CHICAGO (May 22, 2025) — The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has announced the winners of its 2025 Award of Excellence competition, a robust slate of built and unbuilt projects from around the world that respond to current global challenges and demonstrate the vital role of tall buildings in the 21st century. (View the full list of winning projects here.)
Spanning 20 countries and more than 20 categories, this year’s winners exemplify creative and technical leadership across the gamut of sustainable vertical urbanism. From carbon-negative towers to adaptive reuse strategies that extend the life of existing structures by decades, the 2025 awardees are unified by an evolution of values: growth as well as stewardship, height and impact.
“This year’s cohort demonstrates not only technical sophistication and design ingenuity but also an ability to respond to the circumstances shaping the world right now — from regional issues and economic challenges to the accelerating climate crisis,” according to Javier Quintana de Uña, CEO of CTBUH. “These projects prove that tall buildings and the vertical urbanism they engender can instigate better quality of life, ecological resilience and urban equity simultaneously. That’s the direction our industry must move in.”
In categories such as Best Tall Building, Innovation and Urban Habitat, this year’s winners emphasize reuse, low-carbon materials, equitable housing and integrated infrastructure. Submitting companies were also asked to share data on the carbon and material usage in their projects — part of the CTBUH 2025 Awards Carbon Pilot Program — which attempts to consolidate embodied carbon data from across the globe and serve as a benchmark for sustainable development practices. Several projects introduce hybrid programmatic models, blurring the line between public and private realms and prioritizing circularity from the outset.
CTBUH’s call for entries drew its broadest global participation yet, with submissions from firms working in cities as diverse as Brisbane, Göteborg, New Cairo, Tokyo and Toronto, among many others. Each submission was evaluated by multidisciplinary juries comprising leaders in architecture, engineering, planning, construction and real estate development. The selection criteria prioritized performance — environmental, cultural and operational — over prestige or aesthetics alone. Awardees will present their work during the CTBUH 2025 International Conference, themed “From the Ground Up: Tall Buildings and City-Making,” taking place Oct. 6–9 Toronto, where they’ll vie for “best in category” recognition. Results will be announced during the conference’s award ceremony and dinner.
“Our awards have always spotlighted excellence, but in 2025 excellence looks different,” added Quintana de Uña. “We’re now measuring success not by spectacle but by a building’s capacity to support life — human and otherwise — for generations to come.”
Visit awards.ctbuh.org.