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.
Climate: The Latest Architecture and News
"My Solutions Are Not Polite:" Liam Young on Architecture in the Age of Polycrisis in Louisiana Channel Interview
Tropical Modernism Beyond Aesthetics: The Politics of Shade and Air
The image is familiar, a façade layered with brise-soleil, light softened into a patterned shadow, interiors kept cool without machines. It appears as intelligence made visible, architecture that understands the sun. This image is rarely examined closely. The same devices that temper heat also organize access, distribute comfort, and depend on particular forms of labor. What looks like a climatic response is also a decision about who gets relief from heat, and how. Tropical modernism, often reduced to a visual language of shade and porosity, emerges instead as a set of situated practices where climate, labor, and power are negotiated differently across contexts.
At the scale of the element, tropical modernism begins as a technical problem. In hot climates, solar radiation is not incidental but constant, requiring buildings to mediate light, heat, and air before they reach the interior. Architects like Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew approached this with a level of precision that resists any reading of these elements as decorative. Shading devices are calibrated according to solar angles, orientation, and seasonal variation. Brise-soleil are dimensioned to block high-angle sun while admitting diffuse light; overhangs extend just enough to prevent direct gain at peak hours; openings are aligned to encourage cross-ventilation. Mid-century research further tested these strategies, measuring temperature reductions and airflow improvements. In this sense, the language of tropical modernism is not symbolic. It is performative: each projection, void, and screen is part of an environmental system.
Climate and Collective Use: Architectural Permeability in Latin America
Architecture is often understood as a matter of enclosure. Walls define space, separating interior from exterior and establishing clear limits. Yet across many projects in Latin America, this distinction becomes less precise. Rather than operating as closed objects, buildings often remain open, allowing air, light, and movement to pass through them.
This condition is tied to more than form. Across the region, architecture has long responded to climates marked by heat, humidity, strong solar exposure, and seasonal rainfall, as well as to building cultures shaped by adaptation, collective labor, and direct engagement with the environment. In these contexts, fully sealed interiors are not always the most effective response. Space is often organized through shade, ventilation, and intermediate zones that regulate rather than isolate.
Ideology of Performance: Sustainability and the Limits of Efficiency
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
The modern sustainability project is built on the promise that evolving technologies can reconcile urban and economic growth with ecological responsibility. By the metrics developed by the built environment professions and the policies adopted by governments, progress is tangible and accelerating: buildings consume less energy per square foot than they did a generation ago, vehicles emit fewer pollutants per mile, and urban infrastructure is more integrated and measurably cleaner in many cities. And yet total resource consumption continues to rise. Sustainability, as currently practiced across the built environment professions, has become a strategy for optimizing consumption rather than reducing it. Until the profession is willing to question the scale and structure of demand rather than the efficiency with which that demand is met, its most celebrated achievements will continue to fall short of the problem they claim to address.
Thermal Memory: How Climate Shapes Architectural Heritage
On a hot afternoon in May, when the air over western India turns metallic with heat, no one remembers façade composition. They remember where the shade falls. They remember which corridor breathed. They remember the house that was cooler than the street. What stays in memory is comfort beyond the form. Repeated thermal preference stabilizes into spatial configuration, and over time, those configurations become building types.
Heritage is usually catalogued by what can be drawn, not by what changed temperature. In heat, buildings are learned first through skin, only later through sight. Generations learn, through their bodies, what works. Shade reduces glare and radiant heat. Air movement shifts perception by several degrees. Thick walls slow temperature swings. Over time, these experiences accumulate into a spatial preference. What feels right is repeated. What is repeated stabilizes into type.
How to Design with the Rain: Architectural Strategies for Rainwater Collection across Climates
As climate variability intensifies, extreme storms are becoming more frequent in some regions while water scarcity deepens in others. Architects are increasingly pressed to reconsider how buildings engage with rainfall as an environmental force and a design resource. How can architecture move beyond shedding the excess water to actively collect, store, and reuse it? What would it mean to treat rainwater as a material that shapes resilient and meaningful spaces?
