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Ask any AI platform to write an architectural concept statement, and the result will feel strangely familiar. Vague phrases such as “the building establishes a dialogue with the landscape”, “the façade acts as a porous urban threshold,” or “the structure serves as a catalyst for community interaction” appear in most architecture texts — from competition entries and awards submissions to press releases and project descriptions. Yet, after reading them, it is often impossible to answer a simple question: what does the building actually do? And, for that matter, what role did the architect play in making design decisions?

Paradoxically, artificial intelligence exposes this problem rather than causing it, simply reproducing the empty language it has learned from architects themselves.

How did architectural writing become so abstract? Competition culture encourages impressive, often ostentatious language, while academic influence introduces theoretical vocabulary that is not always accompanied by the rigor or references that originally gave it substance, and — from a market point of view — PR agencies frame projects through flamboyant storytelling instead of providing more practical narratives. To some extent, AI mirrors this writing practice, but it also reveals a very interesting dynamic: in order to generate a text that is freed from clichés, architects must provide a clear prompt, a clear idea and a clear objective.

In other words, a clear brief is the strongest communication tool in the architect’s arsenal and yet is oftentimes the most overlooked. Pulling three projects (and their descriptions) from the Architizer Database, we will explore how strong texts define as well as produce architecture that can be explained clearly, answering the questions of:

• The Brief – What problem needs solving?
• The Constraint – What made the project difficult?
• The Design Move – How does the architecture respond?
• The Result – What the building actually does.

Weishan Chongzheng Academy Bookstore of Librairie Avant-Garde

By Trace Architecture Office, Dali, China

Jury Winner, Commercial Renovations and Additions, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The Brief: The project’s aim was to repair and renovate the historic Chongzheng Academy in Weishan Ancient Town, turning it into a multifunctional bookstore that includes spaces for exhibitions, a theatre and a café. Additionally, this intervention intends to revitalize the surrounding area and reactivate the cultural life of the town.

The Constraint: The site includes a 500-year-old academy, a 330-year-old banyan tree, and a 1960s iron factory with a preserved wooden structure. Consequently, any design gesture needed to preserve and protect these historic elements, while introducing new spatial connections between the new and the ancient town.

The Design Move: The project conserves the historic walls, the wooden structures and the surrounding vegetation while inserting two lightweight Book Galleries that reconnect the academy’s courtyards and create spaces for reading and cultural events. The intervention strategy is surgical and strategic, working closely with the existing context.

The Result: The academy is reactivated as a public cultural destination that supports the community and takes advantage of the history and the “artifacts” found on site. The architecture becomes an agent of preservation, insertion and connection, creating a multifaceted civic space.

Fog Bridge

By Art+Zen Architects, Rongcheng City, China

Popular Winner, Unbuilt Transportation, 12th Architizer A+Awards

The Brief: As part of the renovation of the Sangganhe Botanical Garden in Rongcheng, the project required a new bridge to connect the two sides of the Sanggan River. Apart from the bridge acting as a transitional circulation space, the aim was to create a structure that would incorporate a park and support community gatherings.

The Constraint: The bridge design had to accommodate both pedestrian and bicycle circulation, without disrupting the botanical garden’s vegetation and views. In parallel, the structure needed to cover the span of the river using as few supports as possible in order to not to disturb the natural landscape.

The Design Move: The project transforms the bridge into a hybrid infrastructure that simultaneously shapes space. Separate lanes organize bicycle and pedestrian circulation, while a spiral path links the bridge to the café below and to a viewing platform above the river. Structurally, a wooden truss system stabilized with metal cables allows for a large span with minimal piers.

The Result: The project reframes a simple infrastructural requirement and turns it into an opportunity to expand the area’s public space. Consequently, a bridge that usually functions solely as a crossing becomes a connection as well as a horticultural destination.

The Perch

By Nicole Blair, Austin, Texas

Finalist, Residential Renovations and Additions, 12th Architizer A+Awards

The Brief: The clients, a hairstylist and a landscape designer, needed a flexible studio space that could accommodate work, guests and occasional living. At the same time, they wanted to preserve their backyard landscape and avoid relocating during construction. Consequently, the design had to be a compact addition and minimal intervention that could expand the functionality of the existing bungalow.

The Constraint: The project had to overcome several issues such as preserving the mature backyard landscape, comply to local building regulations and limiting construction disruption. Furthermore, the addition had to be lightweight and occupy a small footprint while providing sufficient, flexible space for multiple uses.

The Design Move: A compact 660-square-foot (61 square meter) structure is designed above the existing bungalow. To preserve the surrounding vegetation, the addition rests on four steel columns – three of which pass through the bungalow walls to stabilize the structure – allowing the ground-level landscape to remain largely untouched. The plan follows a split-level organization combined with vaulted ceilings to create a sense of spatial generosity, while integrating ample amounts of storage. Finally, multiple building components were prefabricated off-site to minimize construction disturbance.

The Result: By concentrating the building footprint and lifting the program above the roofline, the project expands the home’s capacity without sacrificing the landscape that initially defined it.

What Architects Can Learn From This Exercise

Across these briefs, a clear pattern emerges: strong projects often begin with a clearly articulated problem, and a successful design brief makes the logic of the architecture immediately legible. What happens, though, when architecture has no problems to solve? What about all the luxury villas or the iconic buildings, whose aim is primarily aesthetic dominance or imposing status? In these cases, the brief serves as justification rather than articulation, and this perhaps is why architectural language has drifted towards metaphor.

Not every project needs to solve a problem. However, the ones that are grounded in clear briefs and real constraints tend to produce the most substantive architecture. And the best part? AI tools may promote this kind of thinking by exposing the ideas that lack specificity. Because AI is remarkably good at repeating architectural clichés and remarkably bad at hiding them.

Architizer's diverse jury of global experts is currently reviewing submissions to the 14th A+Awards! Sign up to receive updates on Public Voting and spring winner announcements.

The post Architects’ Guide: Writing Project Descriptions That Actually Explain the Architecture appeared first on Journal.

Architizer's diverse jury of global experts is currently reviewing submissions to the 14th A+Awards! Sign up to receive updates on Public Voting and spring winner announcements.

“Sustainable” has become architecture’s most overused and least interrogated word.

As someone who reads architects’ project descriptions for a living, several things have become quite clear to me. First of all, the term sustainability appears in project descriptions as a reflex — appended to the end of a paragraph, followed by a brief list of certifications, material percentages or mechanical systems. More often than not, it is treated as a virtue signal, a technical compliance note or a marketing tag. Rarely is it positioned as the architectural premise.

The problem is not that architects lack commitment to environmental performance; rather, it’s that sustainability has been flattened into branding language. When everything is described as sustainable, the word stops meaning anything; and when the meaning of a word is vague, it becomes expendable.

The Add-On Syndrome

Princeton University Central Energy Facilities by ZGF Architects, Princeton, New Jersey | Popular Choice Winner, Sustainable Institutional Building, 13th Architizer A+Awards 

Scan enough project submissions, and a pattern emerges. The design narrative leads with the client’s needs for the commission or the challenges presented by the site. Form and aesthetic considerations come next, and sustainability follows later. At best, environmentally-minded design decisions are introduced as a set of secondary measures: high-performance glazing, green roofs, and efficient systems. Important decisions, certainly, but rarely framed as drivers of the architecture itself. This sequencing reinforces the perception that sustainability is an overlay rather than an organizing principle. At worst, sustainable measures are listed without elaboration: passive cooling is great, but what is it about the design that ensures the building is cooled passively?

Meanwhile, some of the most consequential projects today demonstrate the opposite. Princeton University Central Energy Facilities places energy systems at the center of its architectural expression, making infrastructure legible rather than concealed. The building’s identity is inseparable from its environmentally minded function. It does not hide sustainability behind cladding; it builds form from and expression from it.

Milence Truck Charging by Proof of the sum, Europe | Popular Choice Winner, Sustainable Transportation Project, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Similarly, Milence Truck Charging reframes transportation infrastructure as spatial and environmental architecture. Here, decarbonization is not a checkbox but the project’s core premise. The designers take the green transition as a jumping-off point for elaborating a new, scalable architectural language — one formed with distinct bio-based materials and premised on the logic of prefabrication and modularity.

These examples point to a different narrative sequence: sustainability first, architecture through it. Furthermore, these projects are creating a new design language to express changes to societal behavioural patterns: form celebrates new functions — geothermal energy and electric vehicles necessitate new ways both of building and behaving. The architectural reasoning and expression behind these new infrastructures is a consequential representational matter.

When Clients Assume “Sustainable” Means Expensive

Stone Mill Lofts by The Architectural Team, Inc., Lawrence, Massachusetts | Popular Choice Winner, Sustainable Adaptive Reuse/Renovation Project, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Another dimension of sustainability’s branding problem is economic. Many clients still equate environmental ambition with additional cost (premium materials, complex systems, extended timelines, etc.). And architects are partly responsible for this perception. When sustainability is described as a collection of add-ons, it reads as extra. When it is embedded in form, orientation, material selection and long-term adaptability, it becomes integral. Presented this way, it is more easily argued and demonstrated that a building rooted in the logic of green transition becomes more cost-effective over time.

