The upcoming milsim features new maps and vehicles The post <i>Hell Let Loose: Vietnam</i> Takes 50v50 Slaughter To The Jungle In Sequel Fans Have Been Waiting For appeared first on Kotaku.

ActuGaming.net Future Games Show : Voici le résumé des 45 annonces de la dernière édition (Halloween, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, Deer & Boy…) La Gamescom 2025 aura été la parfaite excuse pour une nouvelle édition du Future Games […] L

New AI regulations suggested by the White House mirror changes to environmental permitting suggested by Meta and a lobbying group representing firms like Google and Amazon Web Services.

Picture this: it’s January 19th, 2038, at exactly 03:14:07 UTC. Somewhere in a data center, a Unix system quietly ticks over its internal clock counter one more time. But instead …read more

The ROG Xbox Ally range has been developed by Microsoft in collaboration with Asus.

While we’ve had plenty of superhero games come out over the past decade and a half (and I’m always down for more), most have either been open-world adventures or fighting games. I’m as excited as anyone for the upcoming Marvel Tōkon and Invincible VS, but I’m also ready for a little something different. That’s where Dispatch from AdHoc Studio comes in. Dispatch is a game made for people who enjoy watching a rerun of The Office as a palate cleanser after the bloody battles of Invincible. So, me. You’re cast as Robert Robertson, the former superhero known as Mecha Man. He has to step away from frontline superheroics as the mech suit he relied on was destroyed in battle. Needing a job, he starts work at a dispatch center for superheroes, and the demo takes you through a small, 30-minute chunk of his first day. You’ll notice Dispatch’s crude humor early on. The first thing you can do in Dispatch is give a colleague a “bro fist” at a urinal, and the juvenile jokes don’t stop there. Middle school boys are going to love it, though I’d be lying if I said a few of the jokes didn’t get chuckles from me. Another of Robertson’s co-workers, who also used to be a superhero until his powers caused him to rapidly age, introduces Robertson’s team of misfit heroes, though that term should be used loosely. He notes they’re a “motley crew of dangerous fuck-ups” as Robertson examines their files, each with a mugshot and rapsheet. Robertson isn’t in charge of the Avengers — he’s leading a D-List Suicide Squad. The cast, however, is full of A-listers: Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer, Aaron Paul, and Jeffrey Wright are among those lending their voices to Dispatch. Much like The Boys, Dispatch plays with the idea of the corporatization of superheroes (though without the satire of and parallels to modern-day politics). These heroes aren’t a lone Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan on patrol — they’re employees waiting for an assignment. Gameplay consists of matching the right (or perhaps “good enough”) hero to the job. Some assignments I saw in the demo included breaking up a robbery, catching a 12-year-old thief, and grabbing a kid’s balloon from a tree while also making sure the kid didn’t cry. Seeing as how one of your misfits is a literal bat man and another looks like a tiefling, you have to choose wisely. The real draw of Dispatch for me isn’t the point-and-click assignment gameplay, but rather the choice-based dialogue. It’s developed by AdHoc Studio, which was formed in 2018 by former developers who had worked on Telltale titles like The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead, and Tales from the Borderlands, and you can easily see the throughline from those titles to Dispatch. At various points, you have a limited time to select Robertson’s dialogue, and occasionally a pop-up saying a character “will remember that” appears. How much Robertson’s choices actually have consequences or influence his relationships with others remains to be seen, though I have no doubt those choices will be fun to make. After its reveal at The Game Awards six months ago, Dispatch will be coming to Windows PC and unspecified consoles sometime this year. You can check out its demo now on Steam.

Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington this weekend — a show of force in the capital that just happens to take place on the president’s birthday — smacks of authoritarian Dear Leader-style politics (even though Trump actually got the idea after attending the 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris).Yet as disconcerting as the imagery of tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue will be, it’s not even close to Trump’s most insidious assault on the US military’s historic and democratically essential nonpartisan ethos.In fact, it’s not even the most worrying thing he’s done this week.On Tuesday, the president gave a speech at Fort Bragg, an Army base home to Special Operations Command. While presidential speeches to soldiers are not uncommon — rows of uniformed troops make a great backdrop for a foreign policy speech — they generally avoid overt partisan attacks and campaign-style rhetoric. The soldiers, for their part, are expected to be studiously neutral, laughing at jokes and such, but remaining fully impassive during any policy conversation.That’s not what happened at Fort Bragg. Trump’s speech was a partisan tirade that targeted “radical left” opponents ranging from Joe Biden to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. He celebrated his deployment of Marines to Los Angeles, proposed jailing people for burning the American flag, and called on soldiers to be “aggressive” toward the protesters they encountered.The soldiers, for their part, cheered Trump and booed his enemies — as they were seemingly expected to. Reporters at Military.com, a military news service, uncovered internal communications from 82nd Airborne leadership suggesting that the crowd was screened for their political opinions.“If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,” one note read.To call this unusual is an understatement. I spoke with four different experts on civil-military relations, two of whom teach at the Naval War College, about the speech and its implications. To a person, they said it was a step towards politicizing the military with no real precedent in modern American history.“That is, I think, a really big red flag because it means the military’s professional ethic is breaking down internally,” says Risa Brooks, a professor at Marquette University. “Its capacity to maintain that firewall against civilian politicization may be faltering.”This may sound alarmist — like an overreading of a one-off incident — but it’s part of a bigger pattern. The totality of Trump administration policies, ranging from the parade in Washington to the LA troop deployment to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s firing of high-ranking women and officers of color, suggests a concerted effort to erode the military’s professional ethos and turn it into an institution subservient to the Trump administration’s whims. This is a signal policy aim of would-be dictators, who wish to head off the risk of a coup and ensure the armed forces’ political reliability if they are needed to repress dissent in a crisis.Steve Saideman, a professor at Carleton University, put together a list of eight different signs that a military is being politicized in this fashion. The Trump administration has exhibited six out of the eight.“The biggest theme is that we are seeing a number of checks on the executive fail at the same time — and that’s what’s making individual events seem more alarming than they might otherwise,” says Jessica Blankshain, a professor at the Naval War College (speaking not for the military but in a personal capacity).That Trump is trying to politicize the military does not mean he has succeeded. There are several signs, including Trump’s handpicked chair of the Joint Chiefs repudiating the president’s claims of a migrant invasion during congressional testimony, that the US military is resisting Trump’s politicization.But the events in Fort Bragg and Washington suggest that we are in the midst of a quiet crisis in civil-military relations in the United States — one whose implications for American democracy’s future could well be profound.The Trump crisis in civil-military relations, explainedA military is, by sheer fact of its existence, a threat to any civilian government. If you have an institution that controls the overwhelming bulk of weaponry in a society, it always has the physical capacity to seize control of the government at gunpoint. A key question for any government is how to convince the armed forces that they cannot or should not take power for themselves.Democracies typically do this through a process called “professionalization.” Soldiers are rigorously taught to think of themselves as a class of public servants, people trained to perform a specific job within defined parameters. Their ultimate loyalty is not to their generals or even individual presidents, but rather to the people and the constitutional order.Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard political scientist, is the canonical theorist of a professional military. In his book The Soldier and the State, he described optimal professionalization as a system of “objective control”: one in which the military retains autonomy in how they fight and plan for wars while deferring to politicians on whether and why to fight in the first place. In effect, they stay out of the politicians’ affairs while the politicians stay out of theirs.The idea of such a system is to emphasize to the military that they are professionals: Their responsibility isn’t deciding when to use force, but only to conduct operations as effectively as possible once ordered to engage in them. There is thus a strict firewall between military affairs, on the one hand, and policy-political affairs on the other.Typically, the chief worry is that the military breaches this bargain: that, for example, a general starts speaking out against elected officials’ policies in ways that undermine civilian control. This is not a hypothetical fear in the United States, with the most famous such example being Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination during the Korean War. Thankfully, not even MacArthur attempted the worst-case version of military overstep — a coup.But in backsliding democracies like the modern United States, where the chief executive is attempting an anti-democratic power grab, the military poses a very different kind of threat to democracy — in fact, something akin to the exact opposite of the typical scenario.In such cases, the issue isn’t the military inserting