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A different social order is easier to imagine when it sits far from the one that already exists. In Latin America, that distance has often been territorial. Parts of the region have repeatedly been treated as places where another world could begin. These places were never empty.

For architects, this idea has a familiar starting point: the plan. Seen from above, a territory can look like a clean sheet, ready for an axis or a grid. At eye level, the same ground is already full of people and the paths they use.

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Ammodo Architecture will launch the first edition of Ammodo Architecture Days in Amsterdam on November 9 and 10, 2026. Organized by Ammodo Architecture, a programme of the Ammodo Foundation, the event will bring together architects, landscape architects, urban planners, artists, communities, collectives and multidisciplinary design teams, alongside recipients of the 2024 and 2025 Ammodo Architecture Award. Taking place at Westergas, a former industrial complex now used as a cultural and public venue, the invitation-only two-day programme will combine a symposium, exhibition, publication launch and award ceremony, creating a setting for exchange between practices working across different geographic, cultural and disciplinary contexts.

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Videos

Obra Blanca, the exhibition of finishes and design products for architecture, will celebrate its seventh edition from October 13 to 15, 2026, at Expo Santa Fe in Mexico City. Conceived for the architecture and interior design community, this initiative combines an innovation showcase with an international lecture program to shape the Obra Blanca Experience: three days of connection, knowledge, and immersion in the architectural finishes and design products sector.

In November 2019, London-based Carmody Groarke and Ghent firm TRANS architectuur | stedenbouw, now known as ATAMA, won the Baumeister international competition to design an extension for Design Museum Gent, Belgium's largest design museum, located in Ghent's historic center. At the time, the museum comprised three buildings: the eighteenth-century Hotel de Coninck, the Leten House, with a sixteenth-century core, and a 1992 wing. After four years of renovation and expansion, the museum reopened on October 3, 2026, within the UNESCO World Heritage city center. The project combines the restoration of these historic buildings with a new wing designed by Carmody Groarke and ATAMA, alongside the restoration work led by RE-ST architectenvennootschap. The museum's collection spans design objects from the fourteenth century to the present, and the renewed building adds spaces for lectures, workshops, exhibitions and events, framing design as something visitors can use and engage with directly rather than only view.

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"Take your dream suppressants." The opening line in Wanuri Kahiū's Pumzi, directed at our protagonist Asha, enforces the order of severing ties with hopeful futures and ancestral memories in pasts shared to compel her focus on the perpetual present in the Maitu Community's heterotopia of an enclave. The bird's-eye view shot of the Maitu reveals a sterile, drone-like structure with a panoptic sphere at its center where normal human behavior is medicalized. The layout is built around closed-loop recycling systems as apt as a self-sufficient organism, designed to escape the toxic environment of a sickly Earth, where every pipe and corridor is engineered to harvest human excretion for water generation, thereby absorbing the roles of nature and state both. The community's architecture perfectly translates the film's message with its physicality.

Across folklore, film, and art, the same move recurs: architecture translates an elsewhere, whether ancestral, spiritual, or speculative, into form that can be seen or entered. The sections below follow that translation from the Kasubi Tombs to Kizazi Moto, and show that the elsewhere is a way of reading the present.

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In 1948, Robert Moses established the Fresh Kills Landfill on the western shore of Staten Island. The site, chosen for its remote marshland and cheap land value, was meant to be temporary, but by 1955 it was the largest landfill in the world, receiving up to 29,000 tons of refuse per day at its 1991 peak. By 2001, after more than fifty years of continuous operation, Fresh Kills covered 2,200 acres, roughly three times the area of Central Park, and was, unspectacularly, visible from space. When it started, Moses didn't expect to design a dump but, without calling it that, a new landform with four artificial hills rising up to sixty meters above sea level built entirely from the accumulated residue of eight million daily lives.

That landform is now, slowly, becoming a park. James Corner Field Operations won the international design competition launched by the city in 2001, producing a master plan called Lifescape that will take thirty years to complete. The landfill's four mounds are being capped, planted, and gradually opened to the public. Methane from decomposing waste is captured and fed into an energy system as the wetlands are being restored around the engineered hills. Evidence of New York's consumption transformed into a feat of ecological engineering and an act of institutional memory management (a way of making a city's most embarrassing landscape slowly look like something it was always meant to be).

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