Crème De La Crème: Must-See Design Moments Of 2025

Massive outdoor installations, pink-infused coworking, bio-based pavilions—those and more are among 2025’s highly original work by artists, architects, and designers.

Check Out These Mesmerizing Designs From The Past Year

For Art D’Égypte’s fifth annual “Forever is Now,” Echoes of the Infinite by StudioPROBA and SolidNature drew from such regional symbols as the Eye of Horus with an interlocking sculpture in marble, onyx, travertine, and quartzite, backdropped by the Pyramids of Giza.

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Resulting from her recent residency at Spot Home Gallery in Naples, Italy, the photographer Kourtney Roy’s Failed Postcards of Napoli, Piazza Mercato, a Baryta inkjet print mounted on aluminum, was among the staged self-portraits in Paris.

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Cast concrete, Finnish oak, and two-toned Dekton surfacing yield a clean, crisp environment at BBA Bnei Brak Active Sports & Leisure Center, a 43,000-square-foot public swim facility in Israel by Studio Shira Lavi BD.

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In addition to being actor Jude Law’s sister, the graphic designer and painter Natasha Law is also known for her high-gloss, pared-down silhouettes of female figures, including, from top left, Reach in Red, Lean in Blue, Tilt in Red, and Redine in Pink, all featured in “Bend Here,” her solo show at Voltz Clarke Gallery in New York.

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For a Laatzen, Germany, outpost of coworking brand Brainhouse247, inviting, unconventionally conceived amenities, like this collaboration area by Ippolito Fleitz Group, where ceiling-hung textile strips tamper acoustics and Claesson Koivisto Rune’s W151 pendant fixture hovers above custom furniture, entice member usage and retention.

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Power Portal, in jacquard-woven polyester, silk, wool, and other fibers, is among 80 works in “Motherlode,” artist Liz Collins’s first U.S. survey, at RISD Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, through January 11.

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At Expo 2025 Osaka in Japan, the Null2 pavilion by NOIZ and Yoichi Ochiai centered on a mirrored-body concept: Steel-framed cubes surfaced in a flexible mirrored membrane powered by blockchain and AI scanned and digitized visitors to create their virtual alter egos.

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The woven elements of the timber-framed Eclosion in Cabin Fever, by Dorottya Kiss and Matthew McArthur, an annual summer-school, design-build event conceived by Hello Wood studio to bring students and architects together to create socially engaged, sustainable projects, nodded to the history of the site, a former textile factory in Česká Kamenice, Czech Republic.

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Agnès Baillon and Éric De Dormael, the sculptor and lighting designer, respectively, teamed up for the eyeglasses-esque Lunettes Marron brooch in resin, oil paint, and gilded brass, presented in Galerie Negropontes’s “Architectural and Design Landscapes” at the Venice Design Biennial, where Baillon’s 22 carat gold–leaf Camée pin also appeared.

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Last spring, the wares of Los Angeles–based jewelry designer Sophie Buhai jumped the pond to Galerie Anne-Sophie Duval in Paris debuting a 20-piece collection, including Sun Sperm Tear Magnifying Glass, in brushed sterling silver, bronze, rock crystal, and blackened sterling silver.

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“Landscapes and Constellations,” at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York through April 26, features Constellation III, Constellation II, and Constellation IV, among the screen prints from the late American artist Allan D’Arcangelo’s 1971 series, Constellation I–IV.

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For the 11th annual Winter Stations outdoor exhibition in Toronto, the American designer Jesse Beus’s Parade was among the six winning installations interpreting the competition’s dawn theme by reimagining lifeguard stations on Woodbine Beach as portals to metamorphosis.

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The 35,000-square-foot Blake School Early Learning Center in Hopkins, Minnesota, by HGA is the state’s first all-electric, zero-emission facility of its kind, making it LEED Gold certified and an Interior Design Best of Year Award honoree.

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Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury’s Silver Rain, in fiberglass resin and vinyl, was displayed in “The Impermanent: Four Takes on the Collection,” the inaugural exhibition at the new permanent home of the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw by Thomas Phifer and Partners, the firm’s first European project.

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Currently on view at the Glenstone museum in Potomac, Maryland, is conceptual artist Alex Da Corte’s Rubber Pencil Devil, his 2018 film that explores themes of humor, satire, violence, and tenderness.

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A collaboration between the late Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Balkrishna Vithaldas (B.V.) Doshi and Studio Sangath, cofounded by his granddaughter Khushnu Panthaki Hoof, the Doshi Retreat is a sensory, contemplative addition to the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, that, formed from weathered low carbon–emission steel, is part architectural pavilion, part art installation and Doshi’s final built work, his first outside India.

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The 4,000-square-foot Hybrid Flax pavilion in Wangen im Allgäu, Germany, by University of Stuttgart Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture has a roof of locally sourced, cross-laminated timber panels reinforced with robot-wound, flax-fiber filament, demonstrating that bio-based materials can be used for permanent, load-bearing structures.

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Cofounded by Joy Herra, the Milanese project space, THE GREAT DESIGN DISASTER, presented “Uniforms on Chairs,” a series of collectible seats provided by Nilufar, including Afra & Tobia Scarpa’s 121 from 1965, dressed in items from Older, a Danish/Italian company specializing in sustainable uniforms that expand the architectural spaces in which they’re worn.

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These 1960’s production diagrams for Totems, a suite of conceptual drawings mapping designer Ettore Sottsass’s sculptural explorations in stacked form, were in “Et Tu, Ettore” at Galerie56 in New York.

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Ghislaine Thesmar and dancers of the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, a Bettina Rheims photograph from 1982, is included in “Imagination at Work,” fashion and costume designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac’s retrospective at Les Abattoirs, Musée-Frac Occitanie Toulouse in France through August 23.

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For Arc’teryx’s Jilin City, China, outpost, a ski season–only repair hub by Still Young is housed in a 10-sided, steel-framed tent capped with a waterproof tarpaulin made from upcycled clothing scraps, crowned by a steel skeletal fossil of the archaeopteryx, the Jurassic-era creature that inspired the brand’s name.

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At the eight-floor headquarters of a Los Angeles finance company, two stacked stairways Gensler carved out of the 1965 building’s floor plates are backdropped by a towering expanse of preserved moss by Garden on the Wall and encourage connectivity.

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The rivers in Kenny Nguyen‘s hometown in the Mekong Delta inspired such mixed-media paintings as Eruption Series No. 91, in hand-cut silk and acrylic on canvas, in the Vietnamese artist’s “Confluence” exhibition at the Branch Museum of Design in Richmond, Virginia.

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In reception at the 225,000-square-foot headquarters of finance company Co-operators in Guelph, Canada, designed by HOK, the custom rug’s pattern was derived from an aerial view of the city.

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At Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York through August 2, the Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri’s site-specific First Sun, in cast aluminum, steel, and iridescent automotive paint, is a 17-foot-tall hybrid human-scarab figure that reimagines the Egyptian sun god Khepri as a contemporary monument to explore nature, gender, and spirituality.

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At Burning Man in Black Rock City, Utah, Ukrainian artist and Expolight founder Mykola Kabluk integrated anodized aluminum and sand with a system of mirrors for Point of Unity, a 20-foot sculpture that connected sky and earth, creating an illusion of infinite space, allowing visitors to see themselves in the context of the universe.