Projects like Stone Mill Lofts exemplify how adaptive reuse can reduce embodied carbon while preserving character and controlling costs. Read the project’s description on Architizer — the future-forward environmental decisions are baked into every aspect of the design’s explanation.

Likewise, the project description for the Brooklyn Diary Project leads with an explanation of how the programmatic ethos permeates every aspect of the design. It is a given that this logic of reuse and minimal resource consumption results in a structure that is less environmentally taxing. Sustainability is not inherently expensive; poorly integrated sustainability is.

Beyond the Word Itself

Brooklyn Diary Project by Yujin CAO + Xiaofan YE, Brooklyn, New York | Popular Choice Winner, Sustainable Non-Residential Project, 13th Architizer A+Awards

One of the discipline’s challenges is linguistic. “Sustainability” has become a catch-all term that obscures specificity. If architects want to elevate their building’s environmental performance, reflecting their design intelligence, the language they use must evolve. As Michael Green has articulated, “it’s time to recognize that we are on a path toward sustainability, but we are not sustainable yet, and there are no sustainable buildings.”

Let’s return to the core meaning of the word for a minute: according to the U.N., “sustainable” refers to “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Crucially, there is an ethical dimension to the term, which encompasses environmental, economic and social elements. While certain aspects of a building may be sustainable, the current systems we rely on — supply chains, material processes, housing and development models, etc. — render it nearly impossible for a building to be sustainable in its totality.

The Catalyst Building by MGA | Michael Green Architecture and Katerra, Spokane, Washington | Photo by Benjamin Benschneider | Jury Winner, Best Sustainable Firm, 13th Architizer A+Awards

This is where architects come in. Decisions about labor, materials and program can all help change larger societal structures. (It should be noted that I am not saying that architects bear all the weight of this responsibility, but, as an industry with a wider-reaching impact, design decisions do bear significant weight.)

Hence, instead of defaulting to “sustainable,” architects should consider more precise framing for their design logic, opting to show rather than tell — to explain how a design works, rather than to rely on technical jargon or listing technical features.

Redefining Architectural Identity

PDX Terminal Balancing & Concourse E Extension by Hennebery Eddy Architects and Fentress Architects, Portland, Oregon | Popular Choice Winner, Best Sustainable Firm, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Some practices have already begun to define their architectural identity not through aesthetic signatures, but through expertise in environmental systems and material innovation, as well as advocacy. As mentioned earlier, Michael Green has become a prominent voice advocating for a revolution in design. His firm’s work foregrounds structural carbon reduction as an architectural proposition. Locally sourced timber is not applied as an ethical veneer; it is deployed as a systemic strategy that not only reshapes form but also the production process, beginning with supply chains.

Not dissimilarly, Hennebery Eddy Architects foregrounds preservation and adaptation in the commissions they select. Their work not only demonstrates that sustainably-minded design can be embedded in rehabilitation strategies, extending building life while enhancing efficiency, but it also elevates the status of such work, which has historically been framed as “lesser-than” when compared with new builds.

In these examples, sustainability is not a separate agenda; rather, it is a mindset that shapes how architecture is practiced.

Scale and Substance

HSBC, New York by M Moser Associates, New York City, New York | Popular Choice Winner, Sustainable Commercial Building, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Environmental responsibility is not limited to cultural or academic projects. Corporate and commercial buildings are equally capable of integrating sustainability as a design driver.

The HSBC New York Headquarters shows how retrofitting existing commercial infrastructure can dramatically improve operational performance while preserving embodied carbon. Meanwhile, Wencheng Biology Expo Park demonstrates how ecological planning and scientific programming can align to create landscape-integrated development. Even hospitality and education projects are redefining environmental ambition. Umoya Boutique Hotel integrates passive cooling and local material strategies into its spatial character, while Xiangshan International Kindergarten uses daylight, enclosure and orientation as pedagogical tools as much as environmental ones.

Across typologies, the pattern is clear: when sustainability is architectural, it becomes legible, producing spaces and places with a presence that is distinct from the architecture of generations past.

Recognition and Rigor

Umoya Boutique Hotel by SkreinStudios, Cape Town, South Africa | Popular Choice Winner, Sustainable Hospitality Building, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Awards play a subtle but powerful role in shaping what architects prioritize. When sustainability is evaluated superficially — reduced to checklists or buzzwords — it reinforces branding or marketing over thoughtfulness and innovation, both signs of rigorous approaches to design. When architects flesh out how their design pushes against the status quo, they collectively elevate the expectations for their profession to produce substantive work.

Recognition frameworks that elevate low-carbon systems, adaptive reuse strategies and climate-responsive planning send a clear signal: sustainability is a form of architectural intelligence, not a decorative virtue or a technical add-on. For architects, this requires a shift in narrative. Environmental performance should not be relegated to the final paragraph of a project description; it should anchor the first.

A Call for Precision

Xiangshan International Kindergarten by Yang Ying Design Studio, Changsha, China | Jury Winner, Sustainable Institutional Building, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Sustainable design practices do not need better marketing — what the movement needs is sharper language and clearer metrics that establish them as a new way of architectural thinking. It’s great that we have certifications like LEED and more, but the general publi needs to better understand the innovations that drive buildings to achieve such standards.

The discipline has already moved beyond symbolic gestures. A new architectural language take shaping; one that takes environmental, economic and social sustainability as a point of departure. Yet, if sustainability continues to be treated as branding, it will remain vulnerable to skepticism. If, however, it is articulated as an architectural structure, a more environmentally responsible ethic becomes central to the discipline’s relevance.

Architects are not short on sustainable ambition. But they must describe it with the same rigor they bring to design guided by sustainable principles. Until then, sustainability will continue to sound like a slogan when really it should read like an architectural revolution.

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Top image: Wencheng Biology Expo Park by The Design Institute of Landscape. & Architecture China Academy of Art, Wenzhou, China

The post Sustainability Has a Branding Problem — and Architects Are Partly to Blame appeared first on Journal.

The judging process for Architizer's 14th A+Awards is now underway. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive updates about Public Voting, and stay tuned — winners will be announced later this spring.  

Landscape architecture has long occupied an ambiguous position within architectural culture. In its early European lineage, landscape design was closely aligned with aristocratic display. Far from being a shared civic system or public right, formal gardens such as Versailles used landscaping as an expression of power, a microcosm of political hierarchy and territorial control. Even as public parks emerged in the nineteenth century, they were often framed as relief from the city, not as structural components of it. Buildings and roads defined urban order; the landscape was treated as an amenity, often seen as an urban tool aimed at increasing real estate value.

That hierarchy reflected the priorities of its time. Industrial expansion and rapid urbanization placed emphasis on density and construction speed, while opening the door to speculation. Architecture appeared to shape the city’s identity, while landscape simply softened its edges or added a decorative flair. The ground was something to decorate or escape to, not something that organized urban life. Today, these assumptions are increasingly untenable.

Hudson River Park’s Gansevoort Peninsula by Field Operations, New York City, New York | Project of the Year & Jury Winner, Public Parks and Green Spaces, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Yet, as cities confront the dual-prong issues of climate volatility and intensifying patterns of urban growth, the performance of the ground itself has become central to how cities function. Heat mitigation, flood management, biodiversity and public health are now negotiated through landscape systems as much as through buildings. What was once considered embellishment has now become essential infrastructure.

And yet, architectural and societal discourse have been slow to adjust. In the broader culture, landscape architecture continues to be described in the language of activation and beautification, even as it quietly carries responsibilities that determine whether cities can endure. Meanwhile, in architectural practice, this type of expertise still sits somewhat uncomfortably and is seen as a relatively separate discipline.

Landscape as Urban System

Loures Riverfront by TOPIARIS Landscape Architecture, Loures, Portugal | Popular Choice Winner, Public Parks and Green Space, 14th Architizer A+Awards

Meanwhile, across contexts, landscape architecture now carries responsibilities that extend well beyond aesthetics. For example, projects such as New York City’s Hudson River Park’s Gansevoort Peninsula, by Field Operations, illustrate how coastal landscapes can operate simultaneously as public space and flood defense. Here, grading, planting and shoreline design absorb environmental risk while sustaining recreational use. The landscape is not applied to infrastructure — it functions as infrastructure, while still improving the quality of life for the city’s residents.

Similarly, TOPIARIS Landscape Architecture’s Loures Riverfront demonstrates how flood-prone territory can be reimagined as a resilient civic landscape. Restructuring access to a mosaic of natural ecosystems found along with highly urbanized zones (think mudflats, salt marshes, and native reed beds — all just minutes away from densely populated neighbourhoods), the project transforms environmental vulnerability into longterm spatial asset. A unique wooden walkway invites visitors to immerse themselves in the marsh in a variety of ways, raising public awareness of the importance of estuarine ecosystems and ocean management, while preserving a crucial and complex natural flood barrier.

These projects signal a broader shift: landscape architecture is increasingly responsible for the long-term performance of cities.

Planning From the Ground Up

Masterplan Begbroke Innovation District by OKRA, Oxford, United Kingdom | Popular Choice Winner, Unbuilt Master Plan, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The most consequential landscape work today does not exist as isolated parkland. It operates at the scale of districts and master plans, shaping growth patterns before buildings define them.

