Carme Pinós wins the 2022 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has just announced Estudio Carme Pinós founder Carme Pinós as their 2022 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize winner. The Spanish architect joins recent winners like Marina Tabassum as well as Pritzker laureates Eduardo Souto de Moura and Diébédo Francis Kéré on a list of those to receive the prestigious 66-year-old prize. 

The Prize grants $20,000 to an architect of any nationality who has made a significant contribution to architecture as an art form. 

Celebrated for her urban planning efforts, artistic interventions, and other public projects, Pinós was commended by 2022 jury chair Toshiko Mori for a wide-ranging body of work.

"Carme Pinós’s architecture engages her strength of reason with compassion for humanity, harmonizing emotion, and rationality," Mori commented. "Each building is embedded within the terrain, connecting and transforming its context. Her curvilinear forms blend with their surroundings, blurring the boundary between physical world and memory. A complex series of sections within each project results in spectacular spatial experiences, while the innate rationality of her plans is influenced by her lyrical intuition to become fluid expressions of openness."

The Academy also awarded four $10,000 Arts and Letters Awards to Anthony Titus Studio founder and RPI professor Anthony Titus for his exploratory work in the field, Johnston Marklee founders Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, Ensemble Studio's Antón García-Abril and Débora Mesa, and SO–IL founders Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu for their unique own vision as the leaders of their respective firms. 

Pinós was selected out of a field of 25 international entries who were nominated by members of the Academy. This year’s jury was composed of Mori, Marlon Blackwell, Peter Eisenman, Steven Holl, Annabelle Selldorf, Nader Tehrani, and Meejin Yoon. 

Don't miss Archinect's interview with Carme Pinós: How to Inject Poetry into Architecture: Carme Pinós in Conversation with Orhan Ayyüce.