Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

In an industry defined by building codes, climate urgency, and the pressures of the real estate market, the architectural competition has quietly become one of the discipline's most generative spaces. Unburdened by budgets, clients, or city regulations, competition entries allow architects to think at the edge of what the built environment could be, and increasingly, that speculative work is being taken seriously as a cultural and intellectual contribution in its own right. Buildner's Unbuilt Award, now in its second edition, is one of those efforts, by treating the unbuilt project as a platform for architects and designers to share concepts that challenge boundaries and inspire future possibilities. In this way, competitions like this allow architecture professionals and students to showcase ideas and visions that, even without being constructed, reflect the spirit of exploration and ingenuity in architecture.

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Foster + Partners, in collaboration with Dar Al-Handasah, has revealed the master plan for Al Najd Agricultural City in Dhofar, southern Oman. Covering approximately 54 million square feet, the development is conceived as a self-sustaining agricultural and urban settlement designed to respond to the region's environmental conditions and agricultural landscape. Commissioned by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning and the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Water Resources, the project forms part of the objectives outlined in Oman Vision 2040, which seeks to strengthen food security, diversify the national economy, and support sustainable development initiatives.

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From projects and institutions that reinforce the relationship between art and architecture to initiatives seeking new approaches to persistent urban and ecological challenges, this week's developments reflect a broader effort to reconsider established frameworks and expand the role of design in contemporary society. Whether through adaptive reuse, policy innovation, artistic experimentation, or critical research, architects and cultural organizations are exploring how existing systems can be transformed to address emerging realities. These questions resonate across new architectural projects that translate environmental conditions and civic aspirations into built form. In Chicago, the completion of the Obama Presidential Center positions architecture as a vehicle for public memory, while in Albania, OODA's Lighthouse reinterprets local landscapes and traditions through a tower overlooking the Adriatic coast. Meanwhile, Heatherwick Studio's proposed AlUla Manara visitor centre responds to the conditions of Saudi Arabia's desert landscape, combining scientific research and tourism within a destination dedicated to observing the night sky.

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ReGreeneration is a Horizon Europe-awarded project working across nine cities to advance urban regeneration through nature-based solutions, participatory governance, and integrated approaches to climate resilience and social equity. The nine cities in the project portfolio span a range of urban typologies, scales, and planning traditions, forming a living laboratory for rethinking sustainable urban transformation in practice. Each city brings distinct challenges and ambitions to the collaboration, and this series of articles explores what each city is doing and what the broader design community can learn from it.

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Mexican sculptor Pedro Reyes has developed a multidisciplinary practice that spans sculpture, architecture, social engagement, and activism. Trained as an architect, Reyes approaches sculpture as both a material and a collective process, combining traditional stone carving with participatory projects that address contemporary social issues. His work frequently explores transformation, whether through physical materials or community action, positioning sculpture as a tool for reimagining social realities. In a 2025 interview with Louisiana Channel, Reyes discusses the influence of architecture on his artistic practice, the concept of "social sculpture," and the importance of preserving craft traditions in an increasingly automated world.

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Milano Centrale is the main train station in northern Italy and the second-largest station in Italy behind Roma Termini. The building was officially opened on July 1, 1931, replacing the city's first central station, which opened in 1864. The construction was intended to showcase the power of then-Prime Minister Mussolini's fascist regime, with a notorious scale, massive arches, and an imposing facade. Following a private competition promoted by Grandi Stazioni Retail, Park, an Italian interdisciplinary collective, was selected to redesign the station's ground floor and mezzanine levels, transforming the historic city landmark into a contemporary urban platform.

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With forty-eight psychogeriatric beds and sixty-eight wheelchair-accessible apartments, accommodation for informal caregivers, and space for bedside care, the De Keyzer building opened in Amsterdam in 2011. Its program had been conceived entirely for elderly people requiring assistance, but shortly after completion, the building was sold to an investment fund, and the apartments began to be rented to young families with children.

For the project's architects, Tom Frantzen and Karel van Eijken, the episode could have been interpreted as a failure of prediction. Instead, it became a confirmation. "It showed, very clearly, that buildings can end up being used in completely different ways than originally intended," Frantzen recalls. The transformation was only possible because the apartments were generous and because the structure allowed for uses more diverse than those anticipated in the original program. Had the building been designed solely for its initial function, the change of use would likely have required a destructive renovation or, in the extreme, demolition.

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The Graham Foundation has announced the recipients of its 2026 Grants to Individuals program, awarding a total of $506,000 to 54 projects that investigate architecture through exhibitions, films, publications, and research initiatives. Selected from more than 600 submissions to the Foundation's September 2025 application cycle, the grants support work by 86 architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, scholars, and writers, reflecting a broad range of interdisciplinary approaches to the built environment and its cultural, social, and political dimensions.

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The New York City local government is one of the largest of its kind, with hundreds of city agencies and elected offices. The Mayor, city agencies, the city council, the comptroller, the public advocate, the borough presidents, and community boards organize to provide services and improve the quality of life in the biggest city in the United States and a primary tourist destination. Like other metropolises in the world, urban developers and authorities in New York are facing common challenges: the atmospheric effects and permanent consequences of the climate crisis, the saturation of transport systems, the lack of housing units, and barriers to accessing adequate housing. During June, the New York City mayor's office announcements addressed traffic and mobility, sports events, immigration, and extreme heat. In recent months, a series of policies have been announced to address a larger problem: ensuring access to housing for a greater number of people through government action.

