3D Visualizations of the project for the Saint-Ouen Grand Paris Nord University Hospital, 2026. Image Courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop
On February 20, Renzo Piano Building Workshop announced that the building permit for the Hôpital Universitaire Saint-Ouen Grand Paris Nord (HUSOGPN) has been officially granted. The project is a state initiative responding to rapid population growth, increasing demand for care, and evolving technical standards with a "next-generation" hospital in Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine, a commune in the northern suburbs of the French capital. The hospital will be located on the site of the former PSA factory, once an industrial engine of the region and now large and well-connected enough to host a program of rare scale: 986 beds and 288 day places, a workforce of over 5,500 professionals, and facilities equipped with contemporary technology for areas such as surgery and maternity. Envisioned as a "hospital-landscape," the building designed by RPBW in association with Brunet Saunier & Associés stands out for featuring a 1.3-hectare roof garden and an urban forest with over 1,000 trees.
Lacaton & Vassal have announced the transformation of a former administrative center into a mixed-use residential and office building in Vannes, a medieval town in Brittany, northwest France. The project is part of a State policy to mobilize state-owned land for housing. In 2023, the French State launched a call for expressions of interest for a project on the former administrative complex, which housed several State services, in consultation with the City of Vannes. The winning proposal is a partnership between GReeStone Immobilier and Grand Ouest Immobilier, with an architectural team formed by the office of Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, winners of the 2021 Pritzker Prize, in partnership with Emmanuelle Delage Architecte. According to the city government, the proposal was chosen with the aim of promoting resilience and limiting the carbon footprint by renovating rather than demolishing.
This week began with the World Day of Social Justice, foregrounding urgent questions of labor rights, spatial equity, and resource governance, and framing architecture as both a product of and a response to the social systems that shape access to land, housing, and opportunity. The announcement of the 15 winning projects of the 2026 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards highlighted a global cross-section of built works recognized for their architectural quality, innovation, and social impact, offering a snapshot of contemporary practice across scales and geographies. This week's news prompts a broader reflection on architecture's civic responsibility, with heritage and community-building through cultural architecture emerging as central themes. Housing, meanwhile, anchors another critical strand of the discussion with three highlighted initiatives: a manifesto reframing housing not as a market commodity but as a civic right and collective project grounded in care; a large-scale waterfront regeneration masterplan responding to regional housing demand through coastal transformation; and a timber residential project that explores the potential of wood in medium-density housing.
Battersea Power Station is a former coal-fired power station located on the south bank of the River Thames in London, originally designed by architects J. Theo Halliday and Giles Gilbert Scott. Notable for its appearance on the cover of Pink Floyd's 1977 studio album Animals and in Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 film Sabotage, the station is one of the world's largest brick buildings and is known for its Art Deco interior fittings and décor. Recognized today as part of modern industrial heritage, the site's transformation into a commercial development began in 2012, with the adaptive reuse guided by a masterplan designed by Rafael Viñoly. On February 16, Battersea Power Station announced the appointment of the strategic urban design practice Studio Egret West to evolve the original masterplan for the remaining 16 acres of the 42-acre riverside neighbourhood in the southwest London.
The final piece of the central tower of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia has been laid in place, bringing the church to its maximum height of 172.5 m. La Sagrada Familia, one of architectural history's most notorious unfinished buildings, became Antoni Gaudí's defining project in 1883, when he transformed a neo-Gothic design into one of the best-known structures of Catalan Modernisme. One hundred and forty-four years after construction began, the upper section of the 17-meter-high, four-sided steel and glass cross was winched into position at 11 a.m. on Friday, February 20, completing the tower dedicated to Jesus Christ. This milestone confirms the project's final stage of construction, which, back in March 2024, was announced as one of the most anticipated completions of 2026, commemorating the centenary of Antoni Gaudí's death.
Kengo Kuma and Associates was recently awarded first prize in the competition to design a new library in Rzeszów, the capital of the Subcarpathian Voivodeship in southeastern Poland. The city, home to nearly 200,000 residents, lies on the Wisłok River and is known as a center for the aviation industry. Strategically positioned along the main Kraków-Lviv railway and road corridor, it also serves as an important transit point near the Ukrainian border. Located on Józef Piłsudski Avenue, the new library is conceived as a connector between the Marshal's Office of the Podkarpackie Voivodeship and the nearby Secondary School Complex, reinforcing the area's civic character. The program combines traditional library functions with cultural, educational, and artistic spaces. In addition to reading and collection areas, an expanded event zone includes a music hall, multifunctional hall, conference rooms, and administrative areas. A spiraling library volume forms the tallest element of the complex, while event spaces and roof terraces extend the program outward, linking the building's activities with the surrounding city.
