SOM Foundation Announces Winner of the 2025 European Research Prize

The SOM Foundation is pleased to announce the winner of the 2025 European Research Prize. A team from the Politecnico di Milano will receive a €20,000 prize to conduct original research that contributes to this year’s topic, “Exploring the Potential of Mobility Corridors.” The European Research Prize was created in 2021 to cultivate new ideas and meaningful research that addresses the critical issues of our time.

As part of the project “Disrupting the Corridor: Water/Ground Mobilities Across the Adriatic,” Simonetta Armondi and Agim Kërçuku will focus on the Adriatic region between Albania and Italy exploring how mobility infrastructures, such as the Trans Adriatic Pipeline and thermoelectric power complexes, mediate flows of water, energy, nature, capital, ideas, space, and politics.

This proposal examines how water, land, and energy infrastructures interact across the Adriatic land-sea basin. The research seeks to challenge and redefine what “corridor mobility” means, as well as the epistemic tools for envisioning a fair ecological future. The team shows that corridor mobility is a material, social, and ecological infrastructure that design disciplines often overlook.

This proposal embodies the SOM Foundation European Research Prize’s spirit of innovation and interdisciplinarity by redefining the boundaries of mobility corridors as not just physical routes, but as hydrosocial and energetic flows. These infrastructures create dependence, extraction, and conflict. They can also become spaces where pathways to sustainability, justice, and resilience are shaped and negotiated. The research uses theoretical multidisciplinary analysis, archival tools, ethnographic fieldwork, and a research-by-design approach in the teaching experience. The aim is to develop relational cartographies and actionable policy and design strategies to mitigate the effects of these infrastructures. The project will showcase the relational cartographies produced during the research and educational experience through an exhibition and a final public seminar. These events will promote collaborative research and community dialogue, culminating in a publication with broad impact.

This year’s jury was led by SOM Foundation Executive Director Iker Gil and included Pedro Gadanho (Architect, author and independent curator, Lisbon), Meredith Glaser (Chief Executive Officer, Urban Cycling Institute, Amsterdam; Professor of Cycling, Ghent University, Ghent), and Carlos Mínguez Carrasco (Chief Curator, ArkDes - the Swedish National Centre for Architecture and Design, Stockholm).

European Research Prize recipients are expected to collaborate with students, faculty, and leaders from various disciplines to pursue their research topics. They will be required to document their findings and develop suggestions for application to professional practice. The outcome of the research will be shared publicly on the SOM Foundation’s website as well as other mediums identified by the winning teams.