Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp, co-founder of OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), has been awarded the 2025 Soane Medal by Sir John Soane’s Museum in recognition of her seminal contributions to architectural representation and the public’s understanding of architecture.
Born in 1945 in the Netherlands, Vriesendorp studied at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and later at Central Saint Martins in London. In 1972, she moved to New York and, in 1975, co-founded OMA together with Rem Koolhaas and Elia & Zoe Zenghelis. Many of her early works were closely tied to OMA’s identity. She produced paintings and illustrations used in magazine and book covers, as well as in competition entries, helping to articulate the firm’s visual and theoretical sensibilities.
A key work that remains iconic is Flagrant Delit, a surreal and provocative painting in which the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building lie in bed together, illuminated by the torch of the Statue of Liberty. This image was used for the cover of Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1978) and has come to function as a visual manifesto of ideas about urban form, fantasy, and architectural storytelling.
In addition to her two-dimensional works, Vriesendorp’s collaborations and projects extended into murals (for example, for the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague, now demolished), animations (in partnership with filmmaker Teri Wehn-Damisch), and many exhibitions of her wider body of work. Exhibitions like World of Madelon Vriesendorp (2008) have toured prominent architecture- and art-centered venues, including London’s Architectural Association, Aedes Berlin, the Venice Biennale, and the Swiss Architectural Museum.
The Soane Medal has been awarded annually by Sir John Soane’s Museum since 2017 to individuals who have made a significant contribution to architecture through theory, practice, criticism, and education, and enhanced the public’s understanding of architecture.
The 2025 jury praised Vriesendorp’s surrealist, mystical, and comedic images for being “playful and memorable” and for helping to make complex ideas of modern and postmodern architecture accessible. Her visual metaphors, buildings with human traits, fantasy, and wit, are credited with influencing both architects and students. She is the first UK-based woman to receive the Soane Medal.
Vriesendorp will formally receive the medal on 18 November 2025 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where she will also give a public lecture on the role of the artist in architecture.
The awarding of the Soane Medal to Madelon Vriesendorp underlines a broader recognition of the role of visual imagination in architecture, not just in design and built form, but also in narrative, metaphor, and in shaping how architectural theory is understood by wider audiences. Her work bridges art and architecture; it gives life to abstract ideas (such as city form, modernism, and the latent meanings of monuments) through visual allegory.
This is also part of a corrective turn in architectural history and criticism, bringing into focus contributions that have often been overshadowed. In many earlier narratives, her paintings were attributed (incorrectly or incompletely) to more dominant names (e.g., Koolhaas), and only in recent years has her influence been more fully acknowledged.
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