Anne Lacaton wins 2025 Jane Drew Prize for women in architecture

French architect Anne Lacaton has won the Jane Drew Prize for 2024 for her contribution to raising the profile of women in architecture.

Lacaton is the co-founder of French studio Lacaton & Vassal, which she established with Jean-Philippe Vassal in 1987.

The Jane Drew Prize is given annually as part of the W Awards, formerly known as the Women in Architecture Awards, which was founded by The Architectural Review and Architects' Journal.

Lacaton follows last year's winner Iwona Buczkowska and 2023 winner Kazuyo Sejima. Other trailblazing architects to have been awarded the prize, which is named after modernist pioneer Jane Drew, include Kate Macintosh, Yasmeen Lari and Zaha Hadid.

According to the Architects' Journal, Lacaton won the prize for being "instrumental in defining what it means to build responsibly in the 21st century with a series of exceptionally inventive retrofit projects".

Much of her work at Lacaton & Vassal focuses on adaptive reuse and social housing projects in France.

Key projects by the studio include the renovation of Paris's Palais de Tokyo museum, the adaptive reuse of a former shipbuilding workshop in Dunkirk and Transformation of 530 Dwellings, a 1960s social housing block in Bordeaux that the studio overhauled.

Prizes previously won by co-founders Lacaton and Vassal include the Soane Medal for architecture in 2023 and the 2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize, when the pair was praised for their "commitment to a restorative architecture".

Also forming part of the W Awards is the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize, which has been this year been awarded to Palestinian writer and architect Suad Amiry.

Named after architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, the prize aims to celebrate individuals who have contributed to architecture from the fields adjacent to it.

Amiry is the author of numerous books and founded the conservation group Riwaq in 1991, which specialises in the preservation and reuse of historic buildings in Palestine.

Following the news of Lacaton & Vassal winning the 2023 Soane Medal, Edwin Heathcote wrote how the studio's work is a leading example of how architects can work with, not against, existing buildings.

As part of Dezeen's series on 21st-century architecture, we named the studio's Transformation of 530 Dwellings in Bordeaux as the most significant building of 2016.

The photography is by Philippe Ruault unless stated. 

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