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Understanding Light Sources: Types, Metrics, and Their Role in Architectural Design
Walking into an electrical store can be intimidating. At first glance, all the lights are on, and the thousands of chandeliers and lamps are blinding. When you walk toward the shelves, you see dozens of options, shapes, colors, prices, and uses. On each package, informational tables display numbers that can seem confusing at first. Lumens, color temperature, wattage—there are many unfamiliar terms. Before defaulting to the cheapest option, only to find that it creates an uncomfortable or poorly balanced atmosphere, understanding a few key concepts can make a significant difference.
Lighting design plays a fundamental role in shaping how spaces are perceived and used, influencing comfort, atmosphere, and even productivity. Poorly designed lighting, on the other hand, can compromise these qualities. Rather than approaching lighting as a purely technical decision, it can be understood as an integral part of architectural design. To help clarify these choices, the following overview introduces the most common types of light sources and key concepts associated with them.
C1 Workplace / Bruzkus Greenberg
- architects: Bruzkus Greenberg
- Location: Mollstrasse, Berlin, Germany
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Robert Rieger
- Area: 1600.0 m2
Rethinking the Architecture Firm for the AI Era
Artificial intelligence has made its way into almost every corner of professional workflows, prompting the architectural industry to rethink how it works. To adapt to this shift, firms are now facing the limits of a model that has changed very little over the past few decades.
What has shifted, and noticeably so, is the pressure on productivity. Today's studios are expected to deliver more work faster and with greater accuracy, while managing tighter budgets, complex regulations, and rising client expectations. In practice, this translates into compressed timelines and a constant demand for precision that leaves little room for error. Often, much of this pressure falls on a small group of individuals who hold critical project knowledge.
One Week Until WUF13 Begins in Baku: Exploring Safe and Resilient Cities Under the Theme “Housing the World”
Co-organized by UN-Habitat and the Government of Azerbaijan, the thirteenth session of the World Urban Forum 13 will take place in Baku from May 17 to 22, 2026, under the theme "Housing the World: Safe and Resilient Cities and Communities." Convened every two years by UN-Habitat, the World Urban Forum is considered one of the leading international conferences dedicated to urbanization and the future of cities. Bringing together architects, planners, policymakers, researchers, local governments, and civil society organizations, the forum serves as a platform for discussing the challenges shaping contemporary urban environments and the strategies needed to address them.
Warsaw Uprising Mound / Archigrest + topoScape
- architects: Archigrest
- architects: topoScape
- Location: Warsaw, Poland
- Project Year: 2023
- Photographs: Michał Szlaga
- Area: 83000.0 m2
Casanova+Hernandez Architects Advances Renovation of Albania’s National Historical Museum
The initial phase of the complete renovation project for the National Historical Museum in Tirana is approaching completion. The project was commissioned by the Ministry of Economy, Culture, and Innovation of Albania and UNOPS, and financed by the European Commission through the EU for Culture (EU4C) program in Albania. The full restoration of the museum's 21,400 square meters is planned in two phases, led by Rotterdam-based Casanova + Hernandez Architects in collaboration with local partner iRI. The first phase consists of the restoration of the existing building located in Skanderbeg Square and is expected to be completed this year, enabling the immediate start of the second phase focused on the redesign of the interior spaces.
Furniture as Architecture: Micro-Modernisms Inside the Home
Modernism is often encountered through built form, photographed facades, canonical plans, concrete manifestos. For most people, its first encounter was far more immediate. It was a chair in an office, a shelf in a living room, a compact unit that reorganized how one sat, stored, or slept. Long before modern architecture could be widely commissioned, it was furniture that entered everyday space, carrying with it a new logic of living. Modernism's promise of transforming life was often delivered through these smaller, repeatable objects.
To understand this shift, furniture has to be read as a condensed form of architecture rather than decoration. Early twentieth-century designers treated it precisely this way. Le Corbusier described furniture as équipement de l'habitation (equipment of living), placing it within the operational system of the building rather than outside it. Similarly, the Bauhaus approached chairs and tables as industrial prototypes, embedding principles of standardization, efficiency, and mass production into their design. As architectural historian Beatriz Colomina has argued, modern architecture did not circulate only through buildings, but through media and objects that translated its ideas into everyday life. Furniture became architecture in miniature: portable, reproducible, and capable of reorganizing space without reconstructing it.
