Architecture in Context: A+Awards Shenzhen Honors 3 Projects of the Year

As global attention turns to Shenzhen, three projects reveal how honesty of making — not spectacle — defines the future of design.

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As the 13th Architizer A+Awards celebration continues its global journey, the spotlight now turns to Shenzhen — a city synonymous with experimentation and architectural ambition. Following regional gatherings in New York and Paris, this final celebration of the season will bring together architects, designers and creative leaders from across Asia and beyond to recognize the Project of the Year honorees at the Shenzhen ceremony.

Hosted at the newly completed Shenzhen Bay Culture Plaza by MAD Architects, the event situates the A+Awards within one of the world’s most dynamic urban laboratories. Long known as a testing ground for new models of urbanization, Shenzhen offers a fitting backdrop for a program dedicated to celebrating local innovation with global recognition. Here, architecture is not only built quickly, but questioned rigorously — making the city an ideal setting to reflect on where the profession is headed next.

The projects honored in Shenzhen exemplify architecture’s new era of craft: one defined not by spectacle or novelty, but by spatial intelligence, cultural grounding and care for context. Each demonstrates how deeply local conditions — social, environmental and material — can generate work with relevance far beyond its immediate site. Together, they underscore a shared belief that architectural craft today lies in shaping meaningful relationships between people, place and built form.

Without further ado, here are the Project of the Year winners to be celebrated at the Shenzhen regional ceremony — projects that embody the A+Awards’ commitment to elevating architecture that is as thoughtful as it is impactful.

Projects of the Year: Shenzhen

FW JI· The Rural Memory Museum

By IARA, Fengwu Village, China

Jury Winner, Architecture +For Good | Popular Choice Winner, Architecture +Localism, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Museums are most often imagined as urban institutions — pristine, inward-looking “white cubes” designed to preserve memory at a distance. The Rural Memory Museum in Fengwu Village proposes a fundamentally different model. Designed by IARA as part of the Fengwu JI rural revitalization initiative, the project questions the museum typology by aligning subject and architecture: a museum about rural life that is itself rural in form, material and use. Built on the footprint of a vanished village structure, the building elevates exhibition spaces above an open, shaded ground floor that functions as a public veranda for gatherings, festivals and daily encounters.

Rather than freezing history behind glass, the museum invites dust, footsteps and conversation, allowing memory to remain active and shared. As the designers explain, “Architectural craft should move beyond a fascination with objects or tools, and instead engage with local culture, emotion, and the connections — remaining grounded in social reality and real people.” That attentiveness is evident in the project’s material language: lime, timber and grey tile are reworked through contemporary craft, with hand-aged walls and charred wood surfaces that register time through touch as much as sight.

Inside, modestly scaled rooms frame ordinary objects and personal stories as cultural anchors, transforming lived experience into collective identity. Paradoxically, by memorializing rural life, the museum helps sustain it — hosting weddings, communal meals and rituals even before its official opening. In doing so, the Rural Memory Museum exemplifies architecture’s new era of craft: one that globalizes the local not by exporting form, but by making architecture indispensable to the life it serves.

Aruma Split Garden

By RAD+ar ( Research Artistic Design + architecture ), Jakarta, Indonesia

Jury Winner, Restaurants (L>1000 sq ft), 13th Architizer A+Awards

In Aruma Split Garden, Indonesian studio RAD+ar reframes the commercial restaurant typology as a spatial experiment rooted in tropical specificity. Rather than maximizing buildable area, the project prioritizes experience — using split levels, diagonal circulation and landscape to transform a compact site into a layered environment that feels open, porous and social. Restaurants, a mezzanine bar and a rooftop beer garden are woven into a continuous spatial sequence, replacing the blunt logic of stacked floors with movement, overlap and encounter.

Landscape operates as the project’s primary organizing system. Oriented north–south to preserve mature trees, the building establishes a natural wind corridor that cools interiors and blurs boundaries between inside and out. Structural elements are calibrated to do more with less: roofs, walls, furniture and circulation are conceived as a single integrated system that mediates light, air and movement with restraint. As the architects note, “By placing emotional intelligence at its core, architecture can be crafted as an ‘ecology of care’ — one that is both creative and adaptive.”

In the context of Indonesia’s rapid urbanization, Aruma Split Garden demonstrates how architectural craft can remain generous even within the realities of everyday commerce. By foregrounding section, sequence and spatial relationships, the project reasserts architecture’s most enduring tools — offering a precedent for how density, ecology and pleasure can meaningfully coexist.

Duling Educational and Cultural Centre

By Project Mingde (The University of Hong Kong) – Elisabeth Lee, Duling, China

Jury Winner, Architecture +Community, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Rooted in the traditions of the Hakka people — a community long defined by resilience, education and collective life — the Duling Educational and Cultural Centre demonstrates how architecture can operate as both infrastructure and cultural stewardship. Designed by Project Mingde, a nonprofit initiative led by students and faculty from the University of Hong Kong, the project responds to a paradox familiar to many rural communities: abundant rainfall paired with chronic freshwater scarcity. Rather than importing a purely technical solution, the design embeds water collection, storage and reuse directly into the building’s form. A cascading roofscape channels monsoon rain into a lotus pond — a culturally resonant symbol — before feeding an underground recycling system that supports daily use. Environmental intelligence here is inseparable from cultural meaning.