itself into politics but rather the civilians dragging them into it in ways that upset the democratic political order. The worst-case scenario is that the military acts on presidential directives to use force against domestic dissenters, destroying democracy not by ignoring civilian orders, but by following them.There are two ways to arrive at such a worst-case scenario, both of which are in evidence in the early days of Trump 2.0.First is politicization: an intentional attack on the constraints against partisan activity inside the professional ranks.Many of Pete Hegseth’s major moves as secretary of defense fit this bill, including his decisions to fire nonwhite and female generals seen as politically unreliable and his effort to undermine the independence of the military’s lawyers. The breaches in protocol at Fort Bragg are both consequences and causes of politicization: They could only happen in an environment of loosened constraint, and they might encourage more overt political action if gone unpunished.The second pathway to breakdown is the weaponization of professionalism against itself. Here, Trump exploits the military’s deference to politicians by ordering it to engage in undemocratic (and even questionably legal) activities. In practice, this looks a lot like the LA deployments, and, more specifically, the lack of any visible military pushback. While the military readily agreeing to deployments is normally a good sign — that civilian control is holding — these aren’t normal times. And this isn’t a normal deployment, but rather one that comes uncomfortably close to the military being ordered to assist in repressing overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against executive abuses of power.“It’s really been pretty uncommon to use the military for law enforcement,” says David Burbach, another Naval War College professor (also speaking personally). “This is really bringing the military into frontline law enforcement when. … these are really not huge disturbances.”This, then, is the crisis: an incremental and slow-rolling effort by the Trump administration to erode the norms and procedures designed to prevent the military from being used as a tool of domestic repression. Is it time to panic?Among the experts I spoke with, there was consensus that the military’s professional and nonpartisan ethos was weakening. This isn’t just because of Trump, but his terms — the first to a degree, and now the second acutely — are major stressors.Yet there was no consensus on just how much military nonpartisanship has eroded — that is, how close we are to a moment when the US military might be willing to follow obviously authoritarian orders.For all its faults, the US military’s professional ethos is a really important part of its identity and self-conception. While few soldiers may actually read Sam Huntington or similar scholars, the general idea that they serve the people and the republic is a bedrock principle among the ranks. There is a reason why the United States has never, in over 250 years of governance, experienced a military coup — or even come particularly close to one.In theory, this ethos should also galvanize resistance to Trump’s efforts at politicization. Soldiers are not unthinking automatons: While they are trained to follow commands, they are explicitly obligated to refuse illegal orders, even coming from the president. The more aggressive Trump’s efforts to use the military as a tool of repression gets, the more likely there is to be resistance.Or, at least theoretically.The truth is that we don’t really know how the US military will respond to a situation like this. Like so many of Trump’s second-term policies, their efforts to bend the military to their will are unprecedented — actions with no real parallel in the modern history of the American military. Experts can only make informed guesses, based on their sense of US military culture as well as comparisons to historical and foreign cases.For this reason, there are probably only two things we can say with confidence.First, what we’ve seen so far is not yet sufficient evidence to declare that the military is in Trump’s thrall. The signs of decay are too limited to ground any conclusions that the longstanding professional norm is entirely gone.“We have seen a few things that are potentially alarming about erosion of the military’s non-partisan norm. But not in a way that’s definitive at this point,” Blankshain says.Second, the stressors on this tradition are going to keep piling on. Trump’s record makes it exceptionally clear that he wants the military to serve him personally — and that he, and Hegseth, will keep working to make it so. This means we really are in the midst of a quiet crisis, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.“The fact that he’s getting the troops to cheer for booing Democratic leaders at a time when there’s actually [a deployment to] a blue city and a blue state…he is ordering the troops to take a side,” Saideman says. “There may not be a coherent plan behind this. But there are a lot of things going on that are all in the same direction.”See More: Politics

Technology leaders are baffled by a “cacophony” of “buzzwords, hype and confusion” over the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), according to the founder and CEO of technology company Pegasystems. Alan Trefler, who is known for his prowess at chess and ping pong, as well as running a $1.5bn turnover tech company, spends much of his time meeting clients, CIOs and business leaders. “I think CIOs are struggling to understand all of the buzzwords, hype and confusion that exists,” he said. “The words AI and agentic are being thrown around in this great cacophony and they don’t know what it means. I hear that constantly.” CIOs are under pressure from their CEOs, who are convinced AI will offer something valuable. “CIOs are really hungry for pragmatic and practical solutions, and in the absence of those, many of them are doing a lot of experimentation,” said Trefler. Companies are looking at large language models to summarise documents, or to help stimulate ideas for knowledge workers, or generate first drafts of reports – all of which will save time and make people more productive. But Trefler said companies are wary of letting AI loose on critical business applications, because it’s just too unpredictable and prone to hallucinations. “There is a lot of fear over handing things over to something that no one understands exactly how it works, and that is the absolute state of play when it comes to general AI