South America: The Latest Architecture and News

Few conditions have shaped contemporary architectural discourse as profoundly as uncertainty. Across international biennials, exhibitions, and forums, architecture increasingly imagines its relationship to the world through flexibility, reversibility, and responsiveness—qualities intended to engage with climate emergencies, political instability, and unprecedented human mobility. Buildings are designed to transform, infrastructures to evolve, and cities to accommodate conditions that appear increasingly unpredictable. This emphasis on agility has expanded the discipline's capacity to engage with environmental change, offering valuable strategies for a world in constant transformation.

Yet this evolution points to a deeper shift in how architecture mediates the human condition. Architecture has long functioned as a mechanism for existential orientation—a way for human consciousness to carve an intelligible coordinate out of an indifferent cosmos, anchoring memory and identity to a fixed point. Within much contemporary architectural discourse, uncertainty increasingly appears less as an external condition to be mitigated than as the horizon from which architectural thinking begins. Spatial experience is increasingly shaped by environments designed around the persistence of flux, where static reference points give way to conditions of continuous transformation.

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The announcement of the winning proposal for Ecuador's new National Museum (MuNA) sparked one of the country's most significant architectural debates in recent years. The public response has since reshaped the competition itself while also raising broader questions about how a national museum gives architectural form to an interpretation of a nation. While the discussion began with a single design, it exposed a challenge that extends far beyond Ecuador.

National museums are not simply asked to represent a nation. They are asked to give it architectural form. Yet identity cannot be built directly. Before it becomes architecture, it must first be interpreted and translated through architectural decisions.

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The Andes are often understood as a continuous mountain range, yet they encompass a wide range of climates and ecosystems. In Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Chile, páramos, dry highlands, temperate valleys, and snow-covered landscapes can exist within relatively short distances of one another. As elevation changes, so do temperature, solar radiation, humidity, wind, vegetation, and topography, producing environments that require different ways of building.

Unlike many mountain regions where cold is the defining environmental condition, high-altitude environments in the Andes combine several climatic conditions at once. As elevation increases, solar radiation becomes more intense. Some regions remain humid throughout the year, while others experience prolonged dry seasons. In many places, steep terrain, snow, and changing weather patterns become additional factors that influence how buildings are designed.

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This article is the winning entry of the Epistle Writing Prize 2025, an annual competition dedicated to recognizing outstanding writing on design, architecture, and the environment.

It's wet season, but this morning's downpour does little to deter the rhythm along La Carrera Séptima. Cyclists and pedestrians weave past ambulatory vendors with carts of avocados, ginger sweets, and phone cases. Toy cars, lightbulbs, and hand-beaded jewelry glisten with raindrops, arranged neatly on tarps that demarcate vendors' territories. Police officers approach a recycler gathering bottles; a tourist bargains for a jacket; two women find each other in the middle of the road, embracing as their coats grow heavy with rain.

La Séptima, or Bogotá's Seventh Avenue, is the most emblematic road in Bogotá, traversed by more than two million people every day. Along this single road — part marketplace, part protest route, part transportation hub — Bogotá's history unfolds. For nearly a year, I traced its rhythms as a pedestrian, commuter, inhabitant, and researcher. In all these moments and their historical incarnations, one image endured: the road is a living body. It is imagined as Bogotá's backbone, its vital artery, its heart. It bleeds, bears scars, and demands care.

The 15th São Paulo International Architecture Biennial (BIAsp), scheduled to take place in September and October 2027, announced architects Gabriela de Matos and Pedro Rossi as the event's chief curators. Following the previous edition on the theme Extremes: Architectures for a Hot World, the duo is expected to bring critical perspectives on architecture, culture, and the city to bear on the theme Architecture, Culture, and Sovereignty. Their role is to direct the conceptual development of the Biennial, assemble a curatorial team, and run a public call for co-curators.

In many Latin American cities, peripheral neighborhoods have historically had less access to the resources that make urban life more than just livable. Housing, transportation, and public services are the usual markers of that gap. But there is another gap that is harder to quantify: the absence of places where people can gather, learn, rest, and participate in collective life. When those spaces do not exist, the city not only fails to provide a service. It fails to acknowledge a presence.

