Mankind Studios is a compact mixed-use building located in a dense urban neighborhood in Bandung, Indonesia. The project occupies a narrow site within a lively hangout district shaped by the city's strong youth culture and creative economy. Bandung's high altitude and mountainous surroundings provide a cooler climate than most Indonesian cities, a condition that directly informs the building's spatial and environmental strategies.
This project is the intervention of a traditional Antioquian house located in the southwest of the department, in a mountainous and warm climate territory.
Set on the edge of the Blaricum heathland, the Tafelberg office is conceived as a place where work takes place within the landscape rather than apart from it. The building withdraws into its surroundings, allowing nature to remain visually continuous while quietly shaping the architecture's form, materiality, and atmosphere.
The area around the Herzogpark in Munich has retained a certain originality, despite the obvious prosperity of its residents. In addition to expensive delicatessen shops, there are also long-established tailors, bakers, and butchers. Our client was able to purchase a double plot in a residential street, directly along the Herzogpark. It sits in a row of four to five-story residential buildings, most of which were built in the early 20th century. The task was to design an apartment building that reflected the unique location and met the highest living standards.
A new year has begun, and with it, a new edition of the ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards. For 17 years, we have handed over the reins to you, our readers, to choose the best architectural projects of the year, and you have consistently delivered. With a brand new set of over 3,000 projects from around the globe, it is now time to get lost in our projects library and start making your selection.
By operating with only five notes, the pentatonic scale establishes a stable and intuitive musical system in which structural clarity allows for variation without the risk of excessive dissonance. From this consolidated structure, which forms the basis of countless musical styles, especially popular music, the blues introduced a decisive inflection by incorporating additional notes into the scale. Without delving into excessive technicalities, these are subtle tonal deviations, small dissonances often associated with a more melancholic sound, known as blue notes. Played fleetingly rather than as emphatic accents, they briefly tension the system, adding expressiveness and depth while keeping the underlying structure intact.
Background — The Noon Repose Pavilion is located on the bank of a rural river in Huizhou, a city in southern China, along the scenic route encircling Nankun Mountain and Luofu Mountain. Huizhou was once a place of exile for the Northern Song scholar Su Shi. During his years there, exile did not result in withdrawal from life, but rather intensified his attention to its everyday rhythms. In his writings, he identified what he called the "sixteen pleasures of life," one of which he described as "resting at noon on a simple rattan pillow." The pavilion takes its name from this phrase. It is not intended as a nostalgic reference, but as a way of anchoring contemporary experience to a different understanding of time—one that allows for pause, slackening, and repose. What is recalled here is not a historical figure, but a mode of living that remains possible in the present.
When developing an architectural project, there are multiple possible points of departure. Some architects begin with volume, gradually carving form in dialogue with its context. Others start from the longitudinal section, while some organize the project around the functional layout of the plan. There is no right or wrong method, but rather distinct approaches that reflect different ways of thinking about and making architecture. Since the widespread adoption of solar panels and photovoltaic energy, however, a recurring pattern has emerged: these systems are almost always introduced later in the process, framed as technical optimizations or responses to regulatory and energy-efficiency requirements. As a result, they tend to be treated as secondary elements, often relegated to rooftops or less visible areas and detached from the architectural language of the building.
Designed by MVRDV in collaboration with Buro Happold, the new Lampegiet Theatre in Veenendaal, the Netherlands, is scheduled to replace the existing theatre building from 1988. Approved by the Veenendaal City Council in January 2026, the project is expected to begin construction in 2027 and reach completion in 2029. Conceived as a contemporary cultural venue that responds to both current performance requirements and the city's historical identity, the new theatre introduces a compact, multi-volume composition wrapped in a porous ceramic facade that allows the building to act as an illuminated urban landmark.
Architecture and interior design practice Templeton Ford has completed Clay Rise, a three-bedroom home in the bucolic village of West Hoathly, West Sussex. The house explores the relationship between local tradition and form through its tiered roofline and contextually driven material palette. Shortlisted for the prestigious 2025 Manser Medal, Clay Rise stands as Templeton Ford's debut project. Architect Andre Templeton Ford and stylist Jessica Templeton Ford launched the practice in 2025, following decades-long careers in leadership positions at award-winning international architecture offices and in creative direction, design, and the arts.
Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron has released new images showing construction progress on the Memphis Art Museum, set to open in December 2026. Currently operating as the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the institution is both the oldest and largest art museum in Tennessee, United States, with a collection of more than 10,000 works spanning from ancient to contemporary art. Commissioned in 2019, the project marks the museum's relocation to a new site in Downtown Memphis along the Mississippi River bluff. The first images of the new cultural campus, designed by Herzog & de Meuron with architect of record archimania and landscape design by OLIN, were released in 2021. The 123,500-square-foot museum will expand gallery space by 50 percent and introduce extensive free, publicly accessible areas conceived as an open invitation to the city.
Residential architecture remains one of the most active fields for unbuilt architectural exploration, offering a lens through which architects rethink how domestic space can respond to landscape, climate, and contemporary patterns of living. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected proposals bring together a range of residential projects that engage with houses, villas, and retreats as sites of withdrawal, mediation, and everyday inhabitation. Rather than treating the home as a fixed or isolated object, these projects approach it as a spatial framework that negotiates exposure, privacy, and connection to place.
Ojo de Nila is a home shaped by the rhythms of the landscape in Bahía Ballena. Designed for a Swiss couple seeking a deeper connection to the environment, the house invites a lifestyle centered on living outdoors in comfort without air conditioning. Set on a secluded mountain with expansive ocean views and surrounded by abundant biodiversity, the home is completely open toward the Pacific so its inhabitants remain in constant dialogue with light, air, and the forest canopy.
More than just a school building, the Regenerative Futures Studio is a carbon-sequestering, solar-powered living ecosystem that filters pollution, fosters animal life, and generates almost zero waste. It provides a dynamic project-based learning environment for students to explore and address real-world problems with a regenerative focus.
The International Guest House is part of the comprehensive campus development of the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IITH). It is among the six core buildings defined in the master plan and was designed through a distinctive framework of international collaboration.
This architectural project represents a sanctuary of tranquility, an escape from everyday chaos, which forms the fundamental intention of the project owner to establish a long-term retreat for family members. A peaceful and undisturbed environment became the essential premise in the search for a site that could respond both to family living and to the potential for a complementary business. This vision ultimately gave rise to the café and future villa nestled within a lychee orchard, conceived as a place for rest, reflection, and quiet enjoyment.
The Ramenzoni House was conceived as a summer residence where architecture acts as a mediator between living spaces and the landscape. The project is based on the principle that the house should not impose itself on the surroundings, but rather reveal and enhance its natural qualities through pathways, framing, and contemplation spaces.
The new lookout point at Point Vue le Jambon in Vresse-sur-Semois is conceived as a discreet and respectful gesture within an exceptional landscape. Rather than asserting itself as an object, the project carefully embeds architecture into the terrain, allowing the site's natural qualities to remain central to the experience.
Most of the general qualities of a vernacular corner house were preserved.
In Latin America, encounters do not necessarily arise from grand architectural gestures or monumental urban plans. They emerge from the in-between, from intermediate spaces: the courtyard, the veranda, the sidewalk, the shared corridor. These areas, often considered residual or informal by the traditional architectural discipline, are precisely where everyday life builds bonds.