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.

Preserving historic buildings requires simultaneously addressing technical, environmental, and regulatory demands while maintaining the material, cultural, and symbolic continuity of what already exists. As the understanding consolidates that the most sustainable building is the one that is already standing, and that preservation also involves construction knowledge, material traditions, and the social fabrics from which they emerged, these same buildings are increasingly confronted with more rigorous contemporary parameters. Energy efficiency, safety, carbon emission reduction, and regulatory compliance have become unavoidable references, placing architecture before a central tension: how to update what already exists without breaking the continuity that sustains its heritage value.

Set on a maple-wooded site, the land slopes gently toward a valley where a river traces its course at the base of the terrain. It is within this natural movement of the ground that Perchée takes shape—a house that favors restraint over imprint, and whose siting strategy seeks, above all, to limit clearing in order to preserve the site’s most valuable quality: the feeling of being truly immersed among the trees.

This school year marks the opening of ‘de Zevensprong’, the new Integrated Child and Expertise Centre in Hoorn, the Netherlands. Designed by Amsterdam architecture studio KRFT, the building brings together five former locations for special (primary) education into one sustainable environment for learning, care, childcare and sport. The centre is a place where children feel at home, can develop freely, and where professionals work side by side with one shared vision: the child comes first.

The expansion project of CPP College arises from the need to adapt the school space to new usage demands, respecting the identity of the original architectural ensemble, which was also designed by our office. The main question was to understand how to intervene in an already established architecture, adding value without compromising the existing language and harmony.

The purpose of the renovation is to revive an urban apartment into a space as a second house. Responding to the client’s request of ‘living an extraordinary life in a versatile space’, I put focus on the design of the opening in the beginning.

Can architecture be built from food? Between the fire that warms, the smells that spread, and the bodies that gather around the table, the apparent banality of cooking and eating reveals itself as a choreographed dance of spatial appropriation and belonging. These gestures organize routines, produce bonds, and transform the built environment into lived place. The kitchen—domestic, communal, or urban—thus ceases to be merely a functional space and affirms itself as a territory of encounter.

At the edge of the historic Nimmerdor forest in Amersfoort, Dutch studio Space&Matter has completed Common Woods, a circular and nature-inclusive neighborhood comprising 56 homes. The neighborhood combines villas, semi-detached houses, and apartments across social, mid-range, and private housing, with the aim of promoting social inclusion and a strong sense of community.

Although modest in scale, the project is set within a remarkable context. It seeks to link two building wings constructed in the early 20th century, whose architecture evokes the spirit of the *Belle Époque*.