Landscape Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

Cities around the world share a common goal: to become healthier and greener, supported by civic infrastructure that restores ecosystems and strengthens public life. The question is how to reach this. Global climate targets, local building codes, and municipal standards increasingly guide designers and planners toward better choices. Still, many cities struggle to translate these frameworks into everyday, street-level comfort and long-term ecological protection. What happens if the city is no longer treated as a traditional city, but as a national park?

National parks operate through systems of protection that treat land as a network of ecological relationships rather than a collection of isolated sites. They establish a shared baseline for what must be preserved, maintained, and made accessible over time. When this logic is applied to the urban environment, success can inspire pride and a sense of shared responsibility among designers, policymakers, and residents, fostering a collective commitment to health, habitat, and civic infrastructure.

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Observed annually on February 2, World Wetlands Day marks the adoption of the Ramsar Convention in 1971 and provides an international framework for recognizing the role of wetlands in environmental protection and sustainable development. The 2026 edition is held under the theme "Wetlands and traditional knowledge: Celebrating cultural heritage," drawing attention to the long-standing relationships between wetland ecosystems and the cultural practices, knowledge systems, and governance structures developed by communities over centuries. The theme highlights how inherited ecological knowledge, often embedded in rituals, seasonal calendars, land-use practices, and spatial organization, has shaped resilient interactions between human settlements and water-based landscapes.

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Residential architecture remains one of the most active fields for unbuilt architectural exploration, offering a lens through which architects rethink how domestic space can respond to landscape, climate, and contemporary patterns of living. In this Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected proposals bring together a range of residential projects that engage with houses, villas, and retreats as sites of withdrawal, mediation, and everyday inhabitation. Rather than treating the home as a fixed or isolated object, these projects approach it as a spatial framework that negotiates exposure, privacy, and connection to place.

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The opening of the new Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris last October sparked renewed questions around the role, form, and future of museums. As cultural institutions continue to proliferate worldwide in this digital era, the museum itself appears increasingly in need of redefinition. Rather than offering a single model or solution, Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums, written by architectural historian and curator Béatrice Grenier, argues for a more contextual and plural understanding of what a museum can be: an institution shaped by its environment, its public, and the specific cultural questions it seeks to address.

ArchDaily had the opportunity to discuss these ideas with the author against the backdrop of the Fondation Cartier's newly inaugurated home on Rue de Rivoli. Housed within a restored Haussmannian building that once accommodated the Grands Magasins du Louvre, the space has been radically reimagined by Jean Nouvel as a dynamic, transformable architecture.

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Set to open on January 19, 2026, the Sydney Fish Market marks the first completed project within the broader renewal of Blackwattle Bay on Sydney's inner harbour. Designed by 3XN in collaboration with BVN and Aspect Studios, and delivered by Multiplex, the purpose-built facility replaces the former market with a contemporary structure that combines an operating wholesale fish market with retail, dining, and publicly accessible waterfront spaces. Positioned approximately one mile southwest of Sydney's central business district, the project reframes one of the world's largest fish markets by volume as both working infrastructure and a civic destination.

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Renzo Piano Building Workshop, in collaboration with Betaplan Architects (Athens) and landscape architect Camille Muller (Paris), has broken ground on a new cultural center in Piraeus, the port of Athens. Commissioned by The Dinos and Lia Martinos Foundation (DLMF), the project seeks to establish an international hub connected to similar art centers abroad, open to the local community, students, and visitors, and contributing to the urban and cultural fabric of the Athens metropolitan area. The complex, called KYKLOS, is planned to host contemporary art collections and cultural programming with an international outlook. Initiated in 2023, the project is currently in development, with construction planned to extend through the last quarter of 2028.

Across recent years, architectural discourse has been shaped by the emergence of new voices, rediscovered territories, and a growing commitment to shared forms of knowledge. These concerns remain fully present in 2025 as ongoing debates that continue to gain density and nuance. Questions of who produces architecture, from which contexts, and under what conditions remain central, increasingly informed by practices that operate collectively, across disciplines, and beyond singular authorship.

