Awards

At this year’s AIA Conference on Architecture & Design, the NYPD 40^th Precinct won the Justice Facility Award, which is given to projects that exemplify quality of form, functionality, and an exceptional architectural response to complex justice design issues. The 45,000-sq-ft 40^th Precinct, designed by BIG, is located in the South Bronx and features the first-ever community meeting room in a New York City police precinct. From the outside, the precinct resembles a stack of boxes, or ‘bricks’ that reference early NYC police stations, unified through a precast concrete façade that alternates between sandblasted and polished finishes.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has awarded The Plus with the prestigious RIBA International Award for Excellence 2026. The recognition places the project among an outstanding group of buildings worldwide celebrated for architectural excellence, with the jury unanimously praising the breadth and quality of this year’s winning entries. Designed for Norwegian furniture manufacturer Vestre, The Plus is dedicated to clean, carbon-neutral fabrication of urban furniture and sets a new benchmark for the manufacturing facilities of the future.

“We are deeply honored that the Royal Institute of British Architects has acknowledged our design for Vestre’s factory The Plus with a RIBA International Awards for Excellence. In all its simplicity, The Plus seeks to explore and showcase how economic growth and ecological sustainability can go hand in hand, by designing and building it as the most environmentally friendly factory in the world. Built from locally sourced timber, powered by local hydroelectricity, geothermal and photovoltaics, covered in locally sourced turf and displacing the bare minimum of forest, the factory has the smallest and gentlest environmental footprint possible. As a positive social side effect, factory workers, leadership, customers, and collaborators alike get to experience the joy of making furniture in the middle of the forest, making it blatantly evident that sustainable manufacturing is not only better for the environment but also more enjoyable for the people who practice it. A literal architectural manifestation of our philosophy of hedonistic sustainability.” – Bjarke Ingels, Founder & Creative Director, BIG

“We’re absolutely thrilled. We were certainly hoping for this but never taking it for granted. To be recognized by RIBA is a huge honor, and I’m incredibly proud of everyone who has contributed to making The Plus what it is today. This award is a recognition of BIG’s visionary architecture and of the close collaboration between architects, engineers, contractors, and our own team that brought the project to life. With The Plus, we wanted to challenge conventional ideas of what a factory can be. Not just an efficient production facility, but a place where architecture, people, nature, and industry come together. This award demonstrates that sustainability, transparency and high productivity can go hand in hand, and it gives us even more motivation in our ambition to become the world’s most sustainable furniture manufacturer.” – Bjørn Fjellstad, CEO, Vestre

The Hungarian Natural History Museum in Debrecen has been named a double winner at the 14th Annual Architizer A+Awards, receiving both the Jury Winner award in the Unbuilt Landscape category and the Popular Choice Winner award in the Unbuilt Institutional category. The A+Awards recognize architecture and projects that exemplify design excellence, innovation, and impact across the built and unbuilt environment.

AIANY and the New York chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) have awarded the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project the Transportation + Infrastructure Design Excellence Award. This awards program recognizes built and unbuilt projects for their design, innovation, and impact – raising awareness about the critical role that well-designed infrastructure plays in our cities, our communities, and our lives.

Designed and developed under the leadership of the New York City Department of Design and Construction in collaboration with MNLA, One Architecture & Urbanism, AKRF, Lower East Side residents, and others, ESCR emerged from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design competition. Designed to protect over 110,000 New Yorkers from future storms while strengthening the neighborhood’s connection to the East River, the ribbon of revitalized parkland along Manhattan’s east side combines flood protection such as barrier walls and sliding gates with amenities such as sports courts, grassy lawns, an open-air amphitheater, and pedestrian bridges.

Large sections, including Stuyvesant Cove Park and the first phase of East River Park, are now open. The next phase of the project is slated to open in 2027.

The Detail Construction Award, an architecture prize launched by DETAIL Magazine in 2025, honors the best building constructions in the fields of facades, roofs, renovation, structural engineering, and interiors. Google Bay View, designed by BIG and Heatherwick Studio, was awarded as the winner in the 2025 “Roof” category by DETAIL readers via online vote.

As Google’s first-ever ground-up campus, Google Bay View brings three new buildings, 20 acres of open space, a 1,000-person event center, and 240 staff apartments to Silicon Valley. The three buildings feature a first-of-its-kind “dragonscale” solar skin roof equipped with 50,000 silver solar panels that generate a total of nearly seven megawatts of energy. The buildings’ long-span canopy rests on cruciform columns, allowing the entire workspace to be open and connected while also relaying services from the solar roof above.

