Focus 2025: ‘Ready Made’ Jury Statement

Architecture is instrumental in shaping the world we live in. A world which is under increasing pressure from conflict, climatic events and societal demands. With development goals and the accelerating need to build, the issue of resources becomes pivotal. 

For the 2025 focus, The OBEL Award Jury asks how we can rethink, reinterpret and repurpose existing resources? Resources that are essentially Ready Made.

Last year’s focus, Architectures with, looked into rethinking modes of practice, whereby this year’s agenda, Ready Made, is rethinking modes of production, value and regeneration. 

Ready Made prioritises what already exists. The building industry and market logics that drive it have led to overproduction and hyper consumption and so Ready Made explores how new value—and new values—can be discovered through the materials and mechanisms of what can already be found. Ready Made also goes beyond the current norms by looking to new standards for bio-based materials and reuse resource cultures celebrated for their availability, regrowth, naturally occurring presence and carbon efficiency. 

Ready Made challenges the notion of architectural aesthetics, the industrial and the vernacular, and ‘traditional’ supply chain and policy frameworks in favour of progressive, optimistic vision of designing for our future within planetary boundaries and with new dialogues on beauty. 

[Ready] – in a suitable state for action
[Made] – something already available or produced