LONDON
Architecture's biggest prizes tend to reward spectacle: the swooping museum, the record-breaking tower. The Soane Medal has taken a different line with its 2026 winner, Farshid Moussavi.
Sir John Soane's Museum in London announced on Monday that the British-Iranian architect has won this year's medal for what the jury called a "sustained and rigorous" contribution to architecture through building, teaching and writing. Moussavi, who founded Farshid Moussavi Architects in 2011 and is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, is the tenth winner since the award was created in 2017.
She will receive the medal at the Royal Academy in London on November 24.
Ethics Through Everyday Decisions
The jury, chaired by architect Amin Taha, framed the award as a statement about what good architecture is. "For nearly four decades, Farshid Moussavi has demonstrated that ethics in architecture is not a matter of proclamation but of practice," Taha said. He argued that a building's moral life lies in the countless large and small decisions that shape how people experience it.
"In a profession often tempted by spectacle on one side and resignation on the other, Moussavi charts a third path: attentiveness," he added. Taha said she teaches that architects cannot control how their buildings will be used or perceived, and that this uncertainty is "an ethical opening, an invitation to design with humility, curiosity and care for lives other than one's own."
That idea, that a building should be flexible enough for people to make it their own, runs through her work.
From Yokohama to Houston
Moussavi first drew international attention with Foreign Office Architects, the practice she co-founded with Alejandro Zaera-Polo. Its best-known building, the Yokohama International Port Terminal, completed in 2002, remains a landmark: a ferry terminal treated as a continuous, folding public landscape with a walkable roof. It is often cited as an early example of computer-aided design producing buildings that feel like terrain rather than boxes.
Since launching her own studio, Moussavi has worked across building types and scales. Her Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, a faceted, reflective volume, opened in 2012. The Ismaili Center in Houston, completed last year, is among her most ambitious civic buildings. In Paris she designed the Îlot 19 housing at La Défense-Nanterre, and in Montpellier the La Folie Divine apartment tower. Shoppers may know her interiors without realizing it: she designed Victoria Beckham's flagship store on Dover Street in London and Harrods' toy department.
The range is the point. Moussavi has consistently argued that there is no clean line between "serious" architecture and the shops, homes and public rooms where daily life happens.
The Writer and Teacher
The Soane jury stressed that her building, teaching and writing form one body of work. Her books, including The Function of Ornament and The Function of Form, examine how buildings produce effects and meanings for the people who use them, rather than treating style as surface decoration.
Her teaching career is equally broad. Born in Shiraz, Iran, in 1965, Moussavi studied at the University of Dundee, University College London and Harvard's GSD. She has led the Institute of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and taught at the Architectural Association in London, the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, the Hoger Architectuur Instituut Sint-Lucas in Ghent, UCLA, Princeton and Columbia. In 2022 she received the Jane Drew Prize for raising the profile of women in architecture.
In Her Words
Moussavi said the recognition carried special meaning because of Soane himself, a founder who understood "that architecture is never only about architecture." She described his house-museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields as one of the most precise arguments in architecture: that a building can be at once "a home, a practice, and a way of thinking about the world."
"What strikes me most is this refusal of separation: between the personal and the professional, between the aesthetic and the intellectual, between the building and its contents," she said. "These are questions that have preoccupied my own practice, teaching, and writing for a long time."
Why the Soane Medal Matters
Soane's museum created the medal to honor its founder and his belief that architecture matters in people's lives. Its recent choices have widened the definition of who counts as an architect: last year's medal went to artist and OMA co-founder Madelon Vriesendorp, and in 2024 it went to structural engineer Hanif Kara. Choosing Moussavi continues that line by rewarding a whole way of working rather than a single celebrated building.
The timing matters too. The profession is under pressure to cut carbon, reuse existing buildings and design for communities rather than skylines. This month's architecture headlines, from reuse-heavy award shortlists to debates over costly new museums, reflect that shift. An award that praises humility and care over spectacle fits that moment.
What This Means for Readers
For most people, architecture is not a monument you visit once. It is the lobby you cross every morning, the shop you browse, the apartment you come home to. Moussavi's core argument, that ethics lives in those everyday details such as light, circulation, flexibility and how a space welcomes different people, is a useful lens for anyone judging a new building in their neighborhood.
If you are in London, Sir John Soane's Museum, free to visit, is a good place to see the ideas the medal celebrates: a home, a studio and a collection packed into one extraordinary building.
The Final Word
Moussavi has spent nearly four decades insisting that buildings should serve the people inside them, not the egos of their designers. With the 2026 Soane Medal, one of London's most distinctive institutions has endorsed that view.
