Courtesy of [applied] Foreign Affairs, Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Share
Or
https://www.archdaily.com/1037581/coming-together-and-the-making-of-place-archdailys-january-editorial-focus
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. Today, this ancestral logic persists: architecture has the potential of bringing people together not by commanding how they gather, but by creating the conditions that make togetherness possible.
This month, ArchDaily explores Coming Together and the Making of Place, a topic that examines architecture as a framework for inclusion, care, and belonging. The theme aligns with the first edition of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards, which approach care from a collective perspective by focusing on spaces that nurture better ways of living together. Looking beyond iconic gathering spaces, the coverage considers everyday environments, from food markets, communal tables, and neighborhood plazas to third spaces, domestic settings, and digital or hybrid environments of remote togetherness. Rather than treating togetherness as a fixed program, it asks how spatial design can support openness, diversity, and collective life without enforcing uniform ways of gathering.
B Garden / 3andwich Design / He Wei Studio. Image © Weiqi Jin
Across the month, the coverage will explore how culinary spaces and shared meals operate as powerful architectural tools for connection, shaping local identity and social exchange. It will examine public markets, plazas, and leisure spaces as social catalysts, where architecture is experienced over time and through repetition. Other articles look at third spaces, neither home nor work, and how they foster informal belonging, as well as the tensions that emerge when safety, control, and exclusion reshape public life, particularly in the Global South.
Related Article Best Articles of 2025: Plural Practices, Environmental Responses, and an Architecture of Care
The topic also turns inward, addressing domestic and educational environments where togetherness is negotiated daily. From multi-generational living arrangements to experimental learning spaces, these settings reveal how architecture can enable care, flexibility, and shared responsibility. Accessibility, in this context, is approached not as a universal checklist, but as a cultural and contextual condition that challenges standardized solutions and calls for situated responses.
Public space for residents and the public. Image © Pingnan Chen
As these spaces are examined, broader questions emerge: What makes a space truly inclusive, and who decides? How does gathering transform space into place? Can accessibility ever be universal, or must it always be contextual? And what new forms of togetherness are taking shape in digital and hybrid environments?
This month’s coverage invites readers to reflect on how architecture can cultivate encounters without imposing them, embrace difference without erasing it, and create environments where people feel not only present, but invited.
Image © Nguyen Gia Phong, Son Vu
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: Coming Together and the Making of Place. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and architecture projects. We invite you to learn more about our ArchDaily Topics. And, as always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.