"There is no space without event, no architecture without action." When Bernard Tschumi wrote these words, he was articulating a fundamental principle of the architect's practice. Architecture is about behavior. Every stroke of a pen on a floor plan is a proposition about how occupants will move or what actions become possible.
To draw is to architect a reality. Though with this power, architecture does not command. It does not issue instructions or enforce compliance, but it operates through a soft control — a mode of influence that shapes behavior by structuring perception and guiding attention.
Mexican architecture practice LANZA atelier has unveiled new details for the 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, titled "a serpentine," which will open to the public on 6 June 2026 at Serpentine South. Designed by studio founders Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo, the project reinterprets the historic serpentine or crinkle-crankle wall through a lightweight brick structure integrated into the landscape of Hyde Park. Marking the 25th edition of the annual commission, the pavilion will remain on view through October 2026 and serve as a venue for Serpentine's public programme of performances, talks, screenings, and community events.
Between 2005 and 2021, French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre developed a long-term project titled Theaters. Recently exhibited at KYOTOGRAPHIE 2026, the work documents a phenomenon that continues to unfold gradually around the world: the decline of infrastructure originally designed for public entertainment in the early twentieth century. Theaters, cinemas, and performance venues that once accompanied the modernization of cities are increasingly being abandoned, repurposed, or "left suspended as hybrid ruins." This process is often associated with the growing individualization of cultural consumption, from the widespread adoption of television to the rise of the streaming industry, as well as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cultural institutions. Below are three cases located in England, Chile, and Japan that illustrate different stages in this transformation, while also highlighting community-led efforts to preserve modern cultural heritage.
Step from the heat of Dubai into the lobby of a glass tower, and the desert seems to disappear. Outside, temperatures climb past 45 degrees Celsius; inside, the air is cold, sealed, and perfectly controlled. For decades, this contrast became the defining image of Gulf modernity. Architecture became less a negotiation with climate, and more a demonstration that climate could be overcome. Towers of reflective glass rose from the desert as symbols of arrival, projecting financial power, technological confidence, and global ambition. Beneath this urban image sat an infrastructure built on oil, cheap energy, and the continuous mechanical suppression of heat.
San Diego, California. Photo by Samuel Ramos on Unsplash
Very close to the Mexican border, in the southwest corner of the United States, lies the city of San Diego. Its urban history began in 1769 with the arrival of a Spanish military expedition commanded by Gaspar de Portola, which marked the first permanent settlement in the territory that was known as Alta California. However, unlike the more formally urbanized administrative capitals and towns of Mexico and Central America, San Diego was conceived as a frontier outpost. Today, it has become the second-largest city in California, just after Los Angeles, and its urban grid tells a story about the Hispanic heritage that is intertwined with the contemporary cultural environment of the United States.
Modernism is often encountered through built form, photographed facades, canonical plans, concrete manifestos. For most people, its first encounter was far more immediate. It was a chair in an office, a shelf in a living room, a compact unit that reorganized how one sat, stored, or slept. Long before modern architecture could be widely commissioned, it was furniture that entered everyday space, carrying with it a new logic of living. Modernism's promise of transforming life was often delivered through these smaller, repeatable objects.
To understand this shift, furniture has to be read as a condensed form of architecture rather than decoration. Early twentieth-century designers treated it precisely this way. Le Corbusier described furniture as équipement de l'habitation (equipment of living), placing it within the operational system of the building rather than outside it. Similarly, the Bauhaus approached chairs and tables as industrial prototypes, embedding principles of standardization, efficiency, and mass production into their design. As architectural historian Beatriz Colomina has argued, modern architecture did not circulate only through buildings, but through media and objects that translated its ideas into everyday life. Furniture became architecture in miniature: portable, reproducible, and capable of reorganizing space without reconstructing it.
High-rise architecture continues to serve as a primary tool for accommodating density in rapidly evolving urban environments. Traditionally defined by efficiency and repetition, the tower is increasingly being reexamined as a more complex spatial and organizational system. Across different geographies, architects are testing how vertical structures can move beyond singular functions to incorporate layered programs, environmental strategies, and new forms of occupation.
The following selection brings together unbuilt projectssubmitted by the ArchDaily community, highlighting a range of approaches to the contemporary tower. From mixed-use developments and residential high-rises to speculative ecological proposals, these works reflect an ongoing shift in how vertical architecture is conceived. These towers engage with broader questions of privacy, coexistence, adaptability, and urban integration.
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Winning design for a reimagined visitor centre and community space in Banff National Park. Paul Raff Studio and Kengo Kuma & Associates, 2026. Image Courtesy of Parks Canada
On May 13, 2026, Parks Canada, the federal agency responsible for protecting and managing Canada's natural and cultural heritage, announced the winning design for a reimagined visitor centre and community space in Banff National Park. The competition was organized in partnership with the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) as part of the 200-Block Banff Avenue Redevelopment Project. The proposal by Paul Raff Studio and Kengo Kuma & Associates was selected from a shortlist of five pre-qualified teams that also included EVOQ + Ryder, KPMB Architects, Revery Architecture, and Stantec Architecture. An independent jury assembled by the RAIC selected the design for its approach to landscape, sustainability principles, and its balance between conservation, heritage, Indigenous perspectives, and visitor experience, among other considerations.
