The house is architecture’s test bed, ‘constantly pushing against the boundaries of how we live’. This double issue features the results of this year’s AR House awards. But when houses are seen as status symbols and repositories of capital, the fetishisation of dream homes can feel like a distraction from the plight of providing adequate housing for all. ‘As long as there are houses, house porn will always be,’ Cath Slessor ruminates in this month’s excoriating Outrage column, ‘But cities continue to be hollowed out by a lack of affordable housing.’

In the second half of the issue, we build a picture of social housing around the world with seven case studies, both new and old, from the UK, France, Spain, Mexico, Colombia and India. We look back at the work of Lacaton & Vassal – winners of this year’s Mies van der Rohe award – and London-based practice Peter Barber Architects, and investigate what lessons might be learned from Rogelio Salmona’s Nueva Santa Fe in Bogotá and Balkrishna Doshi’s Aranya low-cost housing in Indore.

In our Reputations feature, we look to Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva whose career traversed the typologies of home-making. Designing the spaces where we live has always been a challenge for both the civic and social imagination, and it is more and more urgently felt today as the plethora of projects featured in this issue attest.

The house is architecture’s test bed, ‘constantly pushing against the boundaries of how we live’. This double issue features the results of this year’s AR House awards. But when houses are seen as status symbols and repositories of capital, the fetishisation of dream homes can feel like a distraction from the plight of providing adequate housing for all. ‘As long as there are houses, house porn will always be,’ Cath Slessor ruminates in this month’s excoriating Outrage column, ‘But cities continue to be hollowed out by a lack of affordable housing.’

In the second half of the issue, we build a picture of social housing around the world with seven case studies, both new and old, from the UK, France, Spain, Mexico, Colombia and India. We look back at the work of Lacaton & Vassal – winners of this year’s Mies van der Rohe award – and London-based practice Peter Barber Architects, and investigate what lessons might be learned from Rogelio Salmona’s Nueva Santa Fe in Bogotá and Balkrishna Doshi’s Aranya low-cost housing in Indore.

In our Reputations feature, we look to Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva whose career traversed the typologies of home-making. Designing the spaces where we live has always been a challenge for both the civic and social imagination, and it is more and more urgently felt today as the plethora of projects featured in this issue attest.