“For Decades We Have Valued the New More than the Old”: In Dialogue with OBEL Award 2025 Winners HouseEurope!

The potential of existing buildings to shape cities and communities in flux through reuse and adaptation is the key focus of HouseEurope! and their activism: addressing the pressing challenge across much of Europe, where it is often easier, cheaper, and faster to demolish buildings than to renovate. For decades, construction policies, industrial practices, and market systems have favored new development, often undervaluing the cultural, social, and environmental significance of existing structures. For their work advocating systemic change in architecture, HouseEurope! received the 2025 OBEL Award under the theme "Ready Made." In a conversation with ArchDaily, collective members of HouseEurope! Alina Kolar and Olaf Grawert discussed the organization's approach to architecture, policy, and collective action.

When Eating Becomes Spatial: 14 Projects Built Around Shared Meals

In recent years, food has taken on a renewed role within architecture, not simply as a program or typology, but as a shared spatial practice. Beyond restaurants or dining design, communal eating spaces are increasingly understood as environments where presence, ritual, and time intersect, allowing people to gather, stay, and coexist. In these settings, eating does not just happen within space; it actively shapes it, temporarily transforming ordinary, borrowed, or improvised environments into places of exchange.

Water Sculpture LJ / P PLUS arhitekti + m.kocbek architects

In the very centre of Ljubljana, a water sculpture has been realized nine years after winning a public design competition. Conceived as both a spatial and symbolic contribution to the city's public realm, it introduces a distinct micro-ambient within the dense urban fabric – a small urban "platform" whose continuous, rounded form establishes a separate, almost intimate space amid the city's bustle.

Himi Shinmachi Daycare Centre / Shio Architect Design Office

This is a construction project for a new, two-storey wooden daycare centre, replacing a nursery built approximately 50 years ago. This project was secured through a selective tender process. In recent years, it has become increasingly challenging for design firms to secure public building projects. This tender system enables us to take on projects of a manageable scale, allowing us to enhance our expertise and build valuable experience.

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Follow Us On