily life. Comfort emerges from how interiors are opened, shaded, ventilated, and inhabited over time.
Rather than isolating interior spaces from their surroundings, many contemporary projects across the region cultivate comfort through depth, porosity, and intermediate zones. Light is filtered rather than maximized, air is guided through aligned openings and voids, and thresholds become active spaces of use rather than residual edges. These strategies do not seek uniform environmental control, but produce interiors that remain temperate, adaptable, and closely attuned to changing climatic conditions. In this context, environmental comfort becomes inseparable from spatial experience.
Founded as a practice working across architecture and community-focused projects, pk_iNCEPTiON is based in Maharashtra, India. The studio, one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, works on rural schools, houses, libraries, and public buildings, with a focus on spatial organization and adaptability. Operating across varied social and climatic contexts, pk_iNCEPTiON approaches design through careful attention to movement, scale, and the relationship between built form and open space.
A long table can sit almost anywhere and still do the same work. It can stretch beneath a market canopy, run along a school dining hall, or occupy the center of a shared living room, and it immediately changes the room's temperature.
That is why the long table is less an object than a spatial instrument. It does not guarantee a connection, and it rarely looks "inclusive" by default. Instead, it sets conditions: a shared edge, a common rhythm of arrival, a field of mutual visibility, or a rule that turns eating into a scene with others. Food studies describe this practice as commensality, the act of eating together and the social order it can create, reinforce, or contest. But what matters here is not a specific dimension or the table's function, but the way a long surface holds difference, conversation, and silence; intimacy and distance; the decision to join and the right to hesitate.
Selected as one of the winners of ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, NAAW represents a new generation of architectural studios reshaping contemporary practice in Central Asia. Founded in 2019 by Elvira Bakubayeva and Aisulu Uali, the studio operates at the intersection of research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and spatial experimentation, positioning architecture as a tool for reflection and an active agent in shaping contemporary Kazakhstani identity.
Salone del Mobile.Milano has announced the framework for its 64th edition, scheduled to take place from April 21 to 26, 2026, at Fiera Milano, Rho. The upcoming edition will bring together more than 1,900 exhibitors from 32 countries across over 169,000 square meters of exhibition space, highlighting the fair's continued scale and international reach. Beyond its quantitative dimension, the 2026 Salone positions itself as an evolving cultural and economic infrastructure, increasingly structured around long-term strategies rather than isolated events. The program reflects a growing emphasis on accessibility, curatorial depth, and cross-sector dialogue, pointing at the Salone's role not only as a marketplace for the industry but also as a platform where architectural thinking, industrial production, and global dynamics intersect within a single, coordinated framework.
Nearly one week before the start of the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, the organizing committee has released official information on the event's Cultural Olympiad: an arts and culture programme accompanying the Olympic and Paralympic Games. The programme is recognized by the IOC as one of the three pillars of the Olympic Movement, alongside sport and education. Conceived as a widespread platform involving territories, institutions, and communities across Italy, the Cultural Olympiad aims to highlight the Italian Alps and Milan's cultural heritage while promoting Olympic values through art, history, and participation beyond the official sports venues.
Cities are warming at roughly twice the global rate, a trend accelerated by rapid urbanization. While rising temperatures are reshaping daily life worldwide, some towns and neighborhoods, often the most vulnerable and least resourced, are warming more than others. The reason comes down to the urban environment. Built infrastructure, such as roads, buildings, sidewalks, and public spaces, determines how heat moves through a city, where it accumulates, and how long it remains trapped. No matter the climate zone or geographical location, shade remains the most effective and immediate way to cool pedestrians and relieve the built environment.
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
Traditionally, a museum visit is a calendared occasion with a clearly scripted sequence. Arrival is ceremonially marked—by grand stairs or thresholds, by ticketing and information desks, by an audio guide and a concise institutional preface about mission and history. That deliberate "special occasion" quality extends from how museums were long conceived: deliberately exceptional, tightly curated, and organized around a specific narrative arc. In this model, the museum assumes an authoritative voice—its knowledge deep, vetted, and to be respected rather than contested—while architecture and choreography reinforce a rather singular way of entering, learning, and remembering.
