Coming Together and the Making of Place: ArchDaily’s January Editorial Focus

Courtesy of [applied] Foreign Affairs, Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts Vienna

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 looks beyond iconic gathering spaces to consider 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, the coverage asks how spatial design can support openness, diversity, and collective life without enforcing uniform ways of gathering.

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