Farshid Moussavi, the British-Iranian architect born in Shiraz, has won the 2026 Soane Medal, according to Dezeen. Announced on 28 September, the award recognises her work in building, teaching and writing. She is the 10th winner of the medal, which Sir John Soane’s Museum in London established in 2017, and this year’s jury was chaired by the architect Amin Taha.
The medal is due to be presented at the Royal Academy in London on 24 November. Moussavi described the award as "the most meaningful kind of acknowledgement", Dezeen reported. Previous winners include the artist Madelon Vriesendorp in 2025 and the structural engineer Hanif Kara in 2024. The list shows a medal that looks beyond buildings alone: one recent winner is best known as an artist, the other as an engineer.
The prize takes its name from Sir John Soane, the Georgian architect whose house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, is preserved as a museum. Its rooms are still filled with the antiquities, models, drawings and paintings he collected, and the house has long served as a place of study for architects. A medal from that house carries the idea that architecture is a matter of thinking as well as building.
From Shiraz to Harvard
Moussavi was born in Shiraz in 1965, in the Iranian city known for its gardens and for the poets Hafez and Saadi. Her studies took in the University of Dundee, University College London and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she is now a professor.
Teaching has run alongside her practice for much of her career. Before Harvard, she headed the Institute of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her writing has followed the same line of inquiry, in a series of books including The Function of Ornament, The Function of Form and The Function of Style, which look at how buildings communicate through their surfaces, structures and shapes.
A prize for building, teaching and writing suits an architect who has never kept the three apart. In 2022 she also received the Jane Drew Prize, which honours those who have raised the profile of women in architecture.
A terminal that became a landscape
Moussavi first came to wide attention at Foreign Office Architects, the London practice she co-founded with Alejandro Zaera-Polo. There she worked on the Yokohama International Port Terminal in Japan, completed in 2002. The building is known for its rolling timber deck: the roof rises and folds into a public space where people can walk, sit and look out over the harbour.
Culture and commerce
In 2011 Moussavi founded her own practice, Farshid Moussavi Architects, based in London. Its buildings, as listed by Dezeen, include the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, the Ismaili Center in Houston, which opened in 2025, the La Folie Divine apartments in Montpellier and the Îlot 19 housing at La Défense-Nanterre, near Paris. The geography is as wide as the programme: the United States, France and Britain, with Japan in the background from her years at Foreign Office Architects.
The list also has a strong thread of luxury retail. Moussavi designed the Victoria Beckham flagship store in London and the Harrods Toy Department. Few architects of her standing move so easily between a museum, a cultural centre, apartment buildings and a department store, and her books on ornament and style read differently once that range is clear. In a shop, surface and pattern are how a brand speaks to its customers, and her writing treats them as seriously as any other part of architecture.
For readers who know London’s great stores, the Harrods commission shows how far that range extends. A toy department is built for families and for wonder, and it asks for the same care in materials, light and movement as any civic building.
Ethics in architecture is not a matter of proclamation but of practice
Amin Taha, chair of the Soane Medal jury
Ethics in practice
The jury’s chair framed the award in moral terms. "Ethics in architecture is not a matter of proclamation but of practice," Amin Taha said, as quoted by Dezeen. His words point to a body of work judged by what it does for the people who use it, in housing, public institutions and shops alike, as much as by what it says.
For readers in the Arab region, Moussavi’s path is also a reminder of how much the wider Middle East has given to the profession. Like Zaha Hadid, who was born in Baghdad, she built her career in London and took it around the world, and like Hadid she has combined building with teaching.
What comes next
The medal is scheduled to be presented at the Royal Academy on 24 November. Dezeen did not name any current Gulf projects by Farshid Moussavi Architects, but the award brings fresh attention to a practice whose work runs from Houston and Cleveland to Paris, Montpellier and the luxury floors of London. It also honours an architect for whom a building, a lecture and a book are parts of the same work.
Sources: Dezeen