The world of architecture continues to push the boundaries of design, sustainability and innovation and this year promises a lineup of impressive architectural projects that not only redefine the landscapes of cities around the globe but also challenge our conventional understanding of functionality and aesthetics in built environments.
Below are 5 impressive architecture projects due for completion in 2025, each with its own unique design and purpose, telling stories of vision and ingenuity.
1. Google King’s Cross – London, UK
The first wholly owned and designed Google building outside the US, construction on the purpose-built 11-storey building, comprising of more than 93,000 m2, of which Google will occupy 60,400 m2, started in 2018. Designed by Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the construction features a natural theme, with all materials sourced through Google’s healthy materials programme.
Heatherwick Studio and BIG’s focus was not just to make special large workspaces but to find an architectural language that could fit into the local community of King’s Cross and an intense urban context. Rather than a typical office tower the unusual site called for a 330-metre-long building. To respond to this particularity and local context the main floors of workspace are expressed as a single confident volume, like the nearby train sheds. Internally, the workplace, with triple height ceilings, is designed to bring people together and create connectedness and opportunities for chance encounters. Externally the panoramic sculpted roof garden will give unprecedented views to the city around and, at the ground different smaller retail buildings are bound to open underneath the tech giant’s offices.
2. National Assembly of Benin – Porto-Novo, Benin
Having outgrown its current building, which dates back to the colonial era of its past, the parliament of the Republic of Benin has entrusted Kéré Architecture to design a new National Assembly that is meant to embody the values of democracy and the cultural identity of its citizens.
The project takes inspiration from the palaver tree, the age-old West African tradition of meeting under a tree to make consensual decisions in the interest of a community. The assembly hall is located on the ground floor, its spectacular ceiling created by the dynamic reach of the structure, supports the functions above. The crown is comprised of offices and auxiliary functions, set back from the deep façade, which filters the strong sunlight. The trunk is hollow, creating a central courtyard that allows circulation spaces to be naturally ventilated and indirect light to penetrate the plan. A spiral staircase in its centre connects the assembly hall on the ground floor to the offices above. On the top floor, a roof terrace offers sweeping views over the city and the lagoon in the distance.
Besides the building itself, a large part of the site is dedicated to a public park, which will showcase the country’s native flora while providing Porto-Novo with an extensive recreation space. To create a sense of openness and transparency, the park will extend to the foot of the palaver tree, offering a generous shaded space. In the southeast corner of the site, a public square marks the civic façade of the building, across from the former national assembly where Benin’s independence was historically declared. Further facilities for government services are integrated into the park’s topography with planted roofs and form a façade along the southern limit of the site.
3. New Museum’s expansion – New York, USA
In November 2022, the New Museum broke ground on a 60,000-square-foot (5,574 m2) expansion designed by OMA / Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas. Once completed, the new structure will complement and be seamlessly integrated with the Museum’s SANAA-designed flagship building while doubling the museum’s exhibition space and establishing a permanent home for the institution’s cultural incubator NEW INC.
The OMA design will improve vertical circulation for visitors with the addition of an atrium stairway, which will offer views of the surrounding neighbourhood and the opportunity for innovative art installations. The stairway and new entry will align with the terminus of Prince Street, opening the Museum to the city with a visual invitation to enter and climb to the top of a world of cultural possibilities. The façade—made from laminated glass with metal mesh—will provide a simple, unified exterior adjacent to the SANAA building by using materials that recall and complement the original façade while allowing for a higher degree of transparency.
4. Zayed National Museum – Abu Dhabi, UAE
Conceived as a monument and memorial to the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the founding president of the UAE, the Zayed National Museum will be the centrepiece of the Saadiyat Island Cultural District and will showcase the history, culture and, more recently, the social and economic transformation of the Emirates. Designed by Foster+Partners, the aim of the construction is to combine a highly efficient, contemporary form with elements of traditional Arabic design and hospitality to create a museum that is sustainable, welcoming and culturally of its place.
Celebrating Sheikh Zayed’s legacy and love of nature, the museum is set within a landscaped garden, based on a timeline of his life. The galleries are housed within a mound, whose form is an abstraction of the topography of the Emirates. Above this rise five lightweight steel structures, sculpted aerodynamically to act as solar thermal towers. Balancing the lightweight steel structures with a more monumental interior experience, pod-shaped galleries are suspended over a dramatic top-lit central lobby, which is dug into the earth to exploit its thermal properties and brings together shops, cafes and informal venues for performances of poetry and dance. The colour of the interior and exterior spaces has also been chosen to match the distinctive warm-white shade of the Saadiyat Island sand.
5. Queensland Performing Arts Centre – Brisbane, Australia
In May 2019 Snohetta was announced the winner of the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC) design competition together with local Brisbane based partner Blight Rayner. The theatre will serve the QPAC for ballet, opera and drama, amplified performances including Broadway musicals, and will have flexibility to cater for new and emerging theatre styles and trends. The project will provide a 1,500 seat commercial theatre venue in the heart of Brisbane.
The design seeks to honour the traditional owners, the Turrbal and Yuggera people, and is inspired by the movement and flow of the Brisbane River. Aunty Lilla Watsons short prose poem about the kurilpa native water rat was a key reference, conveying the spirit of the river. The building is arranged in a layers. The auditorium is at the heart, encased in a concrete shell that builds upon the legacy of the existing 1986 Robin Gibson building, a bold modernist composition of stepped concrete. A rippled glass veil wraps around the concrete core, referencing the reflection and movement of the river, revealing and blurring the activities within.
The theatre venue is conceived as the warm heart of the new building, made of curved timber ribbons that express the energy flow between performer and viewer. The black spaces created between the expressive timber ribbons are used strategically, to accommodate equipment and technical functions.
