Archiprix 2026. Image: Sabine van der Vooren

Archiprix 2026: 5 Themes

The Archiprix 2026 projects are organized along 5 themes: Enchanting the Everyday, Softening the City, Generous Gestures, Ecologies of Repair, and Constructive Foraging. 

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Enchanting the Everyday 

What does one lose in an accelerated lifestyle, in cities built on rationality and efficiency? The following projects revalue the architecture of the everyday, in objects, materialities, and stories. In a world increasinglycomplex and constructed, these designers have taken a moment to pause and discover the hidden meaning in space. By allowing oneself to be inspired by the everyday, design has the power to grant mythical status to ordinary elements. 

• Dena Khaksar – Columns through the Naked Florence  
• Max van Gemert – Space for Dialogue 
• Robin van Vemde - Cabinet of Curiosities  
• Sef Brouwers – Sacred Spheres 

Softening the City 

The 21st century city is an exciting, rich and diverse place in which friction is inevitable: whether it is between people and nature, people and their own well-being or people and public spaces. Due to an ever-growing global population and rural-to-urban migration, cities become denser, new neighbourhoods arise, and infrastructures keep on expanding. Each of these projects takes a gentle and unconventional approach at creating spaces that soften urban borders and that battle unwelcome and alienating spatial effects.  

• Cédric Dries – BX Nord 
• Clarisse Leung – Inhabited Walls 
• Helena de Raeymaeker – Kikanzu Cambamba  
• Kay Knubben – BAAD   
• Regina Klinger – Vertical Blue 
• Thea van Roosmalen – The Living Environment as a Lifestyle Coach 

Generous Gestures 

How do we design for those who have little to no agency? By stepping inside someone else’s shoes for a while, someone completely different to you, you open yourself up to new ways of thinking, of living, of being. These projects offer a supporting hand to fellow human beings in need of shelter, care, understanding, or security. With an anthropological approach, these projects aim to bridge the gaps that divide us and bring sensitivityand personality to the design process.  

• Cassandre van Duinen – Made in Bangladesh 
• Maarten Hikspoors – The Depolarizer  
• Ties Booisma – Statushuis  
• Wessel Geysels - Voortbouwen  
• Wiebke Stadtlander – Carescapes 

Ecologies of Repair 

These projects have all taken a sensitive, rooted approach to designing spaces that heal our soils, waters, and minds. The global effects of extractive and industrial societies have pushed the planet beyond a point of return. However, it is possible to establish new ways of living with nature, so these projects show: in the centre of Antwerp, the lithium plains of Argentina, or the flowing Rhein in Germany.  By carefully analysing material flows and compositions, and how they have been influenced by climatic changes, these designers have succeeded in reversing harmful processes into regenerative cycles.  

• Fabia Sainz Fernandez – Mountain Nomads  
• Judith Pellicaan – ZOO Antwerpen  
• Lilli Malou Selcho – Of Water and Matter 
• Magdalena Salinas – With Salt it Hurts, With Salt it Heals 
• Rachelle Pruim – Dancing with the Waterwolf 

Constructive Foraging 

Each of these projects embodies a sneak peak in the architectural look and feel of the future, whether that is rooted in local materials, or built of completely new and unconventional sources. These designers all approached the design process from a regenerative angle, finding ways of using what is already there, in terms of material building blocks, natural processes, and people. These processes extend beyond vernacular ways of constructing by reevaluating the relationship between site and building.  

• Hendrik Bijma – Forgotten Resilience  
• Mahdi Begvirdi Varzaghani – Makers Block  
• Niek Nesheretov – Creatie, Recreatie, Re-creatie 
• Pepijn Feijen – Programmable Deployable Structures  
• Rytis Budavičius - Reconstructivism     
• Ziyue Yu – Reconstructing Synergetic Networks