Planned for the Oxford University campus, the Masterplan Begbroke Innovation District by OKRA positions landscape as the organizing framework for development by coordinating circulation, ecological networks and public space — all of this before architectural objects are resolved. Put differently, this is a landscape-led masterplan, reversing the traditional sequence of urban design. Buildings respond to landscape logic, not the other way around.

A similar inversion occurs in MASS Design Group‘s The Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture, where productive landscapes structure academic life and environmental stewardship simultaneously. Here, landscape is not an ornamental setting; it is pedagogical and ecological infrastructure.

In both cases, landscape architecture operates as planning intelligence — establishing durable frameworks that not only structure new ways of living but also are capable of accommodating change.

Public Life, Structured

Lignano 2.0 : Embracing Nature, Celebrating People by STUDIO VI [studio six], Lignano Sabbiadoro, Italy | | Jury Winner, Unbuilt Masterplan, 13th Architizer A+Awards 

Landscape architecture’s evolving role is equally visible in projects that reconcile heritage with both ecology and daily use. Take, for example, Lignano 2.0: Embracing Nature, Celebrating People by STUDIO VI [studio six], which reconsiders coastal urbanism through landscape-led strategies. The design goes beyond aesthetics, aiming to boost social interaction and community engagement by providing new community spaces and public sports areas while promoting environmental awareness and sustainable practices.

Likewise, Bedford Heritage Park by Lemay demonstrates how landscape can mediate between memory and movement without relying on monumentality. The monumental land reclamation project transforms an area one beridden by limestone extraction byproduct, transformed into a thriving regional greenspace. Crucial to the design is spatial sequencing, which supports public gathering while maintaining ecological continuity.

These projects succeed not through spectacle, but through sustained usability and environmental logic. What unites them is not stylistic cohesion, but structural clarity. Landscape is the driver of the design, organizing movement and supporting social exchange — roles traditionally attributed to architecture or engineering.

Advancing the Discipline

Alibaba Xixi Campus (Park C) by ASPECT Studios, Hangzhou, China | Jury Winner, Best Landscape Design Firm, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The evolution of landscape architecture is being advanced by practices that reject ornamental expectations in favor of systemic thinking.

Firms such as ASPECT Studios, which have offices across multiple countries, consistently position landscape as an operational framework at the metropolitan scale. This big-picture thinking is reflected in the scope of their team’s skills, which span from landscape architects and urban designers to wayfinding specialists, strategists, and graphic designers. Their work underscores that landscape architecture can carry authorship, complexity and long-term ambition equal to any building project.

Likewise, Change Studio approaches landscape as a mediator between climate systems and urban form, foregrounding adaptability rather than fixed outcomes. Landscape architecture has always been about shaping land systems — hydrology, ecology, public space, spatial sequence. What’s changing isn’t the discipline’s scope, but the urgency and scale at which those capacities are now required.

Recognition and Responsibility

The Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture by MASS Design Group, Rwanda | Jury Winner, Architecture +Landscape & Jury Winner, Sustainable Landscape/Planning Project, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Recognition plays a quiet but influential role in shaping professional priorities. Awards programs, publications and institutional frameworks signal what counts as architectural excellence. When landscape architecture is treated as supplementary — or judged primarily on visual qualities — its infrastructural contributions risk being underappreciated.

Aligning recognition with the discipline’s expanded responsibilities is not a matter of disciplinary competition. It is a matter of urban capacity. As cities confront climate risk and spatial inequity, landscape architecture increasingly determines whether public environments can endure.

Celebrating landscape projects that uphold environmental intelligence, planning rigor and long-term adaptability reinforces the idea that resilience is designed — and that this type of thinking is something that should be valued.

Recalibrating Urban Priorities

Bedford Heritage Park by Lemay, Bedford, Canada | Popular Choice Winner, Sustainable/Landscape Project, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The historical marginalization of landscape architecture was shaped by different urban conditions. Buildings once appeared to define cities more clearly than ground systems did. That balance has shifted.

Today, the success of urban environments depends as much on how land absorbs water and mitigates heat as on how buildings perform. Landscape does not simply complement architecture. It sustains it. Repositioning landscape architecture within architectural discourse is not about correcting an oversight. It is about acknowledging where urban performance now resides.

As climate pressures intensify and cities continue to densify, the most consequential design decisions may not be those that rise above the skyline, but those that shape the ground beneath it.

The judging process for Architizer's 14th A+Awards is now underway. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive updates about Public Voting, and stay tuned — winners will be announced later this spring.  

Top image: Floating Cloud | Jade Carvings of Long for Chongqing by Change Studio, Chongqing, China | Jury Winner, Best Landscape Design Firm, 13th Architizer A+Awards 

The post Landscape Architecture Is Still Treated as Decoration — and Cities Are Paying the Price appeared first on Journal.

The judging process for Architizer's 14th A+Awards is now underway. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive updates about Public Voting, and stay tuned — winners will be announced later this spring.  

Architecture has a façade problem. Despite decades of discourse around experience, occupation and use, too often, architectural value is measured from the outside. Likely exasperated by the rise of Instagram and other social media platforms, buildings are circulated and celebrated as objects. In this economy of attention, the exterior becomes the primary site of authorship, while interior architecture — where daily life actually unfolds — is treated as secondary or supplemental — it becomes part of a long trajectory of relegating decorative elements to a secondary tier in design.

Nowhere is this imbalance more apparent than in transport and civic interiors. These are spaces millions of people move through each day: terminals, stations, concourses and halls. They shape perception and human behavior more consistently than façades ever will. Yet they remain persistently undervalued in architectural culture. To be clear, this is not a matter of taste; rather, it’s a failure of recognition. For this reason and more, Architizer’s A+Awards champion interior design with accolades dedicated to Transport Interiors, Sustainable Interior Project, and Best Interior Design Firm.

When Architecture Stops at the Envelope

EL COPITAS bar by DA bureau | Jury Winner, Best Interior Design Firm, 13th Architizer A+Awards | Photos by Dmitry Suvorov 

The profession’s long-standing fixation on the icon has trained both architects and audiences to read buildings at a distance. On top of the centuries-long degradation of decoration, silhouettes and hero images stand in as digestible symbols, while interiors — experienced in motion and over time — resist easy capture.

Within this framework, interior architecture is often framed as execution rather than conception — a response to the program, made after the structure has been established. Even when interior strategy determines how a building functions, authorship is diluted. Credit accrues to the object, not the environment. This hierarchy is especially entrenched in large-scale public buildings — especially airports and train stations.

The Architecture People Actually Use

SFO Harvey Milk Terminal 1 by Gensler, San Francisco, California | Popular Choice Winner, Transport Interiors, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Perhaps more clearly than almost any other typology, transport interiors expose the limits of façade-driven thinking. These spaces are designed for constant occupation, not occasional visitation. They must operate under pressure, accommodate uncertainty and guide people who are often running on a sleep deficit, rushing to catch a connection, or are simply disoriented.

Projects such as the Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport demonstrate how interior architecture performs civic labor. Here, spatial clarity and daylight are not simply aesthetic gestures; they are operational tools. Far from being shaped by external form, the experience of the building hinges on how movement is choreographed through the design.

Other practices push interior architecture in a different direction altogether. The work of DA Bureau treats interior space as an immersive environment, where light, sound and material textures combine to produce distinct sensory worlds. These interiors are not subordinate to architecture; emanating main character energy, they are the architecture. Put differently, in these environments, façades are thresholds — interiors are the architecture.

Civic Space Happens Inside

Central Station by Woods Bagot, Sydney, Australia | Jury Winner, Transportation Infrastructure, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The undervaluation of interior architecture extends beyond transport. Civic buildings, too, are often celebrated as objects while their interiors are treated as neutral containers. Yet it is interior space that mediates public life: where people gather, wait, move and encounter one another.

Sydney’s new Central Station offers a reminder that civic identity is constructed through interior sequences as much as urban presence. Its cultural weight is carried by halls, passages and thresholds — spaces that manage scale and movement while sustaining collective orientation. These are not residual zones; they are the building’s public core.

Even at smaller scales, interior architecture shapes how buildings are understood and remembered. Krume Bäcker demonstrates how identity can be constructed on the inside. Its architecture is experienced at the scale of the body, not the skyline, yet it is memorable and unique.

Interior Architecture as Discipline, Not Decoration

CC75 by alvarez | sotelo, Madrid, Spain | Jury Winner, Best Young Interior Design Firm, 13th Architizer A+Awards

C48 by alvarez | sotelo, Madrid, Spain | Jury Winner, Best Young Interior Design Firm, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Part of the problem lies in how interior architecture is framed professionally. Too often, it is positioned as a specialization rather than a discipline — a subset of architecture rather than a mode of architectural thinking.

This is particularly evident in the work of Alvarez Sotelo Arquitectos, whose residential renovations treat the interior as an architectural system rather than a surface condition. Through precise spatial reorganization — adjusting alignments, circulation paths and degrees of enclosure — their projects demonstrate that interior architecture can recalibrate how space is understood and inhabited without relying on formal spectacle.

Practices such as Linehouse further complicate the hierarchy between exterior and interior by demonstrating how material intelligence and spatial continuity can carry architectural intent at close range. Their work foregrounds cultural specificity through atmosphere, resulting in resoundingly unique places defined by their interiors.

