RIBA Charles Jencks Award
The RIBA Charles Jencks Award was established with prize money awarded to Charles Jencks from the Nara Gold Medal, which he received in 1992.
Charles Jencks graciously donated this prize money to RIBA to set up an endowment fund, the interest from which was initially used for an exchange programme between British and Japanese architects.
RIBA Charles Jencks Award 2023 recipient
Dogma, a Brussels-based practice focused on the relationship between architecture and the city, are the 2023 recipient of the Charles Jencks Award.
Founded in 2002 by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara, Dogma’s work on large scale urban design projects. Their exploration of the relationship between theory and practice continues to have a major influence on the profession, particularly among students, through both their thought processes and representation of architecture.
On receiving the award, Martino Tattara and Pier Vittorio Aureli, founders of Dogma said:
“We are truly delighted and honoured to receive this award. We are especially honoured because it is dedicated to Charles Jencks, whose practice combined history, theory and design, which are also inseparable aspects of our work.
Over the last ten years, we have tried to put forward ideas to improve the way in which we live and work in our houses and in our cities, and have done this both through design proposals and by revisiting some of the most salient and often forgotten chapters of the history of our discipline. We would like to share the award with past and present collaborators without whom our work would have not been possible.”
About the Charles Jencks Award
In 2003, the investment purpose of the fund was changed to create an annual award with a remit that has remained untouched since then: to reward an individual (or practice) who has recently made a major contribution simultaneously to the theory and practice of architecture.
In addition to prize money, the recipient delivers a lecture at RIBA's headquarters, 66 Portland Place in London.
RIBA remains grateful to the family of Charles Jencks for their support of ideas in architecture, and their enthusiasm about the power of finely conceived design to move emotions and provoke thought.
Selection process
The selection process starts in April or May of each year, when members of a judging panel comprising the RIBA President and other individuals agreed by the Jencks family and RIBA are invited to submit up to three nominations each.
A meeting then takes place in May or June at RIBA, where judges are requested to support their nominations and agree on a recipient.
Past recipients of the RIBA Charles Jencks Award
- 2022: Forensic Architecture
- 2021: Anupama Kundoo
- 2019: Débora Mesa and Antón García-Abril, Ensamble Studio
- 2018: Alejandro Aravena
- 2016: Níall McLaughlin
- 2015: Herzog & de Meuron
- 2013: Benedetta Tagliabue
- 2012: Rem Koolhaas
- 2011: Eric Owen Moss
- 2010: Stephen Holl
- 2009: Charles Correa
- 2008: Wolf Prix
- 2007: Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, UN Studio
- 2006: Zaha Hadid
- 2005: Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi, Foreign Office Architects
- 2004: Peter Eisenman
- 2003: Cecil Balmond
For more information, please email RIBA Education.
