The Year of Meh: It’s the 2024 Architecture and Design Awards

By Alexandra Lange, Mark Lamster and Carolina Miranda

Better late than never? By now you’ve scrolled through a dozen annual awards with tasteful, oh-so-thoughtful selections. Another fancy house? Boooring. Another chic boutique. Snooze. Another monochromatic gridded curtain wall. Yadda yadda yadda. Not us! We know what you really want, and for the fifteenth consecutive year (in starchitect time, that’s four monographs, three marriages, and two me-too scandals) we bring you our own no-holds-barred scorecard of all that made us happy and sad in 2024. You might think, in a year in which two of the biggest Oscar-bait films were about architects (listen to our podcast about them here or here!), that the IRL architecture itself would be scene-stealing, dramatic, magnetic and yet — not so much.

This year, for the first time, we are also providing audio commentary! A companion podcast by Architecture Writers Anonymous (a.k.a. our groupchat) can be found at Spotify and Apple