American Academy of Arts and Letters Names 2025 Architecture Award Honorees
The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced this week that five recipients, including two design duos, have been honored with 2025 Architecture Awards, including the New York–based honor society’s flagship architecture award, the $20,000 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, and four Arts and Letters Awards worth $10,000 each.
Winning the Brunner Prize, which recognizes architects of any nationality who have made a significant contribution to architecture as an art is British architect and educator Farshid Moussavi. Previously co-founder of Foreign Office Architects (FOA) alongside Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Iranian-born Moussavi established London-based Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA) in 2011 and is currently a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her past accolades include the 2022 Jane Drew Prize and several RIBA awards for her work with FOA and FMA. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2018.
Receiving Arts and Letters Awards for work that is “characterized by a strong personal direction,” are a trio of former RECORD Design Vanguards: Spanish architect and educator Andrés Jaque (2014); Michael Young and Kutan Ayata (2016) of Brooklyn’s Young & Ayata; and Lyndon Neri and Rosanna Hu (2018) of Shanghai-based practice Neri&Hu Design and Research Office. Neri, Hu, and Jaque, who is founder of Office for Political Innovation and dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), were also all featured presenters at RECORD’s 2023 Innovation Conference in New York.
Also recognized with an Arts and Letters Award for “exploring ideas in architecture through any medium or expression” is New Zealand-born, United States–based architect and educator Mark Wigley, whose partner Beatriz Colomina, was among the Academy’s 2024 honorees. Like Jaque, Wigley is known for his curatorial work (in 1988, he co-curated the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture with Philip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) and served as dean of GSAPP (2004–2014).
The 2025 Architecture Awards recipients were chosen from a group of individuals and practices nominated by the members of Arts and Letters. Comprising the selection committee were chair Meejin Yoon, Elizabeth Diller, Michael Maltzan, Toshiko Mori, Annabelle Selldorf, and Nader Tehrani. Diller’s late partner in life and practice, Ricardo Scofidio, was named as one of 21 newly elected members of the Academy in February of this year.
The architecture awards will be presented alongside the art, literature, and music awards at Arts and Letters’ annual ceremony in May.
