World Architecture Festival 2025 Winners

The World Architecture Festival 2025 has unveiled the list of projects that capture the vast, ever-evolving language of architecture today. This year’s winners are more than icons, they are statements of intent, built and unbuilt, that reflect how architects are rewriting the relationship between space, culture, material, and the planet.

Leading the celebration, World Building of the Year goes to the Holy Redeemer Church and Community Centre in Las Chumberas by Fernando Menis. A project that doesn’t seek spectacle, yet achieves a quiet spiritual resonance, rooted in memory, shaped by place, and open to community. A reminder that architecture can be both humble and monumental.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Future Project of the Year is the Gelephu International Airport by Bjarke Ingels Group, a vision suspended between infrastructure and landscape, dissolving the line between built form and nature. It’s architecture as geography, as experience, as cultural bridge.

The poetic continues indoors, with World Interior of the Year awarded to FRACTAL CHAPEL at State Hospital Graz by INNOCAD. Concept and emotion collapse into a single gesture, proving that interior space, when designed with intention, can be just as transformative as any external structure.

In the open air, the Landscape of the Year honors Embracing Flood: Xinjiang River Ecological Corridor by Turenscape. A powerful example of how design and ecology are no longer separate disciplines, but necessary allies.

And this is only the beginning. From Younghusband by Woods Bagot to T3 Diagonal Mar in Barcelona, from light-driven wineries to timber-made workspaces, every awarded project reflects a shift: toward sustainability, toward material honesty, toward architecture that listens, to land, to people, to time.

What this year’s winners share is not a single style, but a shared forward momentum. They redefine what it means to build today, balancing beauty and responsibility, creativity and care. This is a snapshot of where architecture stands now. And a map of where it’s going next. Explore deeply, and let these projects expand your definition of what architecture can be.

_article written by Daniela Moreira da Silva
_photos courtesy of: WAF

_photo 1: World Building of the Year 2025 - The Holy Redeemer Church and Community Centre of Las Chumberas by Fernando Menis
_photo 2: Future Project of the Year 2025 - Gelephu International Airport by BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group
_photo 3: World Interior of the Year 2025 - FRACTAL CHAPEL at State Hospital Graz by INNOCAD architecture
_photo 4: Landscape of the Year 2025 - Embracing Flood: Xinjiang River Ecological Corridor by Turenscape

_special prizes: 
_photo 5: Redhill Early Learning Center by Hubo
_photo 6: Dialogue with Nature—Commune STORE by Atelier Global Limited
_photo 7: 1265 Borregas by MGA | Michael Green Architecture, SERA Architects
_photo 8: Isla Intersections Supportive Housing & Paseo by Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects
_photo 9: Alibaba Xixi Tech Campus Landscape by ASPECT Studios
_photo 10: The Holy Redeemer Church and Community Centre of Las Chumberas by Fernando Menis
_photo 11: Quinta De Adorigo Winery by Atelier Sergio Rebelo
_photo 12: Sponge of the Keys by University of Manitoba
_photo 13: Regenerative Tree by NIKKEN SEKKEI LTD
_photo 14: 'waterspaces' by Rizoma del agua, led by researcher Diego Rivero Borrell
_photo 15: Dockyard X by Jason Wang