The most anticipated buildings of 2021

Franco Stella has recreated three of the ornate Baroque facades of the demolished Berlin Palace and added a fourth of his own design to create Humboldt Forum. The new-comer to Berlin's Museum Island will in part house the collections of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art. It had a virtual opening this month, but the building won't open to footfall until restrictions ease in 2021. 

The backlash against Snøhetta's redevelopment of the postmodern AT&T Building on New York's Madison Avenue – which proposed replacing a substantial chunk of its iconic masonary with glass – was so strong the practice was forced to abandon its plans. The revised scheme, more sympathetic to the original design of Philip Johnson and John Burgee, includes an a new partially covered garden which will open in 2021. 

Zaha Hadid Architects' undulating campus for Bee'ah, the Sharjah-based environmental and waste management company, takes its cues from the surrounding desert dunes. Designed to minimise energy consumption, the building has features including light reflective cladding, solar panels and recycled materials. It is expected to open in spring 2021.

The rotund mirrored volume of  MVRDV's Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen reflects its surroundings in Rotterdam's Museumpark. The gallery, designed as access-all-areas "glimpse behind the scenes of the museumt" contains exhibition spaces, a garden on the roof, a restaurant and large art stores, and will open to the public in September 2021. 

The transformation of Paris' Bourse de Commerce by Domus' in-coming guest editor will finally be revealed to the public on 23 January 2021. The project was scheduled to open in September 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic. Tadao Ando's renovation of the city's former stock exchange to create a new home for works of contemporary art making up the Pinault Collection centres around the insertion of a minimalist concrete cylinder beneath the building's spectacular domed roof and muralled walls. 

Mad's Nanjing Zendai Himalayas Center is a mesmerising play of scale between mountainous tree-covered tower blocks and low-lying pitched-roof buildings and gardens. The traditional and futuristic typologies of Nanjing are married in a project sprawling over 180,000 square metres across a city block. 

Renzo Piano's eagerly awaited Academy Museum of Motion Pictures combines LA's 1930s Saban Building with a huge glass globe to create a 28,000 square metre temple to Hollywood and the film industry. This month, the official unveiling was pushed back from spring to autumn 2021 in a move the museum's director Bill Karmer says has been made to prevent an "irresponsible" opening. 

The renovation of Berlin's much-loved KaDeWe department store by OMA is expected to open in summer 2021. The project splits the existing building into four areas suited to the needs of different shoppers and arranges them around atriums with their own distinctive escalators. These culminate in a view of Berlin granted by a new glazed roof extension. 

Foster + Partners Datong Art Museum will stand along three other buildings to form Datong New City’s cultural plaza. The building of intersecting earth-toned peaks is designed to look like an erupted landscape, with the bulk of its spaces submerged below a stepped plaza. It is one of a swathe of major projects the practice expects to open in 2021, pandemic-depending, including Narbo Via, 425 Park Avenue and the National Bank of Kuwait.

Henegan Peng Architect’s long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum has experienced another set back, but the preview tours of the museum give hope it may eventually open in 2021. The practice won the contest to design the museum, which is set between the pyramids and Cairo, in 2003. The vast 24,000 square metres of gallery space negotiate the level change between a valley and plateau, and features facades and landscaping with a triangular motif. 

Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners' H-Farm building forms part of the experimental "tech start-up orientated education facility" H-Campus, which has primary, secondary and university students rub shoulders with tech start-ups, teachers and companies clustered together on a single site in Treviso. RSHP's building, completing in 2021, will provide a multi-purpose gathering space and features a sloping room that will integrate with the landscaping. 

Mies van der Rohe's iconic modernist masterpiece remained largely untouched from its inception in 1968 until 2012, when David Chipperfield Architects took on its restoration. The practice hopes to address "the damage, deficiencies and deficits of intensive use" within a sensitive modernisation process, which is to be revealed in 2021.  

Each of the 1,000 trees planted across Heatherwick's mixed-use development next to Shanghai's M50 arts district is raised on its own concrete podium. The planters are positioned at the corners of dozens of interlocking blocks and terracces that diminish in scale towards to the top of the building, giving the appearance of a tree-covered mountain.