models,” he said. Trefler is scathing about big tech companies that are pushing AI agents and large language models for business-critical applications. “I think they have taken an expedient but short-sighted path,” he said. “I believe the idea that you will turn over critical business operations to an agent, when those operations have to be predictable, reliable, precise and fair to clients … is something that is full of issues, not just in the short term, but structurally.” One of the problems is that generative AI models are extraordinarily sensitive to the data they are trained on and the construction of the prompts used to instruct them. A slight change in a prompt or in the training data can lead to a very different outcome. For example, a business banking application might learn its customer is a bit richer or a bit poorer than expected. “You could easily imagine the prompt deciding to change the interest rate charged, whether that was what the institution wanted or whether it would be legal according to the various regulations that lenders must comply with,” said Trefler. Trefler said Pega has taken a different approach to some other technology suppliers in the way it adds AI into business applications. Rather than using AI agents to solve problems in real time, AI agents do their thinking in advance. Business experts can use them to help them co-design business processes to perform anything from assessing a loan application, giving an offer to a valued customer, or sending out an invoice. Companies can still deploy AI chatbots and bots capable of answering queries on the phone. Their job is not to work out the solution from scratch for every enquiry, but to decide which is the right pre-written process to follow. As Trefler put it, design agents can create “dozens and dozens” of workflows to handle all the actions a company needs to take care of its customers. “You just use the natural language model for semantics to be able to handle the miracle of getting the language right, but tie that language to workflows, so that you have reliable, predictable, regulatory-approved ways to execute,” he said. Large language models (LLMs) are not always the right solution. Trefler demonstrated how ChatGPT 4.0 tried and failed to solve a chess puzzle. The LLM repeatedly suggested impossible or illegal moves, despite Trefler’s corrections. On the other hand, another AI tool, Stockfish, a dedicated chess engine, solved the problem instantly. The other drawback with LLMs is that they consume vast amounts of energy. That means if AI agents are reasoning during “run time”, they are going to consume hundreds of times more electricity than an AI agent that simply selects from pre-determined workflows, said Trefler. “ChatGPT is inherently, enormously consumptive … as it’s answering your question, its firing literally hundreds of millions to trillions of nodes,” he said. “All of that takes [large quantities of] electricity.” Using an employee pay claim as an example, Trefler said a better alternative is to generate, say, 30 alternative workflows to cover the major variations found in a pay claim. That gives you “real specificity and real efficiency”, he said. “And it’s a very different approach to turning a process over to a machine with a prompt and letting the machine reason it through every single time.” “If you go down the philosophy of using a graphics processing unit [GPU] to do the creation of a workflow and a workflow engine to execute the workflow, the workflow engine takes a 200th of the electricity because there is no reasoning,” said Trefler. He is clear that the growing use of AI will have a profound effect on the jobs market, and that whole categories of jobs will disappear. The need for translators, for example, is likely to dry up by 2027 as AI systems become better at translating spoken and written language. Google’s real-time translator is already “frighteningly good” and improving. Pega now plans to work more closely with its network of system integrators, including Accenture and Cognizant to deliver AI services to businesses. An initiative launched last week will allow system integrators to incorporate their own best practices and tools into Pega’s rapid workflow development tools. The move will mean Pega’s technology reaches a wider range of businesses. Under the programme, known as Powered by Pega Blueprint, system integrators will be able to deploy customised versions of Blueprint. They can use the tool to reverse-engineer ageing applications and replace them with modern AI workflows that can run on Pega’s cloud-based platform. “The idea is that we are looking to make this Blueprint Agent design approach available not just through us, but through a bunch of major partners supplemented with their own intellectual property,” said Trefler. That represents a major expansion for Pega, which has largely concentrated on supplying technology to several hundred clients, representing the top Fortune 500 companies. “We have never done something like this before, and I think that is going to lead to a massive shift in how this technology can go out to market,” he added. When AI agents behave in unexpected ways Iris is incredibly smart, diligent and a delight to work with. If you ask her, she will tell you she is an intern at Pegasystems, and that she lives in a lighthouse on the island of Texel, north of the Netherlands. She is, of course, an AI agent. When one executive at Pega emailed Iris and asked her to write a proposal for a financial services company based on his notes and internet research, Iris got to work. Some time later, the executive received a phone call from the company. “‘Listen, we got a proposal from Pega,’” recalled Rob Walker, vice-president at Pega, speaking at the Pegaworld conference last week. “‘It’s a good proposal, but it seems to be signed by one of your interns, and in her signature, it says she lives in a lighthouse.’ That taught us early on that agents like Iris need a safety harness.” The developers banned Iris from sending an email to anyone other than the person who sent the original request. Then Pega’s ethics department sent Iris a potentially abusive email from a Pega employee to test her response. Iris reasoned that the email was either a joke, abusive, or that the employee was under distress, said Walker. She considered forwarding the email to the employee’s manager or to HR. But both of these options were now blocked by her developers. “So what does she do? She sent an out of office,” he said. “Conflict avoidance, right? So human, but very creative.”

