Young Talent 2025 Proceedings

The jury members want to highlight the hopeful spirit in the selected projects, noting the emergence of a new generation of architects who question conventional authorship and embrace repair, transformation, and imaginative engagement with architecture as forms of protest and deep re-examination of the discipline’s role in society.

The three winning projects show different yet complementary approaches, contexts, and scales. In all three cases, these are multiscalar projects that start from different places as a forest ecosystem, a city, or a building, but converge in their attitude and stance: one of repair and care in the face of a broken world.

The Forest & Phoenix winning project stands out for its generosity and humility. It shows how architectural thinking can be rooted in care and empowerment. What we found especially impressive is how this proposal manages to bring together different types of knowledge (from forest workers, firefighters, scientists, and public users) and creates a space where all of these perspectives can meet and interact.

There is a powerful duality at the heart of the project. On the one hand, it addresses very real, practical needs: it creates tools and structures that support professionals who work with the forest. On the other, it introduces poetic, sensory spaces that honour the atmosphere, rhythm, and spirit of the forest itself. The project doesn’t treat the natural environment as something separate or static. Instead, it integrates human presence with the living cycles of the forest in a respectful, balanced way. The proposal is particularly strong in its attention to materiality. The reuse of charred wood becomes both a symbolic and practical gesture, addressing sustainability and circular resource use in a meaningful way. This approach reflects a sensitivity to the environmental context and a commitment to ecological responsibility.

The second winning project, Brave New Axis , operates in the city centre of Athens. The jury, being familiar with the context and circumstances surrounding the project, highly values its ability to integrate multiple qualities in a coherent and mature manner. From the initial brief – including the definition of the project’s boundaries, scale, form, content, and programme – the work reveals a rigorous and deeply considered approach.

One of the most notable aspects of the project is its strong commitment to the public dimension: it addresses the urban scale, collective space, and the social value of architecture with clarity and sensitivity. At the same time, the project demonstrates a careful and focused attention to specific urban conditions (such as underused voids, available buildings, or obsolete infrastructures) proposing intelligent and respectful strategies for their reactivation.

Brave New Axis exemplifies the transformative power of architecture. It does not rely on working in neutral or empty contexts, but rather emerges from a precise reading of the existing city, uncovering hidden potential and opportunities for intervention.

Hotel Interim, the third winning proposal, faces the renovation of the unused, in its last years, but carefully maintained modernist hotel in Halle (Germany). This project embodies an approach centered on thoughtful intervention and the care of existing structures rather than rebuilding from scratch.  It is a highly delicate and evocative project that, through its multidisciplinary format, has the capacity to raise awareness and propose architectural practices of transformation and reuse as alternatives to demolition. It also manages to speak about a model of the city through the treatment of a single architectural piece.

This project represents a paradigm shift that emphasises that architecture today increasingly focuses on transitional states, collective care, and sustainability rather than mere design or demolition. The jury highlights the high level of maturity demonstrated by its author, due to the profound understanding and communicative ability evoked by the project.

Following the territorial scale addressed by the winning project Forest & Phoenix, as well as its preventive approach to natural catastrophe scenarios, a group of finalist and selected projects can be identified along similar lines.

One such example is the finalist project Sacred, which stands out for its sensitive and site-specific response to the post-volcanic landscape of La Palma, reimagining mourning as a spatial and ritual journey that articulates a profound relationship between memory, terrain, and atmosphere; while more restrained in scale, the selected project Grazing in Rural Regeneration and Fire Prevention similarly engages with processes of repair and resilience, proposing a modest yet effective strategy for ecological regeneration through traditional grazing practices and minimal architectural interventions.

This shared concern for territorial fragility and preventive design extends into other shortlisted projects that address water-based landscapes through equally thoughtful and multi-scalar approaches, such as Continuous Lagoon, which proposes the transformation of a decommissioned power plant in the Po Delta into a resilient prototype for deltaic regeneration. Through the careful integration of existing industrial structures with new ecological strategies, the project outlines a plausible and imaginative scenario for reinhabiting a vulnerable, flood-prone environment. Building on this logic of ecological responsiveness, Ecosystem Strategies for Urban Co-Habitation introduces a technically mature and conceptually ambitious framework that challenges anthropocentric planning models by placing water, flora, fauna, and humans on equal footing; through a methodology grounded in cohabitation and interdependence, and supported by evocative graphic work and multi-scalar resolutions, the project effectively translates ecological thinking into architectural practice.

