• architects: ROOVICE
• Location: Itabashi City, Tokyo, Japan
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Akira Nakamura
• Area: 112.0 m2

• architects: URLO Studio
• Location: Samborondón, Ecuador
• Project Year: 2022
• Photographs: JAG Studio
• Area: 8772.0 m2

• architects: Architecture for London
• architects: Hamish Vincent Design
• Location: Islington, N1, London, United Kingdom
• Photographs: Leighton James

• architects: Superestudio
• Location: Sagunt, España
• Project Year: 2019
• Photographs: David Frutos
• Area: 400.0 m2

Elevation is often framed as progress, lifting movement above the friction of the city and smoothing circulation into uninterrupted flow. Every act of lifting produces a secondary condition in its wake. Beneath flyovers, metro lines, and railway viaducts, a second ground emerges as shaded, ambiguous, and rarely planned with the same intent as what moves above. These spaces are not incidental leftovers. They are the spatial consequence of a design decision that privileges speed, clearance, and efficiency, redistributing value and visibility across the city in the process.

What lies below is not empty. It is structured, constrained, and defined by infrastructure, left without a clear role. Studies on elevated highways consistently describe these undercroft zones as residual spaces, formed when transport systems are conceived independently of the ground they pass through. An Arup report on spaces beneath viaducts notes how they often disrupt pedestrian continuity while remaining outside formal planning frameworks. Similarly, recent academic reviews of under-flyover environments highlight that these areas are rarely integrated into urban design strategies at all. The result is a peculiar condition: space that is physically present and structurally determined, but programmatically undefined.

• architects: Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO
• Location: Columbus, United States
• Project Year: 2023
• Photographs: Hadley Fruits for Exhibit Columbus
• Area: 1927.0 m2

• architects: Atelier Archmixing
• Location: Shanghai, China
• Project Year: 2024
• Photographs: Runzi Zhu
• Area: 35579.0 m2

• architects: Studio WhiteScape
• Location: Bengaluru, India
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Arch Pro
• Area: 5000.0 ft2

• architects: Ximenes Leite Arquitetura
• Location: Itupeva, Brasil
• Project Year: 2024
• Photographs: Felipe Catellari
• Area: 1350.0 m2

• architects: Héctor Fernández Elorza
• Location: Zaragoza, España
• Project Year: 2023
• Photographs: Montse Zamorano
• Area: 27394.0 m2

• architects: MVAA - Molnar & Vass Arhitecți Asociați
• Location: Moldovenești, Romania
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: viewcatchers
• Area: 230.0 m2

Residential architecture continues to offer a productive ground for unbuilt exploration, revealing how architects respond to site, climate, and constraint at the scale of the domestic. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected projects bring together a range of proposals that reconsider the house not as an isolated object, but as a spatial system shaped by its environment. These works position architecture as a framework that negotiates between ground, material, and inhabitation, often emerging directly from the conditions of the site.

Across varied geographies, from Kerala and Cartagena to Amman, Tromsø, and Zwolle, the projects demonstrate diverse responses to domestic architecture. They include compact urban dwellings organized through vertical layering, courtyard houses partially embedded within the ground, residences adapted to sloping terrains, and typological transformations shaped by regulatory constraints. Some projects explore linear spatial sequences rooted in traditional proportions, while others organize domestic life around atria or excavated voids that mediate light, ventilation, and privacy. Together, these proposals examine how the house can be structured through section, material, and environmental performance rather than formal expression.

• architects: aceboXalonso studio
• Location: Madrid, España
• Project Year: 2025
• Photography: Germán Saiz

BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, in collaboration with William Rawn Associates (WRA) and HASTINGS Architecture, has revealed the design for the new Tennessee Performing Arts Center (TPAC), a 307,000-square-foot cultural complex planned for Nashville's East Bank, with construction expected to begin in 2027 and completion anticipated in 2030. Located along the Cumberland River, adjacent to Cumberland Park and Nissan Stadium, the project brings together four performance venues within a unified architectural framework, establishing a new civic anchor that extends the cultural life of downtown across the waterfront.

• architects: zanderroth
• Location: Potsdam, Germany
• Project Year: 2024
• Photographs: Simon Menges & Nino Tugushi
• Area: 2345.0 m2

The California Science Center is a dynamic destination where visitors of all ages can explore the wonders of science through hands-on exhibits, live demonstrations, innovative programs, and large-format films. The Center and IMAX Theater are located in the historic Los Angeles Exposition Park, where an expansion has been under construction since June 2022. The new Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, designed by ZGF Architects, is a 200,000-square-foot addition that will nearly double the Science Center's educational exhibit space. The building was completed on April 13, 2026. Its centerpiece is the retired NASA spacecraft Space Shuttle Endeavour, used for missions from 1992 until its 25th and final mission in 2011.

The Fundació Mies van der Rohe and the European Commission have announced the winners of the 2026 edition of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Awards, selected from a total of 410 nominated works. The 2026 Architecture Prize goes to the renovation of the Charleroi Palais des Expositions in Belgium by AgwA and architecten jan de vylder inge vinck, while the Emerging Architecture Prize is awarded to Temporary Spaces for the Slovenian National Theatre Drama in Ljubljana by Vidic Grohar Arhitekti. The announcement was made in Oulu, European Capital of Culture 2026, at the Aalto Siilo, a landmark of industrial architecture designed by Alvar Aalto in 1931.

In 2012, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook offered one of the clearest documentations of a condition that many residents experience intuitively but rarely name: Hong Kong's dependence on elevated, second-storey urbanism. Through drawings and careful mapping, the book captured how the city's pedestrian networks are routinely lifted above the street—separating people from traffic, extending commercial frontage beyond ground level, and negotiating a hilly topography where "flat" circulation is often an engineered achievement. Since its publication, these systems have only grown in prominence—not only for their sheer spatial complexity, but for the way they recast public space as something continuous yet selective, connective yet curated.

This fascination, however, has always carried a parallel unease. Elevated passages can be generous and effective, offering sheltered movement and reliable connectivity. Yet they also raise persistent questions: where do these routes lead, who gets to connect, and what kinds of programs are invited—or excluded—by this "privileged" level of circulation? The second-storey city does not simply bypass vehicles; it can also bypass the street as a civic stage. Over time, it risks shifting architectural attention away from ground-level public life, relieving designers from having to negotiate pedestrian scale, frontage, and the messy reciprocity of the street. In its worst moments, the result is a landscape of podium clusters and sealed megastructures—buildings that perform connectivity at Level 2 while remaining indifferent to the neighborhood at Level 0.