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.
The relationship between constraint and design excellence is well established in architectural theory, yet often remains underexplored in discussions of site-specific practices. When architects encounter extreme topography, they face a fundamental choice: transform the landscape to accommodate the building, or modify the building to fit the landscape. The first approach is straightforward and requires the builder to cut, fill, terrace, and build on level ground. This choice, however, carries cascading consequences as any amount of earth moved may destabilize slopes, disrupt drainage, and fracture ecosystems. A growing body of innovative architectural work demonstrates an alternative to earth-moving and retaining walls.
Buildner has launched Buildner's Unbuilt Award 2026, the third edition of its annual competition, offering a 100,000 EUR prize fund.
Buildner has also announced the results of Buildner's Unbuilt Award 2025, the second competition in a series celebrating architectural design that has yet to be realized. With a generous 100,000 EUR prize fund, this initiative provides a global platform for architects and designers to showcase their most compelling unbuilt projects, whether conceptual, published, unpublished, or fully developed.
What happens when you choose reuse over demolition? In Østbirk, Denmark, a 30-year-old timber warehouse has been transformed into a 14,000-square-meter world-class innovation hub for nearly 500 VELUX employees. This article explores how the LKR Innovation House project challenges conventional building practices, preserves material legacy, and offers practical lessons for architects working with existing structures. A new book documents the process through essays, interviews, and photographs.
Scientifically, glass is defined as an amorphous solid, meaning its atoms are not arranged in a regular crystalline structure. This is why the material is often described as a "liquid frozen in time." This structural configuration explains one of its most distinctive qualities: transparency. Without a crystalline lattice capable of scattering light, radiation passes through the material with relatively little interference. Although it often appears delicate, this same structure also allows glass to achieve significant mechanical performance. With industrial processes such as tempering, lamination, and specialized coatings, the material can reach high levels of strength, safety, and environmental performance.
In 2023, ArchDaily's editor-in-chief sat down with Tarek Qaddumi, Executive Director of the Line Design at NEOM, at the closing of the Line Exhibition in Riyadh. Qaddumi described a layered, three-dimensional city organized around the idea of a "five-minute sphere" of access: walkable communities stacked vertically, connected by high-speed rail, freed from cars and conventional street infrastructure, and designed to coexist symbiotically with the surrounding natural landscape. It was a compelling vision, and in the context of the moment, it was simultaneously credible and appealing. For architects and urban thinkers grappling with the failures of twentieth-century city-building, the ideas articulated were worth engaging and planning.
San Francisco is a city that has always remade itself under pressure. Its Victorian streetscapes have survived seismic retrofits and glass towers, its neighborhoods defined as much by change as by its resistance to change. But no force in the city's history has reshaped the built environment as completely, or as quickly, as the technology economy. What began in the postwar sprawl of Silicon Valley migrated north and inscribed its logic onto the skyline and the lives of residents. The result of this logic is an architectural culture of considerable technical refinement and refined material palettes, yet one that remains largely indifferent to the existing population.
The cost of indifference is measurable and mounting. San Francisco must accommodate more than 82,000 additional housing units by 2031 under California's Regional Housing Needs Allocation framework, in a city where median rent already ranks among the highest of any American metropolitan area. Teachers, healthcare workers, and service employees are actively displaced by a real estate market calibrated to a single sector's income levels rather than the city's largest workforce.
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.
Not long ago, recent enough to feel current, architecture entered a moment in which buildings became legible as products. The framing offered discipline and a refreshed perspective to an industry that often deems novelty more precious than operational clarity. Nudging exercises of "form" towards repeatability, user experience, performance, and scalability prepared buildings to be a "product" that could now be evaluated. Architecture is more answerable to how well it works, how clearly it communicates its use, and how consistently it delivers its intended experience.
The discipline of product design refreshes the perspectives of architects designing for a changing future. Along with offering a new vocabulary and a rubric for design, the field brings in accountability: a product must perform reliably across time and context. It must hold together as a system of decisions rather than a collection of parts. Quality, therefore, is no longer measured solely by uniqueness, but by consistency and by the ability to produce a predictable experience for its occupants.
In an age so obsessed with skincare and appearances, few architects are truly interested in the intestines of our buildings. With a practice rooted in contextual awareness and technical pragmatism, sensitive to the needs of the people it serves and to resource limitations, Moroccan architect Aziza Chaouni focuses on the hidden systems that allow architecture to be. Over the past two decades, she has been working on projects across different geographies, particularly in the Saharan region, actively engaging with its communities and heritage.
