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Mexican architect Frida Escobedo has been announced by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum as a winner of a 2026 National Design Award in the award program’s category for architecture. Escobedo’s namesake Mexico City studio joins recent past awardees including Michael Maltzan Architects, nARCHITECTS, and Rural Studio for its “meaningful contributions to the built environment that advance the understanding of spatial experiences.”

Frida Escobedo. Photo © Alex Trebus

The National Design Awards jury, chaired by Aric Chen, lauded Escobedo’s practice for producing varied projects across a range of scales and typologies—including multifamily residential buildings, temporary art installations and pavilions, hotels, renovations, and more—that each “explore overlooked aspects of the built environment, using simple forms to reveal the forces shaping collective identity and public space.” In addition to its built work, the studio is architect of several high-profile, in-progress cultural and civic commissions including the Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, set to open in 2030; the renovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, with lead architect and principal designer Moreau Kusunoki; and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Qatari capital of Doha.

Boca de Aqua, a sustainable hotel design by Escobedo in Bacalar, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Photo © César Béjar.

A rendering depicting the renovated public library at Centre Pompidou, Paris. Image courtesy Moreau Kusunoki and Frida Escobedo Studio

Joining Escobedo as winner of the architecture prize, are honorees in several other award categories, including Austin-based Ten Eyck Landscape Architecture, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forma (Climate Action), Charlap Hyman & Herrero (Interior Design), and New York–based architecture and research studio Mattaforma (Emerging Designer). Robert E. Paige, a multidisciplinary Chicago artist, textile designer, and arts educator (and SOM alumnus), was honored with the program’s 2026 Design Visionary award.

A full list of those honored by the 2026 National Design Awards can be found here.  A series of public conversations between the winners and Cooper Hewitt director Maria Nicano will kick off this spring.

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