2025 Winners

Highly commended

Glkhatun archaeological field laboratory, Guillaume Othenin-Girard / the University of Hong Kong, Armenia

Built for the in situ study and digitisation of finds from the nearby Vedi River Valley Fortress excavation, this field laboratory draws its form from the glkhatun — a traditional half-buried house with a conical wooden roof offering time-tested passive climate control. By reviving these historical techniques and building with direct community engagement, the project aims to influence modern construction practice, training and policy beyond the site itself.

Highly commended

Osu Salem Presbyterian School, AP Valletta and David Kojo Derban, Ghana

This restoration brings a vacant, decaying 19th-century school back into use for the historically marginalised Osu community, repairing a partially collapsed roof and rain-damaged timber and adobe structure. New flexible spaces — a multipurpose hall, library, archive and a hall of fame honouring the school's alumni — aim to set a wider precedent for heritage reuse across Accra, contingent on the project's ability to express the community's cultural life.

Civic and community

The Island youth centre, Vincent & Partners, United Kingdom

This purpose-built facility for a charity supporting York's most vulnerable young people centres on an open recreation area linking a public café, music and performing arts space, and sports and wellness facilities. Set within an extensively landscaped greenbelt site with growing areas and a farm shop café, the building's massing sensitively integrates its internal programme into the landscape while supporting the charity's mentoring-led approach.

Commercial mixed use

The Yard Dalian development, Neri & Hu, China

This adaptive reuse project transforms a forgotten U-shaped compound — including a former workers' dormitory — into galleries, retail, hospitality and office space for the local community and student population. Drawing on Chinese garden traditions, the scheme completes the courtyard with a new layer of walls, screens and canopies framing a large rock feature, creating a contemplative refuge from the city's cacophony.

Cultural regeneration

Glkhatun archaeological field laboratory, Guillaume Othenin-Girard / the University of Hong Kong, Armenia

Education

New Court, Gort Scott, United Kingdom

Health

Tatamá Hospital, aRE Arquitectura en Estudio, OPUS and Abalark, Colombia

This 36,751m² hospital reframes healthcare around wellness, using site topography, healing gardens and a rainwater-fed water feature to connect the building to the surrounding landscape. Vegetation-packed courtyards bring natural light and ventilation deep into the plan, while local Colombian coffee-region architectural characteristics — courtyards, balconies, active greenery — soften a highly technical building into something patients can also feel welcomed by.

Hotels and leisure

KIKLIO, K-Studio, Greece

This private island retreat scatters low-level, crafted buildings across a rocky, ecologically rich site, using stone and rammed-earth walls to minimise visual impact while cantilevered roofs provide shade without blocking sea views. Aiming to be Greece's first zero-carbon development, it pairs a solar harvesting garden and micro-wind energy hub with organic gardens and rainwater collection, blending resort luxury with a genuinely restorative approach to the landscape.

Offices

4th & Hewitt, OFFICEUNTITLED, United States

This 300,000sf mixed-use creative office building anchors the Los Angeles Arts District with stepped-back terraces that transition between tower and street, echoing the neighbourhood's industrial warehouse heritage through double-height floors. Ground-level retail and gallery space connect pedestrians to local artisans, while a sustainability strategy of high-performance envelope, rainwater-fed terrace greenery and natural ventilation supports the building's role as a genuine neighbourhood catalyst rather than a purely commercial tower.

Regeneration and masterplanning

Hatay Masterplan, Foster + Partners, DB Architects, KEYM Urban Renewal Centre and Buro Happold, Turkey

Guided by eight design principles, this masterplan rebuilds Antakya around thirteen new districts organised by stream and road edges, each layered into walkable superblock neighbourhoods with schools, gardens and cultural facilities at their heart. The plan builds on protected, flood-safe land along the Asi River, doubles green space per capita, and redensifies the city centre to limit sprawl — a framework for restoring the streets and social dynamics of a city rebuilding after disaster.

Tall buildings

PACE Building, Architects Office, Brazil

This 160-metre, 44-storey residential tower stacks three distinct volumes — long-stay apartments, high-end residences and spacious upper units — separated by leisure and wellness blocks with pools, spas and gyms that double as visual transitions between them. Set in the green Ecoville neighbourhood, the tower's brises, cantilevered slabs and green facades wrap a narrow plot while preserving 1,900m² of native woodland below.

Competition entry prize

Museum of History and the Future, Atelier of Spatial Matters, Finland

Facing the city's medieval castle across the water, this museum's sawtooth roofline is sculpted by the sun, rising toward the north to maximise solar capture across geothermal heat pumps and a timber structure. A fluted glass facade produces subtle kaleidoscope-like reflections by night, while an airy lobby with escalators, café and shop leads visitors up into galleries whose varied ceiling heights accommodate exhibits from intimate objects to large-scale installations.

Student prize

Ashpit Retreat, Connor Curley, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

Set on a demolished power station site in the post-industrial marshes of south Essex, this speculative retreat imagines a near-future sanctuary for followers of Transhumanism, built as a causeway island from the power station's remains. Low-VOC, bio-based construction — mycelium-insulated thatch walls, rough clay plaster, recycled concrete — supports a sensory-conscious design for physical and neurological accessibility, down to a hand-cast door handle referencing an oyster shell found in the site's Victorian landfill.

Sustainable research and design prize

Material Circulation in Zhoushan Village in China by Zhoushan Community Architecture Team and the University of Hong Kong

This research and design methodology, developed since 2017, engages the whole village to collect local material within 2km — from households' leftovers and construction waste through to daily rubbish and natural earth and stone — building it into seven progressively evolving techniques from cave reconstruction to eco-toilet circular systems. The result is a completed Community Development Research Base and ongoing communal infrastructure, using building itself as the vehicle for developing shared environmental awareness across the village.