There are only two days left to vote for the winners of ArchDaily en Español's 2026 Obra del Año Award. The three winners will be announced on April 16, following three weeks of public voting. The 15 finalists chosen by the public showcase the breadth of recent Ibero-American architectural production, spanning Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Spain, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.
Discover the 15 finalists and help choose the three most significant projects of the past year in Spanish-speaking countries. In this final stage, users can vote for one project per day until April 15 at 6:00 PM (GMT-4).
https://www.archdaily.com/1054513/last-days-to-vote-in-the-archdaily-en-espanol-2026-building-of-the-year-awardArchDaily Team
The announcement of the 2026 Obra do Ano Award is drawing near, with only two days left until the close of the final selection stage. The three winners will be announced on April 16, following three weeks of public voting. The 15 finalists paint a portrait of the current state of architecture according to the public, who have been voting for their favorite projects.
View the 15 finalists and join an unbiased network of jurors responsible for choosing the most relevant projects built in Portuguese-speaking countries over the past year. In this final stage, each person can vote for one project per day until April 15 at 7:00 PM (Brasília time).
https://www.archdaily.com/1054514/last-days-to-vote-for-the-finalists-of-archdaily-brasils-2026-obra-do-ano-awardArchDaily Team
Understanding play as a social transformer and a key influence in defining public space, urban life is shaped by a diverse range of individuals across different ages, cultures, ideologies, interests, classes, and social groups. Thinking about how play inhabits cities means thinking about all generations, and about the need to build public spaces with urban equipment designed to endure and be preserved over time.
The performance of play structures calls for an examination of the different stages of their life cycle, along with their impact on the configuration of the urban environment. Analyzing the life cycle of urban play equipment means understanding everything from materials, durability, and maintenance to the role of certifications, applied manufacturing technologies, and environments that are more conscious of their ecological impact.
https://www.archdaily.com/1054664/jobs-in-chengdu-and-nanjing-modum-atelier-is-hiring-architectural-design-interior-design-commercial-research-brand-communications-interns韩爽 - HAN Shuang
It is eight in the morning, and the car's dashboard display reads 36°C on the streets of San Pedro Sula, Honduras. The sky is almost clear: an intense blue with a few bright, drifting clouds. The air conditioning in the cars—all with tinted windows—makes you forget that upon stepping out, the warm, humid air will immediately weigh on your shoulders and break a sweat.
Puerto Cortés on the Caribbean coast is too far away for a quick dip, but in the neighborhood of Armenta, the eponymous river flows almost silently down from the Sierra del Merendón, running from west to east through gray stones. On the northern bank, tall, leafy trees along the upper edge of the ravine shade a long, dry, and dusty plaza, while thick, exposed roots give texture to the ground. The sun is less punishing.
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.
The built environment has historically served humans as a mechanism of environmental control. Through our intellectual capacities and ability to organize, we have used buildings to actively influence and terraform the immediate context in which they are inserted, often treating geography, water, and ecosystems as resources to be extracted and managed. However, more and more, architecture is transitioning from exploiting physical and biological matter to actively collaborating with it. This shift demands that architects explore how buildings and their materials grow, transform, decay, and persist beyond human timelines. This thinking also serves as a starting point for the profession to reflect on how it influences the natural world, as well as the non-human species around it, creating networks and connections between humans, buildings, living organisms, and natural environments.
At the helm of architectural discourse on sacred architecture, attention almost always settles on the monument. Temples, mosques, monasteries, and churches dominate architectural histories, design criticism, and photography alike, becoming the physical symbols through which faith is understood. For millions of pilgrims across India, the most consequential architectural experience begins long before the shrine comes into view. It unfolds across mountain roads, river ghats, shaded streets, temporary camps, queue systems, bridges, water kiosks, medical stations, and countless ordinary pieces of infrastructure through which pilgrimage actually takes place. The architectural work of pilgrimage may lie less in the shrine itself than in the environments that allow millions of people to reach it.