This continuity is reflected in how architecture is understood less as a finished object and more as an ongoing process embedded in social, cultural, and environmental systems. Discussions around agency, participation, and knowledge production persist, alongside sustained attention to rural, peripheral, and historically marginalized contexts. Rather than privileging a single scale or geography, architecture is approached as a practice that moves between territories, acknowledging the unequal conditions that shape how spaces are designed, built, maintained, and inhabited.

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Visited by up to 500 guests annually, this number promises to increase with additional garden club registrations and publicity. Stunning photographs and the book’s elegant design take readers on an exquisite visual tour of the property and its development, including the origins and culture of its owners—Douglas Hamilton former president and chairman of The Walters Museum in Maryland and Tsognie Wangmo, the eldest child of the last king of Sikkim, shortly before the Himalayan royal kingdom was taken over by India.

Media Matters in Landscape Architecture makes a unique contribution to landscape architectural praxis for its explicit framing of “environmental media” in terms of its dual meaning within our discipline. In the sciences, environmental media are the materials of the natural world—soils, air, water, plants, microbes. Within STS and media studies, “environmental media” refers broadly to the relationship between environmental issues—such as pollution, biodiversity loss, climate change—and the creation and application of the tools, interfaces, and images, through which information about these issues is conveyed. This book focuses on how these two distinct understandings of environmental media coalesce within the discipline of landscape architecture and other spatial design fields. Authors from a wide range of disciplines—landscape architecture, media studies, science and technology studies, history of science, engineering, ecology, and architecture—examine how the creation and use of data, images, and models act as the mediums through which a particular understanding of “environment” or “landscape” arises. This framing of environmental media emphasizes the relationships among various design media and the specific material and social environments within which they operate.

As the year culminates, it's once again time for the ArchDaily team of curators to reflect on the best-performing projects of 2025 and consider what readers were most interested in. Through this diverse overview, we assess the cross-continental similarities and differences in trends and construction development. This year brought us many grand cultural and public spaces by Lina Ghotmeh, BIG, Zaha Hadid Architects, DnA, and Serie Architects, who populated events like Expo Osaka and the Venice Biennale, as well as a surprising number of museums and public or landscape works in China and the rest of the Asian continent. However, while these were sought-after projects, the leading works remained, unsurprisingly, residential projects.

More specifically, the houses that were most viewed on the ArchDaily global site were concrete houses that bore considerable injections of greenery and landscape focus. They propose layouts highlighting voids and double heights, as well as inner courtyards or large openings to the exterior. While some references did suggest traditional or vernacular elements, modernist revivals were still predominant. Material trends are much more tame, with a recurrence of raw concrete use, as wood and stone were common accent elements. Still, the more interesting thing about the works this year is the efforts brought by architects in situating and setting the projects within their surroundings, bringing special attention to landscape and how projects merged with nature.

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Every year brings new ideas, projects, and shifts in architectural culture, but it also marks the loss of voices that have shaped the discipline across decades. Architecture moves forward, but it also advances through absence. When figures who helped articulate its language and its ambitions disappear, they leave behind more than completed works or influential texts. Their absence becomes a threshold, a moment in which the discipline pauses to understand what remains, what evolves, and what continues to guide us. These moments of loss remind us that architecture is a long, collective construction, carried not only by those shaping the present but also by those whose visions continue to orient how we think about cities and landscapes.

The architects and thinkers we lost in 2025 came from remarkably different worlds, yet the questions that shaped their work often intersected. Some approached the city through identity, symbolism, and historical continuity, seeking to ground the built environment in cultural memory. Others interpreted it through engineering precision, ecological systems, or radical experimentation, expanding what architecture could be and how it could be experienced. Their work spans contexts as diverse as postwar Britain, rapidly urbanizing China, Central European avant-gardes, and the evolving cultural institutions of Berlin and New York. Together, they form a spectrum of responses that defined, and continue to define, architectural culture over the last half-century, revealing the multiplicity of ways in which architecture can engage with society, technology, and the environment.

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Public spaces remain some of the most dynamic sites for unbuilt architectural experimentation, revealing how cities and architects can imagine accessibility, gathering, and civic identity. In this curated Unbuilt edition, submitted by the ArchDaily community, the selected proposals examine parks, pedestrian corridors, cultural landscapes, and open-access urban environments that invite people to meet, move, rest, and participate in collective life. Rather than treating public space as leftover terrain, these projects position it as essential infrastructure—shaping urban health, memory, and social interaction.

