Xu Tiantian is the founding principal of DnA_Design and Architecture, an interdisciplinary practice that addresses both the physical and social dimensions of the contemporary living environment, across scales. Born in 1975 in Fujian, China, she received a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a bachelor's degree in architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Her recent work focuses on rural revitalization through a strategy she describes as "architectural acupuncture," understood as small-scale, site-specific interventions designed to activate local culture, agriculture, and tourism. These interventions, primarily concentrated in China's rural regions, have been recognized by UN-Habitat as a global model for urban–rural integration. In this interview with Louisiana Channel, she reflects on the role of the architect, questions architecture itself and the concept of beauty, explains her working methodology, and emphasizes the spatial dimension of nature.
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"Beauty in Itself Is Dangerous:" Xu Tiantian on Moving Beyond Starchitecture in Louisiana Channel Interview
Escuelita Lochiel: An ArchDaily Student Project Awards Winner Reframing Education Through Adobe
In the high desert of the San Rafael Valley, a few miles from the United States-Mexico border in Lochiel, Arizona, an adobe schoolhouse has stood for more than a century. Built before 1905, before Arizona was an incorporated state, the schoolhouse served generations of Mexican American students from Arizona and Sonora, cultivating shared cultural experiences, stories, and relationships that transcend physical and political boundaries. Over decades of education and shared histories, it became a place where language and narrative moved freely, even as geopolitical tensions continued to rise along the border. Today, it is one of the last remaining one-room adobe schoolhouses in the United States.
Adobe is among the oldest building technologies in the American Southwest, and among the most demanding to steward. In desert climates, earthen walls face intense weathering from temperature extremes, cracking due to seasonal shifts, and accelerated decay after storm events. These vulnerabilities require sustained and skilled maintenance over many seasons and compounding decades. After years of encroaching abandonment and structural threats, a twelve-year restoration effort by local community members who understood this building as critical cultural infrastructure brought the schoolhouse back from the edge of demolition. That the community chose to undertake this effort, given everything Adobe construction demands of those who care for it, is a statement about what the loss of this building would have cost. The result is a structure that now stands as a monument to Mexican American heritage and a living archive of rural border education.
Milan Design Week 2026 Selection and Wasl Tower in Dubai: This Week’s Review
Across cultural platforms, heritage sites, and institutional developments, this week's news reflects how the built environment is reshaped through processes of transformation, reinterpretation, and public engagement. From archaeological reactivations and adaptive reuse strategies to museum expansions and large-scale international gatherings, architecture operates across multiple temporalities, balancing preservation with contemporary use and spatial continuity with evolving cultural programs. Within this context, ArchDaily's selection of installations and exhibitions from Milan Design Week 2026 highlights how design weeks increasingly function as curatorial frameworks for experimentation, while global events and institutional projects continue to expand the formats through which architecture is produced, shared, and debated.
Saint-Denis’ Brutalist Îlot 8 Housing Complex by Renée Gailhoustet Faces Controversial Redevelopment Plan
Saint-Denis is a commune in the northern suburbs of Paris, France, known for the Gothic Basilica of Saint-Denis and the Stade de France. At one corner of Place Jean-Jaurès in its historic center, adjacent to the Basilica, stands the Îlot 8 housing complex, a Brutalist landmark designed by architect Renée Gailhoustet. Built between 1975 and 1986 to provide workers' housing in the city center, countering the trend of relegating social housing to peripheral areas, the project is now at the center of a controversial redevelopment plan. Often referred to as "residentialization" and restructuring, the proposal involves the demolition of significant parts of its original design. This reconversion is part of the French Nouveau Programme National de Renouvellement Urbain (NPNRU) and is justified by concerns over structural deficiencies, safety, and maintenance.
"Calibrated Instability": Daryan Knoblauch on Building With Tension, Time, and Light
Daryan Knoblauch's work sits at the intersection of architecture and live cultural production, with a focus on how space is made legible through tension and atmosphere. Rather than treating temporary work as a lesser category of architecture, Knoblauch approaches installations, stages, and event architectures as full disciplinary problems—where enclosure, stability, light, and movement must be resolved with the same seriousness as any building, often under tighter constraints and faster timelines.
Across projects, a consistent thread is the productive tension between high-modern precision and an intentionally raw clarity of assembly. Membranes and lightweight systems are not deployed as surface effects, but as structural and spatial instruments—tuned to wind, load, and occupation, and calibrated to produce a sublimity that is felt as much as it is seen. Here, ephemerality is not simply a duration, but a design condition: temporality makes forces—weather, wear, performance—more visible, and demands an ethic of making that is both exacting and adaptable.
Regenerative Salt Landscapes: An ArchDaily Student Project Awards Winner Rethinking Extraction in Argentina
When people think of Argentina, they often picture landmarks like the Obelisk of Buenos Aires. Yet the country spans over 2,780,400 km², making it one of the largest in South America and home to a wide range of landscapes and realities that frequently go unnoticed. In fact, the province of Jujuy in northern Argentina lies within the Lithium Triangle: a high-altitude region shared with Bolivia and Chile that contains roughly 54% of the world's lithium reserves. Within this territory sits the Olaroz Salt Flat, a site where today two competing dynamics converge: the expansion of industrial lithium extraction and the preservation of ancestral culture and lands inhabited by Kolla and Atacama communities, creating a clash of high-capacity industrial extraction and traditional, low-impact agrarian practices.
