The four RIBA International Prize 2026 finalists have been confirmed, with a cross-shaped 1970s Brussels office tower transformed into a public city hub sitting alongside a naturally ventilated university campus, a worker-centred textile factory, and a museum extension in a historic Belgian walled garden. The winner will be announced at the RIBA Stirling Prize ceremony in London on 15 October.
Four finalists, two countries, one biennial prize
The shortlist was drawn from 34 projects awarded RIBA International Awards for Excellence in June, spanning 15 countries and four continents. Among those that did not advance were Foster + Partners’ DY Patil Centre of Excellence in Maharashtra, David Chipperfield Architects’ Rockbund redevelopment in Shanghai, and entries from O’Donnell + Tuomey, BIG, Snøhetta, and FJCstudio.
Two of the four finalists are in Belgium; two are in Bangladesh. RIBA Awards Group chair Neil Gillespie said the shortlist represented ‘the full range of what the prize seeks to recognise: buildings that are rigorously designed, deeply considered, and genuinely meaningful to the people and places they serve. Each project demonstrates an exceptional understanding of its context, showing how architecture can enrich everyday life while responding with imagination and purpose to the complex challenges shaping our built environment.’
This year marks the prize’s 10th anniversary. It is a biennial award; the last recipient, in 2024, was Modulus Matrix, an 85-unit social housing scheme in Cornellà, near Barcelona, designed by Peris + Toral Arquitectes.
RIBA International Prize 2026 finalists in detail
The Royale Belge project in Watermael-Boitsfort, Brussels, is the work of Caruso St John Architects and Bovenbouw Architectuur with DDS+. The cross-shaped tower was originally designed by Belgian architects René Stapels and Pierre Dufau in the 1960s as an insurance company headquarters. The retrofit combines a hotel, shared workspaces and a restaurant within the protected structure, reusing existing materials wherever possible and introducing minimal interventions to improve energy performance. A new central hall carved through the existing podium stitches these uses together and reconnects the modernist landmark with contemporary city life, demonstrating how adaptive reuse can serve an urban sustainability agenda without sacrificing architectural integrity.
The second Belgian finalist is Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture in Hasselt, by Francesca Torzo Architetto. Set within the city’s historic Beguinage, a walled garden enclave of brick buildings, the project extends and reimagines a 1958 museum. The new building presents a restrained brick façade to the street and opens inward to a sequence of light-filled galleries, courtyards and gardens. Local materials and traditional craftsmanship anchor the extension in its context while allowing the cultural institution to evolve.
In Bangladesh, WOHA’s BRAC University in Dhaka takes on a former landfill site, transforming it into a vertical campus serving 20,000 students. The 13-storey building places nine floors of teaching facilities beneath a publicly accessible rooftop park, embedding the campus into the surrounding neighbourhood. Passive cooling strategies, natural cross-ventilation and extensive landscaping drive the climate resilience agenda, offering a credible model for low-carbon education infrastructure in dense, rapidly urbanising cities.
The fourth finalist, the Green Field Factory of Karupannya Rangpur by Nakshabid Architects, is a seven-storey textile facility in Rangpur designed around principles of natural ventilation and biophilic design. Inspired by rural Bengali homesteads, the building integrates courtyards, water bodies, gardens and deep verandahs to reduce reliance on mechanical systems. The project places worker wellbeing at its centre, making operational carbon reduction and occupant comfort mutually reinforcing rather than competing priorities.
Context: a prize now in its second decade
According to ArchDaily, the RIBA Stirling Prize was first awarded in 1996, giving it a three-decade history. The RIBA International Prize, by contrast, reaches only its 10th anniversary this cycle, yet the 2026 shortlist already spans a range of climate and typological challenges that the Stirling Prize’s originally UK-only remit could never have accommodated: adaptive reuse of a post-war commercial tower, a campus engineered for passive cooling in a subtropical climate, an industrial building reoriented around workforce wellbeing, and a museum extension rooted in local craft and materiality.
The RIBA Stirling Prize ceremony, at which the RIBA International Prize 2026 winner will also be named, takes place in London on 15 October.
