Historic center renewal has become a recurring strategy in Central American cities seeking to reassert the symbolic, economic, and functional relevance of their traditional cores. These processes often combine physical rehabilitation, institutional investment, and stricter control over public space. San Salvador offers a recent and instructive case, which allows for understanding of how interventions in inherited civic spaces balance infrastructure improvement with heritage conservation and social regulation. It also enables the assessment of how these choices resonate within broader debates on urban transformation in the region.
Launched in September 2024, the Rediscovering Modernism in Africa series joined a growing worldwide interest in this topic. Previously underrepresented in architectural discussions, the work of architects and researchers on the continent and abroad has continued to tell the story of these high-quality modern works of architecture. These buildings represent designers striving to create locally suited architecture using global concepts and technologies, coinciding with huge political changes as most African countries gained their independence.
Bazaar in Hyderabad, India. Photo by Kanishq Kancharla on Unsplash
Architecture is most often represented as a stable object: a building captured at a moment of visual clarity, isolated from surrounding contingencies. Plans, sections, and photographs promise legibility by suspending time. Yet many of the world's most enduring public environments resist this mode of representation altogether. They are not designed to be read instantaneously, nor do they reveal their logic through form alone. Their spatial intelligence emerges gradually, through repetition, occupation, and duration.
The bazaar belongs firmly within this category. It cannot be understood through a single drawing or a finished elevation. Its organization is not fixed but rehearsed. What sustains it is not purely architectural composition, but shared timing, collective memory, and long-standing patterns of use. Togetherness in the bazaar does not arise from formal design decisions; it is produced through repeated encounters, negotiated proximities, and social familiarity accumulated over time.
The architectural history of North American cities in the 20th century is often characterized by the pursuit of urban renewal. In the United States, Boston, Portland, and San Francisco are just some examples of when municipal governments prioritized high-speed vehicular infrastructure over the existing urban fabric. In Canada, Montreal would have followed this trajectory if not for the intervention of several figures throughout its history, most notably Blanche Lemco van Ginkel (1923–2022). A Harvard-trained planner and architect who, along with her husband Sandy Van Ginkel, advocated for the preservation of urban heritage while applying the principles of modernist infrastructure.
Indian modernism is often narrated through a narrow lens: a handful of iconic institutions, master architects, and formally radical experiments that came to symbolize the nation's post-Independence aspirations. Yet this version of history overlooks the far larger body of modernist architecture that quietly shaped everyday life across the country. Beyond celebrated campuses and canonical buildings exists a vast, dispersed landscape of housing blocks, offices, hostels, hospitals, markets, and townships — structures that were designed to function and endure.
The circular economy, including the reuse of building materials, is fast becoming a key component in the fight against carbon emissions. This involves designing to minimize waste and utilize materials that can be reused at the end of the building's life. On the opposing side, the reuse of materials from partially or wholly demolished buildings can also reduce waste and carbon emissions that would have resulted from using virgin materials. Sustainability purposes aside, the reuse of building materials has a centuries-old history, both for symbolic reasons and simply out of necessity.
In the mountainous regions of Vietnam, the borderlands of Thailand, and the rugged Western Ghats of India, building school projects remains a challenge defined by logistics. In areas where infrastructure and industrial supply chains are limited or distant, transporting each kilogram of material can significantly increase costs and logistical complexity. During 2025, several school projects in rural contexts in Asia showed how the architect's role often shifted from a designer of form to a strategist of procurement. The primary challenge was not merely aesthetic but a matter of durability: using locally available materials and protecting them from monsoon rains, high-velocity winds, and sometimes seismic instability.
In contemporary architectural discourse, scale is often mistaken for influence. Large firms, landmark projects, and master-planned developments dominate visibility. It goes on to reinforce the idea that architectural ambition is measured by size, reach, or spectacle. Yet across India and similar contexts, a quieter but equally consequential body of work is emerging. It is led by small but mighty practices operating with limited resources, close client relationships, and an intimate understanding of local conditions.
Detail of the Garifuna Kiosk Network. Image Courtesy of 24 Grados Arquitectura
How can architecture restore relevance to forgotten places? What dialogues can emerge when buildings and landscapes are treated not as blank slates, but as layers of memory, identity, and potential? For the Honduran architecture firm 24 Grados, these questions shape an approach rooted in adaptation, reuse, and contextual design. Their projects range from the restoration of old Spanish plazas and cultural centers to interventions in natural parks and coastal villages in Honduras. Each one is grounded in the belief that design can reweave relationships between people, place, and heritage.
Heritage restoration has always been an intricate process that requires delicate balancing between preserving the integrity of historic materials while integrating contemporary techniques that can enhance accuracy, efficiency, and resilience. With the restoration process of Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada's capital city, this intersection of tradition and technology is now on full display. The East Block, built in 1865, offers a compelling example of how digital tools can support the efforts of heritage restoration and contribute to a centuries-old craft such as stone carving.
