Benedetta Tagliabue is the recipient of the 2013 RIBA Jencks Award, which is given annually to an individual or practice that has recently made a major contribution internationally to both the theory and practice of architecture. The award will be presented to Benedetta Tagliabue on Tuesday 19 November at the RIBA in London, where she will give a public lecture, chaired by Charles Jencks.
Citation on Benedetta Tagliabue by Charles Jencks:
“Think Global – Act Local”. Many global architects have paid lip service to this maxim but only a handful have lived up to the challenge and had the patience and skill to turn it into a new art. Benedetta Tagliabue, with the firm that she and her late husband Enric Miralles started, has developed a new sort of architectural practice and way of building. Taking time and incorporating the depth of complexi-ty that only time allows, her group and loyal team have together created what has been called an “agglutinative architecture”. I wouldn’t want to burden anyone with this pretentious and hard to pronounce phrase except in order to make them stop dead in their tracks, take a hard look at an urban scheme of EMBT, and think. It is made from many simple parts and put together as a ‘compound idea of many forms’. It derives an ornament from this process of agglutinate design, and many constructional methods directly expressed. It has the pleasant informal rhetoric of an adhocist approach. It presents the Time City as continual work in progress. It is tough, warm, surprising, complex, open-ended and very like the city from which it springs, Barcelona. While other architects there have rejected, or been frightened of extending some lessons of its master, Antoni Gaudi, EMBT has honoured this tradition without letting it down. Of no other practice can that be said. The theory of EMBT is always in the practice of this ‘time architecture of compounds’ and the unique office mentality that Benedetta Tagliabue has continued with today."
Previous winners of the award include:
2012 Rem Koolhaas
2011 Eric Owen Moss
2010 Stephen Holl
2009 Charles Correa
2008 Wolf D. Prix (Coop Himmelb(l)au)
2007 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos (UN Studio)
2006 Zaha Hadid
2005 Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi (Foreign Office Architects)
2004 Peter Eisenman
2003 Cecil Balmond
Dates.-November 19th. 18.30h
Venue.- Royal Institute of British Architects. 66 Portland Place, London, W1. U.K.