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The Holy Redeemer Church and Community Centre of Las Chumberas by Fernando Menis in La Laguna, Spain has been declared the World Building of the Year at the 2025 World Architecture Festival (WAF).

The ultimate accolades of World Building of the Year supported by GROHE, World Interior of the Year, Future Project of the Year and Landscape of the Year were announced today as hundreds of architects from across the world convened at a grand finale Gala Dinner at Miami Beach Convention Center in Florida. A host of Special Prizes, including the American Beauty Prize supported by the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust, were also announced at the closing event to celebrate the eighteenth edition of the festival. The announcement follows the final day of WAF, in which prize winners across all 43 categories have been competing for the winning titles.

BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group has been selected as the winner of the international competition to design the new Hamburg State Opera, a major cultural project planned for the Baakenhöft peninsula in HafenCity, Hamburg, Germany. The building will consolidate the city's opera and ballet companies under one roof, introducing new performance spaces, production facilities, and public amenities along the Elbe. The project replaces the mid-20th-century opera house on Dammtorstraße, responding to the city's call for a venue that reflects contemporary standards in acoustics, stagecraft, and audience experience.

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Spaces of hospitality are a mirror to how different cultures articulate generosity, care, belonging, and identity. In busy city settings, this is reflected in hotels, service systems, and curated amenities that directly shape the visitor experience. These spaces translate care into measurable forms, where success is correlated with efficiency, luxury, and brand identity.

In rural America, hospitality operates with a different logic. In these environments, care is grounded in labor and community, while directly responding to the specific ecological and cultural geographies. Distance, limited infrastructure, and close social networks demand forms of architecture that are flexible and self-sufficient. Designs respond to shifting weather, local materials, and a culture where support often begins with neighbors. In this landscape, architectural thresholds of hospitality emerge in responsive, yet unexpected, ways.

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The biennial Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize was established to increase the visibility, understanding, appreciation, and dialogue around landscape architecture. The creation of the Oberlander Prize began in 2014, and the most recent laureate was landscape architect Kongjian Yu, the pioneer of the "Sponge City" concept. This year, The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) announced that Mexico City-based landscape architect Mario Schjetnan and his firm Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU) are the recipients of the 2025 Oberlander Prize. According to TCLF, Schjetnan belongs to a generation of landscape architects, architects, and urbanists who became aware of the environmental impacts of urban development and their consequences for life, the planet, and its inhabitants. He and the GDU team are the first Latin Americans to be awarded the Oberlander Prize laureate.

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The City of Copenhagen has announced Team SLA as the winner of a design competition to create a new, large-scale urban park in Nordhavn. The project, titled "Nordør – New Park", was designed by Team SLA and By & Havn, and envisions a 30-hectare (75-acre) coastal nature park. Led by the design studio SLA, Team SLA includes VITA Engineers, Urban Agency, Aaen Engineering, Pihlmann Architects, Buro Happold, Kerstin Bergendal, Holdbart, and Aiming Spaces.

A "nature park" is a protected area where conservation is balanced with sustainable development and human use. It often encompasses human-shaped cultural landscapes and integrates strategies for regional development, supporting local communities and promoting the conscious use of the land. This framework allows the proposal to be understood as a platform for recreation, eco-tourism, environmental education, research, and regional growth.

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Kongjian Yu, the pioneering Chinese landscape architect and urban planner credited with coining the "sponge city" concept, has passed away at 62. According to Reuters, he was killed in a plane crash on Tuesday in the wetlands of Mato Grosso do Sul state, in Brazil, while reportedly filming a documentary about his work, after being featured in the opening program of the São Paulo International Architecture Biennale last week.

A globally-recognized advocate for ecological urbanism, Yu gained international relevance after his "sponge city" philosophy was adopted as a national policy in China in 2013. The approach prioritizes nature-based solutions, such as wetlands, parks, and permeable pavements, to absorb and retain water. This novel method stood in stark contrast to traditional concrete infrastructure, offering cities a way to combat urban flooding and accelerate climate change by working with nature rather than against it. His ideas have since been implemented in hundreds of cities worldwide.

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