Archdaily

Sometimes one comes across a project brief so special that they immediately sense the outcome will be a truly unique dwelling. For this particular assignment, the clients asked the architects to renovate and expand their old family farm into a multi-family holiday home for the summer, with the possibility for the materfamilias to extend her stay whenever she wishes to escape the hustle and bustle of city life.

This week's stories share a common thread: the value of looking beyond established frameworks. Two French-Moroccan architects reflected on what architecture can learn from Moroccan culture and local knowledge, while the United Nations General Assembly voted to promote world map projections that more accurately represent the relative size of continents- a symbolic shift that challenges centuries of Eurocentric geographical representation, with direct implications for how we understand Africa and the Global South. A similar spirit of questioning convention runs through this week's featured projects, from city governments repurposing abandoned buildings for circular construction to the German Pavilion for the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale addressing social isolation and democratic coexistence. On the Radar this week, we cover three recently announced projects: a new multifunctional sports complex in Hilversum that brings together sport, education, and community life around a continuous interior circuit; a low-density residential district in Yerevan where landscape restoration preceded construction; and a landscaped public plaza commissioned by the Las Vegas Raiders to replace underutilized parking lots adjacent to Allegiant Stadium.

Oslo is the capital of Norway as well as its largest city, serving as the country's political, economic, and cultural center. Nestled at the head of the Oslofjord and surrounded by forested hills, it's home to roughly 700,000 people in the city, with over a million living in the greater metropolitan area. Founded around a thousand years ago, Oslo has a long history as a trading post and administrative seat. However, much of its modern character was shaped after a major fire in the seventeenth century led to a full rebuilding under Danish rule, when it was briefly renamed Christiania. Today it consistently ranks among the world's most livable cities, prized for its blend of urban life and easy access to nature.

Lumeah is a careful renovation of one of the most intact houses designed by modernist architect Paul Couch. Located in Macedon on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country, the house—formerly known as the Harley House—was conceived as a highly resolved composition of exposed concrete, bluestone, timber, stainless steel and compressed-straw Stramit Board, without a painted surface.

Wa ssl, meaning connection, is a private retreat designed by Azaz Architects and constructed by LayCon, located dramatically on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Alwasseel valley in Al Jubaylah. The project was conceived by a family seeking a place of gathering and retreat—a counterpoint to the noise, density, and accelerated rhythm of life in the city. Conceived in memory of their late father, the house is less an attempt to reproduce the family's former farmhouse than an architectural interpretation of what that place represented: childhood, togetherness, landscape, and a slower relationship with time.

What transforms a space of living into a home? Beyond ownership or shelter, a home is tied to a quieter sense of certainty: the feeling that one can retreat, rest, and momentarily step away from the world's unpredictability. Homes are where routines accumulate, memories settle into spaces and objects, and where personal identity takes physical form through occupation and everyday rituals. Yet this sense of belonging depends on another condition that often goes unnoticed until disrupted: security. To feel "at home" implies a condition of comfort and stability. When domestic environments fail to provide this, spaces designed for rest become sources of unease, subtly affecting routines and well-being.

Following the Sandstone Wood Pavilion designed for the "HU SHI GUANG · Art Eco Site" program in Longyou, Zhejiang, we were once again invited by Fengyuzhu—this time to engage in a regional-scale curatorial initiative—the "Nankunshan-Luofushan Rim Pioneer Zone (Huizhou) Architectural Art Project." Drawing on Su Dongpo's "Sixteen Delights of Life" as its curatorial framework, the initiative brings together architects and artists to create rural waystations and spatial installations along Huizhou's 218-kilometer-long scenic tourism highway. Each participating team selected one of Dongpo's sixteen delights as the theme, creating a spatial installation complemented by café and tea offerings. During early site visits with Bangbang, the initiative's chief curator, a bamboo grove beside Shisanba Bridge in Mazha Town was chosen as our project site.

This single-family home in Los Cóndores, on the outskirts of Lima, is born from a clear decision: to let the slope of the site organize the project. The result is a sequence of platforms, roofs, and open spaces that follow the natural topography, turning the journey—climbing, crossing, pausing—into the core of the domestic experience.

The choice of the site was the starting point for the Casa Itu project. After several months of visiting and analyzing different sites, considering topography, sun exposure, and the surrounding context, we selected a corner lot with a slope oriented toward a pleasant landscape and north, the most favorable orientation in the region.

