On May 26th, the famous British architect Kenneth Frampton will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achivement at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, by the will of Venice Biennale’s Board of Directors chaired by Paolo Baratta.
“Considering his work, Kenneth Frampton has a position of extraordinary insight and intelligence, combined with a special integrity awareness. He stands out as an authority in promoting the key issues of architecture and its role in society”, the two curators Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara explain. “His humanistic philosophy, connected to architecture, is rooted in his writing and has constantly supported this humanistic component through all the different (often misleading) “movements” and architecture trends, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries”.
Educated at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Frampton has taught at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York since 1972. Architect, writer, critic, besides teacher and scholar, he influenced and inspired several generations of students and architects. Among his most famous books, you can find “Modern Architecture: A Critical History. Towards a Critical Regionalism”, which highly influenced architects to re-evaluate places’ context and culture, while “Studies on Tectonic Culture” was essential in stressing the connections between construction and architecture languages. In “A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form”, he got design’ inner principles with extreme lucidity, decoding them to make them accessible to everyone.
The award to Kenneth Frampton will be bestowed on Saturday, May 26, 2018 at Ca 'Giustinian, during the awards ceremony and the official inauguration of the Architecture Biennale 2018.
