Today’s architecture and interior design briefing examines how photographers can read cities and interiors through participation, infrastructure, material contrast and spatial structure. The stories move from a city-making festival in Torino to a Medellín café whose defining experience comes from concrete, plywood and a forest-like rhythm of columns.
Utopian Hours Ten Years Edition Part 2
Utopian Hours returns for the second part of its Ten Years Edition, bringing architects, developers, urban practitioners, community organisers, policymakers and city users together over two days in Torino. Its programme addresses who makes cities, how existing infrastructure can be used differently, the effects of climate change on public space and mobility, and how citizens can claim greater agency. The scope extends beyond formal architecture to transport and food systems, museums, libraries, cafés, bars, public toilets and civic squares. A masterclass by Archigram co-founder Sir Peter Cook, held shortly before his 90th birthday, opens the programme’s architectural perspective. For photographers, the event offers a chance to document relationships between people, everyday infrastructure and public space rather than isolated buildings.
Studio Cadena fills Medellín cafe with 31 towering wooden columns
Studio Cadena has designed the Masa café in Medellín around concrete and more than 30 plywood columns—reported as 31—which rise toward the concrete ceiling. The repeated vertical elements give the interior a forest-like character and create what the studio describes as an atmosphere without walls or enclosure. The design is therefore experienced less as a series of enclosed rooms than as a spacious field structured by material, height and rhythm. For photographers, the columns provide a strong recurring motif: their scale can be read against the ceiling and the open café floor, while the contrast between plywood and concrete anchors the visual palette. Careful framing should reveal how repetition shapes the room without relying on conventional partitions.