Design Educates Awards

We are deeply grateful to everyone who joined us at the Architecture in Foyer Conference 2025 and the Design Educates Awards Ceremony! Thank you to all participants, speakers, and partners for your energy, ideas, and presence. 📸 Here are some moments from the day — we’re happy to share them with you! #ArchitectureInFoyer #DEAwards2025 #ConferenceHighlights #DesignEducatesAwards

We’re excited to announce the Winners of the Design Educates Awards 2025! A heartfelt thank you to everyone who participated and shared their vision of meaningful design with us. Explore the full list of awarded designs on our website and see what design that matters looks like today. See the winners: designeducates.com #DEAwards2025 #DesignEducatesAwards #AwardedDesigns #Architecturedesign #ProductDesign #Universaldesign

Announcing Jury Panel of Design Educates Awards 2025! Our esteemed jury consists of world-renowned architects, designers, innovators and educators who are successfully expanding the boundaries of what is possible in their fields: Prof. Toyo Ito ( Architect, founder of Toyo Ito & Associates, laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize) @toyo_ito_architects , Prof. Barbara Holzer (Architect, lecturer, cofounder and director of Holzer Kobler Architekturen) @holzerkobler , Prof. Rainer Mahlamäki (Partner & Co-Founder, Lahdelma & Mahlamäki architects) @lmarchitects_fi Doriana Mandrelli Fuksas (Architect and designer, leading «Fuksas Design») @fuksas_architects , Prof. Thomas Schroepfer (SUTD, Director Future Cities Laboratory Global Singapore-ETH Centre) @sutdsg , Francine Houben (Creative Director/Founding Partner at Mecanoo) @mecanoo_ , David Basulto (Founder, CEO, editor-in-chief of Archdaily) @archdaily , Prof. Benedetta Tagliabue (Principal Architect and Co-Founder of EMBT) @embtarchitects , Julie Payette (Founding Partner of v2com newswire, publicist) @v2com_newswire , Oskar Zięta (Architect, artist and process designer, founder and CEO of Zieta Studio.) @zieta_studio , Martin Reuter (Architect, Managing Director at ingenhoven associates) @ingenhovenassociates , Dr Peter Kuczia (Architect, founder of Kuczia Architects, initiator of the ‘Design that Educates Awards’) @kuczia.arch At DEAwards we are honoured to work with such outstanding professionals, we are grateful for that support.

Special Recognition in Architectural Design 2025 TROFA TOWN HALL Company name: NOARQ - NO ARQUITECTOS, LDA Location: Paços do Concelho, Praça do Município 480, 4785-205 Trofa, Portugal Team: Author: José Carlos Nunes Oliveira Collab.: André Oliveira, Gaia Ferraris Hugo Araújo, Sara Bitossi, Giulia Furlotti, Ana Fortuna, João Quintas, Juliana Sampaio. The rehabilitation and the extension of the former “Indústria Alimentar Trofense” buildings into the Trofa City Hall. Trofa is the youngest municipality in Portugal and was the only one that did not have an institutional building. For more than 25 years, the City Council occupied scattered spaces in the city, in a precarious situation. The building site is in the south of the urban centre. An incomplete and old area of the city. occupied by an Industrial complex. The plot covers 6,200.85 sqm. Is a strip measuring 28 by 200 meters parallel to the abandoned railway line. The reuse of the industrial complex required a considerable increase in area and an underground floor. We decided to preserve just the seminal building. The new building proposal reduces itself to a series of 5 juxtaposed narrow parallelepipeds divided into 3 floors. The first parallelepiped is used for the longitudinal circulation in the building. Two more blocks on each of the tops of the old building constitute the central mass of the City Hall, where are located all the municipal services. The third parallelepiped attached to the west façade has lost its configuration, to integrate the old building and to preserve its dialogue with the landscape. Photo credits: Duccio Malagamba Learn more at /designeducates.com #TrofaCityHall #AdaptiveReuse #IndustrialHeritage #CivicArchitecture

Special Recognition in Architectural Design 2025 Nanchang OCT Contemporary Art Center Company name: Decode Urbanism Office(DUO) Location: Nanchang city, China Team: We try to team up with nature to create some existence which can touch human spirit. Essentially, this design originated from an intention to transcend the conventional exhibition function of an art gallery. By prioritizing public interests that are seemingly unrelated to the gallery itself, this approach—though appearing detached from art at first glance—ultimately reinforces the gallery’s social responsibility: the democratization of art. The project site has a distinctive feature—it is located at the junction between an urban community and a significant wetland landscape. However, this unique intersection lacks facilities that allow the public to overlook the wetland scenery. The construction of this art gallery presents an excellent opportunity to provide a recreational platform for people to appreciate the natural landscape. Visitors can enjoy distant views of the wetlands while participating in various activities, and this vision became the starting point of the design. At the same time, the establishment of this public space has brought considerable attention to the art gallery, attracting many visitors. Most of these visitors do not come with the intention of appreciating art; in fact, many of them have little understanding of—or even interest in—art. Photo credits: Arch-Exist Photography, Xuexuezi Learn more at /designeducates.com #ArtGalleryArchitecture #PublicArchitecture #DemocratizingArt #ArchitectureAndNature #WetlandLandscape

