Irish architect, educator, and author Níall McLaughlin has been named the 2026 Royal Gold Medal for Architecture recipient. RIBA credited McLaughlin’s body of work with displaying a connection to “place, material, craft, light, and form.”
SANAA cofounder Kazuyo Sejima, last year’s Royal Gold Medal winner, served on the jury chaired by Chris Williamson and rounded out by Anna Liu, Isabel Allen, and Victoria Farrow.
Williamson called McLaughlin “an outstanding role model for young architects” before affirming “his designs share a sense of care and grace that represent the very best of architecture.”
McLaughlin was recognized by RIBA for his 30 years in practice, resulting in projects like the Alzheimer’s Respite Centre in Dublin, Bishop Edward King Chapel in Oxford, New Library Magdalene College at Cambridge University, and renovation work on Darbishire Place, a council housing estate.
In a statement, McLaughlin thanked his team at Níall McLaughlin Architects. “Through practice,” he said in a statement, “we have learned that architecture is not the production of singular objects, but an ongoing performance of development, alteration, and reinvention through lived experience.”
“At a time of accelerating technological change in design and construction,” McLaughlin continued, “we continue to insist on the human rituals and material practices at the heart of our discipline. Building is an act, not an object. Architecture lies in its making and the way that it shapes learning, culture, and communal life.”
In 1962, McLaughlin was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He later studied architecture at University College Dublin and worked for Scott Tallon Walker before launching his own London-based studio in 1990. He took up a series of teaching positions at the Bartlett, UCLA, and Yale.
Past accolades McLaughlin earned include the RIBA Charles Jencks Award in 2016 for Simultaneous Contribution to Theory and Practice. Jencks personally commended McLaughlin for his “commitment to architecture as an art and professional practice.”
McLaughlin’s firm was shortlisted multiple times before it won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2022 with Magdalene College Library, a campus building defined by gabled pitched roofs, brickwork, timber interiors, bay windows, and chimneys.
On April 30 McLaughlin will give a lecture in London, hosted by RIBA.
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