Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

The Comedor project – a soup kitchen – was created in response to the extreme weather events that devastated numerous cities in southern Brazil in May 2024 and the need to improve the conditions of emergency shelters that housed homeless people during this period.

Built at the Ana Neri State School in Porto Alegre, the project begins with a temporary intervention in the auditorium building—a small wooden structure, characteristic of the region's school architecture. Lightweight partitions—curtains suspended by steel cables—were installed in this space to delimit specific areas for each family and adapt the pavilion's use, providing greater privacy and habitability.

In a second stage of the intervention, with the return of classes at school, it was necessary to build a cafeteria for the temporary residents – a new building – that would function independently of the flow of students.

The proposed architecture therefore consists of a large roof and a linear table that occupy an empty sector of the school lot.

The choice of wood construction is part of an investigation that, in some way, permeates the projects developed by the office. It is a way to demonstrate the possibilities of using a low-cost, easily obtainable raw material that takes into account the existence of a local workforce with experience and significant practical knowledge of the material.

In this way, the proposal explores wood as an agile and economical construction technique with the choice of more accessible components, such as round eucalyptus wood for the main columns and beams and a structure of thin slats to support the roof.

To unify the intervention and the various wooden pieces, the green paint unifies the proposal, highlighting the roof within the school's built structure. The wood-protecting impregnating paint helps preserve the material and conceal minor imperfections, keeping the grain visible. The green structure interacts with the white polycarbonate tiles, creating a diffusely lit environment.

The project, initially conceived to serve as a dining hall for families, over time became a leisure space for students, a collective and community space.

Thus, the intervention led to a series of surprising interactions and uses. A playful space, which is used as a place for children to play, and even as a learning tool, where classes are taught outdoors.

The project represents an experiment in design and construction in a short period of time, a simple contribution – among so much to be done – as a response to this immense and unthinkable tragedy.
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Porto Alegre, RS
2024

Project implementation: Ecuador
Project development: Ecuador

Community water infrastructure to improve and strengthen the existing water network. A system of spaces for social interaction, appreciation, environmental care, and the transmission of knowledge about water protection. Shelters, weather stations for environmental monitoring, and meeting spaces.

La Chimba is located in the ancestral territory of the Kayambi tribe in northern Ecuador, near the Cayambe volcano. It's located in one of Ecuador's most important ecosystems, the Paramo, which boasts significant biodiversity and the territory's most important water sources.

La Chimba, with over a hundred years of historical resistance through self-management and self-organization, protects the territory and its water resources from various threats. Strengthening its infrastructure and reinforcing its social character is essential for its subsistence and future growth.

Community water infrastructure creates spaces to monitor, care for, and educate about the páramo territory, which provides water sources for life. In this way, the community values the work done in the past and strengthens processes to maintain the system in the future.

This architectural proposal is responsible for the site and the people of the community, who construct the buildings for collective use on participatory construction days called "Mingas" (mutirao), which encourage local work and knowledge exchange. The intention is to create spaces for access, meeting, and shelter through local techniques present in the community's buildings and terraces that, by their shape as retaining walls on slopes, integrate into the natural landscape, creating an intervention respectful of the páramo ecosystem.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

The Brazilian Institute of Architects of Tocantins (IAB/TO), sponsored by the City of Palmas, presents the linear urban parks of the city of Palmas: Cesamar, Indigenous Peoples and Pioneers, the latter in the design phase.
The inhabitants of Palmas understand that their urban parks are natural environments amidst the "accommodated" urban environment, and that they guarantee the quality of life and the environment in the city's evolutionary process, adapting it to the current climate emergency.

The Palmas Urban Project

While preserving the origins of the state of Tocantins and its ecological capital, Palmas (see panel 1), the urban design of Palmas—designed by architects Luís Fernado Cruvinel and Walfredo Antunes—was directly impacted by the region's environmental characteristics. In this sense, the preservation of the green spaces surrounding the water bodies that permeate Palmas' urban landscape has always been considered a priority for preservation and sustainable use of public resources.
The urban area is structured by the intersection of two arterial roads: Teotônio Segurado Avenue, running north-south; and JK Avenue, running east-west. At their intersection lies Praça dos Girassóis, the fourth-largest square in the world, where the headquarters of the three branches of government are located.
From this point on, the project envisioned gradual growth within a planned area of approximately 15km x 7km. However, its occupation prompted peripheral settlements, both north and south of the city's project, expanding its urban fabric to the current 25km x 8km.
However, whether planned or spontaneous, the preservation of the natural environment and the maintenance of the initial ecological biodiversity are respected in the implementation of the city and its elements, endorsing the ecological legacy of the occupation of the Palmas territory.

Cesamar Park

Palmas' first urban park. Its urban design, designed by GrupoQuatro, was designed by the then-President of the Tocantins Development Agency (AD Tocantins), Architect Aílton Lélis.
Like other urban parks, it's a meeting point for Palmas residents for hiking trails and offers leisure and sports facilities for all ages. In particular, the park offers a public swimming pool on the Brejo Comprido stream.

Indigenous Peoples Park and Pioneers Park

In other areas of the city, we have the Parque dos Povos Indígenas (Indigenous Peoples Park) to the north and, to the south, the proposed Parque dos Pioneiros (Pioneers Park). Both are established in areas initially reserved in the Palmas project and seek to offer more environmental and leisure services to families living nearby, similar to Parque Cesamar. For more details on the facilities offered in these parks, see panels 1 and 2.
We would like to emphasize that the Parque dos Pioneiros riverfront will be the subject of a national competition. More details will be available at the discussion on October 11th in the auditorium.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

On a scale like the city of São Paulo, tackling climate change requires the coordination of three factors: design solutions, urban planning, and public policies. This space seeks to demonstrate how government action is diverse and faces the challenge of addressing multiple scales, from the lot to the municipality, in addition to mobilizing diverse social actors.

In short, the City Hall space is an invitation to a gathering around a table where the topic revolves around São Paulo. It's a place for everyone to see our city, get to know it, and discuss its creation.

The space consists of a prism measuring 4 meters on a side, 1.3 meters high, and elevated 2 meters above the ground, which delimits the space; and a central model, measuring 1.5 by 2.1 meters, which serves as a meeting point. Externally, the exhibition presents visitors with a timeline titled "Parques Paulistanos: 200 anos de história" (São Paulo Parks: 200 Years of History), which displays all the years corresponding to the inauguration of municipal parks, as well as other information regarding the creation of public agencies and important events that shaped public policy development. Internally, the prism's walls are lined with screens displaying an explanatory video titled "São Paulo: A Sustainability Project." To locate the city's plans and projects within the territory, maps are projected onto a large topographical model. The profusion of images and viewpoints guided by a single audio track allows the video to be watched more than once, varying the desired focus.

The exhibition combines park projects, retrofit policies, new sustainable public buildings, and other government initiatives to demonstrate the complexity of intervening in a capital city with so many superlatives. Mentions include: the Master Plan; Downtown Requalification; Economic Subsidy; the new fleet of electric buses; the São Paulo Tram; the Connected Neighborhood: Sapopemba Terminal; the Waterway Plan; the São Paulo Aquatic Plan; Jardim da Luz Park; the Córrego do Bispo Linear Park; the Borda da Cantareira Parks; the Atlantic Forest Municipal Plan; Apurá-Búfalos Park; the Fazenda do Carmo Natural Park; the Cabeceiras do Aricanduva Natural Park; the Cidade Ademar Cultural Center; the Jardim do Éden Park; the Jardim Castelo Park; the Caulim Stream Park; Sampa+Rural; the Municipal Plan for Agroecology and Sustainable Rural Development; the City Hall's Operação Trabalho Program; and the Climate Action Plan.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

The Virginia building was inaugurated in 1951, designed by architect José Augusto Bellucci and engineer Luiz Maiorana.

The building was commissioned by the Matarazzo family to serve as a rental property for Virginia Matarazzo Ippolito. With 11 floors, two apartment blocks, and four shops on the ground floor, it was a high- and mid-income residential complex in its early decades.

With the economic decline of the central region in the 1970s, the building changed from residential to commercial and was gradually abandoned, closing its doors in 2019. In 2020, it was acquired by Somauma, a developer focused on retrofitting.

The new project, developed by Metrópole Arq, was based on an in-depth analysis of the existing building, aiming to adapt it to the new context while respecting its architectural qualities. The facade will be restored while maintaining its formal characteristics and finishes. The apartments were redesigned to meet the region's new housing demands, with units ranging from 26 to 182 m² that fit the building's modularity, preserving the parquet floors, access to balconies, large windows, high ceilings, good lighting, and natural ventilation. All window frames and railings were replaced, meeting the new space configurations, thermal and acoustic performance, and safety standards.

The circulation pipes were updated to meet safety standards. All plumbing and electrical installations were redone to meet the building's new demands.

The building features common areas for a gym, laundry facilities, and bike storage. The ground-floor shops will reopen to the sidewalk, and a gallery will be created connecting Martins Fontes and Álvaro de Carvalho streets.

A commercial space was designed on the roof, offering stunning views of the surrounding area. This space features a lightweight glued laminate structure and a garden with native species.

Metropolis Architects
In its two decades of existence, Metrópole_arq has been responsible for projects that are present in the country's cultural scene, both public and private, and of various scales. The firm focuses on expography and cultural heritage preservation, and its current partners, Anna Helena Villela, Silvio Oksman, and Ana Paula Pontes, actively participate, both jointly and individually, in projects developed in museums and cultural spaces throughout Brazil.

