Neri&Hu's Aranya Arts Centre Wins Dezeen Award for Cultural Building of the Year
The Aranya Arts Centre in Qinhuangdao won Dezeen's Cultural Building of the Year 2025. Neri&Hu's design of rough concrete and carved light-wells draws from Chinese courtyard typology.
Dezeen·March 14, 2026
Neri&Hu's Aranya Arts Centre in Qinhuangdao, China, has won the Cultural Building of the Year award at the 2025 Dezeen Awards, one of the most prestigious global design prizes.
The building serves as a community arts hub for the Aranya residential community on the Bohai Sea coast. Its monolithic concrete volumes are punctuated by deep carved light-wells and courtyard voids drawn from the traditional Chinese siheyuan typology.
Principals Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu described the project as 'an act of subtraction rather than addition — the architecture is what remains after removing everything unnecessary, leaving only the essential relationships between light, material, and human presence.'
The Dezeen jury praised its 'exceptional restraint and contemplative power, channelling the Brutalist tradition through a distinctly Chinese spatial sensibility.' The building houses a 200-seat concert hall, gallery spaces, artist studios, and a rooftop meditation garden.
The Aranya community, developer of the site, commissioned the centre as part of a wider arts and culture programme that has previously included a chapel by Vector Architects and a library by Standardarchitecture.
Content credit: Dezeen / Neri&Hu