Beyond its water strategy, the project reimagines education as an open, collective experience. Classrooms dissolve into shaded outdoor spaces, allowing learning, play and gathering to unfold fluidly across thresholds. Flexible construction techniques and modest materials reinforce an ethic of architectural craft grounded in restraint, participation and care. As the architects note, what must be preserved is “the wisdom of contextual empathy — the subtle attunement to a site’s unspoken histories and the rhythms of nature and human life.”

As a student-led endeavor guided by professional expertise, the Duling Educational and Cultural Centre shows how global academic knowledge can meaningfully engage local realities. In doing so, it exemplifies architecture’s new era of craft — one that globalizes the local not by exporting form, but by cultivating belonging through attentiveness, empathy and shared resources.

Projects of the Year: Paris

6 HPP Ses Veles Puigpunyent

By Fortuny-Alventosa Morell Arquitectes, Puigpunyent, Spain

Jury Winner, Sustainable Multi-Unit Residential Building, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Set against the sun-baked landscape of Mallorca, Ses Veles Puigpunyent presents a new image for public housing, one that is radically local in material form and expression. Designed by Fortuny-Alventosa Morell Arquitectes for the Balearic Housing Institute (IBAVI), the six-unit complex revives traditional construction methods while achieving near-zero energy use. Local lime, stone, ceramics and timber — all sourced from within the island — form a building that reverberates with its surroundings. Each detail not only reflects the place and culture in which it is embedded, but actively contributes to regenerating that very context.

As Joan J. Fortuny explains, “The architect’s craft should be an honest process, supported by technology but grounded in the thinking, politics and culture of place. In the same sense, globalized practice, which today reaches an unprecedented intensity through digital diffusion and remote work, runs the risk of being reduced to image, forgetting the process and the thought that sustain it.”

He adds, “We are at risk of losing the identity of place, and therefore it is essential to preserve the culture of place. The aim is to create an architecture that is deeply rooted in its context, reducing environmental impact while strengthening local culture and economy.” That philosophy runs through every layer of the project: from lime-cyclopean façades to trombe roofs that balance solar gain and ventilation. The result is an architecture both ancient and advanced — one that embodies a Mediterranean ethic of material honesty, climatic intelligence and care for community.

In its balance of technology and tradition, Ses Veles Puigpunyent exemplifies the next era of architectural craft — one defined not by spectacle, but by a quiet commitment to place and ecology.

Aquifer Recharge Plant – Cape Flats (MAR)

By SALT Architects, Cape Town, South Africa

Jury Winner, Factories and Warehouses, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Set within the vast expanse of the False Bay Nature Reserve, SALT Architects’ Cape Flats Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) Plant transforms critical infrastructure into an architectural expression of resilience and care. Designed to combat Cape Town’s growing water scarcity, the project purifies treated effluent to potable standards before re-injecting it into the city’s aquifer. The design presents a dignified and fitting setting for this critical process, which takes the form of a series of filtration buildings, arranged along a man-made slope and unfolding as a procession of form and function: each structure filters both water and light through angled brick fins that shimmer in the coastal sun.

Durability defines the architecture. Brick and concrete are used not as inert matter, but as materials that age with grace, grounding the facility in the landscape and ensuring durability against wind and salt air. “As architecture drifts further into the virtual, our craft and responsibility is to return it to the senses,” explains SALT Architects. “To design buildings that will grow old well — to create places to be touched and to weather with grace, growing more human with time, rather than becoming redundant and replaced.”

Through its tactile honesty and environmental intelligence, the Cape Flats MAR Plant reasserts the dignity of infrastructure; it is a project where technical mastery is given a physical presence worthy of its import. In this sense, the craft of making involves imagining a future where vital infrastructure is treated with the same — if not more — care and consequence as more recreational typologies. In doing so, it exemplifies how architecture can transform essential infrastructure into something greater; it also demonstrates how smaller, thoughtful measures can amount to meaningful shifts in efficiency and longevity.

Hotel Elysée Montmartre

By Policronica, Paris, France

Jury Winner, Sustainable Interior Project, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Adjacent to the legendary Elysée Montmartre concert hall, Policronica’s revitalization of the long-abandoned building redefines sustainable luxury through a singular material vision. The design not only revitalizes a long-abandoned building, but it also showcases the beauty of technical ingenuity and the value of challenging material processes — even if they may seem entrenched. The 16-room hotel unfolds as an immersive study in woodcraft — every surface, fixture and furnishing was conceived, fabricated and installed by the studio’s own design and production teams. The result is a monochromatic interior that merges architectural precision with artisanal intimacy, enveloping guests in a tactile landscape of eucalyptus, brass and natural fibers.

