As cities struggle to provide adequate and affordable housing, examining built examples of collective housing can help inform decisions about what to build and how. These projects offer opportunities to assess solutions, understand their limitations, and consider what might be applied elsewhere. In Paris, two recent examples combine apartments of different sizes with access to gardens, courtyards, and other outdoor spaces, working with structures already in place.
In Uruguay, small-scale residential projects increasingly occupy rural and coastal landscapes, from the hills of Villa Serrana to the maritime forests along the Atlantic coast. Building in these areas often requires structural materials that balance durability, thermal efficiency, and transport feasibility. In these environments, projects rely heavily on materials such as engineered timber framing, steel structural members, exterior wood cladding, or offsite fabrication. These design choices not only help to reduce the weight of raw materials that must be transported over unpaved access roads, but also make construction more feasible in remote locations. The context of the projects in this collection also seems to have played a limiting role regarding floor areas, which were kept at 60 m² or less to reduce structural material requirements and the impact on the terrain.
As one walks along the beachfront of Barcelona, the shoreline feels like it has always been there: sand, palm trees, a long promenade, restaurants, shops and modern hotels, when the reality is that it has not always been this way. Until the 1980s, Barcelona's seafront was a working barrier of railway lines, factories and informal housing, and wastewater ran straight into the Mediterranean. Starting in 1987, Barcelona has continuously created large promenades and passages between the city and the sea, creating an environment that today many might read as previously empty space, but is actually the result of decades of infrastructure and social complexity, along with a municipal effort to transform the city's territory and its relationship to the water. Following that transformation raises three questions that frame this article: who was displaced to open the waterfront, who governs it today, and who keeps it standing?
A bayou is a slow-moving body of water, typically a creek or river that winds through low, flat terrain in a broader wetland landscape. Found throughout the Gulf Coast, bayous are distinct from swamps, which contain forested wetlands characterized by standing water, and from marshes, where tall grasses and herbaceous plants grow in saturated soils. The currents of a bayou landscape support biodiverse ecosystems of plants, trees, insects, birds, and fish, while the shifting water levels, saturated ground, humid air, heavy rainfall, and long, hot summers create a blurry environment between land and water, wet and dry, interior and exterior.
Architecture firm HENN has launched CarbonBudget, a digital tool that calculates project-specific CO2 budgets for buildings. The new platform, free of charge, is a contribution for designers to help reach the 1.5°C target, a global goal from the Paris Agreement to limit long-term global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. As the construction industry is responsible for around one-third of global CO2 emissions, architectural design decisions can effectively contribute to containing global warming. The tool is designed to calculate whether the emissions of a building project located in Europe are compatible with the Paris Agreement target, based on specific inputs such as location and building area. The new platform joins other projects from international offices such as MVRDV NEXT's CarbonSpace, Grimshaw's Minoro, and Henning Larsen's OpenDetail, addressing decarbonization through shared digital information.
In 1948, Robert Moses established the Fresh Kills Landfill on the western shore of Staten Island. The site, chosen for its remote marshland and cheap land value, was meant to be temporary, but by 1955 it was the largest landfill in the world, receiving up to 29,000 tons of refuse per day at its 1991 peak. By 2001, after more than fifty years of continuous operation, Fresh Kills covered 2,200 acres, roughly three times the area of Central Park, and was, unspectacularly, visible from space. When it started, Moses didn't expect to design a dump but, without calling it that, a new landform with four artificial hills rising up to sixty meters above sea level built entirely from the accumulated residue of eight million daily lives.
That landform is now, slowly, becoming a park. James Corner Field Operations won the international design competition launched by the city in 2001, producing a master plan called Lifescape that will take thirty years to complete. The landfill's four mounds are being capped, planted, and gradually opened to the public. Methane from decomposing waste is captured and fed into an energy system as the wetlands are being restored around the engineered hills. Evidence of New York's consumption transformed into a feat of ecological engineering and an act of institutional memory management (a way of making a city's most embarrassing landscape slowly look like something it was always meant to be).
Buildner has announced the results of the Iceland Slow Sauna architecture competition, developed in partnership with Slow Travel Mývatn. Set beside Þúfa – Private Homestay in the volcanic landscape of Lake Mývatn in northern Iceland, the competition invited architects and designers to create a compact retreat combining a sauna and greenhouse within a single architectural experience. Rooted in the Icelandic tradition of bathing as a ritual of stillness and renewal, the brief asked participants to explore how heat, light, vegetation, and landscape could shape an intimate place of recovery and connection to nature.
Volcanic landscapes make geological change unusually visible. Lava hardens into new ground, and plants slowly take hold across it. Ash can remain in the landscape for years. Around active volcanoes, these processes are still underway, affecting where and how people build.
Yet these landscapes continue to attract houses and places of retreat. Their isolation and unusual terrain are often part of the appeal. Building there means bringing everyday life into a landscape that can still change.
There is no shortage of ways to imagine what the world will look like after a climate catastrophe. Genres of movies and novels have been built around the question of what happens when contemporary safeguards fail, from dystopian fiction and post-apocalyptic literature to disaster films, graphic novels, and video games. Burning forests, submerged cities, abandoned infrastructure, resource scarcity, and mass displacement are a familiar visual and narrative vocabulary. We have become remarkably fluent in imagining the consequences of a world that fails to respond to climate change.
