This year’s best international architecture and interiors are revealed as the 2026 World Architecture Festival (WAF) shortlist is announced. Celebrating the most outstanding new completed buildings, interiors and landscape designs from around the world and visionary future architectural projects, the shortlist sets the stage for the festival’s second event in the USA. Finalists will present their projects live to an international panel of esteemed judges at WAF 2026, which will take place at the Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, from 18-20 November.
The 2026 WAF shortlist features 416 projects, across categories ranging from best Creative Re-Use, Housing and Education to best Hotel, Health, Sports and Culture. Selected from over 630 entries, this year’s shortlist celebrates incredible groundbreaking architectural and design achievements.
This year’s WAF shortlist brings together project entries from world leading practices including: Foster + Partners, Snøhetta, Herzog & de Meuron, Coldefy, Grimshaw, Sanjay Puri Architects, Perkins&Will, and Woods Bagot alongside work from an exciting new generation of emerging studios.
Within the shortlist, practices from the USA are the most highly represented, with China, India, UK, and Australia also in the top ten.
The full WAF shortlist awards can be viewed here.
This year’s 205 shortlisted completed buildings include everything from an immersive tropical clubhouse in Vietnam to a landmark fish market in Sydney and a 1.2-acre oceanfront park in Florida.
The 48 shortlisted interiors range from an off-grid private wildlife sanctuary and guest lodge in South Africa to a design-led rooftop bar in Bangkok, while the 12 shortlisted landscapes include a clubhouse in Vietnam designed as a living organism and an ecological landmark in the Philippines that showcases the structural material qualities of bamboo.
The 151 future projects shortlisted include a climate-responsive home in Mumbai and an ambitious vision for a children’s hospital in Texas.
WAF features the world’s largest live-judged architecture awards, complemented by keynote talks, an exhibition, and various fringe events including architecture tours, networking opportunities, and workshops.
This year’s WAF Judging Panel of 164 experts representing 37 countries, includes: Peter Cook, Founder at Peter Cook Studio Crablab, Kai-Uwe Bergmann, Partner at BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), Olga Bolshanina, Senior Partner at Herzog & de Meuron and Cazú Zegers, Director and Founder at Cazú Zegers Architecture.
The full list of WAF Judges for 2026 can be viewed here.
Still to come, the winners of this year’s WAFX Awards, celebrating architecture that tackles major world issues, will be announced on Monday 20 July on WAF social media channels, with the Special Prizes announcements following on Monday 27 July.
All finalists on the shortlist will present their projects within their categories during the first two days of the festival. On the final day, category winners from across all 43 categories will go on to present to the Super Jury to compete for World Building, Landscape, Future Project and Interior Project of the Year. The overall winners of this year’s Special Prizes, including WAFX, will also be announced live from the festival.
WAF programme director Paul Finch comments: “WAF continues to thrive with more than 630 entries to the Awards programme this year, despite global challenges. As ever, the combination of major practices and smaller firms, perhaps entering WAF for the first time, is refreshing, and the shortlisting judges were impressed by the design standards of the selected entries. We have also shortlisted designs for a host of special prizes, which will make for a stimulating set of presentations to our international judges in Fort Lauderdale this November.”
WAF will be in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for its 19th edition, following previous editions of the festival in Miami, Singapore, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Berlin.
Central Yards, developed by Henderson Land, with Lead8 as Design Architect and Wong & Ouyang as Executive Architect
