Rio de Janeiro: The Latest Architecture and News

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Architecture this week looked as much to the past as to the future. Across museums, restored landmarks, and large-scale urban redevelopments, the featured stories explored how architecture is continually reinterpreted through new cultural, political, and urban lenses. From reconsidering the architectural legacy of post-independence West Africa to transforming former prisons into energy-neutral neighborhoods and restoring twentieth-century cultural landmarks, the projects demonstrate how existing buildings and histories remain active participants in contemporary discourse. Alongside these interventions, the announcement of the World Architecture Festival shortlist and renewed attention to global urban growth provide a broader picture of a profession negotiating heritage, environmental responsibility, and rapidly changing cities.

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Modern housing was one of the places where modernism made its boldest promise: that architecture could reshape not only the city, but the way people lived within it. As Argentine architectural historian Ramón Gutiérrez has argued, popular housing is "the great unresolved subject, one that usually does not appear in histories of architecture." In Latin America, this absence is significant. Across the 20th century, expanding cities turned housing into one of the clearest ways to imagine urban change, and modernism entered not only plans and drawings, but apartments, neighborhoods, streets, and domestic routines.

Yet once built, these projects entered cities shaped by politics, memory, inequality, and changing ways of occupation. Their meanings no longer belonged only to the original plan, but to the ways they were inhabited, altered, and transformed over time. What this history reveals is not adaptation, but friction: the moment when architecture stops being an ideal model and meets the city it cannot fully control.

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Before any drawing or formal decision, a space in constant motion was already pulsing where the Market Square at Realengo Park stands today in Rio de Janeiro. Improvised stalls, informal gatherings, music, children running, and adults gathered under makeshift shelters made up a living landscape, shaping an ephemeral architecture.

Within this context lies the work developed by Carlos Zebulun, Helena Meirelles, Larissa Monteiro, Rodrigo Messina, Francisco Rivas, and Juliana Ayako, one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards. Project management, urban planning, and landscape design were carried out by Ecomimesis Soluções Ecológicas, winners of the bidding process held by the City of Rio de Janeiro in 2023.

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Kéré Architecture has unveiled its proposal for the 40,000-square-meter Biblioteca dos Saberes (House of Wisdom) in Rio de Janeiro's Cidade Nova neighborhood. Designed by Francis Kéré, Mariona Maeso Deitg, and Juan Carlos Zapata, the cultural complex is commissioned by the Rio de Janeiro City Hall and planned for a site near Valongo Wharf and the Little Africa area. The design was presented to members of the community on November 20, the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness in Brazil. Important features include a perforated façade for sun protection, roof gardens, landscaped terraces, shaded courtyards, open-air areas, a canopied amphitheater, and a pedestrian bridge connecting the building to the nearby monument to Zumbi dos Palmares.

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