Liam O’Connor selected as 2025 Richard H. Driehaus Prize Laureate at the University of Notre Dame

Architect Liam O’Connor has been selected as the 2025 laureate of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame. The jury acknowledged his lifelong dedication to the design of a body of excellent new traditional public and private buildings and civic monuments — works projecting grace and beauty and expressing the shared emotions and cultural expectations of their audiences. In conjunction with the Driehaus Prize, Philippe Rotthier was named the 2025 Henry Hope Reed Award laureate for his lifelong initiatives and continuing commitment to the cause of a new traditional architecture and urbanism. 

The $200,000 Driehaus Prize, the largest cash award in architecture worldwide, is granted by the Driehaus Trust, in the name of Richard H. Driehaus, founder and chairman of Chicago-based Driehaus Capital Management LLC, as is the Henry Hope Reed Award of $50,000. 

Liam O’ Connor and Philippe Rotthier will be honored at a special awards ceremony at the Murphy Auditorium of the Driehaus Museum, 50 E. Erie Street, Chicago, on Saturday, March 22, at 11:00 a.m. The ceremony will feature a welcome from Stefanos Polyzoides, University of Notre Dame Francis and Kathleen Rooney Dean of the School of Architecture, followed by an introduction by 2024 Driehaus Prize laureate Demetri Porphyrios and remarks by O’Connor. Rotthier will be introduced by 2019 Driehaus Prize laureate Maurice Culot. The annual event is free and open to the public and draws a global audience of industry leaders, academics, and professionals across the architecture, urbanism, and sustainability communities.

O’Connor’s war memorials, in particular, set his work apart for this year’s jury. The memorials are skillfully integrated into their urban or rural settings, with their landscape, fine art, and construction details uniquely and thoughtfully developed in each case. Poetically charged, rationally disposed, and emotionally laden, they are precisely sited, composed, and constructed as statements of public admiration for the idea that freedom exists at all because of heroism and personal sacrifice for the common good, according to the jury citation.

The highest such integration of design, construction, and symbolism is exemplified in his classical British Normandy Memorial that overlooks Gold Beach. The project is located adjacent to one of the five D-Day landing beaches during World War II. The memorial was inaugurated on June 6, 2021, 77 years after the 1944 landings, and commemorates the 22,442 British service personnel who sacrificed their lives there in the struggle to liberate Europe. The names of the fallen are carved into the structure’s 160 limestone Doric columns. 

The Driehaus Prize citation states, “For this project, O’Connor orchestrated a masterplan for 60 acres of land and designed several structures to be eventually built from 3,500 tons of Burgundy limestone and hundreds of sustainably felled oak trees. Such was his commitment to this work that after its construction was halted during the coronavirus pandemic, he took on the task himself while directing 500 craftsmen and craftswomen.”

The citation continues, “Typical of O’Connor’s architecture is its enrichment by symbolic elements that add highly contemporary and personal dimensions to his interpretation of classicism. For the RAF Bomber Command Memorial in Hyde Park Corner in London, his reuse of riveted metal from downed aircraft to construct the central Doric pavilion’s roof memorializes the modern war machines central to these heroic aviators’ glory and demise.”

In addition, the citation noted “the merit of his private and commercial projects, where new construction blends into existing urban settings, in elegant and inventive designs that offer users and onlookers the gift of beautiful everyday places to be.”