4 Design Studios from Around the World Highlighted: Projects That Shaped 2025

In 2025, public space became less about what is designed and more about what is shared, felt, and experienced together. We asked designers and studios from different geographies to tell us which urban projects stood out most for them this year.

Their answers point to a common ground: participation, sensory experience, and meaningful connections with everyday urban life.

Hive Public Space responded: Blooming Futures

With Blooming Futures, Strauss Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn transforms from a school-adjacent street into a shared community space rooted in belonging. The project builds on the playful energy of youth and strengthens the relationship between school and neighborhood.

Developed in collaboration with the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Riverdale Avenue Community School, the process invited students and local residents to co-create fence art along the street. From choosing the medium to shaping the artwork itself, the ideas grew into a joyful composition of flowers, bees, and butterflies flowing along a whimsical path. As part of a broader Active Design initiative, the project shows how small interventions can bring streets back to life.

Studio Carraldo responded: Cappella del Suono

Cappella del Suono is a lightweight wooden pavilion that blends quietly yet powerfully into its hilly landscape. Formed by vertical wooden slats arranged in a regular grid, the structure balances visual protection with openness and permeability.

Suspended at varying lengths, the slats create a playful, almost floating lower edge. When wind moves through the pavilion, the elements gently collide, producing layered sounds reminiscent of the bell chimes from the nearby Convento di Monte Illuminato monastery. Here, architecture becomes something not only seen but heard, as sound, light, shadow, and movement merge into a rich atmospheric experience.

Nómada Estudio Urbano responded: LAPIS Tijuana

Part of the LAPIS (Lugares Amigables para la Primera Infancia) program, the LAPIS Tijuana project places children’s imagination at the center of urban design.

A simple kindergarten yard is transformed through flowers, color, and a cactus imagined as a totem into a playful, nature-based space where learning emerges through play. Participation and reuse are key, turning the project from a finished object into a shared process. It’s a reminder that some of the most powerful urban ideas begin by listening—especially to the youngest voices.

Javier Peña (Founder of Concentrico Festival) responded: Round About Baths

Round About Baths reclaims a traffic-bound, inaccessible roundabout and temporarily transforms it into an intimate public bathing space. Once central to 19th-century social movements promoting public hygiene, urban baths have largely disappeared, replaced by private and commercial wellness spaces.

Combining changing rooms, steam rooms, and cold-water basins, the installation occupies the very heart of car-dominated infrastructure, revealing the hidden potential of forgotten urban spaces. Built from a regular timber structure clad with uncut wooden panels, the materials are later reused, reinforcing the project’s temporary nature. What remains is not the structure itself, but a shift in perception, and a renewed imagination of what public space could be.