Curated and produced by KoozArch, Beyond Recognition reframes the architectural award not as a celebration of individual achievement, but as an invitation to reflect on the values architecture chooses to recognise.

Developed for the UIA World Congress of Architects 2026, the film brings together six international awards, 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, to reveal a broader ecosystem of architectural recognition. Rather than presenting awards as parallel distinctions, it positions them as complementary lenses through which to understand the social, environmental, cultural and political responsibilities of practice today.

Moving between archival material, interviews and built work, the film proposes recognition as an active cultural project: one that shapes imaginaries, redistributes visibility, and influences the future architecture is capable of producing. In doing so, it shifts attention from architecture as object to architecture as agency foregrounding the diverse forms of care, knowledge, collaboration and responsibility that increasingly define the discipline.

Premiered at the UIA World Congress in Barcelona, the film opened a wider conversation on what, and who, we choose to value, arguing that the awards that matter are those capable not only of celebrating excellence, but of expanding architecture's collective horizon.