Holcim Foundation Awards 2025

Presented by Holcim Foundation

Learn more at: https://www.holcimfoundation.org/awards

The Holcim Foundation Awards return in 2025 with a global selection of projects that reframe architecture as an agent of repair, for cities, communities, and ecosystems. The awards spotlight practices that confront the climate emergency through intelligence, cultural sensitivity, and a deep commitment to the people they serve. This year’s honorees reveal a powerful shift: sustainability is no longer an accessory to architecture, but its driving force.

Across Asia Pacific, the Grand Prize goes to the Old Dhaka Central Jail Conservation, a transformative vision that liberates a once-forbidden site and returns it to the public as a vibrant cultural landscape. FORM.3 ARCHITECTS stitch together memory, community, and climate-responsive strategies, showing how adaptive reuse can heal a city’s collective psyche while creating urgently needed green space. Alongside it, the region’s winning projects, from Gelephu Mindfulness City in Bhutan to the Pingshan River Blueway in Shenzhen, point toward a future where cities grow by listening: to nature, to heritage, and to the communities that inhabit them.

In Europe, the Grand Prize Art-Tek Tulltorja reimagines Pristina’s abandoned brick factory as a creative and technological powerhouse. The project shows how existing industrial sites can gain new life, offering space for culture, innovation, and public gathering. Across the region, the awarded projects, from the clay-rich School in Gaüses to Denmark’s Crafts College and Madrid’s revived Southern River Parks, highlight a Europe working with what it already has, integrating nature, craft, and community into contemporary frameworks.

Latin America’s Grand Prize, Schools for Flood-Prone Areas in Porto Alegre, proposes architecture as a life-saving infrastructure, doubling as both a learning environment and an emergency refuge. From community-built landscapes in Medellín to social housing in Asunción, the region’s awarded works champion inclusion, ecological resilience, and the reactivation of forgotten urban ecologies.

In the Middle East & Africa, Qalandiya: The Green Historic Maze stands out as a profound act of care, a slow, incremental revival of a fragile historic village. Here, conservation becomes a vehicle for dignity and opportunity, reflecting the values shared by the region’s winners, from Kenya’s forest-immersed Waldorf School to the climate-smart Zando Central Market in Kinshasa.

North America’s Grand Prize, Moakley Park in Boston, transforms a vulnerable coastline into a resilient social landscape, blending community empowerment with ecological engineering. Its companion winners, from the net-zero Buffalo Crossing to Toronto’s Lawson Centre for Sustainability, show a continent rethinking its heavy-carbon legacy.

Together, the winners of the Holcim Foundation Awards 2025 reveal a new architectural paradigm, one rooted in regeneration, participation, and deep respect for place. They remind us that the most powerful designs are those that restore, reconnect, and reimagine what our built environment can be.

_article written by Daniela Moreira da Silva
_cover image by Nicola Pavan

_prize winners

_photo 1 and 2: Asia Pacific Grand Prize Winner | Old Dhaka Central Jail Conservation
_photo 3 and 4: Europe Grand Prize | Art-Tek Tulltorja
_photo 5 and 6: Latin America Grand Prize | Schools for Flood-Prone Areas, Porto Alegre, Brazil
_photo 7: Middle East & Africa Grand Prize Winner | Qalandiya: The Green Historic Maze
_photo 8 and 9: North America Grand Prize Winner | Moakley Park in Boston, USA