A review of the ninth annual Jencks Award winner’s RIBA lecture.
 

On 6 December, the Royal Institute of British Architects hosted the ninth annual Jencks Award, described by its eponymous founder as ‘a simultaneous prize to theory and practice, two mistresses in addition to Madame Architecture’. Not to confuse his metaphors, Charles Jencks continued by paraphrasing the noted evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould: ‘Greatness is an assault against Dame Nature.’

This polyamorous contextualisation is hardly frivolous; Nature is not a dame easily violated, and without at least several metaphorical mistresses, most architects’ marriage to their profession would end in a calamitous divorce.

The award’s presentation is accompanied each year by a lecture from the beneficiary. American Eric Owen Moss scooped the prize this year, a man Jencks described as ‘an architect’s architect’. This figure, while clearly distinct from the uncompromising individualistic architect of popular imagination (Howard Roark) is nonetheless a stoically heroic one. According to Jencks, no other architect has been responsible for such a large number of buildings in such a small area of city, over such a long period as Moss.



www.architectural-review.com/view/eric-owen-moss-at-the-riba/8624068.article