Town Hall in Portugal Wins Building of the Year

2025 was the second year that the Buildings of the Week on World-Architects featured a global selection of projects, coming after many years of hosting Buildings of the Week focused only on the United States. In its current format, the inaugural Building of the Year, in 2024, went to a community center in India, and now voters have determined that, of the 50 Buildings of the Week featured in 2025, Trofa Town Hall is their favorite. The building serves the small municipality of Trofa, located about 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Porto. What looks like new construction from some angles is, in fact, the renovation of a former industrial building and its expansion, carried out by architect José Carlos Nunes de Oliveira and his Porto firm NOARQ. 

NOARQ gained the commission in 2016 following a pre-qualification competition focused on rehabilitating and transforming the former Indústria Alimentar Trofense facilities near the Nossa Senhora das Dores Park, a central space in Trofa. In our interview with the architect last February—featuring some of the most refreshingly honest and in-depth answers to our boilerplate questions ever—Nunes de Oliveira described the building as “a ghost of the former industrial constructions that once lined the railway tracks from Trofa to the railway station.” Finding inspiration in everything from Vitruvius and the soaring light of Gothic cathedrals to “the precision of Siza's details” and “the sweat of my team [and] knowledge of my engineers,” the resulting building is seemingly carved from a mass of dark brick, its cutouts “tailored to each function, space, scale, and urban or formal meaning.”

Brick outside gives way to smooth concrete surfaces inside, where multi-story spaces, linear corridors, terraces, and constructions both new and existing interlock to connect people with the different functions spread across the elongated building. No space, surface, threshold, or detail appears unconsidered or ill-considered. Or, as Nunes de Oliveira explained it last year: “The building is a synthesis of matter, form, and design, appearing simple but meticulously detailed and constructed, with a design that remains consistent from its urban form to its architectural space and down to the finest construction elements.”

Each distinction brings me an ambiguous feeling of enormous pride and deep curiosity. Every award, beyond the ephemeral euphoria of celebration, also provokes reflection. Once again, I ask myself: why our project among 50 outstanding projects from around the world? Why a project from a peripheral country, in a suburb of a peripheral city? Why a small architectural practice outside the major Portuguese cities and international capitals? Why a massive building, cut by vertical and horizontal lines, silent like a shadow, built from humble, dry, traditional, imperfect materials? 

I feel this award as a tribute to marginality; to the periphery; to going against the current; to the decentralization of great metropolises; to simplicity; to silence. For me, this award celebrates architecture without privilege, culture for culture’s sake. 

It is an award for Portuguese architecture, for the architecture of Porto, and for the devotion to the craft of architects who draw, who build models—a practice that is now in decline.

The Building of the Year poll on World-Architects was open for the month of January, asking visitors to select their favorite building from the 50 Buildings of the Week featured in 2025. Trofa Town Hall tallied approximately 20% of the few-thousand votes cast. The three runners-up are listed below, with links to their respective Buildings of the Week in the captions.