2025 Architectural Hopefuls Competition

Entries: from 15/10 to 17/11/2025

Kick-off meeting: 20/11/2025

Subject 2025: ADAPTATION AND MITIGATION: ANTICIPATING AND ACTING IN THE FACE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

This competition, organized each year by BNP PARIBAS REAL ESTATE since 2008, aims to: ▪ Combine its sponsorship activities in favor of architecture and the young talents of tomorrow with a support initiative aimed at young people. ▪ Encourage architecture students to reflect on and raise awareness of current architectural issues, particularly in terms of sustainable development. ▪ Promote synergies between these students and professionals in the sector (outside the classroom).

Climate change is an indisputable reality. Scientific studies predict that France could experience an average rise of +2.7°C by 2050*, transforming its temperate climate into a subtropical one. In both urban and suburban areas, our cities, increasingly mineralized and exposed, will have to cope with extreme temperatures, heat waves, natural disasters, droughts and intense rainfall
.
Against this backdrop, the real estate sector faces a major challenge: adapting to unstable climatic conditions and protecting residents and users.
It’s not just a question of reducing our carbon footprint, but also of adapting existing buildings and neighborhoods to these upheavals, in a coherent approach where adaptation and mitigation go hand in hand.
In addition to technical adaptation, we also need to support changes in behavior. Intensifying uses, sharing spaces differently, imagining places that are more sober and flexible: architecture is becoming a lever for cultural and social transformation as much as for climate change.

This year’s competition invites students to focus on vacant commercial buildings (nearly 9 million m² of office space are currently empty in France, 2 million of which are considered wastelands). These buildings, located in a variety of urban and suburban contexts, provide an ideal testing ground for rethinking the city and its uses. Participants will be asked to select a vacant commercial property and propose a transformation adapted to the climatic risks specific to its location in France. Heatwaves, floods, drought, or any other relevant hazard: each project will have to propose adaptation and mitigation solutions.

Full competition presentation

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