Young Talent 2025 Winners Announced

The Young Talent category of the EUmies Awards “aims to support the talent of recently graduated architects, urban planners and landscape architects,” the official statement reads, “who will be responsible for transforming our environment in the future.” The biennial Young Talent award is part of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Awards, organized by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe with the support of the Creative Europe program of the European Union.

Submissions for the 2025 edition came, as in previous iterations, from registered schools in Europe. The jury* determined a shortlist in the spring of this year and the twelve finalists were announced in May, at the opening of an exhibition at Palazzo Mora, a collateral event of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. An event this afternoon at Palazzo Michiel featured a granting ceremony but also debates with the winners, representatives from the European Union, Fundació Mies van der Rohe, ACE (Architects’ Council of Europe), EAAE (European Association for Architectural Education), the LINA architecture platform, and members of the jury.

The three winners of the Young Talent 2025 (alphabetical by project name):

• Brave New Axis by Spyridon Loukidis, Markos Georgios Sakellion, and Georgios Thalassinos (GR: National Technical University of Athens. School of Architecture. Athens)
• Forest & Phoenix by Carolina von Hammerstein and Vera Kellmann (DE: Technical University of Berlin. Faculty VI, Planning, Building and Environment – Institute for Architecture. Berlin)
• Hotel Interim by Andreas Stanzel (DE: Bauhaus-Universitaet Weimar. Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism. Weimar)

In addition to the three Young Talent awards for 2025, the Fundació Mies van der Rohe created a parallel award, the Young Talent Open, which invited schools from Council of Europe member countries not part of Creative Europe, including Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Turkey, as well as non-European countries: Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. From among the five finalists announced in May, the winner of the Young Talent Open 2025:

• Poolside Politics by James Langlois (UK: University of Westminster. School of Architecture and Cities. London)

The Young Talent and Young Talent Open winners receive:

• a trophy, a diploma, and the catalogue
• €5,000 each project
• a profile in World-Architects.com
• visibility through the EUmies Awards Young Talent 2025 exhibition in Venice and universities worldwide
• participation in events such as the LINA architecture platform 
• USM furniture to design their workspace

Brave New Axis by Spyridon Loukidis, Markos Georgios Sakellion, and Georgios Thalassinos (GR: National Technical University of Athens. School of Architecture. Athens)

Perpendicular to Athinas Street

Axis, an imaginary line that connects, divides, shaping space and movement. Its points hold unseen multiplicities—if they change, does the whole transform? With this begins an enquiry, a project redefining a strict 19th-century line, that comes to delineate the anarchic ancient form of Athens.

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Forest & Phoenix by Carolina von Hammerstein and Vera Kellmann (DE: Technical University of Berlin. Faculty VI, Planning, Building and Environment – Institute for Architecture. Berlin)

Hybrid infrastructures for an integrative forest fire prevention in Brandenburg

The increase in forest fires requires multidisciplinary approaches for the development of necessary measures. Architecture can be seen as a mediator of the correlations in order to make them visible. The design introduces hybrid infrastructures as mediation spaces for the prevention of forest fires.

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Hotel Interim by Andreas Stanzel (DE: Bauhaus-Universitaet Weimar. Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism. Weimar)

The Active State of Waiting: Adaptive Reuse as an Alternative to Demolition

Hotel Interim reassesses the material and immaterial value of a soon to be demolished hotel in Halle. It explores how the vacant space could serve as an interim of the University of Arts, viewing the building as a resource, the space as a site for experimentation, and its current state as a stage.

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Poolside Politics by James Langlois (UK: University of Westminster. School of Architecture and Cities. London)

Collectivism Amongst the Concrete

A collective of marginalized citizens gathers at the water's edge of Piscine Luminy, united by a vision to revive this once vibrant civic oasis. Through a construction-driven Radical Municipalism, they aim to reimagine/restore the beloved municipal pool, reclaiming it for the people of Marseille.

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• Maibritt Dammann, Associated Partner and Head of Healthcare at C.F. Møller Architects
• Ana Dana Beroš, Architect, Curator, Editor, Educator and Exhibition designer
• Jason O’Shaughnessy, Director of Cork Centre for Architectural Education (CCAE)
• Konstantinos Pantazis, Co-founder of Point Supreme
• Daliana Suryawinata, Founder and Director of SHAU