Farshid Moussavi: From Shiraz to London and the Soane Medal

Sir John Soane's Museum in London has named Farshid Moussavi, the Iranian-born architect, Harvard professor and founder of Farshid Moussavi Architecture, as the winner of the 2026 Soane Medal. Moussavi will receive the medal on November 24 at the Royal Academy in London, where she will give the annual Soane Medal lecture. Since 2017 the medal has gone to architects, theorists and teachers who have widened the public's understanding of the profession of architecture and its place in human life. Rafael Moneo, Denise Scott Brown, Kenneth Frampton, Marina Tabassum, Peter Barber, and Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal are among those who received it before her.

But why Farshid Moussavi? And why now?

The answer lies in a path that for nearly four decades has moved between three fields: building, teaching and thinking about architecture. The Soane Medal jury stressed exactly this link when it announced its choice. In a statement quoted by Dezeen and Metalocus, the jury chair, Amin Taha, described her work as an example of how architectural ethics reveals itself in practice, a steady inquiry carried on at once through building, teaching and writing.

Farshid Moussavi was born in Shiraz in 1965. She began her studies in architecture at the University of Dundee in Scotland, continued at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, and went on to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she took her master's degree in 1991 and to which she returned years later as a professor. After Harvard she worked for three years at OMA, the office of Rem Koolhaas, and in the first half of the 1990s she founded Foreign Office Architects, or FOA, in London with Alejandro Zaera-Polo.

The project that made the office and Moussavi known in contemporary architecture was the Yokohama International Port Terminal, a design that won an international competition with more than 600 entries and was completed in 2002. Speaking to Dezeen in May 2026, Moussavi explained where the importance of the design lay: the designers deliberately reimagined the conventional idea of a terminal. The passenger's route, the city's public space and the roof were woven together where they would normally be kept apart. A roof that might simply have covered a transport facility became a public square and park. People with no plan to travel can walk in, stroll, sit down or come to public events.

Here one of the main lines of Moussavi's work is already visible. For her, architecture does not begin with the shape of a building and does not end there. The question is what kinds of behavior, relationships and possibilities a space can create.

That view became clearer in her independent work. Moussavi founded Farshid Moussavi Architecture in 2011. Its first building, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, opened in October 2012 and was her first commission in the United States. Its black, mirror-finish skin of stainless steel changes with the light and the surroundings. According to reports, the building rises from a hexagonal base to a square top, and its ground floor holds a double-height room for public programs and events.

The same attention to everyday life runs through Moussavi's writing. Three books, "The Function of Ornament", "The Function of Form" and "The Function of Style", are among the most important parts of her research. Rejecting the idea that ornament, form and style are elements detached from social life, she asks what they actually do to us. How does form guide the way we move? How does a facade affect what we perceive? Is style only an architect's signature, or can it grow out of changes in daily life?

— Farshid Moussavi, 2015. Photo by Columbia GSAPP, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons عکس از Columbia GSAPP، CC BY 2.0، Wikimedia Commons

This is where Moussavi's thinking brings architecture into direct conversation with social life, without turning the building into a manifesto. According to Park Books, the publisher of "Architecture and Micropolitics", the 2022 book follows four of her own buildings from 2011 to 2022 and argues against the idea that design is a straight line that starts with a complete image in the architect's mind and is then simply carried out by others. A building is the result of hundreds of small decisions and a constant negotiation among needs, regulations, structure, materials, money, engineers, builders and users. For her, architecture is therefore not a fixed object but a process that finds room for change inside those very limits.

Even housing, in her work of recent years, is looked at from this angle. The question sounds simple, but its consequences are basic. If patterns of work, family structures, childcare and eldercare, and the nature of social relationships have all changed, why should the home still be designed according to models fixed decades ago?

The latest large example of all these ideas is the Ismaili Center Houston, the biggest built project of Moussavi's office so far, inaugurated on November 6, 2025, and the first center of its kind in the United States. While fully contemporary, the building draws on elements of Iranian architecture, among them a tall eivan that opens to the gardens and screens of perforated stone that break the hard Texas light, but it does not rebuild them as historical imitation. With its gardens and courtyards, the building is designed to welcome public use and gathering. In the words of the opening statement quoted by the Harvard Graduate School of Design, it is conceived not simply as a religious building, but also as a place for conversation and encounter among people of different backgrounds.

For an architect born in Shiraz, educated in Britain and the United States, and active for most of her career between Europe and America, this project is not a simple return to "Iranian architecture". Perhaps it shows the opposite: that an architectural heritage stays alive when it is not reduced to a set of decorative signs. Iranian architectural forms, contemporary technology, the climate of Texas, the needs of a religious community and the public space of a city have to be able to speak to one another in a single building.

That may also explain why the Soane Medal offers such an apt lens through which to read Moussavi's work. In a statement published by Metalocus, Moussavi said that Sir John Soane understood that "architecture is never only about architecture".

Buildings usually become news when they are bigger, costlier or stranger than other buildings. But an important part of architecture happens where it is less noticed: in the route we choose, the place where we stop, the distance we keep from another person, the light that enters a room, the chance of meeting or of solitude that a space makes for us.

Farshid Moussavi's work can perhaps be read from there. Over the years she has tried to show that architecture, before it is an image to look at, is a set of conditions for living. The 2026 Soane Medal is less the end of that road than a fresh look at an old and still unfinished question: how do the buildings we make affect the way we live with one another?