Denise Scott Brown, Hon. FAIA, and Robert Venturi, FAIA, were announced the winners of the 2016 AIA Gold Medal Award.
The award, voted on by the AIA’s Board of Directors, is the highest award the association can offer to an architect, and it “acknowledges a significant body of work that has had a lasting influence on the theory and practice of architecture,” according to a statement.
Scott Brown and Venturi, a team that has been married since 1967, have influenced up-and-coming architects over the years through their built work and writings.
Some notable projects that their firm, VSBA Architects and Planners, have worked on are the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the The Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, the Provincial Capital Building in Toulouse, France, the Seattle Art Museum, and buildings for several universities, including Brown, Ohio State, and Yale.
Venturi wrote the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture in 1966, and worked with Scott Brown and architect Steven Izenour on Learning from Las Vegas in 1972. The pair also wrote Architecture as Signs and Systems: for a Mannerist Time in 2004.
“This recognition will resonate with generations of architects,” 2015 AIA President Elizabeth Chu Richter, FAIA, said in a statement. “What Denise and Bob have done for the profession far exceeds the completion of a great building or two. Through a lifetime of inseparable collaboration, they changed the way we look at buildings and cities. Anything that is great in architecture today has been influenced in one way or another by their work."
The duo has won 17 state and local AIA awards and nine national AIA awards. In 1991, Venturi won the Pritzker Architecture Prize but Scott Brown was excluded; they sought to have Scott Brown honored retroactively in 2013. They will receive the 2016 Gold Medal at the AIA convention in Philadelphia in May.
Related Stories
| Jun 17, 2014
U.S. Census report examines why Americans move
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 35.9 million people moved between 2012 and 2013, meaning that 11.7% of the U.S. population moved in one year. The report seeks to examine why.
| Jun 17, 2014
World's tallest pair of towers to serve as 'environmental catalyst' for China
The Phoenix Towers are expected to reach 1 km, the same height as Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill's Kingdom Tower, but would set a record for multiple towers in one development.
| Jun 16, 2014
6 U.S. cities at the forefront of innovation districts
A new Brookings Institution study records the emergence of “competitive places that are also cool spaces.”
| Jun 13, 2014
Gilbane Building Company names new president and chief operating officer
Gilbane Building company hires new president and COO
| Jun 13, 2014
First look: BIG's spiraling museum for watchmaker Audemars Piguet
The glass-and-steel pavilion's spiral structure acts as a storytelling device for the company's history.
| Jun 13, 2014
Grocery stores, restaurants make neighborhoods most desirable [infographic]
John Burns Real Estate Consulting ranks the top 25 housing amenities by generation, based on feedback from more than 20,000 home shoppers.
| Jun 12, 2014
Zaha Hadid's 'gravity defying' Issam Fares Institute opens in Beirut
The design builds upon the institute’s mission as a catalyst and connector between AUB, researchers and the global community.
| Jun 12, 2014
Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects' design selected for new UCSC facility
The planned site is a natural landscape among redwood trees with views over Monterey Bay, a site that the architects have called “one of the most beautiful they have ever worked on.”
| Jun 12, 2014
Austrian university develops 'inflatable' concrete dome method
Constructing a concrete dome is a costly process, but this may change soon. A team from the Vienna University of Technology has developed a method that allows concrete domes to form with the use of air and steel cables instead of expensive, timber supporting structures.
| Jun 11, 2014
David Adjaye’s housing project in Sugar Hill nears completion
A new development in New York's historic Sugar Hill district nears completion, designed to be an icon for the neighborhood's rich history.