Frank Gehry Gets Golden Lion

Written by Phillip Coffey Monday, 28 March 2011 23:51

 

Venice, Italy - The Board of the Foundation La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, and on the proposal of the Director, Aaron Betsky, attributed the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for the 11th International Architecture Exhibition to Frank Gehry. With this award, the desire is to stress –in line with the spirit of the 11th Architecture Biennale– how much Gehry’s work is the significant result of years of experimentation. “Frank Gehry has transformed modern architecture”; writes Aaron Betsky in his motivation. “He has liberated it from the confines of the ‘box’ and the constraints of common building practices. As experimental as the art practices that have been his inspiration, Frank Gehry’s architecture is the very modern model for an architecture beyond building”.

The International Jury of the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, presided over by Jeffrey Kipnis (USA), critic and lecturer at the University of Ohio, and comprised of: Paola Antonelli (Italy), curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; Max Hollein (Austria), director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut and of the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt; Farshid Moussavi (Iran), founder of Foreign Office Architecture in London and lecturer at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi (Italy), critic, historian and lecturer, specialized in urban planning, and a teacher of History of Contemporary Architecture at the Università di Roma La Sapienza, has decided to confer the official awards for the 11th Architecture Exhibition as follows:

Silver Lion for a Promising Young Architect in the International Exhibition to Chilean group Elemental (Padiglione Italia at Giardini, Experimental Architecture)

The Awards and Opening Ceremony of the 11th International Exhibition took place on September 13th in Venice at the Teatro Piccolo Arsenale at 5 p.m. also with the conferral of the following awards:

Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Frank O. Gehry

Special Golden Lion for lifetime achievement to a historian of Architecture to James S. Ackerman on the Fifth Centennial of the birth of Andrea Palladio.

Golden Lion for the Best Installation Project in the International Exhibition

The jury found Greg Lynn’s experimental recycled-toys furniture to best embody the Biennale theme of Out There: Architecture Beyond building. The jury took interest in those projects in which experimentation took on the character of research, and thus to redirect the naïve ambition to achieve a novel solution to a difficult problem in a single daring leap toward increasing the body of knowledge and technique that the entire field can continue to develop. Though remaining at the level of a provocation rather than a prototype, the recycled-toy furniture advances the digital-form problem to a new level that intrinsically engages traditional architectural concerns such as meaning, aesthetics, and advancing fabrication technology with the recycling, an issue of broad, immediate and pressing concern.

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