Special Recognition in Architectural Design 2025 house b·o Company name: @driearchitecten Location: Kortrijk Team: driearchitecten is a close-knit, creative team with a horizontal structure, direct communication, shared responsibility, and strong client focus that boosts creativity, knowledge flow, and engagement. For this project, we built upon a place with a rich history. We were inspired by Le Corbusier, who elevates functions and redefines the ground floor as a service level. Therefore, on the ground floor, we accommodated the essential functions: a space for cars and bicycles, an entrance hall, cloakroom, laundry room, utility room, storage, office space, and an indoor garden.The first floor is reserved for sleeping and bathing, while the second floor houses the living spaces, with expansive terraces. The focus was on maximizing the use of sun and light, given the northern orientation of the existing house. The new top floor opens up to the south to make the most of natural sunlight. This architectural intervention is conceived as a palimpsest: a subtle balance between reuse and renewal, where the original monastic atmosphere is preserved, and the spaces are revitalized. The project creates a new world atop a rich history, with a careful harmony between preservation and innovation. Photo credits: Klaas Verdru Learn more at /designeducates.com #AdaptiveReuse #ContemporaryArchitecture #LeCorbusierInspired #UrbanLiving #ArchitectureAndHistory

Special Recognition in Architectural Design 2025 HALO Company name: NOARQ - NO ARQUITECTOS, LDA Location: Rúa Serafin Avendaño, Santiago de Vigo 36201, Pontevedra, Spain Team: Authors: NOARQ José Carlos Nunes Oliveira, Arch AM2 Arquitectos Alexandre Mouriño, Arch ARENAS & ASOCIADOS Miguel Sacristán, Eng. Halo is the result of an international design competition for an urban elevator that crosses the Atlantic Highway,connecting the rooftop of Vialia High-Speed Railway Station with downtown Vigo in Galicia, Spain. This project is part of amunicipal plan, VIGO VERTICAL, to reduce car traffi c, lower carbon dioxide emissions, and improve urban mobility. Halo, the largest and most ambitious of this plan, aims to solve a vertical level difference of over 40m between the lowerand upper parts of the city. The new structure will connect neighbourhoods and provide access to the intermodal station,that includes bus station, car parking and a shopping mall. The footbridge crosses over the highway, over a horizontalseparation above 70m in length. The project was designed and supervised by NOARQ, AM2 (architects), and Arenas & Asociados, a structural engineeringconsultancy specializing in bridge design and construction by Ferrovial and Oreco Balgon. The elevator links the roof of the Thom Mayne’s station to Garcia Barbón and Rosalía de Castro streets, 50 meters below.The design features a suspended pedestrian walkway in the shape of a ring with a diameter of 84 meters, spanning overthe six-lane highway with two curved spans of 80 meters each. Photo credits: João Morgado, Attilio Fiumarella Learn more at /designeducates.com #ChinaMerchantsMuseum #ShekouShenzhen #Urbanus #MuseumArchitecture

Special Recognition in Architectural Design 2025 China Merchants Group History Museum & Weiboshan Park Company name: URBANUS Architecture & Design Inc. Location: Shekou, Shenzhen, China Team: MENG Yan, Co-founder and principal Architect of URBANUS, specializes in Shenzhen’s architecture and urban design. His built works, new city landmarks, have won awards and been published worldwide. The China Merchants Group History Museum, at Microwave Hill, Shekou, Shenzhen, marks the group’s 150th anniversary, honoring the Shekou spirit and Reform and Opening-Up pioneers. The hill, site of the 1979 Reform “first shot” and 1981 microwave station, symbolizes China’s global link and modernization. The design fits a 7,000-square-meter building into the limited hilltop, tackling urban density and the hill’s distorted scale. Urbanus envisioned “the hill as the exhibition venue, the city as the exhibit,” creating an immersive museum-park. To counter high-rises, the design “elevates” the hill with two freeform, floating platforms along the irregular boundary. The base blends with the hill, the first platform extends from the entrance, and the second rises with contours, enhancing height. Outlines preserve trees, with the first platform shaded and the second above treetops, merging hill and architecture. Photo credits: TAL, URBANUS Learn more at /designeducates.com #ChinaMerchantsMuseum #ShekouShenzhen #Urbanus #MuseumArchitecture #ArchitectureAndLandscape

