UNI
A collaborative community of Architects
Journals
Tallinn's Pearl: A Shell-Shaped Opera House Rising from the Baltic Harbor
Martin Thüring's competition entry distributes an opera house across five interconnected organic volumes on Tallinn's waterfront.
Immersion: An Opera House Born from Ripples, Sound Waves, and Coastal Terrain
Paulina Walachowska's conceptual opera house translates wave propagation and acoustic geometry into a walkable public landscape.
Submersion: A Modular Kit for Building Communities Beneath the Ocean
A scalable underwater habitat system organized around repeatable hubs, standardized connections, and renewable infrastructure for long-term subsea living.
Extended Shell: Retrofitting Kolkata's Balconies as Living Urban Thresholds
A modular retrofit system recovers the social and environmental intelligence of Kolkata's historic verandas for contemporary Park Street residents.
Redefining the Pacific: A Stingray-Inspired Underwater Colony That Grows Like a Living Organism
Modular marine pods elevated above the seabed connect into expandable underwater settlements inspired by stingray biology and behavior.
Kelpscape: An Underwater Habitat That Becomes Part of the Kelp Forest
A submersible research vessel designed to be colonized by the very marine ecosystem it studies, blurring the line between architecture and organism.
OASIS: A Spherical Underwater Habitat Engineered for Life on the Pacific Shelf
A 16.6-meter geodesic sphere proposes self-sufficient living 200 meters below the Pacific, turning structure into landscape.
Temporary Home for Dogs: A Reversed Zoo Rethinks Animal Shelter Architecture
In Bucharest, a sinuous corridor and freed landscape flip the logic of containment, designing a shelter that works to make itself unnecessary.
Above the Baltic: A Lighthouse Reimagined as Tallinn's Waterfront Opera House
Three brick volumes and a tilted glass tower turn a new opera house into both cultural institution and maritime beacon on Tallinn's coastline.
Wireless CoralPods: Modular Underwater Habitats That Grow Like Coral Colonies
A winning underwater architecture proposal imagines detachable, self-sustaining pods that coexist with marine ecosystems rather than displacing them.
Animal Harbor: Rethinking the Shelter as a Civic Landscape in Bucharest
A sprawling complex of curved volumes, planted courtyards, and public programs repositions the animal shelter as a social destination.
One Community: An Animal Shelter That Refuses to Hide from Its City
Bucharest's stray animal crisis becomes a catalyst for public space, memorial landscape, and social infrastructure in this layered proposal.
Opera by the Sea Estonia: Three Shells Dissolving Architecture into Tallinn's Coastline
A winning opera house proposal replaces monumental form with interconnected shells that blur the boundary between building, park and Baltic Sea.
Modular Balconies: A Kit-of-Parts System That Lets Residents Design Their Own Outdoor Spaces
A 50 x 50 cm modular grid transforms identical balcony footprints into gardens, gyms, reading nooks, and social spaces shaped by daily life.
Operative Sanctuary: Architecture Designed for Marine Life, Not Human Comfort
A speculative underwater habitat reframes sustainable architecture as ecological infrastructure for species threatened by ocean pollution.
Gateway to the Deep: A Vertical Architecture for Ocean Floor Access
A pressurized descent system reimagines how architecture might bridge the ocean surface and the sea floor through modular, deployable units.
Opera by the Sea: Two Hyperbolic Paraboloids Frame Tallinn's Baltic Waterfront
A dual-faced opera house interprets Tallinn's historic towers toward the city and opens panoramic glazing toward the Baltic horizon.
Faces of the Soviet Avant-Garde: Turning Moscow's Street Names into an Open-Air Museum
A network of sculptural installations across a Moscow residential district transforms forgotten architect names into spatial encounters with cultural memor
Social Nature: Replacing Fences with Landscape to Rethink Animal Shelter Architecture
A layered system of habitats, elevated walkways, and modular pavilions creates a gradient from public park to protected animal territory.
Post Estonia: An Opera House Conceived as a Field of Glacial Boulders on Tallinn's Waterfront
Alvin Huang and Byron Cai fragment the opera house into an archipelago of geological masses that rethink civic monumentality along the Baltic Sea.