First Prize Winner: Seeds in Forgotten Soil. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner has announced the results of its Re-Form: New Life for Old Spaces, second edition, an international ideas competition examining the adaptive reuse of small-scale existing buildings. The competition invited architects and designers to propose transformations of used, abandoned, or overlooked structures with an approximate footprint of 250 square meters, located anywhere in the world. With no fixed site or program, participants were encouraged to explore alternatives to demolition and new construction through reuse strategies grounded in contemporary social and environmental concerns.
As a fundamental human right, inclusion requires that all people—regardless of their backgrounds, abilities, or circumstances—are recognized and respected, with equal access to the same resources and opportunities. For many people with disabilities and their caregivers, accessible washrooms still fail to provide what is most essential: a safe, private, and dignified place for assisted changing. While many facilities comply with ADA and ICC accessibility standards, conventional washroom layouts often do not accommodate users who require additional space, time, and support from caregivers. This gap has contributed to the growing adoption of adult changing facilities, which extend accessibility beyond conventional washroom requirements and respond to needs that standard fixtures cannot address.
Turin's Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. Image Courtesy of MVRDV
MVRDV and Balance Architettura have unveiled their proposal for the renovation of the Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAM) in Turin, Italy, following their selection through a public competition in December 2025. The project seeks to restore the spatial qualities of the museum's 1959 building while introducing new exhibition strategies, publicly accessible storage, and flexible display systems designed to accommodate evolving curatorial needs. Conceived as both an architectural restoration and an institutional transformation, the proposal aims to reconnect the museum with the surrounding city while adapting it to contemporary approaches to exhibition-making and public engagement. The project is supported by Fondazione Torino Musei and funded by Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, and the construction is expected to begin during the second half of 2027.
Dar al Funoon Abu Dhabi project by Frank Gehry. Image Courtesy of Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi
Dar al Funoon Abu Dhabi, the new performing arts institution designed by the late architect Frank Gehry, is among his final works. Translating to "House of the Arts," the landmark building, commissioned by Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism, was designed as a global hub for the performing arts and is expected to open in 2030. The project adds to Gehry's work in the emirate, which also includes the upcoming Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, and follows the city's designation as a UNESCO Creative City of Music in 2021.
Almost certainly, everyone has their own ritual when entering a pool. There are those who dive in without hesitation, those who start with their toes, those who swim for sport, and those who submerge themselves for pure pleasure. Private or shared, intense or contemplative, every experience with water takes place within an environment carefully constructed to receive it.
Architecture and water are of opposing natures. While one delimits and contains, the other insists on spreading, and it is from this tension between solid and liquid that aquatic centers emerge. In these buildings, the presence of water transforms everything around it. Light fragments into shimmering reflections, sound acquires a distinct reverberation, and temperature and humidity define the atmosphere of the spaces, while materials and structural systems are constantly put to the test. Yet their uniqueness is not merely technical.
NUS School of Design & Environment / Serie Architects + Multiply Architects + Surbana Jurong. Image Courtesy of Serie Architects + Multiply Architects + Surbana Jurong
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
Before architecture students become authors of space, they are subjected to one. For years, they work inside a building that teaches without announcing itself as a teacher. It organizes their exhaustion, their ambition, their visibility, their solitude, their friendships, their sense of scale, and their relationship to judgment. Long before a student can articulate a position on architecture, the school has already offered one in its implicit built environment.
This is not to suggest that buildings determine architects. The influence is slower and less complete than that. A school building operates more like a hidden curriculum: a spatial discipline that works alongside faculty, syllabi, institutional culture, and student life. It teaches through access and obstruction, program adjacencies, daylight exposures, and scale. It produces habits of attention before it produces explicit beliefs.
Across different climates and building cultures, many contemporary projects are working with local ways of building in new ways. Earth walls, bamboo structures, shaded thresholds, and collective construction processes are being reconsidered not as references, but as tools for the conditions architecture is facing now and will continue to face.