TECHNICAL DATA SHEET:
LOCATION: Sao Paulo, Brazil.
YEAR: 2025
METROPOLIS ARCHITECTS TEAM:
Silvio Oksman, Lia Soares, Mariah Peruzzo, Camila Vasconcelos, Amanda Klajner, Eric Dick, Fabiana Costa, Micaela Kosmalski.
INCORPORATION AND WORK:
Somauma
MANAGEMENT:
Tools Engineering
WOODEN STRUCTURES:
Ita Construtora
LIGHTING PROJECT:
Lux Projects
INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE
Imperfect Beauties
BIM MODELING:
Studio +1
SYSTEMS:
Adolfi, RRP Projects and RGK
STRUCTURES:
Emplatec
FRAME CONSULTING:
Polar Ltd.
FIREMEN:
Engeplot
SEALS AND PERFORMANCE:
Versatile
ACCESSIBILITY CONSULTING:
Inovatech

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

Formosa Hi-Fi is a high-fidelity music listening bar located in an underground gallery within the Viaduto do Chá complex, built in the 1930s and now protected by conservation agencies. The project, developed in partnership with the firm Acústica e Sônica, focused on integrating acoustics, architecture, and heritage.

The space is accessed via an underground gallery that crosses Xavier de Toledo Street. It also opens onto the Fountain of Sighs, next to the staircase that leads from the Municipal Theater to the Anhangabaú Valley. Here, Formosa's space expands outward, offering an extraordinary urban perspective.

The entire space is lined with wooden acoustic panels, preserving the original marble walls and featuring a design inspired by the pattern of existing metalwork doors and windows. In the bar and DJ area, the same paneling features illuminated niches for displaying vinyl records.
A lighting scheme was designed for the ceiling. The fixtures are connected to an automation system that allows for infinite lighting combinations that can be synchronized with music.

The bar and DJ area were positioned in a ribbon, utilizing an existing counter facing the room, preserving its spaciousness. Behind the wooden paneling is a service corridor, where refrigerators, storage, equipment, etc. are located. The kitchen, bar, and restroom areas have raised floors to avoid any disturbances to the existing flooring. The only existing restroom was renovated and adapted to accommodate a level, accessible restroom.

All electrical, plumbing, and HVAC systems have been updated. The new systems are visible through the ceiling, but are barely noticeable because they pass above the light fixtures.

Metropolis Architects
In its two decades of existence, Metrópole_arq has been responsible for projects that are present in the country's cultural scene, both public and private, and of various scales. The firm focuses on expography and cultural heritage preservation, and its current partners, Anna Helena Villela, Silvio Oksman, and Ana Paula Pontes, actively participate, both jointly and individually, in projects developed in museums and cultural spaces throughout Brazil.

Acoustics and Sonics
Acústica & Sônica, founded in 1962, operates in interrelated areas such as acoustics, noise control, audio and video, stage lighting, stage technology, and spatial planning. Since 2001, it has maintained a permanent partnership with the North American company Akustiks (South Norwalk, CT), with projects completed in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The team has extensive experience in historic and cultural buildings, notably the Sala São Paulo, Sala Cecília Meireles, the Municipal Theaters of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Praça das Artes, Teatro Cultura Artística, Teatro Castro Alves, David Geffen Hall (New York), Teatro Amira de la Rosa (Colombia), and the Convento do Carmo (Salvador), among others.

LOCATION:
Sao Paulo, 2025
INTERVENTION PROJECT:
Acoustics and Sonics and Metrópole Arq
METROPOLE ARQ TEAM:
Silvio Oksman, Anna Helena Villela,
Camila Vasconcelos, Lia Soares,
Eric Dick, Fabiana Costa.
ACOUSTIC AND SONIC TEAM:
José Augusto Nepomuceno, Julio Gaspar and Julia Batista
MANAGEMENT AND FACILITIES:
100 Engineering, Tatiana Bianchi and Rosana Nakano
CONSTRUCTION: Lar Engenharia
AUTOMATION: Electric Multi-Purpose Table and Automation
LIGHTING TECHNOLOGY: Lux Projetos
FURNITURE: Faher
PHOTOGRAPHY: Dandara Bettino
AREA: 940 m²

Project implementation: Australia
Project development: Australia

Peter Stutchbury Architecture (PSA) is a collection of unique individuals who pursue architecture with an open mind and experimental approach. They possess the talent that maintains standards of design, quality and delivery. Their comprehension of the tasks of architecture, along with their abilities to improve work, unmistakably contribute to the social and professional result of the firm’s projects.

PSA’s work is expertly and inventively responsive to the environmental and physical context in both form and technology. Seeking beauty and clarity, whilst always keeping the land in mind their built work sits comfortably and conscientiously within its context, it connects.

PSA is well known in Australia for their innovative approach to sustainability and design within the practice of Architecture. The principal of the firm Peter Stutchbury has practiced independently since 1981 producing a wide variety of work. Projects have been published and acclaimed internationally. PSA’s work is represented in editions of Phaidon’s World Atlas.

Since 1995 the firm has won 75 Royal Australian Institute of Architects Awards, including 17 National Awards. In 2003 PSA became the first practice to win both of the nation’s major architectural Awards, repeating this feat in 2005. In 1999 they won the overall National Metal Industries Award of Excellence and in 2000 and 2008 The Australian Timber Award. In 2001, PSA’s work was the major contributor to the University of Newcastle winning the Prime Minister’s National Environmental Banksia Award. In 2006 PSA was runner-up in the “Innovative Architectures – Design and Sustainability” Award out of Italy and in 2008 the firm won the International Living Steel Award in Russia. Peter Stutchbury Architecture have exhibited work across Australia, Germany, Luxembourg, France, New Zealand, South Africa, Namibia, USA, Japan and Slovenia and at the Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy in both 2006 and 2008. PSA is in an annual exhibitor at the GA Gallery in Tokyo.

Since the early ‘90s the firm has won or been placed in 21 multiple National and international competitions whilst producing a range of buildings through all the disciplines of Architecture. From the small Israel House at Pittwater (1995 Robin Boyd Commendation) to the significant Life Sciences Newcastle University Building (2001 Sir John Sulman Award), their work consistently maintains a high level of design recognition. The firm has completed works overseas in PNG, Vanuatu, Japan, Russia and project in Taiwan.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

The Brumadinho Memorial is a space of memory and resistance, built at the site of the Córrego do Feijão Mine dam collapse in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, to honor the 272 victims of the country's greatest humanitarian tragedy. The result of a historic mobilization of family members gathered at Avabrum, the memorial arose from the desire to safeguard the victims' bodily parts and to reframe the mud-scarred territory, transforming it into a place of reflection, learning, and transformation. Open to the public in 2025, it is managed by the Brumadinho Memorial Foundation, created in 2023 to oversee its management and foster research and education projects on memory, the environment, law, architecture, and history.

The project, designed by architect Gustavo Penna and his team at Gustavo Penna Arquitetos Associados (GPAA), proposes a symbolic and sensitive path that begins with an entrance pavilion made of concrete stained with mining waste. Its angular, fragmented forms evoke the shock of the dam collapse, while beams of light penetrate the cracks and, every year at the exact time of the tragedy, illuminate a crystal druse in tribute to the "jewels," as family members call their loved ones.

From there, the fissure, a 230-meter gash in the ground, leads visitors to the epicenter of the disaster. The walls display the names of the victims, emerging one by one along the way. At the central point, the suspended sculpture known as the "weeping head" sheds tears onto the concrete and carries water, a symbol of memory and purification, to the reflecting pool next to the observation deck. Surrounding it, a grove of 272 yellow ipês blooms as a sign of life and continuity.

The Memory and Testimony spaces, designed in consultation with family members, house personal objects, records of the tragedy, and the victims' bodily parts, received with dignity and profound respect. For Carlos Antônio Leite Brandão, the memorial is a "fortress of grief," whose glimmers of light break through the darkness and transform silence into presence. Milton Hatoum describes the memorial as a civilizing gesture, capable of "giving aesthetic form to the tragedy" and inviting new generations to look critically at the past with an eye to the future.

The Brumadinho Memorial takes on the task of keeping the memory alive and affirming the dignity of the victims, refusing to be forgotten and reaffirming the right to memory as the foundation of collective life.

Project implementation: China
Project development: USA

Your Greenhouse Is Your Living Room is an environmental device that amalgamates the roles of a greenhouse, an outdoor kitchen, and a living room. It speculates on the agency of growing vegetables and sharing food as a collective act to combat environmental extremes. Designed for abandoned and underused urban spaces, the pavilion features an assemblage of movable and operable furniture that animates the surroundings with vegetable growing racks, kitchen counters, and folding tables. When enclosed, it serves as a greenhouse that encourages growing activities; when opened, it transforms into an outdoor living room that fosters new forms of community sharing in urban life.
The pavilion embodies a microclimate of care that nurtures both plants and humans. It promotes a system of collective farming, where contaminated soil from nearby farmland is treated on site and stored in portable pots designed for communal growing and product exchange among community members. Rainwater, harvested and filtered through the metal reservoir overhead, circulates in the pavilion for gardening and cooking activities. Owing to spatial tactics that mitigate the challenges posed by extreme weather in a subtropical climate, such as strategic gaps between panels that allow for passive cooling, the structure provides an optimal environment for plants, providing the visitors with balanced conditions of ventilation and shading to co-inhabit the space with plants and other species.

Office for Roundtable is a design practice and research collective led by Leyuan Li, currently based in Denver, Colorado, and Guangzhou, China. Their projects span a broad spectrum of different types and scales at the cross-section between interior and urban realms, exploring spaces and events that facilitate sharing among diverse communities to create collective narratives. Recent built projects have been featured on PLOT, ArchDaily, Designboom, Architect’s Newspaper, Gooood, and KoozArch, among others. Most recently, Office for Roundtable was awarded an Honorable Mention in AN’s Best of Practice Awards in the Architect (New Firm) - Southwest category in 2025.
JXY Studio is an interdisciplinary architecture and art studio co-founded by Yue Xu and Jiaxun Xu. Our work aims to push the boundaries of traditional architectural design and explore innovative approaches to the construction of space and narrative through a broader range of mediums, involving the fields of design, research, and visual arts, incorporating imagery, painting, installation, photography, moving image, and other multimedia forms. Combined with extensive experience in digital creation, spatial installation, artistic re-conceptualization of space, and innovative urbanism, each project of the studio is grounded in both logical research and inventive practice. Drawing inspiration from the rich cultural heritage of Lingnan and the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures, we use this unique perspective to fuel the interdisciplinary explorations of architecture and art.

