The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) today (Wednesday 24 September) announced the 2015 RIBA International Fellowships which will be awarded to eleven non-UK architects.

The RIBA’s 2015 International Fellowships are:

• Emilio Ambasz, Emilio Ambasz & Associates (New York, USA)
• Julia Bolles + Peter Wilson, Bolles + Wilson (Munster, Germany)
• Santiago Cirugeda, (Recettes Urbaines) Urban Recipes (Sevilla, Spain)
• Joao Luis Carrilho Da Graca, JLCG (Portugal)
• Richard Leplastrier, Richard Leplastrier (Australia)
• Thom Mayne, Morphosis (Los Angeles and New York, USA)
• Antoine Predock, Studio Predock (Albuquerque, USA)
• Peter Rich, Peter Rich Architects (Johannesburg, South Africa)
• Wang Shu + Lu Yenyu (China) 

The lifetime honour allows individual recipients to use the initials Int FRIBA after their name.

The 2015 RIBA International Fellowships will be awarded at a special event at the RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London, W1 on 3 February 2015.

ENDS

Notes to editors

1. For further press information contact Howard Crosskey in the RIBA Press Office: 020 7307 3761 howard.crosskey@riba.org
2. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) champions better buildings, communities and the environment through architecture and our members. Visit www.architecture.com and follow us on Twitter.
3. The 2014 RIBA Honours Committee who selected the 2015 fellows was chaired by RIBA President Stephen Hodder with Joseph Rykwert, Benedetta Tagliabue, Eric Parry and Louisa Hutton.
4. RIBA International Fellows 2015 citations:

EMILIO AMBASZ  – Argentina/USA

Emilio Ambasz, who was trained as an architect and taught at Princeton University, has made a number of outstanding contributions to both architecture and industrial design. He first came to public notice as the originator and organizer of a number of exhibitions at the MoMA in New York; ‘Italy: the New Domestic Landscape’ in 1972 and ‘The Taxi Project’ of 1976 (which was in fact a reconsideration of urban transport. These were landmark shows – as was the monographic exhibition of the work of Louis Barragan (of 1974) which brought the reclusive Mexican architect to world notice. He represented the US at the 1976 Venice Biennale and won the first prize for the master-plan of the Seville International Exhibition of 1992.

He was one of the first – if not the very first – architect to realize that environment-friendly architecture was not a specialist concern but a design problem as well as a great opportunity. His landscape-cum-building designs include such innovative projects as the Lucille Halsell Conservatory at the San Antonio Botanical Gardens in Austin Texas; and the San Antonio Botanical Gardens in Texas (1988), but even more conspicuously in the Mycal Cultural Centre in Sin-Shanda, Japan. Similarly distinguished are the Fukuoka Prefectural and International Hall; the Ospedale dell’Angello and the Banco del Occhio Medical Centre, both in Venice, Italy; the Terrace Garden for the Pompidou Center in Paris; and his reformulation of the traditional Andalusian house Casa de Retiro Espiritual.

His Vertebra chair is an established ‘classic’ of Industrial Design and is included in the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museums’ collection; it has also been distinguished by a number of awards, as have been his Saturno range of street lights. His design has always been distinguished by wit as well as invention; witness his Handkerchief Television and Soft Notebook.

There have been several one man exhibitions of Ambasz’ work world-wide, twice at New York’s MOMA and twice at the Triennale di Milano, and he is the subject of several monographs. He is himself the author of Natural Architecture/Artificial Design first published in 2001 and republished in 2011.

An Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, he has also been honored with the title of Commendatore della Repubblica Italiana on account of his contributions to Italian culture.

JULIA BOLLES + PETER WILSON – Germany

Peter Wilson was born in Melbourne in 1950. After studying architecture at the University of Melbourne, Peter went on to the Architectural Association in London in 1972, where Julia Bolles-Wilson was also a student. Originally established in London in 1980, the partnership moved to Münster in 1988 on winning the competition to design the new city library there. This highly articulated building is a response to a complex urban situation: its originality and excellence are demonstrated in the fact that almost immediately upon completion it became a mecca for architects and architectural students alike.

Other work includes the 360 degree red-wrapped Luxor Theatre in Rotterdam, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Mies van der Rohe Prize; the visually striking, functionally ambiguous pair of harbour buildings in Münster (2006); and the highly tactile and contextual library in the heart of the Dutch city of Helmond (2010).

Julia Bolles-Wilson has lectured and taught world-wide. She is a regular jury member of architectural competitions and has chaired significant ones such as the Federal Environment Agency Design in Dessau; the new Train station and exhibition centre in Cologne-Deutz; the ‘Topography of Terror’ in Berlin and the Thermal Baths in Wien.