In recent decades, a growing number of projects have tried to address that absence directly. Rather than focusing only on physical infrastructure, they invest in spaces designed to support education, culture, recreation, and community, often merging several of those functions within a single building in neighborhoods where those spaces are otherwise limited.

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When people think of Argentina, they often picture landmarks like the Obelisk of Buenos Aires. Yet the country spans over 2,780,400 km², making it one of the largest in South America and home to a wide range of landscapes and realities that frequently go unnoticed. In fact, the province of Jujuy in northern Argentina lies within the Lithium Triangle: a high-altitude region shared with Bolivia and Chile that contains roughly 54% of the world's lithium reserves. Within this territory sits the Olaroz Salt Flat, a site where today two competing dynamics converge: the expansion of industrial lithium extraction and the preservation of ancestral culture and lands inhabited by Kolla and Atacama communities, creating a clash of high-capacity industrial extraction and traditional, low-impact agrarian practices.

In light of this problem, one of the winning teams of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards, made up of Ezequiel Lopez, Maria Victoria Echegaray, and Agustina Durandez, decided to look into the issue. This was done as part of their thesis project for the Bachelor's in Architecture program at the National University of Córdoba. Their work stems from an interest in engaging with territories that remain peripheral to architectural discourse, using the thesis as an opportunity for sustained, in-depth research. This allowed them to formulate informed design responses grounded in both territorial and socio-economic realities. Rejecting the binary between extraction and preservation, the project approaches the territory as a system where both can coexist through spatial and technical mediation.

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Architecture is often evaluated through what gets built. But in many cases, what matters happens after: how spaces are used, adapted, and made part of everyday life. For Región Austral, winner of ArchDaily's 2025 Next Practices Awards, this is where design really begins. Working across many contexts, the practice approaches public space not as a single object, but as something that needs to be activated, negotiated, and sustained over time. Their projects focus less on defining form and more on creating the conditions for use, with design serving as the starting point.

This approach can be seen across different contexts, from the Olympic Neighborhood Square to the Playón de Chacarita network. While each project responds to a specific situation, both explore how public space can support collective life in areas marked by fragmentation and inequality. Instead of following a predefined approach, the work adapts to different urban conditions, using participation and incremental strategies to shape how spaces function over time.

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Kengo Kuma & Associates has unveiled plans for Qapital, a 32-story mixed-use tower set to rise in Quito, Ecuador, in collaboration with local developer Uribe Schwarzkopf. Scheduled for completion in 2029, the project marks Japanese architect Kengo Kuma's first work in the country, extending the studio's international portfolio into the South American context. Located opposite La Carolina Park in Quito's central business district, the 125.8-meter tower introduces a vertically organized program that brings together residential, commercial, and shared amenities.

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Ecuador's territory embraces a remarkable diversity of landscapes, ranging from the Pacific Coast to the peaks of the Andes, the vast expanse of the Amazon rainforest, and the volcanic Galápagos Islands. Each region of the country presents its own distinctive characteristics, reflected in its varied environmental, cultural, and social contexts. While Latin American architecture is rooted in rich ancestral traditions, native construction techniques, and local materials, contemporary Ecuadorian architecture expresses an evolving identity that blends these elements with actual demands. Tradition and innovation, local resources and modern techniques, along with social responsibility and aesthetics, interact with the natural environment, urban conditions, and social contexts.

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Between 2023 and 2024, photographers Francesco Russo and Luca Piffaretti documented architecture and landscapes across Ecuador's coast, the Andes Mountains, the Amazon rainforest, the Galápagos Islands, and cities such as Quito, Guayaquil, and Cuenca. The photographic documentation explores Ecuador's evolving identity through its contemporary architecture, examining how it engages with natural surroundings, urban conditions, and social contexts. The resulting archive includes more than 40 projects by renowned local practices such as Al Borde, Durán & Hermida, Emilio López, José María Sáez, La Cabina de la Curiosidad, MCM+A, Natura Futura, and RAMA Estudio, among many others. The selection demonstrates how architecture can create high-quality spaces that respond to contemporary demands for sustainability and environmental responsibility by combining creativity and technology with renewable resources, despite ongoing economic, climatic, and political challenges in Latin America and beyond.

