Latin America in Focus: This Month in Architecture

This October, architecture across Latin America became a platform for exchange, bringing together discussions on inhabitation, cultural identity, emerging practices, and the relationship between the built environment and its wider context. From conversations on emerging architectural practices and material research at Design Week Mexico to new approaches to housing, landscape, and public space in Chile and Mexico, recent developments highlight how architecture responds to specific local conditions. Across the region, initiatives addressing climate adaptation and heritage recovery in the Dominican Republic and Colombia also bring attention to the changing responsibilities of cultural institutions and the built environment.

Latin America in Focus: This Month in Architecture, Social Housing, and Heritage Recovery. + 3 Architecture as a Platform for Exchange: Biennials, Design, and Emerging Practices Across Latin America “Inhabiting the Extreme: An Architectural Biography of Antarctica,” by the collective 6044 Sur. Image Courtesy of Bienal Internacional de Arquitectura de Buenos Aires The 20th Buenos Aires International Architecture Biennial brought architecture into a broader conversation about inhabitation, examining how social, cultural, environmental, and political conditions shape the ways people live.

Held under the curatorial theme INHABIT, the event brought together international lectures, exhibitions, and public activities across six main venues and partner institutions, with contributions from architects including Smiljan Radić, Solano Benitez, Andrés Jaque, and Marina Otero Verzier. Through discussions on memory, materiality, urban development, and the relationship between architecture and its context, the Biennial positioned inhabitation as a framework for understanding architecture’s role in shaping contemporary societies. Its exhibitions and public program continued throughout October as part of Buenos Aires Design and Architecture Month, extending the exchange beyond the International Forum and into the city’s cultural institutions.