In light of this problem, one of the winning teams of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards, made up of Ezequiel Lopez, Maria Victoria Echegaray, and Agustina Durandez, decided to look into the issue. This was done as part of their thesis project for the Bachelor's in Architecture program at the National University of Córdoba. Their work stems from an interest in engaging with territories that remain peripheral to architectural discourse, using the thesis as an opportunity for sustained, in-depth research. This allowed them to formulate informed design responses grounded in both territorial and socio-economic realities. Rejecting the binary between extraction and preservation, the project approaches the territory as a system where both can coexist through spatial and technical mediation.
Minoru Yamasaki's Northwestern National Life Building in Minneapolis to Be Converted Into Hotel
A building designed by Minoru Yamasaki in downtown Minneapolis is set to be converted into a hotel, marking a new phase in the life of the former headquarters of the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company, one of the architect's lesser-known yet formally distinctive works. Vacant since 2023, the building at 20 Washington Avenue South is now the subject of an adaptive reuse proposal that aims to introduce hospitality and public-facing functions. Initial plans were presented in April 2026, outlining a transformation of the structure while retaining its defining architectural features. The project is expected to move forward pending approvals, with a projected opening targeted for 2028.
MVRDV Obtains Construction Permit for Low-Carbon Mixed-Use Tour & Taxis Towers in Brussels
Rotterdam-based firm MVRDV has announced a new milestone in the development of its Tour & Taxis Towers, a mixed-use project in Brussels, Belgium. The design was commissioned by real estate investor and developer Nextensa in 2021, within the framework of a site-specific land use masterplan also designed by MVRDV. The two-tower project combines offices, housing, and public amenities across 58,000 m², forming a landmark in the neighbourhood and reaching 126 metres at its highest point. Recently granted construction permission, the project is designed to reduce embodied carbon through the use of a hybrid structure and lightweight façade elements, aiming to minimize the use of concrete in both the structure and foundations. From the early stages, the firm has employed its CarbonSpace software to guide these decisions.
Transparent Lightness: When Pneumatic Architecture Connects with the Environment
In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino explores lightness from a literary perspective and argues, "Opposed to lightness is weight. Removing weight produces lightness; it is a value, not a defect." Drawing on Greek mythology, he reflects on one of Perseus's feats after severing the head of the terrible Gorgon Medusa without being turned to stone. Assisted by the gods Hades, Hermes, and Athena, Perseus flies with his winged sandals and uses a bronze shield as a mirror to reflect her image. Relying, like many architects, on what is lightest—the wind and the clouds—he also fixes his gaze on what is revealed through indirect vision: an image reflected in a mirror.
Historically, transparency has been naturalized as an inherent condition of modern architecture. With the shift from the heavy load-bearing wall to the lightweight glass envelope, glass was introduced into the discipline, blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. In connection with inflatable architecture, transparency is linked to lightness and impermanence, leaving temporary traces on the landscapes it inhabits. By using textiles or plastics as main materials and air as a structural system, the search for lightness in the built environment now recognizes more than a single atmosphere of application.
UIA 2026 Barcelona Announces Full Program, Detailing Formats, Exhibitions, and City-Wide Itineraries
The UIA World Congress of Architects 2026 Barcelona has released its full program, outlining the structure, participants, and range of activities scheduled to take place from June 28 to July 2, 2026. Expanding on the previously introduced theme, Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition, the Congress is conceived as a distributed event across multiple venues and urban contexts rather than a single-site conference. Organized by the International Union of Architects (UIA) in collaboration with the Higher Council of the Colleges of Architects of Spain (CSCAE) and the Architects' Association of Catalonia (COAC), the event is expected to gather approximately 10,000 participants and 250 speakers from more than 130 countries.
Bofill Taller de Arquitectura Unveils Landscape-Inspired Resort in Dhërmi, Albania
Bofill Taller de Arquitectura has revealed the final images of a new resort in Dhërmi, Albania, currently under construction. The project was first announced in 2024, in the context of the numerous developments proposed across the country over the past decade. This time, the project is neither a skyscraper nor an institutional building in Tirana, but a resort set along the mountainous coastline in the south of the country. The design responds to the existing landscape conditions, a coastal, mountainous area surrounded by forests that cover a significant portion of Albania's land surface. The project aims to preserve the character of the forest while engaging with the rugged terrain, jagged rocks, steep mountainsides, and dense pine and cypress forests.
