Archdaily

Architerrax invites architecture students from around the globe to participate in the Architerrax Portfolio Competition. This international competition provides a prestigious platform to showcase your architectural vision, demonstrate your versatility, and gain direct exposure to leading architecture firms worldwide.

About the Competition
The Architerrax Portfolio Competition aims to identify outstanding architecture students and graduates who excel in academic rigor and design excellence, helping them stand out from their peers and bridge the gap between academia and global professional practice.

Brief & Requirements

The Challenge: Select and curate a collection of three of your most spectacular architectural designs and present them in a

Imagine a corridor. Concrete walls two meters apart, a low ceiling, artificial lighting with neither shadow nor gradation. At the far end, a bulletproof glass window, and on the other side, a uniformed officer. You are at a port of entry. It could be in Calais, El Paso, or Lampedusa. An anonymous space, yet far from neutral. Designed so that anyone can understand: passage is not a right; it is a concession.

Site and Landscape - Casa Macahuite is conceived as a composition of five planes (four vertical walls and a floating pergola) arranged in direct relationship with the landscape: sea and mountains. Their configuration generates intermediate spaces that provide shade, cross-ventilation, and continuous visual connection with the surroundings, making climate and site the primary organizers of the project.

At the UIA World Congress of Architects 2026 in Barcelona, discussions surrounding the future of housing frequently extended beyond questions of design to include governance, ownership, and long-term stewardship. Among the speakers contributing to these conversations was Cristina Gamboa, co-founder of the Barcelona-based cooperative Lacol, whose practice combines architecture, housing advocacy, construction management, and environmental research through a cooperative model. During the Congress, ArchDaily spoke with Gamboa about how cooperative practice reshapes the architect's role, why participation extends beyond consultation, and how projects such as La Borda and La Morada continue to inform broader discussions on housing, care, and collective living.

Architecture studio Polysmiths built a three-bedroom house on an infill plot in East London, using cork and other sustainable materials that remained readily available during the pandemic.

"Map the New World" is the motto of Project PLATEAU, led by Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), to develop and expand access to 3D models representing the diversity of cities across the country. Japan comprises a total of 744 cities, including 14 with populations exceeding one million, 190 with between 100,000 and one million inhabitants, and 540 with populations between 10,000 and 100,000. To date, 3D models of more than 250 cities have been made available as open data through the country's public G-Spatial Information Center, and can also be accessed via an online browser viewer. According to public authorities, the project aims to strengthen urban resilience by providing society with new tools to address local challenges. This involves not only urban space modeling but also collaboration with local governments, private companies, and technology communities. The project also includes a digital reconstruction of the recently closed Osaka World Expo site.

Concéntrico returned to Logroño for its 12th edition in June and transformed the city into a working site for architecture. Since its founding in 2015, the festival has built an identity on resisting a distant, controlled exhibition of design by constructing full-scale installations in the city's streets, plazas, and vacant lots, engaging residents and visitors as part of daily life. This year's program brought together more than twenty interventions by architects, designers, and researchers working across a wide range of geographies and methods, each contributing to a citywide experiment in reimagining public space.

The project was developed through a collaboration between students from Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences and the Innsbruck-based collectives Gans Anders and Bonanza. As part of the Gabonsa Music Festival, the students designed a temporary pavilion for the Rossau Recreation Centre, a former municipal landfill site that the collectives seek to reactivate as a public space through cultural events. The result is a hybrid structure situated at the intersection of furniture, installation, and architecture, functioning simultaneously as a seating landscape, landmark, and social meeting point while embodying the festival's experimental spirit.

Set within the climatic and cultural context of Ahmedabad, the House of Green Court draws from the courtyard typology to organize a three-generational family into an individualized yet cohesive whole. The project modulates privacy while responding to the present and evolving needs of its inhabitants.

