The World Architecture Festival has revealed its 2025 shortlist of innovative buildings from around the world.
COMPILED BY Gina Dionisio PHOTOS Archexist, Shrimp Studio; Georg Roske; CL studio; Hufton+Crow; Jason O’Rear; Hufton+Crow; Chen Xi Studio; Rafael Gamo; Turenscape; Zhu Yumeng; Aaron Pocock; Shao Feng; Leonas Garbačauskas; Ignas Maldūnas; Julian Vassallo; Cyrille Weiner; Kris Tamburello; John Athimaritis, Courtesy of Red Sea Global; Fran Parente; Trevor Mein
The World Architecture Festival (WAF) has revealed its full 2025 shortlist of over 460 projects up for awards in the Completed Buildings, Interiors and Landscape categories.
This year’s top 10 shortlisted countries include the USA, China, UK, Australia, India, Canada, Singapore, UAE, Turkey and Japan. The finalists range from major world architects, including Zaha Hadid Architects, WOHA, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, MVRDV, Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Kohn Pederson Fox and Nikken Sekkei, with many emerging practices also on stage competing against the big names.
Below, in no particular order, are 20 outstanding international projects up for awards this year.
Wuhan Snow World by CLOU architects
LOCATION: Wuhan, China
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Shopping
Wuhan Snow World redefines the shopping experience by fusing retail, leisure, and sport within an immersive snow-themed environment. Located in Wuhan’s Huangpi district, the 165,000-square-metre complex integrates indoor and outdoor retail, entertainment, dining, water recreation, and amusement rides – anchored by one of China’s largest indoor ski slopes.
Ritual Space by GEOMIM
LOCATION: Mugla, Turkey
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Hotel and Leisure
The Ritual Space at Scorpios Bodrum combines architecture with spirituality, creating a transformative environment for introspection and connection. The design features narrow corridors and courtyards, resulting in a unique light scenography. Natural materials, such as rammed earth floors and plaster coatings that harmonise with the soil’s colour, are used extensively. Shade and circulation are integrated into the structure, enhancing the meditative atmosphere.
MOREPRK Skyline by AAN ARCHITECTS
LOCATION: Shanghai, China
WAF INTERIORS: Public Buildings
The concept of moreprk skatepark is inspired by its own site and location. The floating glass box allows people to have a 270-degree unobstructed view in the space. Moreprk Skatepark uses “curvature” as a medium to transform the spirit of freedom of movement into spatial form, reshaping the relationship between people and the city, gravity and the sky in a suspended glass box.
Sauska Tokaj by BORD Architectural Studio
LOCATION: Rátka, Tokaj-Hegyalja Wine Region, Hungary
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Production energy and Logistics
Situated in the historic Tokaj-Hegyalja Wine Region, a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Sauska Tokaj winery is a contemporary architectural landmark that seamlessly blends into the rolling, vineyard-covered, undulating hills. Its light, seemingly floating form makes a bold visual statement, contributing significantly to the region’s cultural and economic revitalisation.
Populus by Studio Gang
LOCATION: Denver, Colorado, United States
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Hotel and Leisure
Located on a prominent corner site that connects Denver’s civic, arts, and commercial districts, Populus greets the neighborhood equally on its three sides to welcome visitors and residents. The sculptural façade is textured with vertical scallops that correspond to the width of guest rooms, linking the building’s exterior expression with its interior program. The glass fibre reinforced concrete (GFRC) panel cladding is acid-washed to bring out the material’s aggregate, giving the building a bright, natural hue.
Fenix by MAD
LOCATION: Rotterdam, Netherlands
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Culture
Fenix is MAD’s first completed cultural project in Europe, an reimagining a century-old harbour warehouse into a contemporary museum devoted to the theme of migration. Located on Rotterdam’s Katendrecht Peninsula, once a vital departure point for millions of migrants and home to continental Europe’s oldest Chinatown, the 16,000-square-metre structure reopens as a layered public space that fuses memory, movement, and modernity.
Dongmingshan Senyu Hotel by GLA Architects
LOCATION: Hangzhou, China
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Hotel and Leisure
Dongmingshan Senyu Hotel is located in a natural forest within the Dongmingshan Forest Park, with a dense cover of metasequoia and moso bamboo. The complex consists of a reception centre and three types of detached guest rooms.
One Za’abeel by NIKKEN SEKKEI LTD
LOCATION: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Mixed Use
One Za’abeel stands at the gateway from the Dubai International Airport to the central Dubai, accommodating offices, hotels, residences, and commercial spaces. Its two towers each stand on plots separated by a highway, connected 100 metres above ground by a horizontal cantilevered structure called THE LINK. The linear and asymmetrical silhouette embodies timeless elegance creating a new skyline of Dubai. Located in between the city’s historic Old Town and the emerging recently developed area, THE LINK is designed as an interface of Dubai’s both aspects while amplifying the iconic stature of the project.
NYPD 40th Precinct by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group
LOCATION: New York City, New York, United States
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Civic and community
Located in the southern Bronx directly across the street from St. Mary’s Park, the new NYPD 40th Precinct Station replaces a station house on 138th Street and creates a dedicated space for the community, areas for fitness and training for officers. The form of the 45,000-sq-ft, three-story building is derived from its programmatic requirements, where individual volumes that contain specific elements of the program revolve around a 60-ft light-filled atrium. The precinct’s precast concrete façade alternates between sandblasted and polished finishes, which stand in contrast to the exterior’s reflective glass and metal mesh. Reentrant walls allow windows to be set back from the building perimeter, offering improved privacy and security.
