Spaces of retreat continue to offer fertile ground for unbuilt exploration, revealing how architecture can support rest, reflection, and immersion in nature amid shifting environmental and cultural conditions. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected projects assemble a diverse range of proposals that reconsider hospitality through the lens of refuge. These works position accommodation not as spectacle or excess, but as spatial frameworks shaped by landscape, climate, material restraint, and shared experience.
Across distinct geographies, from Southeast Asian hillsides and Indonesian coastlines to African wilderness, Alpine terrain, Middle Eastern landscapes, and North American forests, the proposals demonstrate varied architectural responses to sensitive sites. They include elevated structures that hover lightly above steep ground, temporary lodge systems embedded in remote ecologies, reconstructed mountain shelters grounded in memory and reuse, courtyard-centered communal stays shaped by lifestyle cultures, contemplative desert retreats, and inclusive woodland camps designed for accessibility and environmental balance.
Residential architecture remains one of the most active fields for unbuilt architectural exploration, offering a lens through which architects rethink how domestic space can respond to landscape, climate, and contemporary patterns of living. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected proposals bring together a range of residential projects that engage with houses, villas, and retreats as sites of withdrawal, mediation, and everyday inhabitation. Rather than treating the home as a fixed or isolated object, these projects approach it as a spatial framework that negotiates exposure, privacy, and connection to place.
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Second Prize Winner: Branch. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner has announced the results of the Howard Waterfall Retreat architecture competition, an international design challenge developed in close collaboration with the Howard Family Trust. The competition invited architects and designers to propose a multi-generational family retreat set within a privately owned, forested landscape in Northwestern Pennsylvania, centered on the dramatic presence of Howard Falls and the surrounding gorge.
Rather than prescribing a singular architectural solution, the brief emphasized a careful dialogue between architecture and nature. Participants were asked to consider how a retreat could balance shared and private living, respond to steep topography and water systems, and integrate sustainably within a sensitive ecological setting. The project also called for an interpretation of family legacy, encouraging designers to acknowledge the history of the site and the original summer cottage while imagining a retreat capable of evolving across generations.
Cities today are being reimagined as living, evolving organisms, combining digital intelligence, ecological systems, and new materials to shape radical futures. At Carlo Ratti's "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective." biennial, over 750 participants challenge established boundaries between architecture, landscape, and technology. Several conceptual projects showcased in the main exhibition challenge conventional boundaries between architecture, landscape, and technology. From bio-adaptive urban systems and Martian water-based settlements to immersive symphonies of satellite data, these works collectively envision new models for cohabitation, resilience, and planetary awareness.
This month's Unbuilt selection presents six speculative projects, presented as part of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibition, as provocations for rethinking the future of cities and human settlement. While some proposals transform architecture into self-sustaining, living infrastructures, others explore how data and sensory interfaces can redefine our relationship with natural and urban environments. Together, they offer a cross-section of how architects and designers are using unbuilt work to imagine new possibilities for life on Earth and beyond.
Residential houses, villas, and retreats are increasingly being designed as places of pause—spaces where architecture supports rest, reflection, and stronger connections to nature. Rather than focusing solely on urban living or compact efficiency, these homes are set in remote, scenic, or rural locations, where the landscape becomes an essential part of daily life. Through careful siting, use of natural materials, and open layouts, they offer an elevated standard of living that is both intentional and grounded in place.
Forests are among the most complex yet vital ecosystems on Earth. They regulate climate, support biodiversity, and sustain human communities. With the growing realities of climate change and environmental degradation, architects, planners, and engineers now face a new imperative: designing within forests in ways that sustain the ecosystems on which they depend.
In 2016, an international public architecture competition was announced to design a new administrative center for the Czech Forestry Commission. The new building would replace the existing headquarters on the outskirts of Hradec Králové, a medieval city surrounded by municipal forests on its eastern limit. CHYBIK+KRISTOF's 'Forestry in the Forest' project was selected as the winning proposal in 2017 after a two-round anonymous competition. Now, seven years after the competition, the firm has revealed images and plans for what is set to become the largest wooden structure in the Czech Republic. The design is characterized by establishing a permanent relationship with the surrounding landscape and by seeking to exemplify the benefits of timber construction for the local industry.
On the shores of serene lakes, where water reflects the harmony between architecture and nature, homes emerge as true retreats. Designed to offer comfort and a deep connection with the surroundings, these residences stand out worldwide for their diverse materials and scales, adapting to different landscapes and lifestyles. From remote woodencabins to sophisticated concrete and glass mansions in urban areas, each project takes advantage of natural resources and the unique characteristics of its setting.
Despite their whimsical appearance, treehouses offer a unique platform for structural innovations and design explorations. Traditional treehouses rely on the trunks of trees for structural support, but, in order to ease the load supported by the tree, contemporary projects often introduce additional systems, such as stilts to maintain the image while offering additional support. One of the key advantages of elevating them in this way is the reduced environmental footprint. Treehouses can be designed to leave the forest floor untouched, preserving small-scale ecosystems. By freeing up the ground below, they minimize disruptions to native flora and fauna, allowing nature to thrive undisturbed. Similarly, many architects use the local topography to create seamless connections, incorporating ramps, stairs, or bridges that integrate with the landscape. These solutions not only improve accessibility but also enhance the overall experience creating an architectural promenade that moves between the treehouse and its surroundings.
