Cultural Heritage Sites in the Middle East Damaged as War Strikes Historic Urban Areas

On February 28th, 2026, the news of the loss of human lives, the operational pattern of military strikes, damage to infrastructure, communication disruptions, and international responses following US-Israeli military attacks on Iran confirmed to the world that there was a new focus of war in the Middle East. This military conflict has also had a human and infrastructural impact on Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, with active combat zones in their territories, and the Gulf States, where damage particularly affected US military bases and energy infrastructure. This adds a new site of armed conflict globally, joining the fifth year of the Russia-Ukraine war, the civil wars in Sudan and Myanmar, persistent conflict in Mali, Burkina Faso, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, violent armed conflict in Haiti, and the forced overthrow of the former Venezuelan president. All these territories are currently involved in the deliberate destruction of their normality, including essential, everyday, and cultural infrastructure of global value. Although information is currently scattered and partial, it is possible to assess some of the damage to cultural heritage caused by this new outbreak of armed conflict.

6 Unbuilt Retreats Exploring Hospitality Through Landscape and Refuge

Spaces of retreat continue to offer fertile ground for unbuilt exploration, revealing how architecture can support rest, reflection, and immersion in nature amid shifting environmental and cultural conditions. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected projects assemble a diverse range of proposals that reconsider hospitality through the lens of refuge. These works position accommodation not as spectacle or excess, but as spatial frameworks shaped by landscape, climate, material restraint, and shared experience.

Clairière School / TRACKS

A preserved space near a residential neighborhood, its contours shaped over the years by the passage of water that gradually carved out these sunken lanes. To access the site, one crosses the wooded edge and discovers the meadow: a protected landscape with trees as its horizon. All the classrooms benefit from an unobstructed view of the generous playgrounds, with this wooded edge as a backdrop. It is this clearing, this inner landscape, conducive to the establishment of a school, that we wanted to capture: a world apart, both a protected space and a place of learning, experimentation, and discovery.

Aurva Illam House / Iki Builds

Set against the expanding urban edge of Hyderabad, Aurva Illam, a name bridging the Sanskrit Aurva (of the earth) and the Tamil Illam (home), is a residential prototype conceived as a "cascading earth" that unapologetically redefines modern luxury for the Anthropocene. Rejecting the ubiquitous glass-and-marble paradigm, the home proposes a new status symbol: bespoke materiality, thermal autonomy, and zero-air-conditioning living.

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