ArchDaily.com

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a lightweight architectural installation conceived as both exhibition object and public pavilion, exploring how minimal structures, craft, and movement can create quiet spaces of gathering within Dhaka's dense urban fabric. Rooted in the environmental realities of the delta—marked by water, monsoon cycles, and fragile ground—the project responds to a context where architecture must remain adaptable, porous, and temporally aware. Designed with a dual life, it transitions from gallery artifact to urban canopy, negotiating between representation and use. Within a compact footprint of just 113 square feet, it achieves spatial generosity through lightness, reversibility, and ease of assembly, disassembly, and relocation.

In the residential neighborhood of Vicente Lopez, Argentina, we thought of a house that would have as its central feature a fluid link with the garden and its vegetation.

The new nursery school in Romano di Lombardia, designed for children aged 0 to 2, is conceived as an architectural device that actively supports early processes of growth and learning. In this project, space is understood not merely as a container of activities, but as a formative agent capable of shaping relationships, fostering autonomy, and nurturing a child's perception of self and environment. The spatial layout is clear and legible, with each environment carefully calibrated to promote orientation, security, and independence, integrating pedagogical intent with spatial and perceptual quality.

At the top of a 1970s building, the transformation of a duplex apartment creates a new way of living in the heights. This through-apartment opens generously onto two planted terraces, true outdoor extensions that invite relaxation in the heart of the city. With its clean lines and open volumes, the project reinvents space with an aesthetic inspired by architectural minimalism and Japanese principles.

In November 2025, ArchDaily launched its first edition of the Student Project Awards. The decision to introduce this new award came from a place of hope; hope in the next generations of architects, their talent and vision, and the importance of giving them visibility and recognition. After all, the future of architecture is being shaped right now, in classrooms, studios, and workshops around the world, and it is vital to support those shaping it. The response was remarkable, with projects from students in every continent, showcasing a wealth and breadth of viewpoints, solutions and visions.

In our current cities, urban density and rising land values often force a choice between large-scale civic buildings and open public space. Traditionally, plazas have been treated as areas surrounding a building's footprint, but this strategy was modified when pilotis were introduced by the early 20th-century modernist movement. While the original intent was to create a sense of lightness that would allow circulation and light to flow beneath a structure, contemporary requirements for seismic loads, fire egress, and heavy occupancies render thin columns insufficient for the needs of current large-scale civic projects.

Facing Vannes train station, the project is part of the rehabilitation of a 19th-century industrial complex, composed of a house, a 44-meter-long hall, and a glass roof vestige of a winter garden. Long abandoned, the site was in a state of advanced decay.

At a moment when architecture is being pushed to respond more directly to environmental and social pressures, Spain's pavilion for World Design Capital Frankfurt Rhein-Main 2026 positions itself as more than a temporary installation. While materiality is at the center of its design, the project explores how a reversible cultural infrastructure can activate public space without permanent construction. Discussions about material use, circularity and reutilization in architecture are closely tied to cultural contexts, environmental conditions, and historical influences that reveal how time shapes the built environment. Beyond its construction, Spain's pavilion expresses

Architecture has long been drawn upward. In Air and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard writes about an imagination shaped by movement; by the urge to rise, to drift, to escape the pull of the ground. Air, for him, invites imagination to distort, to invent, to go beyond what is given rather than simply reproduce it. In that sense, lightness is not only a physical condition, but a feeling: a desire to transcend the weight of the earth and move toward something less tangible. This impulse can be traced across architecture's enduring attempts to lift itself, from pilotis and long spans to

Real House frames the boldness and subtleties of the Sonoran Desert, translating these qualities into spaces that a young family of five can call home. A driving part of the design process was site selection with the clients. Their ambition was to find a foothills parcel with panoramic views, however, as this kind of property was unavailable, we instead transformed the opposite of their preconceptions into an opportunity. Situated on an introverted parcel along a quiet arroyo — with seemingly no views — downslope from a busy road and surrounded by neighbors, the design is transformative. The home reveals a dramatic sightline down the arroyo, while surprisingly capturing the opposing panoramic range of the Santa Catalina mountains.