This week Patrik Schumacher won the right to rename Zaha Hadid Architects
This week on Dezeen, the UK Court of Appeal ruled in favour of Patrik Schumacher in a legal battle with the Zaha Hadid Foundation over the use of the late Zaha Hadid's name.
The Court of Appeal overruled a High Court judgement from 2024, which had required Zaha Hadid Architects to retain Hadid's name and continue paying a licensing fee for its use.
The ruling allows the agreement to be broken and opens the door for Schumacher to change the name of the studio or to renegotiate the contract.
In the US, Donald Trump's plans to build a ballroom at the White House reached the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), with the review receiving over 32,000 public comments. The majority were "in opposition to the project".
The huge number of comments, described as a "large amount of public input" by the NCPC, led the organisation to announce that it was going to delay its vote on the East Wing Modernisation proposal.
We also rounded up the many ways that Donald Trump is using architecture to reshape Washington DC.
In technology news, Apple launched its first-ever budget MacBook, which will be half the price of its current cheapest laptop.
In an exclusive interview with Dezeen, the company's vice president of industrial design Molly Anderson explained how, even though the MacBook Neo is affordable, quality was maintained.
"It's undeniably a MacBook, we're certainly not making any compromises on the design and that's really important," Anderson told Dezeen.
Following the news last week that the Pritzker Architecture Prize is set to be delayed, architecture critic Edwin Heathcote pondered on the award's relevance in 2026.
"The prize matters very much less today than it did 25 years ago," he wrote. "Its historic affirmation of the lone male genius now looks stale, icky even."
As conflict continued in the Middle East, several buildings of architectural significance were damaged, with the Burj Al Arab skyscraper in Dubai damaged by Iranian strikes.
In Tehran, UNESCO reported that the World Heritage-listed Golestan Palace was damaged following a nearby US-Israeli airstrike.
Popular projects on Dezeen this week included a portable stadium kit, an underground house in northern China and a rural Indian home built using "only what was necessary".
Listen to our journalists talk about the key design and architecture stories of the past seven days on our Dezeen Weekly podcast, which this week focused on the future of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
This week on Dezeen
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