Simple Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

Two weeks and over 85,000 nominations later, the finalists of this year's Building of the Year Awards are in. The selection is much like the ArchDaily audience that chose it: diverse in geography, generous in ideas, and precise in intent. With projects from 46 countries, in a variety of typologies and scales, they present a beautiful snapshot of the current architectural moment.

We invite you to sit back, browse, and vote for your ultimate favorites. Below, you will find all of the 75 finalists in their respective categories. Voting is open until February 18th at 18:00 EST. Thank you—your participation is key to making this the world's largest community-driven architecture award.

In the mountainous regions of Vietnam, the borderlands of Thailand, and the rugged Western Ghats of India, building school projects remains a challenge defined by logistics. In areas where infrastructure and industrial supply chains are limited or distant, transporting each kilogram of material can significantly increase costs and logistical complexity. During 2025, several school projects in rural contexts in Asia showed how the architect's role often shifted from a designer of form to a strategist of procurement. The primary challenge was not merely aesthetic but a matter of durability: using locally available materials and protecting them from monsoon rains, high-velocity winds, and sometimes seismic instability.

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Health has become a central concern in architecture, planning, and design, driven by a growing awareness of how the built environment influences physical, mental, social, and environmental well-being. In 2025, this awareness moved beyond specialized building types or performance metrics and became central to architectural decision-making, informing how spaces are conceived, built, and inhabited across diverse contexts. Architects are no longer treating health as an external requirement but as an integral condition of everyday life.

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For several years now, the countryside has ceased to function merely as a picturesque counterpoint to the city and has instead become an active laboratory for new relationships between territory, landscape, and people. Here, environmental urgency meets collective memory; ancestral techniques converse with architectural experimentation; and local communities act as curators of their own territory. Contemporary rurality emerges less as a geography and more as a culture—inscribed in ways of life that care for the environment.

It is a vast rural expanse spread across the planet, assuming different expressions depending on context—from Asian rice fields to African agricultural settlements, from small European farms to the large estates and agro-extractive communities of the Americas. Yet, beneath this plurality, is there something that unites them? And, more importantly, how might architecture illuminate this quiet thread?

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