AR March 2024: W Awards - The Architectural Review

For almost a decade, the W Awards, in association with The Architectural Review and the Architects’ Journal, have shone a spotlight on the work of women and non-binary people in architectural practice and culture. Each passing year witnesses triumphs and progress towards gender equality. In January, previous Ada Louise Huxtable Prize winner Lesley Lokko was announced the recipient of this year’s RIBA Royal Gold Medal, the first woman of colour to win the accolade.

We are proud to present in the following pages the winners and architects shortlisted for this year’s W Awards. Activist and educator Angela Davis is awarded the 2024 Ada Louise Huxtable Prize in tribute to her persistent advocacy of social justice, while Iwona Buczkowska, whose social housing projects in France have not received the recognition they deserve, is awarded the Jane Drew Prize. Four recently completed projects in the UK highlight the work of lead architects who are shortlisted for the MJ Long Prize, while four architects based in Beirut, Hanoi, Paris and São Paulo have been shortlisted for the Moira Gemmill Prize. Now in its second year, the Prize for Research in Gender and Architecture goes to Swedish design and architecture group Mycket’s Heaven, an installation that marks the culmination of years of research into the architecture of queer nightclubs.

But there is still work to do. As conflicts around the world heighten mutually reinforcing forms of inequality, Nada Elia reminds us that ‘no ideology that hinges on supremacy and discrimination is reconcilable with feminism’.

1509: W Awards

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Cover (above) Dima Srouji
‘Palestinian liberation is a feminist issue,’ Nada Elia argues in this issue’s keynote. In this 2016 etching from Dima Srouji’s Cartographic Imaginary series, the Gaza border is overlaid with a print of a woman returning from a fresh-water spring

Folio (lead image) Shahzia Sikander
Forms of oppression are multi‑layered and intersectional. In Housed, from 1995, the artist Shahzia Sikander refers directly to the orientalist western obsession with the veil, and the ways racialised women are caged within stereotypes forged in the western imagination

Keynote
Bodies of land
Nada Elia

Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for Contribution to Architecture

Reputations
Angela Davis (1944–)
Marie-Louise Richards

Jane Drew Prize for Architecture

Reputations
Iwona Buczkowska (1953–)
Manon Mollard

MJ Long Prize for Excellence in Practice

Building
Laura O’Brien, James Gorst Architects
Castle Community Rooms
Ellie Duffy

Building
Michelle Wong, vPPR Architects
White House School
Betty Owoo

Building
Sela-Jaymes Taylor, Gort Scott
Three Mills Studios
Ruth Lang

Building
Jennifer Frewen, Takero Shimazaki Architects
Royal Academy of Dance
Nile Bridgeman

Prize for Research in Gender and Architecture

In practice
Mycket
Katarina Bonnevier, Thérèse Kristiansson and Mariana Alves Silva