Parsons SCE is delighted to announce that Paul Goldberger, the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture, is one of four recipients of the Arts and Letters Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Paul will receive $10,000 as “an American who explores ideas in architecture through any medium of expression.” This year’s winners also include Theaster Gates (who spoke at Parsons SCE last Fall), Walter Hood and John Ronan, and were chosen from a group of 27 individuals and practices nominated by the members of the Academy. The jurors were Elizabeth Diller (chairman), Henry N. Cobb, Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Hugh Hardy, Steven Holl,  Thom Mayne, James Polshek, Robert A. M. Stern,  Billie Tsien, and Tod Williams.

The awards will be presented in New York City in May at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial. Work by the winners will be featured in the Exhibition of Works by Newly Elected Members and Recipients of Honors and Awards, on view in the Academy’s galleries on Audubon Terrace. The Academy’s annual architecture awards program began in 1955.

A summary of the jury’s comments: Author, critic, and lecturer Paul Goldberger’s “broad influence stems from his capacity to engage the reader in a mutual appreciation of architecture,” said Kenneth Frampton. Currently the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City, he taught previously at the Yale School of Architecture and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Through his books and as architecture critic for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, Goldberger has earned a “reputation as the doyen of American architectural critics,” Frampton said, “making the topic readily accessible to the society at large.”  Notable books include Building Art, (2015); Why Architecture Matters (2009); Building Up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the Age of Architecture (2009); and UP FROM ZERO: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York (2004).