From a Wuhan puzzle to a Gurugram garden: Benoy wins five at the 2026 International Property Awards
Five Benoy projects across China, Taiwan and India have been recognised at the 2026 International Property Awards, with wins spanning commercial high-rise, mixed-use, residential, landscape and retail interior categories. The schemes range from a long-stalled site beside a major transit hub returning as a five-zone landscape to a residential tower whose gardens fan out like a peacock’s tail.
Wuhan Alibaba Center: Best Commercial High Rise Architecture, Hubei Province, China
Wuhan Ali Center introduces a new mixed-use model to the Xudong Business District: a 450,000m² scheme in which substantial public realm is woven through what is now Alibaba’s second-largest headquarters campus. Twin office towers of 272.5m and 173m rise above Wuhan’s first MixC shopping centre, a six-storey retail podium, with the suspended Alibaba HUB bridge stitching the towers together overhead. The spatial logic borrows from the Kongming lock, the traditional Chinese interlocking puzzle, so that buildings that read as separate on one approach lock together on another. In its first year, the centre has welcomed 1.2 million visitors, supported more than 1,000 jobs and reached 99.5% occupancy.
Nanjing Alibaba Center: Best Mixed Use Architecture, Jiangsu Province, China
A small city on its own terms, Nanjing Alibaba Center accommodates 30,000 people across 850,000m², making it Alibaba’s largest and most programmatically diverse Chinese campus to date. Its organising logic comes from a computer motherboard: the headquarters reads as the central processing unit, the 37m-diameter stainless-steel Ali-Hub as the router, and seven elevated bridges, together totalling roughly a kilometre, wire the buildings into a single circuit. Sponge-city measures achieve a 76% annual runoff control rate, while operational carbon comes in 40% below benchmark. The campus opened in July 2025.
Taichung D One: Winner, Landscape Architecture, Taiwan
Xinwuri Station is the most connected point in central Taiwan, served by high-speed rail, conventional rail and the MRT, yet the land around it has sat undeveloped for fifteen years. Taichung D One will change that. Organised across five landscape zones (mountain, forest, water, cloud and valley), the 473,208m² scheme draws on Taichung’s position at the edge of the mountains, where built fabric and natural topography are in constant conversation. The development is set to support employment for 16,000 people and to give Xinwuri the centre its transport links have long suggested it deserves.
Conscient Elaira Residences: Winner, Residential High Rise Architecture, India
Currently on site in Gurugram, Conscient Elaira will deliver 268 three-bedroom apartments across two cruciform towers in its first phase, with a second phase taking the total to 536. Landscape carries the design: garden terraces fan out in arcs that echo the peacock’s tail — India’s national bird — and gesture, more distantly, to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Refined floorplates draw daylight deep into each home through generous balconies and cross-ventilation, while multi-aspect apartments look outward to the surrounding golf courses and the Aravalli Hills beyond.
Shanghai EXPO Place: Winner, Retail Interior, Shanghai Municipality
Few sites carry as many lives as Shanghai EXPO Place: a former steel mill, then a host site for the 2010 World Expo, and now two Grade A office towers, a 50,000m² shopping mall and a 1,300m² experience centre. The interior makes that layered history its organising principle. Clean linear forms, bold spatial contrasts and a rhythmic materiality move the eye from the central atrium up to the topmost retail terrace, with industrial memory legible in the design language throughout. The mall opened in December 2024.
