Madelon Vriesendorp: The Latest Architecture and News

Dutch artist Madelon Vriesendorp has been named the recipient of the 2025 Soane Medal, becoming the first UK-based female artist to receive the award since its launch in 2017. A co-founder of Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Vriesendorp is widely recognized for her surrealist and humorous visual language that has shaped how modern and postmodern architecture is represented and understood. Her work, which blends playfulness with critical thought, has provided architecture with vivid, memorable imagery that continues to influence generations of architects.

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Architecture is shaped not only by buildings, but by the ideas that make them possible. Before the constraints of capital, regulation, and procurement, there is a moment when architecture is allowed to think aloud. The first confrontation with this fertile moment usually takes place in academia, in the thesis. It is not merely a requirement for graduation, but a space of speculative freedom where architecture formulates hypotheses, builds arguments, and tests positions.

For many, it is also the first opportunity to think beyond the structure of academic programs — a first chance to explore something more personal, unresolved, or even unreasonable. While often seen as an endpoint, the thesis is better understood as a beginning: the first engagement with architecture as a form of reasoning, where the project is not yet a response, but a question.

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Presenting architects in conversation with creative figures, Architecture Foundation’s headline annual lecture in collaboration with the Barbican will see architect Sam Jacob in conversation with Dutch visual artist Madelon Vriesendorp.

British architect Amanda Levete has been selected as the recipient of the 2018 Jane Drew Prize, recognizing “an architectural designer who, through their work and commitment to design excellence, has raised the profile of women in architecture.”

Founder of London-based practice AL_A, Levete rose to promise as one half of Stirling Prize-winning practice Future Systems, which she ran with then-husband Jan Kaplický. Together, they completed paradigm-shifting and critically acclaimed works such as the Birmingham Selfridges and the Lord’s Media Centre, winner of the 1999 RIBA Stirling Prize.

Levete left Future Systems to form AL_A in 2009, where she found continued success designing cultural venues with bold materiality. Some of the firm’s best known works include the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, the Central Embassy Shopping Center in Bangkok, the 2015 MPavilion in Melbourne, and the recently-opened addition to the V&A museum in London.