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Most awards programs are conducted as a yearly competitive process where “winners” get designated. Is the purpose of highlighting “excellence” in architecture best being served by an annual tournament? Aren’t there perverse effects of that approach, that might cause one to wonder if those competitions turn out producing more harm than good to the pursuit of excellence in building projects, by creating hordes of “losers” for every “winner”?

By recent and not-so-recent experience, I believe Lam is correct in pointing out that awards received do carry significant weight in the evaluation by clients of architects’ qualifications, both in reference to a firm’s general profile and to project experience quoted as specifically relevant to RFPs against the requirements of the specific clients’ project undertaken. The practice is also common in the process of pre-qualification of service providers for open agreement type services arrangements and, also remarkably, for the shortlisting of architects invited to prepare a submission in architectural design competitions.

Do awards inform clients on qualifications specifically relevant to the nature of projects undertaken? Do they dependably inform clients on the nature, scope and depth of the set of professional skills, competencies, proficiencies and reliable availability thereof against the level of quality reasonably expected, if not critically required, in both performing services to be provided and of the output(s) of the work foreseeably to be delivered? Or are they simply presumed to be reliable evidence about the foregoing?

I don’t think anyone can argue without reservation the proposition that such expectations from the public are actually being met, and can be demonstrated in the basis of intelligibly lucid, clear, unambiguous criteria and metrics.

—Author’s name withheld by request

Architecture awards are a kind of coin that some of us trade in. We collect them and our reputation is to some degree dependent on them. However, although there may be some awards that do not depend on submissions by the architect who wants to be awarded or on a kind of club or acquaintance circle to facilitate trust and recognition that the award’s merit will be supported by the receiver I do not know of such awards in architecture.

My own experience is that most juries or selection committees are sincere, but that the ability to truly understand whatever is looked for within architecture for the specific award is not given to many people. The lack of real confirmed merit is pushed upstream, with the awarding institution or function preloading requirements and expectations such that need for such understanding is preempted by narrow given requirements. These tend to circle back to expectations based in the past, and forward-looking enquiry is very much reduced.

Once in a while, the quality and merit of a winner or awardee makes awards seem worthy.

—Michael Karassowitsch

Our new collective book The Rise of Awards in Architecture (Vernon Press, 2022) offers some possible answers to this current riddle.

The book is the first scientific study to focus on awards in architecture and the built environment, investigating their exponential growth since the 1980s. The celebration of excellence in architecture and related fields remains a phenomenon on which there is strangely little scientific scrutiny. What is to be understood from the plethora of award-winning projects, award-winning buildings and awarded professional practices in the built environment, year after year? Glossy images partake in an intense ballet at every local, regional, national or international award ceremony and they are meant to embody proofs of architectural excellence. However, it is necessary to take a critical distance to question what awards are meant to embody, symbolize, and perhaps measure.

Each of the 10 chapters in our volume is centered on one question related to themes as varied as the comparison of Pritzker and Nobel Prizes, the Prix de Rome, the redefinition of quality through awards, green awards and sustainability, the multiplication of sustainable awards, heritage awards, architecture book awards, the awarding of school architecture, awards as mediations, and awards as pedagogical devices. Many fields, once consolidated, have featured a sharp increase in related prizes. The original data, compiled and summarized in four appendices, cover more than 150 award-granting organizations in some 30 countries. Our inventory includes upwards of 24,000 prizes awarded at more than 3,100 events, the earliest of which is the first instance of Western architecture’s seminal Grand Prix de Rome in France in 1720.

A history of contemporary architecture is thus written through press releases that praise the merits of the heroes as much as their works and achievements. And while awards can be vehicles that propel architecture forward, they can also be Trojan horses in an era that is constantly on the lookout for event-driven products, small and big news, and brand imaging.

—Jean-Pierre Chupin, Université de Montréal

An alien coming to earth, if they only had access to award-winning buildings as exemplars of human shelter, would conclude we mostly inhabit museums, concert halls and country houses.