Crucially, these approaches advance the discipline by resisting object-centric thinking. Instead, they demonstrate the importance of architectural intelligence at close range, privileging continuity over novelty, occupation over image. Yet interior work is still too often celebrated in isolation, reinforcing the idea that it matters — just not as much.

Sustainability Lives Inside

Project Big Top by Multitude of Sins, Bengaluru, India | Popular Choice Winner, Best Young Interior Design Firm, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The hierarchy between exterior and interior has real consequences, particularly for sustainability. In many building types, environmental performance is shaped as much by interior decisions as by envelope design. Daylight penetration, material selection, spatial density and adaptability all influence long-term resource use.

In transport and civic interiors, these factors are amplified. Large volumes, extended operating hours and fluctuating occupancy place enormous demands on environmental systems. Interior architecture mediates these conditions daily, often invisibly. Still, sustainability narratives tend to privilege façades and technologies over spatial intelligence. This reinforces the misconception that interiors are temporary or replaceable, rather than integral to long-term performance.

This logic is especially evident in the work of Multitude of Sins, whose interiors frequently address issues of material economy through reuse and minimal intervention. Rather than treating sustainability as a visible layer, their projects locate environmental responsibility in decisions about what is preserved and adapted, building sustainability into their architectural approach rather than positioning it as a technical add-on.

Why Recognition Shapes the Discipline

O’Hare International Airport Terminal 5 Expansion by HOK, Chicago, Illinois | Popular Choice Winner, Transportation Infrastructure, 13th Architizer A+Awards 

Awards are often dismissed as symbolic, but their influence is structural. They define what is seen, what is valued and what is pursued. When interior architecture is treated as secondary, the profession absorbs that hierarchy. This matters because interior architects are integral to the profession. They operate within fixed constraints, negotiate complex programs and shape environments that must perform continuously. Their work is no less architectural because it is internal — far from it. Recognition does not inflate interior architecture’s importance; rather, it gives it visibility.

The consequences of this imbalance become especially clear at the scale of major transport hubs. Interiors like the expansion of Terminal 5 at O’Hare International Airport are among the most complex architectural environments in contemporary practice, required to operate continuously, absorb evolving security protocols and accommodate vast flows of people over time. Yet their architectural intelligence — the spatial sequencing, environmental control and organizational clarity that make them function — is rarely recognized with the same cultural weight as exterior form. When projects of this scale are discussed primarily as infrastructure rather than architecture, the discipline quietly concedes one of its most demanding arenas.

Beyond the Icon: Façades announce buildings. Interiors define them.

Ink Ink Market by LINEHOUSE, Shanghai, China | Popular Choice Winner, Best Interior Design Firm, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The tyranny of the icon persists because it is easy; it offers instant legibility and marketable imagery. Yet, if architecture is ultimately about shaping human experience, then interiors ask more. These are the sites where architecture’s cultural relevance is tested most consistently, where the discipline is given the opportunity to prove its capacity to organize complexity and, often, sustain public life.

Interior architecture — particularly in transport and civic contexts — is where architecture’s social, environmental and operational intelligence converges most clearly. From terminals and stations to adaptive interiors and large-scale public environments, these big-picture projects demand rigorous long-term thinking. By championing interior architecture alongside building typologies, recognition frameworks can reflect how architecture is actually experienced — not just how it is seen — and elevate work that shapes daily life at its most fundamental level.

The judging process for Architizer's 14th A+Awards is now underway. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive updates about Public Voting, and stay tuned — winners will be announced later this spring.  

Enter Your Interior Project in the 14th A+Awards→

Top image: Central Station by Woods Bagot, Sydney, Australia | Jury Winner, Transportation Infrastructure, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The post The Tyranny of the Icon: Why Interior Architecture Deserves Equal Cultural Weight appeared first on Journal.

The judging process for Architizer's 14th A+Awards is now underway. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive updates about Public Voting, and stay tuned — winners will be announced later this spring.  

Sports architecture has long suffered from a credibility problem. Amid the general public and designers alike, stadiums and athletic centers are often dismissed as indulgent, over-scaled spectacles — expensive icons designed for fleeting moments of visibility rather than long-term public value. (Of course, I am speaking about the general public and omit loyal fanbases who have converted pitches such as Camp Nou and Old Trafford into quasi-pilgrimage sites.) Meanwhile, in professional discourse, this typology is evaluated according to capacity and square footage or political symbolism, instead of architectural intelligence. Think back to your history of architecture textbooks: did any stadiums show up amongst those pages?

This generalization, however, obscures the reality of how many sports buildings actually function. These projects not only manage enormous flows of people and structure public space, but they also have high energy operating costs, meaning that they contain the possibility to model new ways of saving higher amounts of energy through smart design. In short, they operate as some of the most complex buildings in the urban environment.

Architects, however, are increasingly pushing back against the idea that all sports buildings are indulgent icons; new projects are arguing for the typology’s potential to serve as both social and economic infrastructure. Likewise, more and more environmental considerations are being poured into the latest iterations of these large-scale projects. For this reason and more, Architizer’s A+Awards champion sports design with categories that include Sustainable Sports & Recreation, Stadiums & Arenas, and, new this year, Sustainable Infrastructure.

How Sports Buildings Became Architectural Punchlines

Aramco Stadium by Populous, Saudi Arabia | Jury Vote & Popular Choice Winner, Unbuilt Sports & Recreation, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The perception of sports architecture as spectacle is not accidental. Over the past several decades, the rise of mega-events and the increasingly global reach of sports broadcasting has reshaped expectations around what these buildings should do. In this context, architectural success has been equated with visibility, leading to dramatic forms and record-breaking spans.

Because of the scale of these designs, their successes and, more often, their failures, are bound to politics. And when sports buildings fail, they fail loudly: underused venues, ballooning budgets, opaque procurement processes, and human rights abuses in the construction. Yet, when they succeed, their architectural intelligence is absorbed into a broader narrative of entertainment or economic development, rendering the clever work of the designers invisible.

In both cases, architecture is treated as secondary (to politics, revenue, data, franchises, etc). The result is a narrow critical framework that overlooks what sports architecture does best: organize large-scale public life under demanding environmental and operational constraints.

Beyond Spectacle: Sports Architecture as Everyday Infrastructure

təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic and Community Centre by hcma architecture + design, New Westminster, Canada | Jury Winner, Sustainable Sports & Recreation Building, 13th Architizer A+Awards  

When sports buildings are evaluated primarily as icons, key architectural questions disappear. How do these projects perform on non-event days? How do they integrate into surrounding neighborhoods and, at a larger scale, the surrounding region more broadly? How do they manage climate, water and energy at scale? How do they support daily use rather than episodic consumption?

Put plainly, reducing sports architecture to moments of spectacle flattens its civic potential. Sustainability becomes a technical add-on rather than a design driver. Public access is treated as a bonus rather than a baseline requirement. Architecture is judged by how it looks from afar. Yet many of the most consequential sports projects today are defined not by formal bravura but by how thoroughly they embed themselves into the everyday life of their users, and how they project themselves into the future of those same communities.

Across contexts, a growing body of work is quietly challenging the assumption that sports buildings exist primarily for elite performance or mass entertainment. These projects operate as shared civic assets, blurring boundaries between recreation, wellness, education and public space.

Academia Atlas by Sordo Madaleno, Zapopan, Mexico | Jury Winner, Gyms and Recreation Centers, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The TMSEWTXW Aquatic and Community Centre exemplifies this shift. Rather than isolating athletic programs as specialized destinations, the project positions sport within a broader civic framework, supporting daily community use alongside more formal training and competition. More than a container for events, the building acts as a mediator between physical activity and public life.

Similarly, though designed as home to one of Mexico’s most long-lived football teams, Atlas FC, Academia Atlas integrates athletic space into a larger educational and social environment. Beyond the function of the program itself, the decisions that drove its construction were made with an eye to the surrounding community: materials were procured locally and traditional construction techniques created jobs for a local workforce.

The Shaoxing University Stormproof Playground pushes this logic further by merging sports infrastructure with climate resilience. The lower level remains open and exposed, transforming the ground plane into a durable, all-weather space for collective use. Indeed, the design dissolves programmatic boundaries, favoring a continuous spatial landscape rather than a series of fixed zones.

Environmental Performance at Civic Scale

SAP Garden by 3XN, Munich, Germany | Jury Vote Winner, Stadium & Arena, 13th Architizer A+Awards 

Few building types concentrate environmental demand as intensely as sports architecture. Large spans, significant enclosures, fluctuating occupancy and extensive mechanical requirements make these projects both high-risk and high-opportunity from a sustainability standpoint.This is where architectural decision-making matters most. In sports buildings, sustainability cannot rely on marginal gains or isolated technologies. It must be structural — embedded in a bevy of ways, from form, orientation and enclosure to systems thinking, material strategy and more.

Sports Center in the Sonoran Desert by Fernanda Canales, Agua Prieta, Mexico 

Projects like SAP Garden demonstrate how large-scale venues can address these issues through architectural systems rather than spectacle alone (though formal choices can reinforce this ethos; for example, the arena conceals part of its programming beneath an artificial hill that organically continues the existing pathways and landscape of the park in which it is embedded).

Likewise, the Sports Center in the Sonoran Desert shows how climate-responsive design becomes inseparable from program in extreme conditions. Here, architecture mediates light and airflow, shaping how sport is practiced and experienced rather than merely housing it.

