Twenty meters tall and four thousand years old, the Western Deffufa towers over the adjacent date orchards and ancient city remains in the desert. It is a former religious and administrative building near the modern-day Sudanese town of Kerma. Its significance is not only in its age and size, but also in that it is one of the oldest mud brick buildings in the world. And as the nearby mud brick houses also attest, earth is a material of continuous use from ancient times to the present. Yet, conversations around contemporary building systems have largely ignored this essential material. Some architects on the continent of Africa, however, are changing that.

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.

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.