Concéntrico is an urban innovation laboratory that invites reflection on the city through architecture and design. Since 2015, it has carried out more than 180 interventions in Logroño, Spain. The new 2025/2026 season of the festival expands on this experimental spirit with three international calls for proposals that bring the ideas in the book Concéntrico: Laboratorio de Innovación Urbana (Park Books, 2025) into action.
A bench in Bristol installed facing a brick wall has aroused local curiosity why put it there? BBC West commented that it joined other perversely placed seating: a bench in Shirehampton facing a derelict building and one in Wedmore facing a hedge. Bristol city council explained that when it plants a planned tree, the bench will provide a shady spot to rest on a steep hill, but promised to review the placement.
Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) unveils a new vision for the Ensemble Immobilier Tour Maine-Montparnasse, a large-scale urban retrofit that transforms a closed 1970s retail complex into an open, pedestrian-focused piece of Paris. Commissioned by the co-owners of the Montparnasse Commercial Centre and the CIT Tower, the project unfolds in parallel with the ongoing redevelopment of the adjacent Montparnasse Tower, led by Nouvelle AOM. The two interventions aim to recalibrate one of the most contested sites of the city, shifting it from an inward-looking megastructure to a permeable urban district grounded in daily life, movement, and public space.
Unlike most popular sports, the origin of basketball has a precise year and creator: it was invented in 1891 in the United States by Canadian physical education instructor James Naismith as an indoor sport for athletes at Springfield College during the winter, after the end of the football season. The sport quickly expanded beyond U.S. borders, being included in the Olympic Games in 1936 and achieving international popularity after the Second World War.
Leisure spaces are often where different generations cross paths. Without formal programs or assigned roles, they allow people to move, pause, and remain together, each engaging space in their own way. In a built environment increasingly shaped by specialization and separation, these shared spatial grounds have become less common, giving leisure-oriented architecture a renewed relevance. Discussions around public space have repeatedly pointed to the value of openness and flexibility in supporting collective life.
Jane Jacobs was also one of the voices that challenged this predominantly rationalist logic, arguing that truly vibrant streets are those capable of sustaining the diversity of everyday life, its informal exchanges, and the forms of care and natural surveillance that emerge from them. What these authors share is a fundamental insight: streets are not merely infrastructures for circulation, but social ecosystems, shaped by the relationships, uses, and encounters that take place within them.
Public space is often understood as belonging to no one in particular, collectively accessible yet institutionally maintained, yet a growing number of initiatives are challenging this assumption by testing shared management and distributed ownership models. In Paris, Adoptez un banc introduces a sponsorship-based approach, allowing individuals and groups to support temporarily and symbolically claim responsibility for historic public furniture without compromising its collective use.
As 2025 comes to a close, this final list in our annual round-up pulls together the installations that shaped the most immersive encounters of the year. Across deserts, plazas, courtyards, coastlines, and museums, artists and designers turn movement, light, sound, and material experimentation into living environments that ask us to slow down, listen, and look again. A single year brought iridescent glass shimmering
The Christmas Festival of Bad Habits is a temporary -space installation located on Římské náměstí in the historic center of Brno, Czech Republic. Developed by architectural studio Peer Collective in collaboration with artist Kateřina Šedá, the non-profit organization Renadi, and the Brno-střed Municipal District, the project reconsiders the spatial and social format of the traditional Christmas market. Instead of retail-driven programming, the installation introduces a structured environment for reflection, movement, and collective experience.
Like many American cities, the streetscape in downtown Brooklyn was for a long time very heavy on the street: a great place to park a car or drive through. But over the past 20 years, the area itself has gone from being a 9-to-5 shopping and business district to one where a growing number of people live 24-7. Since 2004, more than 22,000 housing units have been added to the neighborhood, changing its character so much that its old streetscape just wasn't cutting it.
The plaza includes tables and chairs, bike corrals, and space for community members to host local events. This new permanent plaza reimagines nearly 11,000 square feet of roadway, creating a new community hub. It gives neighbors a place to rest, gather, connect, and celebrate their cultures, outgoing DOT Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said during a Dec. 4 news conference. This plaza is proof of what happens when a city invests in people, in safety, in cultural space, he added.
From Venice, where the 19th Architecture Biennale concluded with debates on material use and long-term cultural impact, to international awards foregrounding regenerative and socially responsive design, the conversation around architecture is increasingly intertwined with planetary priorities. Major urban interventions, from Thessaloniki's seafront redevelopment and Rio de Janeiro's new public library, to Abu Dhabi's Natural History Museum and a civic stadium in Birmingham, demonstrate how multiple cities are addressing mobility, heritage, density, and climate resilience.
What makes this project so interesting is how it completely ditches the traditional opera house playbook. You know the type: imposing facades, grand staircases that separate the cultured elite from everyone else, buildings that basically scream "not for you" to anyone walking by. BIG's approach flips that script entirely. The 450,000-square-foot building is designed as what they call "a public building within a park," where the roofscape is fully walkable and the structure has no defined back side.
