The second edition of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards is now open for submissions, and this year we are proud to present it in partnership with Dropcity, a center for architecture and design in Milan. Together, we are asking students around the world one question: What can architecture enable in the city?
At ArchDaily, we believe the future of architecture takes shape today in classrooms, studios, and workshops around the world. Guided by our mission to empower architects and designers with tools, knowledge, and inspiration, the Student Project Awards recognize students who expand the definition of architecture, work across disciplines, and engage with the urgent challenges of our time.
Open to all students subscribed to ArchDaily Campus, this edition centers on the theme Making the City. Cities are constantly shaped and reshaped by the spaces we build, the ways we inhabit them, and the needs of the people who live there. Today, they face urgent challenges, from climate change and resource scarcity to rapid urbanization. Architecture can respond, not only through large-scale interventions, but through precise, experimental propositions tested at a tangible scale.
We invite students to look closely at their own urban environment, identify a condition, need or opportunity within it, and address it through a spatial intervention, structure, system or architectural device. The challenge is to think at the scale of the city, but respond at the scale of an intervention.
Proposals can engage with any aspect of urban life, including infrastructure, ecology, mobility, resources, and how we use and experience shared spaces. The intervention may be fixed or mobile, singular or replicable, infrastructural or playful. Its scale may be modest, but its ambition can reach beyond its immediate context. What matters is the ability to turn an urban question into a tangible architectural proposition. One that can be tested, adapted and explored through making.
Each of the three winning projects will be partially realized at Dropcity, where fabrication workshops, prototyping labs and exhibition spaces share one roof. One representative from each winning team will travel to Milan to build a prototype that will be presented publicly during Milan Design Week.
Submissions should include the materials necessary to narrate and visually communicate the proposal: plans, sections, drawings, and sketches, accompanied by a written statement outlining the story and intentions of the project. Together, these elements should demonstrate how your design responds to the call for Making the City.
To learn more about the Student Project Awards and submit, visit the official site and stay tuned for updates. Submissions are open until January 31, 2027 at 11:59 pm CET.
