The 2026 Winners
have been announced!
Project - Professional Winner
After Light
Graeme labe, nadia ayres, angelique sloan, Silindile Kunene, Jarred Potgieter, and Oreeditse Gill | luxury frontiers
After Light transforms historic observatories into immersive dark-sky destinations, creating a scalable model that combines adaptive reuse, reversible design, and astronomy.
Located at the historic Sunspot Observatory in New Mexico, the pilot reimagines existing infrastructure for dining, learning, and astronomical observation, while introducing lightweight guest accommodations designed for minimal long-term impact. Guided by a journey from Last Light to First Light, After Light creates a shared guest experience that can be replicated across observatories around the world while responding to each site's unique landscape, legacy, and celestial phenomena.
Project - Student Winner
Salt Constellation
Theilard Suddhartha arias, Angélica Frontana Gómez, and Mar Álvarez | Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey Campus Toluca
Salt Constellation is a low-impact, slow-travel hospitality experience across Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, connecting Kusku, nine Moasis, and Abyssus in a constellation of destinations.
Rather than imposing intrusive volumes onto a fragile landscape, Salt Constellation dissolves into the environment. Buried beneath the salt crust, the self-sustaining Moasis preserve the uninterrupted visual axis of the vast white plain while providing high thermal mass and complete climate protection. The circuit transforms fast-paced tourism into an introspective, multi-day journey where architecture becomes a subtle framework for contemplation, star-gazing, and deep connection with the landscape.
Product - Professional Winner
Folded Poetry
eliza redmann
Folded Poetry is a portfolio of sculptural acoustic artworks that reimagines sound absorption as an integral part of architectural expression and elevated placemaking. Rather than treating acoustic performance as a concealed technical layer, each work integrates noise-reduction into contemporary sculpture, transforming functional surfaces into celebrated immersive design features.
Photography featured in the video is by Matt Ramey, 8-bit Photography, and John Michael Simpson.
Product - Student Winner
MYCOFORM
Victor king | Kealakehe High School
MYCOFORM is a modular wall-tile system designed specifically for hotels and other hospitality environments, combining a sculptural mycelium surface with acoustic absorption, passive humidity regulation, accessible customization, and a replaceable compressed-rice-husk backing structure. Its purpose is to turn one of the largest and most underused surfaces in a hotel—the wall—into an active part of the guest experience while reducing the number of separate products that must be installed, maintained, and eventually discarded.
Technology - Professional Winner
AEES— Adaptive Emotional Environment System
elena kotelnikova
AEES (Adaptive Emotional Environment System) is the world's first operating system for programmable architecture in hospitality, transforming the hotel room from a static physical space into an adaptive environment that responds to each guest's needs.
The platform synchronizes lighting, Adaptive Sky Ceiling, Adaptive Projection Wall, sound, climate, scent, multimedia, and transformable furniture into programmable spatial scenarios called Modes. Guests select an outcome such as Sleep, Recovery, Focus, or Joy, and AEES synchronizes every environmental element to achieve that result.
Technology - Student Winner
Blue Sense Lab
Liu Chia-Yi | National Taipei University of Education
Blue Sense Lab is an interactive ocean conservation platform that merges an Augmented Reality mobile application with a tactile Underwater Check Card to transform recreational diving and eco-tourism into data-driven marine restoration.
The system gamifies environmental action for divers and coastal resort guests. Divers use the waterproof Underwater Check Card to log marine debris, benthic indicators, and key species using raised physical grid markers. Upon surfacing, the AR app verifies the data, quantifies environmental impact, and converts efforts into hotel-specific eco-achievement points, discounts, or recycled rewards. The cloud platform aggregates crowdsourced data and applies AI algorithms to map marine trash distribution and predict future debris accumulation hotspots.