Adding a more poetic and introspective dimension, Lands of Borderlands is anchored in the sensitive landscape of the Polish-Ukrainian border and reframes architecture as an act of attention and care, where spatial gestures become tools to listen to silence, register memory.

Continuing within a context of intervention in the natural environment, we find a series of projects that focus on the concern around material extraction for construction and on working within abandoned post-extractive landscapes. These proposals engage with the material and symbolic consequences of past extraction through acts of poetic reparation, spatial reflection, and constructive reinvention. Among them, the finalist project Other Monuments stands out for its richness and depth: it combines poetics and tectonics with remarkable sensitivity, offering a compelling reinterpretation of monumentality through the transformation of a disused granite quarry into a funerary complex. The project articulates a profound dialogue between landscape, ritual, and material reuse.

This sensitivity to site, matter and memory resonates across Post-Extractivist Retreat , which reclaims a slate quarry ravaged by wildfire through a thermal programme guided by degrowth principles. The shortlisted project proposes a model of regenerative architecture based on material experimentation and careful construction detailing. In Subterranean Oasis, a natural cave system in Eastern Serbia becomes the setting for a spa that draws directly from the geological conditions of the site. It mediates with care between the human body and the subterranean environment, producing spaces of healing that remain embedded within the logic of the terrain. Similarly, Water-Mine explores the latent presence of water within the ruins of Sardinia’s Nebida mining complex, transforming remnants of industrial infrastructure into a museographic and landscape experience.

The conceptual density of Deep Fragmentation introduces a narrative and temporal complexity inspired by literary experiment. Located on the edge of the Bay of Naples, the shortlisted project assembles fragments of ecological data, spatial forms and historical residues into an architecture of uncertainty and attention. In a more poetic register, The Girl of the Blue Thoughts constructs a quiet sequence along a mountain ridge, where built form and landscape unfold through rhythm and restraint. The project is notable for how it works and integrates references with care and subtlety.

Following the lead of the winning project Brave New Axis, the focus now shifts, in contrast to the previous group centred on natural and post-extractive environments, toward projects that engage with the urban fabric and the city.

The finalist designs of Ruining the Ruinous Ruin and Street Runners stand out for their transformative approaches to systemic urban challenges. In Brussels, Ruining the Ruinous Ruin proposes a new urban ecology by treating the city’s obsolete surfaces and infrastructures as productive ruins. Through dismantling and soil regeneration, it reintroduces permeability, water circulation, and biodiversity into the urban fabric, using degradation as a long-term design strategy. In Thessaloniki, Street Runners addresses the precarious conditions of last-mile delivery workers by proposing an integrative infrastructure that embeds care and solidarity within the city’s logistics networks, making visible a labour force often overlooked.

This same commitment to urban transformation through dissident action and human-scale intervention is at the core of the selected project New Ground Floors, developed in Volos (Greece). It reuses disused commercial spaces as student housing. Tested through real occupation, the project proposes a dispersed and relational model grounded in cohabitation and reciprocity, reactivating the ground floor as a vital social threshold between home and street.

Two selected projects explore infrastructural urbanism from different perspectives. Water and Resilience reimagines Lisbon’s water systems as a metabolic infrastructure, interweaving natural and artificial networks to choreograph adaptive responses to scarcity and excess. In the project of The Bridges of Radolfzell, its author reconnects fragmented urban and natural areas through seven architecturally distinct bridges that propose new forms of spatial, social, and ecological connectivity. Following in this infrastructural field, Living Under a Common Roof reclaims the space beneath a viaduct in Ho Chi Minh City to propose a flexible, low-rise housing model inspired by the Vietnamese tube house. The project makes efficient use of leftover space and local materials, offering a climate-responsive and culturally grounded alternative for social housing.

