Exclusive Wallpaper* Weekend / Irish Architect Níall McLaughlin is Awarded The 2026 RIBA Royal Gold Medal / By Harriet Thorpe

Irish architect Níall McLaughlin has been awarded the 2026 Royal Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), recognising his positive impact across architectural thinking, writing and education.

During a career of more than 30 years, McLaughlin’s work within architecture’s religious, educational, health and housing contexts has attracted consistent praise – he was honoured as a Royal Academician in 2019, and a Stirling Prize winner in 2022.

Níall McLaughlin is awarded the 2026 RIBA Royal Gold Medal

‘A humble visionary, his dedication to architecture as an art and professional practice has left an enduring mark on the discipline – one that will undoubtedly transcend trends and time,’ remarked RIBA president Chris Williamson, chair of the award jury, which also included 2025 Royal Gold Medal recipient Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA.

Reflecting on his body of work in an interview with Wallpaper*, McLaughlin explains, ‘I think what binds these buildings together is this need for architecture to create meaning for communities, and to help hold communities together through framing their communal experience. A building is the frame that allows that community to thrive.’

For McLaughlin, who studied architecture in Dublin and established his own practice in London in 1990, the key to this is empathy, an emotion and skill that he believes defines the origin of architecture.

His process is grounded in listening and research, which enable him to then imagine and craft a ‘world’ of moments for an individual, which speak to the humanity shared by a community.

His own immense personal curiosity enables him to observe the world far beyond its physical qualities. He translates the abstract sensations of daily rituals, as much as his memories of transcendent historical architecture, into buildings to share with others.

When designing the Bishop Edward King Chapel in Oxford (2013), he materialised the grounding yet uplifting sensation of flying a kite. When designing The New Library for Magdalene College in Cambridge (the Stirling Prize 2022 winner), he imagined how walls can disappear around you under the magic of a good book.

‘Empathy and intersubjectivity are absolutely central to our discipline, you have to have the confidence to imagine a world for other people, and at the same time, a degree of humility,’ he says, which lies in accepting the limitations of empathy.

While working on the Alzheimer’s Respite Centre in Dublin (2011), McLaughlin spent ten years trying to understand the experience of people with dementia.

It was impossible to comprehend, yet the emotive weight and scientific knowledge of trying resulted in an exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2016, ‘exploring the extraordinary miracle of how we place ourselves in space and time’.

‘Other people might not experience the world the way that I do, but you can test that through the design process,’ he says.

‘We [architects] have to hold a very broad and diffuse range of desires, needs, aspirations and problems together, and make something coherent out of the maze of information that’s produced by any project.’

Rather than impose his own ideology on that information, he allows ideology to emerge from those insights. ‘I think of practice as an ordinary activity, and theory as a rumination of that activity that is often a hard-earned lesson, because it’s engaged with the world.’

For McLaughlin, teaching provides that necessary balance between practice and theory. He has held the position of professor of architectural practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, for more than 25 years.

With the complexity, high stakes, and often adversarial conditions of construction today, he describes how this engagement, as well as maintaining a fulfilling, positive culture for his students and employees, is essential.

In the face of today’s complexity, McLaughlin returns to the ‘basic little molecules of interaction that help build communities’.

In a visit to Darbishire Place (2014), the Peabody housing estate in London’s Whitechapel (nominated for the 2015 Stirling Prize), he might quietly observe parents in their daylight-filled, well-ventilated kitchens with one eye on their children outside in the playground. ‘

The interesting thing about architecture is that it is both subliminal and has a huge impact on our ability to thrive.’

www.riba.org
www.niallmclaughlin.com