Month: April 2026

Qingshuiyan Ancestral Hall Supporting Facility Renovation Set within the core scenic area of the thousand-year-old Qingshuiyan Ancestral Hall in Anxi, Quanzhou, this project renovates a decommissioned old bus station left unused after its functional relocation. The site is anchored by a moss-draped ancient banyan tree at the center of a forest-framed open square, with a dilapidated two-story station building, native rock formations, and ancient mossy paths defining its unique natural and historic context. First built in the Northern Song Dynasty, Qingshuiyan Ancestral Hall sits at the northern foot of perennially mist-shrouded Penglai Mountain. As a vital folk belief center for Fujian, Taiwan and Southeast Asian communities with over 100 million believers, the hall shaped the project’s core ethos of harmony with nature and local heritage. The in-situ renovation integrates tea houses, vegetarian restaurants, and rest areas as a complementary facility for the ancestral hall.

In highly-curated environments such as Disneyland Paris, architecture operates under a different set of expectations. Buildings are not only required to perform, they must also communicate, often instantly. Within this context, the facade becomes a visual marker that can serve as a threshold, mediating light, air, and perception. One strategy that has gained traction in this setting is the use of semi-opaque envelope systems. Neither fully transparent nor entirely enclosed, these facade systems introduce depth and variability.

In highly-curated environments such as Disneyland Paris, architecture operates under a different set of expectations. Buildings are not only required to perform, they must also communicate, often instantly. Within this context, the facade becomes a visual marker that can serve as a threshold, mediating light, air, and perception. One strategy that has gained traction in this setting is the use of semi-opaque envelope systems. Neither fully transparent nor entirely enclosed, these facade systems introduce depth and variability.

translucent panels define the bridge-like passage between the floating cabin and the land.

The post wiki world’s red floating timber cabin bridges land and water in chinese park appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

London’s National Gallery has announced Kengo Kuma & Associates, in collaboration with BDP and MICA, as the winners of the international competition to design a new wing for the institution. Launched in September 2025, the competition attracted 65 submissions from international practices, from which six teams were shortlisted to develop proposals. The selection marks a key milestone in the institution’s long-term development strategy, Project Domani, positioning the new addition as a central component in the reconfiguration of its architectural and curatorial framework. Conceived as the most significant transformation of the museum since its establishment in 1824, the project aims to expand both spatial capacity and curatorial scope, enabling the presentation of a continuous narrative of Western painting within a single setting.

At the foot of the gentle hills that frame the eastern shore of Lake Garda, in a landscape dotted with olive trees, cypresses, and oleanders, single-family holiday homes began to appear over the course of the twentieth century, either scattered across the terrain or clustered in small residential complexes.

This week marked World Health Day, observed annually on April 7 by the World Health Organization. This year’s edition issued the call to “Stand with science,” inviting renewed engagement with scientific knowledge as a foundation for collective action across disciplines. In architecture and urban design, this imperative resonates through projects that translate research into spatial strategies: from the deployment of digital twins to inform urban planning and decision-making, to rewilding initiatives that integrate biodiversity as a tool to mitigate climate change, and materially informed practices that engage resource-conscious construction. Within this broader framework, recent works also foreground architecture’s social agency at multiple scales, including a landscape-driven cancer support center in Kent that aligns wellbeing with environmental sensitivity, an urban installation in Brescia operating as a civic awareness device around life in prison and pathways to reintegration, and the transformation of a street in Mantua into a pedestrian-oriented, biodiversity-rich public space.

The construction industry today faces an unavoidable paradox: the urgent need for sustainable solutions for the future of cities collides with the exhaustion of the term “sustainability” itself, often reduced to a hollow commercial label. In this scenario, Arquivo – one of the winners of ArchDaily’s 2025 Next Practices Award – emerges as a facilitator and mediator between different stakeholders in the construction field through disassembly – or rather, de-construction – and the reuse of building elements. Etymologically, if “construction” derives from the Latin construere (to heap up, assemble), the prefix “de-” imposes a conceptual inversion: it is not about destroying, but about disassembling with intelligence to understand the logic of the parts.

The premise was an interpretation of an Australian Federation Farmhouse, sited on a hilltop in Carrickalinga. With extreme winds, we manipulated the traditional farmhouse, stretching the perimeter to a square, whilst removing the center for the courtyard. With the verandah on the ‘wrong’ side, we inverted the roof. This creates a low eave to the protected garden, allowing solar gain and solar access.

‘dreamscapes & artificial architecture’ presents a field where visions of utopia can be pushed as glimpses and without consequence.

The post a collection of impossible dreamscapes imagines utopia beyond reality’s limits appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.