Civic Design: The Latest Architecture and News

In Hong Kong, where architecture is often driven by real estate logic, infrastructure, and accelerated development, the space for bodily-scaled civic experimentation can be surprisingly narrow. This is where Design Trust has become distinctive. As a grant-making and project-enabling platform, it supports spatial interventions that sit between architecture, research, and public programming—work that is often too modest, collective, or uncertain to fit conventional client–architect pipelines.

At the center of this work is Marisa Yiu, whose leadership positions Design Trust as both an enabler and a cultural actor. Through initiatives such as Micro-Parks Hong Kong, alongside exhibitions and public programs, the organization treats discourse and prototyping as forms of spatial agency, linking designers, communities, institutions, and policy conversations while foregrounding questions of stewardship, maintenance, and the "afterlife" of public space.

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The Rome City Council has approved a Memorandum for the urban regeneration of the Depositi delle Vittorie in Piazza Bainsizza, a former ATAC depot in Rome dating back to the early 1900s. Abandoned for nearly two decades and now privately owned, the site is set to be transformed into a multifunctional complex designed by Stefano Boeri Architetti. The project envisions the adaptive reuse of the former transportation infrastructure through the introduction of cultural, educational, commercial, co-working, and leisure functions, alongside new public spaces and extensive landscaped areas.

Southeast Asia is often narrated as a kind of architectural playground—an arena where modern and contemporary ideals have been tested at full scale through singular, iconic buildings. One can trace an easy lineage through names that have helped shape the region's skyline imagination: Paul Rudolph's Lippo Centre in Hong Kong and The Concourse in Singapore, I.M. Pei's OCBC Centre and Hong Kong's Bank of China Tower, Norman Foster's Supreme Court of Singapore and the HSBC Main Building in Hong Kong, Ron Phillips' Hong Kong City Hall, Moshe Safdie's Marina Bay Sands. Yet this familiar history—told through objects, colonialism, authorship, and signature forms—risks missing a deeper, more consequential layer of influence: the planning logics and infrastructural frameworks that have quietly structured how these cities expand, densify, and distribute everyday life.

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If elevated networks reveal a city that increasingly walks above the street, the podium–tower is the typology that often makes that condition feel inevitable. Across Southeast Asia, podium–tower projects have become one of the dominant languages of metropolitan growth: a system that concentrates housing, jobs, retail, and transit connections into highly legible and managed parcels. From an urban planning perspective, the model can be remarkably effective—absorbing congestion, formalizing circulation, and delivering density quickly. Yet as it spreads, the typology also raises a quieter question: what does it optimize for, and what does it erode—especially at the level of the street, where urban life is meant to be negotiated rather than curated?

At its simplest, the podium–tower is a hybrid structure consisting of a high-coverage, low-rise podium supporting one or more slender vertical towers. The podium typically carries the logistical and commercial weight of the development—retail, parking, loading, drop-offs, back-of-house services, and often amenity decks—while the tower stacks private programs above, whether residential, office, hotel, or mixed use. The promise is twofold: maximize urban density while maintaining a "human-scaled" street wall, and separate the messy logistics of city life from the quieter domain of living and work.

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In 2012, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook offered one of the clearest documentations of a condition that many residents experience intuitively but rarely name: Hong Kong's dependence on elevated, second-storey urbanism. Through drawings and careful mapping, the book captured how the city's pedestrian networks are routinely lifted above the street—separating people from traffic, extending commercial frontage beyond ground level, and negotiating a hilly topography where "flat" circulation is often an engineered achievement. Since its publication, these systems have only grown in prominence—not only for their sheer spatial complexity, but for the way they recast public space as something continuous yet selective, connective yet curated.

This fascination, however, has always carried a parallel unease. Elevated passages can be generous and effective, offering sheltered movement and reliable connectivity. Yet they also raise persistent questions: where do these routes lead, who gets to connect, and what kinds of programs are invited—or excluded—by this "privileged" level of circulation? The second-storey city does not simply bypass vehicles; it can also bypass the street as a civic stage. Over time, it risks shifting architectural attention away from ground-level public life, relieving designers from having to negotiate pedestrian scale, frontage, and the messy reciprocity of the street. In its worst moments, the result is a landscape of podium clusters and sealed megastructures—buildings that perform connectivity at Level 2 while remaining indifferent to the neighborhood at Level 0.

