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The Firm of the Year category of the Architecture Hunter Awards 2025 recognizes an established architecture practice that has demonstrated consistent excellence in design, innovation and leadership over the past year. Unlike the other categories, this award is not open for public submissions. We invited leading voices in architecture media, including editors-in-chief and founders of platforms such as Architizer, Dezeen, ArchDaily and STIR, to nominate three studios they believe deserve this recognition.
The final winner will be chosen through a popular vote by our global audience, honoring not only remarkable projects but also the broader cultural and professional impact of each firm.
JURY: Amit Gupta | Benedict Hobson | David Basulto | Joanna Helm | Paul Keskeys
Frida established her studio in Mexico City in 2006. Early recognition came from competition-winning projects in Mexico, such as the renovation of Hotel Boca Chica (2008), the El Eco Pavilion (2010), and the expansion of La Tallera Siqueiros in Cuernavaca (2012). Her global profile rose in 2018 with the Serpentine Pavilion in London, where she became the youngest architect to design the project. Most recently, she was selected to design the new Modern & Contemporary Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, becoming the youngest and first woman to design a building for the institution. She has received awards including the Architectural League of New York’s Young Architects Forum (2009), the BIAU Prize (2014), the Architectural Review Emerging Architecture Award (2016), and the League Emerging Voices Award (2017). In 2019 she was named an International Fellow of the RIBA, and her studio was listed by DOMUS among the world’s ‘100+ Best Architecture Firms.’ In addition to practice, Frida has taught at Columbia, Harvard, Rice, and Yale, as well as the Architectural Association in London.
Established in Basel in 1978, Herzog & de Meuron is a partnership led by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron with Senior Partners Christine Binswanger, Ascan Mergenthaler, Stefan Marbach, and Jason Frantzen. An international team of over 500 collaborators, including the two Founders, five Senior Partners, ten Partners, and 50 Associates, works on projects across Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The main office in Basel is supported by studios in Berlin, Munich, Hong Kong, London, New York, and San Francisco, and by site offices in Copenhagen and Paris. The practice has designed a wide range of projects, from private homes to large-scale urban developments. Many works are recognized public facilities, including museums, stadiums, and hospitals, while others include offices, laboratories, and residential buildings. Herzog & de Meuron has received major awards such as the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2001), the RIBA Royal Gold Medal and the Praemium Imperiale (2007), and the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (2014).
Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture is an international firm of architects, designers, and researchers based in Paris with a multidisciplinary approach. Founded by French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh, co-founder of DGT Architects, the practice is recognized for projects infused with innovation, poetics, and a vision she calls an “Archeology of the Future,” where each gesture draws from the traces of the past. Her designs emphasize ecological responsibility and materials that express their natural essence. With her former firm, she realized the Estonian National Museum (Grand Prix Afex 2016, nominee for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2017). Notable works include the 14-storey timber tower Réalimenter Masséna in Paris (winner of Réinventer Paris), Stone Gardens in Beirut, and the interior renovation of Palais de Tokyo’s restaurants. Ghotmeh was named among 10 “Visionary Architects for a New Decade” by European Architects Review in 2010 and has received the AJAP Prize (2008) and the Prix Dejean (2016). She also lectures and teaches worldwide.
Marina Tabassum, Bangladeshi architect and educator, founded Marina Tabassum Architects in Dhaka in 2005. Her work seeks a language of architecture that is contemporary yet rooted in place, addressing climate, context, culture, and history. The Bait Ur Rouf Mosque is noted for its absence of traditional iconography, its focus on light and space, and its role as both place of worship and community refuge. Tabassum deliberately keeps her practice small, undertaking only a few projects each year. She is Professor at TU Delft and held the Gehry Chair at University of Toronto (2022–23). She has taught at Harvard GSD, University of Texas, Bengal Institute and BRAC University. Her honors include an Honorary Doctorate from TU Munich, the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Arnold Brunner Prize, Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture, and the UK’s Soane Medal. She chairs the Foundation for Architecture and Community Equity (F.A.C.E) and Prokritee, a fair-trade organization, and served on the Aga Khan Award Steering Committee (2017–22). She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).
