American Academy of Arts & Letters Reveals 2026 Architecture Award Honorees
The Zaishui Art Museum (2023) in Rizhao, China, by 2026 Brunner Memorial Prize winner Junya Ishigami.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced this month that five recipients have been honored with 2026 Architecture Awards. Among them are the $20,000 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, considered the New York–based honor society’s flagship distinction, and four Arts and Letters Awards worth $10,000 each.
Winning the Brunner Memorial Prize, which recognizes architects of any nationality who have made a significant contribution to architecture as an art, is Japanese architect Junya Ishigami. Following a stint at SANAA, Ishigami founded his Tokyo-based practice in 2004 and has since won several international accolades, including the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture (2010), the Swiss Architectural Prize (2016), and Austria’s Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture & the Arts (2024). His work has appeared in RECORD on numerous occasions, most recently with the Zaishui Art Museum in China’s Shandong province and the public plaza at the Kanagawa Institute of Technology in Japan. Other high-profile commissions include the Japanese Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion in London.
Receiving Arts and Letters Awards for work that is “characterized by a strong personal direction,” are Ultramoderne, an 11-year-old architectural practice founded by Yasmin Vobis and Aaron Forrest with offices Providence, Rhode Island, and Berkeley, California, and French lighting designer Hervé Descottes of L'Observatoire International.
Recognized with an Arts and Letters Award for “exploring ideas in architecture through any medium or expression” is Keller Easterling, a writer, architect, and professor at the Yale School of Architecture, where she directs the Master of Environmental Design program. Also honored is K. Michael Hays, an architectural historian and educator based at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
The 2026 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, Marlon Blackwell, Elizabeth Diller, Steven Holl, Thom Mayne, Toshiko Mori, Annabelle Selldorf, Laurie Olin, and Nader Tehrani.
The architecture awards will be presented alongside the art, literature, and music awards at Arts and Letters’ annual ceremony in May. The honor society is now also showing its spring exhibitions, through July 3, at its longtime home at Audubon Terrace in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.
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