In Luohu, where landscape and city are held in close balance, expansive mountains and water are interwoven with a dense, fine-grained urban fabric. Located at the threshold between natural terrain and the built city, the Luohu Library and Youth Activity Center explores how a large public building can be embedded within this dual condition, absorbing both the openness of the landscape and the intensity of the old urban fabric. The project seeks to introduce permeability, openness and spatial breath into a high-capacity cultural complex, while amplifying the site's particular character and the vitality of the surrounding city. This forms the conceptual basis of "Stacking Mountains, Layering the City." — Xiao Cheng

Keeping pace with the ever-evolving landscape and culture of Harajuku through a new passage and creating a slice of sky between the buildings.

Architecture as a Vessel for Living Heritage - The Mami Dan Temple of Toligbé reflects Maison Bignon Sossou's conviction that architecture can become a powerful medium for preserving, transmitting, and renewing Africa's living cultural heritage. Conceived as both a spiritual sanctuary and a cultural destination, the project seeks to reinterpret the sacred landscape of Vodun through a contemporary architectural language rooted in the knowledge, materials, and collective memory of Benin.

Mimado is a restaurant in Temozón Norte, Mérida, where the interior carries the core identity of the project. The design transforms a double-height commercial space into a warm, layered environment defined by Art Deco references, green tile, white oak, vegetation, fluted glass, a mural made from recycled books, and a system of suspended fabrics.

Located in downtown Curitiba, the design of Cença Pizza Bar repurposes a previously underutilized historic building into a vibrant, welcoming, and character-filled bar — an environment that invites people to linger, discover, and socialize.

Designed by the LBWA studio, the apartment, located in a historic tenement building in the Łazarz district of Poznań, not only reflects the character of the historic structure but also introduces fresh, contemporary elements that give it a unique and functional character.

Images of the benches at New York City's High Line Park spread around the world when the project opened in 2009. Emerging diagonally from the same material and modular pattern as the paving, they transition seamlessly from concrete to wood, evoking the railway tracks that once occupied the site. To withstand decades of exposure to the elements, the project required a wood species of exceptional durability, and ipe, harvested from the Brazilian Amazon, was selected. Its slow growth produces a dense, low-porosity hardwood that is naturally resistant to wear, moisture, and biological decay. The choice, however, sparked controversy at the time amid concerns over the certification of the timber's forest management. This broader view changes how we think about materials. Their origin still matters, but so does what happens after the building's life comes to an end.

Macchiato is a public space designed by OUT Architecture for the London Festival of Architecture 2026, located in front of The Colombian Coffee Company along Petticoat Lane, one of London's most vibrant and culturally diverse streets. The project transforms an overlooked urban corner into a place for gathering, conversation, and pause within the everyday life of the city.

Located in the coastal city of Shenzhen, the campus is envisioned as a "terraced courtyard campus" that harmoniously integrates mountain, park, and harbor landscapes. Built along a gentle slope overlooking both the adjacent park and the harbor, the design transforms its natural surroundings into its greatest asset—a place where students can "look up to lush mountains and out to the sea." Breaking away from conventional school design models, the project employs a cross-frame layout and terraced massing that respond sensitively to the site's topography. This approach ensures mountain views for all general classrooms, while specialized classrooms are oriented southward to maximize natural daylight. The core vision is to create a human-scaled, verdant terraced academy. Drawing from Lingnan courtyard traditions and tailored to the local climate, the campus offers a learning environment composed of "hill-like terraces" and "intimate courtyards."

Project Ochre, this residence draws its identity directly from the earth. The name perfectly encapsulates the home's grounding material palette defined by baked terracotta, rich timber, coconut wood roofing, and natural cane and its overall atmosphere of unpretentious warmth.

A house that does not resist the coast so much as negotiate with it. Positioned at the southern edge of the Mornington Peninsula, where the land yields to Bass Strait, the house inhabits a landscape of remarkable intensity. Wind arrives unbroken from the Southern Ocean, rain travels across the horizon, and the air is saturated with salt. The architecture does not resist these forces. Instead, it settles quietly into them, becoming part of the character of the place.