© Anne Purkiss

Little-known today, Arnold William Brunner was a New York architect who was very active professionally, and especially institutionally, between the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. To honor him, in 1955 the American Academy of Arts and Letters created an award with his name that has year after year been handed to leading architects, but until rather recently only to men. In the wake of Elizabeth Diller, Phyllis Lambert, Grafton Architects (Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara), Marina Tabassum, and Carme Pinós, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize goes this year to Farshid Moussavi, who since the start of her solo practice in 2011 has had a thriving career, on both sides of the Atlantic, that she calls ‘micropolitics’: architecture as a sum of small but socially far-reaching gestures...