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Innovation Meets Recognition: Architizer Hosts A+Awards Asia-Pacific Celebration in Shenzhen
In partnership with Shenzhen Bay Culture Square | CR Land | Oezer | Global Design Awards Lab | Sunshine PR
Architizer’s Asia-Pacific A+Awards Celebration in Shenzhen formed a confident climax to the 13th Architizer A+Awards season, following regional gatherings in New York and Paris. Set within a city defined by velocity, the event brought together award winners, jurors and leading practitioners from across the region not only for recognition, but also for two days of collegial exchange and architectural immersion.
The celebration began on Thursday evening with a welcome reception at a buzzing post-industrial hub in OCT Creative Park — a cobblestoned area of the city where a collection of older warehouses has recently been transformed into a locus of creative industries. A+Awards winners and invited guests gathered informally ahead of the main program, using the relaxed setting to make early introductions and set the tone for a gathering defined by shared professional curiosity.
Inside MAD Architects’ Shenzhen Bay Culture Square
Friday’s full-day program unfolded inside the newly completed Shenzhen Bay Culture Square by MAD Architects, a civic complex whose expressive form and generous interiors framed the event from start to finish. As attendees moved through the building’s layered public spaces, the architecture itself became an active participant, reinforcing the idea that design excellence is best discussed from within exemplary built work.
MAD Architects’ Shenzhen Bay Culture Square (front left, surrounded by greenery) played host to Architizer’s Asia-Pacific A+Awards celebration. Photo by Zhu Yumeng
Located in Houhai, Nanshan District, the 46-acre (18.8-hectare) Shenzhen Bay Culture Square anchors a new civic core between the waterfront and the city’s high-rise financial district. Against a backdrop of glossy supertall towers, MAD’s curvalinear stone architecture deliberately turns inward and downward, trading vertical spectacle for a more topographic experience, with a building whose form is a carefully choreographed relationship to the ground.
At the heart of the day was the presentation of the Architizer A+Awards, with winners recognized across commercial, residential, hospitality, cultural, institutional, landscape, planning, transportation, sustainability and firm categories. Throughout the program, winning teams in attendance were invited onto the stage, ensuring that each honored project — and the people behind it — received a visible moment of recognition on the stage in front of their peels.
Awards, Dialogue, and Shared Learning
Keynote sessions were interwoven with the awards presentations, creating an interactive learning environment rather than a conventional conference structure. Speakers including Yuxing Zhang (Founder and Chief Designer, ARCity Office), Florence Chan (Principal, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF)), Peihe Xie (Founder and Chief Designer, AD Architecture), Xihan Gu (Co-Founder, Shang Interior Architects), Florian Heinzelman (Co-Founder and Director, SHAU), Xin Tian (Founder and Design Principal, MoA), Zhile Hu (Founding Partner and Chief Designer, WJ Studio), and Vivi Xie (China Director, ASPECT Studios) contributed perspectives that complemented the awards, reinforcing shared questions around practice, craft, and design thinking across the Asia-Pacific region.
A+Awards guests explored Shenzhen Bay Culture Square on a special guided tour.
Midday, a guided tour of Shenzhen Bay Culture Square offered guests the opportunity to experience MAD’s design firsthand, strengthening the relationship between architectural discourse and built form. As the guests saw, at the heart of the project are nine galleries totaling nearly 538,195 square feet (50,000 square meters). Rather than designing these as neutral white boxes, MAD treats exhibition space as adaptable infrastructure — robust enough to host international touring shows, yet flexible enough to support evolving curatorial formats.
Project of the Year on a Global Stage
A highlight of the afternoon was the presentation of the Project of the Year awards by Architizer Managing Editor Hannah Feniak. After each project was presented in greater detail to the audience, the respective firm was given time to share its own voices and perspectives about its work on the stage.
IARA (left) and Elisabeth Lee of the University of Hong Kong (right) accept their A+Awards Project of the Year honors on stage.
First up, the Rural Memory Museum by IARA was recognized for translating cultural memory into a carefully articulated civic space rooted in its rural context. The Chinese firm’s founders stated that, “To receive the Project of the Year Award is, for us, both an honor and a form of recognition — recognition that an architectural practice centered on people, community, and real life can still be seen and understood.”
Next up, Elisabeth Lee represented a group of students from the University of Hong Kong, Project Mingde, for their work on the Duling Educational and Cultural Center, designed for the Hakka People and demonstrating how educational architecture can operate as both social infrastructure and urban anchor. As she generously put it, “this award belongs to every person who shared a story, offered an idea, or trusted us with their hopes. It celebrates the profound truth that the truest places emerge when created collectively, precisely because they belong to everyone..”
RAD+ar ( Research Artistic Design + architecture) pictured with their A+Awards Project of the Year accolade.
Finally, the Indonesian project Aruma Split Garden by RAD+ar ( Research Artistic Design + architecture) was celebrated for transforming a dense commercial site into a layered spatial landscape that prioritizes climate, circulation and experience. The firm’s founder spoke, saying that “As an emerging practice, we often feel like we are swimming against the tide, advocating for innovation and sustainability in environments where the path of least resistance is often the norm. This award validates that the struggle to improve our architectural ecosystem is worth it.”
Celebrating last season’s A+Awards — and welcoming the next
Architizer’s Managing Editor, Hannah Feniak, closed out the day with a message to all of this season’s A+Awards winners: “We thank you sincerely for your continual pursuit of design excellence. By sharing your knowledge through your work, you inspire architects across the globe to strive for better buildings, better cities, and a better world. Our community looks to you as models setting new bars for design. When it comes to generating inspiration, you deliver it time and again — congratulations to each and every one of you.”
Architizer’s Managing Editor Hannah Feniak provided the closing marks on a magical evening of A+Awards celebrations.
As the final regional stop in the 13th A+Awards season celebrations, the Shenzhen celebration reaffirmed Architizer’s commitment to recognizing architectural excellence on a global stage. Bringing together award-winning projects, leading voices, and an extraordinary setting, the event positioned the A+Awards not only as an honors program, but as a platform for connection — uniting architects around shared standards of craft, innovation and design rigor across borders.
A+Awards festivities brought the architectural community together in Shenzhen through tours, networking events and a glittering awards ceremony.
Looking ahead, the momentum from Shenzhen carries forward into the 14th Architizer A+Awards, now accepting entries and celebrating a renewed focus on architectural craft — not as nostalgia, but as a contemporary discipline shaped by technology, environmental responsibility and cultural intelligence. Open to projects of all types and scales, from architecture and interiors to landscape, planning and urban design, the program continues to recognize work that advances the profession through design excellence, with an emphasis on the clarity of idea and rigor of execution.
Architects worldwide are invited to submit their work and join a global community shaping architecture’s next chapter — one defined by intention, innovation, and craft reimagined for a new era.
Top image: Shenzhen Bay Culture Square by MAD Architects; photo by Zhu Yumeng
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