Project implementation: USA
Project development: Austria, Latvia, USA

Our city’s future weather is not known yet. But the weather always has and will be a permanent companion in our lives.

Weather and water are intricately connected forces that shape our environment and influence life on Earth in profound ways.

The Institute of Weather Modification examines the entanglement of weather modification, hydrological engineering, and urban resilience in California. How have societies sought to manipulate atmospheric and hydrological conditions—from indigenous land practices to twentieth-century weather control experiments? What role do infrastructures of water—dams, reservoirs, desalination plants—play when paired with speculative atmospheric interventions such as cloud seeding?

The video work follows the Los Angeles Aqueduct and its extensions—reservoirs, UV treatment plants, hot springs, lakes, and cloud-seeding stations—tracing the infrastructures and landscapes that sustain the metropolis while pointing to the controversies that have shaped them.
Ultimately, the project asks what it means to build cities in dialogue with the atmosphere itself. If architecture has long been concerned with sheltering us from the elements, how might it now respond to their intensification and manipulation?

Studio Paradox

Operating between documentary and the imaginary, Julia Obleitner and Helvijs Savickis work across installation, film, and architecture. As founders of Studio Paradox, they address contemporary political, ecological, and urban conditions through a multidisciplinary lens. Their practice often engages with hidden or large-scale infrastructures, examining their ecological consequences, their role in shaping future urban trajectories, and their entanglement with collective memory. Their projects have been presented internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Ars Electronica, the Tbilisi Biennale, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture Los Angeles, among others.

Project implementation: Spain, Italy, Brazil
Project development: Spain, Brazil

This work is a collage-like journey through several cities without many apparent similarities, but connected by a common perspective that highlights aspects intimately linked to the environment, such as vegetation, its relationship with water, and the climate. The approach is neither technical nor academic, but rather phenomenological: when faced with stimuli such as heat, poetic solutions are proposed, sometimes looking to the past for answers, attempting to seduce the viewer, inviting them to forget prejudices, unlock their imagination, and connect with their physical well-being.

This line of work, which began years ago in Madrid, was developed in depth in the "Fantastic Guide to São Paulo," a faux illustrated tourist guide published in 2015 that blends reality and fiction. If the tourist guide is a narrative for mass consumption of the contemporary city, this project builds on that idea and proposes to normalize a utopian narrative, presenting surprising situations to the reader as if they were everyday, connecting cities where the author has lived, connecting problems that seem local but are global.

The drawings on display serve as sketches to draw attention to the Biennial's thematic axes. To "Preserve forests and reforest cities," it is necessary to ensure optimal conditions for the survival of bumblebees, thrushes, and other pollinators, which involves caring for existing vegetation. Although the presence of water was decisive for the founding of cities, in their development we have forgotten its importance. We cannot "Coexist with water" without knowing it exists, so a map of each city is displayed, with its waterways and infrastructure developed and then buried and forgotten. "Renovate more and build green" implies preserving the architectural heritage of historically valuable popular buildings such as Neomudejar or transforming interior courtyards into water gardens for cooling off in the summer to "Ensure climate justice." But it also involves transforming the Minhocão (Minhocão) or the Puente de Vallecas (Vallecas Bridge). Both are very similar examples of large-scale infrastructure projects designed for cars in the 1970s that act as physical boundaries, accentuate inequality between neighborhoods, and whose associated problems have mobilized the neighborhood for years. Instead of opting for total demolition, the project presents modifications with the aim of redefining them, valuing the enormous material resources invested in their construction, but also their symbolic power as a monument to the past adapted to the needs of the future.

The drawings have been adapted to the exhibition format of this Biennial and will be part of the publication São Paulo and other Fantastic Cities, published by Lote42 and released at the end of 2025.

Project implementation: India
Project development: Brazil, Portugal

Mumbai, located on the island of Salsette in the state of Maharashtra, is consolidating itself as the largest and most dynamic construction site on the planet. The city faces an extreme urban space crisis, with a population density almost five times higher than that of São Paulo—meaning that Mumbai packs many more people into significantly lower-rise buildings. This overconcentration creates an environment where space has become a scarce, limited, and absurdly expensive resource.

The competition for every square meter is so fierce that vacant lots are virtually non-existent. Owning an apartment in central neighborhoods has become an unattainable dream not only for the low-income population but also for the professional middle class. The urban landscape completely lacks significant green spaces, and urban voids, essential for the city's breathing, have been completely eliminated.

Faced with this dystopian reality, two visionary proposals from the thesis “Collateral Spaces: Support for Imagining Mumbai's New Voids,” developed at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto under the supervision of Professors Jorge Figueira and Teresa Cálix, offer innovative solutions.

1. Airspace: New Elevated Urban Territories

The proposal leverages the 250 kilometers of Mumbai's elevated metro viaducts, particularly Line 7, which traverses several slums in the Mogra-Gundavali area. In contrast to the Slum Rehabilitation Authority's approach—which conventionally utilizes real estate capital for social housing—the "Aerial Space" proposes a radical social experiment by occupying the non-building space above the tracks.

This linear, meandering building intentionally houses different social classes in a single multipurpose megastructure. Coexistence takes place on a continuous, neutral platform, with all units guaranteed to be bright and airy, challenging the usual pattern of precarious social housing. This bold intervention would free up 23 hectares of land for the creation of parks, playgrounds, and plazas, transforming infrastructure into housing architecture and converting marginal spaces into new urban centers.

2. Skyscraper of Air: The Architecture of the Immaterial

This proposal confronts the transformation of Parel's industrial voids into condominiums and shopping malls, instead presenting an immaterial verticality in the form of an artificial microclimate. The project echoes visionaries like Buckminster Fuller and his climate-controlled dome proposal for Manhattan, creating a permanent atmospheric "cloud" over the former factories.

The system combines monumental fig trees with hundreds of sensor-controlled high-pressure misters that maintain a constant temperature of 21°C. The mist takes on symbolic colors according to the Indian cultural calendar—saffron on Independence Day, vibrant hues during Holi. Perceived only by the mist and treetops, this "parallelepiped of air and humidity" serves as a manifesto for the preservation of urban voids, offering a cooled public space dedicated to leisure, cricket, and the simple enjoyment of citizens.

Vazio Inc.: Between Practice and Urban Research

Vazio S/A Arquitetura e Urbanismo operates at the intersection of conventional practice and critical research on urban voids. It adopts a proactive approach that understands informality, voids, and market forces as powerful drivers of new urban projects. In addition to traditional building work, it develops experiments through ideas competitions, academic publications, partnerships with social groups, and ephemeral urban interventions, always seeking new connections between contemporary culture and the production of architectural space.

Project implementation: Switzerland
Project development: Switzerland

The restoration work, which began in 1994 and is still ongoing, involves the ruins of dry stone shelters for people and animals in the Alpine pastures of Sceru, Giumello, Quarnei, Luzzone, and Piora, and in the Ticino Alps, at an altitude of over 2,000 meters in Switzerland. The restoration work specifically involves the collection of stones from within the perimeter wall of these buildings, abandoned since the 1950s.

Currently, the construction of new buildings in these highly valuable natural landscapes is only permitted for public-interest projects, such as hydroelectric infrastructure, forest roads, water intakes, avalanche shelters, alpine refuges, etc. Private individuals may maintain existing buildings, respecting their original function. Only in rare cases is their conversion into vacation homes permitted.

In these reconstructions, the functional and private component of the building, whose maintenance would require reconstruction, is eliminated through the creation of a compact volume devoid of usable spaces. On the contrary, the building's public value, understood as a geometrically significant presence in the landscape, is fully restored. The surrounding space, once cleared of debris, also recovers its original value.

The restorations are carried out on a voluntary basis. Friends, students, family, and colleagues participate. The local population and the owners of the restored ruins appreciate the idealism and effectiveness of this work, which impacts the realities to which they are emotionally connected.

The restorations restore meaning to abandoned pastures. They represent the epilogue of a civilization that survived in Ticino until the advent of modernity. Factors such as sustainability, simplicity, durability, participation, idealism, coherence, and beauty ensure the quality of the interventions over time, but above all, they consolidate the presence of positive values in society.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

The Dryland Garden is a temporary garden, redesigned and replanted each year. Irrigated only by rainfall, the garden germinates, grows, flowers, produces seeds, and dries out within a few months, thus adapting to the seasonality of the Cerrado.

Its flowers occupy the central space of the Central Institute of Sciences (ICC) – an iconic building of Brazilian modern architecture, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and João Filgueiras Lima (Lelé) in 1962. It extends across the building's sequential modules, measuring 730 meters long by 15 meters wide. With over 5,000 m² of planted area on a slab, the garden thrives on a thin layer of soil, without irrigation. When the rains cease, its seeds are harvested for use in the next cycle. The garden uses short-cycle, exotic flowers and native Cerrado grasses in a naturalistic composition, inspired by the Cerrado's grassland formations.

Emerging as an integration between the extension project and management of the green areas of the University of Brasília, the Jardim de Sequeiro has enabled savings and improvement of the central space of the University, while also promoting coordination with teaching, research and innovation activities.

As a temporary and experimental garden, Sequeiro can be redesigned and improved each year, enabling the continuous expansion of its initial scope and the development of its themes in diverse research and workshops, based on interactions with different disciplinary fields and academic experiences.

The Sequeiro Garden has already completed five cycles between 2020 and 2025. During this period, 142 volunteers and scholarship holders participated directly in the project, forming teams that are renewed annually. 118 themed workshops were offered (photography, watercolor, floral arrangements, seed collection, native bees, fabric dyeing, guided tours, and many others), with support from professors from UnB, other educational institutions, and the community at large. Scientific research and collaborative garden planting with ESALQ/USP and UNESP/Bauru have been essential throughout this process, as well as what took place between 2022 and 2024 at the Inhotim Institute in Minas Gerais.