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Every three years, the International Union of Architects' (UIA) World Congress lands in a different city, under a different theme set years in advance. A quick mapping of these host cities reveals a deliberate pattern: throughout the decades, the UIA has purposefully chosen a wide range of venues across all continents, rendering each edition a snapshot of what mattered in that specific place, at that exact moment. The result of this geographic rotation has been a diverse kaleidoscope of conversations, analyzing the profession from countless angles and adapting it to changing times. But 2026 is different; this time the UIA is repeating a host city for the first time: Barcelona, under the theme "Becoming. Architectures for a planet in transition".

Something has been happening in Tirana that the architectural world has not quite found the language for. In the space of a few years, a city of less than a million people in one of Europe's least-known countries has become the site of an extraordinary concentration of architectural ambition — a place where offices that rarely work in the same city, let alone the same decade, are building simultaneously, and where the questions that preoccupy contemporary architecture seem to arrive with an unusual urgency.

The second edition of the Bread & Heart Festival, held in Tirana from June 3 to 5, brought together more than two hundred architects, urban planners, developers, and professionals from across Europe, the Americas, Asia and beyond to discuss "Landscapes of Abundance", a theme organized around the curatorial premise of moving from portrait to landscape, from the individual building to the territory as a whole. The room it assembled would be difficult to replicate anywhere else in the architectural calendar: Francis Kéré, Jeanne Gang, Sumayya Vally, Pierre de Meuron, Bjarke Ingels, Reinier de Graaf, Stefano Boeri, Kersten Geers, Benedetta Tagliabue, Ma Yansong, among them.

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Under the theme Common Ground, ICFF 2026 brought together the international design community through a shared focus on craftsmanship and innovation. From May 17–19, 2026, ICFF (International Contemporary Furniture Fair) returned to the Javits Center for a landmark edition that celebrated the global design community during NYCxDESIGN.

Architect and urbanist Paola Viganò has been selected by Pro Helvetia to curate the Swiss Pavilion at the 20th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Chosen following a unanimous recommendation from the selection jury, Viganò's proposal explores water as a territorial, ecological, and political condition, taking Switzerland's role as "Europe's water tower" as its conceptual point of departure. Developed with StudioPaolaViganò and an interdisciplinary team, the project examines water not only as a resource but also as a subject, a legal entity, and a force that shapes landscapes, infrastructures, and the built environment.

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The original Museum of London building at London Wall permanently closed to the public in December 2022 to prepare for its relocation. Despite community claims to preserve the modernist building, demolition plans for the brutalist landmark were approved in 2024 to make way for the London Wall West redevelopment project. The Museum of London was then officially rebranded as the London Museum and relocated to the historic General Market in Smithfield. The decade-long restoration project of the new location was carried out by Stanton Williams and Asif Khan, alongside conservation architect Julian Harrap. The official opening of the Museum's new permanent galleries is scheduled for November 28, 2026.

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In many Latin American cities, peripheral neighborhoods have historically had less access to the resources that make urban life more than just livable. Housing, transportation, and public services are the usual markers of that gap. But there is another gap that is harder to quantify: the absence of places where people can gather, learn, rest, and participate in collective life. When those spaces do not exist, the city not only fails to provide a service. It fails to acknowledge a presence.

In recent decades, a growing number of projects have tried to address that absence directly. Rather than focusing only on physical infrastructure, they invest in spaces designed to support education, culture, recreation, and community, often merging several of those functions within a single building in neighborhoods where those spaces are otherwise limited.

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From lighting and materials to colors, textures, and forms, every design decision shapes how people perceive, experience, and interact with architecture. In contemporary interiors, these choices are no longer understood as merely aesthetic or functional, influencing comfort, behavior, mood, and even the way users evaluate the quality of a space. Bathroom design, in particular, now creates carefully curated environments with a distinct identity, where every element contributes to the overall spatial experience.

How does bathroom design influence users' feelings? What interventions or technical innovations can transform the end-user experience?

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There is a standard way of telling the history of architecture and food. It begins with the human decision to cultivate, to store, to distribute, to consume, and ends with the building that decision produced. In this version of events, food is the occasion and architecture is the response.

But what if the story runs differently? What if the tomato built Almería? What if the cod redesigned the North Atlantic? What if the soybean is, at this moment, constructing a port in Santos and demolishing a forest in the Cerrado simultaneously, and the architect has simply not been told? These are descriptions of processes already complete, or well underway, that have produced some of the most spatially consequential contemporary landscapes. Much of the built environment is shaped by the pressures, metabolisms, and territorial ambitions of what we eat. Architecture, in this, is often less a project than a consequence, and the discipline has been telling its own story from the wrong end.

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Architecture continues to draw cities as though humans occupy them alone. Plans trace circulation routes, zoning maps assign functions, and buildings are evaluated according to human comfort, safety, and efficiency. Walking through cities across India and Southwest Asia reveals something much more complex. Dogs sleep beneath market stalls, monkeys move across rooftops, birds nest in temple towers and mosque façades, and insects pollinate urban landscapes hidden in plain sight. These species are woven into daily urban life as consistently as human occupants. Streets, courtyards, roofs, drainage systems, markets, and vacant lots are already occupied by multiple species simultaneously. Architectural thinking has been slower to account for this reality.

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