Community

The Temple of Darkness Bakhoor Bakhoor by Bunga Design Atelier is an outdoor experiential installation – a contemporary temple born from smoke, scent, and silence. Inspired by the ritual of burning bakhoor, where fragrant wood releases sacred fumes into the air, the piece reimagines the temple as a space of reflection rather than worship, of darkness rather than light.

The void left in the heart of a neighborhood when a school closes is difficult to fill. This was the case with this 1970s school, built according to the same standards as many others of its time in southeastern Spain. When the educational program was relocated, the life and activity once linked to the school disappeared, leaving behind an empty building at the center of the neighborhood.

The Bale Bio Pavilion reinterprets the Bale Banjar, the open-sided meeting hall that anchors every Balinese village. Raised off the ground and open to the air, the Bale Banjar has long been a space for ceremony, music, and community discussion. At Mertasari Beach in Sanur, Cave Urban translated this familiar form into a lightweight pavilion built from bamboo and recycled materials, merging local typology with regenerative design principles. “We were really interested in the Bale Banjar,” says Jed Long, Director at Cave Urban. “It’s a space that everyone in Bali recognises, a structure that connects people and community.”

The Street is envisioned as a community house designed for a plotted residential development of modest 1500 sq.ft. plots, where each homeowner builds their own dream home. As urban land becomes increasingly expensive, many families are moving to the city’s peripheries. This transition, however, often comes with a loss of the vibrant social life found in traditional neighbourhoods. The Street seeks to bridge this gap by offering a shared space that complements the Indian way of life, rooted in community interaction, cultural continuity, and everyday connection.

A heterogeneous working-class neighborhood from the 1960s receives a new social meeting point: Stadtteiltreff Augustin. The site lies between a secondary school, a church, and cooperative housing. The aim was to create an open, low-threshold space, free of hierarchies, accessible to all, regardless of age, background, or social status.

The concept of the planning of the auditorium complex in Coimbatore is purely based on location and function. It was the client who clearly stated that the building must not obstruct any vision either from outside the campus or from inside. Any other form other than a dome would have been catastrophic.

The PAPER house is a community house located in Dongbo yuan, a residential compound in Hudong Sub-district. VIASCAPE has been working on urban regeneration projects in this area for years, while the PAPER house appears to be a unique experimental case among all VIASCAPE’s practices. This pioneering project targets at a compatibility of design regulations and site restrictions through full-term public participation, with which spatial installation, and design thoughts could be weaved into residents’ daily lives. We also continually try to exploit a possible way of combining formal and informal construction with more common benefits.

Redmond Washington’s Municipal Campus has a vibrant new addition: a 52,000-square-foot, recreation facility designed by Opsis Architecture of Portland, OR and Johnston Architects (JA) of Seattle, WA. The state-of-the-art Redmond Senior & Community Center is a hub for health, wellness and connection, designed to bring generations together while becoming a source of civic pride for the city.