"This sensitivity to the environment is reflected not only in the structural design but also in the careful selection of materials. The use of natural materials like wood, also helps the structure blend with its environment. Some designers have gone further by employing alternative materials such as mirrored panels to reflect the surrounding forest and mask the treehouse's presence entirely, demonstrating that the choice of material can contribute to creating a project that feels like an extension of its setting rather than an imposition on it. This collection highlights notable examples from Sweden, Denmark, Indonesia, and France, showcasing their diverse approaches.
The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's "Living Structures" exhibition, running from November 8th, 2024, to March 23rd, 2025, features Deep Forest, a new installation by Prof Claudia Pasquero and Dr. Marco Poletto founders of architecture and design innovation firm ecoLogicStudio, together with academic partner Innsbruck University. This immersive work challenges traditional architectural paradigms by embracing the naturalization of architecture and technology, a direct counterpoint to modernist attempts to mechanize nature. The exhibition represents the culmination of twenty years of research in bio-digital design, showcasing the potential of symbiotic relationships between technology and the natural world within built environments.
Camping, as defined in dictionaries, involves temporarily staying outdoors, setting up makeshift accommodations, and settling in natural surroundings. In architecture, tents symbolize these aspects, representing a typology that has endured across centuries and cultures, often linked with notions of impermanence and vulnerability.
In light of this common understanding, the term 'glamping' emerged in the early 2000s, blending 'camping' with 'glamour,' suggesting a fusion of camping with luxurious amenities. However, despite its recent popularization, the concept is far from original. Camping has not always been seen as the antithesis of luxury.
Google Earth and Maxar Technologies, organized by Adriano Liziero (@geopanoramas)
The world has its eyes on the Amazon. Geographical data about this vast territory, spanning 6.74 million square kilometers across eight countries in Latin America, is constantly featured in national and international media. Headlines often highlight its sheer magnitude as the largest tropical rainforest in the world, home to 10% of the planet's biodiversity, and responsible for 15% of the Earth's freshwater. However, little attention is paid to what transpires beneath its canopy, on the ground where people live.
Obra realizada com Mass Timber Urbem. Image Cortesia de Urbem
At a time when sustainability and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) concerns are prevalent, there is a crucial need to focus on a sector that accounts for 38% of all global CO₂ emissions and consumes 30% of global resources: the construction industry. In 2022, at COP27, the United Nations announced the Clean Construction Accelerator, a program with actions designed to reduce greenhouse gas production by up to 50% by 2030. A report by ARUP and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development suggests that half of building emissions come from embodied carbon, which is generated in the manufacturing and transportation of materials, not just in construction sites and buildings themselves. It is precisely in this scenario that we see an opportunity for the sector. What is the only renewable material in construction that retains carbon instead of emitting it? Wood.
When thinking of wood, another question tends to arise: "How can wood be sustainable if we need to cut down trees for it?” Ana Belizário, the Commercial Director of Urbem, a large-scale Brazilian mass timber industry, explains throughout this article how planting trees specifically for consumption is not only a sustainable alternative but also an excellent practice in combating the climate crisis and can regenerate the construction sector.
MAD Architects has just unveiled the design for LishuiAirport in China. Dubbed the "forest city,” Lishui is known for its green landscapes and valleys in the Southwest Zhejiang Province. Situated amidst hilly terrain, approximately 15 kilometers southwest of the city, the airport is envisioned as a domestic, regional transportation hub seeking to harmonize with the natural surroundings.
MAD Architects has announced the completion of the Jiaxing Train Station, the first transportation infrastructure project developed by the architecture office. Located in the historic city of Jiaxing, 100 kilometers southwest of Shanghai, the project involves the replacement of a dysfunctional station that had stood at the site between 1995 and 2019. As China has developed significantly in terms of urbanization, its train stations have grown into complicated, widespread, and uninviting infrastructures. Through their project, MAD Architects strive to return to a human scale, to create a facility that responds to the newest developments in transportation technology, while creating spaces that are comfortable and easy to navigate for its users.
Tropical Africa boasts vast forests that cover 3.6 million square kilometers of land in West, East, and Central Africa. These forests provide valuable timber resources that significantly impact sectors, such as the furniture, fuel, and paper industries. However, interestingly, timber is seemingly absent in the contemporary architecture of the countries in this region. While architectural taste plays a role, the main reasons for this absence can be attributed to the wood industries' inability to meet the requirements of availability, affordability, aesthetic appeal, durability, and climatic and structural performance of timber. The wood industry in tropical Africa is mainly composed of informal and small-scale operations, focused primarily on sawing logs rather than refining wood for architectural or structural purposes. Despite this, the large number of informal enterprises in the region presents an opportunity to reshape the wood industry and utilize the local forestry resources to construct timber buildings.
Sustainability has taken center stage in the broad world of architecture and design, inspiring and directing the construction of new structures towards environmental harmony. The use of wood, a classic material with enormous potential to lessen our ecological impact while providing limitless design possibilities, is a notable example of this movement's implementation. In the fight for sustainability in the field of architecture, wood has become an ally. Its distinctive qualities, such as renewability and carbon neutrality, have inspired creative methods among architects worldwide.
A wide range of architectural projects, from vital healthcare facilities to exciting mixed-use buildings, cultural hubs, and welcoming residential spaces, benefit from wood's extraordinary versatility as a building material. In fact, wood's natural warmth and biophilic qualities can create spaces that reduce stress and promote well-being. Furthermore, the carbon-neutral nature of wood aligns perfectly with the design industry's commitment to environmental responsibility.
