Iwona Buczkowska (Foto: Patricia Stroud) y Angela Davis (Foto: Universidad Estatal de Oregón)
Polish-French architect Iwona Buczkowska has been awarded the Jane Drew Prize for Architecture 2024, an award recognising an architectural designer who, through their work and commitment to design excellence, has raised the profile of women in architecture. Founding her practice Atelier Iwona Buczkowska in 1980, Buczkowska has completed several radical social housing projects and public buildings in France.
Buczkowska designed the largest timber housing complex in France, the Cité Pierre Sémard – a social housing project of 225 units completed in the early ’90s in Seine-Saint-Denis (AR June 2022). Rejecting standardisation, she prefers arcs and oblique planes to create intimate and brightly lit homes. Buczkowska ‘encourages us to think of architecture’s contribution to social ecology’, AR Editor Manon Mollard explains. ‘She is both a pioneer of timber construction and a fierce defender of the right to good housing. Buczkowska’s buildings need to be preserved, and her ideas celebrated.’
Political activist, philosopher and writer Angela Davis is the winner of the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for Contribution to Architecture 2024, which recognises individuals, from fields adjacent to and that intersect with architecture, who have made a significant contribution to architecture and the built environment. Davis is a leader of the movement for abolition of the prison system as well as an important voice in other fields of civil rights activism. Davis’s latest book Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, Volume 1 is due to be published by Penguin in March.
Davis’s work has heavily influenced architectural discourse, including in the pages of the AR. Davis’s book Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) is discussed in Rachel Komich’s imagining of a world without incarceration (AR November 2021) and her work is key in Léopold Lambert’s argument that architects are complicit in the prison industrial complex (AR June 2018). Sarah Lamble also draws on Davis’s work when she argues that the problem with gender-segregated prisons is not trans people’s bodies, but incarceration itself (AR March 2022). ‘Angela Davis’s activism and leadership is as relevant and pertinent to architecture as it has ever been,’ explains AR Deputy Editor Eleanor Beaumont. ‘Her work highlights the complicity of architecture as a tool of violence and encourages architects to advocate for spatial justice.’
Luis Fernández-Galiano: ‘Los Ángeles 1968-1989: Disney, Bradbury, Fuller’ (Angela Davis)
Foto cortesía de Atelier Iwona Buczkowska
AV Monografías 259: Cuatro ciudades. Composición filatélica con Judit I de Gustav Klimt, Retrato de Gertrude Stein de Pablo Picasso, Marilyn Monroe y Angela Davis
