Articles by Olivia Poston

The ReGreeneration project, led by C40 Cities and supported by ARUP, Placemaking Europe, Climato Sfera, Inetum, and many others, operates at the intersection of urban ecology, public health, infrastructure, and neighborhood-scale design. Its premise addresses how European cities are built and maintained and how they experience a changing climate, arguing that cities must fundamentally change to remain livable under accelerating climate pressures.

Architects carefully calibrate their relationship to the earth, adjusting foundations to soil, groundwater, climate, risk, and culture. Driven timber piles, rammed-earth platforms, and poured concrete slabs are each a response to a specific set of ground conditions, and each shapes the architecture that rises from it. The way a building meets the earth determines its durability and its limits because foundations are among the most consequential design choices an architect makes.

Pilgrimage is one of the oldest and most persistent cultural practices, a spatial expression of humanity’s search for meaning that has taken form across geographies and religions. While traditionally tied to formal belief systems, its definition has expanded in recent decades, reflecting new understandings of what is sacred and where meaning can be found. This shift reveals something fundamental: the act of moving through space remains central to how people construct meaningful experience. Yet most built environments constructed today are designed to be approached at speed from roads, transit corridors, airports, and optimized urban cores. The Camino de Santiago stands as a sustained counterargument to this condition. It is a piece of distributed architecture, refined over centuries, that remains a sophisticated example of design organized around the moving human body.

In 2023, ArchDaily’s editor-in-chief sat down with Tarek Qaddumi, Executive Director of the Line Design at NEOM, at the closing of the Line Exhibition in Riyadh. Qaddumi described a layered, three-dimensional city organized around the idea of a “five-minute sphere” of access: walkable communities stacked vertically, connected by high-speed rail, freed from cars and conventional street infrastructure, and designed to coexist symbiotically with the surrounding natural landscape. It was a compelling vision, and in the context of the moment, it was simultaneously credible and appealing. For architects and urban thinkers grappling with the failures of twentieth-century city-building, the ideas articulated were worth engaging and planning.

San Francisco is a city that has always remade itself under pressure. Its Victorian streetscapes have survived seismic retrofits and glass towers, its neighborhoods defined as much by change as by its resistance to change. But no force in the city’s history has reshaped the built environment as completely, or as quickly, as the technology economy. What began in the postwar sprawl of Silicon Valley migrated north and inscribed its logic onto the skyline and the lives of residents. The result of this logic is an architectural culture of considerable technical refinement and refined material palettes, yet one that remains largely indifferent to the existing population.

Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district. For many years, built-environment professionals have treated infrastructure as a technical challenge. Mobility justice insists it is, fundamentally, a political one.

The future of transportation hubs in the United States will not be defined by iconic metropolitan airport terminals and expansive central train stations. Rural communities contain the majority of the nation’s road miles, carry nearly half of all truck vehicle miles traveled, and originate two-thirds of rail freight. These realities position rural transportation hubs as vital regional access points and distribution centers that shape national mobility outside models of urban extensions.

As climate variability intensifies, extreme storms are becoming more frequent in some regions while water scarcity deepens in others. Architects are increasingly pressed to reconsider how buildings engage with rainfall as an environmental force and a design resource. How can architecture move beyond shedding the excess water to actively collect, store, and reuse it? What would it mean to treat rainwater as a material that shapes resilient and meaningful spaces?

Post offices stand among the most enduring monuments of civic life in the United States. Across towns and city centers, they carry the shifting architectural ambitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Greek Revival formality to Beaux-Arts monumentality and Art Deco ornament. Architects and federal planners would give these buildings a clear public role and a powerful physical presence. Stone façades, monumental halls, and crafted interiors projected stability, trust, and permanence. The post office placed the federal government directly into the everyday landscape of American life.

Postmodernism in the United States turned architecture into a stage for cultural memory, irony, and heritage at a moment when the built environment was becoming less civic and more commercial and curated. By the late twentieth century, architectural investment no longer centered on monumental public institutions or shared federal commitment to civic space. Private development, corporate expansion, and consumer environments increasingly shaped cities across the country. Buildings took on a new role as cultural images, expected to communicate identity and meaning as much as they provided function.