Photo Omar Elsharawy via Pexels
2025 delivers a composite map to architecture, made up of new openings, profound transformations and careful rereadings of the existing. THE ten selected buildings they do not share styles or geographies, but are united by the ability to interpret their own context and fabric – urban, cultural and social – as an active part of the project.
Foto Ibamoto via Wikimedia Commons
Let’s go, come on Calder Gardens of Philadelphia, a garden museum that dissolves the boundaries between kinetic art, landscape and architecture, to the new Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art at the Palais-Royal in Paris, where Jean Nouvel works by subtraction within the historic complex, overturning the paradigm of transparency experienced thirty years earlier. In Japan, the Naoshima New Museum of Art and the Grand Ring of Osaka embody opposing and complementary visions: on the one hand, the intimacy of a museum set in an island entirely dedicated to art; on the other, a large circular infrastructure which, as an elevated path, organises, connects and makes theExpo.
Anish Kapoor, Monte Sant’Angelo Station, Naples, Italy. Photo: Amedeo Benestante © Anish Kapoor. All rights reserved, DACS/SIAE, 2025
In Europe, the V&A East Storehouse of London redefines the relationship between depot and museum, while the restoration of Grand Palace in Paris it gives the city back a complex, open and traversable organism. The FENIX Museum of Migration in Rotterdam and the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo they instead address the theme of memory – individual and collective – transforming it into a spatial experience.
Foto Nigel Young – Foster + Partners
The selection ends with two architectures in which the structure becomes a story: the station Monte Sant’Angelo metro in Naples, signed by the Anglo-Indian artist Anish Kapoorwhere the corten steel volume becomes a symbolic threshold and descent, and the Zayed National Museum Of Abu Dhabidesigned by Foster + Partners, in which the high structural sails translate identity, climate and sustainability into architectural form.
Below are the data sheets ten projects which, in the course of 2025they demonstrated how thecontemporary architecture you continue to question the present without giving up complexity and civic value.