Public spaces remain some of the most dynamic sites for unbuilt architectural experimentation, revealing how cities and architects can imagine accessibility, gathering, and civic identity. In this curated Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected proposals examine parks, pedestrian corridors, cultural landscapes, and open-access urban environments that invite people to meet, move, rest, and participate in collective life. Rather than treating public space as leftover terrain, these projects position it as essential infrastructure-shaping urban health, memory, and social interaction.
With Palazzo, Benthem Crouwel Architects completes the Paleiskwartier in Hertogenbosch - a robust, warm, and open residential building that literally embraces the city. Commissioned by BV Ontwikkelingsmaatschappij Paleiskwartier, Palazzo marks the culmination of more than thirty years of urban development around the Central Station - an area where living, working, and meeting converge. Palazzo brings the whole together and gives new life to the district. The building deliberately faces the city, creates space for the square, and invites people to connect.
CLUSTER (Cairo Lab for Urban Studies, Training and Environmental Research) in collaboration with THISS Studio and Orient Productions have completed an independent outdoor community arts space in Cairo, located in Giza's Agouza Children's Park, one of the city's few remaining publicly accessible green spaces. Titled Pergola and perched close to the Nile river front, the bright red, ten-metre tall structure offers a new beating heart for an emerging cultural scene in Cairo.
Today, as global challenges demand more adaptive and human-centered responses, architects are rethinking what infrastructure can be: not just a framework for movement and utility, but a catalyst for ecological restoration, cultural continuity, and civic imagination. The following unbuilt projects, submitted by the ArchDaily community, explore this expanded role of infrastructure, where airports, bridges, industrial parks, and pedestrian networks become architectural
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch's fact-free crackdown on e-bikes continues - and the agency has finally released some of the numbers to amNY (believe me, we've been asking). No surprise: The Upper East Side, where Tisch's mother has made her opinion well known, leads in enforcement. The amNY editorial board obviously read Streetsblog, commissioning an op-ed from two Council members and a city labor leader to support a Council bill to rein in Amazon that we wrote about last month.
The public square outside North Acton tube station is set to undergo a makeover to address local concerns about its appearance. The square is fairly new, as it used to be a petrol station. However, between 2015 and 2019, the site was cleared and converted into a public square, featuring steps and a ramp leading down to the station. Now, Ealing Council has started work on some upgrades, including the addition of better lighting and a row of "shed" shops, which will be rented out.
Car-centric planning has hollowed out our cities. Zoning regulations, freeways, and cheap fuel gave rise to sprawling suburbs and isolated communities, dependent on personal vehicles for even the most basic tasks. It's a system that punishes the poor, marginalizes the elderly and disabled, and makes public life thinner and more precarious. The car promised freedom, and delivered debt, pollution, and dependence.
Marginalized in architectural discourse and often dismissed as purely functional, parking garages remain among the most ubiquitous structures in the urban landscape. Designed to accommodate the needs of private vehicles, they occupy central locations, shape skylines, and consume considerable resources, yet rarely receive the same attention - or architectural care - as cultural institutions, schools, or housing. Despite their prevalence, these buildings tend to fade into the background of daily life, treated as infrastructural necessities rather than as design opportunities.
Mohammad Hassan Ettefagh + 23 Category: Public Space, Metro Station Design Team: Mehrasa Nikookar Structural Engineer: Mohammad Panahi Facade Engineers: Behnood Gooharbin, Masoud Gooharbin Project Definer: Seyed Saeed Mirhosseini Site Supervisor: Mohammad Khavarian General Constructing: Mehdi Firoozi More SpecsLess Specs Mohammad Hassan Ettefagh Text description provided by the architects. The metropolis of Tehran once featured a livable and low-density historic core, which, following the Iranian Revolution, underwent unbalanced and unchecked expansion due to population growth and centralized policies.
This month, Nadin Reschke will show her piece 'Lila Fetzen ("Purple Scraps")' at U Schönhauser Allee, which commemorates the officially unrecognized East German womxn movements, especially the Lila Offensive, which was founded in Prenzlauer Berg in the late 1980s. It uses historical photographs as a starting point for a search for solidarity-based gestures of resistance and the visibility of contemporary queer life. In a collective performance on September 20th at 3pm, the womxn's resistance of the 1980s is updated against the backdrop of today's experiences.
The Old City of Fongshan County, the oldest preserved walled city in Taiwan, reflects over two centuries of socio-economic change. In line with the client's goal to regenerate the site, an elevated walkway was implemented to maintain minimal visual and physical footprint while enabling modern exploration. This walkway, with its varied design, adapts to different needs along the city wall and integrates design elements into a single linear structure.
"The new esplanade is a cornerstone of our vision for Halletts Point. This space opens up a stretch of Astoria's shoreline that has been inaccessible for decades, while offering a meaningful, immersive connection to the natural landscape."
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