Farshid Moussavi wins 2025 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize

Farshid Moussavi was born in Iran in 1965. She studied architecture at Dundee University, University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture and Harvard Graduate School of Design. She worked at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) before co-founding Foreign Office Architects (FOA) in 1995 where she worked until its demerger in May 2011. 

She is a Professor in the Practice of Architecture at Harvard University, USA. She published "The Function of Ornament" in 2006, based on her research and teaching at Harvard, and the second volume, "The Function of Forms", in 2009.

Moussavi has also been a visiting professor at UCLA, Columbia and Princeton, and head of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As well as serving on numerous international design juries, she is a trustee of the Whitechapel Gallery and Architecture Foundation in London and a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.

Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FAM)

Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, founded in 2006 by partners Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office is an inter-disciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China. The practice’s burgeoning global portfolio includes commissions ranging from master planning and architecture to interior design, installation, furniture, product, branding and graphic works. Currently working on projects in many countries, Neri&Hu is composed of multi-cultural staff who speak over 30 different languages.  The team's diversity reinforces a core vision for the practice: to respond to a global worldview, incorporating overlapping design disciplines for a new architectural paradigm.

Neri&Hu’s location is purposeful. With Shanghai considered a new global frontier, Neri&Hu is in the immediate center of this contemporary chaos. The city’s cultural, urban, and historic contexts function as a point of departure for design inquiries that span across a wide spectrum of scales. Furthermore, Neri&Hu has expanded the conventional boundaries of practice to include complementary disciplines. A critical probing into the specificities of program, site, function, and history is essential to the creation of rigorous work. Based on research, Neri&Hu anchors its ethos on the dynamic interaction of experience, detail, material, form, and light rather than conforming to a formulaic style.

Lyndon Neri, Honorary FAIA, co-founded Neri&Hu Design and Research Office with Rossana Hu in 2006, an inter-disciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai. Neri received his Master of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. Alongside his design practice, Neri has been deeply committed to architectural education and has taught and lectured at numerous universities. He was appointed as Visiting Faculty at Princeton University School of Architecture for the spring semesters of 2024 and 2025. Neri was appointed the Howard Friedman Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, the Design Critic in 2023 and the John C. Portman Design Critic in Architecture in 2019 and 2021 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 2022 and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor Chair in 2018 at the Yale School of Architecture. Neri co-authored and edited Persistence of Vision: Shanghai Architects in Dialogue, published by MCCM Creations in 2007. In 2017, his first monograph, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, was published by Park Books. In 2021, the second monograph, Thresholds: Space, Time and Practice, was published by Thames & Hudson, and the Chinese edition was translated and published in 2023 by Guangxi Normal University Press. Neri was elevated to Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 2025.

Rossana Hu co-founded Neri&Hu Design and Research Office with Lyndon Neri in 2006, an inter-disciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai. Hu received her Master of Architecture and Urban Planning at Princeton University and her Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, with a minor in music.

Alongside her design practice, Hu has been deeply committed to architectural education and has taught and lectured at numerous universities. Hu was appointed the Howard Friedman Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, the Design Critic in 2023 and the John C. Portman Design Critic in Architecture in 2019 and 2021 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor in 2022 and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor Chair in 2018 at the Yale School of Architecture. Hu was appointed as Chair of the Department of Architecture at Tongji University in 2021 and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, effective spring semester 2024.

Office for Political Innovation (OFFPOLINN) es un estudio de arquitectura internacional, con sede en Nueva York y Madrid, que trabaja en la intersección del diseño, la investigación y las prácticas ambientales críticas. La oficina desarrolla proyectos que transcurren a través de escalas y medios, con el objetivo de integrar la inclusividad en el entorno construido.

Actualmente, la oficina trabaja en proyectos para Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, CA2M, Real Madrid, Colegio Reggio y Grupo La Musa; y entre sus clientes se incluyen Lafayette Anticipations, Victoria & Albert Museum, Museum of Modern Art MoMA, Art Institute of Chicago, Fundación Cisneros, Empresa Municipal de la Vivienda y Suelo de Madrid, Matadero-Madrid, Obispado de Plasencia, Feria ARCO, London Design Museum, Power Station of Art (Shanghai), Fundació Mies van der Rohe y MAK Vienna.

