Vincent Scully Prize 2025 goes to historian and former MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll

Big award news from the National Building Museum today: Barry Bergdoll, architectural historian and former MoMA curator, was named as the 27th recipient of the Vincent Scully Prize. 

Established in 1999, the award celebrates achievements in scholarship, criticism, or practice in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design, with past honorees including Walter Hood, Theaster Gates, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Jane Jacobs, and Mabel O. Wilson. 

Bergdoll, the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University, gained international recognition for reshaping how the public engages with architecture. As MoMA’s Chief Curator of Architecture and Design from 2007 to 2014, he organized landmark exhibitions such as Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront (2009–10), Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream (2012), and Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980 (2015). 

"Through his scholarship and exhibitions, he has opened up architecture to wider audiences, made visible its relevance to our daily lives, and helped us see the built environment with new eyes," Aileen Fuchs, president and executive director of the National Building Museum, remarked on Bergdoll's selection.

The prize jury, chaired by critic Paul Goldberger, praised Bergdoll for "bridging rigorous scholarship with public engagement." 

"Barry Bergdoll has consistently presented architecture not as hermetic, but as enmeshed in wider issues of society, politics, economics, and culture," they noted. 

Bergdoll will be honored at a public event on October 22, 2025, featuring a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Philip Kennicott.