The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced its 2026 Awards in Architecture recipients.
The Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize was awarded to Junya Ishigami. Four other awards went to Hervé Descottes, Ultramoderne, Keller Easterling, and K. Michael Hays.
Separately, Mónica Ponce de León was named as a newly elected member of the historic New York City organization founded in 1898.
The Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize was established in 1955. It has since expanded to include four Arts and Letters Awards each year to recognize “practicing architects and those who have contributed to the field through other mediums of expression.”
The 2026 Brunner Memorial Prize winner has a varied oeuvre. In 2019 Ishigami designed the Serpentine Pavilion and, more recently, the Zaishui Art Museum in China, in which environment and architecture are read as one.
The Tokyo-based architect was awarded a cash prize of $20,000, as the 2026 Brunner Memorial Prize recipient.
The other four winners—a roster composed of practicing designers, historians, and theorists—each received cash prizes of $10,000.
The winners of the 2026 Architecture Award are as follows:
Hervé Descottes is a New York-based lighting designer who served as a juror in AN’s 2026 Best of Practice Awards. Descottes founded L’Observatoire International.
L’Observatoire International has contributed to the Frick Collection; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; British Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and other large cultural institutions.
Aaron Forrest and Yasmin Vobis cofounded Ultramoderne, a Providence, Rhode Island–based architecture and design practice, in 2013. The firm’s portfolio includes Friendship, a Providence duplex with a black corrugated metal facade.
In addition to housing, Ultramoderne has also worked on myriad cultural projects, including gallery spaces and pavilions.
Keller Easterling is a professor at Yale School of Architecture, and is known for her best selling books such as Organization Space and Extrastatecraft. Both works examine the politics of infrastructure.
K. Michael Hays teaches architectural theory at Harvard GSD and has published texts on Ludwig Hilberseimer, Mies van der Rohe, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, and John Hejduk.
Meejin Yoon chaired the 2026 Awards in Architecture jury. The committee included Marlon Blackwell, Elizabeth Diller, Steven Holl, Thom Mayne, Toshiko Mori, Laurie Olin, Annabelle Selldorf, and Nader Tehrani.
To celebrate the winners, awards will be presented at Arts and Letters’ annual ceremonial in May, along with its art, literature, and music awards.
Last year’s Brunner Memorial Prize winner was Farshid Moussavi, and the year before that it was SelgasCano.
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