Newton’s Third Law of Motion dictates that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In urbanism, this concept is evident in how the unprecedented growth of the built environment causes a reaction in rural landscapes. By 2050, the number of people living in cities will have increased by 2.5 billion, representing two-thirds of the global population. This mass flow of people from rural to urban areas gives rise to an equally dramatic flow of natural resources. As can be seen in studies such as Tom Hegen’s The Quarry Series, whose imagery accompanies this article, the extraction of these minerals represents yet another physical manifestation of rapid, linear urbanism.

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Madrid architect Alberto Campo Baeza was born in 1946 in Valladolid, Spain and grew up in Cádiz. He graduated from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 1971 and earned his PhD there in 1982. Campo Baeza has been teaching architecture at the Higher Technical School of Architecture of Madrid, ETSAM for more than 40 years. He sees architecture as building ideas and expressing them in the most essential and clear ways, consistently relying on such basic elements as firmly grounded rectangular platforms, thick solid walls with deep cavities and frameless cutouts, and flat thin planes propped up by delicate posts. Colors, complex curves, and diversity of materials are largely avoided to accentuate primary relationships between elementary prisms and to exalt magic out of sunlight. Campo Baeza’s architecture is about transparency and precision, as well as asserting such fundamentals as ground planes, straight lines, and precise corners. He has built relatively few projects and, for the most part, on a small scale. Yet, his legacy is remarkably complete, consistent, profound, memorable, and inspirational.

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Labor gives rise to design. As the aggregate of physical and mental effort used in the creation of goods and services, labor is tied to both what we create and our process. In a field shaped by production, architecture and design depend on labor from a broad range of professionals. But as workers increasingly put in longer hours and traditional measures of security change, questions of labor practices have arisen amid broader conditions of contemporary work culture. 

Other than curating amazing architecture, ArchDaily is well-known for producing exclusive content and cutting-edge editorial pieces. Sought-after, these articles are produced by a highly experienced team of editors, scattered around the world, generating writings in 4 languages.

Moreover, our platform has pushed its educative status, furthermore this year, in order to function as a comprehensive tool for Architecture. 2019 has given us an abundance of materials to explore, and our editors have tackled with different possibilities, from highlighting technical information, material guidelines, theoretical and conceptual approaches to investigating the digital realm, cities, and traveling. Read on to discover a curated selection from our readers’ most notable articles for 2019.

Bauhaus: a school, a design discipline, and a movement that has been influencing generations of architects and designers for 100 years.

The school was a lot more than modernist designs and primary colors, it was a movement with a political, social, and cultural impact, led by some of the most notable figures in the field. Since its inauguration in 1919, the school has defined its own style through the intersection of architecture, art, industrial design, typography, graphic design, and interior design. When the school was forced to close its doors in the face of political pressure, its professors and students dispersed, spreading its teachings across the world.

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With a mission to provide tools and inspiration to improve the quality of life in our built environment, ArchDaily curators constantly track and share with our audience the best "built projects" in the world. In order to celebrate these achievements and thank our readers for actively participating in our community, we selected the 50 best architectural works published during 2019.

Walls cannot talk. At least, not yet. This is not to say they can’t lie. As ArchDaily recently reported, a growing urban trend is emerging where the entirety of a historic building is demolished apart from the exterior façade, and a new building constructed behind it. This procedure has a name; Facadism. While the act of building a new structure behind a historic façade may seem altruistic at best, or trivial at worst, Facadism offers an insight into the money-centric political and market forces shaping our cities.

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In December 2019, the Chinese city of Shenzhen will host the world’s only Biennale focused exclusively on the topics of urbanism and urbanization. The 2019 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture will explore new phenomena brought about by the digital revolution, and the ability of citizens to become involved in shaping cities. The Biennale curator, Carlo Ratti, exemplifies this intersection between natural and artificial, championing the power of new technologies to transform how we live and design through his work at Carlo Ratti Associati and the MIT Senseable City Lab. In the “Eyes of the City” section of the Biennale, he is joined by MVRDV, and its co-founder Winy Maas, in shaping an experience that invites visitors and observers to question how technologies such as facial recognition can be integrated into urban life.

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Automation is rapidly becoming a normalized part of many people’s daily lives and careers, a trend which has by no means evaded the construction industry. While this increasingly pervasive technology is often considered a symptom of the contemporary 21st century, however, one automated construction technology may have a history stretching as far back as the 1960s. This technology, the bricklaying robot, has transformed dramatically since its limited realization over 50 years ago, splintering into newer, more technologically advanced variations today.

The Kingdom of Cambodia has a rich history of Khmer architecture. Built from the latter half of the 8th century to the first half of the 15th century, these structures are embodied by the iconic Angkor Wat temple complex. But new architecture is being built throughout Cambodia, projects that reinterpret culture and tradition to create modern spaces for contemporary life.

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By 2050, the world’s population is expected to have exceeded 10 billion people, making overcrowded cities one of the most pressing issues of the present. Data analysis, machine learning, transportation developments, and the rapid development of new social technologies are increasingly changing the needs of people and communities, which will have a direct impact on the issue of overcrowding and on our built environment more largely.

Lyndon Neri (b. 1965, Philippines) graduated from Harvard and Rossana Hu (b. 1968, Taiwan) from Princeton; they met while pursuing their undergraduate degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. Before establishing Neri&Hu in 2004 in Shanghai, a prolific, multidisciplinary practice with over 100 international architects and designers, the husband-and-wife partners worked for a decade at Michael Graves & Associates in Princeton. Among their most recognized works are The Waterhouse at South Bund in Shanghai, The Walled – Tsingpu Yangzhou Retreat, and Suzhou Chapel. Apart from running an architectural practice and design studio the partners lead a retail store Design Republic and serve as creative directors of a furniture brand Stellar Works. The following is an excerpt from our candid conversation at their Shanghai office.

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