Casa Florinda began with a question: what to do with the old earthen house that stood in ruins on the land we had acquired to build our home? Although our first plans involved tearing it down, something about the way it belonged to the site prevented us from doing so. The decision to preserve it ultimately intertwined two dimensions of our lives: living and making architecture. Thus, the old structure would become our home and the place where we would test our own convictions about architecture.

The Community of Madrid and the Leganés City Council have launched an urban planning competition to solicit the best proposals for the sustainable and innovative development of the new 'Puerta de Madrid' neighborhood, which borders the established Leganés Norte neighborhood to the north and east. This urban development will be managed through a consortium involving both administrations.

The clients' intention was to create a residential building with studio and one-bedroom apartments.
With only 88m2, a frontage of 5.50m facing the street and 2.00m wide on the rear elevation, the plot is characterized by its small size and peculiar configuration.

The City of Edmonton's Coronation Park Sports and Recreation Centre, designed in joint venture by hcma architecture + design and Dub Architects, in collaboration with velodrome experts FaulknerBrowns, offers the rare combination of a community recreation hub with a high-performance sports training facility. Its elevated cycling track, unusually placed a full storey above ground level and encircled by a running track, allows for a variety of community spaces to be located beneath, within, and around it. A defining feature of this design is the unobstructed sightline established between the ground-level urban court and the cycling track. This not only makes high-speed cycling visible to the public, it also heightens overall spatial awareness and a sense of dynamic activity that will hopefully inspire the next generation of athletes.

The building was designed as a sober and simple volume that is reminiscent of an old atelier or a small-scale classic industrial building. It is constructed from characterful bricks, which give the impression that this building has always been there. This creates an interesting dialogue with the surrounding buildings (including the neighbour's blind facade), whereby the idea of new construction turns into a question about which buildings was there first.

Public space is often intended to be perceived as universal, but access is unevenly experienced. For many women, moving through the city involves a continuous assessment of exposure, visibility, proximity to others, lighting, transport access, escape routes and the likelihood of harassment. These calculations are shaped by spatial conditions as much as social ones. Safety is a question of urban form, maintenance, mobility, governance and the distribution of public investment. While the built environment may not cause gender-based violence, it can intensify vulnerability and normalize unequal access, especially to public spaces.

Librairie Avant-Garde Huize Baiwu Bookstore is situated in Baiwu Village, Huize County, Qujing, Yunnan. Baiwu Village is a historic and cultural village where Hui, Yi, Bai, Han, and other ethnic groups live together, and where cultures brought by migrants from different provinces have converged. The village was once the first stop on the long-distance copper transportation route from Huize to the imperial capital, known as the "Copper Capital." Drawing on the local context and conditions of the site, the project aims to revitalize the rural fabric and reshape the village's cultural and public spaces.

How can daylight tackle global challenges? This question lies at the heart of Light of Tomorrow by VELUX, a global student competition that encourages architecture students to explore the future potential of daylight in the built environment. In its 12th edition, the competition received hundreds of responses from around the world, culminating in eight finalist projects presented to an international jury at the UIA World Congress of Architects in Barcelona. The 2026 global winner, Sun the Quilt, developed by students from Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology in China, was chosen for its strong concept, design thinking, and innovative use of daylight that transforms an everyday domestic ritual into an innovative facade system shaped by daylight, climate, and care.

French-Moroccan architects and twin sisters Salwa and Selma Mikoü have developed a practice that brings together architecture, engineering, craftsmanship, and cultural memory. Founders of the Paris-based Mikoü Architecture, the sisters draw on their different approaches to design as well as their experience growing up between Morocco and France. In a recent interview with Louisiana Channel, they discuss the influence of Moroccan architecture on their work, their collaborative process, and their interest in bringing contemporary construction technologies into dialogue with craft traditions.

Villa Mahler by Philipp Architekten is conceived as a habitable sculpture — a home that behaves like a piece of art. Created for an internationally acclaimed artist, it becomes both sanctuary and stage: an architectural portrait where daily rituals, creative work, and spatial drama merge into one immersive experience.

The Praemium Imperiale is a global arts prize that recognizes exceptional achievements in architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and theater or film. The award has been presented annually since 1988 by the Japan Art Association, with one postponement in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous laureates include Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, Japanese architect and humanitarian Shigeru Ban, and Burkinabé-German architect Francis Kéré, recognized by the association as professionals "who transcend national and ethnic boundaries, embodying the culture and arts of our time." This year, the laureate in the architecture category is Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind, co-founder of Studio Libeskind, known for the design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the World Trade Center Master Plan in New York City.