Back for the 16th (!) consecutive year with the totally prestigious, totally made-up Architecture & Design Awards, co-written with Mark Lamster and Carolina Miranda.

But in keeping with the times (and because we are lazy), we’ve decided to leave the writing of the introduction to ChatGPT:

Architecture in 2025 reflects a discipline reshaped by urgent environmental demands, rapid technological advances, and a renewed commitment to social purpose. The most distinguished work of the year demonstrates how design can respond creatively to these pressures — balancing innovation with responsibility, beauty with equity, and experimentation with a deep respect for place. This year’s awards highlight projects that rethink the limits of material efficiency, expand models for sustainable and affordable housing, and elevate community voices in the design process. They also celebrate adaptive reuse efforts that preserve cultural memory while charting new futures for existing structures. Together, these honors offer a snapshot of a field in motion, recognizing architects whose work helps define what meaningful, forward-looking design can be today.

How inspiring. And now on to the fake awards. Enjoy!

Two weeks before his election as mayor, Zohran Mamdani held about the cutest press conference you can imagine: Surrounded by babies, and backed by a blue climbing structure, he announced that he would launch citywide “baby baskets,” welcoming the 125,000 babies born in New York City each year with a free collection of essential supplies. Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who sponsored a pilot program of 500 “Born in Brooklyn” baby boxes in 2022, introduced Mamdani, saying, “This is a sacred act to have a baby … We want to make sure the last thing you are thinking about is a box of diapers.”

Left unmentioned was the fact that, just a week earlier, Mamdani’s onetime opponent, sitting Mayor Eric Adams, had launched his own baby box program at four of the city’s public hospitals — two in the Bronx, one in Brooklyn, and one in Queens — where more than 7,000 babies are delivered each year. The cost of the NYC Health + Hospitals program is $2.6 million for year one, funded through city tax dollars. The boxes themselves are provided by Welcome Baby USA, a nonprofit organization founded by Sarah Gould Steinhardt in 2019 that had already been providing a smaller number of care packages to Jacobi Medical Center, one of the Bronx launch sites.

An urgent civic need, too long in the shadows

Three Julys ago I was in Rome with my family. Late afternoon, exiting the Forum, trying to cross the street, I felt like I had been struck blind. Some combination of the strength of the summer sun, its low angle, and the stone surfaces around us meant that, despite my sunglasses, it felt as if my eyes were being pierced by hundreds of daggers. I stumbled over to a wall and tried to explain to my family members that I could not see. They would either have to guide me or leave me there until the sun went down. We waited until the earth rotated just a few more degrees, but I remembered that moment reading Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. “In ancient Rome,” writes environmental journalist Sam Bloch, “the porticoes formed a shadow network that stretched for two miles, and a fully covered walk to the Roman Forum struck visitors with wonder. One could effectively stroll from one side of the ancient city to the other in shade.” As the world warms, many have no choice but to work or commute in the heat of the day. The ancients had us (literally) covered.

Bloch’s book, which moves through the past, present, and future of shade from a variety of angles, is filled with such invitations to see the built environment afresh. It’s a bit like a figure-ground puzzle: Are you looking at the black or the white? Shadow or sun?

Photograph by Chris Mottalini

Home improvement books often start with a caveat: “Don’t make big changes until you’ve lived in the house.” When the home is a midcentury gem by the legendary modernist Richard Neutra, that advice comes with teeth. “We have to be very careful,” says Alberto Chehebar of his residence, the 1949 Wirin House in Los Feliz, California.

His wife Jocelyne Katz puts it more bluntly: “The house owns us.” This sense of stewardship has been deepened by the recent fires in Los Angeles; many of the city’s other houses, threatened or lost, were built on similar hillside sites.

The new 1.2 million-square-foot office building features two towers with multiple terraces. Dave Burk/SOM

On the outside, there are no mouse ears. No dwarf caryatids. No Sorcerer’s Apprentice hat. The new headquarters of the Walt Disney Company at 7 Hudson Square, the Robert A. Iger Building, does not partake of the architectural whimsy of the Magic Kingdom — and nor should it. No one is dreaming up cartoon characters within.

Instead, the all-electric, solar-powered, high-performance building brings together Disney’s news, editorial, streaming and live production divisions under one roof, along with back-of-house departments including advertising, technology and corporate, making the company’s public face more akin to midtown media conglomerates than Burbank creative studios. The building is a stage, not the main character — from the swoop of blonde bentwood in the western lobby, which suggests a pulled-back curtain, to the terraces that give employees and visitors views of the surrounding buildings and, beyond their cornices, the Hudson River.

“Bob Iger was always saying, this is a place people come to be creative, not to balance ledgers,” says Colin Koop, design partner at SOM. The team went through hundreds of different greens before they brought six terra cotta panels to a Manhattan rooftop for Iger’s approval. “We wanted to imply this was a creative company on the façade, confidently but subtly.”