Farshid Moussavi Wins 2026 Soane Medal

Farshid Moussavi has won the 2026 Sir John Soane Medal. The jury, chaired by architect Amin Taha and including curator Vicky Richardson, recognized Moussavi for her commitment to bridging practice and academia.

Moussavi founded Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA) and teaches as a professor at Harvard GSD. Her academic appointments span the Architectural Association, UCLA, Princeton University, and other schools.

In a statement, Moussavi framed the award through the legacy of the institution's founder. "To be recognised by an institution whose founder understood so clearly that architecture is never only about architecture is, for me, the most meaningful kind of acknowledgement, and one I receive with both delight and a sense of genuine connection to this place," she said.

She continued: "The Soane Museum has always felt to me like one of the most precise arguments in architecture: that a building can be simultaneously a home, a practice, and a way of thinking about the world, and that architecture is inseparable from the objects, histories, and ideas that surround it. 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. These are questions that have preoccupied my own practice, teaching, and writing for a long time."

The medal adds to a growing list of honors. In 2022, Moussavi received the Jane Drew and Ada Louise Huxtable Prizes. Last year, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award. FMA's built work includes Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art and the more recently completed Ismaili Center Houston.

Jury chair Taha cited the consistency of Moussavi's approach across her career. "For nearly four decades," he said, "Moussavi has demonstrated that ethics in architecture is not a matter of proclamation but of practice—that a building's moral life resides in the countless decisions, large and small, through which it shapes the everyday experience of those who use it."

Taha positioned Moussavi's work against the profession's polarizing tendencies. "In a profession often tempted by spectacle on one side and resignation on the other, Moussavi charts a third path: attentiveness," he said. "She teaches that architects cannot control how their buildings will be used or perceived, and that this uncertainty is not a limitation but an ethical opening, an invitation to design with humility, curiosity and care for lives other than one's own."

Richardson credited Moussavi's "intellectual curiosity" and the rootedness of her forward-looking buildings in "time and place." "Like Soane, she uses lectures to articulate architects' public responsibility for shaping and reshaping the world, while passionately advocating for the causes she believes in," Richardson said.

Richardson also highlighted Moussavi's scholarship on collective housing. "Through her research on social housing—which informed groundbreaking projects in Paris and Montpellier—she also championed the previously under-recognised French architect Renée Gailhoustet," she said. "This generous act brought renewed attention to an overlooked body of work that offers valuable lessons for the future of collective housing."

Madelon Vriesendorp held the medal in 2025. Moussavi's win extends a lineage of laureates whose work the Soane jury reads as continuous with the museum's own argument: that buildings, objects, and ideas form a single discipline.