The Obel Award announced its jury has set Ready Made as its 2025 focus to explore how to prioritize “what already exists” in the built environment and “how we can rethink, reinterpret, and repurpose” those resources.”

In choosing Ready Made, the jury, chaired by Snøhetta founder Kjetil Thorsen, aims to bring the issue of resource use and scarcity to the center of the conversation about architecture’s impact on a world increasingly shaped by climate change. In the jury’s statement, it says this year’s focus “challenges the notion of architectural aesthetics, the industrial and the vernacular, and ‘traditional’ supply chain and policy frameworks in favor of a progressive, optimistic vision of designing for our future within planetary boundaries and with new dialogues on beauty.” 

Other members of the jury are Louis Becker, Design Principal and Partner at Henning Larsen Architects; Aric Chen, general and artistic director of the Nieuwe Instituut in the Netherlands; Nathalie de Vries, founding partner of MVRDV; Sumayya Vally, founder and principal of Counterspace; Dr. Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, professor emeritus at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-University; and Xu Tiantian, founding principal of DnA_Design and Architecture.

The Obel Award was created to honor international achievement in architecture that is beneficial to people and the planet and that contributes to positive social and ecological development. “These contributions should offer seminal approaches to urgent problems, a commitment toward the common good,” the organization says. 

The first Obel was awarded in 2019 to Junya Ishigami + Associates’ Water Garden. Other recent winners include Anna Heringer’s Anandaloy Community Center in 2020, SCAPE’s Living Breakwaters in 2023, and, last year, Colectivo C733’s 36x36.

The 2025 winner will be announced later this year.