The project won an award at the 5th Latin American Biennial of Landscape Architecture in 2022. More recently, it was chosen by Plano Coletivo to be part of, along with other references, its project entitled (RE)INVENTION, at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

Jardim de Sequeiro, 2020, is a project conceived and coordinated by Dr. Júlio Barêa Pastore, a professor of landscaping at the School of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Brasília. The project is carried out in partnership with the UnB City Hall, which is responsible for managing the university's green spaces. Participants include PRC staff, scholarship students, volunteers, and the general public.

More information: Instagram: jardimdesequeiro@gmail.com; Youtube: jardimdesequeiro Email: jardimdesequeirpo@gmail.com

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

Ilê Asé Odé Ibualamo, a Traditional Territorial Unit of Yoruba origin, and its collective living spaces were materially destroyed on December 15, 2022. The lush vegetation and the watercourse, rich in history, also succumbed during the channeling of Cadaval Stream for the construction of a public road, giving way to the cold, gray asphalt that took away its breath, suffocated the earth, and silenced the waters. Ilê Asé Odé Ibualamo represented the great sustaining tree of that peripheral urban environment, like a great Baobab with its memories, knowledge, and practices transferred here from Africa.

The project emerged from the struggle of the Ilê Odé Front, conceived by Odecidarewá Zana de Odé, which brought together architects, urban planners, teachers, researchers, and peripheral leaders to compose a study that gave rise to this project, which integrates traditional wisdom and its technologies in response to the violence suffered. The proposal operates as a tool for struggle and resignification of the memory of Ilê, but also of an ancestral urbanity. We propose a new reading of the city based on a critique of the hygienist methodologies of exclusion of Black territoriality, which guided the development of the São Paulo metropolis. The set of facilities, based on the culture of Traditional Peoples of African Descent, is a practice of re-existence and re-enchantment of life, which resignifies and heals a large open wound in the city. A possible rescue for a future that must also be ancestral.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

Regenera Dilúvio Consortium – Profill Engineering and Environment, Consult Engineering and Assessments and Pezco Economics

The Consortium Urban Operation Regenera Dilúvio (Dilúvio Regenerates Urban Development) seeks to integrate urban development, environmental sustainability, and infrastructure, considering the impacts of recent climate events in Porto Alegre. This 25-year plan focused on the implementation of a linear park on the banks of the Arroio Dilúvio, a tributary of the Guaíba River, in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul.

The project was developed in response to a request from the Porto Alegre Department of Environment, Urbanism, and Sustainability (SMAMUS), which monitors and contributes to the studies. The project was developed by a consortium formed by the companies Profill Engenharia e Ambiente, Consult Engenharia e Avaliações, and Pezco Economics, with general coordination by architect and urban planner Marcelo Ignatios and urban design coordination by architect and urban planner Marlon Rubio Longo.

The OUC's structuring was explored across multiple work fronts, encompassing urban, environmental, urban mobility, economic, social, and demographic studies, and legal aspects, as well as a communication plan for the process, for public discussion. The project addresses solutions for drainage and sanitation issues, with the distribution of green spaces and rainwater drainage, improved mobility at multiple scales, as well as new facilities, the upgrading of precarious settlements, and the production of social housing.

The linear park was structured as an urban environmental corridor, integrated with a system of green areas and drainage infrastructure, to promote the restoration of tree-lined areas along the banks, encourage recreational uses in neighboring blocks, and connect squares and existing vegetation fragments. These facilities are implemented across the entire territory, distributing the reserve and increasing soil infiltration, combining traditional infrastructure (gray networks) with nature-based solutions (green and blue networks).

The OUC Regenera Dilúvio project foresees the possibility of distributed densification in the territory, which, in an optimistic scenario, would reach approximately 60,000 additional residents in new vertical developments within 25 years. Growth and the attraction of new jobs are boosted by infrastructure and environmental improvements to the area, partly financed by the sale of Certificates of Additional Construction Potential. With an expected revenue of R$ 1.46 billion in current values, the certificates correspond to approximately 4 million m² of new built area, obtained through the densification of 65 hectares of land.

In addition to the planned investment program, which totals approximately R$1.76 billion by 2050 and includes other sources of funding, incentive strategies were planned for the creation and strengthening of central areas in the territory, consolidating a new axis of concentration for urban densification and development in Porto Alegre.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

FICA is part of the Community Property Association, which has been working since 2015 to provide access to decent housing for low-income families, acquiring and managing properties in well-located areas, through the provision of the Social Housing Service.

Since 2023, FICA's Morar Primeiro Program has been providing housing to 60 previously homeless people through a partnership with Father Júlio Lancellotti. The program is based on the international Housing First methodology, which advocates that housing is the first (and most essential) step toward social reintegration for people in situations of extreme vulnerability.

We brought to the Biennial the program developed for the population most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis: homeless people—those who contribute least to climate change and suffer most from its effects, lacking shelter and experiencing extremely fragile socioeconomic and health conditions. The Morar Primeiro program is a compelling response to the intersection of the climate and housing crises, guaranteeing safe housing, support for accessing income and employment, the right to the city, and improved health, education, and citizenship.

To make the program viable, FICA acquired vacant and underutilized houses and apartments near the areas where the families served by the program lived. FICA manages the property, condominium, and social services, and the families receive ongoing and personalized psychosocial support. Our multidisciplinary team includes social workers, psychologists, lawyers, architects, and urban planners, as well as a network of partners from various fields and specialties.

Our installation is a 1:1 scale floor plan of a typical Morar Primeiro apartment. Upon entering this space, Biennial visitors have access to data on the impact of the Morar Primeiro program and the FICA Social Housing Service. On the exterior of the floor plan, we present data on the housing crisis in Brazil and São Paulo. The installation is complemented by a projection, on one of the Oca walls, of a photo of the underside of the viaduct occupied by the families before they moved into the Morar Primeiro units.

Project implementation: USA
Project development: USA

OPEN-GROUND is a proposal for an architecture of outdoor public leisure for hot, humid, toxic, and flood-prone climates. Modeled on the shaded sports courts typical of Houston, the project deploys a thick roof, hollow ground, and thermal chimneys to shade and cool this difficult environment while making a space for community gathering.

The space frame roof is loosely filled with recycled insulation material, functioning as a thermal barrier to slow heat gain in the courts beneath. Belowground, an array of tubular chambers functions as a stormwater detention, toxicity filter, and water harvesting system. Connecting the roof and reservoirs below, a series of cylindrical ventilation structures provide conduits for buoyant air. These thermal stacks create a microclimatic engine, using temperature, humidity, and pressure differentials to ventilate and cool the open-air space.

Not only does this cooling center build up the capacity for on-site water detention, it also proposes how climate infrastructures can function beyond bare shelter. OPEN-GROUND offers the political position that the role of architecture in the Anthropocene is to hybridize the relationship between public life and terrestrial systems. The project’s underbelly of pipes and conduits, crisscrossing beams, and soil substrates imagines architecture as part of a planetary stack, mediating a site’s geologies, hydrologies, and atmospheres to offer a new space to gather under the sun.

HOME-OFFICE is a research and design collaborative that explores the reciprocity between architectural types, their technical assemblies, and the environment. HOME-OFFICE was founded by Brittany Utting and Daniel Jacobs in 2017 and is based in Houston, Texas. Brittany Utting is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Rice University and Daniel Jacobs is an Instructional Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Houston.

Project implementation: USA
Project development: USA

Trees are considered by urban planners and designers to be effective green infrastructure to mitigate the impacts of extreme heat. However, the urban distribution of tree canopy is often correlated to class and race. In Miami, for example, studies by environmental and policy scholars have demonstrated that poorer, racialized neighborhoods have fewer trees than affluent ones. Despite afforestation initiatives, two main problems have persisted in the past decade. First, municipalities can only plant trees in public-owned areas, which can be limiting in scope. Second, the lack of investment in tree maintenance results in “green wasting”– tree saplings do not always survive the first 5 to 10 years before they mature enough to provide effective canopies. In these decisive years, community engagement is crucial to establish systems of continuous care between humans and vegetal life.

This project addresses urban afforestation as both an environmental and an socio-economic project, in which architecture can support a culture of reciprocal care between trees and people. It adapts botanical “shade house” structures ubiquitous in South Florida’s agri- and horticultural areas to the urban context. The interventions equip public and residual spaces with the temporary shade needed to support tree maintenance and articulate community engagements. The goal is to provide an architectural strategy for government-run programs such as tree giveaways, composting, and botanical education accessible by the public at little cost.

Project development: Brazil

The project proposes a green infrastructure and Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) strategy for Morro da Formiga, in Rio de Janeiro, a territory characterized by informal settlement on steep slopes, insufficient infrastructure, and high vulnerability to landslides. The proposal is based on a careful analysis of the site and the recognition of environmental knowledge and practices developed by the community itself, understood as socio-environmental technologies capable of promoting resilience even outside of formal planning. The goal is to improve public and residual spaces, integrating risk mitigation actions, environmental valorization, and strengthening existing sociocultural dynamics.

The intervention area comprises a 34,000 m² section under power lines, which forms a connecting axis between the urban fabric, the hillside, and the Tijuca Forest. The design organizes continuous strips of open space along the slopes, creating ecological and social buffers. Planned interventions include the redevelopment of the Cascata River, widening its riverbed and installing filter gardens; expanding the Hortas Cariocas community program, including a seedling nursery and support areas; and implementing agroforestry systems, composting, and green drainage solutions. These actions are coordinated to connect with existing initiatives, incorporating the knowledge accumulated by residents in environmental management and expanding their reach.

The project is structured around three central guidelines: articulation, connecting fragmented spaces and bringing urban occupation closer to open areas; enhancing, expanding, and strengthening socio-environmental projects; and preserving, protecting native vegetation, water bodies, and cultural knowledge. The strategy also envisages the replication of typologies in areas of greater geotechnical risk, including the implementation of evapotranspiration basins for decentralized sewage treatment and the restoration of slopes with adapted vegetation. By reinforcing the role of the Cascata River as a structuring element, a system is created that integrates ecological infrastructure, living spaces, and community facilities, establishing a gradual transition between the forest and the urban fabric.

