Kutan Ayata’s Young & Ayata among five recipients of American Academy of Arts and Letters’s 2025 Awards in Architecture

Kutan Ayata’s practice Young & Ayata is one of five recipients of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s 2025 Awards in Architecture. Arts and Letters’s annual architecture awards program began in 1955 with the inauguration of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize and has since expanded to include four Arts and Letters Awards. This year’s recipients were chosen from a group of individuals and practices nominated by the members of Arts and Letters.

Young & Ayata joins Andrés Jaque, Neri&Hu, and Mark Wigley among this year's Arts and Letters Awards honorees, while the 2025 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize is awarded to the British architect and educator Farshid Moussavi.

These architecture awards will be presented alongside the art, literature, and music awards at Arts and Letters’s annual Ceremonial in May.

Kutan Ayata is Vice Chair and Associate Professor at UCLA AUD. Young & Ayata, founded by Ayata and Michael Young, is an architectural design practice formed in 2008 dedicated to speculations on the aesthetics of the near future. They work through images, objects, and buildings to build scenarios of the background. Based in New York and Los Angeles, the practice is dedicated to both built commissions and experimental research. Both principals teach and view the academic domain as crucial to the continual development of architectural ideas, particularly emergent trajectories in architectural representation.

Young & Ayata recently received the Progressive Architecture Award with their DL1310 Apartments project in Mexico City. They are the recipients of the 2016 Design Vanguard Award from Architectural Record. In 2015 they were one of two first prize winners in the International Competition for the New Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany. They were finalists in the 2015 MoMA Young Architects Program in Istanbul, Turkey. In 2014, the partners were the recipients of the Young Architects Prize from Architectural League of New York, and their entry in the International competition for the Dalseong Citizen's Gymnasium in South Korea received an honorable mention. The firm's work has been published widely and has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Istanbul Modern Museum, the Graham Foundation, SCI-Arc, Princeton, Harvard and Yale Universities.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. Our 300 members distribute over 70 awards annually; fund concerts and new works of musical theater; purchase and commission contemporary art for donation to museums across the country; and present exhibitions, talks, and events for the public at our historic buildings in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City.