This architecture and interior design briefing examines two approaches to shaping place: a monolithic concrete home rooted in Deccan Plateau traditions, and Barcelona’s neighborhood-scale effort to adapt overlooked spaces for climate resilience. Both offer photographers lessons in reading material, context, scale and everyday use.
"Monolithic" concrete house informed by rock-cut monastic homes
Roomoor has completed Monastic Field, a concrete home inside a Jain temple precinct in Baleshwar. Its monolithic character recalls the rock-cut dwellings associated with monks on India’s Deccan Plateau, linking the new residence to the site’s religious and geological references. The home was designed for the family that originally donated the temple land in 2005, adding a specific layer of personal and institutional history to the architecture. For photographers, the project offers a study in how heavy concrete surfaces can frame a building’s relationship with carved stone traditions and ceremonial surroundings. Exterior images should account for mass, shadow and texture, while interior work can emphasize transitions between enclosure, light and the temple precinct.
Designing the In-Between: From Tactical Interventions to Urban Policy in Barcelona
Barcelona’s Trinitat Nova neighborhood is the setting for ReGreeneration, a Horizon Europe initiative operating across nine European cities. The project investigates how residual and peripheral spaces can support climate adaptation, access to nature and stronger everyday public life. Its approach combines complete-neighborhood strategies, communal spaces and nature-based solutions, building on Barcelona’s longer history of tactical urbanism, public-space reclamation, Superblocks and traffic reduction. The central question is how temporary, flexible interventions can inform lasting planning and policy rather than remain isolated experiments. For photographers, that means looking beyond finished architecture: document who occupies these spaces, how routes and informal edges change, and where vegetation, play and social activity meet. Sequence and human scale will be as important as final form.