Today, The Pritzker Architecture Prize announced the appointments of Alejandro Aravena as Chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury and Manuela Lucá-Dazio as an advisor to the Prize and the next Executive Director, beginning in March 2021.
"Throughout the history of the Prize, we have consistently relied on the diversity, expertise and standing of our jury members to interpret the evolving role of architecture as it responds to the changing needs of community, environment and technology. We are pleased to welcome back Alejandro Aravena, and in a renewed capacity as he brings with him a fresh model of leadership to steward our independent, international and esteemed jury," said Tom Pritzker, Chairman of The Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the award in a statement. "Likewise, we are delighted to work with Manuela Lucá-Dazio in this new season as we continue our privilege of honoring architects who have impressed upon the industry through the art of architecture and their service to humanity."
Aravena was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2016. He is the Founder and Executive Director of ELEMENTAL, a "Do Tank" that focuses on projects of public interest and social impact thorough housing, public space, infrastructure, and transportation.
Archinect spoke with Aravena last year. One question posed to the Chilean architect was his quitting the Pritzker jury shortly before he was awarded the prize. The full conversation can be heard on the Archinect Sessions Podcast, Episode 144.
"Historically, architecture has been about creating innovative alternatives and imagining possibilities, but it is also intimately connected with society. As jurors, our task is, first, to be sensitive to those questions society would like the architectural profession to address, and to identify those architects that are trying to use the discipline’s body of knowledge to translate those questions into projects," said Arevena in a recent statement. "I am honored to join this group effort aimed to improve the quality of the built environment."
Aravena was the recipient of the 2019 ULI J.C. Nichols Prize, the 2018 RIBA Charles Jencks Award and the first architect to receive the Gothenburg Sustainability Award in 2017. He was Curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 and served on the Pritzker Prize Jury from 2009 to 2015.
Previous Jury Chairs include Justice Stephen Breyer (2019-2020), who remains as a member of the Jury; Glenn Murcutt (2017-2018); Lord Peter Palumbo (2005-2016) and the late J. Carter Brown (1978-2004). Current jurors also include. Current jurors also include Barry Bergdoll, a Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, curator and author, New York, United States; Deborah Berke, architect and Dean of Yale School of Architecture, New York, United States; André Corrêa do Lago, architectural critic, curator, and Brazilian Ambassador to India, Delhi; Kazuyo Sejima, architect, educator and 2010 Pritzker Laureate, Tokyo, Japan; Benedetta Tagliabue, architect, Barcelona, Spain; and Wang Shu, architect, educator, and 2012 Pritzker Laureate, Hangzhou, China.
According to the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Manuela Lucá-Dazio most recently served as the Executive Director of the Department of Visual Arts and Architecture of La Biennale di Venezia. She has managed exhibitions with distinguished curators, architects, artists, and critics to realize the International Art Exhibition and the International Architecture Exhibition since 2009. She holds a PhD in History of Architecture from the University of Roma-Chieti, Italy and lives in Paris, France.
"It is for me an enormous honor to become the next Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, an essential point of reference in the architecture world, and even more at such a key historical moment for the architectural discourse and practice," said Lucá-Dazio in a statement. "I am deeply grateful to Margot and Tom Pritzker for giving me this chance. I look forward to joining the Pritzker Architecture Prize organization, to support its highly prestigious Jury and serve its mission to celebrate the quality in the profession for the enhancement of the built environment and the lives of those who inhabit it."
Moreover, Martha Thorne, Executive Director since 2005, will step down this coming March, following the announcement of the 2021 Laureate. She will serve as an advisor to the Prize through the 2021 ceremony and oversee the transition.
"We are incredibly grateful for the long and impactful tenure of Martha’s service to the Prize, as she has infused the utmost diplomacy and discretion within her role while bringing to the fore, especially in the composition of jury members, the overdue merit of women in the field of architecture," said Tom Pritzker in a statement.
Reflecting on her stepping down, Thorne said in a statement: "The experience and knowledge gained over the past fifteen years with the Prize has been an enormous privilege. Looking ahead, I am eager to expand my involvement in other initiatives where I can directly affect the field of architecture both working with people and institutions to engage the services of architects and devoting more time to writing."
Archinect spoke with Thorne on the Archinect Sessions Podcast, Episode 48 on the inner-workings of the prestigious award and to address the looming question at the time of the awarding of the 2016 Pritzker to Alejandro Arevena after he had recently left the Prize's Jury.
27 Comments
I'm assuming there is no monetary compensation for this role, like his interns.
Aravena's rise to fame is odd. His firm's architecture is well short in their originality, execution, and vision than that of his peers. The humanitarian impact of the housing projects is notable but limited. And as you pointed out, they did not pay interns until called out. Yet the man is spoken of as a maestro and visionary.
I attended a lecture of his some 11-12 years ago and the question was asked about how he felt about taking a commission when doing low-income/charity type large housing projects. HIs answer will always cast shade on him in my view. He replied: "I expect to be paid, and paid well, for my efforts"
how to build a career on a TED-talk...
And these are the types who accuse you of "selling out" when you go work for a place that does more boring work yet pays you a livable wage.
With that carefully styled hair and rebel humanitarian persona ... the actual work gets a pass but he gets 100 points for good intentions and bringing his own bully pulp
it.
In the olden days, the Pritzker seemed very USA-centric. Now it wants to be global and diverse. This raises the question of how you handle awarding architects operating places where things like unpaid internships, slave labor, and enormous socio-economic inequality are customary and tolerated.
