Long before architecture took the form of walls, roofs, or cities, it gathered people around fire. The simple fire pit was one of humanity's earliest spatial devices: a place for warmth, food, storytelling, and ritual. Around it, space took shape through proximity rather than enclosure, through shared presence rather than prescribed use. The fire organized bodies in a circle, fostered alliances, and turned survival into collective life.
Let's Glow SF, the nation's largest FREE holiday projection arts festival, is making a triumphant return to downtown San Francisco for its fifth and grandest year yet. This all-ages and family friendly event runs for 10 nights from December 5-14, 2025. Breathtaking animated projections will illuminate eight landmark buildings across the city's core nightly from 5:30pm to 10:00pm, transforming them into colossal, colorful canvases featuring work by 19 artists from around the globe.
Last fall, Philadelphia's Center City District (CCD) launched Open Streets: West Walnut on a series of Sundays. One Sunday at a time, the program showed off Center City's innate vibrancy when it catered to people and not cars. CCD provided some light programming, such as musical acts and dance performances, as well as more casual DIY programming, such as corn hole and ping pong, and a few seating pods.
The architect's role has traditionally been relatively well-defined: design a building, direct the project, coordinate logistics, and guide construction through to completion. As specialised fields have proliferated, together with a rapidly changing social economy, the practice of architecture has diversified, opening multiple paths for how architects can contribute to society. Since the 1980s, one of the most consistent shifts may have been the separation between the "design architect" and the "architect of record."
In an era marked by rapid urbanisation and greenfield development, India's cities are grappling with the challenge of vehicle-centric planning and a critical scarcity of genuine communal spaces. Against this backdrop, a cluster of defunct cotton mills has been given new life-and a new purpose. Formerly home to Lakshmi Mills, one of India's oldest yarn and fabric manufacturing companies, the iconic site at a major urban node is now the focal point of a massive redevelopment initiative.
In 2021, Sanaa Shaikh was burned out. As a South Asian woman working in an overwhelmingly white and male profession, she had spent years experiencing her fair share of discrimination and microaggressions-while at the same time being tasked with designing housing developments for underserved communities where she routinely felt like her ideas and perspective were dismissed. She was ready to move on.
