Architecture: Research Guide

Roots and Context. The "Mirador School La Jalquilla" project is located in San Ignacio, in the Ceja de Selva region, on the border with Ecuador, in Peru. This region, with an economy centered on coffee cultivation, faces significant challenges due to its isolation and resource scarcity. The project aims to revitalize local knowledge and traditions, integrating the rich biodiversity and Andean and Amazonian cultures into its proposal. It benefits more than 110 primary and secondary students, in addition to providing sports and public infrastructure for the community. The school stands as a comprehensive path that promotes educational development, fostering well-being, and strengthening ties w..

Cabin Fever is an international summer school and festival launched by the Hungarian architecture studio Hello Wood, known for its design-build approach and community-focused, sustainable projects. Since its founding in 2010, Hello Wood has become a global platform merging hands-on education with socially engaged architecture. The 2025 edition, powered by VELUX, explored how light and space shape human experience — placing presence, intimacy, and connection at the centre of architecture. This dialogue with VELUX reflects a shared conviction: that the future of building lies in responsibility — in creating spaces with care, with awareness, and with light — offering meaningful alternativ..

On the banks of the river in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Montreal, Mise à Jour Studio undertook thecomprehensive transformation of a heritage home. Formerly divided between a residence and a medical office occupying nearly half of the ground floor, the intervention opens up the spaces and enhances visual connections to the river, while bringing new light into the heart of the house.

This house is an apartment, studio, garage, and workshop all in one. And the home of a cat.

The town of Qingjiang lies between the northern foothills of the Yandang Mountains and Yueqing Bay, with the Furong Pond area at the heart of its regional ecological corridor. Against the backdrop of growing suburban agro-cultural tourism, the project centers on Furong Pond, establishing two key landscape nodes: one at the Ecological Island Wharf and the other at Qingyang Park on the opposite shore. By reviving a short-distance ferry route, the initiative aims to create a distinctive water-based ecological and cultural destination for Qingjiang.

Leaving behind the urban fervor of Quito requires a slow decantation, a change of pace where asphalt finally yields to the vegetation of the dry steppe. In the Guayllabamba valley, architecture does not seek to conquer the land but to coexist with it; the House in the Forest arises from this premise, not as an imposed structure, but as a device for inhabiting time. The project is best understood under the logic of the "nest": a structure that weaves intergenerational memories and, instead of settling heavily, decides to levitate over a landscape that it barely disturbs.

One of the many misconceptions that has preoccupied the world of architecture in recent decades is that architecture's noble existence occurs only in the built world.

Bosrijk is a residential area west of the city of Eindhoven, located on a former military defense site. Housing in Bosrijk is designed as 'sculptures in a garden'. For a small plot next to an existing natural rainwater infiltration facility, the office designed a sculpture with five single-family homes, in which the idea of 'living in a forest landscape' was the leitmotif.

Shou Sugi Ban is a traditional Japanese technique for wood preservation that involves charring the surface of timber to create a protective layer. While its origins are rooted in practical durability, the method has been widely adapted into the modern built environment and shapes a unique and distinctive aesthetic. It is a material of contradiction: it remains bold in its visual language due to its dark tones, yet it simultaneously borrows from and complements its natural surroundings, allowing houses to settle quietly into their sites.

Sumayya Vally, Counterspace pays homage to lost gathering spaces across the Muslim world at the inaugural Art Basel Qatar. Architect Sumayya Vally, Counterspace presents In the Assembly of Lovers, an installation commissioned for the inaugural Art Basel Qatar, taking place in Doha from 3–7 February 2026. Curated by Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, the fair explores the theme 'Becoming' – a meditation on humanity's ongoing transformation and the evolving systems that shape how we live, believe, and create meaning.

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.

What matters more: looking to the past or to the future? Recognizing established trajectories or fostering paths still under construction? Perhaps this is not a question with a single answer. Traditionally, architecture awards have operated as devices of consecration, recognizing completed works, established careers, and already tested solutions, most often through a retrospective lens. But what would happen if recognition ceased to be an end in itself and instead began to operate as a catalytic agent, investing less in what has already been done and more in what is still yet to unfold?