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 2004 by partners Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office is an inter-disciplinary architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China. Neri&Hu works internationally providing architecture, interior, master planning, graphic, and product design services. Currently working on projects in many countries, Neri&Hu is composed of multi-cultural staff who speak over 30 different languages.  The diversity of the team reinforces a core vision for the practice: to respond to a global worldview incorporating overlapping design disciplines for a new paradigm in architecture.

Lyndon Neri is a Founding Partner of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an inter-disciplinary international architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China. In 2014, Wallpaper* announced Neri&Hu as 2014 Designer of The Year. In 2013, Mr. Neri was inducted into the U.S. Interior Design Hall of Fame with his partner Ms. Rossana Hu. The practice was the 2011 INSIDE Festival Overall Winner, won AR Awards for Emerging Architecture 2010 by Architectural Review and was selected as one of the Design Vanguards in 2009 by Architectural Record. Mr. Neri received a Master of Architecture at Harvard University and a Bachelor of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to starting his own practice with partner Rossana Hu, he was the Director for Projects in Asia and an Associate for Michael Graves & Associates in Princeton for over 10 years, and also worked in New York City for various architectural firms.

Rossana Hu is a Founding Partner of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an inter-disciplinary international architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China. In 2014, Wallpaper* announced Neri&Hu as 2014 Designer of The Year. In 2013, Mr. Neri was inducted into the U.S. Interior Design Hall of Fame with his partner Ms. Rossana Hu. The practice was the 2011 INSIDE Festival Overall Winner, won AR Awards for Emerging Architecture 2010 by Architectural Review and was selected as one of the Design Vanguards in 2009 by Architectural Record. Ms. Hu received a Master of Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Music from the University of California at Berkeley. Before establishing Neri&Hu with her partner Lyndon Neri, Ms. Hu worked for Michael Graves & Associates, Ralph Lerner Architect in Princeton, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in New York City, and The Architects Collaborative (TAC) in San Francisco.

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.