Noted memorial designer Liam O’Connor is named 2025 Driehaus Prize laureate

The University of Notre Dame has named Liam O’Connor and Philippe Rotthier as the laureates of this year’s Richard H. Driehaus Prize and Henry Hope Reed Award, respectively. 

Known for his extensive body of work that includes the British Normandy Memorial in France, O’Connor, who was also previously a visiting professor at Notre Dame and Yale, was cited by School of Architecture dean Stefanos Polyzoides as producing several other important monuments that are "Poetically charged, rationally disposed and emotionally laden."

The jury’s citation of the British-born Irish architect continued, "Typical of O’Connor’s architecture is its enrichment by symbolic elements that add highly contemporary and personal dimensions to his interpretation of classicism. For the RAF Bomber Command Memorial in Hyde Park Corner in London, his reuse of riveted metal from downed aircraft to construct the central Doric pavilion’s roof memorializes the modern war machines central to these heroic aviators’ glory and demise."

The annual $200,000 prize is among the highest total cash rewards in architecture and includes names such as Michael Graves, Robert A.M. Stern, and Ben Pentreath on its list of laureates. Architect Peter Pennoyer precedes O’Connor as the previous year’s winner. The Driehaus Prize was first established in 2003.

Joining O'Connor was the 2025 Henry Hope Reed Award laureate Rotthier, who helped establish the European Prize of Architecture in his name in 1982. His jury citation mentions: "Rotthier has seeded and cultivated the many different dimensions required in the formation of a movement. Thanks to his lifetime contribution in establishing the European Prize of Architecture Philippe Rotthier competition, many students, designers, architects, practitioners and craftsmen were encouraged to adopt the educational thinking of the new traditional architecture and urbanism."

This year’s Driehaus Prize and Henry Hope Reed laureates were selected by a jury composed of Melissa DelVecchio, partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects; Michael Lykoudis, professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame; Léon Krier, architect and urbanist; Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of the University of Miami; Demetri Porphyrios, principal of Porphyrios Associates, London; and Julia Treese, partner at Treese Architekten in Berlin and Munich. Polyzoides, a partner at Moule & Polyzoides, Architects and Urbanists in Pasadena, California, served as this year's jury chair.