Each year, as the entries close on the A+Awards and the jury deliberates across more than a hundred categories, a parallel question begins to take shape at Architizer: which single image can carry the spirit of an entire year of architecture on the cover of our annual hardbound compendium?
It is never a simple choice. The cover of Architizer: World’s Best Architecture is the first thing a reader encounters — and the thing they keep encountering, as the book finds its place on studio desks, on display for client visits, or on home bookshelves and coffee tables alongside previous editions. It has to be striking enough to stop you. It has to be specific enough to mean something. And increasingly, it’s chosen to reflect something true about the moment in architecture the book is documenting.
This year, the answer came clearly to everyone on Architizer’s team: a stunning shot by Younes Bounhar (lead photographer at doublespace photography) of a housing project taken on Toronto’s Lake Ontario waterfront: Aqualuna, by Danish-founded global firm 3XN. Read on to learn more about the project and how it ended up on the cover of the latest edition of Architizer: World’s Best Architecture.
What Makes Aqualuna the Ideal Cover Project?
Collectively, the Winners of the 14th Architizer A+Awards told a consistent story, one of a profession turning away from spectacle and toward something more considered, more embedded, more human. The buildings that moved juries this year were not those that imposed themselves on their surroundings but those that adapted to them, often drawing on the spirit of a place and channeling that to improve it. Aqualuna is, in that sense, a natural cover: a building that manages to be sculpturally ambitious and deeply civic at the same time. It’s housing that takes its urban implications seriously.
Located at the eastern edge of Toronto’s Bayside community, Aqualuna rejects the conventional tower-on-podium model that has dominated waterfront residential development for decades. Rather than stacking a uniform slab above a commercial base, 3XN treated the entire building as a landscape — two peaks rising at the northwest and southeast corners and meeting at the lower levels to form what the architects describe as a “central valley.”
The effect is a building that opens itself to the lake rather than turning its back on it, improving daylight access for neighboring buildings while creating a pedestrian experience along Edgewater Drive and Merchants’ Wharf that feels genuinely generous.
The façade reinforces this generosity. Angled balconies and terraces vary in rhythm and depth along the building’s exterior, creating a wave-like texture that animates the surface at every hour of the day and from every angle of approach.
It is an image that rewards the camera — which is part of why Bounhar’s photograph works so well as a cover — but the geometry is never merely decorative. Each angled plane improves privacy between units, captures views of Lake Ontario, and contributes to the building’s performance as an object in its urban context.
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Architecture as Social Infrastructure
What distinguishes Aqualuna from a great-looking residential tower is what happens at its heart. The central valley between the two peaks is not a void — it is the building’s social core, housing shared amenities, an outdoor pool and landscaped gathering spaces that encourage daily interactions between residents (something the vast majority of blocky, contemporary housing developments systematically leave out).
The concept is drawn explicitly from the tradition of Danish courtyard apartments: the idea that the space between buildings is as important as the buildings themselves, and that architecture has a responsibility to make that space worth inhabiting.
At street level, a continuous double-height podium activates the Water’s Edge Promenade with retail, public amenities and a community center, ensuring that the building contributes to the life of the neighborhood rather than simply accommodating the people who live in it. These are the details that don’t always photograph well but matter most in the long run — the decisions that determine whether a building becomes part of a city or merely occupies a site within one.
In a year when the A+Awards jury consistently celebrated architecture that “serves as a mediator between human experience and the natural world,” Aqualuna’s waterfront position, its social DNA, and its formal responsiveness to the movement of water and light made it the clearest expression of that value in the Winners’ Gallery.
Cities need buildings like this — not as visual statements but as infrastructure for daily human life, proving that urban density can yield healthy, thriving communities.
About the Book
The Winners of the 14th Annual A+Awards, including Aqualuna, will be published in Architizer: The World’s Best Architecture 2027, our annual hardbound compendium of the year’s most inspiring architecture from emerging studios and global powerhouses alike. Contextually grounded, materially rich, and deeply humane, this year’s edition reflects a profession at its most considered.
As with every edition, the book is designed as a series to be collected: spines that complement each other on the shelf, covers that hold up over time. Aqualuna — its peaks catching the light above Lake Ontario, its facade alive with the rhythm of the water below — sets a high bar.
The World’s Best Architecture book is a limited-run publication and will begin shipping later in 2026. Pre-order your copy now before it sells out:
