RIBA Jencks Award: The Latest Architecture and News

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced Níall McLaughlin, founder of Níall McLaughlin Architects, as winner of the 2016 RIBA Charles Jencks Award. The award is given annually to an outstanding architect or practice "that has recently made a major contribution internationally to both the theory and practice of architecture."

“Niall McLaughlin is a great inspiration for architects today, especially the young, because of his masterful skill in drawing from all traditions – classicism, modernism, postmodernism,” said jury member and award namesake Charles Jencks. “All the “isms” are under his belt, not on his back, and he extends them all through the commitment to architecture as an art and professional practice.”

Previous winners of the award include Herzog & de Meuron (2015), Benedetta Tagliabue (2013), Rem Koolhaas (2012), Eric Owen Moss (2011), Steven Holl (2010), Charles Correa (2009), Wolf Prix (2008), Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos (2007), Zaha Hadid (2006), Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi (2005), Peter Eisenman (2004) and Cecil Balmond (2003).

The RIBA annually bestows the Jencks Award to an outstanding architect or practice "that has made a recent significant, simultaneous contribution to the theory and practice of architecture." This year the honors go to Herzog & de Meuron.

Selected by a panel of judges chaired by David Gloster (RIBA Director of Education) and which included Charles Jencks, Stephen Hodder (RIBA President and Chairman of Hodder and Partners), Julia Peyton-Jones (Director of the Serpentine Galleries) and Brett Steele (Director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture), Herzog & de Meuron will receive the award on Thursday 29 October at the RIBA in London. In addition, the Swiss architects will receive an honorarium of £1,000 and a certificate.

Herzog & de Meuron have already received The Pritzker Architecture Prize (2001), an RIBA Royal Gold Medal (2007), a Praemium Imperiale (2007) and the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) (2014).

Read on to see the judges statements.