Extreme Architecture: Challenges and Solutions in Inhospitable Environments
"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.
World Wetlands Day 2026: Integrating Traditional Knowledge for Climate Resilience
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.
How Cities Design Public Life in the Shade
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.
Best Articles of 2025: Plural Practices, Environmental Responses, and an Architecture of Care
Across recent years, architectural discourse has been shaped by the emergence of new voices, rediscovered territories, and a growing commitment to shared forms of knowledge. These concerns remain fully present in 2025 as ongoing debates that continue to gain density and nuance. Questions of who produces architecture, from which contexts, and under what conditions remain central, increasingly informed by practices that operate collectively, across disciplines, and beyond singular authorship.
This continuity is reflected in how architecture is understood less as a finished object and more as an ongoing process embedded in social, cultural, and environmental systems. Discussions around agency, participation, and knowledge production persist, alongside sustained attention to rural, peripheral, and historically marginalized contexts. Rather than privileging a single scale or geography, architecture is approached as a practice that moves between territories, acknowledging the unequal conditions that shape how spaces are designed, built, maintained, and inhabited.
California Changing: 50 Site of Climate Change in Augmented Reality
The state of California has emerged as a pioneering force in designing for climate change, yet it has also faced the devastating impacts of numerous climate-related disasters, including droughts, wildfires, and rising sea levels. This book offers a unique climate change tour, delving into architectural scale sites across the state. From innovative houses using sustainable techniques to historical locations ravaged by the combined forces of drought and wildfire, the book explores a range of poignant examples. The main visual contents are a set of architectural site illustrations that are each enhanced by an augmented reality component showcasing the interplay between past, present, and future scenarios. The publication caters to architects, landscape architects, planners, design enthusiasts and general audiences alike, fostering a curiosity about climate change and its relevance to our daily lives.
The Best Interviews of 2025: Architecture’s Year of Reflection, Repair, and Optimism
In 2025, the architectural field has been marked by a dense calendar of exhibitions, a measured slowdown in construction across multiple regions, and a period of reflection that scrutinizes the impact of intelligence (artificial and natural)—both on professional practice and workplace culture, as well as its use as a pedagogical tool. Over this calendar year, ArchDaily has published more than 30 interviews in a range of formats—Q&As, in-person conversations, video features, and more. These exchanges have engaged themes of sustainability and nature, housing and urban development, AI and intelligence, adaptive reuse and public life, and have closely followed major exhibition platforms including the Venice Biennale, Expo 2025 Osaka, Milan Design Week, Concéntrico, and others.
How Environments Shape Outdoor Dining Spaces: 24 Architectural Approaches
Outdoor terraces occupy a familiar threshold in cities around the world, operating as social rooms that sit between interior space and open air to host rituals of daily life. People meet to share a drink, watch the street's movement, or pause before returning to their routines. These places serve as cultural settings as much as commercial ones, revealing how hospitality and public life intersect to shape the city's character.
Climate influences these spaces more directly than almost any other design force, shaping how terraces function and how people inhabit them. Sun, wind, rain, and humidity guide decisions about orientation, shading, openness, and material selection. Each terrace becomes a negotiated space between human comfort and environmental pressure, and this negotiation can be read in every enclosure, surface, and spatial boundary.
Beyond Universal Models: The Turn Toward Situated Architecture
Specificity has re-emerged as a central language in architectural discourse. In an increasingly globalized field, where projects often follow familiar models regardless of context, architects are now turning toward approaches rooted in the particularities of each site. This renewed attention to context reflects broader social, climatic, and political pressures: cities are facing extreme heat, ecological challenges, shifting demographics, and new forms of collective life that demand responses grounded in their immediate conditions.
