Archi News

Across history, the relocation of capital cities has often been associated with moments of political rupture, regime change, or symbolic nation-building. From Brasília to Islamabad, new capitals were frequently conceived as instruments of centralized power, territorial control, or ideological projection. In recent decades, however, a different set of drivers has begun to shape these decisions. Rather than security or representation alone, contemporary capital relocations are increasingly tied to structural pressures such as demographic concentration, infrastructural saturation, environmental risk, and long-term resource management. As metropolitan regions expand beyond their capacity to sustain population growth and administrative functions, governments are turning to spatial reconfiguration as a means of addressing systemic urban imbalance.

The Corten Houa project emerged from a contextual and site-specific response to the pre-existing conditions of the plot — a former timber factory, now in ruins, with only oxidized steel sheets remaining as traces of its industrial past. The architectural form and layout were meticulously defined in accordance with the site's topography, employing a fragmented volumetry that aligns with the natural contours of the land, thereby minimizing the visual and physical impact of the intervention on the terrain and its surrounding landscape.

Zaha Hadid Architects has released images of its design for the redevelopment of the waterfront along the Zhedong Canal in Hangzhou's Xiaoshan District, China. The Qiantang Bay Central Water Axis project envisions a sequence of landscaped parklands, terraces, and gardens along the canal basin, proposing the transformation of former industrial areas into a green corridor extending toward the city center. The proposal adds to other recent design initiatives in the area, including Snøhetta's Qiantang Bay Art Museum, planned at the confluence of the Qiantang River and the Central Water Axis, as well as Zaha Hadid Architects' Grand Canal Gateway Bridge, a pedestrian bridge intended to connect the firm's 800,000-square-meter Seamless City masterplan on the east and west banks of the Grand Canal.

For decades, heritage has been easiest to recognize from the street. We protect facades, skylines, and monuments because they are visible, stable, and legible as cultural assets. Yet most of what we remember about living is how we eat together, withdraw, argue, care, and rest, which happen far from view. It happens inside rooms. As open plans quietly give way to thresholds, corridors, and enclosures, a deeper question emerges: what if cultural memory survives not in what architecture shows, but in how it is lived?

1. Context – The Stable and the Orange Barn is a residential project located on a narrow flag-shaped plot in Toyohashi, Japan, surrounded by factories, nursing facilities, and suburban houses. Rather than asserting a strong formal gesture, the design began by closely observing the everyday rhythms of a young family and their relationship with the surrounding environment.

Gunawarman 35 stands at a corner in the heart of Jakarta's Gunawarman district — a meeting point of residential calm and urban vibrancy, of heritage textures and contemporary life. The design embraces this duality, creating a dialogue between scale, material, and light.

Wujiang Wedding Hall is located on the northern side of the Chuihong Scenic Area in Wujiang District, Suzhou. Its cultural roots could be traced back to the Chuihong Bridge, originally built during the Northern Song Dynasty. Over the course of a millennium, the site has accumulated a series of significant cultural landmarks, including the ruins of Chuihong Bridge, Huayan Pagoda, and the Ji Cheng Memorial Hall. Together, these elements form a historic landscape shaped by the convergence of Taihu Lake and the Grand Canal, bearing witness to the layered transformations of Wujiang's urban and cultural history. The original project site consisted of a two-story cafe and a gateball court located at the intersection of two streets, which had been vacant for many years. The renovation preserves the existing structural framework while introducing new functions such as a marriage registration office, community-oriented commercial spaces, and public activity areas. Through this transformation, the project seeks to weave together historical context and contemporary urban life.

Fostering a sense of family and accelerating decision-making through a robust workplace – This redevelopment plan for two buildings – the head office and main branch – spans two sites facing the town's symbolic Hamamatsu Castle. It was brought to fruition by Shinkin Bank (credit union) with deep roots in this historic castle town.

The house reflects our proposal for contemporary architecture focused on the integration between interior and exterior, valuing pure proportions, natural materials, lighting, and cross ventilation. The office values formal simplicity and the choice of materials that bring comfort and warmth to the residents. From the beginning of the project, we have considered its materiality and volumetry, the voids and solids, the light and the shadow.

Brown & Crouppen's new headquarters transforms a century-old stove factory into a workplace that competes with the comfort of home while honoring St. Louis' industrial heritage. 

