Today is Earth Day. To commemorate the occasion, MoMA announced a new climate-oriented architecture prize supported by a major gift from the Legacy Emilio Ambasz Foundation.
The Ambasz-MoMA Annual Prize for Nature-Reconciled Architecture is a collaboration between MoMA’s Department of Architecture & Design and the Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment, which advocates for architecture as an ecological and cultural practice.
The prize will award $200,000 annually to an architectural project completed in the last 30 years that jurors deem to be in “alignment with the core principles of the Ambasz Institute,” MoMA said in a statement.
Of that $200,000 annual sum, $100,000 will go toward an architect, or group of architects, and the other half will be set aside for a nonprofit organization “to plant trees in honor of the project client’s name.”
Five jurors will evaluate prize submissions: Three will be from MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design—including Martino Stierli and Evangelos Kotsioris, who was recently appointed director of the Ambasz Institute—and two esteemed external experts who will rotate every two or three years.
“What’s compelling about the Ambasz-MoMA Annual Prize is its potential to extend beyond architecture’s internal discourse,” Kotsioris said. “It is designed to recognize practitioners who invent new prototypes for symbiotic relationships between architecture and its immediate environments, while also supporting the annual planting of trees with direct and lasting benefits for local communities across the world.”
Project submissions will be reviewed through a “research-driven, nomination-based process” drawn from MoMA’s “global network of invited advisors and Institute research.”
“The establishment of this new, important prize not only makes it one of the most generous in the field, but also promises to shape architectural discourse for years and decades to come,” Stierli said.
The winner of the inaugural Ambasz-MoMA Annual Prize for Nature-Reconciled Architecture, selected from an initial pool of 20 to 30 projects, will be announced in late 2026.
The gift from the Legacy Emilio Ambasz Foundation will also support a new annual Ambasz-MoMA lecture series titled “Architecture as Poetry.” That series will start in spring 2028 and be organized by the Department of Architecture and Design.