The Courtyard as Architecture’s Lightest Cooling System
The courtyard is often remembered as a figure from the past, an inward-looking space of nostalgia, culture, and domestic ritual. But this framing misses its primary role. Before it was symbolic, the courtyard was operational. It organized air, moderated light, and absorbed heat. It did not decorate architecture; it made it habitable. In contemporary housing, these functions are normally delegated to mechanical systems, applied after form is fixed. In courtyard houses, they are resolved spatially, before a wall is even built.
What appears as a recurring typology across regions is, in fact, a set of highly specific responses to climate. The courtyard in Egypt does not behave like the courtyard in Morocco, nor like the courtyard in India. Each is calibrated to a different environmental problem, using the same spatial device. To read them as a single type is to flatten their intelligence. To compare them is to understand how climate can be embedded directly into form.
ArchDaily’s Selection: 15 Installations and Exhibitions from Milan Design Week 2026
Bringing together a week of exhibitions, installations, and industry exchange, Milan Design Week 2026 and the 64th edition of Salone del Mobile.Milano concluded on April 26, following six days of programming across the fairgrounds and the city. Held from April 20 to 26, this year's events reaffirmed Milan's central role within the global design calendar. The Salone itself drew over 316,000 visitors from 167 countries. With 1,900 brands represented and a strong international presence, the week once again operated as both a cultural platform and an economic engine, navigating a context marked by market uncertainty while maintaining its capacity to convene designers, institutions, and industry leaders at a global scale.
STARTT Designs New Access to the Archaeological Areas Behind the Pantheon in Rome
The Pantheon in Rome is globally known as a major tourist and architectural icon, a built testimony to both Greek culture and Roman technique, and a symbol of the Roman Empire. The monument was recently intervened upon by the Italian architecture studio STARTT (Studio of Architecture and Territorial Transformations). The project, titled Pantheon – Micro Architectures for Archaeology, was promoted by the Italian Ministry of Culture as part of a program of interventions initiated in 2019 to open public access to the archaeological areas of the Pantheon. STARTT's project represents the first phase of the program, focusing on opening a new entrance from the Pozzo del Diavolo, an area located behind the monument's Rotunda, allowing visitors to access parts of the building's archaeological fabric that were previously reserved for technical functions.
Hôtel de la Paix: An Alternative Approach to Modern Heritage in Togo
In late 2024, an event was held in the grounds of the recently refurbished colonial-era Palais de Lomé in the capital of Togo. Students from the architecture university of Lomé were attending the first Lomé Architecture Encounters (RAL #1), curated by the transdisciplinary Studio NEiDA, and which involved lectures, film screenings, workshops, and building visits. A parallel exhibition displayed the country's most significant architecture through history. The purpose of the event was to explore the architectural heritage of Togo, and it would be the start of a journey that crosses borders, asking questions about the conservation of modern heritage. Unlike colonial buildings like the Palais de Lomé itself, which are more appreciated and readily restored, neglected modern buildings like the Hôtel de la Paix require creative, bottom-up approaches to return them to their former vitality.
The Bass Museum of Art Commissions Johnston Marklee for Campus Expansion in Collins Park, Miami Beach
The Bass Museum of Art has appointed the Los Angeles-based architecture practice Johnston Marklee to lead the expansion of its campus in Collins Park, Miami Beach, advancing a long-term vision that integrates architecture, landscape, and contemporary art. Founded in 1964 following the donation of the John and Johanna Bass collection, the museum is housed within a 1930s Art Deco building originally designed by Russell Pancoast as the Miami Beach Public Library and Art Center. Over time, the institution has evolved through architectural interventions, most notably the campus framework introduced by Arata Isozaki, which establishes a dialogue between the historic fabric and contemporary additions.
MVRDV, Diamond Schmitt, and Two Row Architect Reveal Design for the Temerty Building at the University of Toronto
The University of Toronto has revealed the design for the Temerty Building, a new facility for health research and education at the heart of the university campus. The project was designed by MVRDV and Diamond Schmitt Architects in collaboration with Two Row Architect. It builds on a previous collaboration between the first two offices at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, scheduled for completion in late 2026. The project was first introduced in Temerty Medicine's 2018-2023 Academic Strategic Plan and envisions a 36,000-square-metre extension to the university's Medical Sciences Building, including laboratories for higher education, classrooms, and shared spaces. Work on site is expected to begin in the second half of 2026, starting with preparatory work in July.
The Alchemy of Mass: Peter Zumthor and the Perception of Lightness
Architecture begins as an encounter with gravity. It is the ancient act of placing weight upon the earth, of persuading matter to stand, hold, and shelter. Within this fundamental condition of heaviness, however, lies a quieter possibility: density itself can generate a sense of lightness—a perceptual condition in which the body, fully convinced of matter's weight, begins to experience space as suspension.
Much of contemporary architecture has pursued lightness through reduction: thinner structures, smoother surfaces, increasingly seamless transitions between interior and exterior. Here, lightness is equated with disappearance, as if gravity could be overcome by withdrawing material presence. Yet there exists another register in which lightness is not the result of absence, but of intensification. It emerges when material presence becomes so precise, so fully asserted, that it begins to alter perception itself—when mass remains heavy, but no longer behaves as simply inert.
