Next, Venezuela. While we weren’t planning on publishing a project there, we were well on our way to securing permission to cover a building for the U.S. State Department recently completed elsewhere. But following the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in early January, the parties involved backtracked, withholding photos and drawings after our writer had already been inside the building.

On February 3, President Trump shared a new rendering of the White House ballroom—an analysis of which is the subject of this month’s Forum column (online soon). The ballroom’s design has been in perpetual flux since it was first revealed last summer, with capacity figures and costs increasing, not to mention a change of architects.

The Radio & Television Building in Lausanne, by Office KGDVS, opens just as debate about public radio and television comes to a head in Switzerland. On March 8, the country votes on an initiative to cut funding for the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, echoing similar tribulations for public broadcasting in the U.S.

Architecture can indeed be a political act—not always aimed at expressing resistance or symbolic meaning—but in some cases simply conveying goodwill. For Humayun’s Tomb Museum in Delhi, India, architecture firm Vir.Mueller built mostly subterranean galleries for the over 450-year-old monument. But recognizing the present-day plight of the thousands of people living in extreme poverty just next door, it created spaces for the community to sit, wash their hands with clean water, and just feel they belong.

Civic architecture, in all its forms, can and should respond to difficult times.