Year in review, part one: the best rooms of 2025

Soft fried black beans at Verlaine. Pressed duck at Dialogue. Hot buttered kimchi chow at Chego.

My former colleague Jonathan Gold, still the only food critic to win a Pulitzer, would often distill his review of a new restaurant to a detailed, almost molecular-level consideration of a single dish—and sometimes a single bite.

I’ve often wondered why we don’t write about architecture the same way, at least some of the time. The room is after all the Platonic form, the basic unit, of the enterprise; it is architectural expertise reduced to its purest, most concentrated, and most accessible category. Or else it’s something like the opposite, the anomalous space in a building where an architect can break from practicality or expectation.

Frank Gehry, paraphrasing something Philip Johnson told him, often explained to me that one reason he separated his early projects into discrete, nearly standalone forms was to honor the fact that so many of his favorite works from architectural history qualified essentially as a single room: Chartres, Ronchamp, the Pantheon, even Johnson’s own Glass House. (Well, that and Gehry’s obsession with the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi, paintings that line up household objects so that they touch while remaining autonomous.) Gehry’s Winton Guest House in Minnesota, from 1987, is probably the best example of this approach, though you can see it in larger projects like L.A.’s Loyola Law School too.

Thoreau, for his part, when he paused in “Walden” to imagine the American domestic architecture of the future, wrote of “a larger and more populous house” than his own cabin that, crucially, would “still consist of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall.”

And so, as 2025 comes to a close, in lieu of a traditional best-of list, I present (in no particular order) the ten most memorable new, or newly repurposed, rooms I visited this year.

1) Cambridge, Mass.: Thomas Tull Concert Hall, Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, SANAA with Perry Dean Rogers Partners Architects. I stopped off to see SANAA’s Massachusetts debut in the company of two friends and fellow writers, Mark Lamster and Garnette Cadogan. On the whole the building, highly constrained by the university’s preference for a red-brick exterior, the better to match Eero Saarinen’s nearby 1955 MIT Chapel, is a mixed bag. But the circular main hall is breathtaking, channeling Aalto (whose Baker House dorms are also close by) on its lower half, with taupe acoustical curtains ringing the space, and then breaking into a riot of somehow perfectly behaved mechanical equipment overhead. Bonus: The acoustics are by Nagata.

2) London: Collections Hall, V&A East Storehouse, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. When the curator Brendan Cormier gave me a tour of the Storehouse, a brilliant repurposing of the media center built for the 2012 London Olympics, we paused after emerging from an airlock to look up at the mammoth Collection Hall stretching in front of us. A couple entering a few seconds later then audibly gasped as they stopped to take in the same view. That’s not something that happens every day! As I wrote in September, there are reasons to question the project’s commitment to full transparency, and to think carefully about its connection to the V&A’s checkered acquisition history. But the main hall itself—a vast space lined with catwalk-like mezzanines and a partially glass floor, showing off items including sculptures, paintings, dresses, furniture, and even a suspended chunk of the Robin Hood Gardens façade—is the most breathtaking new room I saw in person this year.

3) Orange County, New York: Handwashing stations, Storm King Art Center, Heneghan Peng Architects, WXY Architecture, Gustafson Porter + Bowman, and Reed Hilderbrand. How about an outdoor room? It was a bitterly cold day when I toured the expanded Storm King campus last winter. And it must surely mean something that what stuck with me from that visit were not any of the smartly configured (and nicely heated) indoor spaces but, instead, a row of al fresco sinks with oversized wooden shutters. Looking out toward a meadow where a parking lot used to be, it’s a lovely place to contemplate the success of Reed Hilderbrand’s larger remaking of the Storm King landscape—and maybe, with its focus on open-air circulation, one modest sign of how the COVID-19 pandemic has remade public architecture.

4) Becket, Massachusetts: Veranda at the Doris Duke Theater, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Mecanoo with Marvel Architects. There are many elements to admire in Mecanoo founder Francine Houben’s new hyperflexible mass-timber theater on the sylvan Jacob’s Pillow campus, which replaces an earlier building destroyed by fire. Most striking of all, for the way it channels the larger blurring of indoor and outdoor spaces on that campus, and for its architectural grace, is the veranda that rings the new building, lined with simple posts under a scored timber ceiling. I completed nearly a half dozen laps on my visit, just to have an excuse to stay inside that extended threshold.

5) New York City (by way of Tokyo): Unit A1305 of the Nakagin Capsule Tower, Kisho Kurokawa. The centerpiece of my favorite small architecture exhibition to open this year, “The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower,” is one of the capsules in question, rescued before the 2022 demolition of Kisho Kurokawa’s experimental 1972 high-rise. Now part of MoMA’s permanent collection, the capsule—officially A1305, and once occupying the tower’s top floor—has been meticulously restored, complete with blue carpet, red Olivetti typewriter for some period flair, and porthole window. The exhibition, curated by Evangelos Kotsioris, an assistant curator at MoMA, along with curatorial associate Paula Vilaplana de Miguel and Joëlle Martin, a former intern at the museum, is a model of scholarship and economy. It runs through July 12 of next year.

