Field Operations founder James Corner to receive 2023 Richard Neutra Award

James Corner has been named the winner of the 2023 Richard Neutra Award for Professional Excellence by the Department of Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

"The Richard Neutra Award means a great deal to me," Corner reflected on the recognition. "I feel extremely honored to join the roster of esteemed past recipients. Neutra represented a view of architecture, landscape, and urbanism as an integrated whole, a unity that served to advance both social and environmental good. His work is an inspiration, pointing toward design innovation in the service of improving quality of life for all."

The award was established in 1980 in honor of the pioneering late modernist and Cal Poly Pomona professor and seeks to enshrine the work of architects and individuals who have "dedicated their careers toward the research, design and development of innovative environments in which we live, work and play." 

Since its founding in 1999, Corner's firm Field Operations has succeeded in taking the landscape architecture profession to unprecedented new heights of both influence and technical achievement. Recent projects like San Francisco's Presidio Tunnel Tops and the first phase of North Park at the Freshkills Park in Staten Island, New York, have further cemented the newly-structured firm’s reputation that was built on previous works such as the New York High Line and Chicago's Navy Pier. 

Corner is himself the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2010 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award and this year's ASLA Design Medal, and joins a list of names that includes four former Pritzker Prize winners and two-term U.S. Vice President Al Gore to have received the Neutra Award.

Corner, who is also an Emeritus Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, follows the 2022 Neutra winner Tatiana Bilbao. 

An awards ceremony and lecture featuring Corner will be held at Cal Poly Pomona's Bronco Student Center on November 1, 2023, at 6:30 PM PST. A live stream of the event can be accessed here.