Beyond a set of physical interventions, the proposal constitutes a collaborative process that recognizes the community as a protagonist in the transformation of the territory. The incorporation of local knowledge, combined with high-performance environmental solutions, allows for the construction of a multifunctional and adaptive landscape, capable of responding to climate extremes and historical inequalities, promoting safety, belonging, and quality of life.

About the author:
Larissa Scheuer is an architect and urban planner with a degree from FAU-UFRJ and works as a landscape architect at Embyá – Ecological Landscaping. With experience in landscape architecture and urban planning, her work has been recognized with several national awards, including the Arquitetas e Arquitetos do Amanhã Award, third place in the Grandjean de Montigny Award, and selection as a finalist for the Tomie Ohtake AkzoNobel Prize.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

The city of Foz do Iguaçu, established in 1914, bears the scars of Brazil's history in its urban fabric. The construction of the Itaipu hydroelectric plant left its mark on the territory, occupying an area larger than the city's current urban footprint. The land to be occupied by the Ecopark is part of this process of urban occupation and redefinition. It's an ongoing, tortuous process, but one that reveals a vision for the future that's sorely needed in the face of the environmental collapse we're already facing as a society.

Construction of the plant began in 1974, amid the military dictatorship. To minimize environmental impact, areas in the city were set aside for various purposes. The current site was formerly a nursery for reforestation around the dam. Although it seems speculative, if this area had not been set aside for this purpose, it would likely have been swallowed up by the city's expansion, as today, the perimeter of the site is already densely populated. This reveals a tortuous process of historical recycling: without Itaipu, there would be no flooding for the dam; without the dam, there would be no need for nurseries for new seedlings; without the need for reforestation, there would be no urban vegetation reserve, which now results in a new park for the city. As Eduardo Galeano stated over 50 years ago, "in the history of mankind, every act of destruction finds its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation" (Galeano, 1978: p. 396).

André Prevedello is an architect and researcher. He was a director of AP Arquitetos in 2010 (www.aparquitetos.com.br), with projects and awards in Brazil, South America, and Europe. He holds a bachelor's and master's degree from the Federal University of Paraná and a postgraduate degree in hybrid arts from the Federal University of Technology of Paraná. He is pursuing a doctoral research degree with a scholarship from the Lusófona University of Lisbon. He is a researcher for SOS Climate Waterfront H2020-MSCA-RISE-2018, under the European Union's Horizon 2022 program, with research conducted in Portugal, Greece, and Sweden. He is a professor of theory and history. He has won the IAB-PR 2021 and IAB-SC 2021 awards, BUILD – Sustainable Building Awards England, Best Spatial Architecture Design Studio, and the IAB MS 2023 Award. He also won first place in the Eco Parque Itaipu, first place in the Requalification of the Salão Nobre and UFCSPA Theater, first place in the Pelotas City Council, first place in the Colinas Cooperativa Cascavel, first place in the Salvador International Project Seminar Competition, and first place in Caixa Econômica – Solutions for low-cost housing, among others. He is a constant contributor to lectures, conferences, reviews, and exhibitions.

Tais Mendes is a geologist with a degree from the Federal University of Paraná. She is a project manager at AP Arquitetos. She has experience managing highly complex projects, having worked on hydroelectric projects in Brazil, Peru, and Guyana. At AP Arquitetos, she was responsible for managing several projects throughout Brazil, including the SESC Mogi das Cruzes Unit, the new headquarters of the São Paulo Military Police Battalion, the SESC Balneário Mato Grosso do Sul unit, the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFCSPA) Theater, and the new Pelotas City Hall, among others.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil, Mexico

Invisible Cities, Incredible People (cipesin.com) is a participatory media project that uses audiovisual resources to give voice and visibility to community leaders in Latin America. In urban peripheries, precarious housing and the lack of basic infrastructure remain major challenges, faced daily by residents who often find solutions to collective issues in their own local leaders. Their initiatives, although transformative, remain invisible beyond their territories. The project seeks precisely to break this silence by documenting and disseminating stories of mobilization and solidarity that reveal the power of excluded communities.

The initiative began as a pilot project during the postdoctoral research of Bianca Moro de Carvalho, a professor at the Federal University of Amapá (UFA), at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo. The project was supported by a CAPES grant and supervised by Professor Dr. Angélica Benatti Alvim. From the outset, it collaborated with researchers from the Federal University of Amapá (UNIFAP), Mackenzie University, and the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez (Mexico), resulting in documentaries that portray the lives of residents in various Latin American contexts. Currently, it is part of the research project of the same name at UNIFAP and has its own platform, cipesin.com, which hosts the films produced and new narratives.

Stories have already been recorded in seven cities: Macapá and Santana (Amapá), Paraisópolis (São Paulo), Goiânia (Goiás), São Félix do Coribe (Bahia), Mexico City, and Ciudad Juárez. The documentaries' authorship and filming are the result of a shared direction between the project's coordinators and the volunteer collaboration of professionals: photographer Guy Veloso filmed in the Sertão region of Bahia; Mariana Contreras-Saldaña recorded Ciudad Juárez; Selenne Galeana Cruz worked in Mexico City; Willian Santiago in Paraisópolis; and Filemon Tiago in Goiânia. This network strengthens the reach and broadens the diversity of perspectives. In all cities, the stories reveal leaders who face social inequalities, lack of access to housing, education, healthcare, and political representation. Despite the adversities, they demonstrate enormous capacity for mobilization, coordinating practices ranging from cultural workshops and community food to demanding public policies.

The methodology used is participatory media, introduced at UNIFAP in 2017 by filmmaker Peter Lucas, a professor at New York University and The New School, and author of the book "Viva a Favela: Direitos Humanos e Incluição Visual no Brasil, dez anos de fotojonalismo" (Live the Favela: Human Rights and Visual Inclusion in Brazil, Ten Years of Photojournalism). Its proposal is based on audiovisual production in conjunction with the residents themselves, allowing them to narrate reality from their perspective. This practice democratizes communication, reinforces community leadership, and transforms documentaries into tools for social inclusion, critical reflection, and the promotion of human rights.

The results are already demonstrating impact: strengthening international academic networks, creating spaces for debate on the right to the city, and encouraging communities to produce their own audiovisual recordings.

Invisible Cities, Incredible People is, therefore, more than a research project: it is a movement to listen to and recognize silenced voices. By uniting teaching, research, and outreach, it promotes transnational exchanges and brings distant worlds closer together, contributing to the construction of more just, supportive, and resilient societies.

Project implementation: India
Project development: India

This project is an intervention within a unique urban ecosystem - a network of fishing ponds, created and managed by members of the Koli fishing community, in a mangrove forest of the Mithi River, despite all odds.

Dharavi Koliwada, an urban fishing village of the Kolis, was once a vibrant, bustling neighbourhood surrounded by the Mithi River Estuary. Today, all of it is entrapped by the larger city. Yet, the estuarine ecosystem continues to survive in a dense, concretised urban context with vast amounts of pollution and waste choking the river.

The ponds represent an indigenous, nature-based livelihood initiative of the Koli community.
Their efforts illustrate co-dependent human-nature relationships as the key to conservation efforts. The action-based participatory project hopes to leverage the community's indigenous knowledge and restore a dwindling connection with their aqueous surroundings. The first concrete step of the project is a participatory landscape intervention on the last remaining commons within the habitat they want to restore.

The community approached urbz to help build a shared program and vision to guide the collective actions needed to achieve their restoration objectives. Together they have outlined a vision and strategy to facilitate the community who have already begun reviving ancestral aquaculture ponds. After several workshops, exhibitions, and focus group discussions to engage diverse community stakeholders from the locality, a list of challenges has been identified.

The pressing challenge is accessing these landscapes. Fisher families need unimpeded access to tend to their habitat. A small strip of common lands along the river, which used to access fishing ponds, has suffered from administrative neglect, resulting in illegal dumping and unsafe conditions. Women, elders, and children cannot safely visit the river edge where they once conducted livelihood, cultural, and recreational activities. Even fishermen risk injury due to sludge accumulation and hazardous waste.

Once safe access is secured, the community aims to raise awareness about the Mithi River's increasing pollution and urbanisation-induced deterioration. They propose to do this by organising boat tours for concerned citizens to spotlight the urban biodiversity and motivate them to take action to conserve the landscape.

The project recognises that the Kolis not only derive their livelihood from these waters but also maintain a profound spiritual relationship with this amphibious marine landscape. By supporting their traditional practices while introducing sustainable innovations, the project aims to create a model for indigenous-led urban ecological restoration that addresses both environmental degradation and community wellbeing.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

On a planet confronting its limits in the face of extreme climate events, architecture and urban planning are called upon to profoundly rethink their role. More than reflection, it's necessary to develop radical proposals and concrete solutions. It is on this frontier that the city of Rio de Janeiro stands as a living laboratory forging the foundations of a new pact between urban and natural—where citizenship intertwines with the preservation and integration of nature into the urban fabric.

Rio de Janeiro's participation in the 14th Biennale is a celebration of the dialogue between the urban and the natural, resulting in unique and inclusive urban solutions, paving the way for a contemporary Carioca urban tradition. The city presents a portfolio of interventions that translate the Biennale's curatorial axes into reality, demonstrating that it is possible to reconcile climate resilience with social justice. In a multifaceted strategy, Rio continues its mission to reinstate itself as a forest city through urban reforestation manifested at various scales, from the vitality of community gardens and productive backyards to the grandeur of urban parks and the reconnection with its forests.

Extensive, topographically dramatic, and socially diverse, Rio de Janeiro—a world city—embodies the central dilemma of our century: orchestrating a just socio-ecological transition amidst insurmountable complexities. Its complexity, inherent to an urban center of global importance, amplifies tensions and potentialities, demanding operations at multiple scales—from macro to micro—under the imperative of integrating social justice, urban planning, and climate action.

