MoMA Launches $200,000 Ambasz Prize; Trees Get Half

The Museum of Modern Art has announced a $200,000 annual architecture prize, and half of the money will buy trees. The inaugural Ambasz-MoMA Prize goes to Kashef Chowdhury/URBANA, a Dhaka-based firm, for the Friendship Centre in Gaibandha, Bangladesh. The award carries a $100,000 cash purse; the other $100,000 funds tree-planting by a nonprofit in the project client's name.

The museum bills the prize as the largest award for a single architecture project. Its cash component matches the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which honors living architects for career achievement. The full $200,000 equals the Driehaus Prize, given annually by the University of Notre Dame to a living architect working in traditional and classical forms.

The prize recognizes projects from anywhere in the world, built in the last three decades, that "repair architecture's relationship with nature," as MoMA's press materials put it. It is named for Emilio Ambasz in return for a major gift from the Legacy Emilio Ambasz Foundation. The Argentinian-American architect curated in MoMA's architecture and design department from 1968 to 1976, has given the museum more than $20 million, and has sat on its International Council since 1978. He also served on the MoMA PS1 board from 2002 to 2006.

Why the Friendship Centre won

Designed between 2008 and 2010 and completed in 2011, the Friendship Centre is a training facility and meeting space for underserved communities in the rural Jamuna River delta, a flood-prone region also susceptible to earthquakes. Because the soil cannot bear large weights, the building rests behind a compacted earthen embankment rather than costly elevated foundations. Workers built it almost entirely by hand using locally made clay bricks. Its form draws on the ruins of a monastery at Mahasthangarh, the country's oldest known archaeological site, dating to at least the third century BCE.

"The Friendship Centre has been in service to an underserved community for 14 years. Yet, it is not a building of 14 years of age, but rather 2,300 years of age, as it draws its inspiration for flood protection from the nearby third-century BC settlement of Mahasthan," Chowdhury said in press materials. "We are delighted that its coexistence with the surrounding agricultural, rural landscape, without really showing its mass forms to adjoining villages, has been recognized in this important judgment."

Chowdhury founded his firm with Marina Tabassum in 1995 and has been sole principal since 2005. He won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for the Friendship Centre in the 2014–16 cycle and was a finalist in 2004 for A5, a pavilion apartment.

The complex includes offices, classrooms, a library, meditation spaces, dormitories, and dining facilities. Green roofs, open-air courtyards, and interconnected rainwater harvesting pools moderate temperatures and provide natural ventilation — useful where April and May mean mid-90s heat and 65 to 74 percent humidity.

Where the second $100,000 goes

The Fundación Gran Chaco, in Formosa, Argentina, will receive the planting funds for reforestation of the Gran Chaco forest, honoring Friendship, the NGO founded and directed by Runa Khan, the Centre's client.

The winning project emerged from nearly 140 candidates, assembled through research by the Ambasz Institute and nominations from 30 international experts. The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment was established in 2020 within MoMA's architecture and design department and organized the 2023–24 exhibition "Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism," which e-flux called "a brilliant cross-section of architectural innovations as they were developed."

"This inaugural prize marks an important extension of the Institute's research beyond the Museum, recognizing exemplary architectural practice while supporting tangible environmental action," said Evangelos Kotsioris, director of the Ambasz Institute and a MoMA architecture and design curator. "By honoring Kashef Chowdhury/URBANA's extraordinary work on the Friendship Centre, the inaugural Ambasz–MoMA Prize recognizes an architecture that brings together environmental adaptation, historical continuity, and an extraordinary sensitivity to the communities it serves."

The inaugural jury included Kotsioris, chief curator Martino Stierli, and assistant curator Paula Vilaplana de Miguel, joined by two external members: Shelley McNamara of Ireland's Grafton Architects and Wang Shu of China's Amateur Architecture Studio. With COP31 delegates gathered in Antalya as warming warnings mount, the prize's tree budget looks less like gesture, more like down payment.