The historic architecture award returns after nearly three decades with a new focus on reparative and regenerative urbanism across the post-colonial world
After nearly three decades, the Paris Prize is returning — but with a fundamentally different purpose.
The Van Alen Institute has announced the revival of its historic architecture award as the Re:Paris Prize, repositioning the programme around reparative and regenerative approaches to architecture and urbanism across the global post-colonial landscape.
The inaugural Re:Paris Prize will be presented in partnership with the Pan-African Biennale, which will take place in Nairobi, Kenya, from 7 to 11 September 2026. Two Africa-based designers will be selected from participants in the Biennale, with their awards announced in Nairobi on 10 September. A third, US-based recipient will be selected through an open call later this year.
Each of the three winners will receive a $35,000 travel fellowship to undertake field research focused on communities that have historically experienced displacement, exclusion and marginalisation.
The new prize deliberately reverses the geographical and intellectual direction of its predecessor.
Between 1904 and 1997, the Paris Prize was awarded to architecture students and young designers by the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects, later known as the National Institute for Architectural Education. The organisation became the Van Alen Institute in 1996.
As its name suggests, the original prize centred Paris as a destination for architectural education and research. Winners received a year of study at the École des Beaux-Arts, positioning the French capital as an important centre for architectural knowledge and professional development.
Among its recipients were architect Max Abramovitz and William Van Alen, the Brooklyn-born architect behind New York’s Chrysler Building and the institute’s namesake.
The Re:Paris Prize retains the idea of travel as a means of expanding architectural knowledge, but turns the original model on its head. Rather than sending designers to Paris to study established European architectural traditions, the new programme will support research within regions that have historically been positioned at the margins of dominant architectural discourse.
“For over a century, the original Paris Prize defined architectural merit from a singularly Western perspective,” said Van Alen Institute executive director Hayley Eber. “With the Re:Paris Prize, we are flipping that narrative on its head by celebrating design research and innovation created in regions long relegated to the margins, amplifying reparative approaches that redefine how we shape our built environment.”
For Eber, the reinvention of the prize is also an opportunity for the institute to critically examine its own institutional history.
The South African-born executive director, who joined the Van Alen Institute in 2025 after working as an academic at The Cooper Union, said the new programme emerged partly from a desire to “hold our own archival history accountable”.
The partnership with the Pan-African Biennale places this rethinking within a wider effort to expand the centre of architectural discourse beyond established Western institutions.
Omar Degan, founding curator of the Pan-African Biennale, has helped shape the objectives of the new prize and will participate in selecting and mentoring the winners.
“The Pan-African Biennale does not seek to correct exclusion from within existing frameworks,” said Degan. “It establishes a new one — one in which Africa is the author of its own spatial knowledge, its own architectural discourse, its own futures. The Re:Paris Prize belongs to that project.”
He added: “For a century, recognition required a journey to Paris. This one funds the opposite journey — into African cities, to research what is already being built there.”
The distinction is central to the new award. Rather than treating African cities and communities primarily as sites for external observation, the Re:Paris Prize is intended to support designers working through existing forms of spatial knowledge, local practices and community-led approaches to the built environment.
The two Africa-based recipients will be selected from designers participating in the inaugural Pan-African Biennale, which brings together architectural practices and practitioners from across the continent.
The jury includes Nora Akawi, an architect and educator at The Cooper Union; Ifeoma Ebo, founding principal of Creative Urban Alchemy; architect and educator Mark Gardner; Kabage Karanja, co-founder of Nairobi-based architecture and research practice Cave_bureau; and Mphethi Morojele, managing director of MMA Design Studio. Degan will also contribute to the selection process and provide mentorship to the recipients.
The winning designers will undertake field research with an emphasis on communities that have historically navigated displacement and exclusion. Their research will ultimately become part of a longer programme of public exchange, with the winners expected to present their work at the Van Alen Institute’s storefront in Gowanus, Brooklyn, in autumn 2027.
The three designers will also return to Africa to present their work at the second Pan-African Biennale, scheduled for 2028, extending the prize beyond a single award ceremony into an ongoing cycle of research, exchange and public discourse.
For the Van Alen Institute, the programme represents a significant shift in how an award with deep historical connections to European architectural education can operate today. For the Pan-African Biennale, it provides another platform through which African architectural knowledge can shape international conversations on the future of cities.
The Re:Paris Prize therefore isn’t simply a revival of an old award. It is an attempt to rewrite what the award itself represents — replacing a historic model in which architectural knowledge flowed towards Paris with one that supports research emerging from the cities, communities and practices that have long been overlooked by the dominant architectural establishment.
The first two winners will be announced in Nairobi on 10 September 2026, during the inaugural Pan-African Biennale. The US-based award will follow through an open call, with the recipient expected to be announced in December.
