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Thomas Heatherwick has been appointed as the General Director and curator of the 2025 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. In its fifth edition, the Seoul Biennale serves as a platform for addressing urban challenges faced by major global cities, fostering innovative solutions and public discussions around architecture and urbanism. As Asia's largest architecture biennale, scheduled to take place from September 1 to October 31, 2025, the exhibition will focus on making cities more joyful, engaging, and radically human-centered. At the heart of this mission is an ambitious public engagement program that directly involves citizens in shaping the Biennale. Through an open call, ten multidisciplinary teams, comprising architects, urban planners, sculptors, community organizers, metalworkers, and textile designers, have been selected to collaborate with local communities. These projects will respond to two central questions: How do buildings make people feel? And how can they be transformed to foster a deeper sense of connection?

For nearly the past two decades, cities around the world embraced "starchitecture"—futuristic, eye-catching buildings designed by globally renowned architects. In China, this trend was particularly pronounced as rapid urbanization fueled the construction of iconic megastructures like Zaha Hadid's Galaxy SOHO, OMA's CCTV Headquarters, and Herzog & de Meuron's Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing. At the time of their construction, these were all celebrated as symbols of progress and global ambition. However, architecture worldwide has begun shifting toward a more context-driven, human-centered approach, with China emerging as one of the key contributors to this transformation. This year, Liu Jia Kun's 2025 Pritzker Prize further underscores that shift.

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In 2016, an international public architecture competition was announced to design a new administrative center for the Czech Forestry Commission. The new building would replace the existing headquarters on the outskirts of Hradec Králové, a medieval city surrounded by municipal forests on its eastern limit. CHYBIK+KRISTOF's 'Forestry in the Forest' project was selected as the winning proposal in 2017 after a two-round anonymous competition. Now, seven years after the competition, the firm has revealed images and plans for what is set to become the largest wooden structure in the Czech Republic. The design is characterized by establishing a permanent relationship with the surrounding landscape and by seeking to exemplify the benefits of timber construction for the local industry.

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