Continuing a conversation initiated through Beyond the Prize at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Beyond Recognition brings six international architecture awards back into dialogue.

How do we recognise what architecture is worth? This is a question that every architectural award sets out to answer. Firstly, a building is always and at least two things at once. There is the tangible building, as accomplished on site: the material, the structure, the specifications, the formal decisions that can be drawn, costed, regulated and photographed. And then there is the intangible building, which is what the thing accomplishes once standing — the uses a community makes of it, the ecologies that gather around it, the encounters it makes possible or forecloses.

Which of these architectures do we reward with acclaim, prizes, recognitions? A building is usually commissioned for a stated purpose yet more often than not, it begins to serve a constellation of adjacent and radiating forms of use and affordance, accreting meaning much as the hull of a boat accretes barnacles. Designers can anticipate a great deal of this. What they cannot specify is the thing a place gathers unto itself: its atmosphere, its hold on memory, what the Romans were content to call the *genius loci* — that primordial ghost of a place that stays in body and mind.

The indomitable Monica Pidgeon, editor of the journal Architectural Design from 1941–75 (and role model here at Koozarch), recognised the common ground between awards, events like World Congress for the International Union of Architects (UIA World Congress) and critical publications. The shared privilege is in providing a platform for recognition, holding up the brightest, sharpest and most critically impactful practitioners in the field. Indeed, UIA is the only architectural organisation to be recognised by the UN and UNESCO. Therefore as a platform, the UIA World Congress offers an unparalleled opportunity to recognise architectural value in relation to questions of impact and planetary urgencies.

At the last Venice Biennale of architecture, six awarding bodies — namely, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the Holcim Award for Sustainable Construction, the Ammodo Architecture Award, the OBEL Award, the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize and the EUmies Award for Contemporary Architecture — hosted a conversation on this very subject, entitled Beyond the Prize. Questions revolved around who or what should be rewarded, and if the immeasurable quantum of purpose should trump metrics of performance. The opportunity of candid conversation between these six influential awards allows an open discussion around what architectural recognition — particularly the recognition conferred by awards — really means.

Touching the tangible

In the short term, recognition can be measured, and translates into something tangible. It produces visibility which, in the contemporary economy of the discipline, is a currency in its own right. Firstly, a set of nominations allows one to distil and infer a set of architectural and even societal values prevalent at any given time. Awards therefore work projectively: not merely an ornament added once a project is safely complete, but a beacon pointing the discipline towards the kinds of practice deemed worthy of attention. Some prizes make this explicit, directing funds towards a project still in progress, empowering communities and financing the work rather than merely crowning it. Recognition, in this register, is less a reward for what has been done than an investment in what might happen next.

This critical turn is telling: the question moves from the value of a project towards its embedded values. If the awards of a given moment compose a portrait of its priorities, then that portrait is changing in front of us. Across the most highly-regarded awarding bodies, there is a discernible turn away from the fetishised object and the lone author, and towards a broader, more distributed sense of what architectural achievement consists of. Sustainability, social agency, the conditions of labour, the contributions of clients and communities and institutions: these have migrated from the margins of the conversation into the criteria themselves.

Recognition is complicated, too, by the ever widening definition of practice. Expanding beyond construction, architects, spatial practitioners and communities engage with the production of valuable research, responsive policies, and impactful protocols — expanding, in short, what we are prepared to count as architectural work. Such forms of practice are less the work of an architectural auteur than of a conductor, coordinating forces it cannot fully control. As such, recognition has begun to reach beyond completed buildings to supporting projects in process, research methodologies and even patents. The animating question is no longer focussed on what a building looks like — or whether it is built at all — but rather how architecture operates, and in whose interest.

There is a potential self-congratulatory gloss to this story. The honest truth is that recognition frequently lags behind the ethics it professes. A prize may celebrate low-carbon construction while flying its shortlisted practices across continents to a gala; it may honour community-led work while reserving its jury seats for the same metropolitan institutions; it may reward buildings in the ‘global South’ while drawing its funding and its gaze from axes of power. This is not a reason to be cynical about prizes — it is a reason to hold them to the standard they themselves have set. The awards worth defending are those willing to function as sites of inquiry rather than mere mechanisms of validation: not only identifying excellence, but interrogating the terms on which excellence is granted, and remaining honest about who gets left outside the frame.

Conferring value

Perhaps the form of recognition that feels most legitimate — to use a loaded term — remains the oldest: judgement by a jury of one's peers. The principle runs deep: we are judged by our peers in the playground and in the penal system. Projects are most often brought to the attention of awarding bodies by scouts within the industry — individuals who dedicate their energies to seeking out and selecting projects from a global smorgasbord of practice. To be noted amid the throng is already a collegiate mark of validation and acknowledgement. When, as in the case of the foundations above, an award follows genuine peer review — real deliberation, real disagreement, the expenditure of intellectual labour rather than the rubber-stamping of a marketing exercise — it confers an affirmation that is qualitatively different from the pay-to-attend ceremonies that double as networking events.

If short-term recognition is about visibility, that longer task is about memory. The Serbian writer Milorad Pavić — better known for his labyrinthine fictions — evokes the shadow that a building goes on casting, long after the building itself is gone. It is a useful image to hold. To understand where a culture has been, and where it imagines it is going, there are few sharper instruments than the record of what it chose to honour. Award categories and their juries are, like them or loathe them, fated to shape what is remembered — which is also to say that they are fated to be revised, as each era discovers that the priorities of the last no longer quite hold. Visibility hardens into legacy; legacy settles into canon; and canon, eventually, becomes the ground on which the next generation builds. Whether or not we acknowledge that responsibility, awards cast the long shadows in which future practitioners will wander.

Seen this way, the most interesting act an award can perform is a mode of redistribution — not only of money, though the cash prize is rarely trivial, but of attention, of respect and of camaraderie. Building alliances and facilitating exchange between architects, projects and collaborators is undoubtedly impactful, especially for those whose endeavour goes against the grain of the market, and towards more ethical and responsible forms of practice. As construction sits high on any honest ledger of planetary harm, there is a certain justice, then, in steering those funds towards the practices attempting to repair rather than extend the damage. To recognise, build awareness and allegiances for such work is to redistribute the genuinely scarce resource of visibility towards those who have most often been kept at its edges.

Reporting Recognition

The value of such awards lies not in the trophy but in the conversations that produce it, and those that it generates. The conversations among judges and industry experts hardly ever leave the judging chamber; those outside are left to infer the criteria, to guess at why one proposal was vaunted over another. If awards already identify excellence, the harder task is to make public the terms on which excellence is granted — to open the jury room, name those who are still kept outside it, and treat every prize as a question the discipline can ask itself out loud.

The argument for opening those discussions is almost irrefutable: the criteria by which architecture is deemed responsible, valuable or moving could be among the most generative conversations that the discipline has to offer a wider public. We must only be willing to share them. If recognition shapes the canon that the next generation inherits, then the only responsible way to honour a building is to be honest about whom, and what, we choose to honour and leave unhonoured. Whose work are we prepared to count?

Beyond Recognit

BIO

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.