Music Connects Everything: A Fractured Stone Opera House on Tallinn's Baltic Waterfront
Tomasz Abram's shortlisted opera house splits a monumental mass apart to reveal a crystalline glass seam that symbolizes music's connective power.
New Opera for Estonia: A Wave-Formed Timber Hall on Tallinn's Waterfront
A runner-up entry in the Opera by the Sea competition proposes a curved timber volume that mirrors the Baltic Sea while engaging the historic Linnahall.
TOP-OF-ART'sy: An Opera Complex That Becomes Tallinn's Waterfront Public Ground
A shortlisted entry for Opera by the Sea distributes cultural programming across linear volumes, bridges, and a newly created island on Tallinn's shore.
PÄRT OPERA: A Monumental Stone Platform That Turns an Opera House into Public Infrastructure
Raised above the waterfront on stepped terraces and rhythmic colonnades, this opera house invites the city in before the curtain rises.
Connection to Traditions: Pressed Earth Housing Shaped by Ghana's Climate
A residential community in Ghana uses passive ventilation, pressed earth walls, and porous courtyard planning to root sustainability in local tradition.
Väike Linn: An Opera House That Grows from the Waterfront
Kristin Urbatzka's radial opera complex dissolves the boundary between cultural building and coastal landscape through curved volumes and public terrain.
Urban Retrofit: Turning Mass Housing Facades into Fields of Individual Expression
A modular balcony framework grafted onto Venezuelan public housing lets residents reshape their own domestic edge, unit by unit.
The School Beyond Its Walls: Enrico Panzacchi School by Archisbang and Areaprogetti
A pavilion school for 485 students in Ozzano dell'Emilia opens its gymnasium, auditorium and a new public square to the city.
The Sub-MarinaTube: A Plastic-Recycling City Beneath the Pacific Garbage Patch
Vertical towers and horizontal tubes organize an underwater settlement that combines habitation, marine research, and ocean waste recovery.
BUBHUB: Underwater Bubble Clusters That Grow Like Coral Reefs
A modular underwater habitat system designed to blur the line between architecture and marine ecosystem through biomimicry and incremental growth.
SCENTLAND: An Animal Shelter Designed Through the Nose of a Dog
Winner of Strays 2020, this proposal uses scent mapping to generate circulation, form, and program for a sensory-driven shelter.
Hudson Yards: A Green Ray and Vertical Ecosystem for Manhattan's Dense Future
A shortlisted New Dencities entry organizes towers, courtyards, and a continuous landscape axis into one interconnected urban framework.
Biodiversity Lab: An Underwater Habitat That Grows Like a Coral Reef
A shortlisted entry for EHC Pacific reimagines the research laboratory as a modular, coral-compatible framework on the Great Barrier Reef seabed.
Opera by the Sea: A Layered Waterfront Cultural Building for Tallinn's Baltic Coast
A sustainable opera house proposal connects marine cooling systems, stepped massing, and civic landscape on Tallinn's shoreline near Linnahall.
Garden: Sustainable Architecture Reimagines the Urban Void Beneath Leaside Bridge
Garden transforms the void beneath Leaside Bridge through sustainable architecture, greenery, social spaces, and circular stormwater design.
TOP HAT!: A Parametric Roof Truss That Gives Old Buildings New Balconies
A modular framework perches atop existing residential blocks, deploying customizable balconies, screens, and social spaces across rigid façades.
Opera by the Sea: Curved Volumes and Coastal Geometry on Tallinn's Waterfront
A wave-inspired cultural landmark beside Linnahall fuses a 2,000-seat concert hall, library, museum, and public terraces into one flowing composition.
Barcelona in 2050: Recovering the Courtyard as Climate and Civic Infrastructure
A shortlisted Hyperblock entry reimagines Barcelona's Cerdà grid as a network of courtyards, water channels, and layered public spaces for 2050.
A New Wood: A Spiritual Journey Through Forest Paths, Faith, and Free Will
Three elevated timber walkways through a dense forest reinterpret Little Red Riding Hood as a spatial system of choice and consequence.
Opera House in Tallinn: Two Overlapping Circles That Dissolve the Stage Door
Paweł Gala's shortlisted proposal for Opera by the Sea uses a dual-circle diagram to merge public life and performance on Tallinn's waterfront.