Design prizes are easy to announce and hard to justify. The A’ Design Award & Competition has spent nineteen years building the apparatus that justification requires: a standing jury of several hundred academics, practitioners and journalists, category criteria drawn from doctoral design research, and an evaluation method that hides the entrant’s identity from the people scoring the work. What follows is a survey of twenty winning projects, weighted toward architecture, drawn mostly from the 2025 to 2026 edition with a handful of earlier laureates that have held up.
Entries for the 2026 to 2027 edition are open now. Designers, architects, studios and brands can review the brief at the Call for Entries page and begin a submission through A’ Design Award Registration.
What the A’ Design Award Is
The A’ Design Award is an annual juried competition open to designers, artists, architects, agencies, design offices, companies and brands anywhere in the world, across every discipline the field contains. Work must have been realised within the previous ten years, which keeps the field current without excluding buildings that needed a long gestation. The competition runs 196 categories, from architecture, building and structure design through interior space, landscape, urban planning and on into product, furniture, lighting, packaging and interaction design.
Its stated purpose is worth quoting because it explains the breadth: the organisers describe the aim as building strong incentives for designers, companies and brands in every country to produce better products, services and systems that benefit society. That is a wide net, and the category structure is what stops it from becoming shapeless. A hospice in Chinatown and a tram depot in Bern are not judged against each other. Each is measured against criteria written for its own discipline.
The calendar is fixed. Submissions close on 30 June for the early deadline, 30 September for the standard deadline and 28 February for the late deadline. Results are announced publicly every year on 15 April. Entrants can request a complimentary preliminary review before committing, which is a useful discipline in itself: it forces a studio to articulate what the project is actually claiming.
The Jury and How Judging Works
The credibility of any award rests on who decides and how. For the 2026 to 2027 cycle the International Design Academy numbers 312 members, drawn from practice, academia, the design press and industry. Names on the panel include Alessandro Deserti, Professor of Design at Politecnico di Milano, Hiroki Sato of the Chiba Institute of Technology, and Wenkai Xue, Dean of the Industrial Design College at the LuXun Academy of Fine Arts.
Four mechanisms do the work. Entries are evaluated blind, against category criteria rather than reputation, so a first project from an unknown practice is read on the same terms as one from an established office. Jurors vote independently, without sight of colleagues’ scores, which limits the anchoring effect that sinks so many panel decisions. Scores are then normalised by z-score calibration, correcting for the fact that some jurors mark generously and others do not. And the criteria themselves are discipline-specific and revised annually.
Recognition is designed to emerge from intrinsic design quality rather than from reputation signals.
The Award in Numbers
Scale is the other half of the argument, and the Award in Numbers page sets it out plainly. Across nineteen years the competition has drawn 95,145 submissions from 231,218 registered users representing 180 nationalities, and has named 23,537 winners. The 2025 to 2026 edition alone produced 1,664 winners from 115 countries working in 162 design disciplines.
The distribution figures matter more to laureates than the entry figures. The organisation reports 8.5 billion annual impressions across broadcast, print and digital media, 44,210 press mentions, translation of winning work into 108 languages, and a dissemination network of 3,868 sites. Six award levels are granted, with Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron forming the public tiers.
The A’ Design Prize
What a laureate actually receives is unusually concrete. The A’ Design Prize documents more than 215 separate benefits, and the emphasis falls on publicity rather than cash. Winners receive a 3D-printed metal trophy, a framed metal certificate, inclusion in the printed and digital yearbooks, and a perpetual worldwide licence to use the winner logo.
Beyond the objects sits the promotional machinery: press release preparation and distribution through DesignPRWire, guaranteed publication across the IDNN and DXGN networks to more than a hundred magazines, translation into 108 languages, exhibition in Italy and an eight-year window of further exhibition prospects, gala photography, designer interviews, and listing across the World Design Rankings and associated indices. For a small practice without a communications budget, this is the substantive prize. The organization spends the greater part of its own budget advertising its laureates, which is a defensible way to run an award.