Beyond Global Icons: Rethinking the Stadium

OPEN ARENA | National Athletics Center by NAPUR Architect, Budapest, Hungary | Popular Choice Winner, Stadium & Arena; Popular Choice Winner, Sustainable Sports & Recreation Center, 13th Architizer A+Awards

As mentioned at the outset of this article, stadiums occupy a particularly contested place in public discourse. They are often criticized as single-use megastructures — expensive to build, difficult to maintain and underutilized outside of event cycles. While these critiques are not unfounded, they are not inevitable outcomes of the typology.

The Open Arena National Athletics Center in Budapest offers a different model. By prioritizing public accessibility beyond event schedules, the project reframes the stadium as an everyday urban space rather than a sealed object. Though built for the 2023 World Athletics Championships, the stadium’s temporary upper stands were designed to be removed, so that after the event, they could be replaced by an extensive covered leisure park, called the “Open City Ring.”

At a much larger scale, projects like Aramco Stadium reveal how infrastructural thinking can coexist with visibility. The challenge is not scale itself, but whether architecture is deployed to support long-term civic use rather than short-term impact.  In short, stadiums succeed when they are designed as systems, with a long view to adaptability and cultural engagement, rather than as monuments.

Why Recognition Matters

Haidong City Sports Center by Character Architecture Design Studio, China Architecture Design & Research Group, Haidong, China 

Sports architecture occupies an uncomfortable position between categories: civic building, infrastructure, cultural venue and environmental system. When recognition frameworks prioritize novelty or iconography, the architectural labor that allows these buildings to endure often goes unnoticed.

The most consequential sports architecture today is not always found in global capitals or Olympic host cities. Increasingly, it appears in regional contexts, where buildings must work harder, longer and for broader constituencies. Take, for example, the Haidong City Sports Center, which, on top of offering a space for daily recreation, seeks to articulate local identity. The project demonstrates that infrastructure does not need international visibility to have a lasting impact.

Awards do more than celebrate outcomes. They signal what the profession values. They shape client expectations and influence how architects approach future briefs. When sports architecture is judged rigorously — on spatial intelligence, sustainability and civic performance — design ambition follows. Conversely, when these projects are dismissed as indulgent or secondary, the message is clear: architectural thinking is optional here.

Shaoxing University Stormproof Playground by The Architectural Design & Research Institute of Zhejiang University (UAD), Shaoxing, China | Popular Choice Winner, Gyms and Recreation Centers, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Sports architecture organizes collective life at scale. It structures public space, manages environmental demand and supports social interaction across demographics. These buildings are not luxuries. They are urban utilities with cultural weight. Treating sports architecture as spectacle underestimates its civic responsibility and architectural potential. If architecture wants to claim relevance where it is most visible and most demanding, it must take sports buildings seriously — not as icons, but as infrastructure.

The judging process for Architizer's 14th A+Awards is now underway. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive updates about Public Voting, and stay tuned — winners will be announced later this spring.  

Enter Your Sporting Venue in the 14th A+Awards→

Featured image (top): OPEN ARENA | National Athletics Center by NAPUR Architect, Budapest, Hungary | Popular Choice Winner, Stadium & Arena; Popular Choice Winner, Sustainable Sports & Recreation Center, 13th Architizer A+Awards

The post Stadium Love: The Case for Taking Sports Buildings Seriously appeared first on Journal.

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With 2016 back in the cultural conversation, it feels like a good moment to look at what architecture was doing then.

It was a peak era for starchitecture, shaped by parametric design tools and new fabrication methods that made bold forms easier to realize. At the same time, architecture was starting to look for something else. Many projects turned toward landscape, atmosphere and emotion, searching for meaning beyond spectacle. Optimism and experimentation still drove the conversation, and these A+Awards winners captured that energy.

A decade later, they reveal both what architects cared about at the time and what aged well.

When architecture became topography:

Messner Mountain Museum Corones

By Zaha Hadid Architects, South Tyrol, Italy

Popular Choice Winner, Museum, 2016 A+Awards

Set high on Mount Kronplatz, MMM Corones reflects a 2010s fascination with architecture as terrain. Rather than sitting on the mountain, the museum is cut into it, its fluid concrete volumes following the logic of geology and movement. Circulation unfolds along a descending ramp that pulls visitors through compressed galleries toward framed views of the Dolomites, turning the act of walking into part of the exhibition.

A sharp glass canopy pierces the rock like a shard of ice, marking entry without domesticating the site. Dedicated to mountaineering culture, the building treats landscape as both subject and structure. Its sculptural confidence and immersive spatial narrative capture a decade when architecture sought intensity through form, topography and physical experience.

When architecture chose restraint:

Grace Farms

By SANAA, New Canaan, Connecticut

Jury Winner, Architecture +Engineering, 2016 A+Awards

Restraint becomes the defining gesture at Grace Farms. Rather than asserting itself as a singular object, the River unfolds as a low, continuous presence across open farmland, guiding movement through a sequence of glass-walled spaces joined by a gently sloping roof. Programs for reading, gathering, reflection and recreation are held within a light steel and timber structure that favors openness and visibility over enclosure.

The building keeps attention on people and shared activity, allowing landscape and daily use to take precedence. Architecture here acts as a quiet framework, shaping encounters without demanding focus. Its clarity and understatement mark a moment when pulling back felt like a deliberate, confident choice.

When form meant feeling:

Harbin Opera House

By MAD Architects, Harbin, China

Popular Choice Winner, Architecture +Wood, 2016 A+Awards

Long regarded as a defining work in MAD Architects’ early global rise, the Harbin Opera House captures a moment when the studio’s nature-driven ambitions were at their most expansive. Shaped by metaphors of wind, water and ice, its sweeping white aluminum form reads as a frozen landform emerging from Harbin’s wetlands.

The sculptural exterior contains two performance halls, with circulation treated as a slow procession that turns arrival into part of the event. Inside, large glass surfaces and a faceted roof pull daylight deep into public spaces, while the main auditorium is wrapped in warm Manchurian ash, shaped to support acoustics and atmosphere. The project reflects a 2010s confidence in expressive form, civic symbolism and architecture’s ability to stage emotion at an urban scale.

When technology meant optimism:

The Lowline Lab

By Raad Studio, New York City, New York

Popular Choice Winner, Architecture +Technology, 2016 A+Awards
Jury Winner, Architecture +Technology, 2016 A+Awards
Jury Winner, Architecture +Self Initiated Projects, 2016 A+Awards

Conceived as a test site for a new kind of public space, the Lowline Lab reflects a 2010s faith in technology as an urban problem-solver. Installed within an abandoned underground market, the project uses custom optical systems to capture daylight at street level and channel it below through mirrored tubes and a suspended solar canopy. The sum of these efforts is a softly lit interior landscape where plant life grows without artificial light, framed by raw industrial surfaces and experimental hardware.

Part exhibition, part laboratory, the space imagined a future where neglected infrastructure could be reclaimed through technical ingenuity. Its speculative tone, environmental ambition and belief in design-led transformation mark it as distinctly of its moment, when cities still looked to bold experiments to signal progress.

When ordinary buildings started turning expressive:

City View Garage

By LEONG LEONG, Miami, Florida

Jury Vote and Popular Choice Winner, Architecture +Metal, 2016 A+Awards

Positioned beside the I-195 freeway at the edge of Miami’s Design District, City View Garage treats a parking structure as a visual event rather than background support. Its façade is wrapped in gold-toned, titanium-coated stainless steel, shaped into folded, wave-like fins that catch light and shift with movement along the highway. What reads as surface expression is driven by function: openings required for daylight and ventilation are exaggerated into a shimmering screen that softens the building’s mass.

From inside, the patterned apertures frame fragmented views of the city. The project reflects a 2010s impulse to elevate everyday infrastructure through bold material presence, turning utilitarian programs into landmarks with graphic clarity and instant recognizability.

When architecture told a city’s story:

Great Amber Concert Hall

By Volker Giencke & Company, Latvia

Popular Choice Winner, Hall/Theater, 2016 A+Awards

Great Amber is a product of a period when cultural buildings leaned unapologetically into symbolism to define a city’s image. Rising as a tilted, amber-colored cone, the concert hall takes its form from local legend, with the structure appearing to brace itself against the coastal wind. A translucent double-skin façade encloses the concrete interior, creating a buffered interior climate while allowing light to filter deep into the building.

Inside, the main hall follows a terraced vineyard geometry, pairing spatial drama with acoustic precision, while mirrored light tubes pull daylight down into the performance space. The project captures a 2010s belief in architecture as a narrative object, where material, form and metaphor worked together to project cultural ambition at an urban scale.

When architecture turned introspective:

Sayama Forest Chapel

By Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, Tokorozawa, Japan

Popular Choice Winner, Religious Buildings & Memorials, 2016 A+Awards

Sayama Forest Chapel is a prime example of introspective, emotionally attentive architecture. Set at the edge of a dense forest, the chapel takes the act of prayer as its formal starting point, shaping space around the posture of bowed hands and bodies. Two leaning structural planes form a gassho-like figure, angled inward to respect the surrounding trees and focus attention toward the woods ahead. Cast-aluminum roof tiles ripple with subtle texture, while a gently sloped slate floor draws visitors forward almost imperceptibly.