MASS Design Group was founded on the understanding that architecture’s influence reaches beyond individual buildings. MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) believes that architecture has a critical role to play in supporting communities to confront history, shape new narratives, collectively heal and project new possibilities for the future. We are a team of over 200 architects, landscape architects, engineers, builders, furniture designers, makers, writers, filmmakers, and researchers representing 20 countries across the globe. We believe in expanding access to design that is purposeful, healing, and hopeful. In 2021, The American Institute of Architects honored MASS Design Group with the 2022 AIA Architecture Firm Award. In 2020, MASS was named the Architecture Innovator of the Year by the Wall Street Journal, for our origins in healthcare and commitment to architecture as a medium for healing. In 2019, Architect Magazine ranked MASS fourth in its list of Top 50 Firms in Design and in 2017, MASS was awarded the National Design Award in Architecture, given each year by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
MUDA was founded in Beijing, China, and Boston, U.S, in 2015, and our Chengdu office was established in 2017. MUDA is a place where diverse cultural backgrounds, unique mindsets, and creative design abilities are embraced and appreciated. Our architect team are consist of a bunch of great architects who have farseeing ideas, plenty of experience, professionalism, and distinctive characters. Our design practices include various kinds, including public architecture, cultural architecture, commercial architecture, urban planning, landscape design, and interior design. As a global lead architecture firm, we have accumulated abundant experiences in diverse kinds of markets. Caring and understanding our clients' needs, we dedicate to providing efficient and effective solutions to them with our expertise.
Founded in 2006 by partners Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office is an interdisciplinary design practice based in Shanghai. Its global portfolio spans master planning, architecture, interiors, installations, furniture, product, branding and graphic works. With projects worldwide, Neri&Hu brings together a multicultural team speaking over 30 languages, reinforcing its vision of a global worldview and overlapping design disciplines for a new paradigm in architecture. Shanghai, considered a new global frontier, is a purposeful base for the practice, where cultural, urban, and historic contexts fuel design inquiries across scales. Neri&Hu has expanded conventional boundaries by incorporating complementary disciplines and grounding its work in research. Each project critically probes program, site, function, and history to create rigorous architecture. Its ethos rests on the dynamic interaction of experience, detail, material, form, and light, avoiding formulaic styles in favor of layered, contextually rich design.
OMA is an international practice operating within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism. AMO, a research and design studio, applies architectural thinking to domains beyond. OMA is led by seven partners – Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, Chris van Duijn, Jason Long, and Managing Partner – Architect David Gianotten – with offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong and Australia. OMA-designed buildings under construction include the New Museum extension in New York, Museo Egizio in Turin, Dhaka Tower in Bangladesh, Palais de Justice in Lille, CMG Times Center in Shenzhen, and the Bajes Kwartier in Amsterdam. Recent projects include Simone Veil Bridge in Bordeaux, LANTERN in Detroit, Mangalem 21 in Tirana, Aviva Studios in Manchester, Apollolaan 171 in Amsterdam, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Toranomon Hills Station Tower in Tokyo. Earlier works include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Los Angeles, Fondazione Prada in Milan, De Rotterdam, CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, Casa da Música in Porto, the Seattle Central Library, and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin.
