Bustler's top 10 architecture & design competitions of 2025

Happy New Year! Closing out our look back at the editorial highlights of 2025 on Archinect and Bustler, we turn to the competitions that most captured readers’ attention.

Drawn from the hundreds of architecture and design contests listed here, these were the top 10 competitions based on reader popularity.

1. Re:Form – New Life for Old Spaces

"Choose a site—used, abandoned, or forgotten—anywhere in the world, and give it a new purpose! In a world facing urgent environmental and spatial challenges, the most sustainable solutions may come not from new construction, but from reimagining what already exists. Re:Form invites architects, designers, and innovators to embrace the challenge of adaptive reuse, working within spaces under 250 square meters to give them renewed purpose and relevance."

2. Land Art Generator Initiative 2025 Fiji: Climate Resilience for Island Communities

"The residents of Marou, Fiji and the Land Art Generator Initiative invite you to design a permanent destination artwork that will supply clean and reliable electricity and drinking water to the coastal village’s 67 households, support tourism, and help to build a sustainable future for generations to come."

3. Shade Zones Design Competition

"As L.A. gets ready to welcome the world, we need shade that moves with us - wherever we are. And we’re inviting the next generation of talent to help us create it. This year, USC School of Architecture and LA Metro are inviting student designers to bring their A-game to create modular, reusable shade structures to keep Angelenos cool and keep LA moving - whether for daily commutes or major events. Starting Sept. 1, teams of undergrad or grad students at any college or university in LA County can register to get in the game."

4. Buildner's Unbuilt Award 2025

"Unbuilt projects hold untapped potential. They tell stories of creativity, vision, and exploration. The Unbuilt Award 2025 shines a spotlight on these extraordinary designs, creating a platform for ideas that redefine boundaries. With categories for small, medium, and large-scale projects, this competition ensures every vision receives the attention it deserves. No qualifications are required—this open call is for everyone, everywhere. Winners will share a total prize fund of 100,000 € and will also be featured in Buildner’s exclusive printed book, ensuring lasting recognition."

5. Small Lots, Big Impacts

"Small Lots, Big Impacts is a two-stage initiative to build a path to a better future for Los Angeles—one where a new generation of homeowners has the chance to thrive in more resilient neighborhoods. The recent fires have highlighted the importance of combining public resources with creative ingenuity to address the city’s housing crisis. Thus, in Small Lots, Big Impacts, the City of Los Angeles is leading the way, hosting demonstration projects on its own land that will offer new visions for building housing that can translate to thousands of similar, privately-held lots."

6. Best Thesis Award: Architecture

"As the academic year concludes, the "Best Thesis Awards 2025" brings together architectural talent to celebrate and recognize the most groundbreaking theses of the year. This global platform is a space for innovation, creativity, and the exploration of diverse perspectives on the built environment."

7. The Resilient Campus

"The Resilient Campus challenges architects, landscape architects, planners, and other allied design professionals to boldly envision the University at Buffalo’s South Campus—a public campus on its way to becoming carbon neutral—as a socio-ecologically integrated landscape that engages the pressing and intertwined challenges of climate change. As a forward-looking academic environment, its design should foster a resilient, adaptable, and inclusive setting that recognizes and integrates the interdependencies among its many constituencies and species, human and non-human."

8. 2025 Skyscraper Competition

"eVolo Magazine is pleased to invite architects, students, engineers, designers, and artists from around the globe to take part in the 2025 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition is one of the world’s most prestigious awards for high-rise architecture. It recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the implementation of novel technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations; along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution. It is a forum that examines the relationship between the skyscraper and the natural world, the skyscraper and the community, and the skyscraper and the city."

9. International Design Competition for the New DAEGU Metropolitan City Hall

"The current Daegu City Hall in Dongin was constructed in 1993, and the City Council building in 1956. Due to aging facilities and a shortage of administrative space, the city has been leasing nearby office buildings and operating in a dispersed manner since 2004. Among these, the former Gyeongsangbuk-do Provincial Government Office, built in 1965 and currently used as the Daegu City Hall in Sangyeok, is located approximately 4 km or a 15-minute drive from the Daegu City Hall in Dongin. This facility is also fragmented across several buildings, making it inconvenient for citizens to visit, significantly reducing administrative efficiency, and resulting in considerable unnecessary expenditures. As a result, the necessity of constructing a new city hall was brought into public discussion. Since the initial construction plan was established in 2004, a Citizen Participation Committee consisting of 250 citizens took part in the site selection process in 2019, ultimately selecting the Duryu Water Purification Plant site in Dalseo-gu as the final project location."

10. ASA EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN COMPETITION 2025 – Future Nostalgia in Architecture

"ASA EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN COMPETITION 2025 invites architects, designers, students, and creative thinkers to submit their most innovative works under the theme ‘Future Nostalgia in Architecture.’ This competition, hosted by the Association of Siamese Architects (ASA), explores how architectural design can bridge the past and future—blending history, culture, nature, and technology in new and exciting ways. Participants can freely select locations and scales, using Thailand as a case study to develop innovative architectural visions."

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