Advocates for Change: 8 Visionary Leaders in Architecture Join the A+Awards Jury

From reasserting architecture’s social might to shaping greener urban policy, these advocates are using their talents to address the pressing challenges of today’s world.

Architizer Editors

The A+Awards are back and with the Main Entry Deadline on December 6th, it’s your chance to get your work in front of some of the most influential voices in architecture and beyond. Our jury, made up of over 250 experts from across architecture, design, publishing, technology and more, is as diverse as the projects it celebrates. Each year, we’re excited to welcome new leaders who are breaking new ground and redefining what’s possible in the built environment.

Enter the 13th Annual A+Awards

This year, we’re proud to introduce eight inspiring individuals who are truly advocating for change in the industry. These visionary leaders are using architecture to tackle real-world challenges, whether it’s designing sustainable spaces, reimagining how cities function, or creating environments that honor community and identity. Their work is reshaping the way we think about the role of architecture in today’s world and their impact reaches far beyond buildings.

Learn more about these eight advocates for change and how their passions is driving the future of architecture:

Andrew Maynard

Director, Austin Maynard Architects

Andrew established Andrew Maynard Architects (now Austin Maynard Architects) in 2002 after winning the Asia Pacific Design Award’s grand prize for his mobile work station, THE DESIGN POD — the first of many awards he has received throughout his career. Andrew is Tasmanian and has a bachelor of Environmental Design and a bachelor of Architecture (with honors), both of which he received at the University of Tasmania. In 2020, Andrew was named Fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects for his significant contribution to the architecture profession. Andrew was also a founding board member of Nightingale Housing — a non-for-profit organization creating ethical, socially sustainable and cost effective housing, whilst also revolutionizing the developer-dominated housing market.

Andrew is an innovative and inspiring architect whose work has been published globally and exhibited worldwide — from New York, Budapest and Osaka; to Milan, Sao Paulo and Tokyo. Andrew’s work has been shown throughout the world. His first big exhibition was at the YOUNG Guns exhibition in New York City in 2004 while his Styx Valley Protest Shelter was exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Andrew is regularly asked to lecture, which he loves. He has been a keynote speaker at the Malaysian Institute of Architects conference, the New Zealand Institute of Architects conference and the Anabata conference in Jakarta.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Artistic Director, Serpentine

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) is Artistic Director of Serpentine in London, and Senior Advisor at LUMA Arles. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show ‘World Soup (The Kitchen Show)’ in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions, including recent exhibitions Enzo Mari at Triennale Milano (2020) and WORLDBUILDING at Centre Pompidou Metz (2023) and Julia Stoschek Collection Dusseldorf (2022).

In 2011 Obrist received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence, and in 2015 he was awarded the International Folkwang Prize, and most recently he was honored by the Appraisers Association of America with the 2018 Award for Excellence in the Arts. Obrist’s recent publications include Ways of Curating (2015), The Age of Earthquakes (2015), Lives of the Artists, Lives of Architects (2015), The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021), and 140 Ideas for Planet Earth (2021), Edouard Glissant: Archipelago (2021), James Lovelock: Ever Gaia (2023) Remember to Dream (2023), Une vie in Progress (2023).

Jha D Amazi

Principal, MASS Design Group

Jha D Amazi believes that the narratives upheld in our public realm should be expanded to represent, honor, and celebrate the experiences, histories, and cultures of people who have been historically denied representation in our memorial landscape. As a Principal at MASS Design Group, Jha D leads the Public Memory and Memorials Lab, engaging communities to design projects such as the Franklin Park Action Plan (Boston, MA), the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument Project (Tallahatchie County, MS and Chicago, IL), the Gun Violence Memorial Project (Chicago, IL, and Washington D.C.), and the Sugar Land 95 Cemetery Revitalization Project (Sugar Land, TX).

Beyond her contributions at MASS, Jha D is a spoken word artist, event producer, and self-proclaimed SpaceMaker for the LGBTQ+ communities of color. In 2023, she was appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Council on Black Empowerment by Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. Jha D graduated with honors from Northeastern University (B.S. Arch) and the University of Pennsylvania (M. Arch I). Prior to joining MASS, she worked as a Designer at Sasaki and taught studio at the Boston Architectural College.

James Corner

Founding Partner, Field Operations

James Corner is Founding Partner of Field Operations, based in New York City, with offices in San Francisco, Philadelphia, London and Shenzhen. His work focuses upon the design of important urban public realm projects, which include New York’s highly acclaimed High Line, San Francisco’s Presidio Tunnel Tops, Chicago’s Navy Pier, Cleveland’s Public Square, Santa Monica’s Tongva Park, London’s South Park at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Hong Kong’s Victoria Dockside, and Shenzhen’s new city of Qianhai.

