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.
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.
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.
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.
Most people probably have their own ritual when entering a swimming pool. Some dive in without hesitation, others start by dipping their toes, some swim for sport, and others immerse themselves simply for pleasure. Whether individual or shared, intense or contemplative, every experience with water takes place within an environment carefully designed to receive it.
Architecture and water belong to opposing realms. While architecture defines boundaries and contains space, water constantly seeks to spread beyond them. It is from this tension between the solid and the liquid that aquatic centers emerge. In these buildings, the presence of water transforms everything around it. Light breaks into shifting reflections, sounds acquire a distinctive reverberation, temperature and humidity shape the atmosphere of the spaces, and materials and construction systems are continuously put to the test. Yet their uniqueness is not merely technical.
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.
A monument is usually the most conservative building a state will commission. It is expected to stabilize memory, to make history legible, and to give public form to a shared narrative. Eastern Europe's twentieth century produced an entire body of work from the Baltic to the Balkans that resisted precisely those expectations, challenging the conventional relationship between monument, memory, and representation. Commonly grouped under the name spomeniks, these architectural exercises are perhaps the best-known examples of a much broader landscape of memorial architecture that emerged across the region. These were societies emerging from occupation, civil conflict, or revolution, and none of them possessed a single symbolic language capable of accommodating the complexity of their histories. Rather than searching for new heroes or new icons, many architects and artists turned to space itself as the medium through which remembrance could be constructed.
These monuments occupy an unusual position between sculpture and architecture. At one scale, they read as deliberate abstract compositions arranged with the clarity of a drawing by Kandinsky. At another, they seem less resolved, as if testing the limits of a spatial language still in formation. Their forms often appear caught between certainty and experimentation, the same monument readable as a controlled geometric object and as an open-ended search for how collective memory might inhabit space. But these readings coexist and give many of these works their enduring ambiguity.
One of the defining qualities of contemporary interiors is flexibility. Offices, education facilities, hotels, and cultural venues need to be adaptable. They require spaces that can expand, divide, open, and close according to different activities, without sacrificing comfort, or accoustics. How a space is subdivided, then, is no longer a secondary decision, but a central component of architectural performance.
Every twelve years, the banks of the Ganges at Prayagraj become one of the largest cities on Earth — and then disappear. The Maha Kumbh Mela draws over 400 million pilgrims across six weeks, requiring the construction of a full urban infrastructure: pontoon bridges, field hospitals, kilometers of temporary roads, a grid of tent cities visible from space. When the festival ends, it is dismantled entirely. No gathering in human history produces a more complete architecture of movement; built for arrival, engineered for transience, and designed to leave no permanent trace. The Kumbh Mela is exceptional in scale, but not in condition: movement has become a defining spatial problem of the century.
This month, ArchDaily explores Architectures of Movement: Land, Borders, and the Politics of Belonging, a theme that examines how mobility reshapes architecture's relationship to territory, ownership, and identity. The topic does not treat movement as a crisis to be managed, but as a fundamental lens through which to reconsider what buildings, cities, and borders actually do: who they accommodate, who they exclude, and what they make permanent.
A building material rarely begins where architecture encounters it. By the time concrete reaches a construction site, its limestone has already been quarried, processed, and transformed. Timber arrives long after the forest. Glass appears detached from the sand from which it was made. By the time materials enter construction, much of the landscape and industry that produced them has already disappeared from view.
In 1743, a small cabin suspended by ropes was installed in a courtyard of the Palace of Versailles for the private use of King Louis XV. Manually operated by servants hidden from view, the so-called "flying chair" allowed movement between floors without stairs, and unknowingly introduced one of the central questions of modern architecture: how to move people vertically in a way that is efficient, safe, and integrated into the building.
The mechanization of this principle, with the introduction of a safety elevator in the early 1850s, paved the way for an unprecedented urban transformation. Without the elevator, the skyscrapers of Chicago and New York in the 1880s would have been unfeasible not because of structural limitations, but because of access. The elevator made it possible to build higher, and it also defined the logic of how these buildings would operate, where their cores would be placed, how their lobbies would be organized, and who could reach which spaces.
Dallas City Hall, Texas. Image via World Monuments Fund
On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the United States' Declaration of Independence, the World Monuments Fund has announced a new list of ten heritage places representing the country's history. The special initiative, titled "Irreplaceable America," recognizes historic places across the country whose preservation is considered "essential to the richness and complexity of American history," spotlighting urgent preservation needs. From the oldest botanical garden in the country to I.M. Pei's modernist Dallas City Hall, the selected sites bear witness to Indigenous heritage, artistic experimentation, and public health, colonial, and Black history.
Guangzhou Yunxi Botanical Garden / AECOM + Architectural Design & Research Institute of SCUT + Guangzhou Landscape Architectural Design & Research Institute. Image Courtesy of Yunxi Botanical Garden
While human life depends heavily on plants for the medicines, building materials, and fuel they provide, they also play a vital role in many ecological processes. From climate regulation through carbon dioxide absorption to soil fertility and the purification of air and water, plant diversity offers opportunities to address some of the most pressing challenges of this century, including food security, energy availability, climate change, and habitat degradation. In this context, botanical gardens act as living refuges that foster innovation, adaptation, and human resilience. But what can architectural practice learn from botany and its methods?
In architecture, however, this question still remains relatively marginal. We often know who designed a building, we are familiar with its finishes, the manufacturer of its window frames, the brand of its cladding systems, and even its energy performance—but we almost never ask where the tons of material that made its existence possible came from.
