ArchDaily.com

Mennorode is a phased renovation and masterplan for a former Mennonite community house, now operating as a hotel and conference centre in Elspeet, the Netherlands. Founded in 1925, the site has developed over time into a dispersed ensemble of low-rise buildings embedded among the trees.

Situated in the vibrant urban fabric of Lisbon, this 150 m² project unfolds over two floors of an iconic building from the 1950s, recently rehabilitated to embrace the demands of contemporary life. The intervention goes beyond mere restoration; it emerges as a manifesto of respect for the modernist legacy, reinterpreting the sobriety of the era through a bold and current lens. The central proposal was clear: to honor the memory of the original structure while injecting new energy that responds to the fluidity of today's daily life.

Having thrown a stone today, Eshu kills a bird of yesterday. The Yoruba proverb tells both a story of reparation and of ancestrality by joyfully bending spacetime conventions and accessing subjects from the past with present actions. The saying offers a poetic entry point to broader West African traditions and to the practice of Scottish-Nigerian artist and architect Dele Adeyemo. Named one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, Adeyemo's work brings together ecology, spirituality, dance, and territory, examining how embodied cultural practices can generate alternative spatial possibilities within and against the architecture of racial capitalism.

The client's brief was to design a new retirement home on the site of a former orchard adjacent to a hospital. The building is conceived as four independently functioning households for approximately 60 residents, fully barrier-free. An orchard and brick walls near a cemetery with a church, a historic town with a beautiful town hall. Tall trees. And then old age as a phenomenon—calm, silence, brick as the archetype of home. The proximity of the hospital and cemetery may invite bitter associations; here, however, we see quality, an image of quiet and contemplation, an image of the peaceful edge of town. A chateau-like, symmetrical, almost classicist layout brings atriums, gardens, views, and abundant daylight into the Home. Old age is one of today's European themes. How do we approach ageing? What do we do for older people, how do we perceive them, what do we offer them, and what do we ask of them? What is it like to be an elderly person in the Czech Republic in 2026?

185 Yongkang Road formerly was a 60-square-meter street dinner. During our first site visit in November 2018, The venue itself did not leave us a particularly deep impression. The only intuitive feeling is that the venue is long and narrow. In December, client decided to use this venue for a vintage houseware gallery, named 'Single Person'.

Lightness and solidity, exposure and retreat. On the easternmost reaches of Waiheke Island, a house occupies the crest of a ridgeline - permanence in an otherwise shifting landscape.

Above the Pacific coastline of Costa Rica, pavilions unfold around a garden and connect beneath a single floating roof. Nature becomes the pathway, guiding movement between views of ocean, forest, and sky.

Set at the edge of a clearing for the photovoltaic array that powers the main cottage on the site, Cardwell Clubhouse is an off-grid hybrid building that is part utility and part leisure hub. Designed by Dubbeldam Architecture + Design for an outdoors-oriented family who spend much of their time on the site immersed in nature and active pursuits, the clubhouse functions as the site's central social and activity hub. It combines a multipurpose clubhouse room – doubling as a flexible guest suite – with a garage that stores outdoor leisure equipment for activities like racquet sports, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and more. An adjacent outdoor court for tennis, basketball, and pickleball (created in the clearing necessitated by the solar array), along with areas for bocce, horseshoes, and children's games, reinforce the clubhouse's role as a destination for gathering and play.

On the slope above the Krkonoše village of Strážné, a timber log cottage once stood. It was swallowed by the era of mass recreation, along with respect for ownership, craftsmanship, people, objects, and nature. The original house was concealed beneath layers of alterations, extensions, and makeshift additions, poor repairs, and artificial panel cladding. Unfortunately, almost nothing of the original cottage remained worth saving. The small amount of preserved original structures was, for the most part, in poor technical condition. Rather than merely preserving its material substance, the aim therefore became to rediscover the spirit of the house.

Cultural centers continue to serve as a productive ground for unbuilt architectural exploration, reflecting how architects are rethinking the role of public institutions in relation to landscape, experience, and program hybridity. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected projects bring together a range of proposals that expand the definition of the cultural center beyond a singular building. These works position architecture as a spatial framework that mediates between research, exhibition, retreat, and public life, often embedded within or distributed across natural and urban contexts.