Spanish architect, writer, and assistant professor at Rice University Jesús Vassallo was selected as the recipient of the Shepley Bulfinch Award. Founded in 1952, Shepley Bulfinch is an international architecture firm that focuses on sustainable design practices. Vassallo has committed much of his work towards design production and housing revolving around realism in architecture. 

A licensed architect in Spain, Vassallo received his masters of architecture at Harvard GSD and his bachelors in architecture from Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. His most recent project, titled "Tall Timber," focuses on mass timber construction systems for housing developments. Vassallo's research emphasizes the need for carbon reduction and awareness by focusing on mass timber construction as an alternative to steel or concrete systems. 

“Anticipating the disruptive potential of mass timber construction systems for collective housing, and capitalizing on what architects do best, which is to innovate in the application of a new technology as opposed to its basic science, this research project will focus on producing a catalog of new applications of mass timber construction systems for mid-rise housing projects,” Vassallo shares with the Boston Real Estate Times. 

“In order to attain this goal, the project will work by rehearsing different degrees of prefabrication and by focusing on the range of scales between the construction detail and the repetitive structural system.”