Rather than asserting presence, the building withdraws, allowing architecture to act as a quiet companion to grief and reflection. Its emphasis on bodily gesture, material sensitivity and shared spirituality captures a 2010s belief in architecture’s capacity to care through form.

When architecture made room for cultural exchange:

Thread Artist Residency

By Toshiko Mori Architect, Sinthian, Senegal

Jury Winner, Architecture +Humanitarianism, 2016 A+Awards
Jury Winner, Architecture +Community, 2016 A+Awards

Thread was conceived as a place where architecture could support cultural exchange without overpowering it. Designed by Toshiko Mori Architect, the project provides living, working and gathering spaces for artists invited to engage directly with the surrounding community. The building’s form responds to climate and daily use, relying on simple materials and open, shaded spaces that encourage interaction and shared activity.

As opposed to operating as a closed institution, Thread functions as a social framework, hosting workshops, performances and informal encounters between visiting artists and local residents. Its role extends beyond accommodation, acting as a physical platform for learning, making and dialogue. The project signals a moment when architecture increasingly positioned itself as an enabler of participation, collaboration and cultural continuity rather than an object of attention.

When cantilevers reached into the landscape:

Manshausen Island Resort

By Snorre Stinessen Architecture, Steigen, Nordland, Norway

Jury Vote and Popular Choice Winner, Architecture +Cantilever, 2016 A+Awards
Popular Choice Winner, Architecture +Glass, 2016 A+Awards
Popular Choice Winner, Hotels & Resorts, 2016 A+Awards

At Manshausen Island Resort, architecture narrows its role to shelter and framing, allowing landscape to dominate the experience. The cabins sit lightly on historic stone quays or rocky shelves, their compact timber volumes opened almost entirely to the sea through expansive panes of glass. These large glazed surfaces are not about transparency as spectacle, but about proximity, placing guests face to face with shifting weather, low Arctic light and the constant movement of water.

Constructed from layered massive wood clad in larch, the cabins age quietly against the elements while interiors remain spare and protective. The project captures a moment when retreat architecture leaned into exposure, trusting glass to mediate between comfort and raw nature rather than separating the two.

When reflection became experience:

Mirrors

By bandesign, Gifu Prefecture, Japan

Jury Winner, Restaurants, 2016 A+Awards

Set along an avenue of cherry trees, Mirrors turns reflection into a spatial device rather than a visual trick. Two angled mirror walls multiply the surrounding blossoms, folding the street into a dense, shifting canopy that changes with light and season. What begins as a café becomes an immersive threshold, where real trees and reflected ones collapse into a single field of color and movement.

Materials stay deliberately restrained — white steel surfaces, gravel underfoot, carefully placed color accents — so that seasonal change remains the focus. Blossoming camellias give way to cherry pinks, marking time through perception rather than signage. The project captures a moment when small-scale architecture leaned on perception, atmosphere and sensory play to transform everyday settings into fleeting, shared experiences.

When circulation shaped the building:

TERMEH Office – Retail Building

By Ahmad Bathaei and Farshad MehdiZadeh Design | FMZD, Hamadan, Iran

Jury Winner, Office – Low Rise (1 – 4 Floors), 2016 A+Awards

The TERMEH building treats movement as its primary architectural driver. Positioned along one of Hamedan’s key urban axes, the project separates retail and office functions while giving each a direct relationship to the street. A thickened slab becomes the central gesture, folding downward to form a stair that lifts the office into view and use from the public walkway.

Light and planted space are drawn into the interior through a vertical void, softening the transition between levels. The exterior is wrapped in patterned local brick, filtering daylight while grounding the building in familiar construction language. The result is a compact urban structure shaped by access, circulation and layered public presence rather than formal display.

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The post Peak Parametric? What the A+Awards Looked Like in 2016 appeared first on Journal.

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Why does the jury matter so much? Because in the architectural world, who chooses the winners is just as important as what wins. The A+Product Awards jury is composed of specifying architects, designers and thought leaders from the most respected firms on the planet.

Among them are some of the key creative and technical forces behind the buildings defining our era. For more than a decade, the program has proudly welcomed jurors from globally renowned firms, including:

• Foster + Partners

• Handel Architects

• Perkins and Will

• HOK

• Henning Larsen

• AECOM

• Olson Kundig

• Gensler

• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)

• HDR

• Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF)

• Woods Bagot

Together, these firms represent thousands of built projects across every major typology — from civic landmarks and luxury residences to transit centers and commercial hubs. The scale and diversity of their work is matched only by the complexity of the specifications required to bring such buildings to life.

These firms design iconic structures, and in order to realize their vision, they rely on exceptional products to solve site-specific challenges and meet increasingly rigorous performance standards.

Credibility Through Specification

Projects by A+Product Awards Juror Firms, clockwise from top left: JTI Headquarters by SOM; Legacy of Bodegas Faustino Winery by Foster + Partners; Sawmill by Olson Kundig; 1200 Avenue by Handel Architects.

When a product receives an A+Product Award, it is being recognized by the very people who specify the materials, systems, and technologies that power real-world architecture. That distinction matters.

A jury composed of specifiers from firms like Gensler, Olson Kundig and Perkins and Will isn’t choosing based on aesthetic appeal alone. They’re thinking about integration, long-term performance, sustainability metrics, user experience and the kinds of behind-the-wall innovations that quietly revolutionize buildings from the inside out.

These are the experts whose product decisions directly shape the future of the built environment — and they bring that expertise to the judging table.

A Platform That Mirrors the Industry

Another reason the A+Product Awards holds such prestige is that the jury mirrors the actual structure of the architecture and construction industry. While many award programs cater to a narrow audience, the A+Product Awards acknowledges the collaborative, cross-disciplinary nature of building practice.

From façade specialists and interior designers to lighting experts and sustainability directors, the jury encompasses a broad cross-section of roles and perspectives. That diversity ensures that entries are evaluated holistically, with design intent, construction feasibility and long-term performance all weighed together.

Start Entry →

Recognition That Travels

The impact of winning doesn’t end with the trophy (although the custom-engraved award is certainly the showstopper of any showroom or trade booth display). Each A+Product Award winner is promoted year-round through Architizer’s publishing platforms, including newsletters, product spotlights, social media features, and inclusion in the annual A+Product List, read by thousands of architects worldwide.

The credibility of being selected by names like Foster + Partners and HOK gives products a powerful edge when it comes to trust. Architects care about beautiful products, sure — but more than anything, they want proof that others in the industry will attest to their quality and performance.

An Invitation to Make Your Mark

For product manufacturers, materials innovators, and building systems developers, this is your moment. The 2026 A+Product Awards offers a rare opportunity: to present your work to the architects who are shaping the global skyline.

The Extended Entry Deadline is February 27, 2026 — and no further extensions will be offered. Whether you’re launching a groundbreaking façade system, a sustainably sourced furniture line or a revolutionary lighting product, this is your chance to be seen, specified, and celebrated.

Enter the A+Product Awards →

The post The Architecture Powerhouses Elevating the A+Product Awards appeared first on Journal.

The judging process for Architizer's 14th A+Awards is now underway. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive updates about Public Voting, and stay tuned — winners will be announced later this spring.  

Healthcare buildings are among the most complex projects architects are expected to deliver. They are shaped by dense regulatory frameworks, unforgiving performance requirements and programs that must operate continuously, often under extreme pressure. Few typologies demand more from architecture — and yet few receive less architectural credit.

Meanwhile, in professional discourse, hospitals and research facilities are still described primarily through the language of engineering (think words like efficiency, optimization, compliance, etc.). This creates a paradox that is easy to ignore, but vital to recognize: when these buildings “work” well, architecture is expected to disappear. If architectural intelligence is measured by the ability to organize complexity through space, healthcare should be one of the discipline’s most celebrated proving grounds. Instead, it remains one of its most underrated typologies; a persistent blind spot that has been further marginalized by digital consumption of architecture as an Instagram aesthetic.

This is not a failure of individual projects or the work of their designers; among other things, it is a failure of how the profession frames value. For this reason and more, Architizer’s A+Awards champion Healthcare design with categories that include Architecture +Health, Design for Wellbeing, and, new this year, Sustainable Healthcare Building.

When Architecture Became a Liability

Annex to house research, practices and human genetics laboratories by Dannien Roller Architekten + Partner, Tübingen, Germany 

Over the past two decades, healthcare design has been shaped by the rise of evidence-based planning, risk mitigation and performance metrics. These frameworks have brought real benefits, including better coordination between disciplines and, most importantly, improved patient outcomes. The double-edged sword, however, is that they have also narrowed the definition of success.

In many healthcare projects, architecture is tolerated so long as it does not interfere. Design ambition is often approached as something to be justified rather than assumed. Spatial decisions are framed as technical accommodations, not architectural propositions.

This is especially visible in research-driven environments, where the rigor of scientific programming tends to dominate perception. Yet, projects like the Annex to House Research Practices and Human Genetics Laboratories demonstrate how deeply architectural decisions — about massing, light and organization — can shape working conditions. However, these contributions are rarely discussed as architecture. They are absorbed into a broader narrative of performance, where spatial intelligence is rendered invisible once it functions correctly.

