Carme Pinós received the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The four traditional Arts and Letters Awards were also presented to Antón García-Abril & Débora Mesa, Florian Idenburg & Jing Liu, Sharon Johnston & Mark Lee, and Anthony Titus.
The academy's annual architectural awards program began in 1955 with the inauguration of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize - an award for an architect of any nationality who has made a significant contribution to architecture as art - and has since expanded to include four Arts and Letters Awards for architects who explore ideas in architecture through any medium of expression.
On this occasion, jury members Toshiko Mori (president), Marlon Blackwell, Peter Eisenman, Steven Holl, Annabelle Selldorf, Nader Tehrani and Meejin Yoon chose the winners from a pool of 25 individuals and practices nominated by Academy members.
Carme Pinós's studio has been developing outstanding national and international commissions for more than 20 years, having built, among other countries, in Mexico, Austria and France, in very different contexts, settings, programmes and scales. Among her most recent works are the Headquarters for the Territorial Delegations of "Les Terres de l'Ebre", the Escola Massana, Art and Design Centre and the MPAVILION 2018.
As the studio says, "the response to the programme, the context, the budget and the time is necessarily unique, but always, as a common denominator, in each proposal we share the same way of understanding the world and architecture, where common sense and responsibility must prevail".