Across recent years, architectural discourse has been shaped by the emergence of new voices, rediscovered territories, and a growing commitment to shared forms of knowledge. These concerns remain fully present in 2025 as ongoing debates that continue to gain density and nuance. Questions of who produces architecture, from which contexts, and under what conditions remain central, increasingly informed by practices that operate collectively, across disciplines, and beyond singular authorship.
This continuity is reflected in how architecture is understood less as a finished object and more as an ongoing process embedded in social, cultural, and environmental systems. Discussions around agency, participation, and knowledge production persist, alongside sustained attention to rural, peripheral, and historically marginalized contexts. Rather than privileging a single scale or geography, architecture is approached as a practice that moves between territories, acknowledging the unequal conditions that shape how spaces are designed, built, maintained, and inhabited.
In 2025, India's most consequential design projects unfolded largely out of sight. While public attention gravitated toward museums, cultural landmarks, and visually arresting façades, the architecture that most decisively shaped daily life existed underground, at the city's edges, or inside secured compounds few citizens would ever enter. Sewage networks were rebuilt, flood tunnels bored beneath dense neighborhoods, substations lifted above floodplains, and data centers multiplied across peri-urban landscapes. These were not peripheral works of engineering; they were the spatial systems that allowed Indian cities to remain functional through record heatwaves, erratic monsoons, and accelerating urban growth.
Amateur Architecture Studio, Ningbo History Museum, 2008. Image Courtesy of Louisiana
Born in 1963 in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China, architect Wang Shu has dedicated his career to defining a contemporary approach to building that is deeply rooted in China's cultural and material history. In 2012, he was recognized with the Pritzker Prize, becoming the first Chinese citizen to receive the distinction. The award jury acknowledged his body of work "for the exceptional nature and quality of his executed work, and also for his ongoing commitment to pursuing an uncompromising, responsible architecture arising from a sense of specific culture and place." In 2027, along with his wife Lu Wenyu, Wang Shu will be a curator for the Venice Architecture Biennale.
La Sagrada Familia by Antoni Gaudi. Image by Maksim Sokolov, via Wikimedia Commons, License CC BY-SA 4.0
As 2025 concludes, we look ahead to 2026, a year scheduled to deliver a diverse range of significant architectural projects across the world. The year is particularly notable for the completion of new infrastructure and cultural buildings, including long-term projects. Europe will be in the spotlight of the new year with the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. This event will feature projects such as the Olympic Village by SOM and the Winter Olympics Arena by David Chipperfield Architects. Also in Milan, BIG is set to complete construction of the City Wave project as part of a new business district in the city. At the same time, after more than 140 years of its establishment, the architects around the world will also be watching for the long-awaited completion of Antoni Gaudí's La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, announced for 2026.
In recent years, this long-standing relationship began to shift. Architectural images did not simply become more refined or technologically advanced; they took on new social and institutional significance. As images moved beyond professional contexts and entered wider public circulation, their role expanded. They were no longer only methods of communication within the discipline, but also objects of public interpretation, discussion, and, at times, dispute. This marked a subtle but important change in how architectural visuals were understood and used.
As 2025 approaches its end, we look back at an eventful year in the world of interior design. Last year, designers favored reserved, modest approaches, a trend that continued from previous years. The emergence of artificial intelligence generated intense discussions on digital equity and misinformation, which continued into 2025, especially with the topic of the Venice Architecture Biennale, Intelligens. This opened the conversation to the opportunities of digital technologies, attempting a more hopeful outlook. On the other hand, completed interior design projects over the year focused more on the tangible and the pragmatic, with expressed raw materials and an appreciation of history.
Courtesy of The Royal Commission for AlUla | Rana Haddad + Pascal Hachem Reveries, Desert X AlUla 2024
Architecture and design enter 2026 in a moment of renewed experimentation, urgent environmental reflection, and an expanded global dialogue on the built environment. As cities confront the pressures of climate adaptation, demographic shifts, and technological transformation, this year's international calendar offers a lens into how the discipline is responding, creatively, critically, and collectively. From long-standing biennials to newly established platforms, the events of 2026 spotlight architecture's evolving role as both a record of our changing world and a driver of more equitable, sustainable futures.
In Vietnam, the tube house has almost become a vernacular form in densely populated cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. This typology originated from ancient façade taxes and as a strategic response to urban land scarcity and optimization of street frontage for commerce. Their traditional structure typically relies on the front façade for daylight and ventilation. People living there often face the challenge of designing in a space defined by the deep plots, limited street frontage, and close neighboring buildings, restricting natural light and airflow. To counter this fundamental lack of perimeter exposure, Vietnamese architects usually employ several strategies oriented towards internal environmental manipulation. This curated collection explores tube houses under 100 m2, where their small size increased the need for absolute spatial economy and the verticalization of function, which directly influenced design decisions across all projects.
.jpg?1478078308 "Hangzhou Xiangshan Campus. Image © Iwan Baan")
