The Accademia Adrianea di Architettura di Roma has awarded the 2018 Piranesi Award to Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza for his outstanding professional career in relation to historic heritage.
The Piranesi Award is a prestigious international recognition, sponsored by the Accademia Adrianea, the Ordine degli Architetti of Rome, and the Casa dell'Architettura, which honors the quality of an architect's work and their approach to the classical.
The Spanish architect will accept the prestigious award on Friday, March 16, 2018, at the Casa dell'Architettura, where he will deliver a keynote lecture on the Pantheon and how this magnificent building has been a constant presence throughout his career and architectural design process. He will also look back on the highlights of his professional career, which began in 1978.
Reflecting on this honor, the Spanish architect noted:
Campo Baeza was born in Valladolid, where his grandfather was an architect. However, from the age of two, he lived in Cádiz, the city where he first discovered light. He is a Professor of Architectural Design at the Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM), where he has taught for over 35 years. He has also taught at ETH Zurich, EPFL Lausanne, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the Bauhaus in Weimar, Kansas State University, the Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, D.C., and in 2016, at L’École d’Architecture in Tournai, Belgium. More recently, he taught at the University of Buffalo, where he was appointed the 2017 Clarkson Visiting Chair in Architecture.
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He has lectured worldwide and received major awards, including the Torroja Award for Caja Granada and the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. In 2013, he was awarded the Heinrich Tessenow Gold Medal by the Tessenow Society in Hamburg, the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the International Award Architecture in Stone in Verona, and a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) International Fellowship in 2014. That same year, he was elected a full member of the Architecture Section of Spain's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. In 2015, he received the BigMat Award in Berlin and the Spanish International Architecture Award (PAEI 2015). He also won the first-prize *ex aequo* to build the new facility for the Louvre Museum.
His work has been widely recognized, from the Turégano and De Blas houses in Madrid, to the Gaspar, Asencio, and Guerrero houses in Cádiz, the Rufo House in Toledo, and the Moliner House in Zaragoza. Other notable projects include the Olnick Spanu House in Garrison, New York, the House of the Infinite in Cádiz, and the Cala House in Madrid. His larger-scale works include the BIT Center in Inca (Mallorca), the Entre Catedrales public space in Cádiz, and the Caja de Granada headquarters and the Museum of Memory of Andalusia, both in Granada. He also built a nursery for Benetton in Venice and the offices for the Junta de Castilla y León in Zamora. Recently, he completed the Sports Pavilion for the Francisco de Vitoria University in Madrid.
In addition to his built work, Alberto Campo Baeza has written several books, such as “La Idea Construida,” “Pensar con las manos,” and “Principia Architectonica,” which have been published in multiple languages. In 2014, he published “Poetica Architectonica”; in 2015, “The Built Idea” was translated into English and Chinese; and in 2016, his latest writings were published under the title “Varia Architectonica.” Recently, his entire body of work was compiled in the monograph “Complete Works” by Thames & Hudson, and in 2017, he published “Teaching to Teach.”
Alberto believes in architecture as a built idea, where the primary components are gravity, which builds space, and light, which builds time. The Spanish architect’s name and work write a significant new chapter in the history of Rome's Piranesi Award, further enriching a roll of honor adorned with the great figures who have shaped contemporary architecture—a privileged field for ongoing research into the very essence of architecture and the enduring values of the classical amid a changing reality. The Piranesi Rome Career Achievement Award was previously awarded to Rafael Moneo (2010), Guido Canali (2011), David Chipperfield (2012), Peter Eisenman (2013), José Ignacio Linazasoro (2014), Bernard Tschumi (2015), Yoshio Taniguchi (2016), and Eduardo Souto de Moura (2017).
This article was written by Javier García Librero. The translation is powered by AI.
