A week ago, we announced the 15 finalists for the ArchDaily en Español Obra del Año Award, which celebrates the best architecture in Latin America and Spain, inviting our readers to act as a jury and select their favorite projects from those published throughout the year. Today, the time has finally come to reveal the winners of the 2025 Obra del Año Award.
The social initiatives of Ecuadorian architect David Regalado Ojeda in the city of Loja demonstrate a departure from the autonomous architectural project, addressing collective formal identity through a park built from recycled materials, where history is transformed into play and learning.
Artists, volunteers, and the local community collaborated on the project with zero financial investment: everything was recycled and built through community support.
Below, a few words from architect David Regalado Ojeda:
In Latin America, the ground is rarely just a surface to build on. It can be a river edge, a steep slope, a humid forest floor, a floodable landscape, or a territory under ecological pressure, and in many cases, it carries a history of communities that already knew how to respond to it, building on stilts, on platforms, over water, long before contemporary architecture asked the same questions.
These projects continue that conversation. They engage with conditions that move, absorb, erode, and grow, rather than treating the ground as something to level or control. Elevation allows architecture to adapt without fully taking over: water can pass below, vegetation can remain, and slopes can keep their original condition. In each case, the decision to rise is tied to something specific: water, humidity, topography, vegetation, or ecological recovery, and the knowledge of how to build within it and not against it.
Architecture is often understood as a matter of enclosure. Walls define space, separating interior from exterior and establishing clear limits. Yet across many projects in Latin America, this distinction becomes less precise. Rather than operating as closed objects, buildings often remain open, allowing air, light, and movement to pass through them.
This condition is tied to more than form. Across the region, architecture has long responded to climates marked by heat, humidity, strong solar exposure, and seasonal rainfall, as well as to building cultures shaped by adaptation, collective labor, and direct engagement with the environment. In these contexts, fully sealed interiors are not always the most effective response. Space is often organized through shade, ventilation, and intermediate zones that regulate rather than isolate.
Building above water means doing away with a part of construction that is quite literally the basis of most of our built environment: the foundation. In a world dominated by water, currents, and shifting levels are variables that simply cannot be ignored, which is why the most emblematic feature these projects share is their adaptability.
Instead of robust, deep bases – such as piles or caissons – designed to anchor architecture into the earth, floating structures frequently employ solutions like concrete pontoons or plastic drums to prevent the building from sinking. These are typically paired with anchoring systems to "fix" the structures, even if only temporarily, to a specific location.
As climate variability intensifies, extreme storms are becoming more frequent in some regions while water scarcity deepens in others. Architects are increasingly pressed to reconsider how buildings engage with rainfall as an environmental force and a design resource. How can architecture move beyond shedding the excess water to actively collect, store, and reuse it? What would it mean to treat rainwater as a material that shapes resilient and meaningful spaces?