The Cost of Invisibility

Boston Children’s Hospital Hale Family Building by Shepley Bulfinch, Boston, Massachusetts | Popular Choice Winner, Hospitals and Healthcare Centers, 14th Architizer A+Awards

Meanwhile, when healthcare buildings are treated as technical exercises, the consequences are spatial as much as cultural. Circulation becomes efficient but disorienting. Planning is optimized for current needs but resists adaptation. Sustainability is reduced to systems and equipment rather than embedded in form.

The result is not failure in a clinical sense, but it is a failure of architecture. Spaces that meet every code requirement can still exhaust staff, confuse visitors and limit a building’s ability to evolve. The problem is not that these buildings lack care; it is that architectural thinking has been sidelined in favor of procedural success.

Even in high-profile projects like the Hale Family Building at Boston Children’s Hospital, architectural contributions — from daylight strategies to interior scale and beyond — can easily be described clinically rather than critically. Many similar buildings perform exceptionally well, yet their architectural intelligence is rarely positioned as central to that performance.

Projects That Quietly Refuse the Frame

Atria Institute by Rockwell Group, New York City, New York 

Despite this persistent bias, a growing body of work challenges the assumption that healthcare must recede into technical neutrality. These projects do not reject performance; they deepen it through architectural structure.

In New York, the Atria Institute occupies a unique space between healthcare, research and workplace architecture. Its hybrid program demands a level of spatial authorship that cannot be reduced to coordination alone. Here, architecture does not decorate function; it organizes it, negotiating privacy and calm in a dense urban context, without losing sight of collaboration and long-term adaptability.

At a vastly different scale and setting, the Tibet Maternity and Children’s Hospital demonstrates how healthcare architecture can respond simultaneously to climate and culture while still attending to care. The building’s form and organization are shaped by environmental constraints that make mechanical dependence impractical. Architecture becomes an operational tool, not an expressive layer.

The Burtinlé District Hospital, on the other hand, offers another perspective entirely. Operating under limited resources, it demonstrates the critical importance of long-term thinking translated into architectural provisions, seen in passive climate strategies and durable construction. Likewise, the project is notable for the legibility of its circulation. In this context, architecture is inseparable from performance because it is the primary means by which performance is achieved.

These projects are not exceptions. They are evidence that healthcare architecture already operates at a high level of architectural intelligence — even if the profession has been slow to acknowledge it.

Sustainability Is Not an Add-On

Boston Children’s Hospital Urban Green Design by Mikyoung Kim Design, Boston, Massachusetts 

Nowhere is this misalignment more consequential than in sustainability. Healthcare buildings are among the most energy-intensive typologies in the built environment. They operate continuously, require strict environmental control and are expected to last for decades.

This makes healthcare architecture one of the discipline’s most urgent sustainability challenges. And yet, sustainability is often addressed at the level of systems rather than structure. The opportunity lies not in better equipment alone, but in architectural decisions that reduce long-term demand and increase resilience.

Boston Children’s Hospital illustrates this at multiple scales. The Hale Family Building integrates environmental performance into its spatial logic, demonstrating how architectural structure can support both experience and efficiency within a demanding clinical setting. At the campus scale, the Boston Children’s Hospital Green Masterplan extends this thinking further, treating landscape, circulation and adaptability as environmental tools rather than secondary considerations.

Sustainability, like so many other fundamental aspects of healthcare design, cannot be cosmetic; it must be architectural.

Why Recognition Still Matters

Lush Labyrinth by Bureau Fraai, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Architects are often reluctant to admit it, but awards play a quiet and powerful role in shaping professional priorities. They signal what counts as architectural excellence. They influence how clients frame briefs. They determine which forms of architectural labor are made visible — and which are quietly absorbed into other disciplines.

This matters acutely in healthcare-adjacent work, where architecture frequently operates between categories: part renovation, part interior, part research environment, part spatial experiment. Projects like Lush Labyrinth sit uncomfortably within conventional typologies, despite making a clear architectural argument about how space, movement and atmosphere can reshape institutional environments. When work like this struggles to find recognition, it is not because it lacks ambition, but because existing frameworks are too narrow to acknowledge it (notably, however, this particular project was named a Finalist in the Hospitals and Healthcare Centers category at the 13th A+Awards).

Recognition does not simply reward finished buildings. It defines the boundaries of the discipline itself. When healthcare architecture is underrepresented — or only recognized when it conforms to familiar narratives of efficiency — design ambition becomes optional by default.

The Discipline’s Real Test

Burtinle District Hospital by APC Architectural Pioneering Consultants, Burtinle, Somalia | Jury Winner, Hospitals and Healthcare Centers, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Burtinle District Hospital by APC Architectural Pioneering Consultants, Burtinle, Somalia | Jury Winner, Hospitals and Healthcare Centers, 13th Architizer A+Awards

If healthcare buildings are to be taken seriously as architecture, they must be evaluated on architectural terms. That means asking different questions:

Can the building be understood under stress?
Is it adaptable over decades, not just optimized for the present?
Are structure, systems and envelope working together rather than in parallel?
Does environmental performance emerge from form and planning, not just equipment?

Projects like the Burtinlé District Hospital and the Tibet Maternity and Children’s Hospital already meet these criteria. They demonstrate that architectural thinking is not a threat to performance, but its foundation.

Tibet Maternity and Children’s Hospital by BAZUO Architecture Studio, Tibet, China

Healthcare architecture is not a niche category; it’s a fundamental element of human society. It is where architecture’s relevance is tested most directly — in moments of vulnerability and pressure, which are also weighted by long-term responsibility. Treating these buildings as engineering problems with aesthetic constraints limits the discipline’s agency at precisely the moment it should be most confident.

If architecture wants to matter where it is most needed, it must claim healthcare unapologetically as design. Not despite its constraints, but because of them.

The judging process for Architizer's 14th A+Awards is now underway. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive updates about Public Voting, and stay tuned — winners will be announced later this spring.  

Enter Your Healthcare Project in the 14th A+Awards→

Featured image (top): Tibet Maternity and Children’s Hospital by BAZUO Architecture Studio, Tibet, China

The post Why Is Healthcare Architecture Still Treated Like Engineering, Rather Than Design? appeared first on Journal.

Showcase your visionary architectural concepts: The 2026 Vision Awards features categories that reward UNBUILT projects presenting bold ideas for the future of architecture. Take advantage of early bird pricing before April 17th. 

Long before a building is constructed, it exists as an image. A sketch passed across a desk. A rendering uploaded to a shared drive. A model photographed at just the right moment. Architecture, at its core, is an act of translation — turning ideas into something others can see, understand and believe in. Yet for many young architects, representation — sketching, rendering, photography and videography — remains one of the least formally taught and most informally learned skills in practice, despite being central to disseminating design thinking to the rest of the world.

How to Visualize Architecture, Architizer’s newest publication, begins from this gap. Rather than treating representation as a technical afterthought, the book reframes it as a central design discipline — one that shapes how projects are conceived and communicated. Throughout its eight distinct chapters, the book reinforces the view that architecture must be understood as more than the built final project and that by strategically representing their design and thought processes, architects will bolster their value as creators.

Preorder the Book

Visualization as Authorship, Not Afterthought

The book’s core premise is simple but powerful: architectural images are never neutral. Every drawing, rendering or photograph carries intention. Each decides what to reveal, what to withhold and what story to tell. When done well, representation reinforces creative authorship by communicating the values, priorities and ideas that have shaped a design long before construction begins.

For emerging architects navigating competitions, client presentations, portfolios and award submissions, this reframing is critical. Visualization is not simply about illustrating a project; it is about persuading, provoking and inspiring commitment. How to Visualize Architecture provides the tools to do exactly that.

Learning from Award-Winning Work

Pictured: (Left page) Slovenian Pavilion for EXPO Osaka 2025 by Dekleva Gregoric Architects | Jury Winner, Vision for Materials & Jury Winner, Vision for Sustainability, 2025 Vision Awards; (Right Page) Symplasma by Henriquez Partners Architects | Editor’s Choice Winner, Vision for Sustainability, 2025 Vision Awards 

What truly distinguishes the book is its use of real, contemporary examples. Every chapter is richly illustrated with drawings, renderings, physical models, photography and video drawn from Architizer’s Vision Awards program. Importantly, every Vision Awards Winner has their work published in this instructional guide.

These projects span geographies, scales and creative mediums, offering an unprecedented look at how compelling architectural imagery is produced in practice today. Rather than presenting images in isolation, the book breaks them down — showing where the eye lands, what decision an image clarifies and how it advances a broader narrative. In doing so, it lifts the curtain on the creative process, showing how everything from early sketches and conceptual drawings to finished photographs of the built work are powerful communicators, each with different strengths that lend themselves to various use cases.

A Toolkit for Every Stage of Practice

Pictured: Plaza Tehran by Mobina Mirzaee | Editor’s Choice Winner, Vision for Vertical Living, 2025 Vision Awards  

How to Visualize Architecture is designed to be used, not simply read. Each chapter follows a consistent thematic backbone that is then structured according to principles, techniques, focused themes and best practices, offering a concrete lens that ties visual craft to purpose. Readers are encouraged to move fluidly between chapters, using the book as a reference during early brainstorming, late-night deadlines or final portfolio assembly.