Rio de Janeiro, therefore, is not coming to the Biennial simply to showcase projects, but to share an urban management model that understands the city as an integrated ecosystem. We present a set of solutions that emerge from the urban soil of the city and also from the humid soil of the forest, in the firm conviction that the architecture we need for the future is already being built today, on the hillsides, in the floodplains, and on the asphalt of the state capital.

Project implementation: China
Project development: China

Nature Into Building
Tank Shanghai Art Center is located on the banks of Huangpu River in the West Bund area, part of a large-scale project to transform the former industrial zone into a vibrant river-front community.

The specific site for Tank Shanghai was once part of an abandoned airport with decommissioned aviation fuel tanks, which underwent a long and thorough decontamination process before redevelopment.

While carefully preserving the oil tanks and transforming them into different art spaces, OPEN “invited” nature to turn the entire site—once paved in concrete with barely any grass—into an urban park open to all. The Art Center is then seamlessly embedded into this newly created urban forest and grassland, without revealing where the architecture starts and ends. It is an art center without boundaries—emblematic of this unique institution’s vision for contemporary art.
Central to the design is the merging of architecture and landscape through a Z-shaped “Super-Surface”—a five-hectare landscaped expanse of trees and grasses which connects the five tanks and integrates the site’s different elements. The Super-Surface provides both aesthetic and practical benefits to its riverside context, which enjoys a 115-meter stretch of shoreline. The lush greenery creates an attractive and urgently needed parkland in a city with just 17.56% green space, contributing to ecological restoration and the return of animal life.

Flanking the south side of the plaza, an “Urban Forest” provides much desired shade and greenery to the urban residents. On the east, a grassy plaza offers open space for leisure and outdoor events, doubling as a standing area for large audiences during festivals.

Programmatically, the varied spatial configurations and flexible design allow the institution to host diverse exhibitions, performances and community activities. Despite the structural challenges of adapting the tanks, the renovation preserves many of their original industrial features, maintaining a dialogue between past and present.
In summary, Tank Shanghai adapted containers of fuel into containers of culture and life, connecting people, art, and nature. It stands as a social equalizer that attracts and generously accommodates people from all walks of life.

About OPEN:
OPEN is an architecture office that collaborates across different disciplines to practice architectural, urban, landscape, and interior design. We also research and develop design strategies in the context of unprecedented challenges facing our generation and beyond.

OPEN was founded by LI Hu and HUANG Wenjing in New York City. It established its Beijing office in 2008. Some major projects by OPEN include: Sun Tower, Shanfeng Academy, Chapel of Sound, Shanghai Qingpu Pinghe International School, UCCA Dune Art Museum, Tank Shanghai, Pingshan Performing Arts Center, Tsinghua Ocean Center, Garden School/Beijing No.4 High School Fangshan Campus, and Gehua Youth and Cultural Center.

Project implementation: China
Project development: China

Building in Nature
Hidden underneath a dune by Bohai Bay, Dune Art Museum designed by OPEN Architecture returns to primal and timeless forms of space and directly responds to its ocean front site with a delicate ecosystem.

When asked to design a building along the shore, the architects of OPEN immediately knew this was a rare opportunity. They had been deeply concerned about the careless acts of wiping out dunes for ocean-view real estate developments that frequently happened in China at the time, fully aware of how critical dunes are to the environment.

The decision to build the museum into the dune was therefore deliberate. Because the very existence of the museum, this stretch of dune is ultimately preserved instead of destroyed for real-estate. After the structure was completed, sand was restored atop the building envelope, local shrubs and trees were replanted. The building was opened in October, and by the following June—just one winter and spring later—the plants had fully grown back. The museum had since effectively “disappeared” into a seamless coexistence with nature.

Here, the conscious act of building becomes protection rather than destruction, indicating a different mindset in climate practices and architectural engagement with nature.

Enveloped by sand, the museum’s interconnected, organically shaped galleries draw inspiration from natural caves. A series of cell-like contiguous spaces accommodate differently-sized galleries, a café, and some ancillary spaces. Openings frame views of the shifting sky and sea, allowing visitors to experience the landscape as part of the architecture.

The building’s many skylights, each with a different orientation and size, provide carefully calibrated natural light throughout the year. Its sand-covered roof greatly reduces heat load, while a low-energy, zero-emission ground source heat pump system replaces traditional air conditioning.
About OPEN:

OPEN is an architecture office that collaborates across different disciplines to practice architectural, urban, landscape, and interior design. We also research and develop design strategies in the context of unprecedented challenges facing our generation and beyond.

OPEN was founded by LI Hu and HUANG Wenjing in New York City. It established its Beijing office in 2008. Some major projects by OPEN include: Sun Tower, Shanfeng Academy, Chapel of Sound, Shanghai Qingpu Pinghe International School, UCCA Dune Art Museum, Tank Shanghai, Pingshan Performing Arts Center, Tsinghua Ocean Center, Garden School/Beijing No.4 High School Fangshan Campus, and Gehua Youth and Cultural Center.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

Piratininga Waterfront Park (POP) represents a milestone in urban planning and environmental management in Brazil, serving as both an urban public park and a living laboratory of sustainability. Its innovative design is based on the adoption of Nature-Based Solutions (NbS), a strategy that combines green infrastructure with ecological restoration to aid in the recovery of Piratininga Lagoon.

To this end, three large constructed wetland systems were implemented, capable of naturally filtering water from the urban basins of the Cafubá River, the Arrozal River, and the Jacaré River. These systems occupy an area of approximately 35,000 m² spread over two linear kilometers along the lagoon. They treat water from the main contributing rivers, as well as surface runoff and drainage from neighborhoods, reducing the input of sediment and pollutants into the water body and promoting the gradual recovery of the lagoon's environmental quality.

Associated with this solution, there is also the restoration of Atlantic Forest connectors in surrounding wetlands, which reinforce ecological connectivity, expand habitats for local fauna, and strengthen ecosystem services provided to the population.
In addition to environmental restoration, the park was also designed as a space for social and cultural integration. The Ecocultural Center, a facility dedicated to environmental education and cultural activities, seeks to raise awareness of the importance of preservation.

The Park also includes cycle paths, piers for fishing and contemplation, leisure areas and sports centers, constituting a multifunctional infrastructure that promotes health, mobility, tourism and quality of life.

To showcase the functioning of constructed wetland systems and other types of NBS applied in the Alfredo Sirkis Piratininga Waterfront Park, the exhibition space will feature an audiovisual station showing documentaries and videos about Piratininga Waterfront Park and the Jacaré River Basin Renaturalization; and virtual reality headsets, offering an immersive experience in POP. A self-explanatory model will also demonstrate how constructed wetlands work.

Project development: United Kingdom

The Climate Forum is a research, curriculum, and exchange platform that brings the urgent focus of the climate and ecological emergency to the center of the Spatial Practices program at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. Led by Catalina Mejía Moreno, Senior Lecturer in Climate Studies, in collaboration with students and faculty from the Spatial Practices courses, the Climate Forum has been building a collaborative platform where pedagogical initiatives, spatial practices, and projects involving socio-ecological, racial, and environmental justice are highlighted and shared among students and faculty. At the same time, the Climate Forum has worked to consolidate modes of critical thinking that focus on practices of reparation, reciprocity, kinship, and non-extractive practices, whether material, spatial, or otherwise, while articulating methods to better understand the social structures in which we all operate and the spaces of action in which equitable and solidarity-based practices can emerge.

CLIMATE WHEEL: CLIMATE WHEEL: As spatial professionals, we have a duty to move away from practices that degrade the Earth and society. By recognizing climate change as a symptom of a broader problem, we understand that addressing the climate crisis holistically means moving beyond logistical and technocratic "solutions" as mere tools for sustainable construction. This "climate wheel" stems from the project "What is and what can be"—a project that seeks to understand the myriad ways in which architectural and spatial professionals can instead choose life-affirming practices. "What is and what can be" is an ongoing project in the Spatial Practices program (Central Saint Martins, UAL) that seeks to understand how "climate" or "climate issues" are being addressed in classrooms: through the content taught, the work of students, and the teaching practices of professors. The 'climate wheel' builds on a foundation of existing climate action frameworks that shape courses, the profession, and broader discourse. We analyzed 11 frameworks spanning institutional principles, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) guidance, industry action groups, business certification, and climate justice movements. The words used in the wheel emerge from their terminologies.

This project was conceived and produced in collaboration between the Spatial Practices Climate Forum and MA Architecture (CSM), and supported by UAL's Climate Action Manager, and the CSM's BA Architecture and MA Cities courses.
'What is and what might be' – visit here: https://climate-forum.com/climate-audit-from-what-is-to-what-might-be

Project implementation: Ghana
Project development: Austria, Ghana

“Rehearsal of Green Returns” is a two-channel video installation that reflects on the transformation of the Old Tamale Airport in northern Ghana—a disused runway built in the 1920s—into a living landscape and shared urban terrain. Once a sealed-off strip of colonial infrastructure, the 1.4-kilometer-long, 40-meter-wide runway now lies within Tamale’s rapidly expanding urban fabric. Its unusual scale and rigid asphalt surface mark it as a site of latent potential: a “different” open space, suspended between memory, infrastructure, and the imagination of the future.

Green Returns Essay captures the open and processual nature of the project, working with uncertainty and fragility rather than offering fixed solutions. The act of gently "unsealing" seeks to reverse the patterns of extraction, enclosure, and overheating that define so many modern urban environments.

The installation unfolds through two perspectives. The first video presents [A]FA's speculative design proposal, which envisions the gradual activation of the runway and its transformation into living terrain. This imagined change transforms the inert asphalt into a dynamic landscape for multispecies gathering and cohabitation. The second documents a direct intervention carried out in May 2025: the transplantation of mature savanna trees from a nearby forest onto the airfield surface. This fragile yet radical gesture—moving life from one soil to another—transforms the sealed infrastructure into living space, blurring the boundaries between architecture, landscape, and ecology.

