AZURE is excited to present the jury of the AZ Awards 2026! Our 10 panelists represent the best in their fields of architecture, urbanism, interiors, industrial design and more.

If you haven’t already, enter the AZ Awards 2026 now! The early bird deadline is January 23, and the final deadline is February 13. Put your work in front of an international panel of experts as part of one of the industry’s most renowned awards programs, covering design categories from A to Z.

Lloyd Alter, Architect and Writer

Lloyd Alter has been an architect, real estate developer, prefab proselytizer and writer, and is a past president of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario. He teaches Sustainable Design at Toronto Metropolitan University. He has contributed to many publications, including The Guardian, Green Building Advisor, Passive House Plus and Azure, and was a contributor and editor at Treehugger.com for 15 years. Alter is the author of Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle, from New Society Publishers. His latest book, The Story of Upfront Carbon, examines the carbon emitted while making everything in our lives, from iPhones to hamburgers (and yes, buildings). He currently writes at Carbon Upfront!

Loreta Castro Reguera, Co-Founder, Taller Capital

Architect and urban designer Loreta Castro Reguera is a co-founder, with José Ambrosi, of the Mexican architecture studio Taller Capital. They build and work in Mexico, designing projects related to housing and public space that consider material austerity in favour of spatial richness, making the most of what is available on-site. Cost-effective in their construction and maintenance, their projects attend to diverse social, urban, environmental and cultural conditions. An important focus of the firm is the design of soft water management infrastructures.

Castro Reguera is also a professor at Estudio RX, a design thesis seminar held at the School of Architecture, UNAM. She has been a guest professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Desgin, UCLA, IUAV Venice, the School of Architecture of Nancy in France, the Escola da Cidade in Brazil, the National University of Colombia in Medellin, and the Catholic University of Perú in Lima. Through Mexico’s National Creators System, she published the book La Imagen del Agua en la Ciudad, and developed and curated the exhibition Ciudades de Agua presented in the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City. She lectures extensively, has been on the jury of several renowned architecture prizes and has published several articles and essays for books and periodicals.

Jonathan Garnett, Creative Director, Modellus Novus

Jonathan Garnett is a founder and Creative Partner at Modellus Novus, where he oversees creative direction for a range of the firm’s architecture and design projects as well as external and internal initiatives. The New York studio’s work includes renowned interiors for restaurants including Saga, Nami Nori and Crown Shy. A native of Oakland, California, of Black and Japanese descent, he received his Bachelor of Arts (Magna Cum Laude) with Concentrations in Industrial Design and Graphic Design from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, studied at the Technical University at Delft in the Netherlands, and received his Master of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles.

Kevin Lamyuktseung, Associate Principal, SO-IL

Kevin Lamyuktseung has directed a number of SO–IL‘s award-winning and widely published buildings, including the recently completed Amant arts campus in Brooklyn. He also played a key role in the office’s large-scale built cultural works, including the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis and the K11 Arts and Culture Center in Hong Kong.

Currently, he leads the Williams College Museum of Art, a 7,250-square-metre contemporary art museum. Skilled at working with arts institutions, he has spearheaded designs for significant institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the PHI Contemporary, the Adelaide Contemporary, the Hangzhou Arts Campus and the Shanghai East Museum. Lamyuktseung’s talent at exhibition space design has been made evident in his built work with Amant, the Bad Thoughts Exhibition Gallery at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Future Work Exhibition at Design Miami Basel.

Carol Phillips, Partner, Moriyama Teshima Architects

Carol Phillips, Partner at Moriyama Teshima Architects, is a recognized leader with over 30 years of experience shaping transformative places for communities. A Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, she has been at the forefront of sustainable design, pioneering low-carbon and mass timber construction while advancing net-zero carbon strategies. Her portfolio spans academic institutions, cultural landmarks and civic buildings across Canada and internationally, each project marked by innovation, inclusivity and environmental responsibility.

Guided by a design philosophy that emphasizes the connection between people, place and nature, Phillips creates architecture that fosters collaboration, cultural sensitivity and ecological stewardship. Her empathetic and collaborative approach ensures that every project not only responds to the climate crisis but also strengthens community bonds and enhances the human experience through beautiful, inspiring, thoughtful and context-driven design.

Gabrielle Rousseau, Founding Partner, Ivy Studio

Gabrielle Rousseau is an architect and founding partner of Ivy Studio with 11-plus years of experience across hospitality and interior architecture. She has led the studio’s most ambitious, award-winning projects — from fine-dining restaurants to café-retail hybrids — ensuring tight cohesion between creative vision, technical rigour and operational realities. Known for her precise eye, she also brings the team’s deepest FF&E knowledge, maintaining close relationships with manufacturers and suppliers and translating performance requirements into compelling specifications.

