The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, together with The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban studies, has announced that Miami-based architect and urban planner Chad Oppenheim has been selected as the 2023 Laureate of The American Prize for Architecture®, the prestigious award that is regarded internationally as the highest honor for architecture in the United States.
Oppenheim’s built works, spanning over two decades, are expansive in typology and geography, including works ranging from cultural and hospitality buildings to residences and urban masterplanning throughout Asia, Australia, Europe and North and South America.
Ayla Clubhouse & Golf Academy , ©Rory Gardiner
“Subtle, powerful, elegant, and deeply romantic” states Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, architecture critic and Museum President/CEO of The Chicago Athenaeum, “he is a prolific American architect who is radical in his restraint, demonstrating his reverence for history and culture, as well as time and space, while honoring the preexisting built and natural environments, as he reimagines a more beautiful and poetic world with modern, meaningful buildings that relate to their context and reinvigorates the landscape and places in which his designs exits.”
“His monumental, immutable architecture enhances the lives of its occupants, realizes a site’s full potential, and protects and celebrates the natural environment.”
“From the serene Jordanian desert to the lush Bahamas, he shapes buildings and places to achieve the optimal balance between creativity and pragmatism, function and experience, construction and aesthetics.”
Desert Rock Resort, 2020-ongoing, ©Oppenheim Architecture
“He treats his buildings and projects with sanctity as he unlocks the mystical and metaphysical essence of the power of architecture.”
“Oppenheim’s buildings engage and harness their surrounding land and seascapes and showcase the designer’s dedication to sustainable practices and materials.”
“He believes that buildings and their environment should be deeply symbiotic, where projects ‘belong’ to their site and form follows feeling. Guided by three philosophical pillars—spirit of place, silent monumentality, and the essential—he has spent decades creating landmark architecture that is highly sensitive and responsive to its context and climate.”
“Every fragment of his designs is essential—every line has a reason and every shape a purpose. Ideas are reduced to the elements and expressions that are truly significant, where the goal is to remove the extraneous, to enhance the meaningful.”
“For example, in his plans for the Wadi Rum Desert Resort (2011) in Petra, Jordan, Oppenheim carved 47 individual dwellings into the sandstone rock surface, taking conservation measures like harvesting rain water in underground cisterns.”
Wadi Rum Desert Resort, ©Oppenheim Architecture
“The property engages and harnesses the surrounding desert land and showcases the designer’s dedication to sustainable practices and materials.”
“In Petra, Oppenheim explores the potential of a site like archaeologists searching for the code that will unlock the vision of a project. The soil, the colors, the landscape, the winds, and the movement of the sun are all elements that are discovered, studied, and considered while shaping the design and, more importantly, the experience of a building.”
“From the first moment I saw his work over a decade ago,” Narkiewicz-Laine continues, “I was immediately moved and overwhelmed by his immense and powerful philosophical awareness for an architecture that transcends the ordinary into the sublime, the ephemeral into the timeless, the commonplace into a significant work of art and, ultimately, a masterpiece.”
“Such is the power of a real architect and an extraordinary visionary.”
The American Prize for Architecture
Established in 1994, The American Prize for Architecture, also known as The Louis H. Sullivan Award, is given to an outstanding office and/or practitioner in the United States that have emblazoned a new direction in the history of American Architecture with talent, vision, and commitment and has demonstrated consistent contributions to humanity through the built environment and through the art of architecture.
The Award, organized jointly by two public institutions, The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, honors American architects, as well as other global architects practicing on a multiple of continents, whose body of architectural work, over time, exemplifies superior design and humanist ideals.
The American Prize for Architecture pays tribute to the spirit of the founder of modernism, Louis Sullivan, and the subsequent generations of Chicago practitioners as Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel H. Burnham, and Holabird & Root.
It also broadcasts globally the significant contributions of America’s rich and inspiring architecture practice and its living legacy to the world at large.
Previous Laureates include Sir Norman Foster, Michael Graves, the General Services Administration, Richard Meier, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, Form4Architecture, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates PC., Bernardo Fort-Brescia and Laurinda Spear of the Miami-based firm of Arquitectonica, Eric Owen Moss, and Victor F. "Trey" Trahan of Trahan Architects APAC.
Last year, the Prize was given to SHoP Architects.
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Press release courtesy of The Chicago Athenaeum
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