Following the debate and revindication proposed by the winning project Hotel Interim, and moving from interventions that take the urban scale as their starting point, we now focus on the next group of finalist and selected projects, which explore architectural strategies grounded in the architectural piece, the building.

Echoing the approach proposed by Hotel Interim, which reclaims a building in limbo as a space for collective experimentation, the finalist project Beyond Demolition proposes a clear alternative to demolition by treating architectural leftovers not as waste but as a resource. Through the reuse of components from a nearby condemned structure, it outlines a replicable methodology that the jury highlighted for its potential to normalise and give visibility to circular practices in architecture. Alongside this, the shortlisted project Empty Beauties explores the adaptive reuse of vacant office buildings, offering a catalogue of spatial and technical interventions grounded in real data. By reorganising the building’s empty cores and quantifying its CO₂ savings, the project demonstrates how existing structures can be transformed with minimal environmental impact—an approach the jury valued for its realism and transferability.

Extending this commitment to reframe architectural obsolescence, there are two projects that propose forms of repair that confront decay without erasure. Repairing Robin Hood Gardens takes on one of the most emblematic brutalist housing complexes, treating its damaged state not as a flaw to be hidden but as a record to be revealed. The jury recognised its ethical stance, where repair becomes a form of justice and a means to rethink collective housing through adaptability and appropriation. Similarly, the finalist project Rescripted Neapolitan Realities challenges the expected fate of the Vele di Scampia by turning it into a cultural and social platform. Through participatory filmmaking and spatial transformation, it constructs a new collective identity around a contested site, an approach the jury described as both utopian and powerful in its ability to shift perception.

Following this reparative and reuse-oriented approach to existing buildings, projects are also highlighted that deal with the more habitual conversion of highly singular industrial and/or heritage buildings. Among them, the finalist projects Three Chimneys Archipelago and Tabacalera stand out for their ambitious scale and strategic transformation. The former reactivates the post-industrial complex of Les Tres Xemeneies in Barcelona through a seductive set of interventions that balance memory and innovation, while Tabacalera applies a technically sophisticated and programmatically ambitious strategy to convert Madrid’s old tobacco factory into a multifunctional cultural centre.

In parallel, the shortlisted projects Centralen, Sendling’s Kitchen <3 and Paral·lel Cultural Nexus explore diverse typologies and programmatic frameworks to reinsert derelict structures into contemporary urban narratives. Centralen engages in a careful balancing act between heritage and sustainability, reducing the building’s carbon impact by 44% while creating new communal programmes around a carefully designed in-between space, an approach the jury praised for its spatial intelligence. Sendling’s Kitchen <3 layers new functions over an existing wholesale market in Munich through a detailed and constructive project that redefines service architecture via food, infrastructure, and bioclimatic strategies. Meanwhile, Paral·lel Cultural Nexus reimagines a former industrial complex in Barcelona as a vertical new public facility, where cultural exchange and urban density meet.

Finally, to round off and complement this selection of projects, the jury wanted to include a series of proposals whose contribution lies in the development of complex programmes with strong social value.

Within this last group of projects, the jury highlights a selection of proposals that engage with socially-driven programmes and vulnerable populations, where architecture becomes an active agent in processes of care, rehabilitation and integration. The finalist People and Outlaws rethinks the prison as a space for rehabilitation rather than punishment, fostering connections between young offenders and the surrounding community through a human-scale design rooted in trust and proximity. Sharing a similar ambition, Hermetic Architecture proposes a penal facility based on gradual resocialisation, where well-researched spatial strategies aim to support reflection and reintegration. Both projects use architecture to reframe incarceration as an opportunity for renewal.

Care and continuity are also central in Continuity of Aging, which proposes a flexible housing model that reduces the trauma of institutional transitions by allowing residents to age in place, surrounded by stable relationships. In a similar spirit, KO-101 – Affordable Heterotopia reimagines suburban living through a dense, modular housing system rooted in collective values and self-sufficiency, offering an inclusive model for vulnerable groups. In a different register, Behcinar transforms a degraded urban site into a porous, garden-like community centre that reclaims collective memory and fosters new forms of interaction.