Top 20 A’ Design Award Winners
The selection below is ours alone. We were given no shortlist and no preferences. Fifteen projects come from the 2025 to 2026 edition announced on 15 April 2026, and five from earlier cycles. Every entry names the design, the designer or studio responsible, and links to the project record at A’ Design Award.
Park1538 Gwangyang Cultural Facility by Unsangdong Architects and POSCO A&C
Built on decommissioned steelworks ground in Gwangyang, South Korea, this Platinum winner sets an exhibition hall and an education center on a site that was closed to the public for decades. Steel ribs serve three functions at once: carrying load, forming the facade, and directing movement, producing long spans and genuinely flexible floors. The exhibition hall cantilevers to shelter an open plaza beneath it, and retired plant machinery is kept in the landscape rather than cleared, holding the site’s industrial record in view. Completed April 2025. View the project record.
Changchun Aerospace Expo Cultural Building by Cheng Sun, Dagang Qu and Xi Huang
A 4,500 square metre cultural building placed inside a protected wetland in northeast China, which is a brief that punishes any instinct toward monumentality. The response keeps the massing low and horizontal, caps height at 18 metres, and treats the roof as continuous ground so the building reads as landform rather than object. A customised structural steel frame carries curved geometry; the envelope combines glazing and metal panels detailed for severe cold. Designed at Harbin Institute of Technology’s Sun Cheng studio. View the project record.
Higeta Building Headquarters Office by Nobuaki Miyashita
Seven stories of reinforced concrete on a narrow, deep lot in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, totaling 1,722 square meters. The facade is the argument: anodized aluminum louvers at 300 millimeter pitch, each blade 50 millimeters across and 170 millimeters deep, angled individually to cut southwest solar gain while preserving outward views. A central light court and operable windows to the north and south drive seasonal cross-ventilation. A black elastic spray coating deepens the shadow between blades, referencing the fermentation business the company has run since 1697. View the project record.
PW Senrichuo Senior Residence by UDS Ltd.
Senior housing rarely receives serious architectural attention, which makes this 548-unit residence in Toyonaka, Osaka worth study. Twelve floors above ground and one below combine independent and assisted living, in reinforced concrete with partial steel framing, certified ZEB Ready with energy use more than halved. The plan is a loop: corridors circle a courtyard so residents can walk continuously between inside and out without arriving at a dead end. Five separate dining areas and widened alcoves along the corridors distribute gathering rather than centralising it. View the project record.
King Boat Cultural Museum by C.M. Chao Architect & Planners
The first museum in Taiwan dedicated to the King Boat Ceremony, built at Donggang in Pingtung County and completed in December 2024. Five stories of glass-fiber-reinforced concrete, chosen for salt resistance as much as texture, with a wave-form base and folded facade lines drawn from the ocean the ceremony addresses. A central atrium lined in expanded aluminum mesh handles acoustics and filters light. A 42-foot King Boat replica occupies the third floor beneath a 360-degree viewing platform. View the project record.
The Taipei Weather Station by IMO Architecture and JC Cheng Associates
A meteorological instruments center in New Taipei City, completed in 2023, built on the premise that a weather station should face the weather rather than retreat behind screens. Wind-activated movable fins run across the facade, and Corten steel surfaces collect and channel rainfall, so the instruments and the building measure the same conditions. A three-dimensionally undulating roof caps the volume. In a country defined by typhoon and monsoon exposure, making instrumentation legible as architecture is a substantive move, not a decorative one. View the project record.
Tramdepot Bern by Penzel Valier
Transport infrastructure judged as architecture, and it survives the judging. Christian Penzel and Martin Valier built this Bern depot in two stages, the second completed in 2023, using steel trusses spanning close to 90 meters to keep the halls free of columns. The system is deliberately extensible, so future bays can be added without introducing internal supports, which is the kind of decision that determines whether a building is still useful in forty years. Shed glazing in a glass and aluminum shell sets a daylight rhythm across the hall; anthracite timber and black steel line the interior. View the project record.
