Not Your Average Commune: 4 Architectural Visions for Collective Living
The votes for the 2025 Vision Awards have been counted! Discover this year's cohort of top architectural representations and sign up for the program newsletter for future updates.
Around the world in the 21st century, not only scientists but also designers, architects, urbanists and local governments are working to build strong, resilient cities for their communities.
Reports from institutions highlight the urgency of this mission. For example, the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) shows that the global mean sea level climbed by 20 centimeters (about 8 inches) between 1901 and 2018. Even more concerning, the rate of increase has accelerated, from 1.3 millimeters per year (about 0.05 inches) in the early 20th century to 3.7 millimeters per year (about 0.15 inches) between 2006 and 2018. This accelerating pace makes clear the need for new spatial and communal models capable of supporting long-term resilience.
Against these realities, highlighted daily in reports and news coverage, architecture studios are experimenting with new approaches to neighborhood design. Their work goes beyond buildings and infrastructure; it is about reimagining how communities live. As climate change intensifies, social fragmentation deepens and identities shift, the central question becomes: what kinds of community spaces do we need now to sustain the futures we aspire to?
Taken together, the winners of this year’s Vision Awards show a shift in how communities imagine agency and connection. They explain that future-oriented design is no longer only about innovation in form or technology, but about developing relationships between people and emerging ecologies, which is more important than ever. Through different scales and contexts, the winning proposals suggest that resilience is ultimately a social practice, one supported by shared spaces that invite collective imagination.
Collaborative Urban Culture
Loods M by RAU
Jury Winner, Vision for Culture and Vision for Community, 2025 Vision Awards
Loods M by RAU / Jury Winner, Vision for Culture and Vision for Community, 2025 Vision Awards
Loods M in Maassluis, designed by RAU, focuses on the idea of community as a spatial and environmental ethic. Set in a historic harbor district, the project repurposes maritime heritage into a shared cultural hub, crowned by the inverted hull of a reclaimed container ship. At its core, RAU imagined Loods M as a “living room” for the city, which contains museums, educational programs, makers spaces and local businesses coexisting together.
Also, Loods M’s material and structural logic extends this ethos. Its flexible construction signals a commitment to circularity, foregrounding the idea that buildings, like communities, must remain open to change. For them, adaptation is not a compromise but a value. At the same time, the project raises important questions. How is access governed? Who defines the programming, and who benefits most from it? Community hubs can reinforce existing hierarchies if they rely too heavily on cultural institutions rather than grassroots leadership.
Climate-Responsive Living
Community 2.0 by UArchitects / Misak Terzibasiyan
Editor’s Choice Winner, Vision for Community, 2025 Vision Awards
Community 2.0 by UArchitects / Misak Terzibasiyan | Editor’s Choice Winner, Vision for Community, 2025 Vision Awards
Community 2.0, designed by UArchitects / Misak Terzibasiyan for the delta region of Khulna in Bangladesh, addresses a rapidly escalating reality: climate change is not a future threat but a current crisis. Rising water levels have transformed once-stable land into islands, placing the livelihoods and homes of seventy families at risk. The proposal envisions a settlement that can rise with the water, integrating systems that support self-sufficiency.
Also, this project reminded me of a documentary named “Adaptation Bangladesh: Sea Level Rise” directed by documentary filmmaker Justin DeShields, which focuses on how people in rural areas find a solution to sea level rise and the climate crisis in their own way, such as floating farms, schools and libraries.
This floating community project reframes community through the lens of ecological vulnerability and adaptation. Here, resilience is not simply the capacity to survive but the capacity to remain in place to sustain cultural and familial roots despite environmental disruption. In regions where displacement often becomes the default response to climate disasters, the idea of enabling people to stay is profound.
Yet this vision must be examined critically. Floating settlements, while innovative, can be romanticized as elegant solutions to global climate injustice. The families of Khulna are not simply adapting to natural changes; they are bearing the burden of a crisis disproportionately caused by distant industries and political decisions.
In this context, as in many others, architecture can mitigate harm, but it cannot correct structural inequality. For this reason, the project’s greatest challenge lies not in its technical feasibility but in ensuring that its implementation is driven by the community itself.
Regenerative Rural Life
LAND-CR.AF.T.ED by C+S Architects
Editor’s Choice Winner, Vision for Housing, 2025 Vision Awards
LAND-CR.AF.T.ED by C+S Architects | Editor’s Choice Winner, Vision for Housing, 2025 Vision Awards
The Land-CR.AF.T.ED project by C+S Architects addresses a different but equally urgent challenge: the decline of rural communities across Europe, driven by depopulation, agricultural contraction and the erosion of local identity. Situated in Tuscany and commissioned by Mayor Renzo Macelloni, the project imagines a future where regenerative agriculture and social housing form the foundation of a renewed communal life.
At its core, this project proposes a model of micro-farms based on pixel-farming, small, diverse agricultural plots capable of producing high yields through ecological balance rather than industrial scale. This agricultural landscape is complemented by 12 raw-earth social homes that reinterpret the traditional Tuscan farmhouse through contemporary, low-carbon materials such as oxidized zinc, 3D printing and timber.
Also, the project’s strength lies in its holistic vision. It does not position agriculture, housing or community identity as separate issues but as interdependent components of a living ecosystem.
Waterfront Renewal and Ecological Stewardship
Stanton Yards Cultural Waterfront Master Plan by OSD (Office of Strategy + Design)
Jury Winner, Vision For Landscape, 2025 Vision Awards
Stanton Yards Cultural Waterfront Master Plan by OSD (Office of Strategy + Design) | Jury Winner, Vision For Landscape, 2025 Vision Awards
As a good example of waterfront renewal, Stanton Yards shows a vision for Detroit’s post-industrial riverfront, reimagining 13 acres through a master plan that fuses mixed-use programming with an ecologically attuned landscape. Designed with an “outside-in” ethos, the project demonstrates how obsolete industrial edges can be reclaimed as socially inclusive, environmentally restorative public domains.
This project prioritizes sustainability and harmony between built form and the natural environment. Industrial structures are repurposed rather than replaced, allowing the site’s history to remain visible while enabling new uses. A network of plazas, parks and promenades enhances movement across the waterfront, while dune-inspired topography and a reconfigured marina edge restore access to the river.
The votes for the 2025 Vision Awards have been counted! Discover this year's cohort of top architectural representations and sign up for the program newsletter for future updates.
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