Embracing Flood – Xinjiang River Ecological Corridor by Turenscape
LOCATION: Shangrao City, China
WAF LANDSCAPE: Urban
In the city of Nanchang, within the Yangtze River flood plain in east-central China, Turenscape transformed a 51 hectare badly abused landscape into a dreamlike floating forest that regulates storm water, provides habitat for wildlife, offers an array of recreational opportunities and gives local residents a new way to connect with nature.
Netherlands Pavilion Expo 2025 Osaka by RAU Architects & Tellart
LOCATION: Osaka, Japan
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Display
Designed and built by the Dutch-Japanese consortium AND BV (comprising RAU Architects, DGMR, Asanuma, and Tellart), the pavilion offers a fully integrated spatial narrative, where architecture and guest experience are seamlessly fused into one holistic story about circularity, emissions-free energy, and our shared responsibility as Guests on Earth.
Mandai Rainforest Resort by WOW Architects and Warner Wong design
LOCATION: Singapore, Singapore
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Hotel and Leisure
The resort adopts a deeply biophilic approach, where the architecture is designed not just to sit within the landscape but to become a part of it. Inspired by natural forms, the liana-like structure flows through the site – meandering, branching, and floating like an extension of the rainforest. While some elements resemble biomimicry, the intention is not imitation but enhancement – creating deeper sensory and emotional experiences for guests.
Habitat Qinhuangdao by Safdie Architects
LOCATION: Qinhuangdao, China
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Housing
The housing is organised into a series of stacked residential blocks of 16 stories that are offset and surrounded by gardens at the base and linked via skybridges at the 17th and 32nd floors. The buildings’ stepped and staggered forms create private terraces, balconies, and solariums. The buildings’ long elevations face east, west, and south to take in sunshine. Grand “urban windows” – view corridors between the city and the sea – humanise the scale and connect the development to its context. North-facing interiors borrow light that filters through these large urban windows. As a result, the development feels bright, airy, and open.
Klaipėda state musical theatre by MAMA architects
LOCATION: Vilnius, Lithuania
WAF INTERIORS: Public Buildings
The architects interpreted the musical theatre spaces not only as a place for the arts to flourish, but also paid homage to sacred language in the interior architecture, where an emotional depth would be revealed even before the music started.
Naxxar House by AP Valletta
LOCATION: Naxxar, Malta
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: House and Villa – (Rural/Coastal)
Situated in the rural village of Naxxar on the Mediterranean island of Malta, this project extends and transforms an 18th-century palazzino into a contemporary residence. The intervention is based on a respectful dialogue between a new addition and the existing architecture and grows out of both the building’s character and the architecture of adjacent historic defensive towers, once dotting the surrounding landscape before being absorbed by recent urban development in the area.
Fondation de Chine by Coldefy
LOCATION: Paris, France
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Housing
The Fondation de Chine is a cultural and architectural collaboration that embodies the convergence of Chinese and French cultures. Located on the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (CIUP), it serves as both a residence for students and a cultural centre for the promotion of Chinese heritage in Paris. This dual purpose guided the architectural approach, to find common ground between two distinct cultural and urban typologies.
Van der Vlugt Residence by STRANG Design
LOCATION: Key Largo, Florida, United States
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: House and Villa – (Rural/Coastal)
This residence positions itself as a sophisticated outpost along a desolate and relatively untouched stretch of coastline in the Upper Florida Keys. Its unique and natural site offers an unhurried counterpoint to the intensities of the nearby Miami metropolis. The home partially engages a pre-existing berm while also demonstrating a certain degree of freedom from the low-lying landscape.
Desert Rock by Oppenheim Architecture
LOCATION: Red Sea Development, Saudi Arabia
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Hotel and Leisure
Desert Rock is part of an ambitious and unprecedented eco-tourism development in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, set among 11,000 square miles of islands, beaches, desert, mountains, and volcanic areas. Completed in December, 2024, this LEED Platinum-certified project engages with the majestic granite mountains and mythical desertscape. Working with the language of the earth, the architects designed new spaces and experiences – buildings that disappear within the tectonic landscape, echoing ancient Nabatean civilisations that once lived in the region. Indoor and outdoor spaces are located within crevices and caves, or on shaded slopes, utilising the cooler microclimates and minimising solar gain.
Angra House by Studio Arthur Casas
LOCATION: Angra dos Reis, Brazil
WAF INTERIORS: Residential (single dwelling)
Originally built in the 1980s, the project was reimagined from architecture to interiors, with an emphasis on daylighting and cross ventilation – enhancing and highlighting its connection to the surroundings in every possible corner. The goal was to adapt the L-shaped house to the needs of a couple with two children who enjoy hosting family and friends, as the original layout no longer suited their lifestyle.
Central Station by Woods Bagot in collaboration with John McAslan + Partners
LOCATION: Sydney, Australia
WAF COMPLETED BUILDINGS: Transport
The transformation of Central Station to accommodate a state of the art metro interchange required the design of spatially and structurally efficient operational segments, and sophisticated, multilevel passenger flow strategies. This was also desinged with the future in mind, so that the station serves additional placemaking and regeneration outcomes. The project features a dramatic new main entrance sequence for the imposing early 20th century edifice and incorporates as its centrepiece a distinctive 50m-span vaulted roof.
World Architecture Festival and Inside World Festival of Interiors will take place at Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami, on 12 – 14 November 2025. | worldarchitecturefestival.com
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