Architecture is never only about the building that stands in front of you. It is also about the decisions that shaped it, the people who will use it, and the ideas that travel between the drawing board, the classroom, and the page. That understanding sits at the center of Farshid Moussavi’s work, and it is the reason she has been awarded the 2026 Soane Medal.
The medal, given annually by Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, recognizes contributions that deepen the public understanding of architecture’s place in everyday life. Moussavi becomes the tenth recipient since the award was established in 2017. She will receive the medal and deliver the Soane Medal Lecture at the Royal Academy on 24 November 2026.
A practice that refuses separation
Jury chair Amin Taha described Moussavi’s contribution with unusual precision. For nearly four decades, he said, she has shown that ethics in architecture is not a matter of proclamation but of practice. A building’s moral life, in this view, resides in the countless large and small decisions through which it shapes the experience of those who use it. The jury awarded her the medal for the sustained and rigorous inquiry she has pursued simultaneously through building, teaching and writing.
That refusal of separation runs through Moussavi’s own response to the honor. She noted that Sir John Soane’s Museum has always felt like one of the most precise arguments in architecture: a building that can be at once a home, a practice and a way of thinking about the world. Architecture, in her reading, is inseparable from the objects, histories and ideas that surround it. The questions that occupy the museum are the same ones that have preoccupied her own work for a long time.
From practice to teaching and back
Moussavi founded her firm in 2011, with offices in London and Paris. Before that, she was a partner at Foreign Office Architects. Her built work ranges across cultural, commercial, and residential projects. Notable completed buildings include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, La Folie Divine apartments in Montpellier, the Îlot 19 housing development at La Défense-Nanterre in Paris, and the Harrods Toy Department in London. She also designed Victoria Beckham’s flagship store in Mayfair.
Her largest project to date is the Ismaili Center Houston, which she won through an international competition and completed in late 2025. The building continues her interest in how architecture can hold complex programs while remaining attentive to the daily life of its users.
Alongside practice, Moussavi has maintained a continuous academic presence. She is a Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she received her MArch in 1991. She has also taught at the Architectural Association, the Berlage Institute, UCLA, Princeton, Columbia, and other schools. Her research has examined housing, architectural production, and the relationship between design intention and construction reality.
In 2024, she curated the exhibition “Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art” at the GSD’s Druker Design Gallery, focusing on construction coordination drawings as the medium through which ideas become buildings.
Writing as another form of practice
Moussavi is the author of four books. The most recent, Architecture and Micropolitics, published by Park Books in 2022, extends her long-standing interest in the small-scale decisions and spatial negotiations that shape how buildings are lived in. Earlier volumes explored ornament, the function of form, and the politics of architectural style. Across these texts, she treats writing not as commentary on practice but as a parallel mode of investigation.
This combination of building, teaching and writing is what the Soane Medal specifically recognizes. Previous winners have included figures whose work likewise crossed categories: Madelon Vriesendorp last year, structural engineer Hanif Kara in 2024, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, Peter Barber, Marina Tabassum, Denise Scott Brown, Kenneth Frampton and Rafael Moneo. The list suggests an award that values sustained cultural contribution over any single spectacular project.
Style, ethics and everyday experience
Moussavi’s work has often been noted for its formal clarity and material precision. Yet the jury’s language points less to aesthetic signature and more to the ethical dimension of ordinary architectural choices. How a threshold is detailed, how light enters a room, how public and private zones are negotiated, how construction documents transmit intention, these are the sites where architecture either supports or constrains daily life. Moussavi’s practice, teaching, and writing keep returning to those sites.
In 2022, she received the Jane Drew Prize for elevating the profile of women in architecture, along with the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize. More recently, she was recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Soane Medal adds a different kind of recognition: one that places her work in a lineage concerned with architecture’s public and cultural role rather than with professional success alone.
An open lecture and a continuing argument
The medal comes with a public lecture. On 24 November at the Royal Academy, Moussavi will address an audience that includes both specialists and anyone interested in how buildings shape experience. The openness of the event continues the museum’s founding interest in making architecture legible and important to a wider public.
For Moussavi, the award seems less a culmination than a confirmation of a long-held position. Architecture, she suggests, is never only about architecture. It is about the lives it organizes, the ideas it carries, and the careful work of keeping practice, thought, and teaching in conversation with one another.
The 2026 Soane Medal recognizes someone who has kept that conversation rigorous and continuous for nearly four decades.