Finally, Lazaret 2.0 responds to the growing need for emergency medical infrastructure in the face of pandemics and climate disasters. The project develops a mobile, modular hospital system that is both technically robust and sustainable: an architecture prepared for uncertainty.

Young Talent Open 2025

The winning project Poolside Politics engages with architectural legacy in a highly sensitive and imaginative way. It operates with optimism and precision, focusing on what already exists, elements that are available, though often overlooked, neglected, or invisible. The project brings attention to what is possible when we work with the existing: it demonstrates that attentiveness and care can uncover opportunities and that architecture can serve as a powerful transformative tool. Rather than proposing erasure or replacement, the project reveals how transformation can emerge from what is already there. Moreover, the jury values the project’s ecological dimension. It suggests that through thoughtful reuse and careful observation, we can generate new forms of value using what we already have. Poolside Politics is a compelling example of how architecture can act both critically and constructively, reimagining existing territories with intelligence and purpose.

This shared concern for the overlooked, the marginal and the abandoned becomes evident across the awarded entries. Many proposals avoid replacement in favour of reactivation, emphasising care, repair and reinvention as architectural strategies. Several of them focus specifically on the regeneration of communities through local knowledge and resources.

Among them, the finalist project The Belmonte Tomato Farmers Cooperative stands out for its sensitive and situated transformation of a declining Calabrian village through the establishment of a farmers’ cooperative. Emerging from immersive research and local engagement, the proposal avoids externally imposed solutions and builds instead on existing cultural practices. The jury praised its honesty and commitment to transforming the ordinary into a collective project. Similarly concerned with the entanglement of environmental and social issues, the finalist proposal of Dynamics of an Overexploited Territory proposes a masterplan for Bangka Island in Indonesia, where artisanal fishing and illegal tin mining clash. The jury highlighted the project’s compelling narrative and its use of monsoon cycles as a design principle, creating dignified, vernacular infrastructure in a fragile and contested environment.

Similarly grounded in low-tech strategies and local reuse, the finalist project Bridging the Maribyrnong addresses post-industrial degradation in Melbourne through small-scale, pedagogical infrastructures attached to existing bridges. These lightweight, site-specific additions use found materials to restore ecological habitats and reconnect communities to the river. The project demonstrates how modest interventions can catalyse broader environmental restoration. Along similar lines, the shortlisted project of To the Bricks that Built Us engages with a disappearing community of brickmakers in the Mekong Delta. The proposal combines ephemeral architectures with traditional festivals to celebrate the memory of a declining trade. The jury appreciated its poetic dimension and capacity to re-signify a fading legacy.

Other projects operate through speculation, protest and narrative imagination. The finalist project Reimagining Urban Vernacular transforms a high-tech skyscraper in Sydney into a self-built, low-tech communal shelter. Through dismantling, bricolage and climate-responsive design, the squatters reclaim the tower and redefine the very notion of shelter. The jury highlighted its evocative drawings and its ability to humanise the typology through a structural and imaginative reappropriation.

Also working through speculative fiction, the shortlisted project Tuareg Trails of Tomorrow reimagines the future of Arlit (Niger) through the revival of ancient trade routes. While the jury recognised the dramatic tone and cultural richness of the proposal, it also acknowledged its bravery in addressing a politically charged and ecologically damaged context through architectural means.

Among the shortlisted projects, Queer Space/Protest Architecture proposes a temporary occupation of a colonial square in Jakarta (Indonesia). Through ephemeral structures and performative interventions, the project asserts queer presence in public space, fostering dialogue, activism and visibility. The jury valued its courage in addressing a politically sensitive topic within a complex social context. Also dealing with contested narratives and public engagement, Heterotopia for Urban Hacking reclaims forgotten infrastructures in Ankara as layered sites of memory, storytelling and participation.

Finally, operating at the intersection of planning, regulation and public space, Entanglement and Public Affairs explores the tensions between old and new, public and private in the redevelopment of an inner Melbourne suburb. The jury considered the project original in its engagement with regulation, albeit somewhat conventional in its architectural expression.