Let’s acknowledge, truthfully, that for the most part, architecture awards are for staged photos of expensive buildings made for ambitious clients by architects from big cites that specialize in that sort of thing. Most architects don’t specialize in that sort of thing.

The logic of awards means that they are incapable of recognizing the fact that, for most clients and situations, buildings involve a myriad of important concerns outside of those that the awards program concerns itself with. Awards are for best-looking flowers, and most of us are growing the potatoes that feed people.

To be clear, I freely acknowledge that the buildings that get awards are often truly extraordinary, in their way. Like the way ballet is extraordinary. Precise, demanding, beautiful, graceful an amazing accomplishment. But most buildings are incapable of being like that like most people are incapable of being ballet dancers as it is, and as it should be.

As a consequence of the logic of design awards programs, which are capable of only recognizing certain kinds of buildings, there are entire other classes of buildings (warehouses, supermarkets, tract housing) and classes of types of valuable work in architecture (programming, advising, technological research) that are pretty much excluded from our collective, critical understanding of contemporary architecture.

—Martin Tite

In Memoriam

Essy Baniassad, 1936-2023

“All culture derives from the poor.” Dr. Esmail Baniassad

It is an honour to offer this tribute to Dr. Essy Baniassad, an inspirational teacher and dear friend of mine from 1977 to 2023. I often think of the many lessons that he taught me about a life in architecture. I am certain that he similarly touched so many of us.

Essy Baniassad grew up in Tehran, the son of a brick mason. As a young man, he left Iran after nearly being killed by the Shah’s police. He went to the US and studied architecture at The University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, as a way of learning the English language. He received his Ph.D. in architecture at the University of Manchester. After teaching architecture in Manchester, England, Essy served as a visiting professor at The Nova Scotia Technical College (TUNS) Faculty of Architecture.

I first met Essy as my thesis advisor at TUNS in 1977. Just after graduation in 1978, while wandering aimlessly in a park, I came across Essy, who immediately challenged me to an impromptu running race in his socks: “Let’s race around that apple tree and back.” He was always a free spirit, with both a childlike quality and a remarkable intellectual rigour. One might see Essy alone on a Sunday morning, walking down the street, playing with a piece of string, or emerging from the fog on his windsurfer. From 1980-1994, as Dean of Architecture and Planning at what is now Dalhousie University, Essy designed an architecture curriculum, built upon his doctoral dissertation, which encompasses the complete discipline of architecture. Today, that curriculum remains intact and vital at Dalhousie. In 1982, while I was completing my graduate studies at UCLA , Essy offered me a teaching position, and the opportunity to return to my native Nova Scotia. When I said that I must first go to Italy and work with Giancarlo DeCarlo, he said “Go what is good for you is good for the school.”

Essy inspired many through his wisdom and insight. Each September, Dean Essy would say to the incoming first-year architecture students, “Don’t let the school stand in the way of your education.”

To the faculty, he would say, “In architecture, there is much to learn and little to teach, but what can be taught can be taught clearly.”

To me as a young practitioner, he would say, “I suggest that you fashion your practice after that of Frank Lloyd Wright.” When I was con- man of the Department of Architecture from 2000 to 2005 and then Chair Professor from 2006 to 2007 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

Essy traveled the world with his sketchbook, using his fine drawing hand as a way of reading cultures. He taught me strategic observation by drawing landscapes from a fast-moving automobile. His life’s research in community development took him to South America, where he was kidnapped by the Shining Path guerrilla group, and was later shot and almost died in Lima, Peru. Undaunted, he also ventured to Africa, where he started an architecture program in Botswana. While speaking with the university president in Botswana, he was told that there could be no new architecture school there due to the lack of funds. In response, Essy said, “Do you have dirt? Do you have a shovel? If you give each student nine square metres of dirt and a shovel, you can have the best school of architecture in the world.” It was Essy’s view that an institution needs to grow its own leaders. From this emerged an exchange program between the University of Botswana and Dalhousie University. At a personal level, his irreverent attitude toward architectural education inspired me to develop the Ghost design/build laboratory at our farm (1994-2011).

Two months ago, I spoke with Essy by telephone, from his hospital