The year 2026 brings new destinations and dates to look forward to, with highly anticipated architectural projects and imminent openings. It is the year of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics and the Football World Cup in Mexico, but also a year that already reveals some dominant themes. One of these is the museum.

In Paris, the winner of the competition to design the new Louvre, which will be the future home of the Mona Lisa, is still to be announced. Meanwhile, in Abu Dhabi, two new museums have just made it in time for 2025, while a third is still under construction. 2025 also marked an important milestone in Cairo, where the Grand Egyptian Museum finally became fully operational after a decade of waiting. The Turin Egyptian Museum site, designed by OMA, is still uncertain, however, as its completion has once again been postponed.

We will also continue to wait for the opening of the Grand Théâtre in Rabat, designed by Zaha Hadid, for which there are no updates. A highly anticipated Zaha Hadid Architects project in Italy, the Mediterranean Museum in Reggio Calabria, might end up in the Domus 2027 selection since the foundation stone was finally laid in February 2025, nearly 20 years after the competition.

There has been a major comeback with the Shanghai Grand Opera House by Snøhetta, which was eagerly awaited last year but is still not complete. A new announcement is the Lucas Museum in Los Angeles, a project by MAD, the firm founded by Ma Yansong. He will be Domus’ guest editor for all of 2026.

Here is the complete list of the most awaited architectural works of 2026, as we prepare to guess which ones we will see again next year on the next list.

Designed by Ma Yansong, Domus guest editor for 2026, and commissioned by Star Wars creator George Lucas, the spaceship-like building is about to land on the western edge of Exposition Park. It will be surrounded by stadiums, gardens — including a newly designed landscape accompanying the project — and other museums. After six years of construction, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is scheduled to open in autumn 2026. It will offer the city over 9,000 square metres of exhibition space across five floors, dedicated to all forms of visual storytelling. These include comics such as Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon; cinematic concept art by Neal Adams for Batman and Ralph McQuarrie for Star Wars; and paintings by Frida Kahlo and Jacob Lawrence.

“What we have attempted here is to resist the temptation to add yet another tower to the already majestic urban ensemble of CityLife”: this is what Bjarke Ingels told Domus about CityWave, BIG’s office complex soon to join the skyscrapers by Hadid, Isozaki, and Libeskind as “a bridge over individuality.”  
In the past year, thanks in part to the Milan-Cortina 2026 Olympics, the CityLife area has seen two new openings: Fabio Novembre’s Golden Goose Arena, dedicated to padel, and CityOval, a large event space inside the Palazzo delle Scintille. BIG, instead, has proposed a “horizontal skyscraper” made of two volumes—105 and 53 meters tall—connected at ground level by a pedestrian plaza and at the top by a curved timber-and-steel roof, the project element that will certainly become its recognizable feature.

The artificial island of Saadiyat is the contemporary architectural heart of the UAE capital and is set to become one of the world's most ambitious cultural districts. This is evident from the recent architectural contributions: Jean Nouvel with the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2017, followed by Mecanoo with the Natural History Museum and Foster + Partners with the large sail-like structures of the Zayed National Museum, both of which are expected by late 2025. In 2006, Frank O. Gehry’s design for a new Guggenheim was unveiled. However, many completion dates have been announced and then postponed due to various stops and restarts. The building, which is expected to be the largest Guggenheim in the world, with 30,000 sqm of exhibition, educational and research spaces, should open to the public by 2026.

With the Winter Olympics now very close, the territory is set to be transformed through a combination of new construction and reuse, both permanent and temporary. It is now certain that the Games will pass through key locations in Milanese and Italian history. The opening ceremony will take place at San Siro Stadium (could this be its last major event?) and the closing ceremony will take place at Verona Arena.