Japan has been part of the architectural mainstream since the Pritzker was first awarded - heck, Barragan was one of the first winners. With Aravena, my issue with his award was the quality of work in general (Middling brutalism) and the caveats that came with his signature projects (A lot of press coverage, deservedly, but also difficult to replicate due to the subsidies of the natural resources industry that made the projects financially feasible). Should the award be given to the best architecture or the best intentions, keeping in mind the wide range of "best". Shigeru Ban has a lot of middling instituional work but his humanitarian projects has indeed been innovative, scalable, and truly impactful.
Does Shigeru Ban pay his interns a livable wage? Indeed, which starchitects do? All of these awards are for the 1% of architecture - people that make their money in other ways, but are somehow upheld as the paragons of architecture.
"Historically, architecture has been about creating innovative alternatives and imagining possibilities..." Not really, unless history started in the 20th cent.
How about making a roof that doesn't leak? Anyway he has the loon starchitect visage down pat.
I know there's a lot of hate for socially admirable projects in these forums. But the half-a-house idea is actually brilliant and as far as I know successful. I mean, we're architects: we should all *know* that the structure and the wet parts are the most expensive parts of a house to build, and that building the rest of it doesn't really need, at all, the input of an architect.
I just wish every time the incremental houses were shown that pictures of them *after* the owners started self-building were included. They look so much better being lived in!
MESSY VITALITY FTW!!! Not to mention stable housing for people.
"building the rest of it doesn't really need, at all, the input of an architect." But imagine if architects tried! This is what happens when you don't take the public's desire for beauty or at least character seriously. They do it themselves.
Thayer-D, people shouldn't be allowed to do that. It looked like a nice and completed project above. Where's this? At this point, it's not about ugly or beautiful but violating one's work.
It's LeCurbusier's worker's housing in Pessac near Bordeaux of 1926. Your right about beauty since it's subjective, but what's clear is that people will do what they want with their home as they have the right to. My point is that if architects insist on providing minimalist designs, they shouldn't be surprised to see residents adding what they wouldn't. Here's public housing in DC done by progressives for democrats in a liberal city. No overt historicism, but plenty of character which happens to fit in nicely with its neighbors. What are architect's waiting for?
I think people should absolutely be able to do whatever they want to their own home - even if an architect originally designed it - and whatever they do it will be reflective of society.
The historical works of architecture should be preserved. Unless architects' intent is the modifiable base unit design like Araveno's. That's my personal opinion.
Social housing that looks like social housing is an epic fail. Here is how the Spainish do it in a modern vernacular.
:
French social housing:
I have a lot of questions about projects like all of the above, and whether they are fixing the problems that plagued modernist housing projects. Pruitt-Igoe, for instance, was praised by both magazines, politicians and its own residents --calling it "poor-man's penthouses" for about 10 years after being built--until white residents started fleeing and people realized they were living in a food/business/pub transport desert. Do these residents own their apartments, or is it the typical feudalistic model that urbanists love? Is there transportation and opportunity nearby? I see a lot of talk about how "social change" is somehow being reborn in architecture after being discarded in the 70s. And yet when these bureaucrats were developing "social housing" who did they call? The people who already knew how to build, ask clients for their input, respond to climate, site, human scale concerns that bureaucrats constantly undermine. Many in the Americas had been building in China or Europe while others were honing their craft on smaller projects in middle America or Canada. Even supposed post-modernists like Holl, Rem, etc. as well as 90s architects are building high density now.
Yet it seems to be the architects that propagate this false narrative of architects vs. public that are able to take advantage of the new public interest in social housing. The question again if the underlying infrastructure (ownership, economy, transportation) has been improved to the same standard as the new interest in building quality. You can't have architecture without urban design and economy, and you can't have urbanism without architecture.
It is interesting to me how the bureaucrats of the present-future are using key words like "resilience, equity, social" and sometimes "placemaking" to signify a kind of moral high ground. But it is important to look beyond at what they are really proposing. Everywhere you look there's a 100m project for resilient or social something something. But not much accountability for where the $$ ends up, just like in the past.
That said, it seems like Arevana is more of the craft school of a Murcutt but the focus on "social" buzzwords around him make me eye-roll-y and suspicious
The public pays to build a Pruitt-Igoe or Robin Hood Gardens and then the public pays to tear it down and then the public pays to build another horror and will pay, again, to tear that down. With few exceptions the architects follow the cardinal rules: (1) Public housing must look like public housing and (2) graft, corruption, and payoffs will further degrade the designs which were half-assed to begin with.
Cite your sources, please.
Can see the same irrational mentality in Pruitt Igoe and Hudson Yards. Projects formed by bureaucrat-industrial complex where everything looks great on a spreadsheet or narrative. They find the architect that will stamp their own Neo-feudalistic model, then blame architecture when it fails. Pruitt-Igoe cut Yamasaki design's public lobbies, landscaping, and doubled the units. Hudson Yards just bypassed better proposals to do haphazard DS+R and KPF drivel. Neither has any concept of deeper needs of public, context or architectural values.
Yes, the persistent activity of constructing dense clusters of impoverished renters and then neglecting to do pretty much all of the property maintenance is an endless repeating cycle in the USA. Blaming the architectural style of failed public housing schemes is just a fun sideshow for media and architectural academics.
The smart part of the New Deal was creating large needed economic projects and jobs along with housing, whereas the current thinking is just to build housing with no idea of economic context, purpose or industry. Now you have neo-feudal private companies building housing complexes that they own and lease to tenants that will likey have no path to ownership. Much like the tenants of so many housing projects, public and private.
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