Xu Tiantian describes her practice as 'architectural acupuncture', which harbours a deceptively small premise: find points where interventions might shift something larger. In an interview, she discusses how architecture can apply pressure precisely, within communities shaped by complex conditions.

This week, we also study the design of shaded urban sites: trees, canopies, shelters and courtyards as points of relief, offering immediate changes to how overheated public spaces are experienced amid a climate crisis. Artist Shezad Dawood brings disparate points—textiles, ecology, technology

and memory—into contact, while Seamus Murphy returns to particular places and people repeatedly, his photographs small points of attention within enormous histories.

In these, acupuncture offers a way to think about scale: the focused gesture, the specific site, the moment of contact. The word sounds almost absurdly small beside climate change, inequality and ecological crisis. Where must we intervene when the problem is much larger than the point of intervention?