2024 Soane Medal Goes to Hanif Kara

The Soane Medal was established to "[recognize] architects, educators and critics who have made a major contribution to their field through practice, history or theory, and in doing so have furthered and enriched the public understanding of architecture.” Hanif Kara is the first engineer to win an award whose previous recipients include architects Rafael Moneo (2017), Denise Scott Brown (2018), Marina Tabassum (2021), Peter Barber (2022), and Lacaton & Vassal (2023), and historian/critic Kenneth Frampton (2019). (No award was given in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.)

In his nearly thirty years of practice at AKT II, Kara has worked with some of the most famous architects in the world, such as BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, Zaha Hadid Architects, David Chipperfield Architects, Herzog & de Meuron, and Foster + Partners. Accordingly, he has also worked on projects that garnered Stirling Prizes, RIBA's highest honor — four of them, to be exact: Peckham Library by Will Alsop (2000); Sainsbury Laboratory by Stanton Williams (2012); Bloomberg’s European Headquarters by Foster + Partners (2018); and Kingston University London – Town House by Grafton Architects (2021).

The museum's announcement of Hanif Kara as the 2024 recipient of the Soane Medal mentions the above architects and buildings, highlighting the engineer's role in high-profile projects, but it also draws attention to his advocacy for interdisciplinary collaborations and approaches to the built environment, and the desire to preserve and build for reuse through what he calls “advanced reverse design.” In the case of the last, Kara “combines the innovative use of new and ancient techniques and materials to arrest, mitigate, and in some cases reverse, the environmental impact of construction.”