On January 30, an exhibition entitled "Concours Beaubourg 1971: Une mutation de l'architecture" opened in Paris, showcasing archival material from the competition that resulted in the selection of the current Centre Pompidou, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers between 1969 and 1974. In view of the building's recent closure for renovation, approximately 100 archival documents, including some never before exhibited from the Centre Pompidou's collections (plans, drawings, photographs, models, etc.), are on display at the Académie d'Architecture at Place des Vosges until February 22, 2026. Co-produced by the Académie d'Architecture and the Centre Pompidou, with support from the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Saint-Étienne, the exhibition presents alternative, imaginative, and sometimes unbuildable proposals for the building. It offers a review of a fertile period in architectural history, highlighting the lasting effects of the "Beaubourg competition" on the discipline and profession.
Concéntrico is an urban innovation laboratory that invites reflection on the city through architecture and design. Since 2015, it has carried out more than 180 interventions in Logroño, Spain. The new 2025/2026 season of the festival expands on this experimental spirit with three international calls for proposals that bring the ideas in the book Concéntrico: Laboratorio de Innovación Urbana (Park Books, 2025) into action. Through these calls, the organization seeks to explore further three lines of research, the ephemeral, the ecological, and the symbolic, to imagine different ways of inhabiting the city. The winning projects from this edition's calls for entries will be developed, built as urban installations, and presented in the exhibition during the festival, taking place in Logroño from June 18–23, 2026.
Exhibitions can be an opportunity to extend architectural discourse beyond professional circles, opening conversations with broader publics and serving as an interface between architecture and society. Within this concept, major international events such as the Osaka International Expo 2025 and the Venice Architecture Biennale have adopted the idea of the circular economy as one of their organizational objectives. The idea of circularity in events can be reflected in, for example, their energy consumption, the impact of the displacement they generate, their waste, or the useful life of their infrastructure. The site destined for the last World Expo, held in Osaka from 13 April to 13 October 2025, was surrounded by a massive timber structure designed by Sou Fujimoto Architects, one of the world's largest wooden constructions. The Japan Association for the 2025 World Exposition committed to reusing building materials "as much as possible," with concrete plans for their reuse to be finalized by March. In the meantime, some relocation alternatives are already emerging for the pieces of the World Expo structure.
From 7 March to 31 May 2026, Brazilian architect Eduardo Longo's Casa Bola will open to the public for the first time. The futuristic ball-shaped house in São Paulo will host one of the two parts of the ABERTO5 exhibition, alongside a project on Faria Lima, a major avenue at the heart of the city featuring landmarks by architects such as Ruy Ohtake and Isay Weinfeld. Founded in 2022, ABERTO is an exhibition platform that promotes the encounter of architecture, art, and design in Brazil and internationally. After its first international exhibition at Maison La Roche in Paris, ABERTO returns to São Paulo for its fifth edition, presenting over 60 art and design pieces by 50 Brazilian and international artists. According to architect and curator Fernando Serapião, Casa Bola represents one of the most radical works of Brazilian architecture, challenging conventional domestic space and reflecting Eduardo Longo's experimental vision for housing.
The Southbank Centre is a cultural complex in London built between 1963 and 1968 and widely regarded as a representative example of British Brutalism. Today, the site hosts a wide range of events, including visual arts, theatre, dance, classical and contemporary music, literature, poetry, and debate. The building was designed by a team from the Architects' Department of the London County Council, led by architect Norman Engleback. It became a controversial example of modern architecture following its opening in October 1967, when engineers voted Queen Elizabeth Hall "the supreme ugly" in a poll of new buildings, and the Daily Mail referred to it as "Britain's ugliest building." Fifty-nine years later, on February 10, 2026, the complex was granted Grade II listed status by the UK government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), following a 35-year campaign advocating for its protection as modern architectural heritage.
On February 5, 2026, Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest metropolis, was officially declared the host city of the 2029 Asian Winter Games. The Host City Contract was signed between the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) and the National Olympic Committee of the Republic of Kazakhstan during a ceremony in Milan, Italy, one of the host cities of the ongoing Winter Olympics. Established in 1986 in Sapporo, Japan, the Asian Winter Games will mark their tenth edition in 2029 and are held approximately every four years. The announcement follows an earlier decision to postpone the Games, which were originally scheduled to take place in the Trojena ski resort, masterplanned by LAVA and currently under construction as part of the NEOM mega-project in Saudi Arabia.
