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.
CG House integrates with nature and embraces the central tree of the land. This residence in the interior of São Paulo bets on functional blocks, social integration, and aesthetics inspired by contemporary Brazilian modernism. Located on a corner lot of 5,051m², filled with trees and marked by a slope that opens to a valley view, GC House was conceived as a weekend retreat to host friends and family. Designed by Estúdio Naia, the residence aimed to preserve the existing vegetation, especially a large tree at the center of the lot, which ultimately became the focal point of the project.
At 29 rue Nollet in Paris (17th arrondissement), for the Régie Immobilière de la Ville de Paris (RIVP), the client, the architectural firm NZI Architectes (Sandra de Giorgio, Gianluca Gaudenzi) completed in December 2025 the conversion of an obsolete car park into a social housing residence comprising 83 units. Gross floor area: 2,450.1 sq m.
91.0 is a house on a forested waterfront lot in the Gulf Island archipelago of the Canadian Pacific Northwest.
Architectural heritage is often described as what survives time. Yet survival does not explain why certain buildings are preserved while others disappear. Many works now protected as cultural heritage were once criticized, contested, or openly rejected; they were accused of being socially misguided, materially flawed, or symbolically excessive. Over time, however, these same shortcomings have become central to their meaning as heritage emerges as a slow and unstable process of interpretation.
1. Opening Hook – Haniyasu House is a two-family residence that reconnects living and making through an architecture shaped by earth, craft, and shared daily life.
Tsuyoshi Tane is a Japanese architect born in 1979 in Tokyo and based in Paris, where he founded ATTA – Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane Architects in 2006. Working across cultural, institutional, and landscape-related projects, Tane has developed an architectural approach that positions memory as a fundamental design driver. In his interview with Louisiana Channel, filmed in his Paris studio, Tane reflects on architecture as a discipline of observation and thought, arguing that meaningful design emerges from carefully reading the traces embedded within a site. For him, architecture is not produced on a blank slate but begins with an inquiry into what already exists, physically, culturally, and emotionally, beneath the surface of a place.
The Břetislav Kafka Library in Červený Kostelec transforms a historic former inn into a bright, flexible, and welcoming public library. The design works with the building's original architecture, combining tailored interiors, playful furniture, and a distinctive color palette to create a space that is both functional and inviting.
Sordo Madaleno, in collaboration with építész stúdió and Buro Happold, has been selected to design the 43,000-square-meter New Debrecen Collection Center for the Hungarian Museum of Natural History. Debrecen, Hungary's second-largest city, is currently the focus of significant urban and university-related development, including plans to relocate the Hungarian Museum of Natural History from Budapest to the edge of Debrecen's Great Forest. The proposed Collection Center is conceived as a facility dedicated to the controlled storage and study of more than 11 million objects, drawing conceptual inspiration from traditional Hungarian clay vessels, structures historically used to protect and preserve. The project would mark the first European cultural commission for the Mexican architecture practice, which operates studios in London and Mexico City.
House A. Martínez, located in the center of Peribán de Ramos, Michoacán, is a project that proposes a simple way of living, where space accompanies daily life and architecture becomes a silent support for what is essential.
Located in Ben Tre, Vietnam, Ben Tre Buddhist Temple & Ancestral Hall has a gross floor area of 450m2. It contains an altar space, a seating area, an event space, and a kitchen.
The East Courtyard is located in Qidong, Jiangsu, near the city and facing the sea. Commissioned by children who work away from home year-round, Benzhe Architecture rebuilt this residence for their parents, who are over sixty. It uses modern design language to respond to new rural construction—preserving rural simplicity while improving the quality of living. Qidong is located on the north wing of the Yangtze River estuary, where the Yangtze unloads its last mouthful of sediment and turns to flow into the East China Sea. The original site was a typical fishing village homestead, surrounded by arrays of wind turbines and tidal flat landscapes.
This residence is located in a residential area of Shimizu Ward, Shizuoka City. Low-rise houses and a three-story office building, with an elementary school across the road to the south, surround the site. The plan places an L-shaped building at the site's center, with a parking lot facing the southern road and a garden to the north. A large roof spanning both interior and exterior spaces was designed to envelop the entire site, aiming to create expansive and deep spatial qualities. The garden functions as an open "blank space" accessible to the neighborhood, guiding light and wind toward the surrounding homes.