Special Recognition in Architectural Design 2025 Wall·Line·Garden Company name: On Architects Inc. Location: Yonggang-ri, Hwagae-myeon, Hadong-gun, Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea Team: ON Architects Inc. explores the value and potential of local architecture, proposing experimental transformations that foster communication between people and regions. Nestled in the deep mountain valley of Ssanggyesa, Hadong—one of Korea’s most scenic regions within Jirisan—the site lies amidst centuries-old terraced green tea fields. These cultivated slopes, defined by stone retaining walls and rhythmic plantings, form a cultural landscape shaped by human hands in harmony with nature. Rather than disrupting this scenery, the architecture aims to become a quiet continuation of the land’s memory. The project seeks to dissolve into the mountainous terrain, layering spatial sequences that echo the surrounding topography. Embedded into the sloping earth, the structure becomes one with the agricultural patterns of the green tea fields. Stones once used to shape terraces are reinterpreted as walls; linear tea rows as guiding lines; and stepped fields as garden terraces within the architecture. The site’s elevation changes are embraced as a natural tool to organize spatial programs. Moving inward from below, visitors experience the building as a flow of layered voids and solids, eventually emerging onto the surface landscape—where remnants of tea cultivation and dense bamboo forests await. Photo credits: Yoon, Joonhwan Learn more at /designeducates.com #Ssanggyesa #HadongKorea #TeaFieldArchitecture #ArchitectureInNature #CulturalLandscape

Special Recognition in Architectural Design 2025 The James Avenue Pumphouse Company name: 5468796 Architecture Inc Location: Winnipeg, MB Canada Team: 5468796 Architecture is a design studio established in 2007 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, on Treaty 1 territory. The James Avenue Pumping Station in Winnipeg, slated for demolition multiple times since 2000, was successfully preserved by 5468796 with private investment and support from the City. The adaptive reuse project uses the equipment and structure of the original site to integrate it into the city’s evolving Waterfront community. The ‘found object’ approach applies two key design interventions to make the project feasible: using the original gantry crane rail to support a ‘floating floor’ above the pumping equipment, and building a residential block in the narrow space between the pumphouse and Waterfront Drive. These interventions, along with a larger residential building, ensured the project’s financial viability and contributed to the transformation of the surrounding historic district. The design celebrates the historic industrial beauty, offering a flexible office space and residential blocks. Photo credits: Marcel van der Burg Photo credits: James Brittain Photography Learn more at /designeducates.com #JamesAvenuePumpingStation #WinnipegArchitecture #AdaptiveReuse #IndustrialHeritage

Special Recognition in Architectural Design 2025 Marie Curie Building Company name: Proof of the sum Location: Oss (The Netherlands) Team: Roy Pype, Maurice van den Berg, Claire de Zoete, Eerde van Leeuwen, Amir Eismann, , Gosia Machaj, Natalia Sulkowska-Bakker, Krzysztof Zinger Pivot Park Pivot Park in Oss is a campus for open innovation in the field of drug discovery and development serving both start-ups and existing companies. Open innovation seems to be the key word for the success of the Pivot Park. Access to the unique, high-quality R&D facilities and knowledge exchange with the community make the campus a pharmaceutical focal point in The Netherlands. With the opening of Marie Curie, Pivot Park grows over a quarter in area. Key position Building Marie Curie is in a key position in the master plan. It forms the first sight when one drives into the car park and then walks towards Pivot Park. For this reason, a semi-public plinth has been built on two sides. Here, the façade has been opened up twice as high to create a view through to the heart of the campus. Directly behind this entrance is a central grandstand where lectures and events can be held. This grandstand staircase forms the starting point of the public route through the building. Planned and unplanned cross-pollination Besides office and research spaces, the nearly 12,000 sq m building provides shared meeting facilities, co-working zones, roof terraces and meeting spaces. Photo credits: Marcel van der Burg Learn more at /designeducates.com #PivotPark #MarieCurieBuilding #InnovationCampus #LifeSciencesArchitecture

Special Recognition in Architectural Design 2025 China Merchants Group History Museum & Weiboshan Park Company name: URBANUS Architecture & Design Inc. Location: Shekou, Shenzhen, China Team: MENG Yan, Co-founder and principal Architect of URBANUS, specializes in Shenzhen’s architecture and urban design. His built works, new city landmarks, have won awards and been published worldwide. The China Merchants Group History Museum, at Microwave Hill, Shekou, Shenzhen, marks the group’s 150th anniversary, honoring the Shekou spirit and Reform and Opening-Up pioneers. The hill, site of the 1979 Reform “first shot” and 1981 microwave station, symbolizes China’s global link and modernization. The design fits a 7,000-square-meter building into the limited hilltop, tackling urban density and the hill’s distorted scale. Urbanus envisioned “the hill as the exhibition venue, the city as the exhibit,” creating an immersive museum-park. To counter high-rises, the design “elevates” the hill with two freeform, floating platforms along the irregular boundary. The base blends with the hill, the first platform extends from the entrance, and the second rises with contours, enhancing height. Outlines preserve trees, with the first platform shaded and the second above treetops, merging hill and architecture. Photo credits: TAL, URBANUS Learn more at /designeducates.com #ChinaMerchantsMuseum #ShekouShenzhen #Urbanus #MuseumArchitecture #ArchitectureAndLandscape