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In November 2025, ArchDaily launched its first edition of the Student Project Awards. The decision to introduce this new award came from a place of hope; hope in the next generations of architects, their talent and vision, and the importance of giving them visibility and recognition. After all, the future of architecture is being shaped right now, in classrooms, studios, and workshops around the world, and it is vital to support those shaping it. The response was remarkable, with projects from students in every continent, showcasing a wealth and breadth of viewpoints, solutions and visions.

Five months after the launch of the open call, and following the announcements of a longlist of 104 projects and a shortlist of 20, our external jury of architects and practitioners carefully reviewed the proposals to select the three winners and four honorable mentions of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards. Approaching each project with care, the jury looked beyond final outputs, focusing on the ideas, questions, and positions driving the work. The result is a selection of winning projects that reflect both the spirit of the awards and the shifting priorities shaping architecture today.

Pilgrimage is one of the oldest and most persistent cultural practices, a spatial expression of humanity's search for meaning that has taken form across geographies and religions. While traditionally tied to formal belief systems, its definition has expanded in recent decades, reflecting new understandings of what is sacred and where meaning can be found. This shift reveals something fundamental: the act of moving through space remains central to how people construct meaningful experience. Yet most built environments constructed today are designed to be approached at speed from roads, transit corridors, airports, and optimized urban cores. The Camino de Santiago stands as a sustained counterargument to this condition. It is a piece of distributed architecture, refined over centuries, that remains a sophisticated example of design organized around the moving human body.

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As a major driver of natural resource consumption, energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions, the construction industry has a significant impact on the environment, consuming 32% of global energy and contributing to 34% of global CO₂ emissions. Building materials play a crucial role in shaping the built environment. Through principles of circular economy, renewable and self-sufficient solutions, and technological innovations, analyzing the environmental performance of each material highlights the opportunity to review and assess the different stages of its life cycle.

By establishing a common framework for measuring and managing the environmental impact of building materials, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) emerges as a key approach. This methodology provides a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental impacts associated with products, processes, or activities throughout their entire life cycle. From raw material extraction, manufacturing, and transportation to construction, use, and end-of-life treatment, the analysis considers the environmental burdens linked to each stage. In the context of building materials, LCA offers a holistic and systematic approach to assessing environmental performance and identifying opportunities for design optimization, among other improvements. In this way, it quantifies impacts such as carbon emissions, energy consumption, water use, air pollution, waste generation, and ecosystem depletion.

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