CapitaSpring was named Best Mixed-Use at the inaugural RIBA Asia Pacific Awards, with BIG’s Director and Head of China, Shu Du, attending the ceremony to accept the honor on behalf of the design team. Rising 280 meters in the heart of Singapore’s bustling financial district, CapitaSpring is a vertical oasis, where offices, residences, retail, restaurants, and a revitalized hawker market come together under one roof. Designed jointly by BIG and CRA – Carlo Ratti Associati, the building features a 35-meter-long green oasis open to the public, spanning four stories and home to more than 38,000 plants.

Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art has been awarded Silver in the “Best Cultural, Sports and Education Project” category at the MIPIM Asia Awards 2025, which celebrate sustainable, visionary, and community-focused architecture. The awards recognize projects for their overall sustainability, integration with the environment and community, quality of the user experience, economic contribution, originality of concept, and architectural qualities. Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, located on Jinji Lake and covering 60,000 m², offers a modern interpretation of the garden elements that have defined Suzhou’s urbanism, architecture, and landscape for centuries. Clad in rippled and curved glass and stainless steel, the façades reflect the surrounding sky, water, and gardens, while 12 interconnected pavilions beneath a continuous, ribbon-like roof guide visitors through a sequence of gardens and courtyards, intertwining art, history, nature, and water.

“The Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art is a tribute to the rich garden heritage of Suzhou. We envision the ‘廊,’ a traditional element of Suzhou gardens, gracefully winding through the landscapes and transforming into pavilions. In doing so, it frames the contemporary gardens, making them an integral part of the exhibition, as significant as the artwork within.” – Catherine Huang, Partner, BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group

The museum will officially open its doors to the public in 2026.

The Robert Day Sciences Center at Claremont McKenna College has been voted by the public as this year’s top University Building of the Year in the 2025 Archello Awards. The center is BIG’s first built project in the Los Angeles area, designed as a stack of two volumes, each pair rotated 45 degrees from the floor below. Each level of the 135,000-sq-ft building is oriented in a different direction, channeling the flow of people and ideas between the labs, classrooms, and surrounding campus. At the heart of the building is a full-height atrium, providing direct views into classrooms and research spaces from all floors. The Robert Day Sciences Center is the first completed building in the BIG-designed masterplan for CMC’s Roberts Campus, which envisions a more unified campus shaped by a series of buildings that extend the central mall and adjacent sports bowl currently under construction.

BIG HQ has been recognized as Best of Interiors 2025 in the Office category by Elle Décor Italia. Organized around large windows and half floors staggered from one another, the BIG HQ features open plans throughout the building, connected by a black steel staircase moving in an asymmetrical zigzag between levels. At the heart of the building stands a stacked column of granite and marble. Everything from door handles to concrete columns is integrated as part of a continuous spatial system that defines the headquarters’ interior architecture. Agla Egilsdottir, Associate and Director of Interiors, attended the ceremony on behalf of BIG to receive the award.

At the world’s largest event dedicated to architecture and development, World Architecture Festival, the Gelephu International Airport wins Future Project of the Year.

Recognized for its integration of local crafts, the project is part of BIG’s broader masterplan for Gelephu Mindfulness City and will feature a diagrid structure crafted from locally sourced timber adorned with painted wood carvings by local artists. The airport will serve as Bhutan’s first in-land mobility hub, connecting to the broader region via accessible trackless trams and public buses, reinforcing its role in sustainable and inclusive national development.

Palm, the door handle designed by BIG’s Product Design Team in collaboration with DND, has been recognized with two honors at the Archiproducts Design Awards 2025 in Milan: the Archiproducts Design Award and the Sustainability Award. The accolades acknowledge the project’s contribution to design quality and material innovation within architectural hardware. Palm forms part of DND’s ongoing research into tactile architectural components and is produced in natural brass and aluminum, featuring rounded forms that are molded to fit the palm of the hand. The awards ceremony gathered 1500 professionals from the global design community to celebrate creativity, innovation, and sustainable design practice.

Gelephu Mindfulness City has been recognized as one of four Asia Pacific winners at the 2025 Holcim Foundation Awards for Sustainable Construction – one of the most significant honors recognizing innovation and best practice in sustainable architecture and design. Developed by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group with Arup and Cistri, the 1000+ km² masterplan in Bhutan envisions a new economic hub shaped by the country’s culture, landscape, and the principles of Gross National Happiness, setting a global benchmark for mindful urban development.