Landscape Staircase in the Vall del Pardís / Comas-Pont arquitectes
- architects: Comas-Pont arquitectes
- Location: Manresa, Spain
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Adrià Goula
- Area: 643.0 m2
Innovation Lab / MTA ARCHITECTS
Mastering Interdisciplinary Architecture and Sustainable Urbanism at UC Berkeley
Today, interdisciplinary learning and exchange are more important than ever in addressing increasingly complex environmental, social, and urban challenges.
Each summer, the University of California, Berkeley's College of Environmental Design (CED) becomes an intensive laboratory for architectural, landscape, and urban exploration. Through two complementary programs—Design + Innovation for Sustainable Cities (DISC) and the Summer Institutes—Berkeley offers an immersive curriculum grounded in disciplinary rigor, intentional exchange, and a shared institutional culture. Together, these programs reflect CED's long-standing multidisciplinary structure, with architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, and urban design thriving and collaborating under one roof.
Shenzhen Longhua Foreign Languages School (Fucheng Campus) / Z&Z STUDIO
- architects: Z&Z STUDIO
- Location: The Southwest Corner of the Intersection of Guanlan Avenue and the Planned Xitian Road in Longhua District, Shenzhen, China
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Tianpei Zeng
- Area: 55737.0 m2
The Tiny House / 7th Hue Architecture Collective
- architects: 7th Hue Architecture Collective
- Location: Thrissur, Kerala, India
- Project Year: 2024
- Photographs: Marc Frames
- Area: 2023.0 ft2
The Southern Lookout / AJC Architects
- architects: AJC Architects
- Location: Hornsby, Sydney, Australia
- Project Year: 2026
- Photographs: Alexander Mayes
- Area: 200.0 m2
Vallarta Forest House / Díaz Webster Arquitectura
- architects: Díaz Webster Arquitectura
- Location: Zapopan, México
- Project Year: 2024
- Photographs: Rafael Palacios Macías
- Area: 237.0 m2
MOM Apartment / J.MAYER H.
- architects: J.MAYER H.
- Location: Berlin, Germany
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Frank Sperling
Bearing House / Dub Studios
- architects: Dub Studios
- Location: Santa Monica, United States
- Project Year: 2023
- Photographs: Dub Studios
- Area: 2500.0 ft2
Above Water, Slope, and Forest: Elevated Architecture in Latin America
In Latin America, the ground is rarely just a surface to build on. It can be a river edge, a steep slope, a humid forest floor, a floodable landscape, or a territory under ecological pressure, and in many cases, it carries a history of communities that already knew how to respond to it, building on stilts, on platforms, over water, long before contemporary architecture asked the same questions.
These projects continue that conversation. They engage with conditions that move, absorb, erode, and grow, rather than treating the ground as something to level or control. Elevation allows architecture to adapt without fully taking over: water can pass below, vegetation can remain, and slopes can keep their original condition. In each case, the decision to rise is tied to something specific: water, humidity, topography, vegetation, or ecological recovery, and the knowledge of how to build within it and not against it.
Jardins Secrets Bioclimatic Shells / Vincent Callebaut Architectures
- architects: Vincent Callebaut Architectures
- Location: Montpellier, France
- Project Year: 2026
- Photographs: Vincent Callebaut Architectures
- Area: 8209.0 m2
Kawagebo Snow Mountain Hotel / Moguang Studio
- architects: Moguang Studio
- Location: Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, China
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Yumeng Zhu
- Photographs: Haiting Sun
- Photographs: Moguang Studio
- Area: 2500.0 m2
The Spatial Continuum / Abin Design Studio
- architects: Abin Design Studio
- Location: Kolkata, India
- Project Year: 2025
- Photographs: Manan Surti Photography
- Area: 605.0 m2