The Institut du monde arabe (IMA) in Paris has named Salima Naji the winner of the Grand Prix at the fourth edition of its Prix du design. The announcement came on the evening of Wednesday 9 September 2026. The Moroccan architect and anthropologist was honoured for the Tiznit Heritage Interpretation Centre, a building of raw earth that stands at the foot of the city's historic ramparts in southern Morocco.
The jury was chaired by the Egyptian architect Shahira Fahmy. Twenty-six projects reached the final, five of them Moroccan, and the IMA's president, Anne-Claire Legendre, attended the ceremony. The finalists' work is on show at the institute in Paris until 20 September. The IMA created the prize in 2023.
Naji told the Moroccan news agency MAP that she was deeply moved and that the prize rewards 20 years of effort. She has also said that her work concerns the question of a heritage turned towards the future. It is a short description of a career spent restoring and building with the materials of the land itself.
The building in Tiznit
The centre brings together wood, stone, earth and tataoui, a traditional building technique. Naji said the building pays tribute to craftspeople. The jury said the project reactivates local materials and ancestral techniques through contemporary architecture.
That judgement points to what sets her apart. Raw earth is among the oldest building materials in Morocco's south, where the fortified villages known as ksour and the kasbahs of the Atlas and the pre-Saharan valleys were built from it. Concrete is now common across much of the region. A public building made of earth, beside the city's historic ramparts, makes the case for another course: that old methods can still serve a modern institution, and that the people who master them deserve credit.
From Rabat to the Atlas
Naji was born in Rabat in 1971, to a Moroccan father and a French mother. She studied architecture at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris-La Villette and anthropology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), and she holds a doctorate in social anthropology.
Her doctoral thesis, dated 2007 in the French thesis register, looked at the collective granaries and zawiyas of the Atlas and pre-Saharan Morocco. Its title was Les entrepôts de la baraka. The granaries were communal storehouses, and the zawiyas were religious lodges, so the subject sat exactly where building, belief and community meet. She later added postgraduate training in aesthetics, arts and image technologies, and then in the philosophy of art.
That double training explains her method. She approaches a ruined granary as an architect and as an anthropologist, asking how it was built and also who built it, who used it and why it mattered to them.
Twenty years in the south
Naji has been based in Tiznit since 2008 and has worked for around 20 years with stone, earth and tataoui. Her projects include the restoration of ksour, mosques, collective granaries and synagogues. She designed the Aït Ouabelli cultural centre in the province of Tata and an adobe archive centre in Tiznit. She also restored the kasbah of Agadir Oufella in Agadir, a project completed in 2023.
She has written as well as built. Her books include Portes du sud marocain (2003), Greniers collectifs de l'Atlas (2006), Art et architectures berbères du Maroc (second edition 2009) and Architectures du bien commun: pour une éthique de la préservation, published by MetisPresse in Geneva in 2019. The last title states her position plainly: preservation, in her view, is a question of ethics as well as technique.
She describes her approach with a coined term, paléo-innovation. The word joins the very old with the new, and it fits work that treats ancestral know-how as a living source of ideas, not as a museum subject.
Recognition before Paris
The Paris prize follows a run of earlier honours. Naji received the Fondation EDF Jeunes Architectes prize in June 2004, and in 2018 France made her a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In September 2024 the Académie d'architecture in Paris presented her with its Grande Médaille d'Or, the academy's highest distinction. She told Le Matin at the time that it was a consecration for her as a Moroccan and African architect.
Why it matters in the Gulf
The 2026 laureates give the prize a regional character. Along with Naji, the list includes the Saudi designer Aseel Alamoudi and two projects made in AlUla, and the Qatar News Agency carried the IMA's announcement on 11 September, naming Studio Salima Naji as winner of the main prize.
For readers in the Gulf, her practice has a clear echo. Earth and stone are central to how AlUla, Diriyah and Oman's mud-brick towns present their own heritage, and each faces the same question that Naji has pursued in Tiznit: how to restore and build in ways that respect local materials, local climate and local craft. Her answer, tested over two decades, is to start with the people who know the material and to let them lead.
What the Grand Prix recognises, then, is a method more than a single building. The Tiznit centre is the most visible result, but the work that led to it was done in granaries, kasbahs and village mosques, by an architect who chose to settle in the south and stay there.
Sources: Le Matin, TelQuel, Time Out Paris, Qatar News Agency, Le Matin (Académie d’architecture)