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Lesley Lokko and Marina Tabassum named among TIME 100 Most Influential People of 2024

2024-04-17T17:16:00-04:00

TIME Magazine has named architects Lesley Lokko and Marina Tabassum to its list of the world’s '100 Most Influential People of 2024.'

The recent RIBA Gold Medalist (Lokko) and Soan Medal winner (Tabassum) were honored by the publication along with artists Jenny Holzer and LaToya Ruby Frazier and global figures such as the noted Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza and Russian political activist Yulia Navalnaya.

Brief profiles from Harvard GSD’s Dean Sarah M. Whiting and filmmaker/screenwriter Ava Marie DuVernay accompany Tabassum and Lokko, who join a list of other architects selected as TIME 100 honorees that includes SCAPE founder Kate Orff (2023), Kengo Kuma (2021), Jeanne Gang (2019, Bjarke Ingels (2016), and Wang Shu (2013).

The full list of honorees is available here.

Oliver Wainwright on RIBA's '100 Women: Architects in Practice,' a new primer for industry-wide change

2024-02-29T13:40:00-05:00

We’re not there yet. In an industry where the gender pay gap has widened in recent years, where all-male panels at conferences are not unusual, and where macho culture still prevails on building sites, a book like this, sadly, still has a place.

Writing for The Guardian, critic Oliver Wainwright says he hopes RIBA’s new publication 100 Women: Architects in Practice, which we previewed in December, will encourage competition judges, academic panels, awards juries, exhibitions organizers, and rebuke “the headhunters who claim women never apply, [...] the clients who say they just can’t find women with the right experience.”

Many of the architects included in the book, namely Mariam Kamara, Suhailey Farzana, and others, are women whose practices are informed by and in service to decolonization in the developing world à la the 2023 RIBA Gold Medal winner Yasmeen Lari and 2021 Soane Medalist Marina Tabassum. (The profiles are divided into 18 geographical "sub-regions" based on the UN's geoscheme.)

The 320-page book was written by Harriet Harriss, Naomi House, Monika Parrinder, and Tom Ravenscroft, with Alison Brooks responsible for the foreword.

'Tiny house, big impact': Marina Tabassum shares her flat-packed vision with CNN

2023-04-04T14:17:00-04:00

Past Aga Khan Award winner and 2021 Soane Medalist Marina Tabassum was recently featured in a short CNN profile of her ongoing Khudi Bari project in the coastal region of her native Bangladesh.

The concept, which seeks to deliver mobile two-level residential structures to a largely landless population in the heavily flood-prone area, first came about in October of 2018 and was accelerated by a pandemic downturn that ground several of her eponymous studio’s other ongoing projects to a halt.

Tabassum says the bamboo structures (whose name translates to “tiny home” in Bengali) can be easily disassembled and transported elsewhere, relying on steel joints and metal corner braces for structural strength. The design is split into two levels, with the uppermost elevated about six feet above the ground plane to accommodate up to four people in the event of flooding.

Image courtesy Marina Tabassum Architects

According to MTA: “The architecture mimics traditional vernacular language of the Ben...

Desert X 2023 features work that highlights the social and ecological consequences in our changing world

2023-03-18T10:00:00-04:00

The fourth edition of Desert X kicked off earlier this month in Southern California’s Coachella Valley with 12 site-specific installations that focus on ecology and the global social and economic consequences of climate change.

Artists were challenged by the “desert, its beauty, harshness, and ever-changing environment,” according to the event’s founder and President Susan Davis. Their responses included evocations of childhood memory, Native American customs, free trade, conspiracy theories, and popularized notions of the American West, among other inspirations.

Desert X 2023 installation view, Hylozoic/Desires, Namak Nazar, photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy of the artist and Desert X.

“Desert X 2023 can be seen as a collection of artistic interventions that make visible how our energy has a transference far beyond what we see just in front of us in our own localities,” co-curator Diana Campbell says. “From deserts to floodplains, finding, building and developing tools and tactics to...

Marina Tabassum is the 2021 Soane Medalist

2021-11-17T14:18:00-05:00

Marina Tabassum has been named the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Soane Medal honoring her lifework and innovation in the field. The Marina Tabassum Architects founder is the fourth recipient of the medal joining Denise Scott Brown, Rafael Moneo, and Kenneth Frampton on a list of past winners.

Widely admired for her attempts to move away from for-profit architecture and towards a more just and humane application of the profession, Tabassum has been lauded as a trailblazer for female architects, as well as women of color, and was recently among several architects and urban planners named as Academy of American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award winners.

Tabassum referred to past medal winners in a lecture delivered at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London on Tuesday.

“I am 52 years old. Unlike the giants who preceded me to this lectern, I consider myself a work in progress: the search is still on,” she began.

Related on Archinect: Marina Tabassum, Justin Garrett Moore amo...

Marina Tabassum, Justin Garrett Moore among 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award Winners

2021-04-16T13:45:00-04:00

The American Academy of Arts and Letters awards Marina, Tabassum, Justin Garrett Moore, Julie Eizenberg and Hank Koning, Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, and Ersele Kripa and Stephen Mueller as the 2021 architecture award winners.

The jury chair Anabelle Selldorf and fellow jury members, including Steven Holl, Toshiko Mori, Thom Mayne, and Billie Tsien, selected this year's winners from a group of 32 nominated individuals and practices. The Academy awards four cash prizes that will provide further funding for each architect and designer in their efforts to pursue the realms of creative exploration within architecture.

Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize

Award Details: A prize of $20,000 is awarded to an architect of any nationality who has made a significant contribution to architecture as an art.

Marina Tabassum: She is the founding principal of Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA) located in Dhaka, Bangladesh...