Mrs Suad Amiry !
The Palestinian architect, scholar, and activist Suad Amiry reveive the 2025 European Prize for Architecture from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art, Design and Urban Studies jointly with Patrik Schumacher.
The two architects are recognized for their contrasting but equally influential contributions: Mrs Amiry for her decades-long work safeguarding Palestinian architectural heritage,
Since founding the Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah in 1991, novelist, essayist and architect Suad Amiry has dedicated her career to documenting and restoring Palestinian heritage as a form of cultural resistance. Riwaq’s Registry of Historic Buildings catalogued more than 50,000 structures across the West Bank and Gaza, while projects such as the 50 Village Rehabilitation Project and The Life Jacket Project have combined conservation with social and economic resilience.
‘Spanning for more than three decades,’ notes Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, president of The Chicago Athenaeum, ‘Suad Amiry has been on a heroic mission to vigorously promote, protect, intervene, renovate, and restore cultural landmarks, monuments, and vernacular architecture throughout the State of Palestine.’
Mrs Amiry’s vision ties built heritage to collective memory and survival. ‘Israel tore down nearly 400 historic centers during the Nakba,’ she has stated. ‘Hence I will reclaim, document, and rehabilitate another 400 throughout the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem.’
Beyond her architectural work, Amiry is also a celebrated writer, with books such as Sharon and My Mother-in-Law (2003) and Mother of Strangers (2022) amplifying Palestinian voices worldwide. Her approach has earned her the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2013) and the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize (2025), cementing her role as a figure whose practice is both architectural and political.
Congratulations on your well deserved success !
Es Devlin, ‘Memory Palace’,
Fragments of cities come together to chart the evolution of human – named after the mnemonic technique of cataloguing memories within familiar locations.
The 18-metre-wide sculpture is carved from bamboo and set within a mirrored box-room. The reflective planes multiply its dimensions, echoing the expanse of time and space.
Memory Palace offers Devlin’s personal curation of pivotal moments that have brought humankind to its present, collected in one sweeping cartographic gesture. Among the buildings and topographical features are the caves of southern Africa where early homo sapiens scratched images into walls; the room where Mary Wollenstonecraft wrote her feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792; the Montgomery street where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in 1955; and the steps of the Rikdaghuset in Stockholm from where Greta Thunberg launched her School Strike for Climate Change last year.
Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, Ealing, London
Photography: Peter Mallet