James’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, most notably the ASLA Design Medal, the Richard Neutra Award for Professional Excellence, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. He holds Honorary Doctorates in Design from the Technical University of Munich and Manchester Metropolitan University. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the National Building Museum, the Royal Academy of Art in London, and the Venice Biennale. His books include The High Line: Foreseen/Unforeseen (Phaidon, 2015); The Landscape Imagination (Princeton, 2014), and Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (Yale, 1996).

James is Emeritus Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, where he served on the faculty since 1990 and as Professor and Chairman from 2000-2013. He sits on the Board of the Urban Design Forum and the Government Advisory Board of Shenzhen and is an Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Kongjian Yu

Founder & Principal Designer, Turenscape

For over 25 years, Kongjian Yu has fought against deteriorating urban ecologies and the environment. His pioneering research on Ecological Security Pattern (1995) and Ecological Infrastructure, Negative Planning and Sponge Cities (2003) has been adopted by the Chinese government as guiding theory for nationwide ecological protection and restoration campaigns. He helped shift Chinese national-level policies from economic development-centered urbanism toward ecologically prudent urbanism through numerous letters to top Chinese leaders and over 600 lectures to almost all ranks of Chinese officials; numerous television programs; and as a leading member of several national expert committees. He is the editor and/or author of several text books authorized to train Chinese officials.

Yu defines landscape architecture as the art of survival. His guiding design principles are the appreciation of the ordinary and a deep embrace of nature, even in its potentially destructive aspects such as urban flooding. He drew on inspiration from his childhood farming experience and the ancient wisdom of water and waste management to design and test a series of nature-based solutions, including strengthened constructed wetland for water filtration, ‘green sponge’ for storm water management and ecosystems services-oriented design for brownfield remediation. He has then upgraded and standardized these solutions to become replicable ecological engineering modules that can be implemented at large scale in a cost-effective manner.

Beyond his scientific research and education as professor and social advocate, Yu practices what he advocates in terms of green solutions and sustainability. In 1998, he founded Turenscape, one of the first private practices in urbanism and landscape architecture in China, which has grown to become one of the largest practices in the world in these fields, with over 500 professionals. He and his team have designed and built over 500 projects in over 250 cities in China and abroad. He has won over 40 prestigious international awards for his ecologically sound and culturally sensitive projects. Yu is the author of over 20 books and is the founder and chief editor of internationally awarded magazine Landscape Architecture Frontier. He has been an invited lecturer, speaker, and guest professor around the world. He founded and has been leading the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture, and the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Peking University for decades. Yu received his Doctor of Design Degree at Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1995.

Germane Barnes

Founder, Studio Barnes / B-arn-S

Germane Barnes is the Principal of Studio Barnes, and Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Architecture Graduate Program at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Barnes’ practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation.

His work has recently been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 2021 exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, and the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. He is a winner of the Architectural League Prize and is a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He was selected in the inaugural cohort of The Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab created by Theaster Gates and sponsored by Prada. His work has also been featured and acquired to the permanent collections of international institutions most notably San Francisco MoMA, LACMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, The New York Times, and The National Museum of African American History and Culture. His project, Griot was widely published, as a participant in Biennale Architettura 2023, Laboratory of the Future.

Julia Watson

Author and Researcher, Julia Watson LLC and Lo—TEK Institute

Julia Watson is an Australian born, award-winning author, educator, and landscape designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Watson is an expert on traditional and indigenous technologies and focuses her work at the intersection of anthropology, ecology and innovation. Her eponymously named studio foregrounds traditional knowledge, sustainability and nature-based innovation, while the Lo—TEK Institute launched in 2024, to foster climate and environmental literacy for scholars worldwide. Watson was named by Wallpaper* in 2023 and 2024, as one of the 300 people defining creative America, and is the 2024 recipient of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art’s Arthur Ross Award for lifetime achievement in Education.

Hubert Klumpner

Architect & Principal-Partner, Urbanthinktank_next, Professor of Architecture & Urban Design, ETH Zurich

Hubert Klumpner is an Austrian architect and the design principal of Urbanthinktank_next. He currently holds the position of Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, ETHZ. He is internationally renowned for his architecture, urban and research projects, which focus on the interface of informality and the design of architecture prototypes, innovative building typologies, and civic spaces for culture, education and shelter in pursuit of an alternative architecture practice. Through his architecture practice Urbanthinktank, Klumpner has been influential as one of the originators of the “social turn” — a movement that gained recognition at the MoMA exhibition Small Scale Big Change / New Architectures of Social Engagement in 2010.

Urbanthinktank’s work aims to transform everyday neighborhoods into critical areas for imagining public space and social practices, emphasizing the role of architecture as critical infrastructure for art and culture in addressing inclusion in post-crisis cities. As a founding partner of Urbanthinktank, he has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Golden Lion at the International Architecture Biennale Venice, the Chicago Award of the Museum of Architecture and Design, the Curry Stone Foundation Design Prize, and the Gold Holcim Award Latin America. Current projects include Fabrica de Cultura in Barranquilla, Colombia, and the General Urban Plan for Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. His contributions are widely published in architecture books and journal article.

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