xmasGreeting.run()

Throughout 2025, we at Tengbom have moved across the entire creative spectrum. We’ve worked closely with clients and users, students and developers, municipalities and colleagues – always navigating between inherited legacies and future needs. But above all, we’ve been thinking and exploring. Broadly, and together. Because that’s where our projects begin.

It’s easy to talk about creativity as something vague and fluffy. We don’t do that. To us, it’s a method. A mindset. A way to solve real challenges – whether it’s about creating a space where more people feel welcome, transforming instead of building new, or thinking one step further even when everyone else seems to agree.

And sometimes, it means building a rhyme calculator.

This year, our colleague Andreas Nordström teamed up with AI to code the base of a digital rhyme machine – one that, with some success (and some confusion), delivers rhymes for everything from candy to socks. We see it as a nod to something bigger. That creativity doesn’t need to be serious to be important. It just needs room to exist, for goodness’ sake.

“Creativity is born from other creativity. But inspiration is never a clean transfer: we filter, misinterpret and mix things up. We hear one thing and understand another, and in that gap, new ideas emerge. In the misunderstandings of the creative game of whispers, masterpieces can be born.”

/ Andreas Nordström, Head of Competitions at Tengbom

If we’ve learnt anything this year, it’s that the best architecture doesn’t begin with regulations – it begins with a bold idea that’s allowed to take flight. It’s when we make space for more ideas, more voices, and more out-of-line sketches that we find new ways to create value for people and planet. For real.

Soon, we’ll be wrapping up 2025. We’re leaving some projects in progress, some just getting started, and a whole bunch in that glorious space between chaos and clarity. But before the mulled wine comes out, we want to say thank you.

To you who’ve worked with us. Challenged us. Trusted us to think freely, together. We’ll see you again in 2026 – at a table, in a conversation, on a building site, or in something entirely new we can’t yet imagine.

This year’s Christmas donation goes to UNICEF and their work for children around the world.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Tengbom.