There’s a Sphere-alike in Redrock, MindsEye’s open-world version of Las Vegas. It’s pretty much a straight copy of the original: a huge soap bubble, half sunk into the desert floor, with its surface turned into a gigantic TV. Occasionally you’ll pull up near the Sphere while driving an electric vehicle made by Silva, the megacorp that controls this world. You’ll sometimes come to a stop just as an advert for an identical Silva EV plays out on the huge curved screen overhead. The doubling effect can be slightly vertigo-inducing.At these moments, I truly get what MindsEye is trying to do. You’re stuck in the ultimate company town, where oligarchs and other crooks run everything, and there’s no hope of escaping the ecosystem they’ve built. MindsEye gets this all across through a chance encounter, and in a way that’s both light of touch and clever. The rest of the game tends towards the heavy-handed and silly, but it’s nice to glimpse a few instances where everything clicks.With its Spheres and omnipresent EVs, MindsEye looks and sounds like the future. It’s concerned with AI and tech bros and the insidious creep of a corporate dystopia. You play as an amnesiac former-soldier who must work out the precise damage that technology has done to his humanity, while shooting people and robots and drones. And alongside the campaign itself, MindsEye also has a suite of tools for making your own game or levels and publishing them for fellow players. All of this has come from a studio founded by Leslie Benzies, whose production credits include the likes of GTA 5.AI overlords … MindsEye. Photograph: IOI PartnersWhat’s weird, then, is that MindsEye generally plays like the past. Put a finger to the air and the wind is blowing from somewhere around 2012. At heart, this is a roughly hewn cover shooter with an open world that you only really experience when you’re driving between missions. Its topical concerns mainly exist to justify double-crosses and car chases and shootouts, and to explain why you head into battle with a personal drone that can open doors for you and stun nearby enemies.It can be an uncanny experience, drifting back through the years to a time when many third-person games still featured unskippable cut-scenes and cover that could be awkward to unstick yourself from. I should add that there are plenty of reports at the moment of crashes and technical glitches and characters turning up without their faces in place. Playing on a relatively old PC, aside from one crash and a few amusing bugs, I’ve been mostly fine. I’ve just been playing a game that feels equally elderly.This is sometimes less of a criticism than it sounds. There is a definite pleasure to be had in simple run-and-gun missions where you shoot very similar looking people over and over again and pick a path between waypoints. The shooting often feels good, and while it’s a bit of a swizz to have to drive to and from each mission, the cars have a nice fishtaily looseness to them that can, at times, invoke the Valium-tinged glory of the Driver games. (The airborne craft are less fun because they have less character.)Driving between missions … MindsEye. Photograph: Build A Rocket Boy/IOI PartnersAnd for a game that has thought a lot about the point at which AI takes over, the in-game AI around me wasn’t in danger of taking over anything. When I handed over control of my car to the game while tailing an enemy, having been told I should try not to be spotted, the game made sure our bumpers kissed at every intersection. The streets of this particular open world are filled with amusingly unskilled AI drivers. I’d frequently arrive at traffic lights to be greeted by a recent pile-up, so delighted by the off-screen collisions that had scattered road cones and Dumpsters across my path that I almost always stopped to investigate.I even enjoyed the plot’s hokeyness, which features lines such as: “Your DNA has been altered since we last met!” Has it, though? Even so, I became increasingly aware that clever people had spent a good chunk of their working lives making this game. I don’t think they intended to cast me as what is in essence a Deliveroo bullet courier for an off-brand Elon Musk. Or to drop me into an open world that feels thin not because it lacks mission icons and fishing mini-games, but because it’s devoid of convincing human detail.I suspect the problem may actually be a thematically resonant one: a reckless kind of ambition. When I dropped into the level editor I found a tool that’s astonishingly rich and complex, but which also requires a lot of time and effort if you want to make anything really special in it. This is for the mega-fans, surely, the point-one percent. It must have taken serious time to build, and to do all that alongside a campaign (one that tries, at least, to vary things now and then with stealth, trailing and sniper sections) is the kind of endeavour that requires a real megacorp behind it.MindsEye is an oddity. For all its failings, I rarely disliked playing it, and yet it’s also difficult to sincerely recommend. Its ideas, its moment-to-moment action and narrative are so thinly conceived that it barely exists. And yet: I’m kind of happy that it does. MindsEye is out now; £54.99