This flexibility reflects the realities of architectural practice. Visualization is required at every stage, whether shaping an initial idea, building a case for a client or documenting completed work.  The book meets architects where they are, offering guidance that adapts to changing needs and time constraints.

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Designing for Different Audiences

Pictured: Under the Fjords by ZOA Studio | Jury Winner, Rendering Artist of the Year, 2025 Vision Awards

One of the book’s most practical contributions is its emphasis on the audience. Young architects are often asked to present the same project to very different groups — private clients, civic boards, competition juries and professional peers — each of whom reads images differently.

The book offers clear strategies for recalibrating visuals accordingly. Mood and narrative for clients. Context and stewardship for communities. Clarity of intent and originality for juries. The takeaway is not to create more images, but to use the same material more intelligently — reordering, foregrounding or editing visuals to suit their intended viewer.

Building a Visual Practice Over Time

Pictured: Shelter of Calm by ELEMENT VISUALIZATIONS | Editor’s Choice Winner, Rendering Artist of the Year, 2025 Vision Awards

Visualization, the book argues, is not a one-off task but an ongoing habit. Readers are encouraged to maintain living archives of sketches, in-progress screenshots, mock-ups and field notes — building a visual memory that can be activated when opportunities arise. Whether preparing for a presentation, a publication or an awards submission, this archive becomes a powerful resource.

For young architects in particular, this mindset can be transformative. It shifts visualization from a reactive task into a proactive design strategy — one that strengthens both creative thinking and professional visibility.

Why This Book Matters Now

Pictured: “Nostalgia,” Bierpinsel, Berlin by Wonseok Chae | Editor’s Choice Winner, Architectural Illustrator of the Year, 2025 Vision Awards

Ultimately, How to Visualize Architecture is an argument for taking representation seriously. It positions visual storytelling as a professional advantage, capable of accelerating understanding, strengthening persuasion and helping ambitious ideas earn real-world support.

Beautifully illustrated, rigorously structured and grounded in contemporary practice, the book serves as both a practical guide and a source of inspiration. For young architects looking to sharpen their voice, clarify their ideas and communicate architecture with confidence, it is not just a publication worth owning — it is one worth returning to again and again.

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Showcase your visionary architectural concepts: The 2026 Vision Awards features categories that reward UNBUILT projects presenting bold ideas for the future of architecture. Take advantage of early bird pricing before April 17th. 

The post How to Visualize Architecture: Get the Complete Guide To Architectural Storytelling appeared first on Journal.

Architizer’s Asia-Pacific A+Awards Celebration in Shenzhen formed a confident climax to the 13th Architizer A+Awards season, following regional gatherings in New York and Paris. Set within a city defined by velocity, the event brought together award winners, jurors and leading practitioners from across the region not only for recognition, but also for two days of collegial exchange and architectural immersion.

The celebration began on Thursday evening with a welcome reception at a buzzing post-industrial hub in OCT Creative Park — a cobblestoned area of the city where a collection of older warehouses has recently been transformed into a locus of creative industries. A+Awards winners and invited guests gathered informally ahead of the main program, using the relaxed setting to make early introductions and set the tone for a gathering defined by shared professional curiosity.

Inside MAD Architects’ Shenzhen Bay Culture Square

Friday’s full-day program unfolded inside the newly completed Shenzhen Bay Culture Square by MAD Architects, a civic complex whose expressive form and generous interiors framed the event from start to finish. As attendees moved through the building’s layered public spaces, the architecture itself became an active participant, reinforcing the idea that design excellence is best discussed from within exemplary built work.

MAD Architects’ Shenzhen Bay Culture Square (front left, surrounded by greenery) played host to Architizer’s Asia-Pacific A+Awards celebration. Photo by Zhu Yumeng

Located in Houhai, Nanshan District, the 46-acre (18.8-hectare) Shenzhen Bay Culture Square anchors a new civic core between the waterfront and the city’s high-rise financial district. Against a backdrop of glossy supertall towers, MAD’s curvalinear stone architecture deliberately turns inward and downward, trading vertical spectacle for a more topographic experience, with a building whose form is a carefully choreographed relationship to the ground.

At the heart of the day was the presentation of the Architizer A+Awards, with winners recognized across commercial, residential, hospitality, cultural, institutional, landscape, planning, transportation, sustainability and firm categories. Throughout the program, winning teams in attendance were invited onto the stage, ensuring that each honored project — and the people behind it — received a visible moment of recognition on the stage in front of their peers.

Awards, Dialogue, and Shared Learning

Keynote sessions were interwoven with the awards presentations, creating an interactive learning environment rather than a conventional conference structure. Speakers including Yuxing Zhang (Founder and Chief Designer, ARCity Office), Florence Chan (Principal, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF)), Peihe Xie (Founder and Chief Designer, AD Architecture), Xihan Gu (Co-Founder, Shang Interior Architects), Florian Heinzelman (Co-Founder and Director, SHAU), Xin Tian (Founder and Design Principal, MoA), Zhile Hu (Founding Partner and Chief Designer, WJ Studio), and Vivi Xie (China Director, ASPECT Studios) contributed perspectives that complemented the awards, reinforcing shared questions around practice, craft, and design thinking across the Asia-Pacific region.

A+Awards guests explored Shenzhen Bay Culture Square on a special guided tour.

Midday, a guided tour of Shenzhen Bay Culture Square offered guests the opportunity to experience MAD’s design firsthand, strengthening the relationship between architectural discourse and built form. As the guests saw, at the heart of the project are nine galleries totaling nearly 538,195 square feet (50,000 square meters). Rather than designing these as neutral white boxes, MAD treats exhibition space as adaptable infrastructure — robust enough to host international touring shows, yet flexible enough to support evolving curatorial formats.

Project of the Year on a Global Stage

A highlight of the afternoon was the presentation of the Project of the Year awards by Architizer Managing Editor Hannah Feniak. After each project was presented in greater detail to the audience, the respective firm was given time to share its own voices and perspectives about its work on the stage.

 Jingqiu Zhang and Lubin Liu, co-founders of IARA, accept their A+Awards Project of the Year honors on stage.

First up, the Rural Memory Museum by IARA was recognized for translating cultural memory into a carefully articulated civic space rooted in its rural context. The Chinese firm’s co-founders, Jingqiu Zhang and Lubin Liu, stated that, “To receive the Project of the Year Award is, for us, both an honor and a form of recognition — recognition that an architectural practice centered on people, community, and real life can still be seen and understood.” 

Next up, Elisabeth Lee represented a group of students from the University of Hong Kong, Project Mingde, for their work on the Duling Educational and Cultural Center, designed for the Hakka People and demonstrating how educational architecture can operate as both social infrastructure and urban anchor. As she generously put it, “this award belongs to every person who shared a story, offered an idea, or trusted us with their hopes. It celebrates the profound truth that the truest places emerge when created collectively, precisely because they belong to everyone..”

Antonius Richard Rusli and Leviandri Swady of RAD+ar ( Research Artistic Design + architecture) pictured with their A+Awards Project of the Year accolade.

Finally, the Indonesian project Aruma Split Garden by RAD+ar ( Research Artistic Design + architecture) was celebrated for transforming a dense commercial site into a layered spatial landscape that prioritizes climate, circulation and experience. The firm’s founder, Antonius Richard Rusli, spoke, saying that “as an emerging practice, we often feel like we are swimming against the tide, advocating for innovation and sustainability in environments where the path of least resistance is often the norm. This award validates that the struggle to improve our architectural ecosystem is worth it.”

Celebrating last season’s A+Awards — and welcoming the next

Architizer’s Managing Editor, Hannah Feniak, closed out the day with a message to all of this season’s A+Awards winners: “We thank you sincerely for your continual pursuit of design excellence. By sharing your knowledge through your work, you inspire architects across the globe to strive for better buildings, better cities, and a better world. Our community looks to you as models setting new bars for design. When it comes to generating inspiration, you deliver it time and again — congratulations to each and every one of you.”

Architizer’s Managing Editor Hannah Feniak provided the closing remarks on a magical evening of A+Awards celebrations.

As the final regional stop in the 13th A+Awards season celebrations, the Shenzhen celebration reaffirmed Architizer’s commitment to recognizing architectural excellence on a global stage. Bringing together award-winning projects, leading voices, and an extraordinary setting, the event positioned the A+Awards not only as an honors program, but as a platform for connection — uniting architects around shared standards of craft, innovation and design rigor across borders.

A+Awards festivities brought the architectural community together in Shenzhen through tours, networking events and a glittering awards ceremony.

Looking ahead, the momentum from Shenzhen carries forward into the 14th Architizer A+Awards, now accepting entries and celebrating a renewed focus on architectural craft — not as nostalgia, but as a contemporary discipline shaped by technology, environmental responsibility and cultural intelligence. Open to projects of all types and scales, from architecture and interiors to landscape, planning and urban design, the program continues to recognize work that advances the profession through design excellence, with an emphasis on the clarity of idea and rigor of execution.

Architects worldwide are invited to submit their work and join a global community shaping architecture’s next chapter — one defined by intention, innovation, and craft reimagined for a new era.

Start Submission →

Top image: Shenzhen Bay Culture Square by MAD Architects; photo by Zhu Yumeng

The post Innovation Meets Recognition: Architizer Hosts A+Awards Asia-Pacific Celebration in Shenzhen appeared first on Journal.