Peter Wilson has lectured worldwide and has run studios in four continents. Peter is also a regular jury member of architectural competitions – he was president of the jury for a new Arts Centre in Maribor, Slovenia and in 2012 he was a member of the jury for the new Medellín Velodrome in Columbia.

Both Julia and Peter are dedicated to teaching and have inspired students and architects through their provocative and relevant public lectures around the world. Of particular note is their inventive use and indeed development of architectural drawing as a tool of representation and research, and their intellectual contribution to thinking on architecture has been considerable. Bolles+Wilson’s work has been broadly published and has received many awards. In 2009 they were rewarded with a Gold Medal at the XI International Triennale of Architecture in Cracow, and in 2013 Peter was awarded the 2013 Gold Medal of the Australian Institute of Architects.

The RIBA is recognizing the distinctive and highly crafted work of Bolles + Wilson – that has been in consistent production over 3 and a half decades – in awarding them each International Fellowship.

SANTIAGO CIRUGEDA – Spain

Santiago Cirugeda is the personification of guerrilla architecture, though he prefers to call himself a citizen. He understands how hard it is for people to improve their own environs and set up the collective Recetas Urbanas (Recipes for the City) to empower other citizens to find loopholes in planning laws to adapt and create their environments – something artists or an architects do by obtaining permits for installations and temporary interventions. On his website you can find out how to attach ‘habitable scaffoldings’ to the facades of existing buildings or to build ‘puzzles’ – houses made entirely from waste materials. The collective is also working on a database of all sites in Spain that can be successfully architecturally recycled if and when such an opportunity presents itself.

He himself has developed a series of subversive projects which explore the complexities of urban life today. These include the occupation of public spaces and containers, building prostheses into facades, patios and empty lots, negotiating a way between legal and illegal zones, reminding us of the pervasive control to which we are all subject.

Cirugeda is also known for urban interventions, such as Take Back the Streets, in which he placed a skip in the centre of Seville which could be used as a swing, a stage, a mini-skate park, a small pond with a fountain, a flowerbed or even a swimming pool. In 2007, he published the book Situaciones Urbanas, in which he presented a wide variety of projects, along with their legal ramifications and social impact.  He has built housing units on rooftops, classrooms on top of a variety of institutions, and civic centres built from materials he himself collected from about-to-be demolished buildings. Spanish newspapers love to write about his projects, generating an intense debate not only about their legality but why the administration cannot or does not want to provide such facilities as swings and playgrounds.

His work is therefore about the possibility of action, appropriation, occupation and use, wherein the citizen can act as initiator, using the guidelines and instructions set out by Cirugeda, to build, display or create space.

JOAO LUIS CARRILHO DA GRACA –Portugal

The Portuguese architect João Luís Carrilho da Graça graduated from the Escola Superior de Belas Artes de Lisboa in 1977 and immediately set up his own practice. He lectured at the Technical University of Lisbon – faculty of architecture, between 1977 and 1992.

From 2001 until 2010, he was professor at the Autonomous University of Lisbon and he has taught at the University of Evora since 2005. He headed the architecture department at both institutions until 2010. He has been invited to several universities, seminars and conferences all over the world.

He was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic in 2010; he received the Pessoa Award in 2008; the Luzboa-Schréder Award in 2004 at Lisbon’s first international light art biennal; the Order for Merit of the Portuguese Republic in 1999; and the International Art Critics Association Award in 1992. For several years he was nominated for the Mies Van Der Rohe European Architecture Award.

His most significant works include the Archaeological Museum of Praça Nova do Castelo de São Jorge (2010) which was awarded the Piranesi Prix de Rome – a hovering structure of corten steel steps down to the site, protecting the existing mosaics, its underside covered in a black mirror that allows the visitor to see the pavements; the Pedestrian Bridge over Carpinteira stream in Covilhã, Portugal (2009) – the 220 metre-long sinuous and segmented bridge winds above the valley, the central section perpendicular to the line of the valley; the School of Music at the Lisbon Polytechnic Institute (2008) which was designed around both indoor and outdoor acoustic requirements and took into account the particular specificities of each musical instrument; and the Knowledge of the Seas Pavilion at the Lisbon Expo 1998, later converted into the Live Science Pavilion – which includes flexible exhibition areas, associated support spaces and administrative offices.

RICHARD LEPLASTRIER  – Australia  

Richard Leplastrier is a key figure in Australian architecture and architectural education. His architecture is sensitive to place and to culture and he uses his studio as a teaching room as well as a place to make architecture.