Casa Morena | © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG In the coastal enclave of Lagos, Portugal, Mário Martins Atelier has crafted Casa Morena. This residence quietly asserts itself as an ode to the dialogue between architecture and its natural setting. Completed in 2024, this project demonstrates a considered response to its environment, where the interplay of light, material, and landscape defines a sense of place rather than architectural imposition. Casa Morena Technical Information Architects1-5: Mário Martins Atelier Location: Lagos, Portugal Project Years: 2024 Photographs: © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG A simple house, one that wishes to be discreet and to be influenced by its location, to become a house that is pleasant with thoughtful landscaping. – Mário Martins Atelier Casa Morena Photographs © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG © Fernando Guerra / FG+SG A Contextual Response to Landscape and Light The design of Casa Morena finds its genesis in the site itself, a pine-scented plot overlooking the expanse of a bay. The pine trees, longstanding witnesses to the landscape’s evolution, provide the project’s visual anchor and spatial logic. In a move that both respects and celebrates these natural elements, Mário Martins Atelier structured the house’s reticulated plan to echo the presence of the trees, creating a composition that unfolds as a series of volumes harmonizing with the vertical rhythm of the trunks. The solid base of the house, built from locally sourced schist, emerges directly from the terrain. These robust walls establish a tactile continuity with the ground, their rough textures anchoring the architecture within the landscape. In contrast, the upper volumes of the house adopt a distinctly lighter expression: horizontal planes rendered in white plaster, their smooth surfaces catching and refracting the region’s luminous sun. This duality, earthbound solidity, and aerial lightness establish an architectural narrative rooted in the elemental. Casa Morena Experiential Flow Casa Morena’s spatial arrangement articulates a clear hierarchy of public and private domains. On the ground floor, the house embraces openness and transparency. An expansive entrance hall blurs the threshold inside and out, guiding inhabitants and visitors into a luminous social heart. The lounge, kitchen, and office flow seamlessly into the garden, unified by a continuous glazed façade that invites the outside in. This deliberate porosity extends to a covered terrace, an intermediary space that dissolves the boundary between shelter and exposure. The terrace, framed by the garden’s green canopy and the swimming pool’s long line, becomes a place of repose and contemplation. The pool itself demarcates the transition from a cultivated garden to the looser, more rugged landscape beyond, its linear form echoing the horizon’s expanse. Ascending to the upper floor, the architectural language shifts towards intimacy. The bedrooms, each with direct access to terraces and patios, create secluded zones that still maintain a fluid relationship with the outdoors. A discreet rooftop terrace, accessible from these private quarters, offers a hidden sanctuary where the interplay of views and light remains uninterrupted. Material Tectonics and Environmental Strategy Casa Morena’s material palette is rooted in regional specificity and tactile sensibility. Schist, extracted from the site, is not merely a structural element but a narrative thread linking the building to its geological past. Its earthy warmth and rugged surface provide a counterpoint to the luminous white of the upper volumes, an articulation of contrast that enlivens the building’s silhouette. White, the chromatic signature of the Algarve region, is employed with restraint and nuance. Its reflective qualities intensify the play of shadow and light, a dynamic that shifts with the passing of the day. In this interplay, architecture becomes an instrument for registering the ephemeral, and the environment itself becomes a participant in the spatial drama. Environmental stewardship is also woven into the project’s DNA. Discreetly integrated systems on the roof harness solar energy and manage water resources, extending the house’s commitment to a sustainable coexistence with its setting. Casa Morena Plans Basement | © Mario Martins Atelier Ground Level | © Mario Martins Atelier Upper Level | © Mario Martins Atelier Roof Plan | © Mario Martins Atelier Elevations | © Mario Martins Atelier Casa Morena Image Gallery About Mário Martins Atelier Mário Martins Atelier is an architectural studio based in Lagos and Lisbon, Portugal, led by Mário Martins. The practice is known for its context-sensitive approach, crafting contemporary projects seamlessly integrating with their surroundings while prioritizing regional materials and environmental considerations. Credits and Additional Notes Lead Architect: Mário Martins, arq. Project Team: Nuno Colaço, Sónia Fialho, Susana Jóia, Mariana Franco, Ana Graça Engineering: Nuno Grave Engenharia Landscape: HB-Hipolito Bettencourt – Arquitectura Paisagista, Lda. Building Contractor: Marques Antunes Engenharia Lda.