The Global Award for Sustainable Architecture™ has announced the winners of its 19th edition, held under the theme “Architecture Is Transformation.”
The award ceremony took place on 15 April 2026 at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, as part of an international symposium organised in collaboration with Saint-Gobain, official partner of the prize for the third consecutive year. Founded in 2006 by architect, researcher and professor Jana Revedin, the award recognises each year five architects, urbanists or landscape designers whose work embodies a responsible, innovative and deeply committed approach to sustainability.
Under the patronage of UNESCO since 2011 and supported by the International Union of Architects (UIA) since 2024, the prize has become an important international platform for reflection on the major challenges facing contemporary architecture. The 2026 edition places transformation at the centre of the debate, not as a purely technical upgrade, but as architecture’s ability to act on construction methods, resource management, everyday uses and social relations in a profound and lasting way.
The five winners of the 2026 edition
This year’s laureates are Ye Man, architect and founder of ZSYZ in China; Doan Thanh Ha, co-founder of H&P Architects in Vietnam; Loreta Castro Reguera and José Pablo Ambrosi, founders of Taller Capital in Mexico; Amelia Tavella, founder of Amelia Tavella Architects in France; and Andreas Kipar, architect, landscape architect and urbanist, co-founder of LAND, working between Germany and Italy.
According to the jury, their work demonstrates how architecture can act simultaneously on territories, resources, practices and social dynamics, contributing in concrete ways to the sustainable transformation of the built environment.
What emerges from the selection is a set of highly diverse practices in terms of geography, scale and language, yet united by a strong coherence between research, ethics and impact. It is precisely this relationship between design intelligence and transformative responsibility that defines the spirit of the 2026 edition.
From prefabricated timber to local building wisdom
In the case of Ye Man, the jury highlights a contemporary reinterpretation of the modernist principle of purification — understood as reduction, refinement and environmental awareness. Her architecture promotes prefabricated timber construction that is biodegradable, reversible, and based on traditional mortise-and-tenon joints, combined with advanced technologies. Her projects result from patient work on experimental prototypes and remain closely attuned to the spirit of place, local customs and the principles of the circular economy.
Doan Thanh Ha also works through essentiality, but does so through the concept of CAN — Culture, Architecture, Nature. For the Vietnamese architect, these three dimensions are inseparable and must work together to foster a form of sustainability that is also spiritual. His practice is grounded in architecture made with and for inhabitants, rooted in the Vietnamese context and attentive to local identities, climatic intelligence and intangible heritage. The jury recognises in his work a deeply humanistic and “right-tech” approach, aligned with innovation, transdisciplinarity and adaptability.
Repairing the city through water
For Loreta Castro Reguera and José Pablo Ambrosi of Taller Capital, the central issue is the relationship between city and water. The jury was particularly struck by their methodical and scientific use of architecture and design as tools to “repair the wounded city”, confronting a paradox that defines many Mexican urban conditions: water scarcity and flooding at the same time. Within this tension, their work identifies a design opportunity — to restore water’s presence in the city not as decoration, but as an urban and landscape structure capable of transforming everyday uses and redefining the relationship between inhabitants and resources.
Their urban vision is shaped by infrastructures for sustainable water management and by the construction of a genuine water culture, capable of rethinking how cities function. For the jury, their practice offers a particularly powerful expression of adaptability and regeneration.
Heritage, time and a sensitive architecture
The work of Amelia Tavella is recognised as one of the strongest expressions of reconciliation between space and time, that is, between heritage and sustainability. Her architecture is described as sensual, organic and deeply rooted in Corsica — an island that, as she explains, taught her light, colours and slopes, while reminding her that no act of creation has meaning without ethics. Tavella sees buildings as living beings whose “skin” is their envelope, and she works on materials, traces and temporal layers through a multidisciplinary process involving artists, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, filmmakers, writers and poets.
The jury especially praises her reversible and respectful way of building, one that lays the groundwork for future visions without erasing what already exists. In this sense, her practice responds fully to the criteria of innovation, transdisciplinarity and adaptability.
Landscape as ecological and social regeneration
With Andreas Kipar and LAND, the award recognises a long-standing body of work on landscape regeneration as a response to the climate crisis. For decades, Kipar has transformed former industrial areas, contaminated soils and abandoned territories into new social, ecological and cultural oases. The jury underlines his long-term commitment and his ability to create spaces as “open works”, where inhabitants and nature can recover a sense of dignity and belonging.
In his approach, landscape rehabilitation is essential to reducing emissions, strengthening biodiversity and building more resilient communities. For this reason, the jury considers his work to embody all the award’s criteria: innovation, transdisciplinarity, adaptability, regeneration and empowerment.
An award that anticipates the debate
With its 2026 edition, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture™ confirms its role as an international observatory on the transformations shaping contemporary design culture. Significantly, several of its past winners later received the Pritzker Prize, including Wang Shu, Alejandro Aravena, Balkrishna Doshi, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, and Diébédo Francis Kéré. In 2026, the award reaches a total of 95 laureates worldwide, forming a community that shares a common ethical commitment to sustainability in architecture, urban regeneration and social responsibility.
The 20th edition of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture™ will take place in Venice in 2027 and will be dedicated to the theme “Architecture Is Equity.” It is a continuation that confirms the prize’s trajectory: reading architecture not as an isolated discipline, but as a field capable of acting on coexistence, spatial justice and shared futures.
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