ArchDaily Student Project Awards: The Latest Architecture and News

Public space is often designed around a narrow idea of how people move, interact, and respond to their surroundings. ParkTEA starts from a different position. The city can also make room for those who experience space through different sensory and social conditions.

Developed by Ignacio Martínez Pardo at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM), the project was conceived within the Master's thesis (Graduate-MHab) program during the 2024 to 2025 academic year, under the guidance of Héctor Fernández Elorza, Jesús Aparicio, Carlos García Fernández, and Jaime Daroca Guerrero. Recognized as one of the winners of the first edition of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards, ParkTEA engages the theme of coexistence through a proposal that brings together care, infrastructure, and urban life.

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In the high desert of the San Rafael Valley, a few miles from the United States-Mexico border in Lochiel, Arizona, an adobe schoolhouse has stood for more than a century. Built before 1905, before Arizona was an incorporated state, the schoolhouse served generations of Mexican American students from Arizona and Sonora, cultivating shared cultural experiences, stories, and relationships that transcend physical and political boundaries. Over decades of education and shared histories, it became a place where language and narrative moved freely, even as geopolitical tensions continued to rise along the border. Today, it is one of the last remaining one-room adobe schoolhouses in the United States.

Adobe is among the oldest building technologies in the American Southwest, and among the most demanding to steward. In desert climates, earthen walls face intense weathering from temperature extremes, cracking due to seasonal shifts, and accelerated decay after storm events. These vulnerabilities require sustained and skilled maintenance over many seasons and compounding decades. After years of encroaching abandonment and structural threats, a twelve-year restoration effort by local community members who understood this building as critical cultural infrastructure brought the schoolhouse back from the edge of demolition. That the community chose to undertake this effort, given everything Adobe construction demands of those who care for it, is a statement about what the loss of this building would have cost. The result is a structure that now stands as a monument to Mexican American heritage and a living archive of rural border education.

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When people think of Argentina, they often picture landmarks like the Obelisk of Buenos Aires. Yet the country spans over 2,780,400 km², making it one of the largest in South America and home to a wide range of landscapes and realities that frequently go unnoticed. In fact, the province of Jujuy in northern Argentina lies within the Lithium Triangle: a high-altitude region shared with Bolivia and Chile that contains roughly 54% of the world's lithium reserves. Within this territory sits the Olaroz Salt Flat, a site where today two competing dynamics converge: the expansion of industrial lithium extraction and the preservation of ancestral culture and lands inhabited by Kolla and Atacama communities, creating a clash of high-capacity industrial extraction and traditional, low-impact agrarian practices.

In light of this problem, one of the winning teams of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards, made up of Ezequiel Lopez, Maria Victoria Echegaray, and Agustina Durandez, decided to look into the issue. This was done as part of their thesis project for the Bachelor's in Architecture program at the National University of Córdoba. Their work stems from an interest in engaging with territories that remain peripheral to architectural discourse, using the thesis as an opportunity for sustained, in-depth research. This allowed them to formulate informed design responses grounded in both territorial and socio-economic realities. Rejecting the binary between extraction and preservation, the project approaches the territory as a system where both can coexist through spatial and technical mediation.

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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.

Every architecture student knows what it's like to spend sleepless nights working away, rushing to finalize a project as a deadline looms ahead. Revising every detail, putting the finishing touches and hoping for the best. The pay-off? Seeing the finished project, talking about it with your classmates, and getting to dream about your perfect idea of what a space should look and feel like.

While making the shortlist selection throughout the past two weeks, the ArchDaily jury panel was well-aware of what it feels like to be an architecture student. Comprised of architects, the panel carefully studied, considered and debated each individual project, with an understanding of what goes into each and every submission. The result is a shortlist that exemplifies the spirit of the Student Project Awards and its mission to recognize the creativity and vision of students who are redefining architectural practice and discourse.

Eighteen years ago, two architecture students decided that they had a project worth pursuing. It wasn't a built structure, but a digital project that ended up revolutionizing the way people around the world consume architectural content. This was how ArchDaily was founded, and it still guides our work to this day. The future of architecture is continuously being shaped in classrooms, studios, and workshops around the world, and we want to continue supporting the students who are actively participating in this evolution. Recognizing the creativity and vision of students who are redefining architectural discourse around the world is what led us to create the Student Project Awards.

We are now pleased to present the longlisted projects for this first edition of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards. With hundreds of projects submitted from around the world, our in-house team of architects and editors carefully combed through every single entry, narrowing them down to 104 longlisted projects. The students who participated represent the diversity of the architectural landscape itself, with submissions from every continent, all levels of study, and in various scales and typologies.

The ArchDaily Student Project Awards submission deadline has been extended by one week. Students now have until February 20, 2026, at 11:59 pm (CET) to submit their projects.

Open to students subscribed to ArchDaily Campus, the inaugural edition of the Awards centers on the theme Architecture of Coexistence, inviting proposals that explore inclusive spaces for communities and collective forms of care. The extension provides additional time for students to refine their conceptual projects and strengthen both their spatial and narrative arguments.

Dear Readers,

The past year marked a defining moment in ArchDaily's evolution: a year of recalibration, intention, and renewed editorial purpose. 

In an increasingly fast-moving and saturated media landscape, we took the opportunity to ask the fundamental questions: What does architectural media need to be today? What responsibilities do we carry as a global platform? And how can we contribute meaningfully to a profession navigating social, environmental, and cultural transformation?

And by engaging deeply with these reflections, we stepped fully into our role, bringing greater definition to who ArchDaily is and how it operates.

The first edition of the ArchDaily Student Project Awards is officially open for submissions!