Architecture has long relied on images, drawings, sketches, and renderings to convey its message. Our human brain encodes images both visually and verbally, doubling memory strength. In this age where images dominate the digital media landscape, most of us share our work, and even our lives, on visual platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest.
But this visual abundance has a cost: the more crowded the feed, the harder it becomes to hold anyone’s gaze. An average user may spend two hours on social media each day, but a single post often earns only seconds of focus. What once promised connection, is only deepening isolation.
At A–D, we seek a community willing to pause, to question, and to listen together. The challenge is to connect with those voices and cultivate spaces where dialogue grows into a collective vision.
An elder once told the children, ‘Every story is a thread.’ Alone, it frays. Together, threads weave a cloth strong enough to carry memory, identity, and hope. That’s how the A–D storyteller network came to exist.
We wanted to create a space where storytellers could connect, exchange, and grow. We wanted more than recognition for the Global Challenge projects. We wanted reflection. Because architecture is not only what we see, it is what we live. The GC2025 projects prove it. They show how to achieve much with little, through local knowledge, shared effort, and lived experience.
Many of these projects are not yet built. They are beginnings. Seeds of possibility. Already alive with promise. And the question became: how do you tell the story of something that is still becoming, stories of process, stories of relationships?
And so we called for storytellers. Not only professionals but anyone with the courage to listen, imagine, tell and share. Nine answered. They came with curiosity, with courage, with hands ready to try.
Our 2025 cohort of storytellers chose different media. Some captured voices, recording memories. Some drew and painted, some traced possibilities with pictures. They carried no single style, but a shared spirit. They listened. They collaborated. They began weaving threads that could hold not just a project, but a community.
We are proud to introduce our first cohort of storytellers and their pieces:
- Lorato Nonofo, Botswana – Interior Architect, Creative, Podcaster
- David Peralta Inga, Ecuador – Architect, Sketcher, Storyteller
- Nayra Mamani Ancalle, Bolivia – Urbanist, Researcher, Collaborative
- Natalia Figueredo, Brazil – Architect, Urbanist, Researcher
- Laura Espinosa Ayala, Colombia – Decolonial, International Affairs Analyst, Urbanist
- Maria Paulina Giraldo, Colombia – Urbanist, Designer, Place-maker
- Sofia De La Guerra, Venezuela – Practitioner, Facilitator, Designer
- Akemi Higa, Peru – Designer, Urban Storyteller, Visual Artist
- Zin Nyein Aye, Hong Kong – Designer, Storyteller, Photographer
Within these stories are memories, identity, and hope, not scattered, not fleeting, but held together, story by story, thread by thread. We invite you to follow their work, to listen, and perhaps to add your own thread.
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