Kenneth Frampton, president of the jury for the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP), named seven finalists for the award at an event in Santiago, Chile last week. The program, which was announced in March 2013 as part of Dean Wiel Arets’ new curriculum for the school, seeks to honor the best built work in the Americas. Arets launched the prize in collaboration with Phyllis Lambert, Hon. FAIA, and Dirk Denison, FAIA, at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where Lambert serves as founding director.
“These seven built works are creative responses to the challenges of building in the 21st Century here in the Americas,” Arets said in a release. “By highlighting them as MCHAP finalists, we wish to focus the public conversation on the opportunities of the modern metropolis—we seek to create a hub and it is our ambition to create a dialogue, that unites architects working in the Americas, but at the same time opens the discourse with others involved in the discipline around the world."
Jury members for the prize include Frampton and Arets as well as Jorge Francisco Liemer, architect and professor at Torcuato Di Tella University; Dominique Perrault, Hon. FAIA, founding principal of Dominique Perrault Architecture (DPA); and Sarah Whiting, dean of the Rice University School of Architecture in Houston. Jury members visited the building sites of the finalist projects.
A shortlist of 36 works for MCHAP was announced in April, narrowing down a field of 225 nominees selected by an international pool of architects and ambassadors from related fields. The winning project will be announced at an MCHAP Conference, which will be held in Chicago on October 22. Chilean practice Pezo von Ellrichshausen received the MCHAP.emerge award—aimed at recognizing work by an emerging practice—for Poli House in May of this year.