A House shaped and powered by nature - Winkelhaus is the inaugural project of estudio kmmk in Switzerland. The single-family home was shaped by its stunning natural surroundings and by the family's vision of having something specific to their needs. The house forms a harmonious relationship with the adjacent forest and expansive valley.

Coastal development in major cities has long been a terrain of opportunity and contention—shaped at once by the pursuit of capital (premium views, scarce land, and the promise of reclamation), by civic demands for public access and collective waterfront life, and by contemporary aspirations for sustainability and place-defining urban identity. Precisely because these agendas rarely align, extracting the full potential of waterfront sites is never straightforward.

Lei Wa Lakom Library is the second realized project within the Parallel Gives program, led by Architect Mai Al Busairi- Kuwait, demonstrating how modest, socially driven architecture can create enduring cultural and educational impact through climate-responsive and context-aware design.

The European Commission and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe have announced the seven finalist projects for the 2026 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - Mies van der Rohe Awards, supported by the European Union's Creative Europe programme. The selection follows the announcement of 410 nominated works in November and a shortlist of 40 projects revealed in early January. Of the seven finalists, five have been selected in the Architecture category and two in the Emerging category. According to the jury chaired by Smiljan Radić, the finalist projects are exemplary contributions to the future of European architecture, demonstrating how the discipline can respond simultaneously to specific local conditions and broader social, cultural, and environmental challenges. The selected works range from interventions in former industrial sites, small villages, and peripheral urban areas to carefully calibrated projects within larger cities. Across these varied contexts, the projects show how architecture can transform overlooked or ordinary settings into inclusive, high-quality spaces for living, learning, and social exchange.

The project transforms a 19th-century farmhouse typical of the region, which brings together dwelling and agricultural functions beneath a single roof. Deprived of its farming use and located outside the building zone, this exceptionally large volume has become difficult to maintain given the limited habitable floor area permitted. In this context, the client's mixed housing/permaculture program represents a rare opportunity for a coherent requalification of the whole.

This week's architecture news brings together a series of announcements that reflect how the discipline is engaging with larger structural and institutional frameworks. The OBEL Foundation's introduction of Systems' Hack as the theme for its 2026 cycle foregrounds architecture's relationship to the systems that organize contemporary life, from infrastructure to resource flows. At the scale of the design industry, Salone del Mobile.Milano's outline of its 2026 framework, including OMA's involvement in the Salone Contract master plan, signals an evolving understanding of major fairs as long-term cultural and economic infrastructures rather than standalone events. Running alongside these agenda-setting developments, the final days of nominations for the 2026 ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards underscore the role of collective evaluation and public participation in shaping contemporary architectural discourse.

Cornered against a protected forest, on a gentle slope that overlooks a lush botanical garden, there is a bold infrastructure, a mute monument, almost without memory, function and scale. The building is meant to host culinary activities; from intimate, informal dines to large social events. Supported by a generous specialized kitchen totally buried underground, the building challenges the archetype of an open plan.

Mugok is not a place that invites escape from everyday life through temporary retreat. Rather, it is an architecture that guides one to recover a renewed attitude within the everyday. Here, architecture does not dominate the subject—the user, the human—but instead settles quietly as a background for being. Space is constructed through a language of restraint rather than display, and it is precisely this restraint that gives rise to a profound inner resonance. Within this quietude, the user regains their center and re-establishes a relationship with the world.

Chongqing is a city shaped by the continuous interplay between mountains and water. Its complex topography overlaps with a dense infrastructural network, where elevated roads, steep terrain, and waterfronts together form a highly charged urban landscape. Located at the convergence of these conditions, the Luxi Lake Café is conceived as a small architectural insertion that responds to the relationships between urban infrastructure, natural geography, and everyday public life through a light and restrained spatial intervention.

This renovation transforms a former residence into a restaurant while preserving traces of its residential use accumulated over time. In the renovation of existing architecture, the act of design is always situated between the past and the future. Unlike new construction, such projects already contain an accumulation of time, requiring the designer to engage in dialogue with the memory of the space. Beyond physical information such as changes in form, materials, and spatial configuration, carefully reading the traces of everyday life once lived there holds significant meaning when envisioning a new spatial reality.