• architects: Gris | Estudio de Diseño + Arquitectura
• Location: El Paredon, Guatemala
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Denise Lipman
• Area: 1750.0 m2

• architects: Ivy Studio
• Location: Montreal, Canada
• Project Year: 2026
• Photographs: Alex Lesage
• Area: 20000.0 ft2

Ola Hassanain is a Sudanese architect and artist operating in the Netherlands, and will be exhibiting at the Pan-African Architecture Biennale in Nairobi, Kenya, later in 2026. All three locations tell stories of the built environment's relationship with water. These illustrate the continuous battles between the amorphous forces of nature that are the rivers and seas, and human attempts to shape and control them. In most cases, they are attempts at extraction. Catastrophes happen as a result of the overreach of these attempts or of their mismanagement, or both.

• architects: tHE gRID Architects Research and Design Studio
• Location: Ahmedabad, India
• Project Year: 2026
• Photographs: Vinay Panjwani
• Area: 8762.0 ft2

As the technical requirements of building envelopes have evolved, fire performance has become a key criterion in the design of ventilated facades. Given this situation, analyses no longer focus solely on the individual reaction of materials, but also on the joint response of the entire building envelope under possible scenarios of external fire propagation.

From June 10-12, 2026, 3daysofdesign returns to Copenhagen with a city-wide program of exhibitions, installations, talks, and showroom presentations organized around the theme "Make This Moment Matter." Taking place across eight Design Districts throughout the Danish capital, this year's festival brings together design brands, cultural institutions, studios, and practitioners to explore contemporary questions shaping design and the built environment. As part of the program, Cobe and ArchDaily will host the public launch of a guest-edited edition of Cobe Notes, under the theme Thresholds, at the Cobe Bookcafé, Nordhavn on June 10.

• architects: Maria Schunn
• Location: Cluj-Napoca, Romania
• Project Year: 2026
• Photographs: in-still
• Area: 200.0 m2

Australian artist, director, and BAFTA-nominated producer Liam Young creates imaginary worlds as a way of thinking through the futures we fear, desire, and are already making. As a creator and designer of atmospheres, he proposes speculative landscapes reflecting the possibilities of a world to come, whether ideal or truthfully unsettling. In his worldbuilding practice across the film, television, and video game industries, fiction becomes a tool for navigating the environmental urgencies of the present. He is considered a "futurist" working across design strategies, technological scenarios, and collective imaginations, grounded in his academic research yet reaching a wider audience in exhibitions such as "In Other Worlds" at the Barbican Centre in London and "Age of Nature" at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen. In February 2026, he was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner for Louisiana Channel, where he shares his visions of our future: from architecture consolidating as a boutique industry to the need for a new kind of planetary punk at the scale of the climate crisis.

When we think of façades, we rarely think of them as habitats. We see them as the elements that separate interior from exterior, regulate temperature, reduce noise, and protect buildings from external conditions. They give architecture its visual language, but they are also expected to keep the outside world at a distance. In doing so, façades have often been understood as barriers: surfaces that define where human comfort begins and where the environment is meant to remain outside.

But the outside of a building is never empty. For centuries, architecture has unintentionally created opportunities for other forms of life. Birds nested beneath roof tiles, insects occupied cracks in masonry walls, and mosses or plants took root along ledges, gutters, and rough stone surfaces. These conditions were rarely designed with other species in mind, but they created small opportunities for life to inhabit them.

• architects: Omrania
• Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
• Project Year: 2026
• Photographs: Royal Commission for Riyadh City
• Area: 40000.0 m2

• architects: Field Office Architecture
• Location: Mansfield, Australia
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Sean Fennessy
• Area: 300.0 m2

• architects: JK-AR
• Location: Gyeongju-si, South Korea
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Rohspace
• Area: 952.0 m2

• architects: Various Associates
• Location: Wenzhou, China
• Project Year: 2024
• Photographs: Jonathan Leijonhufvud
• Area: 800.0 m2

• architects: Casey Brown Architecture
• Location: Orange, Australia
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Zella Casey Brown

• architects: Eduardo Vera
• architects: González Olsina & Vega Arquitectos
• Location: Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Luis Abba
• Area: 230.0 m2

• architects: studioMDA
• Location: New York, United States
• Project Year: 2024
• Photographs: Roland Halbe
• Photographs: Alex Yudzon
• Area: 35000.0 ft2

• architects: VAUST Studio
• Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
• Project Year: 2026
• Photographs: Nicolas Quiniou
• Area: 700.0 m2

For much of the twentieth century, architectural culture was shaped by the pursuit of lightness. Steel structures and curtain walls reduced the building envelope to a thin layer separating interior from exterior, while façades became smooth, continuous surfaces where windows were cut as precise openings within an abstract plane. But for centuries, buildings were conceived as bodies of mass; walls possessed depth, windows were recessed within thick masonry, and space was often experienced as something carved from the solidity of construction. In recent years, several contemporary projects appear to revisit this older spatial logic, reintroducing thickness as an architectural condition through deep openings, monolithic volumes, and heavy envelopes.

This shift does not imply a rejection of modern construction technologies, nor does it represent a nostalgic return to historical forms. Instead, it reflects a renewed interest in the fundamental relationship between material, mass, and void. By reintroducing thickness into the architectural vocabulary, these buildings reconnect contemporary practice with long-standing traditions in which space was inseparable from the weight and depth of construction.