MEXTROPOLI: The Latest Architecture and News

This past year marked a period of introspection for architecture. As 2025 unfolded, the discipline, confronted with evolving environmental and social realities, entered a broader turning point in how it understands its role and how users engage with it. Throughout the year, exhibitions shifted focus away from buildings as isolated objects toward a broader understanding of relationships between ecology, equity, everyday life, and collective imaginaries. Across institutions and cities, they operated less as showcases and more as discursive platforms: places where architecture was not only presented, but also imagined, questioned, and collectively redefined.

While exhibitions have long functioned as sites of discourse, politics, and community, this role became more explicit in 2025. As Carlo Ratti noted in an ArchDaily interview during the pre-opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, exhibitions today can "hybridize the way that people come together," an ambition that echoed across cities and institutions as exhibitions evolved into spaces for debate, experimentation, and collective reflection. Exhibitions are places where architects and designers meet, where conversations unfold openly with the public, and where ideas emerge through spontaneous exchanges among passersby. Exhibitions became spaces where architectural discourse extended beyond professional circles, opening conversations to broader publics through everyday encounters, shared experiences, and informal exchanges.

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2025 promises to be a landmark in architecture, heralding a vibrant renaissance of creativity and exploration. As societies confront challenges such as climate change, rapid urbanization, and technological evolution, architecture is both a mirror to these dynamics and a compass pointing toward a sustainable and inclusive future. This year's architectural calendar offers abundant opportunities to celebrate the discipline's transformative power — from boundary-pushing festivals to thought-provoking exhibitions that explore pressing cultural and environmental narratives.

From well-established biennials to inaugural gatherings, including the World Architecture Festival 2025, Desert X Al Ula, and the COP Climate Conference, the 2025 calendar highlights themes such as sustainability, heritage, and community. These events underscore architecture's unique ability to shape a better future, addressing global challenges while honoring cultural diversity and design ingenuity.

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As the architectural landscape continues to evolve in response to pressing global challenges, events such as biennales, design weeks, and fairs play an instrumental role in shaping the profession's future. These gatherings facilitate the exchange of innovative ideas, the exploration of sustainable practices, and the fostering of collaboration among architects, designers, and urban planners. They serve not only as platforms for showcasing cutting-edge designs but also as forums for critical dialogue about the built environment's impact on society and the planet.

Happening worldwide from September to December 2024, a variety of significant events hope to engage the architectural community. The World Urban Forum in Cairo focuses on local sustainable actions, while Dubai Design Week showcases innovative design in the Middle East. The World Architecture Festival in Singapore features live project presentations, and the Architecture & Design Film Festival in New York offers compelling narratives critical to contemporary discourse.

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Videos

From the 21st to the 25th of September, the Mextrópoli Festival + XII Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism took place in Mexico City. As part of the event, ArchDaily spoke with 2014 Pritzker Prize winner Shigeru Ban about the central theme "Inhabiting at the margins", a proposal that sought to make visible the work of those who are providing solutions to the growing social, environmental, and economic needs at the margins of the system.

Five finalists of the open call were announced on the 9th of December to determine the project that would be in charge of the XII BIAU: Ibero-American Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021 - to be held in Mexico during September 2022 with the collaboration of the Architecture and City Festival, MEXTRÓPOLI.

On the 13th December, the winning project to curate the new edition was announced: 'Habitar al Margen' (Living on the Edge), presented by Anna Vergés and Guillem Augé (undo, Spain), and Raúl Cárdenas and Ana Martínez (ToroLab, Mexico).

The health crisis forced the MEXTRÓPOLI Festival to be rescheduled from March to September. However, months later, it remains an equally critical landscape. In Latin America, and specifically in Mexico, the number of infections continues to increase and the outlook does not present a close solution to the problem. That is why it was decided to move, once again, the Festival's face-to-face activities to March 2021, hoping that by then a safer scenario will be lived that allows to enjoy the activities already programmed, and some that can be added. then.

Mextrópoli is a ludic and reflexive event that heightens the voices of architects, city planners and authorities to generate knowledge about the city that occupants inhabit. At Mextrópoli, public spaces are filled with pavilions, panel discussions that involve prominent actors in issues such as urbanism and public policy, as well as a strong selection of speakers. This program seeks to include all citizens. Students, activists, urban planners and architects are welcome to experience the extraordinary city.

In its sixth edition, the Mextrópoli Architecture and City Festival will propose new ways of thinking about the city as an open territory that is continually redefining its limits.