There is no harder place to build than a high mountain, and none where a building feels more provisional. From the Andes to the Himalaya to the Alps, high-altitude construction strips architecture back to its most elementary transactions. The rock reads as permanence itself, yet a structure set near the limit of habitation exists in negotiation with almost everything around it: with wind that arrives without obstruction, with a ground too steep and too frozen to excavate, and with everything it needs arriving from far below. What can be carried up, what can be assembled by few hands, and what can sustain itself are some of the terms of the problem.
Those constraints have produced a remarkably consistent building culture across otherwise unrelated ranges. The refuge, the hut, the bivouac, and the observatory belong to a shared typology in which shelter is inseparable from logistics, and where lightness, prefabrication, and self-sufficiency were structural necessities long before they became virtues.
Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has been selected to receive the Andrée Putman Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2027 Créateurs Design Awards (CDA). The award, one of two Legacy Awards presented by the organization, recognizes a career that has influenced architecture and the built environment across generations and geographic contexts. Kuma will receive the honor during the CDA Awards Ceremony, which will take place at the Shangri-La Paris on January 16, 2027.
What narratives do materials carry, and how can the visible "traces" of artisans engage in a dialogue with manufacturing processes and industrialization? Between design and construction, the act of thinking through making can become a guiding principle for a design philosophy. Combining wood, industrial materials, and reused objects, Atelier CRAFT's approach is rooted in reversible architecture, guided by its manifesto: "Transform design through making." Based in Saint-Ouen, Paris, the practice explores the relationships between humans and materials, the act of making, and manufacturing processes.
Amid the transformation of Uzbekistan's cities, ARC Architects develops an architecture that seeks to connect past and present. Founded in 2017 by Bobir Klichev, the studio emerged from Bukhara's architectural community and remains closely connected to the country's cultural and climatic particularities. With offices in Tashkent and Bukhara, ARC combines minimalism and ethnic references to develop a contemporary language rooted in its context.
Rather than reproducing a traditional image of Uzbek architecture, the studio seeks to understand how this heritage can be reinterpreted today, an exercise that necessarily engages with the overlapping historical layers across the country. For centuries, cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara were important commercial and cultural centers of Central Asia. Their architecture developed around inner courtyards and narrow streets, forming urban fabrics in which buildings and collective spaces are inseparable.
Nature-based solutions are a primary strategy for contemporary climate adaptation and urban ecological resilience, embraced by cities regardless of their geography or climate zone. Green roofs, urban forests, bioswales, expanding tree canopy, protected wetlands, and permeable landscapes are featured prominently in municipal adaptation plans. These interventions are deployed across neighborhoods, distributed through street networks, and measured by hectares restored, trees planted, stormwater retained, or temperatures reduced. This shift expands the role of ecology within cities, establishing environmental elements as infrastructure systems and providing planners with a grounded framework for integrating natural systems into urban development.
Across the Gulf, Bedouin heritage often enters architecture first as an image. Airport terminals recall tent silhouettes, visitor centres incorporate woven screens, and pavilions reinterpret traditional textiles as decorative façades. These references have become a familiar visual language for expressing regional identity. They also risk reducing one of the world's most sophisticated vernacular building traditions to an architectural motif. Long before the Bedouin tent became a cultural symbol, it was an environmental technology: a lightweight, adaptable structure capable of creating comfort in one of the planet's most demanding climates. What contemporary infrastructure may inherit is not the tent's silhouette, but the construction intelligence woven into it.
The Arts and Crafts movement is often remembered as an architectural style defined by handcrafted details, an intimate scale, natural materials, and a rejection of excess and industry. Its influence is frequently traced through visual characteristics that continue to appear in contemporary architecture and interiors, from exposed timber and crafted joinery to an emphasis on texture and permanence, yet reducing the movement to an aesthetic vocabulary overlooks its far more significant contribution. For William Morris, Philip Webb, John Ruskin, and their contemporaries, architecture was a question of how things were made, who made them, and whether the process of making could cultivate dignity, meaning, culture, and beauty.
When Francis Kéré set out to build a school in his home village of Gando, Burkina Faso, he chose clay, a material his own community associated with scarcity, not architecture. To prove it could hold, he built test bricks and submerged one in water for five days before showing his neighbors it hadn't failed. Then he trained the villagers themselves to raise the walls, rather than bringing in a construction crew from the city. More than 200 people from Gando have since worked as builders because of that choice. The school carries something a materials list alone cannot: the trace of the hands that will go on living in the village long after the scaffolding came down.
In a slim volume with a yellow-edged cover, recently published by the Porto-based imprint Circo de Ideias, the architect Paulo Martins Barata (a founding partner of Promontório) makes a deceptively bold claim that the architecture produced in Europe since the Great Recession belongs to neither of the two camps that structured the twentieth century's fiercest disciplinary debate.
The Language of Metamodern Architecture borrows its title, with evident irony, from Charles Jencks' 1977 The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, the book that famously declared modern architecture dead at 3:32 pm on July 15, 1972, with the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe. His wager is that another death, never officially certified, occurred somewhere around 2008, and that architecture has been living, mostly unaware, in what grew up around the grave.
