Our Year in Review

2025 has been a year filled with exciting firsts for The World Around. We began January with the opening of Life On Earth—our first physical exhibition—which charted the evolving relationship between design and the planet at the University of Kentucky. The reception was overwhelming, with students and faculty members from across the university’s design departments filling out the college auditorium for commemorative lectures from The World Around founding director Beatrice Galilee, and McKenna Dunbar, an inspirational energy justice organizer from Cycle 02 of our Young Climate Prize.

As Valentine’s Day approached, we unveiled our debut public art curation in Times Square, partnering with Times Square Arts for the 17th edition of its annual Love & Design Competition. Pernilla Ohrstedt’s winning proposal, a technicolored cube composed of 40 recycled oyster cages, engaged both with New York’s material histories and its ecological future in a powerful collaboration with the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit on a mission to restore oyster reefs to New York Harbor. By March, the cages had been donated to the Billion Oyster Project and deployed around the city’s coastline, defending against storm damage and rising flood risk.

That month, Mariam Issoufou, an acclaimed architect, and a Young Climate Prize mentor and Design Champion, was appointed to our board of directors. She was later joined by Wendy Fisher, eminent global philanthropist and founder of the A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa. It was an honor to welcome two such exceptional leaders to the helm of the organization.

At the end of April, commemorating the start of an exciting new institutional partnership, our flagship Annual Summit was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, convening speakers from around the world to highlight the most groundbreaking projects and ideas from the past year. Curated with MoMA’s Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment, the day-long program amplified voices from Korea, Morocco, Puerto Rico, Senegal, and Thailand among many others. The four winners of our Young Climate Prize Cycle 02 also each presented their extraordinary climate action initiatives to a full theater. We saw record in-person attendance for this year’s Summit, which was also livestreamed to an international audience of thousands. 

For the vernissage days of the Venice Architecture Biennale, The World Around partnered with SMAC San Marco Art Centre for the debut event in our new On Site series, which offers insight from the epicentres of architecture and design innovation through our eyes on the ground. Bringing together the Biennale’s most exciting contributors and critics, the panel generated an animated discussion and was packed with insider takes on the show ahead of its official opening. We were gratified to see ​​so many contributors from The World Around Community represented across the exhibition.

As crowds filled New York City for Climate Week in September, trailblazers from the first cycle of our Young Climate Prize took the stage at the Climate Film Festival to discuss the power of narration in mobilizing climate action. Later in the week, new board member Issoufou hosted a climatic design workshop for Young Climate Prize alumni and a group of aspiring architects at her NYC studio. At the end of the month, we expanded our On Site coverage by journeying to Marfa, Texas, and reintroducing master minimalist Donald Judd through his far-seeing, if largely overlooked, architecture practice.   

In October, we launched our new (and improved) website, complete with a designated space for our new editorial platform, Insights, and a directory of all the Community members who have joined us on our journey to date. 

Finally, we raised a glass to the year gone by during our third annual fundraising dinner. Hosted at the Refinery at Domino, a 19th-century sugar factory re-envisioned by PAU, the evening gathered some of the most influential minds in contemporary architecture and design on the New York City waterfront. There could not have been a more appropriate way to end 2025, in the company of our supporters and friends, whose generosity and belief has enabled us to advance and grow over the past 12 months.

Building on the milestones of 2025, our calendar for next year is filling up fast. In February, we’ll travel to Los Angeles for In Focus: Transformation, a program exploring how designers, thinkers, and makers contend with a world in flux. On Earth Day, we’ll open applications for the third cycle of the Young Climate Prize. The next cohort of 25 under-25s will then be announced at the end of the year. In May, we’ll be returning to MoMA for a second year with our acclaimed Annual Summit. Now a staple in the New York cultural calendar, this daylong program of talks and conversations will convene the most exciting names in architecture, design, and environmental fields to explore architecture’s ‘Now, Near, and Next.’