Richard is always spoken about in relation to Glenn Murcutt and his reputation is possibly diminished by this. It does not help that he shies away from publicity and has little interest in having his projects published. Yet he is the key philosophical influence behind much of the best work we see from Australia today. He provides the backbone of thinking and belief.

He had an extraordinary apprenticeship with Jørn Utzon, with whom he worked at the time of the Sydney Opera House and they became good friends. He became associated with Kenzo Tange in Tokyo and Tomoya Masuda at Kyoto University. The influence of Japanese design and craft is strong in his work, but he has brought to it a uniquely Australian identity. He is trying to bring ancient Aboriginal ideas about the land into play with the opportunities and problems of modernity. He is a superb teacher and speaker. He builds small exquisite buildings that are far more original on visiting than they are in pictures. He is a real first principles thinker. 

Of particular note are his tiny hidden houses, his exquisite furniture, his boat Dorothy and his broad influence within Australia. Specifically his most important projects are: the tiny two bedroomed Palm Garden House, Northern Beaches, Sydney (1976) which dissolves into its garden like a mirage; Rainforest House, Mapleton, Queensland (1991); Lovett Bay House, Sydney (1994); Cloudy Bay Retreat, Bruny Island, Tasmania (1996) designed with one of his former pupils David Travalia, a small house, built as a retreat for study and meditation, like an oyster: rough and tough on the outside, but smooth and polished on the inside; and the Design Centre Tasmania, Launceston, Tasmania (2002) also designed with David Travalia to house the Tasmanian Wood Design Collection and to be used as a living room for the city in which the exhibits would ‘furnish the life of the city’.

Thom Mayne – USA

The architecture of Thom Mayne has been likened to Mozart’s Sonata No 13 in B flat played by The Clash.  His work always pushes at the boundaries of architecture whilst still respecting its traditions. A child of the revolutionary Sixties, his architecture retains its radicalism well into the 21st century. His respect for the Greats of Modernism is thus tempered by a continuing interest in the complexities of the counter-culture.

In 1972, after training at the University of Southern California and Harvard Mayne helped found both the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and Morphosis, the Santa Monica based practice of which he is still Principal Architect.  Mayne describes the early days of the group as more of a garage band than an architectural practice.

Their early mature work includes: Sun Tower in Seoul, South Korea (1997); Diamond Ranch High School, Pomona, California (1999); University of Toronto Graduate House, Toronto, Canada, (2000). In retrospect each of these projects appears be several years ahead of its time.

Morphosis was one of the firm’s first projects fully to realize the benefits of computer aided design. Its work has a layered, sculptural quality. This is typified by later work which includes the New Academic Building at 41 Cooper Square, The Cooper Union, New York (2009); the Perot Museum of Nature & Science, Dallas (2012); the newly completed Bill and Melinda

Gates Hall, Cornell University, New York (2013) and Le Phare (The Lighthouse), a green wind-powered office building at La Défense, Paris due to be completed in 2017.

Mayne has held teaching positions at Columbia, Harvard, Yale, the Berlage in the Netherlands and the Bartlett in London. He is a tenured faculty member at the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture, where he serves as Director for the Now Institute, a multi-disciplinary center for urban research and design.

Mayne was a member of the Holcim Awards global jury in 2006 and a member of the Holcim Awards jury for region North America in 2005. In 2009, he was appointed a member of the Presidential Community for Arts and Humanities. Mayne was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2005 and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 2013.

 

Antoine Predock – USA

Antoine Predock epitomises a rooted American architecture and he continues to practice in Albuquerque, New Mexico, just off the legendary Route 66. When the American Institute of Architects presented Predock with its Gold Medal in 2006 the jury said: ‘Arguably, more than any American architect of any time, Antoine Predock has asserted a personal and place-inspired vision of architecture.  He designs buildings that grow out of their unique landscapes, creating, at the same time, symbols that are fearlessly expressive and sincere, simultaneously complex and guileless. His approach to design is born out of his geographic surroundings, the American West, an open desert full of history and expansive space.’

Many of his buildings seem always to have been there in their landscape settings. His Shadow House, Santa Fe, New Mexico (2004) in the shadows of Jemez Mountains embodies the sense of space of the high desert and weaves modern and traditional materials: the foyer’s earthen oxblood floor, the warm concrete tower and the glass prism designed to pick up the changing light from the sky above. Flint River Quarium in Georgia (2004) is a labyrinth of monolithic limestone blocks with pools of water – an apparently naturally formed aquarium.  Set in a grove of aspens, Highlands Pond House, Colorado (2006) rises out its landscape using local limestone and timber and adding the pizzazz of titanium. Corkins Lodge, Brazos, New Mexico (2012) is a mountain retreat made of local wood and concrete shuttered with similarly rough sawn timbers.  His work has such conviction and passion that it also translates to other cultures and has been universally embraced, witness his recently completed Canadian Museum for Human Rights (2014), which he describes as ‘a symbolic apparition of ice, clouds and stone set in a field of sweet grass.’ He has also finished the new National Palace Museum in Taiwan and is working on a college complex and a museum in Doha, Qatar. Equally he is adept at integrating contemporary work into historical contexts, such his work at Stanford and Rice Universities.

