Meet the winners of this year’s Loewe Foundation Craft Prize

Loewe Foundation Craft Prize 2026 Jurors (Left to Right) Bottom row: Naoto Fukisawa, Designer and Director, Japan Folk Crafts Museum, Tokyo; Kunimasa Aoki, Winner of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize 2025; Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, Architecture and Design correspondent, El Pais; Sheila Loewe, (Chairwoman) President, Loewe: Dame Magdalena Odundo, Ceramicist. Middle row: Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, Creative Directors, Loewe; Patricia Urquiola, Architect and Industrial Designer; Wang Shu, Architect and Pritzker prize Winner. Top row: Abraham Thomas, Curator of Modern Architecture, Design and Decorative Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minsuk Cho, Architect and winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale 2014; Olivier Gabet, Director of the Department of Decorative Arts, Louvre Museum Paris; Deyan Sudjic, Essayist and Director Emeritus Design Museum, London; Frida Escobedo, Essayist and Architect.

Included in the 2026 jury seeking consensus on the one most worthy of the €50,000 grand prize and two special mentions (each receiving €5,000) were Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, founders of New York fashion house Proenza Schouler who recently stepped down to take up the creative directorship of Loewe.

As first-time jurors bringing their design objectivity to a learned assembly counting Abraham Thomas, Curator of Modern Architecture Curator, Design & Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Deyan Sudjic, Director Emeritus of the Design Museum London; and Olivier Gabet, Director of the Department of Decorative Arts at Louvre Museum, Paris, McCollough and Lazaro admitted to feeling a little intimated.

“Like Freda is making the new wing at The Met,” Hernandez says in awe of fellow juror, Mexican architect Freda Escobedo and her commission to design the museum’s new Tang Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art. “These people are such experts in this field.”