PAO is an international practice with offices in Los Angeles, Beijing and Shenzhen. Founded in 2010 by James Shen, He Zhe, and Zang Feng, the firm is a multi-disciplinary art and design practice focused on work that fosters social interaction and diverse perspectives. Domus named PAO as one of the world’s best architecture firms of 2019 and Fast Company listed PAO as one of the world’s ten most innovative architecture companies in 2018. The studio’s award-winning works have been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Design Society and the London Design Museum. In 2020 PAO spun off the Plugin House Company to specialize in developing low-cost prefabricated homes as products. James Shen received his Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science in Product Design from California State University, Long Beach. Shen has been a Loeb Fellow at Harvard, a Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and an Innovation Fellow at MIT’s China Future City Lab. He has taught at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
pihlmann architects is founded by Søren Thirup Pihlmann in 2021. Our portfolio ranges from temporary pavilions, over single-family houses to transformations in cultural environments worthy of preservation and cultural institutions. To us, architecture is defined by the two outermost positions of the architectural scale – context and component – and the space in between is created as a result of these. We are involved throughout all phases of our projects: Conducting research and experiments with one hand while constructing with the other. Our projects are characterized by the idea of highlighting the material itself as the protagonist of architecture. By exploring the immanent processes and potentials of materials, we believe that robust and simple architecture comes to life. An architecture which inherits both character and atmosphere from the function and origin of the applied materials. Søren Thirup Pihlmann established the architecture office lenschow & pihlmann together with Kim Lenschow Andersen in 2014. pihlmann architects continue to explore and create architecture on this foundation.
Snøhetta is an international architecture and design firm with offices in Oslo, Paris, Innsbruck, New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Adelaide and Melbourne. The practice began in 1989 with the winning entry for the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt, followed by the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet in Oslo and the 9/11 Memorial Museum Pavilion in New York. Since its inception, Snøhetta has embraced a transdisciplinary approach, integrating architecture, landscape, interior, product, graphic and digital design. Collaboration across disciplines is central to its process. Current projects include the Ordrupgaard Art Museum expansion in Denmark and the Shanghai Grand Opera House. Recent works include Le Monde Group Headquarters in Paris, Europe’s first underwater restaurant Under, Times Square’s public space redesign, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art expansion, Lascaux IV, Powerhouse Brattørkaia and Norway’s new banknotes. The studio combines traditional craft with digital technology and is deeply committed to social and environmental sustainability, designing with humanism and meaningful concepts at its core.
Founded in 1937 in Mexico City and directed through three generations of architects, Sordo Madaleno operates from our headquarters in Mexico City and our London studio. We embrace a global mindset while tapping into the richness of local contexts in an increasingly interconnected world, covering architectural, urban, and interior design disciplines. As architects and strategic thinkers, we are inspired to craft human-centered environments that promote connection and maintain a deep focus on sustainability. These are fundamental benchmarks of design excellence. Our methodology is pragmatic and rigorous. We embrace risk as a vital and necessary tool of our trade. We begin again as often as it takes to discover game-changing solutions.
Sou Fujimoto was born in Hokkaido, Japan. Graduated from the Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering at Tokyo University, he established Sou Fujimoto Architects in 2000 in Tokyo Japan. In 2016, Sou Fujimoto opened an office in Paris - France, after won the 1st prize for “Pershing”, one of the sites in the French competition called 'Réinventer Paris', following the victories in the Invited International Competition for the New Learning Center at Paris-Saclay's Ecole Polytechnique and the International Competition for the Second Folly of Montpellier in 2014. In 2013 he became the youngest architect to design the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London. His notable works include; “Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013” (2013), “House NA” (2011), “Musashino Art University Museum & Library” (2010), “Final Wooden House”(2008), “House N” (2008) and many more.
SPASM Design is an intimate and research focused architecture studio dedicated to pushing the envelope and uplifting the everyday. Our peculiar conception of every project is rooted in the genius loci of our sites and their future inhabitants. We strive to deliver endearing and memorable architecture; true extension of user and site. Established in 1995 as a partnership between Sanjeev Panjabi and Sangeeta Merchant, SPASM continues to lead a studio core of 20, through the construction and design of residential, commercial and mixed use projects across India and abroad. Since the turn of the century, the practice has thrived by the design and construction of bespoke single family homes, luxury villas and commercial office towers. SPASM has since attracted worldwide acclaim, including being awarded the AD50 and AD100 Award in Design for 13 consecutive years.