Museums are undergoing a structural reorientation—from fixed, authoritative narratives to porous spatial ecologies that redistribute agency, visibility, and encounter. Previous institutions experimenting with open formats—most notably V&A East Storehouse and Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen—anchor a renewed argument for museum journeys as exploratory rather than purely instrumental through showcasing their well-treasured archive. As society shifts toward open-source modes of knowledge—inviting multiple readings, revisions, and rediscoveries—the spaces that house collections are likewise evolving. Galleries, archives, and back-of-house become visible; process takes its place alongside product; and the visit is reimagined as a porous circuit that diversifies how culture and art are encountered. In this context, András Szántó's *Imagining the Future Museum* articulates a timely provocation: museums perhaps should start to learn to shapeshift—handing greater "agency" to visitors, releasing them from heavy curatorial intermediation so that they become active participants rather than passive recipients. Museums, in other words, are no longer bound to a single authoritative script—a plural ecology of typologies is now emerging.
©OBEL Foundation
The OBEL Foundation has announced "Systems' Hack" as the focus of its 2026 cycle, setting the conceptual framework that will guide the foundation's activities and the selection of the next OBEL Award. Founded in 2019, OBEL recognises architecture's potential to act as a tangible agent of positive social and ecological change, supporting approaches that expand how the built environment is defined and shaped. The 2026 theme calls on architecture to critically engage with the systems that underpin contemporary society, including infrastructure, energy, food, water, education, and information, and to examine how these interconnected networks might be reconfigured in response to accelerating global challenges.
This week's news compilation opens with two international commemorations, the International Day for Clean Energy and the International Day of Education, alongside a major archaeological discovery in Fano, Italy, where excavations have revealed a basilica described by Vitruvius, linking contemporary architectural discourse with deep historical continuity. Across this week's broader architecture news landscape, a central theme emerges around the advancement of civic architecture conceived as open, publicly engaged infrastructure, with cultural and institutional projects increasingly designed to strengthen their relationship with the city and everyday urban life. At the same time, renewed global attention turns toward Africa, where large-scale transport infrastructure and the conservation of modernist landmarks reflect interests in the region and the reassessment of the continent's architectural heritage. Complementing these narratives, this week's highlights also include a new model for car-free urban districts, co-designed public landscapes grounded in indigenous knowledge, and a residential development responding to regional context, reflecting how architecture is negotiating public space, civic responsibility, and territorial identity across diverse geographies.
The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced that Irish architect, educator, and writer Níall McLaughlin will receive the 2026 Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. Awarded on behalf of His Majesty the King, the Royal Gold Medal is among the significant international distinctions in architecture, recognizing a sustained contribution to the advancement of the discipline through built work, education, and critical discourse. In announcing the award, RIBA noted McLaughlin's long-standing influence across architectural practice and pedagogy, citing a career that spans more than three decades and reflects a consistent engagement with the cultural, environmental, and social dimensions of architecture.
Foster + Partners, in collaboration with Angola's Ministry of Transport, has unveiled the master plan for the Icolo e Bengo Aerotropolis, a large-scale development planned around the recently completed Dr. Antonio Agostinho Neto International Airport. The proposal organizes business, research, residential, and hospitality programs within a landscape-led framework structured around the airport. Development is planned to proceed in phases, beginning with the business and cultural district located to the north of the site.
David Chipperfield Architects has released new images of the Ice Hockey Arena in Milan, one of the host sports venues for the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. The project, currently in its testing phase, was commissioned to Arup and David Chipperfield Architects in 2021. The first images of the elliptical amphitheatre arena were released in 2022, ahead of the start of construction in 2023, which was scheduled for completion in 2025. The new sports and cultural events venue has a capacity of 16,000 spectators, 12,000 seated and 4,000 standing, and is a centrepiece of a broader urban redevelopment project originally designed by Foster + Partners for Milano Santa Giulia, a district in the south-east of Milan, just a few kilometres from the city centre and connected to the high-speed rail network and motorway.
WORKac is a New York-based firm founded in 2003 by Amale Andraos and Dan Wood. The firm has always believed in "the power of architecture and design to engage in environmental and social concerns, and to create new possibilities for the future." In that sense, the firm's principals define their approach to architecture as a constant evolution. For them, it is a continuous process of learning, questioning, and relearning, which is nurtured through the firm's engagement in local culture, climates, and histories, as well as discourse in the fields of ecology, landscape, and urbanism. In this way, they are able to bring these topics together with a focus on public, cultural, and civic projects that aim to reinvent how people live, work, and experience the world.
