A+Awards 2026 Spotlight the Year's Most Striking Buildings

Architizer’s A+Awards 2026 highlighted projects that stood out to both judges and the public across architecture, interiors and landscape design. The annual competition, one of the field’s major stages, typically names two winners in each category, one chosen by judges and one by the audience, which often reveals what is both professionally admired and visually memorable.

This year’s selections leaned toward architecture that blends everyday function with open public space, nature, and visible materials. The featured projects included large infrastructure, corporate campuses, landscape interventions and residential buildings, many of them designed to feel less like closed objects and more like networks of movement, views and transitions.

Among the winners was Mae On Art Forest by EKAR in Mae On, northern Thailand, about three hours from Bangkok. It won the public-choice award in sustainable renovation and adaptation, for an art space in a natural forest that uses restrained interventions such as paths, stopping points and small wooden structures so the architecture almost disappears into the landscape.

In Sydney, the Sydney Fish Market by 3XN with GXN and BVN won the judges’ choice in landscape and public architecture. The large waterfront project features a huge wavy roof, a functioning market, restaurants and open public areas. In India, Vortex 21 by Neelesh Chopda Architecture in Betul won the public-choice façade award for a home shaped by sweeping curves and cuts that make it look like a dynamic sculpture.

Another public favorite was Gelareh by ZAV Architects in Kohsar, Iran, which won in architecture and color. The home uses bold layered colors to define space, light and atmosphere, continuing the firm’s work with vivid houses, including projects on Hormuz Island. The article also noted a renovation of LG’s Seoul headquarters, originally by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 1986, where Junglim Architecture updated the lobby, plaza and internal connections with a new central stair, paving, plantings, fountains and shaded seating.