In 2018, the MEXTRÓPOLI Festival of Architecture and City presents its fifth edition, consolidating itself as a key event in the cultural agenda of Mexico City and as an important architectural event on a global scale. With its high curatorial quality MEXTRÓPOLI promotes the voices of architects, artists, mayors, and humanists who are globally recognized in their respective disciplines while offering affordable prices to students and anyone interested in the present and future directions of cities. MEXTRÓPOLI is a platform that allows you to experience the city, as well as to reflect on its political, civilian and aesthetic aspects.

WOHA's first exhibition in Latin America, Garden City Mega City: WOHA's Urban Ecosystems presents over two decades of WOHA's international designs. With its inauguration at the Museum of the City of Mexico during the MEXTRÓPOLI International Festival of Architecture and City, the exhibition proposes the introduction of biodiversity and lively public spaces into vertical, climate-sensitive highrises within megalopolises.

The exhibition features sixteen intricate architectural models, an immersive video installation and large-scale drawings and images that show WOHA's proposals for vertical communities in the tropical megacities. PLANE-SITE documented the exhibition's opening along with the points of view of various MEXTRÓPOLI contributors and city officials.

As part of the MEXTRÓPOLI festival in Mexico City early last month, Singapore-based firm WOHA debuted their first exhibition in the Latin America, GARDEN CITY MEGA CITY. WOHA's architecture introduces biodiversity into public spaces, turning high-rise courtyards and hallways into teeming community assets. In this exhibition, the architects show how their work has addressed both climate change and the social challenges that occur as a result of rapid (upward) urban development.

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MEXTRÓPOLI, International Festival of Architecture and the City is an opportunity to experience the city through architecture.

During the festival, Mexico City turns into the most important and diverse stage for thinking, creating, designing and enjoying the city. MEXTRÓPOLI encourages creative exercises and critical dialogue between the community, experts, and decision-makers. Through conferences, workshops, lectures, pavilions and open-air activities, Mexico City becomes a key global reference for architecture and urbanism.

MEXTRÓPOLI is the only Latin American forum that brings together more than 52 thousand people over 4 days: students, citizens, students, professionals, tourists, creatives, public servants, artists, opinion leaders and experts to generate knowledge, exchange, and achieve a new vision of the city through architecture.

The MEXTRÓPOLI Pavilion will become a public space that is activated to promote reflection of key issues for the city, a pavilion with social vocation, which is recyclable and reusable, contemplating relocation and achieve incorporated as a recreational device, information carrier and knowledge to a space currently demands the city. Participants must design a structure that complies with the requirements that specify the rules of this competition in terms of time, cost and characteristics; considered as a fundamental part to evaluate the proposal on thematic approach should be discussions within the structure will be carried out, this way the MEXTRÓPOLI Pavilion will become a traveling purposeful device that every year open global space competition from generating ideas that revolve around the development process of architecture and the city, which in turn will become the benchmark per se of each edition of the Festival of Architecture and City.

Held annually since 1998, Arquine’s International Architecture Competition seeks to explore issues of importance and relevance to society, creating a space for dialogue between both national and international architects.

For the 18^th edition of its international competition, Arquine has launched an open competition to design a Pavilion for MEXTRÓPOLI, an annual International Architecture and Latin American City festival. The installation will be located in Mexico City’s historic center, and should be a public space where key themes relating to the city can be discussed. The pavilion should also have a flexible design, as it ultimately will be repurposed as an information center for a part of the city that needs it.

More information about the competition after the break. 

During the Mextropoli Festival in Mexico City, we had the chance to sit down with Martha Thorne, the Vice Dean of the IE School of Architecture and Design, and the Executive Director of the Pritzker Prize, who spoke with us about some of the challenges currently facing architecture education.

"When there is globalization in any field there’s the danger that every place becomes similar, or in this case the danger that schools can become similar or standardized, all trying to approach architecture and the academics of architecture in the same way,” she explained. “I think what’s really interesting is to try to look at schools and see how they try to differentiate themselves.”

Arquine’s second annual International Architecture and Latin American City festival, MEXTRÓPOLI, will take place from March 6-10, 2015 in Mexico City. To encourage citizen participation, the festival will be broken down into six parts: listening, dialogue, observation, taking action, participation and celebration.

MEXTRÓPOLI aims to convert Mexico City into a pioneering city, making it an architectural reference for the continent. The festival also serves as an important cultural project for the city, encouraging urban regeneration and promoting Mexico city’s artistic heritage.

At last week's Mextrópoli conference we spoke with Winka Dubbeldam about the challenges of architecture education. We also asked her to elaborate on why she thinks architecture should embrace industrial design tools. Watch the short clip to hear Winka's thoughts on making technology a more integral part of our built environment.