Learning Landscape Primary School by People’s Architecture Office
A 20,535-square-meter primary school compressed onto a 7,820-square-meter site in Shenzhen, completed in 2025, forced PAO to abandon the classroom-and-corridor plan entirely. Three organizing figures, named Mountain, Valley and Beach, generate terraced levels, an entrance mount, courtyards and interstitial rooms graded from enclosed to fully open. Teaching, informal play and cross-disciplinary work occupy one continuous section rather than separate zones. Planting across the terraces and green roofs moderates Shenzhen’s subtropical heat. View the project record.
Ascending Ground Community Library by Hao Zhong
A community library for Wuzhen that takes the town’s grey brick and white plaster tradition as a structural proposition rather than a surface one. A heavy masonry mass, built from locally sourced recycled brick, is set against a tall central void, so reading rooms alternate between enclosed cave-like chambers and open terraces. Circulation wraps the void and climbs to a social platform, making the upper levels and roof usable public ground. The contrast between mass and light does the organisational work. View the project record.
The Ripple Hospice by Minghan Lin, Yuchen Qiu and Hao Zhong
An unbuilt competition proposal for a hospice in Manhattan’s Chinatown, organised as concentric rings after the pattern a drop makes on water. Curved CLT segments in a hybrid timber structure follow those rings, and circulation runs from the active street edge inward through progressively quieter thresholds to the private rooms. The environmental systems share the same geometry: stacked passive ventilation, hydronic radiant slabs, on-site water filtration and reuse. Daylight, airflow and the acoustic water features vary passively with occupancy. View the project record.
Barn Quartet Single Family House by Katarzyna Starzyk
Four barn volumes on a 4,046 square meter plot near Tarnobrzeg in Poland, holding 423 square meters of usable area across a single story. The program is separated rather than merged: a parents’ wing with gym, a children’s and guest wing with garage, a central living pavilion, and a detached hunting lodge, composed as one low horizontal line. Double-layer external walls are clad variously in ceramic tile, HPL panel and timber. A heat pump and high-efficiency mechanical ventilation handle servicing. Closed shell reached 2025. View the project record.
UNESCO Ancient Theatre Revitalization by LYT X Studio
Adaptive reuse on a UNESCO-protected site at Ohrid, North Macedonia, completed October 2025, and notable mainly for what it declines to do. Rather than adding a permanent architectural object to an ancient open-air performance structure, the team kept every intervention demountable, so the archaeological fabric and the original spatial logic of the cavea remain legible. The principal addition is a lightweight tensile membrane roof that filters daylight and moderates temperature while leaving sightlines to the surrounding landscape open. Reversibility as a design position, consistently held. View the project record.
Olivino Restaurant by Not A Studio
A Platinum winner in interior space, converting a 626 square metre industrial exhibition hall in China into a fine-dining room without disguising what it was. Gu Yi’s team kept the double-height, column-free volume and its steel dome, preserved and structurally reinforced the original skylight grid, and buried HVAC and lighting inside the roof build-up so no services interrupt the shell. Two inserted objects, a circular glass wine cellar and a copper stove, define the dining zones. Materials run to handmade brick, metal plate, gold foil and glass. Completed May 2025. View the project record.
Wuhan Senbo Resort Hotel by WJD Design
Interior work at a scale that usually defeats coherence: 46,000 square meters of interior within a 118,000 square meter resort in Wuhan, delivered between January 2023 and May 2025. The team abstracted mountain, water and lotus into a recurring formal system and held it across the whole sequence of public rooms rather than letting each space go its own way. Curved and doubly-curved surfaces are executed in custom glass-fiber reinforced gypsum, with BIM simulation resolving geometry and trade coordination. Sustaining one motif system this far is the achievement. View the project record.
Ryokan Ohana Hotel by UDS Ltd.
