Architect, critic, cultural historian, and current Columbia GSAPP faculty member Mabel O. Wilson has been named as this year’s winner of the National Building Museum’s prestigious annual Vincent Scully Prize recognizing “excellence in practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design.”

The award, named after the late architecture historian, has been given out every year since 1999 and will now honor Wilson as its 23rd recipient. Wilson joins a list of past winners that includes fellow writers Jane Jacobs and Paul Goldberger as well as other important voices like the architect Phyliss Lambert and television commentator Charlie Rose.

The author of Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums and the co-curator of a recent well-received MoMA exhibition, Wilson has steadily made a name for herself through her writing, research, and other creative projects including the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia and work as a co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present.

“Mabel O. Wilson has built up a reputation over many years as the leading researcher, historian, and designer on space, politics, and cultural memory in Black America. And her recent contributions have culminated in both co-editing Race and Modern Architecture and co-organizing Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” the jury’s statement read. “Both her lifelong work and these two recent, high-profile contributions more than justify her selection as someone in the vein of Vincent Scully, opening the eyes of both professionals and the broader public to deeper understandings of the built environment.”

A conversation between Wilson and Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Dean Steven Nelson will be held at the museum at 6:30 on Tuesday, October 19th. More information, including tickets and livestream reservations, can be found here.