How Asia's 5,000-year-old rice terraces are inspiring modern flood control

Tiny homes are a growing solution to homeless veterans and vulnerable youth, especially those who identify as LGBTQ. But the movement faces challenges from regulations and neighbors across the nation.

The architecture of a hospital can have huge effects on those inside it: the strain that old hospital buildings put on nurses, who spend too much of their time walking from one supply room to another, and on patients, whose already frail health is tested by living in rooms with one to three other patients, by the noise of the hospital, by infections. St. Mary’s Hospital in Sechelt, B.C., opened a new $44-million dollar building that has made the inside quality of life and care better.

Although the poor Nigerian village of Makoko has some makeshift schools, they cannot cater for the increasing number of children in the area. But a new floating school is aimed at generating a sustainable, inexpensive, ecological, alternative building system and urban water culture for the population of Africa’s coastal regions.

Pop-ups, temporary constructions intended to enliven public places, can often be used as temporary structures and events as marketing tools, and as camouflage for their larger and less charming permanent developments. But young architects in London, their talent and energy outrunning their employment opportunities, initiate, design and build pop-ups as glimpses of what a better city – more open, more social, more pleasurable, more surprising – might be

Last year, Venezuela became an urban laboratory for architects and urban designers who believe in the implementation of participatory processes and collaborative design techniques in order to change communities who live under threat. This initiative activated urban processes of physical and social transformation through architecture, using self-building techniques in public spaces located in conflictive urban contexts.

The physical classroom environment can have profound effects on a student’s academic performance, sense of belonging, and self-esteem. What would the Platonic ideal classroom look like, illustrated? It might include more greenery, fewer visual distractions on classroom walls, and some tweaks to light sources.

While billions of taxpayer dollars are allocated each year to support shelters and social service initiatives, homelessness remains a persistent problem in the U.S. - in 2013, an estimated 610,000 people slept without shelter every night. All over the country, people are building "tiny homes" to give to the homeless, providing them with shelter, a bathroom, and a kitchen for less then the cost of a shelter.

For a megacity with more than 18 million people in its metro area, Mumbai, India is not a particularly vertical city. Many of its inhabitants squeeze into low-rise slums crammed into the urban space. But an ongoing slum rehabilitation program seeks to clear these corrugated metal shacks and relocate the slum-dwellers to new high rises.

What can you do to enjoy time with Alzheimer’s patients? A suburb near San Diego has recently opened a new town square with architecture designed to look like it is from the 1950s. The space offers aging baby boomers with dementia or Alzheimer’s a place to enjoy and interact with nostalgia.

Can we engineer buildings to prevent collapse in earthquakes? The answer is yes, and the Inquiry dives into how better building design can save more and more lives as urban density increases.