Studio Gang’s David Rubenstein Treehouse has joined the world’s most beautiful universities, with Harvard’s first mass-timber building one of eight campus projects selected for the 2026 list and one of just three built in wood. That is according to the Prix Versailles, the world architecture and design award announced each year at UNESCO in Paris, which published its 2026 universities list on Monday.
“Invoking the feeling of being nested high up inside a treetop cabin,” is how the award’s citation reads, crediting a conference centre that has remade the format as an open and welcoming place to meet. Visitors climb a sculptural central staircase that wraps the freestanding elevator core to reach Canopy Hall and its terrace, spaces Studio Gang first revealed at structural finish last November.
Completed in October 2025 as Harvard’s first university-wide conference centre, the 55,000-square-foot building hosts events for anywhere from 20 to 755 people. Its embodied carbon is 55 per cent below that of a comparable concrete-and-steel frame, a saving Studio Gang credits to responsibly sourced mass timber.
The Treehouse anchors the first phase of Harvard’s Enterprise Research Campus, the US$750 million Allston district that opened in June with two laboratory buildings, 343 apartments, and a 246-room hotel.
Timber carried more than the Treehouse onto the list, with the Bloomberg Student Center at Johns Hopkins University, a cascading cluster of 29 mass timber pavilions by Bjarke Ingels Group and Rockwell Group, named alongside it.
“A village of timber pavilions climbing the natural hill on the university’s edge,” is how BIG founder Bjarke Ingels described a 150,000-square-foot student hub that opened in October 2025 beneath nearly 1,000 rooftop solar panels.
Grafton Architects delivered the third timber build, with the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation dedicated at the University of Arkansas last August as the first mass timber building and first American project for Pritzker Prize laureates Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara.
“Our design envisions the new building as a ‘Story Book of Timber’,” Yvonne Farrell said of a Fay Jones School facility framed in more than 62,000 cubic feet of Arkansas-grown wood.
Stone, steel, and glass fill the remaining places, with Oxford’s Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Cambridge’s Ray Dolby Centre, and Amsterdam’s converted library joining UNSW Sydney’s Health Translation Hub, the only Australian building selected. Bjarke Ingels Group is the only practice to appear twice, with Claremont McKenna College’s Robert Day Sciences Center its second entry beside the Baltimore student hub.
It comes as the award kept returning to timber, after Toyo Ito’s Gaia at Nanyang Technological University, then Asia’s largest mass timber building, made the 2024 list. The campus prize began in 2019, one of eight categories in which a World Jury hands down 24 World Titles each year.
Three of the eight universities will take World Titles when the World Jury meets at UNESCO at the end of the year, and on the list published Monday, mass timber built exactly three of the eight in the running.
