RIBA awards the 2026 Royal Gold Medal to Níall McLaughlin
Níall McLaughlin is awarded the 2026 Royal Gold Medal for architecture, conferred by the Royal Institute of British Architects. The medal recognizes the Irish architect’s three-decade-long contribution to architectural practice, education, and critical thinking, marking a body of work defined by continuity, care, and a sustained attention to how buildings are made, used, and inhabited over time.
The RIBA Honours Jury highlighted McLaughlin’s work at Darbishire Place for Peabody in London (2014) as a particularly significant contribution to contemporary architecture in the UK. Shortlisted for the 2015 Stirling Prize, the project rethinks one of London’s oldest housing estates through urban repair, demonstrating how social housing can be both environmentally responsible and spatially generous. Critics observed that if new housing were designed with similar care, the green housing agenda would already be far more advanced.
Responding to the announcement, McLaughlin described the award as both an honor and a challenge, acknowledging architecture as a shared practice across generations. ‘At a time of accelerating technological change in design and construction, we continue to insist on the human rituals and material practices at the heart of our discipline.’ he shares. ‘Building is an act, not an object. Architecture lies in its making and the way that it shapes learning, culture, and communal life.’
Níall McLaughlin portrait | image by NMLA
A practice defined by restraint, material intelligence, and making
Founded in London in 1990, Níall McLaughlin Architects has developed a portfolio that spans education, culture, housing, healthcare, and religious architecture. Across wildly different typologies and budgets, McLaughlin’s work is united by a sensitivity to place, material, craft, light, and form, and by an insistence on the quality of space rather than architectural authorship. From the cloud-like Bandstand at Bexhill (2001), to the calm orthogonal pavilions of the Alzheimer’s Respite Centre in Dublin (2011), to the latticed timber oval of the Bishop Edward King Chapel in Oxford (2013), his buildings favor clarity and restraint over overt formal expression.
This ethos reaches a clear articulation in The New Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, completed in 2021 and awarded the 2022 Stirling Prize. Composed of simple brick volumes, the project exemplifies McLaughlin’s belief that architecture emerges through making rather than image. ‘Architecture is not the production of singular objects, but an ongoing performance of development, alteration, and reinvention through lived experience,’ he notes. Building, in this view, is an act embedded in time, shaped by rituals, materials, and communal use rather than fixed outcomes.
Limerick | image by Nick Kane
education as a parallel practice
Teaching has run alongside practice from the beginning of McLaughlin’s career. For over 25 years at The Bartlett School of Architecture, as well as teaching roles at Oxford Brookes, UCLA (2012–2013), and Yale as Lord Norman Foster Visiting Professor of Architecture (2014–2015), he has argued for practice, study, and teaching as a single continuum. His advocacy for transparency in working hours and pay, alongside openness around mental health, positions education not as an adjunct to practice but as an ethical framework for the profession’s future.
RIBA President Chris Williamson, who described him as a ‘humble visionary,’ whose work combines care, grace, and intellectual depth without diminishing its modesty. A public lecture by Níall McLaughlin will take place in London on April 30th 2026, marking the formal celebration of a career that has consistently resisted spectacle in favor of thought, craft, and collective responsibility.
Goleen | image by Nick Kane
Faith Museum | image by Nick Kane
Salt Marsh | image by Nick Kane
Bishop Edward King Chapel | image by NMLA
Darbisher Place | image by Nick Kane
Magdalene Library | image by Nick Kane
Deal Pier | image by Crispin Hughes
project info:
architect: Níall McLaughlin Architects | @niallmclaughlinarchitects
awarding body: The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) | @riba
The post níall mclaughlin wins the 2026 RIBA royal gold medal for architecture appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.