Farshid Moussavi, professor in practice of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), has received the 2026 Soane Medal. Sir John Soane’s Museum in London gives the award each year to encourage a better understanding of the central importance of architecture in people’s lives. Moussavi will receive the medal and give the Soane Medal Lecture at the Royal Academy in London on November 24, 2026.
“To be recognized by an institution whose founder understood so clearly that architecture is never only about architecture is, for me, the most meaningful kind of acknowledgement,” Moussavi said. She added that the questions the Soane Museum raises “have preoccupied my own practice, teaching, and writing for a long time.”
Moussavi received her MArch from the GSD in 1991 and has taught at the school for many years. She founded Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA) in 2011, with offices in London and Paris. The practice’s recent projects include the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; La Folie Divine apartments in Montpellier; Îlot 19, a multi-tenure housing development at La Défense–Nanterre; and the Ismaili Center Houston, completed in November 2025. She has written four books, most recently Architecture and Micropolitics (Park Books, 2022).
Amin Taha, chair of the Soane Medal jury, said that for nearly four decades Moussavi “has demonstrated that ethics in architecture is not a matter of proclamation but of practice.” The jury cited her “sustained and rigorous inquiry, pursued simultaneously through building, teaching and writing.”
That inquiry has shaped her work at the GSD. In 2024 Moussavi curated Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art in the Druker Design Gallery. The exhibition presented construction coordination drawings, the documents architects use to direct the builders, engineers, and trades who realize their designs. It made the case that architecture, unlike painting or sculpture, is an art made through instructions carried out by others. The project was also featured Harvard Design Magazine with a visual folio of the same name in “Instruments of Service,” issue 52. A publication that expands the project is forthcoming from Harvard Design Press.
Moussavi’s research on housing, a subject she has pursued in both practice and teaching, is also central to her work at the school. In the Harvard Design Magazine roundtable “What’s in a Home: Reconsidering the Fundamentals of Housing”, she joined Stan Allen and Toni L. Griffin to discuss her GSD courses “Housing as an Ecology of Care” and “Housing Matters.” She described home as “less a kind of fixed object or typology, and more a condition of care and interdependence.” Moussavi is exploring these ideas in the fall 2026 option studio, “Housing As an Ecology of Care: From Blank Type to Dwelling,” taught with Hanif Kara and Philip Denny. The studio focuses on the adaptive reuse of a Berlin department store.
Hanif Kara, Professor in Practice of Architectural Technology at the GSD, received the Soane Meda in 2024. Past Soane Medal recipients include Madelon Vriesendorp, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, Peter Barber, Marina Tabassum, Denise Scott Brown, Kenneth Frampton, and Rafael Moneo.