Before co-founding Ivy, Rousseau worked at Atelier Zébulon Perron, contributing to the Four Seasons Montréal common areas and the Alt+ Hotel in Brossard — experience that sharpened her mastery of luxury hospitality standards, back-of-house interfaces and guest-flow choreography.

Tiffany Shaw, Founder, Reimagine Gathering

Tiffany Shaw is a Métis artist, architect and curator based in Edmonton, Alberta. She holds a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University and a Masters in Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). 

Through her work as a Métis Architect and Indigenous Practice Leader with Reimagine Architects, Shaw founded the Indigenous-owned consulting company Reimagine Gathering. She is renowned for her insightful aesthetic, weaving storytelling through craft and materials while honouring the nuances of diverse cultural landscapes. She seeks to engage methods of motherhood and caregiving into workplace practices as a way of centring care, responsibility and reciprocity. Her work forms a cohesive narrative between past, present and future, bringing essential cultural and relational dimensions into contemporary practice.

Shaw has exhibited widely, including the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Winnipeg Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Alberta, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, La Biennale De Quebec and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. She has been the recipient of multiple public art commissions, including her work pehonan at ᐄᓃᐤ (ÎNÎW) River Lot 11∞ Edmonton’s Indigenous Art Park, curated by Candice Hopkins, and ask the water, in Banff, Alberta, curated by Ciara McKeown.

Gabriel Tan, Principal, Gabriel Tan Studio

Principal of Gabriel Tan Studio (founded in 2016) and Studio Antimatter and co-founder of Origin Made, Gabriel Tan is a Singaporean designer based in Porto. Working at cultural intersections, he explores new approaches to tradition, craft and technology. He designs for renowned brands, including B&B Italia, Herman Miller and Louis Poulsen, while also creative directing Japanese furniture brand Ariake and craft-driven design brand Origin Made. Tan’s interior design practice, Studio Antimatter, works on selective residential and hospitality projects.

Tan’s work has received international recognition, including the Industrial Designers Society of America’s IDEA Award, Japan Good Design Award and the 2025 President’s Design Award for Designer of the Year, Singapore’s highest design accolade.

Michael Van Valkenburgh, Creative Director, MVVA

Michael Van Valkenburgh is the Creative Director of MVVA, the landscape architecture firm he founded in 1982, whose projects include Brooklyn Bridge Park, Arkansas Riverfront and a few of Toronto’s most beloved green spaces, including Corktown Common, Biidaasige Park and the Landmark Landscape at University of Toronto’s St. George Campus. His leadership of the firm is an extension of his passion for landscape as a living artistic medium that deepens and enriches people’s lives through the confluence of aesthetics, technology and ecology. He has combined his love of cities and the energy of urban living with the lessons of his childhood on a dairy farm in rural New York State, where economy of means was a constant priority.

Van Valkenburgh earned a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University and a Master of Fine Arts in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, Emeritus, at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where he taught for almost four decades. He received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in 1989. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. Van Valkenburgh is the author of Designing a Garden (2019) and Brooklyn Bridge Park (2021), both published by The Monacelli Press.

John Löfgren and Jonas Pettersson, Co-Founders, Form Us With Love

Form Us With Love is a Stockholm-based international design studio founded in 2005. At the studio’s core lies a process that blends traditional creative practices with a lean, strategic application. The central intention is to evolve with the needs of each project, its place in the market and the ever-changing needs of real people. It has collaborated with brands including Keilhauer, Cappellini, Bene, +Halle, IKEA and more.

FUWL designs for an important reason: to improve life overall. That idea on its own is vast and difficult to tackle; progress is a constant game of one step forward and two steps back. People have different needs than a business has, though much of it overlaps. And what is a solution for the planet now has to be taken into the context of the centuries it might be around. The studio considers a lot of elements when designing a product — sustainability being chief among them. Each solution it finds gets added to its broader knowledge, so it’s not starting from zero when arriving at a brand new problem.

FUWL aims to design real change by understanding industry and culture, systemic change that has implications across life’s various sectors. To do this, it identifies industrial opportunities that can solve social needs and design solutions with a balanced use of resources. This results in necessary, high-quality products that deliver business growth and create real change.

Submissions close Friday, February 13, 2026 (early-bird deadline is January 23, 2026). Online entry portal and more information at awards.azuremagazine.com

Keilhauer is the EMERGING Category sponsor. Colombo Design America, Vicostone and Landscape Forms are the Gala Sponsors for the 2026 AZ Awards.

Media Partners: ArchDaily, Archilovers, Archinect, Archiproducts, Designboom, The Architect’s Newspaper, Architonic, Bustler, Design Week Mexico, v2com newswire, and World-Architects.