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Some of the most significant transformations of South American landscapes have been produced not by cities, but by large infrastructures built to extract and distribute natural resources. Mining operations, energy systems, and transport networks have connected remote landscapes to broader economic structures while transforming rural territories and urban settlements throughout the continent. These infrastructures do not simply occupy space; they reorganize it. They have not only supported economic growth but also reconfigured territories in ways that continue to generate political, environmental, and social debate across the continent. From this perspective, territories can be understood not as fixed geographic areas but as socio-ecological systems shaped by cultural, environmental, and political relations, a point emphasized by anthropologist Arturo Escobar in his work on territorial thinking in Latin America.

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Across South America, architecture endures through the materials it uses, those that persist over time. Bamboo, brick, wood, and concrete appear across regions, connecting climate, labor, and culture in ways that ensure their persistence through generations. Their continuity does not depend solely on preservation or heritage. It depends on use.

In this context, cultural memory does not reside primarily in monuments or images, but in practice. It survives in repeated gestures: laying bricks, tying guadua joints, assembling wood frames, casting slabs that anticipate another floor. These actions are transmitted less through manuals than through participation. Over time, they form systems of knowledge embedded in habit and necessity. Materials endure not because they symbolize the past, but because they continue to work.

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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.

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Across South America, architecture is increasingly being understood as a collective act. Rather than imposing external views, many studios and designers are building with and for communities, learning from their local practices, materials, and ways of inhabiting. These projects are repositioning the architect's role from an author to a facilitator, transforming design into a participatory process that centers collaboration, care, and mutual respect.

What unites these efforts is not style or scale, but a shared belief: architecture emerges from collective dialogue, not imposition. From rural Ecuador to the urban peripheries of Brazil, Colombia, and Paraguay, these projects reveal how social engagement and local making produce spaces that are sustainable not only environmentally but also socially. They respond to inequality not through top-down solutions, but through co-authorship, offering spaces that reflect the needs, knowledge, and agency of the people who use them.

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The second edition of the Ammodo Architecture Award has recognized 26 recipients for their contributions to socially and ecologically responsible design. Selected from 168 submissions spanning over 60 countries, the laureates represent a wide range of practices, from established offices to emerging collectives and community-led initiatives. Each recipient receives a grant ranging from €10,000 to €150,000 to support the continued development of their projects. Beyond recognition and financial support, the Ammodo Architecture initiative also functions as a knowledge platform, connecting awardees across regions and facilitating the exchange of ideas on key themes identified by the advisory committee.

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In South American Indigenous communities, a child’s place is wherever they choose to be. Babies crawl on the earthen floor, approach the fire, investigate anthills, and experience the world with their whole bodies. They learn by feeling: discovering limits, recognizing dangers, and gathering lessons no manual could ever teach. In urban contexts, by contrast, children are often confined to spaces designed for adults, filled with rules that—though well-intentioned—tend to distance them from essential experiences. Rather than judging which model is “better,” what matters is recognizing that when cultures observe one another, there is always room for learning.

From an architectural perspective, this childhood with little freedom of time and movement challenges us to rethink how we shape daily environments. Why restrict spontaneous exploration to controlled settings? Why create physical and symbolic barriers between children and the natural world? And, above all, how might contemporary architecture break away from this paradigm and, inspired by Indigenous childhoods, design environments that restore to children their wild, curious, and complete dimension?

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Roberto Burle Marx is often celebrated as a pioneering figure in landscape architecture, particularly for his innovative approach to integrating nature within urban environments. His work, characterized by a deep respect for native flora and a commitment to ecological balance, offers valuable lessons for contemporary landscape architects. At a time when climate change and biodiversity loss are pressing global concerns, revisiting Burle Marx's principles provides insight into creating urban spaces that are not only functional and aesthetically pleasing but also resilient and sustainable.

From the 1930s to the 1990s, Burle Marx's work anticipated many of today's concerns about sustainability and urban well-being. Long before terms like "sustainable design" or "green infrastructure" became commonplace, Burle Marx was already advocating for the use of native plants, recognizing their role in creating self-sustaining ecosystems that required minimal intervention. His projects often transformed neglected urban areas into vibrant, ecologically balanced spaces that not only improved the environment but also enhanced the quality of life for city dwellers.

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