Baccarat Residence . Image Courtesy of Sou Fujimoto Architects
This week's news landscape brought together diverse approaches to built and cultural heritage, ranging from the design of a Museum of Jesus' Baptism at a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Jordan to major transformations of modern industrial sites and the development of major cultural districts. The World Monuments Fund's support for 21 locally led heritage projects foregrounds conservation strategies that reinforce the role of architecture in safeguarding both material and intangible heritage. Across this week's highlighted projects, adaptive reuse, landscape integration, and the reconfiguration of civic space emerge as recurrent strategies for extending the life and relevance of existing built environments. The projects also reflect broader contemporary concerns, including material research in timber construction, zero-waste urban installations, large-scale residential efficiency, and infrastructure upgrades linked to global events like the Olympic Games. Framing these developments within a wider territorial perspective, discussions on relocating capital cities worldwide offer an example of how geopolitical discourses continue to shape architecture, revealing the evolving relationship between the built environment and structures of power over time.
World Monuments Fund (WMF) is an independent organization dedicated to safeguarding treasured places around the world that enrich lives and foster mutual understanding across cultures and communities. On February 10, WMF announced a $7 million commitment to support 21 heritage preservation projects launching in 2026. These investments advance work at sites included on the 2025 World Monuments Watch, WMF's nomination-based advocacy program, while also supporting new phases of conservation, planning, and training at additional heritage sites across five continents. The selected sites reflect a wide chronological and geographic range, from ancient cultural landscapes to modern architectural landmarks. The projects highlight the diversity of global heritage, spanning Mughal gardens and Ottoman religious complexes to modernist cinemas, industrial mining landscapes, Indigenous cultural routes, and sacred shrines, and point to the long-term cultural knowledge embedded in its preservation.
The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics officially opened on Friday, February 6, with a ceremony staged across four locations in northern Italy. The main opening event took place at San Siro Stadium, one of Milan's most significant modernist landmarks, and combined dance and performing arts, referencing Italian culture with performances by international artists, including pop star Mariah Carey. Although several competitions had already begun on February 4, the opening ceremony marked the start of a broader programme of sporting, social, and cultural events distributed across Milan and the three Alpine host areas: Cortina d'Ampezzo, Valtellina, and Val di Fiemme. The Games are scheduled to run until February 22, concluding with a closing ceremony at the Verona Arena, ahead of the Paralympic Games, which will take place from March 6 to 15. As a large-scale international event, the Olympics place significant demands on sports infrastructure, transportation networks, accommodation, and tourism capacity, offering early indications of the longer-term urban, architectural, and territorial impacts the Games may leave behind.
The recently inaugurated exhibition matière en résonance ("resonant matter") brings together a wide range of models and a curated selection of photographs to present sauerbruch hutton's ongoing exploration of timber. The exhibition starts from the premise that while the age of concrete defined the twentieth century, the early twenty-first century has seen a worldwide resurgence of timber, a much older building material. Timber is presented as offering "a different version of modernity" and as the subject of renewed interest that reawakens long-standing collective imaginaries. Over more than two decades, the Berlin-based architecture practice has explored the possibilities of timber construction, from façade elements to load-bearing structures and modular systems. The exhibition reflects the results of this sustained investigation, reinforcing both technical innovation and the embodied qualities of timber across a diverse range of European contexts. The exhibition will be on view from 3 to 28 February 2026 at the Galerie d'Architecture de Paris.
Zaha Hadid Architects has released images of its design for the redevelopment of the waterfront along the Zhedong Canal in Hangzhou's Xiaoshan District, China. The Qiantang Bay Central Water Axis project envisions a sequence of landscaped parklands, terraces, and gardens along the canal basin, proposing the transformation of former industrial areas into a green corridor extending toward the city center. The proposal adds to other recent design initiatives in the area, including Snøhetta's Qiantang Bay Art Museum, planned at the confluence of the Qiantang River and the Central Water Axis, as well as Zaha Hadid Architects' Grand Canal Gateway Bridge, a pedestrian bridge intended to connect the firm's 800,000-square-meter Seamless City masterplan on the east and west banks of the Grand Canal.