The transplant was carried out with local and international expertise in collaboration with the Ghana Forestry Commission. The trees were prepared during the rainy season, dug at the end of the dry season, and transported across the city despite logistical obstacles. Once replanted, they required irrigation, care, and storm protection. Their survival—standing, living, and adapting trees—now forms the ecological backbone for the site's future transformation.

By combining vision and implementation, speculation and labor, Green Returns Rehearsal unfolds as an essay, not a final statement. It enacts a radical act of grounding and greening, pointing to a resilience rooted not in control but in care, imagination, and collective practice. Situated within the urgency of rethinking the sealed, overheated surfaces that dominate cities worldwide, the installation is simultaneously a document and a proposition: an invitation to consider how architecture can serve as an ecological essay, returning life to urban soil and reimagining shared futures.

Project implementation: Mexico
Project development: Mexico

This project is a public washhouse designed to address the water crisis that the community of La Huerta de San Agustín has suffered in recent years. The aim was to design a dignified space, expanding the current work area and respecting the water source from a nearby natural spring.

The students were tasked with developing a collaborative assessment to understand the community's needs and demands through a series of interactive activities, which led to an architectural program. This program includes the laundry room itself with an attached playground, where children can spend time under the watchful eye of their mothers; along with this, there is an area for hanging clothes and a multipurpose rest area that offers views of the nearby rainwater harvesting area.

After several months of work, the students presented their projects to the community, who voted on their favorite design. The winning project was inspired by water lilies, natural biofilters, for the structure, given the project's connection to water and the surrounding natural environment. Each space is built on its own individual wooden structure, supported by a central column where the roof acts as a funnel that collects water and carries it to a cistern. This water is then used by people to wash their clothes and is then directed to a biofilter that cleans it, allowing it to be reused. Each material was chosen taking into account availability, ease of construction, environmental impact, and budget, which depends on donations from those willing to support the cause. This ongoing project represents the efforts of countless people, from teachers to students to the community itself, showing how their combined efforts can lead to something that goes even further than just themselves.

Project implementation: Germany
Project development: United Kingdom

Against a backdrop of growing climate challenges and urban inequalities, TreesAI emerges as an innovative response, aiming to revalue urban nature not just as an aesthetic component, but as critical, investable infrastructure for more resilient and just cities. Our tool, Location-Based Scoring (LBS), offers a practical, data-driven approach to addressing the complexities of the built environment and the environmental issues that impact cities.

TreesAI, born from the innovative context of Dark Matter Labs, is not traditional software. It is a dynamic system of quantitative and qualitative tools and methods, developed to meet the specific needs of partners involved in building more sustainable cities. The system's core essence is its ability to integrate innovative technologies with relevant data, positioning trees and urban ecosystems as investable infrastructure assets.

TreesAI's proposal goes beyond the traditional view of investing in nature. Rather than limiting itself to carbon offsetting, TreesAI focuses on the numerous co-benefits that nature offers cities. These benefits include thermal regulation, stormwater management, improved air quality, and contributions to public health and social well-being. By focusing on these multiple values, TreesAI proposes rethinking the value of nature in urban planning, creating financing models that recognize the long-term impact of nature-based solutions.

This approach transforms natural assets into tangible investments, generating a new civic economy that prioritizes the health of the planet and its inhabitants. A practical example of this innovative approach was the Location-Based Scoring (LBS) pilot project, conducted in Stuttgart, Germany, in 2023. In this project, we developed a tool to provide a deep, high-resolution understanding of georeferenced climate risk areas.

LBS allows users, from urban planners to community members, to explore the location profile of their cities, accurately identifying climate risks and vulnerabilities. The tool adapts to the specificities of each territory, offering granular and actionable insights to city managers and policymakers. With contextual adjustment capabilities, LBS transforms complex data into intuitive maps and scores, facilitating informed decisions about where and how to implement nature-based solutions, such as tree planting and urban flood management.

Visualizing LBS data helps simplify the analysis of critical information. This visualization allows urban planners to clearly see where climate risks are highest and where nature-based solutions, such as tree planting, can have the greatest impact. By utilizing real-time data and enabling contextual analysis, LBS offers a practical approach to mitigating climate risks, creating more efficient and adaptable green infrastructure.

The integration of LBS with other systems and methods developed by Dark Matter Labs creates a robust platform for TreesAI partners, enabling them to monitor, plan, and invest in green infrastructure more effectively. TreesAI's vision goes beyond simply using data—it proposes a revolution in the way cities approach the use of natural resources, recognizing them as assets that can generate long-term benefits for both society and the environment.

This is an invitation to rethink the value of nature in urban planning, especially for cities like São Paulo, where climate challenges and urban inequalities are widely felt. Through tools like LBS and Resilience Compass, TreesAI aims to transform the way urban managers think about green infrastructure, offering a fairer and more efficient financing model for the sustainable future of cities.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

The creation of the new campus of the Technological Institute of Aeronautics (ITA) in Ceará represents a milestone in the expansion of excellent military academic training in Brazil. This is a strategic project of the Brazilian Air Force, made possible by the Cooperation Agreement between the Ministries of Defense and Education. The campus will be located at the former Fortaleza Air Base, a site of significant historical value, whose origins date back to the 6th Aviation Regiment of 1933 and the architectural design by Emilio Hinko of 1941.

The architectural proposal seeks to reconcile the preservation of history with contemporary solutions. The master plan, developed by CEPE (Center for Aeronautical Engineering Studies and Projects), envisages the redevelopment of the historic site, combining heritage conservation with the inclusion of new programmatic spaces dedicated to teaching, research, and academic life. The project promotes a harmonious relationship between the old and the new, with functional sectorization designed for efficiency, urban integration, and sustainability.

The campus infrastructure will include three buildings for engineering programs, a library, an auditorium, administrative headquarters, five student residences, sports and leisure areas, parking, bike paths, a technology park, and a photovoltaic plant, highlighting the university's commitment to clean energy. The road system will be restructured, with the widening of roads and the creation of new internal streets, promoting fluidity and connection with Fortaleza's urban network.

The architecture adopts bioclimatic principles, prioritizing cross ventilation, natural lighting, solar protection, and the use of local materials, such as cobogós, promoting thermal comfort and regional identity. The buildings incorporate sustainable practices, reducing energy consumption and increasing environmental efficiency.

Project implementation: Argentina and Germany
Project development: Argentina and Germany

Every year, more than 10 million tons of marine shells—primarily from oysters, clams, scallops, and mussels—are discarded as waste. This project explores how marine resources, often overlooked as byproducts, can serve as a basis for material experimentation in architecture, design, crafts, and science. It highlights innovative practices with materials that redefine the relationship between the built environment and the ecosystems that sustain it.

Spanning multiple scales—from buildings and building elements to materials value chains—the project examines how design can foster new interdependencies between materials, construction, and ecological systems.
At the heart of this exploration is the collaborative research of environmental architect Angie Dub and experimental designer Heidi Jalkh, who are transforming discarded seashells into a sustainable material for the built environment. By combining crushed seashells with algae-based biopolymers, they produce a heat-free bioceramic composed entirely of marine biomass. This practice-based research rethinks bioregional value chains, exploring the potential of marine food waste in urban areas such as Buenos Aires and Berlin, where the designers are based.

Through prototypes, raw materials, molded components, and test samples developed during the research phase, the project provides an in-depth exploration of material transformation from shell to tile.

CONQ presents an emerging modular construction system, illustrating the potential application of this shell-based bioceramic and pointing to future research directions. Furthermore, the material samples showcase the diverse colors and finishes that naturally arise from different shell species, demonstrating the material's inherent variability and the design's balance between mechanical performance and aesthetic versatility.

The project highlights the urgency of transitioning from extractive material practices to regenerative and circular economies. Rather than viewing raw materials as inert, extractable resources, it proposes a systemic and dynamic approach, one that recognizes the deep interconnections between materials, buildings, and the ecosystems that sustain them.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

Every city transforms. At the household level, children grow older and move out, freeing up rooms that become offices; parents age, abandoning homes to return to live with children or caregivers. Small changes in the master plan cause houses to lose their real estate value and become seen merely as land—major demolitions make way for new residents or the investment market. In the commercial sector, shopping mall stores rotate at high speed to keep up with trends, while corporate offices close and open with the immaterial fluidity of the stock market. Behind a contemporary so-called digital world, to which immaterial words like fog and liquid are associated, persists a material universe that, for convenience, we forget.

The vertigo of coming into contact with what the city throws away every day is an experience shared by few architects. Every day, a team tours buildings slated for demolition or radical transformation in search of reusable elements.

The Archive serves as a temporary home for architectural elements through the temporary lease of a space in the Ondina neighborhood of Salvador. Check-in, storage, sorting, cataloging, recovery, and resale take place at the headquarters. Buildings constructed from the archive are often an amalgamation of parts of the city, but the opposite can also happen: a building is dissolved into dozens of small renovations.

The work tells the three stages of the process of dismantling and building from what already exists in the world.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

Interest in new materials has guided the research and practice of Estúdio RAIN, which since 2019 has been dedicated to researching plant resin derived from castor oil.

Initially, the studio focused on experimenting with the biomaterial, seeking to expand its use beyond its traditional application as a thin-layer varnish. The goal was to enable the molding of large volumes of the material. This phase resulted in amber-toned light filters—the resin's natural color. Subsequently, the material's purity was challenged by the introduction of air during the curing process. The increased bubble content gave the resin a whitish, translucent appearance, enabling the development of organically shaped foam membranes used as light diffusers.

The Rícino C series represents a third advancement in this research. In it, plant-based polymers are combined with natural aggregates to create composite materials. Organic and mineral elements—such as flowers, fruits, roots, algae, seeds, and rocks—are incorporated into the resin, resulting in surfaces with different textures, densities, and hues, which can be applied to various functions.

