AIA Gold Medal to Shigeru Ban

The AIA Gold Medal, which recognizes “individuals whose work has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture,” is considered the AIA’s highest annual honor. Recent recipients of the award, which extends all the way back to 1907, have been Deborah Berke, David Lake and Ted Flato, and Carol Ross Barney. Shigeru Ban is the first recipient from outside the United States since 2019, when Richard Rogers won the award. Nevertheless, Ban's roots in the US are deep, having moved to California from Tokyo in 1977 and eventually earning a Bachelor of Architecture degree at Cooper Union in New York City in 1984. One year later, Ban established his eponymous practice in Tokyo. Since 1999, Ban has collaborated with New York architect Dean Maltz on projects in the US.

The architecture of Shigeru Ban is well known, especially given that he has previously won the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2014) and the Praemium Imperiale (2024), among other accolades. Broadly speaking, his projects are split almost evenly between fairly high-budget work for private clients—museums, houses, office buildings, and other types in timber, glass, and even cardboard—and low-cost humanitarian efforts, such as temporary shelters for people displaced by disasters. The latter began in 1995, when Ban built a shelter out of paper tubes in a Rwandan refugee camp and temporary housing for victims of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake; that same year he founded the Voluntary Architects’ Network (VAN), an NGO dedicated to providing disaster relief worldwide.

On the same day as the AIA Gold Medal announcement, the AIA revealed that Jackson, Mississippi's Duvall Decker has won the 2026 Firm Award, which was first awarded in 1962 and recognizes “one firm every year that has produced notable architecture for at least a decade.” Founded by Anne Marie Duvall Decker and Roy Decker in 1998, Duvall Decker is known as much for their community-centered ethos as for the design skill on display in their buildings. Their approach “involves a deep, compassionate listening to understand the complex needs of a community,” per the AIA announcement, “and then creatively developing solutions that deliver impactful results.”

The “community advocacy [that] is woven into every project” is evident in a few projects singled out by the AIA, most of which can be found in Duvall Decker's officr profile:

• Bennie G. Thompson Academic and Civil Rights Research Center at Tougaloo College: “This center provides vital academic spaces while also housing the college’s vast art collection and serving as a hub for civil rights research.”
• U.S. Courthouse in Greenville, Mississippi: “This project was designed to be more than a government building; it aims to be an equitable benchmark that honors the character and history of Greenville.”
• Work with Jackson Public Schools: “The firm’s ‘careful, incremental renovations’ have played a vital role in elevating public education, a contribution described by Superintendent Errick L. Greene as ‘both rare and invaluable.’”