In these projects, vernacular knowledge appears through practical decisions: how to cool a building without machines, how to build with what is nearby, how to make a structure easier to repair, and how to keep construction knowledge within the community that will use it. The conditions making this knowledge necessary are not coming. They are already here.
An informal vendor selling balloons along La Séptima in the Plaza de Bolívar. "Bogota, Colombia" by szeke is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
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.
Most of Europe's future housing already exists, yet renovation continues to happen too slowly to address climate, housing, health and resource challenges at the scale required. Re:Living explores how renovation can move from isolated projects to a scalable approach for transforming existing buildings. At the heart of the initiative is a new research project, The Housing We Need for the Future We Want, which examines how better use of the existing building stock can unlock new opportunities for architects, cities and communities.
The project developed by CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, Park Associati, Politecnica Building for Humans, Openfabric, DOTDOTDOT, Studio Mattioli, and Eckersley O'Callaghan has been selected to design the new Main Hospital and Children's Hospital in Brescia, Italy. The international competition mandate was to redevelop an existing hospital, preserving and extending a radial plan conceived by engineer Angelo Bordoni in the early twentieth century. The existing healthcare complex, Spedali Civili di Brescia, follows a hexagonal masterplan and radial layout that informs the new design for the premises. The geometry is reinterpreted to update the campus for future models of care, drawing a new CareRing around it that connects people, nature, and healthcare through the principles of One Health, the idea that human health, environmental health, and social wellbeing are inseparable.
Mexico City. Image by Eduardo Enriquez, via Unsplash
Mexico City is a sprawling metropolis of layered temporalities, where architecture operates as a continuous negotiation between deep-seated history and intense urban mutation. Built over the aquatic traces of Tenochtitlan, the city's fabric is an ongoing dialogue between eras: the monumental scale of the Pre-Hispanic Templo Mayor and the Viceroyalty architecture of the Catedral Metropolitana coexist with the modern and contemporary impulses that define its skyline. This dense juxtaposition creates a unique urban canvas where sacred geography, colonial imposition, and 20th-century ambition intersect.
The mid-century marked a definitive era of experimentation, forging a Mexican Modernism that masterfully synthesized international structural rationalism with local identity and materiality. This synthesis is epitomized by the sweeping, plastic integration of art and architecture at the Ciudad Universitaria, the structural poetry of Félix Candela's hyper-parabolic shells, and the raw, monumental brutalism of Teodoro González de León and Abraham Zabludovsky. Parallel to this, the intimate, introspective mastery of Luis Barragán and Juan O'Gorman redefined domestic space, experimenting with light, vernacular color, and tectonic honesty to create spaces of profound spatial stillness.
An experiential rebellion takes center stage in the fourth episode of the Room For Dreams podcast, hitting directly at the heart of today's screen-deep, image-obsessed design culture. Recorded live at Milan Design Week 2026 in cooperation with INDX|GLOBAL, host Claire Broadka sits down with four Indian architectural voices — Indrajit Kembhavi, Manish Gulati, Sanjay Singh, and Sidhartha Talwar — to explore a critical question: have we sacrificed the soul of architecture for the sake of a picture-perfect Instagram post?
Recent events highlighted the many ways architecture responds to changing environmental, social, and cultural conditions. Major earthquakes in Venezuela, Japan, and Northern California renewed attention to the role of planning, infrastructure, and building practices in shaping resilience to natural hazards. As these questions continue to inform the built environment, the opening of the 2026 UIA World Congress of Architects in Barcelona brought together practitioners and researchers to discuss climate, housing, public space, and the future of the profession. Recent project announcements, preservation initiatives, completed works, and new design tools further reflected the range of approaches shaping architectural practice today, from heritage conservation and adaptive reuse to environmental performance and long-term planning.