Amidst this plurality, the presence of the granule is the unifying factor. It concentrates the material's intrinsic information, defining its visual and technical characteristics. The granule, however, does not exist in isolation: its essence manifests itself in accumulation—whether by dispersing and coloring the resin, or by sedimenting and conferring hardness and opacity.

Exploring new possibilities, a collection of orthogonal lines was created that highlight the material's enigmatic character. Robust and silent, almost monolithic volumes are articulated through visible joints, revealing connections. The Rícino C series expresses the organic nature of the plant-based polymer and its capacity for transformation, highlighting the material's versatility and beauty.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

Cobogó Alberobello is the result of ongoing, independent research by Raquel Finotti of Talpa Design, who investigates the potential for reusing waste from various sources. This specific project focuses on construction waste.

Each module of the project contains 62% of recycled aggregates, sourced from materials carefully separated, crushed, and prepared for incorporation into the mix, transforming what would otherwise be considered waste into valuable raw materials. This dedication ensures that each piece carries not only a practical function but also conveys the narrative of care and attention at every stage of the process.

The naturally reddish hue of cobogó is the result of tile and brick waste, creating an organic palette that eliminates the need for artificial colors and captures the essence of clay. By incorporating these crushed fragments into the design, a unique aesthetic is revealed, combining innovation, memory, and sustainability.

Beyond aesthetics, Cobogó Alberobello performs important architectural functions: it modulates light input, promotes ventilation, and adds texture to spaces, providing comfort and visual poetry. Its versatile geometry allows for multiple layouts, offering compositional freedom and ensuring that each assembly is unique, adapting to the needs and desires of each project.

The cobogó's design connects with Brazilian tradition while also evoking Mediterranean references, recalling historic cities and landscapes steeped in memory. The result is a piece that transcends practical function and transforms urban waste into architectural poetry, reaffirming the ability to find beauty, meaning, and sustainability in what was once mere waste.

Cobogó Alberobello epitomizes the search for more conscious architectural solutions, demonstrating that it is possible to combine creativity, environmental responsibility, and aesthetic sensitivity in each module produced.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

The Semear cinzas (2024) initiative, conceived by artist Ana Lúcia Canetti, featured photographer Mariana Alves and was part of the Coordenadas […] event, held by the Graduate Program in Visual Arts at the University of Brasília. The event, which has been running for 10 years under the coordination of Professor Karina Dias, seeks to interrupt, even briefly, routine relationships with the landscape, reinventing connections with urban space through collective actions.

Ana Lúcia Canetti is a visual artist, ceramist and PhD candidate in Visual Arts at UnB. She holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Faculty of Arts of Paraná (2007), a master's degree in Psychology from UFSC (2010), in the research line "Ethical and aesthetic relationships and creative processes", and a degree in psychology from UFPR (2004).

For the work, the artist produced twenty ceramic pieces. Some were fired at high temperatures and glazed with ash; others were fired at low temperatures using the raku and raku nu techniques, in which soot from the vegetable firing is inscribed on the pieces, creating dots and lines.

Each participant chose one of these pieces and walked through a pine monoculture area in Brasília, DF, sowing plant ash harvested from different regions of the Cerrado. Some blew it, others spread it with their fingers or threw it into the air. Before the walk, they received instructions with the following instructions:

Choose a seed made of clay and fire
Try to read the messages left by the burning
What is written by soot in the earth's fractures?
What do the colors of the glazes reveal?

Walk in a group and sow ashes
Try to read what is advertised and fall to the ground
What do these little dust clouds tell us?

Being in the world is gardening other species
And also be the object of your sowings
What are we sowing? How are we being gardened?

I invite you to sow the glow of an extinguished fire,
Redistributing meanings of life in the darkness of the landscapes,
Bypassing repetitions,
Touching infertile soils,
Spreading sparks that can still light us up.

The work was inspired by the book *The Sower – On Contemporary Nature*, by Emanuele Coccia (2022). For the author, sowing is a form of illumination: a “distribution of astral light in terrestrial space,” created by fragments of matter that capture sunlight in the “mineral and gray flesh of the earth” (p. 30). Coccia proposes an analogy between the sower and the painter: both manipulate light as they attempt to redesign the world. The landscape, in this context, is less a geological figure and more an economy of light. Sowing and painting thus become a politics of light—“an act of setting the sun and its astral force elsewhere in the cosmos” (p. 45).

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

Located on Unileão's Lagoa Seca campus in Juazeiro do Norte, the new multifunctional building was conceived as a strategic element to strengthen the integration of teaching, research, culture, and community life. The building houses the Central Library, a thousand-seat auditorium, classrooms, healthcare laboratories, and administrative departments. These spaces are interconnected by open-plan and lounge areas that foster social interaction and encourage users to stay.

The design emphasizes dialogue with the rest of the campus and also serves as a gateway to the Veterinary Hospital. One of the project's highlights is the large grandstand that connects the entrance plaza to the auditorium foyer, becoming a meeting and contemplation space with a privileged view of the Chapada do Araripe and taking advantage of natural ventilation. More than just a topographical transition element, this grandstand serves a social and symbolic function, solidifying itself as a landmark on campus.

The building's materiality reinforces its connection to the surrounding area. Its reinforced concrete structure ensures robustness and rational construction, while the solid ceramic brick walls, produced locally, contribute to both climate control and the project's identity. On the east and west facades, hollow bricks filter intense sunlight, promoting thermal comfort—a key factor in the region's semi-arid climate.

The project incorporates indoor and outdoor gardens with native or adapted species, creating a pleasant microclimate through evaporative cooling. These gardens go beyond landscaping, playing a functional and environmental role, contributing to sustainability and the well-being of users.

The spatial organization follows a rational logic. The 8 x 10-meter structural modulation optimizes execution, reduces costs, and ensures flexibility of use over time, allowing the building to adapt to new demands and extend its useful life. Between the main volumes, a shaded roof connects the blocks and provides a space protected from the sun, expanding the outdoor living areas.

The ensemble's volume is notable for the contrast between the orthogonal blocks and the auditorium's elliptical shape. This choice breaks the rigidity of the composition and adds dynamism and architectural identity to the ensemble.

More than just an academic building, Unileão's new multifunctional building is a cultural, social, and environmental infrastructure, deeply rooted in the territory and sensitive to the local climate and cultural conditions. By valuing regional materials, integrating the landscape, and creating meeting spaces, the project reflects the campus's vocation as a space for knowledge, belonging, and well-being.

Project implementation: Brazil
Project development: Brazil

Bianca Cuvello, an architect and urban planner with a degree from the Federal University of Amazonas and a native of Manaus, understands that the urban development of the Amazonas capital is intrinsically conditioned by the natural environment, especially the extensive river basin that characterizes the region. However, rapid urbanization has intensified the phenomenon of peripheralization, creating complex challenges related to social inclusion and access to decent housing. Spatial segregation, in this context, pushes low-income populations to areas where infrastructure is precarious and insufficient.

Given this scenario, amphibious housing emerges as an alternative capable of mitigating these problems, promoting a more balanced integration between residents and floodplain and wetland areas. Amphibious architecture, designed to be built over water, seeks to combine sustainability and technological innovation with construction solutions adapted to the surrounding environment, combining two fundamental structural typologies: stilt housing and floating housing.

This strategy reaffirms the limits and potential imposed by the Amazon's natural constraints, while enabling the occupation of historically neglected and sparsely populated urban spaces. Furthermore, the proposal engages with the city's social and housing issues through design guidelines aligned with the 5 Points for Amazonian Architecture (Cereto, 2024). Therefore, the objective is to reflect on housing solutions that not only respond to Manaus's environmental specificities but also promote the social integration of marginalized populations into the established urban fabric.

Thus, the amphibious housing typology aims to ensure functionality and efficiency, incorporating appropriate equipment and construction systems consistent with local economic constraints, especially in a context marked by scarcity of resources.

Project implementation: China
Project development: China

The China Architecture Exhibition at the 14th São Paulo International Architecture Biennial, Sharing · Intergrowth · Commensality: Designing for an Overheated Planet, marks a rare collective appearance of thirty leading Chinese architects. Each participant brings a new work shaped by the winds of place, the memory of land, and the urgencies of climate. These projects are not declarations of form or displays of personal signature, but rather quiet and meaningful conversations with rivers, with mountains, with neighborhoods, and with people. Taken together.

The curatorial team—Chief Curator Li Cundong and Executive Curator Xiao Wei—has deliberately resisted imposing a single style or narrative. Instead, they allow a chorus of voices to emerge, weaving together traditions, innovations, and visions for the future. Their approach highlights architecture not only as technical production but also as cultural empathy and ecological responsibility.

The exhibition is structured around five threads: Vernacular Resonance, which reinterprets local traditions such as courtyards, timber frames, or village patterns as seeds for grounded futures; Green Innovation, where sustainability is not ornament but origin, integrating renewable energy, biomaterials, and circular practices; Resilience for the Future, proposing adaptive infrastructures and public spaces capable of withstanding floods, droughts, and extremes; The Value of Margins, where innovation arises in peripheries, informal settlements, and ecological frontiers; and Back to Balance, a forward-looking outlook toward the UIA World Congress of Architects 2029 in Beijing.

Complementing these are five additional perspectives: Green Building, advancing ecological balance through low-carbon life-cycle strategies; Urban Regeneration, reactivating dormant urban areas through site-specific interventions that respect history while meeting contemporary needs; Landscape Architecture, reweaving fragmented ecosystems and enhancing climate resilience; Rural Revitalization, creatively transforming traditional settlements into new paradigms of endogenous growth; and Innovation Practices, which break disciplinary boundaries and explore new possibilities at the intersection of digital technology, biomimicry, and social experimentation.

As one of the core exhibitions of this Biennial, the China Architecture Exhibition is less a display of “feats” and more a practice of shared responsibility. It demonstrates how architecture can remain humble yet transformative—anchored in place, attentive to people, and oriented toward a more balanced and sustainable planetary future.