A historic samurai residence in Yanagawa City, Fukuoka, converted into a twenty-room hotel across 3,860 square metres and four storeys, opened January 2025. The interior strategy is subtractive: added decorative layers were stripped so original structure and finishes read directly. The lobby opens onto a restored Imperial Garden courtyard whose stone arrangement forms part of the designated cultural property, and rooms are oriented to frame it. Yame lanterns and rush-grass tatami bring local craft into the fabric, with community artisans retained for ongoing maintenance rather than a single handover. View the project record.
Concert Hall in Warsaw Music School by Tomasz Konior, Konior Studio
A Platinum winner from the 2020 to 2021 edition, and among the strongest heritage insertions the award has recognized. Konior placed the new music school deep within the plot of a decaying historic orphanage, preserving the street frontage and continuing its scale and window rhythm rather than contrasting with it. At the center sits a circular concert hall 24 meters in diameter for 300 listeners and 70 musicians, built in concrete and steel with individually milled ash acoustic surfaces. Usable area 10,138 square meters. Completed October 2020. View the project record.
Strait Culture Art Center by Zong Wu Xu and Pekka Salminen, PES-Architects
A 152,601 square metre cultural complex on the south bank of the Minjiang River in Fuzhou, completed August 2018 and a Platinum winner in 2020 to 2021. Five buildings are arranged as jasmine petals with the Liangcuo River running between them, housing a multifunctional theatre, opera house, concert hall, art museum, film and television centre and a central cultural hall. The tectonic interest is in the envelope: more than 40,000 ceramic rods on the front facade and 36,000 ceramic plates behind, claimed as the largest ceramic curtain wall ever built. View the project record.
Maitreya Dharma Hall on Abandoned Mine by Guanghai Cui
A Buddhist worship building inserted into an abandoned quarry at Xikou Town, Fenghua District, near Ningbo, completed June 2022 and a Platinum winner in 2022 to 2023. A single-shelled glass roof spans an interior holding 4,500 people, with a central vertical element running from ground to roof serving both structure and ventilation. The site covers 144,977 square metres with a 35 metre height difference between its high and low points, and the North-Ring underground railway runs beneath it. Post-extraction land reclamation at a scale that few practices attempt. View the project record.
Fushan Ecology Greenway by Tengyuan Design
The landscape entry in this selection, and one that earns its place structurally rather than horticulturally. Qingdao Tengyuan Design Institute linked the ends of two existing footpaths across a city-center green space with a 21-meter height difference, using an observation tower whose hexagonal floors diminish upward after the pinecones found on the mountain. Circulation splits into inner-ring steps for direct passage and outer-ring ramps for slower viewing, converging on a 360-degree platform. A steel grid of inner and outer cylinders carries cantilevered footpaths hung on cables. Platinum, 2022 to 2023. View the project record.
Impression of Railway Park by Ching-I Wu and Fu-Chu Hsu, S.D. Atelier
Urban design closes the selection: 15,288 square meters of public realm around Taichung Railway Station in Taiwan, completed February 2020 and a Platinum winner in 2020 to 2021. Decommissioned railway facilities are repurposed on an eco-museum model, combining ecological, cultural, and leisure programs, and the whole is threaded into a pedestrian corridor linking historical sites across the city. The stated aim, renovating the image of a city through its own cultural assets rather than importing new ones, is a position ArchEyes readers will recognize from a dozen European precedents. View the project record.
Entries Are Open for the 2026 to 2027 Edition
The A’ Design Award & Competition is now accepting entries for its 2026 to 2027 cycle across all 196 categories. Architects, designers, studios, companies and brands can read the full brief, category list and criteria at the Call for Entries page, and begin a submission at A’ Design Award Registration. Work completed within the last ten years is eligible, and a complimentary preliminary review is available before the deadline.
Results for the next edition will be announced publicly on 15 April. ArchEyes will publish a selection of the strongest architecture, interior and landscape projects from that announcement on 1 May.
All photographs are published courtesy of the A’ Design Award & Competition. Photographer credits appear with each image.
