OBEL 2025: on the Ready Made is an editorial project developed by KoozArch for the OBEL Foundation, dedicated to the exploration and dissemination of critical thought around the 2025 OBEL Award theme: Ready Made.

The project takes the form of a curated series of monthly contributions — conversations, editorials, and essays — which seek to expand perspectives on the theme while fostering dialogue that reaches beyond established audiences, strengthening and extending the OBEL Foundation’s network.

Read all contributions here and download the reader here.

For 2025, the OBEL Award invites us to ask: How can we rethink, reinterpret, and repurpose existing resources? At its core, Ready Made foregrounds what already exists, challenging the cycles of overproduction and hyper-consumption that dominate the building industry and its market-driven logics. The theme urges us to uncover new values—and new forms of value—through the reuse, adaptation, and revaluation of what is already at hand.

Beyond reuse, Ready Made also embraces the potential of bio-based materials and regenerative resource cultures. These approaches highlight the availability, renewability, and carbon efficiency of natural systems while pointing toward new standards for design and construction.

Through this editorial collaboration, KoozArch and the OBEL Foundation seek to not only interrogate these urgent questions but also to situate them within a broader cultural and architectural discourse. All contributions are published in the KoozArch magazine as well as being soon available as an open access publication.