The Diana Center, a 98,000 square-foot multipurpose arts building at Barnard College designed by WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, is the winner of a 2011 Chicago Athenaeum American Architecture Award. The project will be exhibited in Buenos Aires at the 13th International Architecture Biennial in October, and will be on display throughout Europe in the next year.
Established in the 1990s by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, together with The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and Metropolitan Arts Press Ltd., the awards program honors and celebrates the most outstanding new achievements and innovations for new architecture. Past recipients of the award include Renzo Piano, Perkins + Will, Eric Owen Moss and other leading architecture firms with distinguished projects designed and built in the United States. which makes this award such an honor.
The Diana Center establishes a new nexus for social, cultural, and intellectual life on campus and within the city. Located on Broadway, the Diana Center unites landscape and architecture, interior and exterior in a seven-story structure that rethinks the conventions of a mixed use building. The building is home to the departments of architecture, art history, visual arts, and theater and includes architecture and painting studios, a 500-seat events space, black box theater, cafe, dining room, reading room, classrooms, and exhibition galleries.