6) Detroit, Michigan: South Concourse at the Michigan Central Station, Quinn Evans. The Grand Hall of the exquisitely restored main train station in Detroit, a 1913 Beaux-Arts marvel now owned by Ford, might be the fancier and more dramatic space. But give me the adjacent South Concourse, with its exposed steel-and-glass roof structure under which the public can access free Wi-Fi at broad work tables, as the more stirring symbol of the station’s (and Detroit’s) complex rebirth.

7) Chicago, Illinois: “Thin Volumes: In the Round,” Chicago Architecture Biennial, Iman Fayyad. Installed on a broad landing inside the Chicago Cultural Center, a main venue for Florencia Rodriguez’s Chicago Architecture Biennial, this installation by MIT’s Fayyad is a fascinating exploration of the potential of turning flat plywood sheets, with minimal labor, into a collection of complex curved surfaces. With its blood-red carpeting and round stools inside, its dome-like form topped by an open oculus, it is also a mesmerizing addition to the Biennial in purely spatial terms. Through Feb. 28 of next year.

8) Princeton, New Jersey: Grand Hall, Princeton Art Museum, Adjaye Associates with Cooper Robertson. The astronomically high numbers I’ve heard flying around about how much the new Princeton Art Museum cost to build don’t shock or even bother me. Princeton, with an endowment of $36 billion, can afford it, even as the federal government squeezes the Ivies—and it’s nice to see, in this age of architectural budgets pushed to the absolute breaking point, a client spending what it takes to realize an ambitious project, rich in materiality, in full. The Grand Hall, a multipurpose room with retractable seating under a cruciform glulam ceiling framed by suspended sheets of craggy concrete, is the place where the design’s combination of muscularity and precision comes together most masterfully. As a counterpoint to the praise you’ve read here and elsewhere for the museum, I should add that I very much enjoyed this contrarian take from undergrads Madison Anderson and Robert Mohan, writing in the Daily Princetonian.

9) Los Angeles, California: The future site of Sixth Street PARC, Hargreaves Jones, Michael Maltzan Architecture, HNTB. The new park underneath L.A.’s Sixth Street Viaduct won’t be complete until 2026. But when I had a chance to walk through the space in late summer, the bridge’s massive concrete supports being slowly devoured by a creeping graffiti overlay, it was some combination of sublime scale and in-progress chaos that really hit me. The highlight of the tour was the chance to walk through a long tunnel and see the spot where visitors (water levels permitting) will be able to step directly into the concretized river channel, the first location in the river’s 51-mile course where this kind of access will be officially sanctioned by public agencies. 

10) Venice, Italy (by way of Santiago, Chile): Kitchen, Deserta Ecofolie, Venice Architecture Biennale, Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Pamela Prado. This minimal dwelling for two people, designed for off-grid living in the harsh Atacama Desert (and by extension in any locale threatened by climate apocalypse) and installed in an idyllic garden behind the Arsenale, was probably my favorite single project in this year’s Venice Biennale. (The design team was led by Pedro Ignacio Alonso, an architect, and the curator Pamela Prado.) The kitchen, with a simple stainless steel counter and sink bisecting a floor-to-ceiling window, made a lovely place to contemplate the end of days, though I must add that the project as a whole also had a sense of humor, as suggested by the inclusion of a framed photograph (by Tim Street-Porter) of Reyner Banham riding his fold-up bicycle across the cracked floor of a different desert, the Mojave.

Honorable mention: the second-floor galleries in the Fenix Museum of Migration, Rotterdam, by MAD Architects, repurposing a 1,000-foot-long, century-old warehouse; the stretch of Peter Zumthor’s forthcoming David Geffen Galleries for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that will allow visitors to feel as though they’re suspended over Wilshire Boulevard; Do Ho Suh’s “Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul,” an enveloping installation that was part of the artist’s recent monographic exhibition at Tate Modern and featured, inside a room of diaphanous white fabric, sewn architectural features (in primary colors) including doorknobs and light switches.

Nearly all the rooms on this list are busy meeting their functional and programmatic requirements, as you might expect. But keep in mind that there’s no rule that a room have a function, architectural or otherwise. In that spirit, and as a palate cleanser for this absurd year as it draws mercifully to an end, I give you Georges Perec, our friend from a few weeks ago, from his 1974 book “Species of Spaces.” (The translation is by John Sturrock.)

“I have several times tried to think of an apartment in which there would be a useless room, absolutely and intentionally useless. It wouldn’t be a junk room, it wouldn’t be an extra bedroom, or a corridor, or a cubbyhole, or a corner. It would be a functionless space. It would serve for nothing, relate to nothing.... A space without a function. Not ‘without any precise function’ but precisely without any function; not pluri-functional (everyone knows how to do that), but a-functional. It wouldn’t obviously be a space intended solely to ‘release’ the others (lumber-room, cupboard, hanging space, storage space, etc.) but a space, I repeat, that would serve no purpose at all.”

Do you have a favorite room, new or old, that you visited in 2025? I’d love to hear about it: [email protected]

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