Kanye West turning a Tadao Ando Malibu beach house into a ruin, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi purchasing and re-selling the 1955 Richard Neutra-designed Brown-Sidney House, and fashion designer Marc Jacobs renovating a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house near New York City are just a few examples of pop stars' affair with historically significant architecture. Celebrities, like soccer players, form an elite group characterized by a high concentration of wealth and significant social status. They are not only buyers of high-end architecture as authored property and cultural capital, but also agents of its preservation and promotion. This year, we are seeing new examples of this agency at work from a more abstract yet also more popular perspective: from the stage design for Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance to a newly designed stadium for Shakira by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, architecture is used as a vehicle for promoting Latin American identity.

Trees are often the first things to vanish when construction starts. Clearing a site has long been one of architecture's most immediate acts, removing what already exists to make room for something new. When vegetation is preserved, it is typically treated as a secondary layer, added back as landscape rather than shaping the project itself.

The rehabilitation of the Center Dramatique National Nanterre-Amandiers continues the story of a place that has long been emblematic of contemporary French theater, conceived from the outset as a space open to all. At the intersection of the city and the park, the project reaffirms the theater as a place of encounter, creation, and shared experience, deeply rooted in its local context. The architecture supports this evolution through a restrained intervention that reveals and reorganizes the spaces. The existing volumes are preserved and reorganized around a newly recomposed grand hall, the true heart of the theater. Transparency, continuity of movement, and a diversity of spaces help transform the building into a welcoming and permeable place. In this way, Les Amandiers reasserts itself as an open theater, where stage, city, and everyday life come together. The history of the Nanterre Amandiers National Drama Center (CDN) is that of a theater in constant transformation, closely linked to the city's evolution and driven by a strong artistic and social ambition. Located to the west of Paris, Nanterre is a commune within the Paris metropolitan area that, since the 1960s, has experienced profound urban and social changes. It was in this context that the city became the first to support the project of Pierre Debauche's company, whose founding intention was to bring to the theater "those who had never been there before."

Messa House is a 350-square-metre retail space in Almaty, Kazakhstan, designed as a place to slow down, offering a quieter alternative to typical fast-paced retail environments. It focuses on how a person actually moves through and senses architecture, letting form, proportion, and material quietly shape the atmosphere instead of competing for attention.