The 2025 German Architecture Prize has been awarded to projects that exemplify careful, sustainable design, yet critics argue these winners fail to address Germany's most pressing architectural challenges. The housing shortage, land use issues, and poor environmental performance continue to plague German architecture, with little sign that prestigious awards are driving meaningful change toward bold solutions.
The top prize, officially called the State Prize and worth 30,000 euros, went to Berlin-based Sauerbruch Hutton for their Franklin Village project in Mannheim. The development, built on a former military barracks site, features three-story wooden buildings arranged around large green courtyards. The project offers only rental apartments designed to avoid burdening residents with massive loans, with more than ten percent designated as subsidized housing developed in close consultation with future residents.
While Franklin Village represents much of what current building policy demands, it lacks the urban density needed to solve Germany's housing crisis in cities. The project's perimeter gallery walkways echo Michiel Brinkman's housing courts in Rotterdam's Spangen district from the 1920s, where the Dutch pioneer of modern architecture conceived these spaces as meeting areas between private homes and public life. However, unlike Brinkman's urban-scale housing developments, Franklin Village resembles more of a suburb due to building regulations that forced designers to create open gardens rather than dense residential courtyards.
Strong competition came from other innovative projects, including the 'Nordgrün Extension' in Karlsruhe by Drescher Michalski architects. This project added four stories above a former post office, supported by steel columns to avoid burdening the original structure. The design saves land, creates density, and preserves the embodied energy in the existing building while featuring striking copper-green angular metal sheets on the facade. The project demonstrates how post-war residential neighborhoods could serve as urban building resources.
The German Architecture Prize, awarded every two years since 2011 by the Federal Ministry of Building and the Federal Chamber of Architects, has become the nation's most important award for planning and building culture alongside the Nike prize from the Federation of German Architects. This year, 201 projects were submitted, with 10 receiving 3,000-euro awards.
A notable trend among winners is the enthusiasm for wooden construction, marking a dramatic shift after a century of the material being dismissed by the construction industry and craftsmen focused on brick and concrete. Wood now shapes major office buildings, often combined with clay and other natural materials. Munich architect Florian Nagler, whose garden house charmingly combines tradition with modern technology criticism, has been tirelessly promoting the core message: build simply, use few materials, and enable self-repair.
Despite these sustainable approaches, critics argue that even renewable building materials like wood are finite, as demonstrated by the timber crisis following Russia's renewed invasion of Ukraine. At the prize ceremony, Deutschlandradio host Marietta Schwarz called for architecture that makes people happy, can be somewhat crazy, and encourages people to step out of themselves. However, the award-winning buildings, despite being recognized as Germany's best architecture, fail to achieve this vision.
The winning projects share a cautiousness that also characterizes recent architectural discourse about building costs, sprawling construction regulations, and politically dictated middle-class pragmatism. Architecture debates in Germany frequently focus on very bourgeois residential and urban development culture, as confirmed by the prize selections.
Many urban planners and politicians have studied Jane Jacobs' 1961 classic about the decline of American inner cities or Aldo Rossi's 1966 essay 'The Architecture of the City,' which envisioned cities as places of identification. These works established that cities must be socially, culturally, functionally, and aesthetically diverse, with flexible buildings capable of adaptation.
Some architects advocate for a construction transformation based on private developers and property owners, material durability, simple construction methods, and clear forms aesthetically oriented toward an idealized Biedermeier style. Architects Hans Kollhoff, Ernst Böhm, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, and others promote these ideas in the recently published essay collection 'For Sustainable Urban Architecture' by Wagenbach Publishers, where the past serves as a model for the future.
However, German architecture has yet to provide answers to the housing and refugee crises, growing conflicts between metropolises and neglected rural areas, or climate change. The architectural establishment appears united by caution rather than innovation, suggesting that prestigious prizes alone cannot drive the fundamental changes needed to address Germany's most pressing urban challenges.
