There’s a long shadow hanging over the AIA Gold Medal for 2015. Yesterday, the institute announced that Moshe Safdie is next year’s winner—a surprise for those who were expecting Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to get the prize. This was the first year Venturi and Scott Brown were jointly eligible because of a change in the rules to allow two architects to win the award together. That change was made in the wake of the movement last year to amend the 1991 Pritzker Prize, which was awarded solely to Venturi and never acknowledged Scott Brown’s role in their body of work.

Venturi and Scott Brown were one of the three finalists considered for the Gold Medal this year, in what a source described as a close vote. “You can cogitate all you like about why it happened,” Denise Scott Brown said after learning that the couple had lost. “I’ve had very long years of not getting the job—and not getting this and that—and it’s not ripping my flesh off.”