Situated architecture describes this shift. It refers to design approaches in which form, program, and materiality emerge from the specific environment that produces them: its microclimates, cultural structures, and everyday rituals. Rather than beginning with universal templates, these practices start with observation, prototyping, and direct engagement with local dynamics. This logic is visible in the climatic and material experiments of TAKK in Spain, such as Portable Garden and 10k House, which operate as lightweight prototypes tuned to thermal and ecological gradients; in Studio Ossidiana's Art Pavilion M, shaped by layered soils and ecological cycles in the Netherlands; in Izaskun Chinchilla's reinterpretations of vernacular objects and her later experiments with 100 Sillas and 3 Salones Urbanos; in the narrative-driven domestic spaces explored by Common Accounts; and in Raumlabor's urban interventions that respond directly to the specificities of post-industrial Berlin.
Architecture in Ecuador: 16 Projects Rooted in Territory, Craft, and Collective Practice
Between the Andes, the coast, and the Amazon, Ecuador's architecture has evolved as a reflection of its layered geography, a place where climate, topography, and culture unite. Throughout the territory, architecture has been an act of adaptation: from vernacular traditions rooted in collective labor and local materials to the colonial and modernist influences that reshaped its cities. This diversity has produced distinct constructive systems, from bamboo and cane structures along the coast to earth and stone constructions in the Andes, forming an archive of adaptive design that continues to influence contemporary practice.
Yet in the past decade, Ecuadorian architecture has undergone a quiet but deep transformation. New academic programs and international references have encouraged a growing awareness of climate and social justice. Emerging architects are redefining practice through workshops, collective studios, and on-site experimentation that blurs the line between design and activism. No longer focused on architecture as an object, a new generation of architects is approaching design as a process. One focused on collaboration, sustainability, and cultural identity. Their questions have shifted the design language from what to build to with whom.
COP30 Outcomes for the Built Environment: From Sustainable Cooling to Climate Adaptation Commitments
On November 21, 2025, the closing day of the 30th edition of the Conference of the Parties (COP) took place, the yearly gathering of United Nations member states to negotiate international climate agreements and assess global progress toward emissions reduction. This year, the event was held in Belém, Brazil, a port city of fewer than 1.5 million people, widely known as a gateway to Brazil's lower Amazon region. First convened in 1992, UN Climate Change Conferences (or COPs) are an international multilateral decision-making forum on climate change involving 198 "Parties" (197 countries, nearly all of them, depending on definitions of country, and the European Union). Their purpose is to assess global efforts toward the central Paris Agreement aim of limiting global warming to as close as possible to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. The event brings together leaders and negotiators from member states, business figures, young people, climate scientists, Indigenous Peoples, and civil society around issues considered essential to that climate goal. This year, COP30 was marked by strong criticism of its ties to the fossil fuel industry, descriptions of agreements as fragile and insubstantial, and the struggle to move climate finance "from pledge to lifeline."
Designing with Smoke: The Chimney as Architectural and Environmental Instrument
Chimneys are among the most quietly persistent elements in architectural history. Yet their presence persists in nearly every cultural and climatic context, serving as a technical feature and a spatial, atmospheric, and symbolic device. It populates dense city skylines and anchors rural horizons alike, its vertical silhouette as ordinary as a window or a doorframe. This apparent ordinariness is deceptive. The chimney is one of the few architectural components that links the intimate scale of interior life with the expansive forces of the environment. For architects and designers, the necessity of the chimney presents a choice: to let it recede quietly into the building's functional fabric or to amplify it as a central, expressive element that shapes a project's identity.
Climate, Craft, and Continuity: Behind the Global Recognition of Bahrain’s Architecture
Bahrain's architectural participations in the international exhibitions have gained increasing global recognition, marked most recently by major awards at Expo 2025 Osaka and the Venice Architecture Biennale. These milestones reflect a broader trajectory in which the country's design culture, rooted in climatic intelligence and cultural continuity, has become a prominent voice in international conversations on context-driven architecture.
This growing visibility builds upon a deep architectural lineage. Bahrain's identity has long been shaped by its position as a maritime crossroads of the Arabian Gulf, where the legacy of pearling settlements and the compact urban fabric of Muharraq and Manama reveal a dialogue between local traditions and global exchange. Today, that dialogue evolves through practices that merge preservation with experimentation, translating heritage into a contemporary architectural language that is both place-specific and forward-looking.
