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Safety Shelters / Paulo Moreira Architectures
- architects: Paulo Moreira Architectures
- Location: Johanesburgo, África do Sul
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: leon krige
- Area: 50.0 m2
Villa Normanni Puglia / Urban Interior
- architects: Urban Interior
- Location: San Vito dei Normanni, Italy
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Cosimo Calabrese
- Photographs: Duotono Fotografia
- Area: 206.0 m2
More Architecture for Less: SSdH and the Latent Potential of Existing Buildings
Amid growing recognition of architecture's responsibility toward environmental and planetary ecologies, contemporary practice is increasingly oriented toward working with what already exists—its material, spatial, and historical conditions. Within this shift, architecture and design aesthetics are increasingly about reshaping inherited environments. This approach underpins the work of SSdH, a Melbourne-based architecture practice founded in 2020 by Todd de Hoog, Harrison Smart, and Jean-Marie Spencer. Working across scales of renovation, extension, and adaptive insertion, the studio consistently engages existing buildings as active agents. Winner of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, the Australian firm foregrounds environmental responsibility, material economy, and collaborative processes grounded in site-specific conditions.
Villa Butterfly / Mohamed Amine Siana
- architects: Mohamed Amine Siana
- Location: Marrakesh, Morocco
- Project Year: 2023
- Photographs: Doublespace Photography
- Area: 750.0 m2
Why Smart Lockers Are Architecture’s New Micro-Infrastructure
How can the most structured elements in architecture give rise to unplanned forms of everyday life? "Spontaneous order" describes how structured systems can generate unplanned but coherent patterns of behavior. In urban discourse, it is often used to describe cities: frameworks of streets, plots, and buildings that are designed, while everyday life is not. Movement, encounters, routines, and informal uses emerge from simple spatial rules rather than explicit programming. In cities, this is visible in how sidewalks, stations, and thresholds operate. The structure is fixed, but the social order is fluid, setting conditions for behavior rather than defining it.
A similar logic can be observed in architectural micro-infrastructures such as locker systems. Like cities, lockers rely on structured frameworks that do not prescribe how life unfolds within them. A locker system is highly controlled in architectural terms: repetitive modules, strict grids, standardized dimensions, controlled access. Yet once in use, it produces spontaneous behaviors. People pause in corridors, return at irregular times, linger near locker zones, or briefly interact with others doing the same. What appears to be a strictly infrastructural storage system begins to generate informal social and spatial behavior.
Is the "Correct" Way to Sit All Wrong? Why Movement is the New Flow State
Workplace ergonomics have long been defined by stability: fixed postures, lumbar support, carefully calculated angles, and the relentless pursuit of the "correct" way to sit. Comfort was largely associated with maintaining a supported posture in chairs designed to reduce movement, align the spine, and sustain the body during long periods of sitting. Today, as contemporary workspaces become increasingly flexible and hybrid, questions are emerging around whether comfort is truly linked to static permanence, or rather to the possibility of movement itself.
Although ergonomic chairs have evolved significantly, many still operate within a "corrective" logic, managing discomfort through mechanisms and adjustments without fundamentally reconsidering the relationship between the body and motion. Recent research on sedentary behavior and active ergonomics has challenged the idea of stillness as the ideal condition for comfort. Instead, subtle posture transitions and continuous micro-movements are now understood as important contributors to circulation, musculoskeletal health, and overall wellbeing. In this context, contemporary ergonomics gradually begins shifting away from models based on containment toward approaches centered on adaptability, balance, and fluid movement.
Qbiss Notch: A Red Dot Design Award–Winning Modular Façade System
Qbiss Notch, a new design edition developed by Pininfarina for Trimo's Qbiss façade system, has received the Red Dot Design Award. Based on Trimo's Qbiss façade technology, the project introduces vertically installed modular Qbiss panels, an alphabet of engraved Glyphs, and Notches with integrated lighting. Together, these elements allow designers to create distinctive façade compositions. Despite its visual flexibility, the system is designed around the efficiency and precision of prefabricated construction.
UNStudio Reveals River-Oriented Master Plan for Former Industrial Site in Cluj-Napoca, Romania
A former industrial site along the Someș River in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, is being transformed into a large-scale mixed-use district that reconnects the city with its waterfront. Designed by UNStudio in collaboration with Felixx Landscape Architects and Planners for developers IULIUS and Atterbury Europe, the RIVUS project combines urban regeneration, adaptive reuse, landscape design, and new public infrastructure within a single framework. Developed through a public participation process involving local residents, the proposal will transform the former Carbochim industrial platform into a river-oriented district organized around public space, mobility, and everyday urban activity.
Katia and Maurice Krafft Sports Complex / rhb architectes
- architects: rhb architectes
- Location: Eckbolsheim, France
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Guillaume Porche
- Area: 2986.0 m2
Concéntrico Festival 2026 Unveils 24 Urban Installations Across Logroño, Spain
Concéntrico Festival 2026 will take place in Logroño, Spain, from June 18 to 23, transforming the city into a large-scale laboratory for architecture, design, and urban experimentation. Over six days, more than twenty interventions will be distributed across squares, vacant plots, streets, bridges, and emblematic spaces throughout the city, bringing together leading studios, researchers, and creators from the international scene, including Chilean architect Smiljan Radić, the raumlabor collective, Matilde Cassani, AAU Anastas, and Sahra Hersi, among others. This edition introduces a shift towards more collective, festive, and performative practices in public space, with a strong emphasis on sonic experiences and projects linked to accessibility, inclusion, and urban transformation. The programme is structured around three thematic axes: Identity and Fiction, Urban Ecologies, and Ephemeral Agents, ranging from architectures that understand public space as ritual or celebration to experimental approaches exploring materials, sound, and processes of reuse.
AD Classics: Palmas 555 / Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos
- architects: Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos
- Location: Paseo de Las Palmas 555, Lomas de Chapultepec, Miguel Hidalgo, 11000 Ciudad de México, D.F., Mexico
- Project Year: 1975
- Photography: Courtesy of Sordo Madaleno Arquitectos, fotografía por Guillermo Zamora
- Area: 5000.0 m2
Palmas 555 is a building that stands out in the urban landscape of Mexico City due to its special volumetry and innovative design. This corporate office building was designed and constructed by Juan Sordo Madaleno together with José Adolfo Wiechers and José Ignacio de Abiega as Associate Architects in 1975.
Quiané Center for Culture and Ecology – Phase 2 / Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas de Múnich + Frente por la Defensa de la Tierra + Comunidad de Santa Catarina Quiané + CAMPO + Atarraya Taller de Arquitectura
- architects: Atarraya Taller de Arquitectura
- architects: CAMPO
- architects: Comunidad de Santa Catarina Quiané
- architects: Frente por la Defensa de la Tierra
- architects: Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas de Múnich
- Location: Santa Catarina Quiané, México
- Project Year: 2020
- Photographs: Paulina Ojeda
- Area: 250.0 m2