Dallas Morning News architecture critic Mark Lamster has been awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, marking the 10th Pulitzer overall won by the 140-year-old newspaper.

Mark Lamster. [Courtesy photo: Mark Lamster]

Lamster, a 2017 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, was cited “for his rigorous and passionate architecture criticism, using wit and expertise to amplify his opinions and advocate for city residents.” 

Most recently, Lamster has been a passionate advocate for the preservation of I.M. Pei’s Dallas City Hall, which has been the target of everyone from municipal cost-cutters to developers eyeing the site for a future Dallas Mavericks arena. While the city hall’s needed improvements have been slated as costly as $595 million or more, Lamster called plans to abandon the landmark “a tragic farce.”

Lamster has earned honors before this—in 2021, he was awarded the $50,000 Rabkin Prize for arts journalism. But winning a Pulitzer puts him in another category altogether, with a guarantee that “Pulitzer prize winner” will be an appellation that follows him the rest of his life.

A focus on Dallas, from Thanks-Giving Square to Klyde Warren Park

Lamster, who has degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Tufts University, has written several books, including his acclaimed 2018 biography “The Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century.”

The Pulitzer Prize board noted that he has been a senior editor at Princeton Architectural Press and a contributing editor to Architectural Review, Design Observer, and ID. Beyond the Morning News, his work has appeared in leading newspapers including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

But what earned Lamster his Pulitzer is closer to home—a series of articles written in 2025 that explored a range of issues facing. Dallas. Besides the city hall’s future, they included his advice on how to make downtown Dallas more safe; his opposition to a city hall plan to put 150 digital kiosks on city streets; his take on plans to transform Thanks-Giving Square; his view that the city’s proposed $3 billion new convention center project is “a massive gamble of the city purse”; and the inside story on how Klyde Warren Park “brought Dallas together.”

“To state the obvious, on a personal level it’s tremendously rewarding,” Lamster said of the award, according to the Morning News, “and I’m especially glad that it will bring more attention to the effort to preserve Dallas City Hall.”

Lamster’s Pulitzer was accompanied by a monetary award of $15,000.

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