AV Proyectos 122 deals with material scarcity, a topic on the agenda of several academic publications analyzed by Luis Fernández-Galiano, and illustrated here in a journey through seven projects in the Global South that stand out for their creativity

Luis Fernández-Galiano   An event in the Gulf and two books of Harvard and Yale have scarcity as their focus. Sharjah, the cultural capital of the Emirates, gathers 65 participants from 40 countries in its second Architecture Triennial, developed between November 2023 and Ma

Chat Architects   Thailand   Located off the coast of the Angsila fishing village, in Chonburi Province, Thailand, this prototype designed to boost ecotourism draws on the bamboo scaffolding traditionally used for oyster cultivation. The local fishermen bring people visiting Ang

A Threshold   India   On land where fruit-bearing plants are grown, arches of different sizes and walls of brick peep through dense vegetation, looking like ruins of an abandoned construction. Outside Kaggalipura, a village some 40 kilometers south of Bangalore, the capit

Daaz Office   Iran   A project of the NGO Iran-e-Man, this educational center for children is also a gathering and learning place for people of the Iranian village of Seyed-Bar. The budget was limited but the villagers took part both physically and financially in realizi

BE_Design   Rwanda   Bruce Engel, who founded BE_Design in 2016, was commissioned to raise this shelter for health, education, and mentorship programs catering to women, which doubles as a place for the rural community to gather in. At the heart of the building is a spac

Atelier Masomi    Niger   In rural Niger, markets run on a weekly basis, but the fast demographic growth of the remote village of Dandaji led to building of a new marketplace for daily shopping, on the original site around the ancestral tree villagers have always gathered at.

Juan Salamanca Balen - SALBA estudio   Colombia   Located 20 kilometers to the north of the municipality of Uribia, in Colombia’s La Guajira department, this school for the indigenous Wayuu community is immersed in a desert landscape. The project seeks to reflect the pillars of the organization behi

Natura Futura Arquitectura, Frontera Sur Arquitectura   Ecuador   In Huaquillas, a town in the province of El Oro, on Ecuador's border with Peru, this project of Fundación Comunidad Solidaria y Farmacias Mia transformed an insalubrious space into something decent for a family that makes a living collecting recyclab

Alberto Ballesteros   Humboldt already pointed out the huge inequality that existed in Mexico, which reveals to what extent the problem plagues the history of the country. Many efforts have been made to rebalance the scale, but in the last six years a Federal Plan promote

Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter   Sweden   The extension is conceived as a composition of several volumes clad with the typical brick of the area, but reinterpreted with a lighter appearance, as an openwork, which adds visual appeal and dynamism to the facade by creating an interplay of light

Dorte Mandrup   Sweden   The materials proposed for the extension establish a continuum with the original building, on which it rests lightly with a glass-topped gallery while preserving its identity with a fragmented facade that adapts the scale of the museum to that of the

Herzog & de Meuron, Olsson Lyckefors    Sweden   The twin volume in proportion, scale, and materiality is placed close to its antecessor, leaving between them a narrow courtyard-gallery space that organizes the museum route, and culminates in both facades in a curve that connects the two...

Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra   Spain   The Royal Shipyards of Seville are the city’s most impressive civil construction. They are located in a privileged spot: in the Arenal neighborhood, midway between the river and the monumental site of the Cathedral, the Archive of the Indies, and the

In the context of the ‘Le monde comme il va’ exhibition, South Korean artist Kimsooja presents her latest work, To Breathe - Constellation, set up in the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, refurbished just three years ago by the prominent Ja

During the first months of 2023, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei displayed a recreation of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series, for which he used almost 650,000 Lego blocks. Just one year later, the historic space of the cinema-theater occupied by the Ga

Marlborough Gallery, founded in 1946 by Frank Lloyd and Harry Fischer, will shut down this month of June, after nearly 80 years. The closing will affect its original base in London and locations in New York, Barcelona, and Madrid. In Spain the galler

During the 2024 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the Empire Polo Field was transformed into a caleidoscopic landscape filled with a selection of large-scale installations. Curated by the Public Art Company, this edition’s exhibition combined

Cosmos is a modular furniture system on which the Norman Foster Foundation has been working since 2019, now produced in collaboration with Tecno and presented during Milan Design Week 2024. The main design feature is the use of the least material po