The project’s innovation lies in its radical material circularity. Policronica worked directly with small forest owners to source eucalyptus wood, an invasive species and a massive fire hazard, transforming an undervalued raw material into refined joinery through a self-developed solar vacuum drying process that accelerates curing from an 18-month process down to just six days, while preventing warping or splitting, and thereby additional waste.

“Architectural craft is defined by integrated productive design,” says founder Julien Labrousse. “In the age of globalization and supply chain fragmentation, craft… makes it easier to incubate all stages, from the raw material source to the finished object, in one place.”

In an era when interior architecture often depends on fragmented supply chains and mass production, Policronica’s holistic process stands apart. Hotel Elysée Montmartre revives the spirit of Parisian craftsmanship for the 21st century; it is a quiet manifesto for design autonomy, material honesty and the enduring value of making.

Projects of the Year: New York City

Hudson River Park’s Gansevoort Peninsula

By Field Operations, New York City, New York

Jury Winner, Public Parks and Green Spaces, 13th Architizer A+Awards

This remarkable feat of design and engineering reclaims a former sanitation pier as Manhattan’s first public beach and salt marsh, setting a new benchmark for resilient urban landscapes. The New York City-based firm shaped the site through an intensive community-driven process, balancing active amenities — ballfields, lawns, and gardens — with layered ecological edges that expand biodiversity and reconnect New Yorkers with the river. From oyster-seeded reef balls to tidal pools and shaded dunes, the project merges computational precision with natural systems to anticipate climate challenges while enriching daily civic life.

“Digital tools are here to stay and continue evolving. We should harness them to create the innovative landscapes of tomorrow—not only in terms of form and spatial experience, but also ecological performance and resilience,” says Karen Tamir, Associate Partner at Field Operations. “At Gansevoort Peninsula, wave oscillation and storm surge modeling informed the siting of the salt marsh — identifying an area with calmer wave action that would provide a more stable environment for marsh establishment and long-term ecological resilience.”

Importantly, this park neatly exemplifies the thread of excellence that runs through Field Operations’ broader oeuvre — one that has boldly reimagined the face of public green space in cities from here in New York to London and Shenzhen. In so doing, they have not only positively improved the lives of those living in the various locales but have also powerfully reshaped the global narrative around landscape architecture more broadly, paving the way for other designers to follow in their footsteps.

Vistalcielo

Veinte Diezz Arquitectos, Merida, Mexico

Popular Choice Winner, Architecture +Renovation, 13th Architizer A+Awards

In Mérida’s historic center, this design transforms an abandoned house into a serene refuge that not only revitalizes an old structure but also uses contemporary architectural language as a frame to celebrate a design culture that revitalizes existing structures, rather than simply replacing them. This is done through a rich material palette of grey cement, striated concrete and regional stones, which root the home in its local material language. Meanwhile, sky-blue grilles punctuate the textured walls, recalling the vibrancy of Yucatán’s built heritage. Inside, a sequence of patios and open modules encourages fluid movement between interior and exterior spaces, reconnecting domestic space with the city’s tropical climate.

“Architectural craft today is about knowing when to step away from the screen,” reflects José Luis Irizzont, Principal Architect of Veinte Diezz Arquitectos. “Digital tools accelerate design, but true craft lies in understanding how things are built by hand, on-site, under the sun. It’s the moment where lines become matter.”

This is one of many homes that the Merida-based firm has rescued from ruination. Through this ethos, Vistalcielo bridges past and present: “We risk losing the wisdom of ancestral techniques in our obsession with speed and novelty,” Irizzontadds. “Honoring the past doesn’t mean resisting change, it means building bridges between material memory and contemporary intention.” By leaving its traces visible, their designs incorporate the story of dereliction into a hopeful symbol that simultaneously imbues neglected local heritage with a brighter future while promoting an architecture of regeneration as opposed to replacement.

Lever Club

Marmol Radziner, New York City, New York

Popular Choice Winner, Commercial Interiors (>25,000 sq ft), 13th Architizer A+Awards

When Lever House first rose on Park Avenue in 1952, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s glass-and-steel tower redefined the Manhattan skyline and set a global precedent for modernist design and architectural techniques. Marmol Radziner’s recent transformation of this third-floor space restores this spirit of innovation, recasting the long-neglected cafeteria level as a private lounge that simultaneously honors SOM’s legacy and asserts a contemporary vision of architectural craft.

The bespoke furnishings throughout the space were designed and fabricated by the firm: the proportions of tables, chairs, and other furniture were inspired by the structure’s slender mullions. Likewise, this honed green stone, rosewood paneling, and custom carpets echo Lever House’s pioneering façade. With a close attention to detail, the project celebrates the beauty of its midcentury precedent while also reimagining the space for more contemporary uses.

More broadly, as a design-build firm, Marmol Razinger’s attention to detail reasserts the vital connection between design and construction—the substance of architectural craft. “The separation of design from construction is one of the risks to architectural craft,” notes Ron Radziner, Design Partner. “As an architect-led design-build firm, we provide clients with comprehensive and realistic information about every aspect of their project, from start to finish. Our precise construction capabilities allow us to be innovative within our design, ensuring each project is built.