Currently leading the South–North (SoNo) Lab for Sustainable Construction and Conservation at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, Chaouni brings to the academic realm her architectural expertise in operating under pressing constraints, advocating for reciprocal collaboration between the Global South and the Global North. ArchDaily had the opportunity to speak with Aziza about her experience in Africa and how it can foster more sustainable ways of designing buildings for the future of our cities.
The pursuit of stronger, lighter, and more durable materials has guided architecture long before polymers or carbon fibers existed. One of the earliest large-scale examples of composite materials can be found in the Great Wall of China, where stone, clay bricks, and organic fibers such as reeds and willow branches were blended to create a resilient and lasting structure. These early techniques reveal a timeless intuition: distinct materials, when combined thoughtfully, produce properties unattainable by any single element. As the construction sector faces urgent ecological pressures, this intuition is being revisited through the lens of sustainability, with architects and engineers exploring bio-based, recycled, and hybrid composites designed not only for performance but also for circularity and environmental responsibility.
The home carries multiple identities as shelter, sanctuary, workplace, and stage for daily rituals. In recent years, its role has expanded in unprecedented ways. The pandemic, notably, coerced the home to act as a site of extraordinary adaptability to absorb functions once delegated to schools, offices, gyms, and studios. This transformation has shifted how we imagine domestic life, urging us to think of the home not simply as a backdrop for activity but as a dynamic framework for living, producing, and creating. Within this expanded understanding, artists find themselves asking a renewed question: how can the home allow the flexibility needed for creative practice?
Meet the architects and designers of the future as their newest work comes together, and take a peek behind the doors of the world's #1 university for art and design.
In architecture, most practices revolve around delivering projects to clients. Offices are shaped by deadlines, budgets, and clear briefs. While this structure produces buildings, it rarely leaves space for architects to question broader issues — about how we live, how cities are changing, or what the future demands of design. But alongside this production-focused system, a quieter movement has emerged: studios, collectives, and foundations that prioritize research, experimentation, and reflection. These are the architecture think tanks — spaces designed not to build immediately, but to think first.
The idea of a think tank is not new. Traditionally found in politics, economics, or science, think tanks bring together experts to study complex problems and propose solutions. In architecture, their rise reveals a tension at the heart of the discipline. If architecture is to remain socially and environmentally relevant, can it continue to rely only on client-driven practice? Or must it carve out space for slower, deeper inquiry?
Few plants have accompanied humanity as closely as cannabis. Used for millennia to make textiles, paper, and medicines, it has quietly shaped everyday life and built environments alike. Hemp, its non-psychoactive variety, is one of the earliest cultivated crops and a material of remarkable versatility: strong, breathable, and renewable. From ropes and sails to insulation and biocomposites, hemp’s fibers have been helping humans build for thousands of years.
Climate risk is a shared global condition, marked by intensifying heat, water scarcity, flooding, and ecological loss that no border can contain. In 2025, these pressures sharpened a collective awareness that government pledges and international agreements are not keeping pace with lived realities. Across geopolitical contexts, the tension is immediate and structural, revealing gaps between policy ambition and material change. This moment has exposed a growing reliance on disciplines outside formal structures to respond quickly, intelligently, and with accountability.
The phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution describes how distant species can develop similar structures when confronted with comparable challenges. Dolphins and ichthyosaurs, for example, are separated by millions of years of evolutionary history, yet both evolved nearly identical hydrodynamic bodies. Architecture has its own parallels: A-frame structures emerged independently in both the European Alps and Japan, even without direct cultural exchange, as spontaneous responses to snow, wind, and material scarcity.
Noor Riyadh 2025 brought large-scale light installations to public sites across the Saudi Arabian capital, temporarily transforming transit hubs, historic districts, and significant landmarks into illuminated urban environments. From November 20 to December 6, 2025, Riyadh became a citywide gallery of light, motion, and shifting perception. The festival's fifth edition featured 60 artworks by 59 artists from 24 countries, including more than 35 new commissions, responding to the theme "In the Blink of an Eye." Through light as both medium and concept, the installations reinterpreted the capital's rapidly evolving architectural landscape and reflected how perception shifts in spaces shaped by heritage and ambitious urban development.
