The Monuments Men have ruled architecture for a good 500 years, since at least the days Andrea Palladio was designing impressively scaled villas for his clients in Northern Italy. Their prominence peaked about a decade ago, with the well-chronicled rise of the globe-trotting celebrity architect and his small army of publicists.

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But many in the profession have lately been calling for a broader, more nuanced definition of how architecture operates, beginning with an effort to acknowledge its fundamentally collaborative nature.

Three significant awards this month suggest that the campaign is making headway. Prizes are usually trailing indicators of change in any field, not leading ones. (See: the Oscars and the NAACP lifetime-achievement award that almost went to Donald Sterling.) In this case, the honors offer a chance to measure an emerging shift in how architecture defines itself, a loosening of the Monuments Men's collective grip.

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Do any of these awards represent a sea change, a radical shift? Not quite.

In Ban, the Pritzker found a convenient middle ground: an architect who has made a career smoothly bridging the gap between socially conscious and high-design architecture. He was hardly an obscure or shocking choice.

Lambert's Golden Lion is a reminder about how much more work will be required to fully understand the role clients have played in producing architecture's greatest buildings.

Female architects are right to wonder, as many have, why the AIA decided to break the Gold Medal gender barrier by honoring someone who died 57 years ago rather than a contemporary figure like Jeanne Gang or Annabelle Selldorf — or a male-female partnership like the one between Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi or Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

And as the Architecture Lobby points out, the way the profession pays and licenses its youngest members is as outdated as its tendency to honor the "solo creative genius." Even worse is its attitude about working conditions for the crews who build high-profile projects in places like Qatar and China.