"Maybe the Pritzker delay says exactly what we need right now"

With the Pritzker Architecture Prize in potential jeopardy over its patron's links to Jeffrey Epstein, Edwin Heathcote reflects on the award's relevance in 2026.

The announcement of the 2026 Pritzker Architecture Prize has been delayed, yet another casualty of the Epstein scandal. Having shown up in the files, the award's patron, Tom Pritzker, admitted an association with the dead paedophile, saying he displayed "terrible judgement". He has resigned as executive chairman of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation, which sponsors the prize.

Does the Pritzker prize itself show bad judgement too? The first winner, in 1979, Philip Johnson, was the profession's most prominent and prolific networker and ex-fascist, an architect who attended the Nuremberg Rally and admitted to being turned on by the uniforms, praised Hitler and set up a US fascist party. It was not an auspicious start.

The prize matters very much less today than it did 25 years ago

Richard Meier (1984) has since been cancelled for the way he treated women in his office and in 1991 the jury managed to shoot itself in the foot by choosing Robert Venturi but not crediting his partner (in design, theory and life) Denise Scott Brown. A horrible sleight that has still not been corrected.

But, for better or worse, the Pritzker became "the" architecture award, the one that defined the era of starchitecture. The announcement usually roughly coincides with the Academy Awards ceremony and, just as with that Hollywood slebfest, we all like to complain that the wrong people are winning and the best actors or movies are being ignored.

The prize matters very much less today than it did 25 years ago. Its historic affirmation of the lone male genius now looks stale, icky even. That focus on an individual is beginning to look like everything that is wrong with architecture which, like the movies, is a collaborative industry in which poorly paid young people are often used and abused.

Yet "Pritzker Prize-winning architect", like "Oscar-winner" has become shorthand for a certain kind of industry status. Just as the Academy Awards give movies and their makers a huge boost of free publicity, the kind advertising just can't buy, the Pritzker prize is one of the very few moments (apart from massive failure) where architecture is pushed into the headlines.

It is probably the only prize in the profession that has the cultural capital and broad recognition to do so. That boost gives the media an opportunity to consider architecture and, for once, take it seriously. Who are these obscure figures receiving $100,000 and a bronze medal?

That discussion can be useful, as it was with Lacaton & Vassal (2021), who used their award to talk about their "Never Demolish" agenda, RCR (2017) with its notions of building for a local landscape (the studio is currently, incidentally, building a luxury tower in Dubai) and Alejandro Aravena (2016) who used the platform to raise the issue of housing for the poor.

It cannot really cope with the shift in architecture towards more diverse forms of practice

The conventional wisdom and, in fact, the angle I've been drawn to, is that the Pritzker, though often a little ridiculous and dated, is generally good for the discourse. It gives us something to be dismissive about, to sputter furiously about, or occasionally even be pleasantly surprised about. It triggers reactions and conversations, even – perhaps especially – when it gets it wrong.

Now I am not so sure, because I worry about whether there even is an architecture discourse any more. The industry's media, which used to be a vast tentacular web of competing and complementary global publications, has shrunk to a few upmarket magazines clinging desperately on, this website along with a couple of more niche others, and Instagram.

Traditionally the Pritzker was given to architects who had performed well in the media for a few decades. Their buildings had proven photogenic, widely published, easily identified and striking. This, thankfully, has faded over the last decade or so, with some more surprising choices.

David Chipperfield, who won in 2019, is an outstanding architect. But he did not need a Pritzker prize to be recognised. Diébédo Francis Kéré (2022), on the other hand, told me the prize made a real difference – but he is also good copy with his outstanding backstory, a charming fellow working in the difficult conditions of Burkina Faso to make useful architecture for villagers.

The Pritzker still represents a kind of media/architecture axis. It cannot really cope with the shift in architecture towards more diverse forms of practice, the moves towards activism or ecology and the accommodations with the non-human, with reuse and circularity, collectivity and making. As it recognises a built body of work, it finds it difficult to recognise the younger, more radical, more original and more interesting practices for which it would make a much bigger impact were they to receive it.

The other major parallel with the Academy Awards is that Hollywood likes to think of itself as culture, even though it is actually the movie business. Architecture struggles with a similar issue of self-image. Its protagonists are part of the construction industry, and not necessarily that high up in its pecking order either. There are a few auteurs, but the rest of us are too often runners or grips.

The Pritzker has, for all its faults, begun to shift with the times

The occasional choice of a more activist architect in the Pritzker lineage serves to reassure the architecture industry of its capacity for social good, even though for its first three or so decades not a single architect won who had significant contributions to make for the poor.

In fact the opposite is true. Like the inaugural winner Johnson, architects love dictators; despite their left-ish rhetoric they genuflect before autocracies. Planning is easier in a dictatorship.

Somehow the Pritzker has managed to survive all this. It is not even the richest architecture award – that is the Driehaus Prize, limited to classical architects, an award that gets no coverage at all outside the profession and even there only grudgingly.

So this year the announcement will be delayed. Fine. The world will survive. Maybe the delay itself says exactly what we need right now, a gaping hole.

But before we dismiss it entirely as an anachronism, it is worth remembering that I am writing about it and you are (I hope) still reading. The Pritzker has, for all its faults, begun to shift with the times and, even if it finds its format inimical to recognising some of architecture's more subtle and nuanced successes in less well-covered places, it can still provoke.

Often, that provocation might just be a puzzled "who?" But in whatever we have left that must serve as "The Discourse" it gives us all something to complain about, which in itself is a rare and unifying moment.

Edwin Heathcote is an architect and writer who has been architecture and design critic of the Financial Times since 1999. His numerous books on architecture include Monument Builders, Contemporary Church Architecture and the recently released On the Street: In-Between Architecture.

The photo, showing Tom Pritzker bestowing the Pritzker Architecture Prize medal on 2025 laureate Liu Jiakun, is courtesy of the Hyatt Foundation/Pritzker Architecture Prize.

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