There are also structures intended to remain as part of the Olympic legacy: The Milan Arena, designed by Chipperfield for ice hockey, is a key structure for revitalising the Santa Giulia area, while the well-known Olympic and Paralympic Village, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is part of the regeneration of the former Porta Romana railway yard. Other cultural and social hubs in Milan will also be activated for the Games, such as the Forum di Assago area, which will house the Ice Skating Arena, and the Fieramilano structures, designed by Studio Fuksas around twenty years ago, which will house the Speed Skating Arena and the Rho Ice Hockey Arena. Similar prospects apply to the mountain venues, such as the 1955 Olympic Curling Stadium in Cortina, which also featured in the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only.

At last, we’ve arrived. After 145 years of construction, Antoni Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece is finally set to be completed in 2026. This year marks the centenary of the Barnabas Tower, the first of eighteen towers designed by the Catalan architect (and the only one he saw completed). Under the direction of Spanish architect Jordi Faulí, the final tower—an impressive 172.5 meters tall—will also be finished, marking the end of a building site many believed would never be completed.
Alongside Casa Batlló, another iconic Gaudí building whose incredible restoration has just been inaugurated, in 2026 we will finally be able to visit the Sagrada Família free of cranes and scaffolding, as no one has ever seen it before.

Following the inauguration of Powell Hall in St. Louis, which Snøhetta discussed with Domus, the Norwegian studio is preparing to add another cultural project to its extensive portfolio. Designed in collaboration with local firm ECADI, the project's defining feature is a spiral-shaped roof that opens out like a traditional Chinese fan. At the same time, it serves as a staircase, connecting the ground floor to the top of the building and inviting the public to experience the architecture and take in the views of the city and the Huangpu River. Beneath this scenic feature are three auditoriums and their supporting facilities, all brought together to transform the performance space into a civic place, much like the Oslo Opera House, which is now an urban icon.

Peter Zumthor designed the David Geffen Galleries, the final addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is scheduled to open in April 2026. The meeting of the Swiss architect's work with the urban environment of Los Angeles is rather unprecedented. However, his raw yet organic forms of concrete and glass engage in dialogue with three major chapters of American and global architectural history: the original modernist building by William Pereira (1965); Bruce Goff’s Japanese Pavilion (1988); and the two buildings by Renzo Piano Building Workshop: the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA (2008) and the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion (2010).

Before its official opening, BIG is preparing to open part of the museum with an exhibition showcasing Bjarke Ingels’ work as guest editor of Domus 2025. Each issue of the magazine was dedicated to a different material, ranging from stone to wood and even the immaterial. The full museum, which has 60,000 sqm of exhibition space, courtyards, foyers, a theatre and public facilities, will be fully open to visitors from 2026 onwards. Its glass-and-steel design, undulating roofs and references to the 'lang' — covered pathways through gardens — recall centuries-old Chinese tradition, reinterpreting it in a contemporary way.

Is it another V&A museum? Yes. The recent opening of the V&A East Storehouse, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and combining archive, storage and exhibition spaces, is only the first of the new buildings commissioned by the museum in London’s Olympic Park area. It will soon be joined by the V&A East Museum, designed by Irish studio O’Donnell & Tuomey. This building will host temporary exhibitions and a permanent collection titled 'Why We Make'. Inspired by the work of Cristóbal Balenciaga, the building was designed in collaboration with the V&A following the major exhibition dedicated to him in 2017. Its exterior is said to resemble a “pleated dress”, giving the structure a sculptural identity. A precise opening date has already been set: 18 April 2026.

The building, which is expected to be completed in 2026, will form part of the masterplan for Paper Island in the contemporary heart of Copenhagen. The surrounding mixed-use buildings have already been completed by the firm Cobe. It will add a new piece to the landscape of Københavns Havn, the ancient port of the Danish capital that has become a symbol of its contemporary transformation thanks to the many architectural works that line its shores, including the Opera House, the 'Black Diamond' library, Olafur Eliasson's rotating bridge and OMA's Blox for the Danish Architecture Centre.
The Waterfront Culture Centre's mission is to celebrate and narrate the city's relationship with water through experiential spaces and architecture. Its truncated pyramidal roofs harmonise with the new context and break traditional hierarchies by lacking a main façade, acting as a mediator between water and land.