Herman Hertzberger

Hermann Hertzberger received the Gold Medal with which the Royal Institute of British Architects has every year since 1848 been honoring the careers of professionals whose works have an international reach. An instigator, along with Jaap Bakema and Aldo van Eyck, of the 1960s structuralist movement, Hertzberger, born in Amsterdam in 1932, has maintained an intense professional activity, both theoretical and academic, that is directed at the elaboration of programmatically flexible formal structures with the capacity to evolve in time and shape balanced and livable public spaces. In addition, he carried out a rethinking of pedagogical architecture in his project for the Montessori school in Delft, addressed the needs of the modern individual in the Central Baheer offices in Apeldoorn, and was a pioneer in developing the idea of the interior street in the Ministry of Social Affairs in The Hague. All this was taken into account by the jury that gave him the medal, composed of RIBA president Angela Brandy and the architects David Adjaye, Yvonne Farrell, Niall McLaughlin, Sarah Wigglesworth and Sir Terence Conran.