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In our current cities, urban density and rising land values often force a choice between large-scale civic buildings and open public space. Traditionally, plazas have been treated as areas surrounding a building's footprint, but this strategy was modified when pilotis were introduced by the early 20th-century modernist movement. While the original intent was to create a sense of lightness that would allow circulation and light to flow beneath a structure, contemporary requirements for seismic loads, fire egress, and heavy occupancies render thin columns insufficient for the needs of current large-scale civic projects.

However, the pursuit of architectural lightness is not a strictly contemporary phenomenon. Following the modernist introduction of pilotis, several mid-century projects began experimenting with the illusion of suspension to achieve civic transparency. In 1953, the National Congress of Honduras in Tegucigalpa, designed by Mario Valenzuela, applied these principles to a legislative setting. The building consists of a solid assembly chamber elevated on a series of slender columns. Because the site sits on a terrace at the end of a sloping street, the resulting void does more than just provide circulation; it frames views of the city, creating the impression that the heavy legislative mass is lightly suspended above the urban fabric.

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At the edge of most cities, beyond the ring roads and interchanges, a different kind of architecture is taking shape. It is not designed to be seen, visited, or remembered. It does not gather people; it moves things. Inside, thousands of parcels travel continuously, being sorted, lifted, scanned, and dispatched with minimal interruption. These buildings rarely enter architectural discourse, yet they are among the most consequential spaces of our time. The defining typology of the 21st century is increasingly the warehouse.

The scale of this transformation is difficult to grasp because it unfolds horizontally, across territories rather than skylines. Global warehouse space now exceeds tens of billions of square feet, expanding rapidly alongside the rise of e-commerce. During the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for logistics infrastructure accelerated by several years, compressing future growth into an already strained present. In India, the warehousing sector continues to grow at double-digit rates, reshaping peri-urban land into storage and distribution corridors. Logistics is no longer a background system; it is a territorial condition.

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In Iran's capital, Tehran, movement defines the city. Each day, millions navigate a landscape shaped by highways, traffic corridors, and dense urban blocks. Over decades of rapid expansion, infrastructure has become the dominant language of development. Streets prioritize vehicles, sidewalks function as narrow conduits, and many public spaces operate primarily as passages rather than places of gathering. Across parts of West Asia, ongoing conflict has also reshaped the region's urban landscapes, where significant architectural environments have been damaged or transformed. Within this broader context, the preservation and creation of everyday civic space becomes increasingly meaningful. Recognized with the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the Jahad Metro Plaza project, designed by KA Architecture Studio, demonstrates how modest infrastructural interventions can reshape the civic life of a city.

The metro network plays a central role in Tehran's daily life. It connects distant districts and sustains the rhythms of the metropolis. Yet the places where the underground city meets the surface are rarely conceived as civic environments. Metro entrances typically appear as fragments of infrastructure: stairs descending below ground, surrounded by railings, kiosks, and improvised circulation paths. They function efficiently as thresholds, but seldom as places to remain.

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Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district. For many years, built-environment professionals have treated infrastructure as a technical challenge. Mobility justice insists it is, fundamentally, a political one.

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For centuries, large-scale infrastructure operated in the background. Ports, power plants, and energy facilities were positioned at the edges of cities, designed primarily for efficiency, and rarely considered part of civic life. Their function was indispensable, yet their architectural presence remained secondary. These structures supported urban growth and global exchange while maintaining a spatial distance from everyday urban experience.

Today, this condition is gradually shifting. As global trade intensifies and energy systems expand in complexity, the buildings that coordinate and house these networks are becoming more visible within the urban landscape. Rather than remaining neutral containers for technical operations, they begin to assert spatial identity. Infrastructure is no longer only operational; it is increasingly institutional, symbolic, and urban. The architecture that supports these systems now participates in how cities project themselves.

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When Hong Kong's architectural story is told, it is often reduced to a handful of icons. Many people most readily name I.M. Pei—Pritzker Prize laureate and architect of the Bank of China Tower in Central (1990), as well as global works such as the Le Grand Louvre in Paris and the Miho Museum in Shiga. Looking elsewhere, one also encounters a long lineage of British and international architects whose imprints have shaped the city's institutional skyline: from Ron Phillips' civic works—most notably the former Murray Building (1969), now The Murray Hotel, and Hong Kong City Hall (1962)—to Norman Foster's infrastructural and corporate monuments, including the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Tower (1986) and Hong Kong International Airport (1998), and, more recently, Zaha Hadid Architects' The Henderson (2024).

