Urban Design
Design and planning of urban spaces, infrastructure, and communities that shape how people live and interact in cities.
Life Floats: A Floating Neighbourhood Built from Hulls for a Sinking Jakarta Shoreline
Four buoyant prototypes for housing, gardens and utilities gather around a central dock where subsidence has drowned the jl Pantai Mutiara district.
Revitalization of the Bakhrushins' Heritage: Glass and Brick Wake a 19th-Century Orphanage
A family quarter grows on the Bakhrushin orphanage grounds, where cleared clutter, reopened windows and a glass florarium return old brick to use.
Afloat: A Floating Indonesian City That Uses Shared Housing to Ease Ethnic Tension
Timber gables, fishing grids and planted islets form a water district where a common way of living becomes the ground on which neighbors meet.
prOpencity: Treating the Dense City as Open-Source Code That Its Citizens Can Edit
A collage-driven urban experiment that swaps the masterplan for a repeatable loop of listening, prototyping and revising with the people on the street.
LBWA Plays Blue Joinery Against Walnut and Marble in a 68 m² Tenement Apartment in Poznań's Łazarz District
A renovated flat in a historic Poznań tenement keeps its arched windows and paneled doors while blue cabinetry, walnut and marble carry the design.
OUT Architecture Turns a Coffee Cup Stain into a Broken Ring of Benches on a London Market Corner
A broken ring of steel and cork benches outside an Aldgate café reclaims an overlooked Petticoat Lane corner for the London Festival of Architecture 2026.
E PLUS DESIGN Stacks a Chongqing Shopping Complex into a Terraced Hillside Beside Green Heart Park
At LUXERIVERS in Chongqing, a 22,535 m² retail and art complex steps down toward Luxi Lake as planted terraces, open atriums and public stairs.
Manuel Cervantes Estudio Turns a Mexico City Transit Interchange into a Skylit Public Concourse
At El Rosario in Mexico City, a 65,000 m² modal transfer center uses steel, perforated metal and daylight to give the daily commute a civic room.
An Urban Social Network: Redesigning Barcelona's Blocks Around Everyday Life
A distributed network of collective spaces across Barcelona's superblocks weaves ecology, accessibility and social infrastructure into one spatial system.
HYPERBLOCK: A Catalogue of Strategies for Growing Barcelona Upward
Vicky Daroca's Editor's Choice entry layers nine flexible massing systems above Cerdà's 133-metre grid without erasing the city beneath.
Synergize: Rewiring Barcelona's Cerdà Grid into a Cooperative Urban Network
A shortlisted Hyperblock entry dissolves block boundaries to create 800-metre pedestrian districts within Barcelona's iconic grid.
The Waves: An Opera House Born from Collision of Water and Air on Tallinn's Peninsula
Alina Fedoseeva's waterfront opera house translates the behavior of Baltic waves into vertical metal streams, sweeping base curves, and illuminated public
