As major cultural events, institutional transformations, and new architectural commissions unfold across different geographies, this week's discourse highlights how architecture operates at the intersection of public life, creativity, and long-term adaptation. With Milan Design Week 2026 foregrounding process, experimentation, and citywide participation, the projects and initiatives emerging this week point to a broader shift toward openness, accessibility, and experiential engagement across disciplines and urban contexts. Ongoing investments in cultural infrastructure, from new museums to large-scale renovations and competition-winning proposals, further underscore how institutions continue to recalibrate their spatial and social roles in response to evolving environmental, technological, and cultural demands.
Small Scale Category Winner + Student Winner: Architecture as Resilient Machine. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner has launched the Unbuilt Award 2026, the third edition of its annual competition, offering a €100,000 prize fund. At the same time, the results of the Unbuilt Award 2025 have been announced, marking the second competition in a series that celebrates architectural designs that have yet to be realized. The initiative provides a global platform for architects and designers to showcase their most compelling unbuilt projects—whether conceptual, published, unpublished, or fully developed.
London's National Gallery has announced Kengo Kuma & Associates, in collaboration with BDP and MICA, as the winners of the international competition to design a new wing for the institution. Launched in September 2025, the competition attracted 65 submissions from international practices, from which six teams were shortlisted to develop proposals. The selection marks a key milestone in the institution's long-term development strategy, Project Domani, positioning the new addition as a central component in the reconfiguration of its architectural and curatorial framework. Conceived as the most significant transformation of the museum since its establishment in 1824, the project aims to expand both spatial capacity and curatorial scope, enabling the presentation of a continuous narrative of Western painting within a single setting.
RSHP has won a competition to redevelop the Rives-Défense site in La Défense, the business district of Paris. Announced during MIPIM, the project envisions the transformation of an 8-hectare site at the western edge of the district into a low-carbonmixed-use neighborhood. Commissioned by Paris La Défense, the proposal is developed by a multidisciplinary team led by RSHP and including Atelier SOIL as co-architect and urban planner, Altitude 35 as landscape architect, Arcadis as engineering consultant, as well as Atelier Franck Boutté, Urban Eco, and Mobius.
First Prize Winner: Living on Groundwater. Image Courtesy of Buildner
In collaboration with building materials manufacturer Kingspan, Buildner has launched MICROHOME 2026, the eleventh edition of its annual competition, offering a €100,000 prize fund. This global competition invites architects, designers, and creative thinkers to redefine the concept of microhomes and develop cutting-edge, sustainable solutions for compact housing.
MVRDV's shortlisted design for the Shift Landmark competition, 2026. Image Courtesy of MVRDV
Shift, a company offering digital programs to reduce carbon emissions through individual behavior change, has announced the five finalist teams advancing to Stage Two of its international architecture competition. Launched in January 2025, the Shift International Architecture Competition called for proposals to design "the Shift Landmark": a 25,000 to 30,000 m² building in Waterkant, a new waterfront district in southern Rotterdam. The project includes a hotel, a conference and meeting center, and a sustainable food court. Its objective is to set a new standard for a purpose-driven destination that turns circular living into "something individuals, companies, and organisations can feel, experience, and act on." The five shortlisted design concepts reflect different visions of sustainability and climate action, developed by teams led by the European offices of MVRDV (Netherlands), Heatherwick Studio (United Kingdom), Office for Political Innovation (Spain), Mecanoo (Netherlands), and Ecosistema Urbano (Spain).
Concéntrico is an urban innovation laboratory that invites reflection on the city through architecture and design. Since 2015, it has carried out more than 180 interventions in Logroño, Spain. The new 2025/2026 season of the festival expands on this experimental spirit with three international calls for proposals that bring the ideas in the book Concéntrico: Laboratorio de Innovación Urbana (Park Books, 2025) into action. Through these calls, the organization seeks to explore further three lines of research, the ephemeral, the ecological, and the symbolic, to imagine different ways of inhabiting the city. The winning projects from this edition's calls for entries will be developed, built as urban installations, and presented in the exhibition during the festival, taking place in Logroño from June 18–23, 2026.
Highlighted Submissions: Common Spaces. Image Courtesy of Buildner
Buildner, in collaboration with the City and County of Denver and AIA Colorado, has announced the winners of the Denver Affordable Housing Challenge, an international ideas competition exploring how affordability and design excellence can reinforce one another within the specific urban, social, and environmental context of Denver.
As the nineteenth edition in Buildner's Affordable Housing Challenge series, the competition invited architects and designers from around the world to respond to Denver's housing crisis through proposals operating at architectural, urban, and systemic scales. The brief did not prescribe a single site or typology but, rather, encouraged flexible strategies capable of addressing affordability, climate resilience, and community impact while contributing positively to Denver's urban identity.