Yet within the same period as Pei and Foster, local architects were also producing buildings of enduring significance—works that carried the legacies of Bauhaus, but translated them into a language distinctly calibrated to Hong Kong's climate, density, and civic life. These projects may not always read as commercially prominent icons, yet they often register a sharper sense of social responsibility and public agenda. Among the most important figures in this lineage is the late architect Tao Ho, whose work and public role formed a quieter—but no less foundational—strand in Hong Kong's modern architectural heritage.

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Post offices stand among the most enduring monuments of civic life in the United States. Across towns and city centers, they carry the shifting architectural ambitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Greek Revival formality to Beaux-Arts monumentality and Art Deco ornament. Architects and federal planners would give these buildings a clear public role and a powerful physical presence. Stone façades, monumental halls, and crafted interiors projected stability, trust, and permanence. The post office placed the federal government directly into the everyday landscape of American life.

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Postmodernism in the United States turned architecture into a stage for cultural memory, irony, and heritage at a moment when the built environment was becoming less civic and more commercial and curated. By the late twentieth century, architectural investment no longer centered on monumental public institutions or shared federal commitment to civic space. Private development, corporate expansion, and consumer environments increasingly shaped cities across the country. Buildings took on a new role as cultural images, expected to communicate identity and meaning as much as they provided function.

Postmodernism began as a critique of modernism's exhausted promises. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many designers no longer treated modernism as radical or socially redemptive. Urban renewal projects accelerated the demolition of historic neighborhoods, and landmark preservation battles raised urgent questions about what the United States valued and, ultimately, protected. The loss of major civic icons, including New York's Penn Station, sharpened public awareness that progress often arrives through erasure. In Chicago, architect and provocateur Stanley Tigerman captured this sense of rupture in his 1978 photomontage The Titanic, which depicts Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall sinking into Lake Michigan, a blunt image of modernism's symbolic collapse. Postmodern architects worked inside this turbulence, shaped by economic shocks, corporate excess, shifting cultural production, and a growing skepticism toward grand architectural solutions.

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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.

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The Nobel Foundation has revealed the first design proposal for the new Nobel Center, a public cultural and educational institution dedicated to science, literature, and peace. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects Berlin, the project will be constructed along Stadsgårdskajen at Slussen in Stockholm, with construction scheduled to begin in 2027 and completion planned for 2031. Conceived as a permanent home for the activities surrounding the Nobel Prize, the building aims to make the work of Nobel Prize laureates accessible to a broad public through exhibitions, public programs, and interdisciplinary exchange, positioning the center as both a civic landmark and an international point of reference.

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Since August 2025, debate has intensified in Dallas, United States, over the future of one of its modern landmarks: I.M. Pei & Partners' Dallas City Hall. This month, the Dallas City Council will continue weighing whether to repair, sell, or demolish the 47-year-old building, following growing concerns over long-deferred maintenance and the need for major investment. In late October, council members began public listening sessions and committee meetings to gather resident input. Preservationists and some council members urged a full study of repair options and historic landmarking, while others emphasized fiscal and operational concerns.

Supporters of preservation stress the building's civic and architectural significance, while those advocating for demolition point to high maintenance costs and the redevelopment potential of the centrally located site. A petition to "Save Dallas City Hall," calling on council members to halt demolition plans and commission a transparent renovation study, remains open for signatures. Meanwhile, the mayor has said he wants to review all the facts before taking a position on whether the city should relocate or invest in repairs. The case adds to the growing list of modernist icons worldwide facing uncertain futures, sparking broader cultural debates about civic heritage and public infrastructure.

Foster + Partners has opened Civic Vision, the first comprehensive exhibition of the practice's work to be presented in Australia. On view until December 21, 2025, at Parkline Place, the firm's latest completed project in Sydney, developed by Investa on behalf of Oxford Properties Group and Mitsubishi Estate Asia, the exhibition offers an in-depth overview of Foster + Partners' global portfolio since its founding in 1967 by Norman Foster. It explores the evolution of the practice's design approach and its exploration of civic architecture across different contexts and scales.

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This week's architectural developments highlighted how design operates as a form of social and cultural infrastructure, linking care, community, and context across scales. From London's reinterpretation of the almshouse model to the transformation of urban gateways in Phnom Penh and Tirana, architecture reflected a shared interest in spaces that foster connection and adaptability. Parallel to these urban and infrastructural works, new cultural projects in Paris and Hanoi explored how museums and performance spaces can renew public institutions through material experimentation and spatial flexibility.

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