Archdaily
Pedagogy in Space: Architecture Schools' Hidden Curriculum
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
Before architecture students become authors of space, they are subjected to one. For years, they work inside a building that teaches without announcing itself as a teacher. It organizes their exhaustion, their ambition, their visibility, their solitude, their friendships, their sense of scale, and their relationship to judgment. Long before a student can articulate a position on architecture, the school has already offered one in its implicit built environment.
This is not to suggest that buildings determine architects. The influence is slower and less complete than that. A school building operates more like a hidden curriculum: a spatial discipline that works alongside faculty, syllabi, institutional culture, and student life. It teaches through access and obstruction, program adjacencies, daylight exposures, and scale. It produces habits of attention before it produces explicit beliefs.
Sublime Comporta Sand / Fragmentos
- architects: Fragmentos
- Location: Grândola, Portugal
- Project Year: 2026
- Photograph: Francisco Nogueira
- Area: 25000.0 m2
Brick Tower Mixed Use Building / ASA Studio
- architects: ASA Studio
- Location: Gasabo District, Kacyiru, Kigali, Rwanda
- Project Year: 2026
- Photographs: Gaël Vande weghe
- Area: 835.0 m2
Raintree Lane Farm House / Yangnar Studio
- architects: Yangnar Studio
- Location: San Kamphaeng District, Chiang Mai, Thailand
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Rungkit Charoenwat
- Area: 150.0 m2
Nam Da House / 24Minimalist Architecture
- architects: 24Minimalist Architecture
- Location: Nam Da, Vietnam
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Quang Dam
- Area: 105.0 m2
YP Building / Simplex Architecture
- architects: Simplex Architecture
- Location: Seocho District, Seoul, South Korea
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Kyungsub Shin
- Area: 1120.0 m2
Estero Residences + Gamba café / Barde + vanVoltt
- architects: Barde + vanVoltt
- Location: San José del Cabo, Mexico
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Zaickz Moz
- Area: 1000.0 m2
The Ecological Intelligence of Sacred Landscapes
Architecture often speaks about ecological design as though it were a recent discovery. Biodiversity corridors, regenerative landscapes, sponge cities, and more-than-human urbanism are presented as emerging responses to contemporary environmental crises. Across India and the SWANA region, landscapes shaped through religious practice have long organized relationships between people, water, vegetation, and animals. Long before ecological performance became a design metric, temple tanks stored monsoon water, sacred groves protected biodiversity, and oasis settlements sustained life in some of the world's most arid environments. Few of these places emerged from explicit environmental agendas. They emerged through cultural and spiritual practices. Their environmental logic remains highly relevant today. Many of the conditions now discussed through more-than-human design have existed for centuries within landscapes architects rarely study as ecological infrastructure.
Buildings of Liangzi Lake Changling Ferry / UP Architecture
Sandstone House / 4Brick Studio
- architects: 4Brick Studio
- Location: Shyanumangala, Bangalore, India
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Ekansh Goel
- Area: 7800.0 ft2
Machikado Project in Toyama / Plan 21
Limoeiro House / Mana arquitetura
- architects: Mana arquitetura
- Location: Jardim Luzitania, Brazil
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Carolina Lacaz
- Area: 214.0 m2
Building Public Life: How Bogotá and Mexico City Addressed Urban Inequality
In many Latin American cities, peripheral neighborhoods have historically had less access to the resources that make urban life more than just livable. Housing, transportation, and public services are the usual markers of that gap. But there is another gap that is harder to quantify: the absence of places where people can gather, learn, rest, and participate in collective life. When those spaces do not exist, the city not only fails to provide a service. It fails to acknowledge a presence.
In recent decades, a growing number of projects have tried to address that absence directly. Rather than focusing only on physical infrastructure, they invest in spaces designed to support education, culture, recreation, and community, often merging several of those functions within a single building in neighborhoods where those spaces are otherwise limited.
Laboratorium Coffee Shop / EktraArhitectura
- architects: EktraArhitectura
- Location: Cluj-Napoca, Romania
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: in-still
- Area: 100.0 m2
Renovation of 5 X 7 / Greater Dog Architects
- architects: Greater Dog Architects
- Location: No.2689, Qiantao Road, Shaoxing city, Zhejiang, China
- Project Year: 2023
- Photographs: Metaviz Studio
- Area: 80.0 m2
Villa Riviera Golf Residence / Atelier130
- architects: Atelier130
- Location: Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Alejandra Loreto
- Area: 600.0 m2
Caiçara House / Studio Carlito e Renata Pascucci
- architects: Studio Carlito e Renata Pascucci
- Location: Praia de Boiçucanga, Brazil
- Project Year: 2022
- Photographs: Julia Novoa
- Area: 180.0 m2
Guesthouse "Postal route" / Plazma Architecture Studio
- architects: Plazma Architecture Studio
- Location: Neringa, Lithuania
- Project Year: 2026
- Photographs: Norbert Tukaj
- Area: 770.0 m2