• architects: SIA arquitectura
• architects: gonçalves perić
• Location: Amadora, Portugal
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Charlotte Auger
• Photographs: João Lança de Morais
• Area: 369.0 m2

• architects: Atelier AJO
• Location: Pont-de-Salars, France
• Project Year: 2024
• Photographs: Sandrine Iratçabal
• Area: 170.0 m2

A housing block in New Belgrade appears orderly from a distance. Concrete slabs repeat with disciplined consistency, windows align into measured grids, and balconies stack with the confidence of a system certain of itself. However, proximity changes the reading. One balcony is enclosed in aluminum glazing, another softened with improvised shading. Insulation thickens part of a façade while laundry frames another edge like an accidental elevation study. The district still reads as planned, though occupation has made its order less uniform. Within that order, repetition has gradually been rewritten through occupation.

• architects: Modal Architecture
• architects: Quartz Architecture
• Location: Clohars-Carnoët, France
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Eric Sueur
• Area: 1000.0 m2

• architects: Modum Atelier
• Location: Nan Jing Shi, China
• Project Year: 2024
• Photographs: AYstudio
• Area: 67.0 m2

• architects: NAAW
• Location: Almaty, Kazakhstan
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Damir Otegen
• Area: 150.0 m2

• architects: ALMA de Arquitectos
• Location: Zapopan, México
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: César Belio
• Area: 340.0 m2

• architects: CARTA. Architecte + Designer
• Location: Val-David, Canada
• Project Year: 2024
• Photographs: David Boyer
• Area: 6363.0 ft2

• architects: Atelier 008
• Location: Modra, Slovakia
• Project Year: 2025
• Photographs: Matej Hakár
• Area: 201.0 m2

Between the 1950s and 1960s, two cities were built that would leave a lasting mark on the history of architecture and urbanism. Born from a shared vision yet separated by more than 14,000 kilometers, Brasília in Brazil and Chandigarh in India were both planned and constructed from scratch, deeply shaped by modernist principles.

Emerging during a period of profound political and social transformation, when many nations sought to redefine their capitals as symbols of progress, both cities assumed a strategic role. Through their architectural language, they reinforced ideological and national narratives closely tied to state power.

These were cities conceived in the abstract, guided by a utopian vision. They were intended to be avant-garde urban centers, free from the deficiencies that plagued mid-twentieth-century cities, embodying aesthetic principles aligned with progressive political ideals and embracing new technologies—most notably the automobile.

Yet this promise of the future also generated significant challenges. While these difficulties undoubtedly reflect the social and economic realities of their respective countries, they were also shaped by a modernist vision that is increasingly being reassessed today.

• architects: MVRDV
• Location: Bordeaux, France
• Project Year: 2024
• Photographs: Paul Lefevre
• Photographs: Matthieu Lecouvey
• Area: 5250.0 m2

In an industry defined by engineering tolerances and performance certainty, interior finishing still relies on a process that introduces variability into every project. Even experienced applicators often depend on judgement-based mixing—estimating water ratios and adjusting by feel until the material appears workable. While skill reduces variability, it does not eliminate it. The result is inherent inconsistency that transfers directly onto the finished surface.

As Europe experiences one of its earliest and most intense heatwaves in recent years, World Environment Day 2026 arrives amid renewed discussions about climate adaptation, urban resilience, and the capacity of cities to respond to increasingly extreme temperatures. Across Portugal, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, temperatures have surged well above seasonal averages, prompting heat alerts, school closures, emergency planning measures, and growing concerns about the performance of buildings and public infrastructure under prolonged heat stress. The convergence of these highlights a reality that is becoming increasingly worldwide: climate change is no longer solely an environmental concern but an issue that is fundamentally reshaping the spaces where people live, work, and gather.

• architects: Renée del Gaudio Architecture
• Location: Allenspark, United States
• Project Year: 2026
• Photographs: David Lauer
• Area: 2100.0 ft2

BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group is nearing completion of the EVE Music Hall in Čepin, eastern Croatia, designed in collaboration with SIRRAH projekt and Theatre Projects. The 10,000 m² project contains a live music venue, congress facilities, exhibition spaces, a café, and rooftop event spaces. The venue is expected to host concerts, conferences, exhibitions, and cultural activities, accommodating nearly 4,000 guests indoors and up to 25,000 outdoors. The new cultural building marks the office's first project in Croatia and is expected to become its first completed music performance venue in early 2027.

What happens when a city’s industrial past becomes the raw material for its future? In Copenhagen, Nordhavn transforms the old harbor into a living laboratory of sustainable urbanism, where warehouses and docks give way to independent districts, small islands, and canals that redefine what it means to inhabit the city.

Modern cities are running on performance indicators. They move millions of people each day, concentrate capital, separate land uses, and sustain complex systems of logistics and consumption. In that sense, the city functions as a system to be continually adjusted and optimized.

Today's dominant metrics are familiar and widely witnessed: vehicles per hour, average commute times, floor area ratios, parking turnover, housing starts, and tax revenue per parcel of land. These figures describe a city that is legible through efficiency. They are inherited from an industrial logic, where urban space is treated more like a production mechanism than a lived-in environment. In this framing, cities begin to mimic the needs and metrics of a machine.

• architects: REX
• architects: Richards and Spence
• architects: HASSELL
• Location: Brisbane, Australia
• Project Year: 2026
• Photographs: Cieran Murphy
• Photographs: David Chatfield
• Photographs: Ethan Rohloff
• Area: 73000.0 m2