Cultural institutions represent an active field for unbuilt architectural exploration, reflecting how architects continue to question the role of public buildings in shaping urban life. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected proposals bring together a range of projects that engage with museums, exhibition centers, and diplomatic buildings as sites of public encounter. Rather than treating these programs as fixed types, these projects approach them as evolving spatial settings through which cities engage with history, knowledge, and representation.
Across varied geographies, from Wenzhou and Helsinki to Belgrade, Debrecen, Mexico City, and Nürnberg, the proposals explore different responses to contemporary cultural architecture. They range from adaptive reuse of industrial and ideological structures to new buildings embedded in waterfronts, parks, and residential neighborhoods. While some emphasize continuity with historical contexts, others experiment with lighter structures, environmental strategies, or new relationships between interior programs and the public realm. Together, they offer a snapshot of how cultural institutions are being reimagined in diverse urban conditions.
Can academic projects explore new directions and contribute to public discourse on global and local issues? The 2025 Politecnico di Torino Architecture Students Award aimed to address these questions, showcasing how architectural research, training, and experimentation can be integrated into a school curriculum.
The Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction has announced the Grand Prize Winners of the 2025 Holcim Awards, selecting one project from each global region to represent the most impactful approaches to sustainable design in this cycle. This edition marks the introduction of the Grand Prize format, replacing the previous tiered distinctions to better acknowledge diverse regional contexts and avoid hierarchical rankings. Evaluated by juries chaired by Sou Fujimoto (Asia Pacific), Kjetil Trædal Thorsen (Europe), Sandra Barclay (Latin America), Lina Ghotmeh (Middle East and Africa), and Jeanne Gang (North America), the winning projects reflect the Foundation's principles of holistic, transformational, and transferable design.
The ultimate accolades of World Building of the Year supported by GROHE, World Interior of the Year, Future Project of the Year and Landscape of the Year were announced today as hundreds of architects from across the world convened at a grand finale Gala Dinner at Miami Beach Convention Center in Florida. A host of Special Prizes, including the American Beauty Prize supported by the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, were also announced at the closing event to celebrate the eighteenth edition of the festival. The announcement follows the final day of WAF, in which prize winners across all 43 categories have been competing for the winning titles.
https://www.archdaily.com/1036083/world-building-of-the-year-and-interior-of-the-year-revealed-at-world-architecture-festival-2025Enrique Tovar
In total, the three-day festival will see over 460 live pitches from the 2025 finalists, presented to more than 160 international judges. Today has seen shortlisted projects from around the world compete for 21 award categories within Completed Buildings, Future Projects, and Interiors. Award winners include OMA, Sordo Madaleno, Studio Arthur Casas, and NIKKEN SEKKEI.
https://www.archdaily.com/1036039/world-architecture-festival-2025-day-two-winners-announcedEnrique Tovar
In total, the three-day festival will see over 460 live pitches from the 2025 finalists in front of over 160 international judges. Today has seen shortlisted projects from around the world compete for 22 award categories within Completed Buildings, Future Projects, and Interiors. Award winners include WOW Architects, BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, Batlleiroig, and Perkins&Will.
https://www.archdaily.com/1035985/world-architecture-festival-2025-day-one-winners-announcedEnrique Tovar
The EUmies Awards are organized annually by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and the European Commission, with the support of the European Union's Creative Europe Programme. Based on the principle that "architecture is not merely a technical or aesthetic matter, but a cultural, environmental, and democratic issue," this 19th cycle of the Prize brings together 410 works from 40 countries and 143 regions across Europe. Beyond recognizing contemporary architecture projects, the Awards also aim to reflect European values such as cultural diversity, sustainability, democracy, and solidarity. This year, most nominated works (23%) are residential projects, including both collective and single-family housing, followed by cultural (13%) and educational (12%) programs. The selection shows a balance between transformations of existing buildings (44%) and new construction (56%), while 12% of the nominees are transnational works and 33% of the studios are 10 years old or younger, underscoring the growing visibility of emerging practices.
The event invited designers to reflect on one of architecture's oldest and most symbolic elements: the stair. Beyond its functional role as a connector of levels, the stair was positioned here as a medium of architectural storytelling—an invitation to explore ideas of procession, sequence, space, and form.
For this first edition, participants were asked to conceptualize a stair not as a technical solution but as an expressive artifact—an embodiment of their design sensibility and architectural values. There were no constraints on site, scale, material, or program. Instead, designers were challenged to reimagine the stair as a sculptural, poetic, and even philosophical construct—one that could provoke, question, or elevate our understanding of vertical space.