 

PETER RICH – South Africa

Peter Rich’s work was little known in Europe until the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre was awarded the Building of the Year prize at the World Architecture Festival in Barcelona in 2009.

Yet from the 1970s Peter researched and documented by means of sketches and measured drawings the traditional rural settlements of South Africa, his motivation being the distinct possibility that such indigenous settlements would be completely destroyed by the apartheid regime.

Peter Rich’s greatest contribution to African architecture has been through his seminal research into African concepts of space-making in sub-Saharan Africa, including traditional transitional and contemporary applications. He founded the Kigali-based practice Light Earth Design in order to lead the development of local African building industries, particularly in land-locked countries, through the application of appropriate sustainable technologies. His research has also led to the development of first-generation African urban environments at densities in excess of 125 units per hectare.

From his 2008 thematic master plan for Aksum, close to the iron-age city in Ethiopia, through Mapungubwe, to his latest project, the Laetoli African Origins Museum in Tanzania, Peter has used spatial models derived from a local tribal vernacular to communicate the story of Africa’s creative genius to the world.

As a practicing architect and as Professor of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg for 30 years, he developed a contemporary architectural vocabulary that built on his research. Peter soon began to engage with tribal communities, acting in turn as architect, facilitator or activist. After 1994, the establishment of democracy allowed Peter to engage with a series of important Government- funded cultural heritage projects intended to help heal the deep wounds of apartheid.

The Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre (2010) is contained by two hollow cairns that evoke route-markers found in Southern African cultures; the Alexandra Heritage Centre (2000) is a rugged township building and provides a sense of community and poverty relief through training inhabitants in tourism and heritage; while the Thulumtwana Children’s Facility, Gauteng (2000) was a child-owned and managed project  that employed three modified shipping containers, shade structures and low enclosing walls to articulate a series of outdoor rooms and courtyards for playing and learning.

In 2010 Peter was awarded Honorary Fellowship of the American Institute of Architects and The South African Institute of Architects Gold Medal.

 

Wang Shu & Lu Wenyu – China

Architect and Professor Wang Shu was born in Urumqi, a city in Xinjian and studied at the Nanjing Institute of Technology. He practices in Hangzhou and is the Dean of the School of Architecture of the China Academy of Art.

Wang Shu has said: “The notably divergent lives we are aware of cannot appear in a power system that functions from top to bottom and cannot be designed by a professional system affiliated to it, it has to come from the bottom. Before criticizing the society, architects have to criticise themselves first and that is why I named my studio ‘Amateur Architecture Studio.” It is not an attitude that chimes well with the party line in the People’s Republic of China and for most of the ‘90s Wang Shu took the initiative to stop the professional work and continued his studies instead.

The other reason Wang Shu and his wife Lu Wenyu chose the name Amateur Architecture Studio was to remind themselves, their fellow architects and their clients of the importance to the non-professional builder of spontaneity, cultural traditions and craft skills. Such skills he had learn for himself working on building sites.

Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu are highly critical of the part architects have played in the destruction of the hutongs and large parts of Chinese cities. Their critique formed part of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2006 with Tiled Garden, an installation made up of 66,000 tiles salvaged from demolition sites.

The couple’s principal works include: Library of Wenzheng College, Suzhou University, China (2000), built on stilts on a lake ‘to make people aware that they live between mountains and water’; Five Scattered Houses, Ningbo, China (2005) designed as a place where natural elements and people can coexist in the local environment; Xiangshan Campus of China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou (2004) which is like a small town with rich private and public spaces. Ningbo History Museum, Ningbo(2008). It is a mountain which was built with a large number of recycling of traditional building materials to keep and awaken memories.

In 2010, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu were awarded the Schelling Prize for Architecture, a significant European award. And in 2012, Wang became the first Chinese citizen to win the Pritzker Prize, the world’s top prize in architecture “for the exceptional nature and quality of his executed work, and also for his ongoing commitment to pursuing an uncompromising, responsible architecture arising from a sense of specific culture and place.”

 

 

Posted on Wednesday 24th September 2014