The British Council has just announced the team set to represent the United Kingdom at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2025. The selected team comprises experts from the UK and Kenya, including Nairobi-based Cave_bureau. Scheduled to run from May 24 to November 23, 2025, the UK Pavilion hopes to ignite meaningful conversations about architecture's impact on communities and the planet.
Willow Technologies is a material research and building technology practice that has been selected as part of ArchDaily's 2023 Best New Practices. Founded by Ghanaian-Filipino designer and architectural scientist Mae-Ling Lokko, it operates in the gap between research, development, and diffusion of bio-based building materials. Working with agro-waste and bio-based materials usually incurs technical questions regarding scalability, industrial production, standardization, fireproofing, and mechanical strength. Exploring this data is where Willow Technologies situates itself, but peculiarly through the lens of developing regions in West Africa. Through comprehensive works with coconuts, moringa, rice, and other indigenous crops, Lokko’s practice has been able to investigate and catalog the material character of various crops, their possible by-products, local transformation techniques, and the prospect and challenges of scalability as building materials.
Pictured (from left) are: Joseph Henry, Meneesha Kaur Kellay, Sumitra Upham, Jayden Ali and Sevra Davis (Director of Architecture Design Fashion at the British Council). Image Courtesy of British Council
“Home Economics addresses the frontline of British architecture: the family home," says the winning team. "The exhibition will ask urgent questions about the future of housing. Social and technological changes are collapsing the patterns of domestic life - but the design of the home hasn't caught up. Can the house ever escape its economic status as an asset? Should our homes still be considered private spaces? How do new types of families and households produce new spatial needs? What are the models of ownership, finance and work that make these conditions possible?"
Conceptual Design. Image Courtesy of Carmody Groarke
The British Council recently announced that London-based practice Carmody Groarke have been selected to design the UK pavilion at the 2015 Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL) in Guadalajara, Mexico. The organisers of the international event, which is the largest literary festival in the Spanish speaking world, have chosen the UK to be this year's "Guest of Honour" as part of a bilateral initiative launched to "build, strengthen and celebrate the growing connections" between the two countries.
A changing skyline. Image Courtesy of CPAT / Hayes Davidson / Jason Hawkes
It has been revealed that the theme for the 2015 London Festival of Architecture (LFA) will centre around 'Work In Progress'. The festival, which is comprised of a series of events in and around the UK capital, seeks to "highlight the key role architecture plays in social, urban and cultural development." The annual celebration, which will run between the 1st and 30th June, will be jointly delivered by the Architecture Foundation, the British Council, New London Architecture, and the RIBA's London branch. Last year's 10th anniversary festival saw over 200 events ranging from walking tours and cycle rides, to exhibitions, talks, debates and films all addressing the theme of 'Capital'.
Alicja Borkowska and Iris Papadatou from you&me architects have been announced as the UK winners of the inauguralOld Doha Prize, a competition to redesign part of the old city of Doha in Qatar.
Four teams of architects have "worked intensively to develop contextual design responses to address the challenge of regenerating and maintaining the heritage of the city" as part of a British-Qatari collaborative project to "reimagine the urban landscape of old Doha." As a city defined by its strong heritage, coupled with ambitious plans for the future, the competition aimed to discover ways of regenerating parts of the city centre in a sustainable, yet vibrant, way.