En 2016, OFFPOLINN recibió el Premio Frederick Kiesler de Arquitectura y Artes de la Ciudad de Viena. El estudio también ha sido galardonado con el LEÓN DE PLATA al Mejor Proyecto de Investigación en la 14.ª Bienal de Venecia y con el Premio Dionisio Hernández Gil.

La obra de OFFPOLINN forma parte de las colecciones del MoMA y del Instituto de Arte de Chicago, entre muchas otras, y ha sido objeto de exposiciones individuales en el MoMA, el MoMA PS1, el MAK de Viena, la Universidad de Princeton, el Centro de Arte Contemporáneo RED CAT Cal Arts de Los Ángeles, la Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine de París y Tabacalera de Madrid. También se ha exhibido en el Instituto de Arte de Chicago, el Zentrum für Kunst und Medien ZKM (Karlsruhe), el Museo de Diseño de Londres, la Whitechapel Gallery (Londres), el Z33 (Hasselt), el Museo Suizo de Arquitectura (Basilea), las trienales de arquitectura de Lisboa y Oslo, y las bienales de arquitectura de Venecia, Chicago, Gwanju, São Paulo, Santiago de Chile y Seúl.

Andrés Jaque, holds a Ph.D. in architecture. He is the founder of the Office for Political Innovation, an international architectural practice, based in New York and Madrid, working at the intersection of design, research, and critical environmental practices.. He is also the Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, New York.

In 2014 he received the Silver Lion at the 14th Mostra Internazionale di Architettura, Biennale di Venezia.

He is the author of award-winning projects such as Plasencia Clergy House (Dionisio Hernández Gil Prize), House in Never Never Land (Mies Van der Rohe European Union Award's finalist), TUPPER HOME (X Bienal Española de Arquitectura y Urbanismo), or ESCARAVOX (COAM Award 2013). He has also developed architectural performances as well as installations that question political frameworks through architectural practice; including IKEA Disobedients (MoMA Collection, 2011); PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society (Mies Barcelona Pavilion, 2012) or Superpowers of Ten (Lisbon Triennale, 2014).

Andrés Jaque is a Professor of Advanced Design at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) and Visiting Professor at Princeton University's School of Architecture.

Mark Antony Wigley is a New Zealand-born architect, author, and (since 2004 until 2014) Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York, USA.

In 2005, Wigley founded Volume Magazine together with Rem Koolhaas and Ole Bouman. A collaborative project by Archis (Amsterdam), AMO Rotterdam and C-lab (Columbia University NY), Volume Magazine is an experimental think tank focusing on the process of spatial and cultural reflexivity. The magazine aims to explore "beyond architecture’s definition of 'making buildings'" by presenting global views on architecture and design, broader attitudes to social structures and created environments; and embodies progressive journalism.

Created and founded in collaboration with Brett Steele the Institute of Failure; essentially an academic institution for the instruction and theory of failure (as opposed to success).

An accomplished scholar and design teacher, Mark Wigley has written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture and is the author of Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998); White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995); and The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (1993). He co-edited The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationalist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (2001). Wigley has served as curator for widely attended exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Witte de With Museum, Rotterdam. He received both his Bachelor of Architecture (1979) and his Ph.D. (1987) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Young & Ayata formed a partnership in New York in 2008 to explore the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities of architecture and urbanism. The practice is dedicated to both built commissions and experimental research. The practice views the reality of contemporary building as a provocation for architectural form, material and technology. In following these trajectories it is necessary to understand architecture in its historical processes. Michael Young and Kutan Ayata, both principals teach and view the educational experience as crucial to the continual development of architectural ideas.

Young & Ayata is one of two first prize winners in the International Competition for the New Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany. Recently, they were finalists in the 2015 MoMA YAP Program in Istanbul, Turkey. In 2014, the partners were the recipients of the Young Architects Prize from Architectural League of New York, their entry in the open international competition for the Dalseong Citizen's Gymnasium in South Korea received an honorable mention, and their submission for the Pamphlet Architecture 35 publication was also given an honorable mention. A manifesto titled "The Estranged Object: Realism in Art and Architecture", written by Michael Young with the projects of Young & Ayata was published in the Spring of 2015 by the Graham Foundation; an exhibition with the firm's work in relation to this publication was on display at the Graham Foundation in Chicago. In 2015, the Firm's work was also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art-New York, the Istanbul Modern and Princeton University.