Architect Sergei Tchoban has been selected as this year’s Laureate of the European Prize for Architecture. Considered Europe’s Highest Award for Architecture, the prize is presented by the European Centre and The Chicago Athenaeum. Tchoban was chosen for his powerful designs and a unique design vision that celebrates the best of modernist buildings that are internationally iconic, complex, enigmatic, provocative, and profoundly artistic.
Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, President of the Chicago Athenaeum, noted how Tchoban's work encompasses an endless variety of forms, surfaces, colors, poetry, using the most contemporary methods of planning and sustainable solutions, from cultural facilities to commercial, office, and religious buildings. Throughout his career, Tchoban developed public, commercial, and civic architecture with a deep sentiment that celebrates ordinary life in complex urban cities and diverse cultural situations. His work demonstrates an unyielding commitment to create an architecture that is as richly profound as it is inspiring.
“We are delighted to present The European Prize for Architecture to this highly innovative and creative Russian/German architect," states Narkiewicz-Laine. " He has been instrumental in shaping in our time an unprecedented and inspiring discourse between art and architecture with the keen ability to bridge and transform imagination and the creative mind into the actual built works in the environments in which they are placed. His is a most rare, thought-provoking, and profound approach to architecture, extensions of his life, his philosophy, and his intellect, that fuse the power of imagination into the final end product—the building.”
Each year, The European Prize for Architecture is awarded jointly by The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design to architects who have made a commitment to forward the principles of European humanism and the art of architecture. The European Prize for Architecture is not a “lifetime of achievement award,” but rather serves as an impetus to support new ideas, to encourage and foster more challenge-making and forward-thinking about buildings and the environment, and to prompt the pushing of the envelope to obtain an even greater, more profound result.
The Prize also honors the commitment and achievements of the best European architects who have determined a more critical, intellectual, and artistic approach to the design of buildings and cities.
Previous Laureates include: Bjarke Ingels (Denmark), Graft Architects (Germany), TYIN Architects (Norway), Marco Casagrande (Finland), Alessandro Mendini (Italy), Santiago Calatrava (Spain/Switzerland), LAVA Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (Germany), and Manuelle Gautrand (France).
The formal ceremony for the prize will be held at a Gala Dinner at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens, Greece on September 28, 2018. An exhibition on “Sergei Tcoban: Visionary Architect” opens at Contemporary Space (74 Mitropoleos Street) in Athens that same evening and continues through October.