Interpreting the contemporary habitat is a priority for architects and designers worldwide. Amid shifting trends, stylistic blends, and the revival of different techniques, contemporary interior design brings together materials, textures, and colors to transform the user experience. Within the domestic realm, a series of realities, tensions, and activities unfold, with design serving as a strong foundation and support system to meet the needs of its inhabitants. During Milan Design Week 2026, ICEX and Elle Decor Italia presented the fourth edition of Appartamento Spagnolo—a spatial framework created to showcase contemporary Spanish interior design within a historic context.
Ambrosian Monastery, Milan. Image Courtesy of Stefano Boeri Architetti
As global urban challenges intensify alongside growing environmental, social, and cultural pressures, this week's news reflects how institutions, exhibitions, and restoration projects are highlighting the relationship between the built environment and collective experience. From international forums addressing housing insecurity and urban resilience to cultural events examining memory, identity, and spatial perception, positioning architecture as both a framework for policy and a medium for critical reflection. At the same time, major restoration and redevelopment initiatives highlight a renewed focus on preserving historical continuity while adapting heritage sites and cultural institutions to contemporary forms of use, accessibility, and public engagement.
MVRDV and OODA have revealed a new masterplan for the regeneration of a vacant 28-hectare site between Marvila and Beato on Lisbon's riverfront. Recently approved by the Lisbon City Council, the project was developed in collaboration with LOLA Landscape Architects and Thornton Tomasetti to transform the area into a landscape-led urban district. Titled The Marvila Masterplan, the proposal establishes a framework for introducing 1,400 homes alongside public facilities, commercial spaces, and services within a fragmented and largely abandoned territory. The project is a private initiative led by the principal landowner and developed in coordination with the Lisbon City Council and Infraestruturas de Portugal.
Heritage, in interiors, is increasingly rarer to be only a matter of preservation alone. More often it arrives as friction: the encounter between what a building already is—its plan logic, its scars, its structural inconsistencies—and what contemporary life demands of it.
Some of the most convincing projects today are not those that "restore" an interior back to a single moment, nor those that erase the past under a seamless new skin. They are the ones that stage a relationship between old and new—allowing contrast to do more than tell a story, and letting the clash become a pragmatic tool for construction, budget, and speed.
"I want to start by thanking architecture itself." With these words, Chilean architect Smiljan Radić, the 55th laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, opened his acceptance speech in Mexico City. Reflecting on what he calls "distractions," he thanked the many encounters that have accompanied him throughout his life and practice: from art, cities, materials, structures, and compositions to landscapes, poetry, nature, forms, stories, and memories. He spoke about what, within them, provoked him and the marks they left on his architectural imagination.
From the black light in Chandigarh and the interior of San Salvatore in Rialto, to the heaps of stone on the Croatian island of Brač; from the fallen columns of the Temple of Poseidon and the abandoned shires scattered across Chile, to People Meet in Architecture, Kazuyo Sejima's 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, the traveling Chilean circus, and the silence of the water within the cisterns of Hagia Sophia, his speech unfolded as a tribute to moments, encounters, and distractions. A collage of memories and impressions that, together, shaped the architect he became.
Casa Batlló in Barcelona has unveiled the restored Third Floor of the building, opening the last original residence preserved from Antoni Gaudí's 1904-1906 transformation of the property to the public for the first time. Led by restoration architect Xavier Villanueva and developed over three years through an archaeological-style conservation process, the intervention recovers a largely intact domestic environment that had remained inhabited by descendants of the Batlló family for more than a century. Adapted into a series of private rooms for gatherings, cultural events, and experiences, the restored apartment combines heritage preservation with a contemporary interior design intervention by Paola Navone – OTTO Studio, establishing a new program for one of Barcelona's most recognized architectural landmarks.
In December 2024, art curator Koyo Kouoh became the first African woman selected to curate the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. She proposed an introspective and sensitive approach to the exhibition, shaped by themes of grief, memory, spirituality, and global exhaustion. Following her premature passing in May 2025, the Biennale decided to continue with the same curatorial project, titled In Minor Keys. Wolff Architects was appointed by Kouoh in early 2025 to realize the exhibition design and scenography, focused on "the transformative spatial power of the threshold as a portal to alternative comprehension and experiences." The event was inaugurated on Saturday, May 9, and will run until Sunday, November 22, 2026, across the Giardini della Biennale, the Arsenale di Venezia, and other locations throughout Venice.
Public space is often designed around a narrow idea of how people move, interact, and respond to their surroundings. ParkTEA starts from a different position. The city can also make room for those who experience space through different sensory and social conditions.
Developed by Ignacio Martínez Pardo at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM), the project was conceived within the Master's thesis (Graduate-MHab) program during the 2024 to 2025 academic year, under the guidance of Héctor Fernández Elorza, Jesús Aparicio, Carlos García Fernández, and Jaime Daroca Guerrero. Recognized as one of the winners of the first edition of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards, ParkTEA engages the theme of coexistence through a proposal that brings together care, infrastructure, and urban life.
