THE ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL BERKELEY UNDERGRADUATE PRIZE FOR ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN EXCELLENCE
The Berkeley Prize has been suspended for the 2023-2024 academic year.
Explore the past 25 years of the Prize through the pages below.
About the prize.
The international Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence (BERKELEY PRIZE) was founded by Raymond Lifchez , Emeritus Professor of Architecture and City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design (CED), through the result of a generous gift to the CED's Department of Architecture by the late Judith Lee Stronach.
Student Participants
Awards granted, individual winners, berkeley prize through the years.
Question To Past Winners: How do you think the Prize has influenced your professional life as an architect or in any other profession or career pursuit?
Benard Acellam, Assistant Architect at DE-ZYN FORUM LTD; Assistant Lecturer in Architecture at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda; BP Essay Prize Winner, 2015.
Essay Prize
Each year, the PRIZE Committee selects a topic critical to the investigation of the social art of architecture and poses a Question based on that topic. Full-time undergraduate students in an architecture degree program or majoring in architecture in accredited schools of architecture throughout the world, including Diploma in Architecture students, may submit a 500-word essay proposal responding to the Question. Entries by teams of two students are encouraged and the second team member can be an undergraduate studying in fields related to architecture.
Philipp Goertz, Graduate Student at RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany; BP Travel Fellow, 2018
Travel Fellowship
Semifinalists who select this option are invited to submit proposals demonstrating how they would use the opportunity to travel to an architecturally-significant destination of their choosing, preferably to participate in a hands-on service-oriented situation. This is an exciting opportunity to explore a different part of the world and to participate in an organized project that will assist the winner in gaining a deeper understanding of the social art of architecture.
Past Fellowships
Community service fellowship competition.
Semifinalists who select to compete for a Community Service Fellowship are invited to submit proposals demonstrating how they would use the opportunity to initiate a program or join an on-going program that reflects the content of their Essay proposals. This is an exciting opportunity to explore how to start and/or to participate in an organized project that will assist in the overall understanding and application of the social art of architecture.
Architectural Design Fellowship
From 2008 to 2011 the BERKELEY PRIZE Committee offered students the opportunity to compete in the Architectural Design Fellowship Competition to foster the study of the social art of architecture by helping to sponsor local and regional architectural student design competitions that were run by students themselves. This competition challenged the candidates to produce a thorough and practical proposal for a design competition that would benefit their community and bring attention to the resources available to the community from their school.
Teaching Fellowship
From 2013 to 2014 a new BERKELEY PRIZE Teaching Fellowship was offered to undergraduate architecture studio design faculty from around the world. The primary goal of this Fellowship was to support innovative thinking by faculty as they work to focus their students' attention on the social, behavioral, and physical characteristics of the users of the buildings and spaces being designed.
Each year the Berkeley Prize Committee invites a distinguished professor or scholar in the field of architecture or the related social sciences to write about some aspect of the year's Berkeley Prize topic.
- They are meant to help focus students' thoughts on the issues surrounding the year's Question.
- They are a model for excellence in writing.
- They exhibit both how defined and how broad the range of possible response to a Question.
The social art of architecture encompasses a large field of inquiry that links design studies to people studies. In an ever-growing corpus of published work, researchers from a variety of disciplines work with architects to investigate how to make architecture better for all people. The various topics of the history of the BERKELEY PRIZE give a glimpse into the range of these studies. Each year, the PRIZE publishes "resources" to help participants further understand the specific topics. Included in The LIbrary is a selection of these resources as well as other articles and links that detail why architecture is and must be, first and foremost, about people.
Committee Members
Click on the individual photos to see the member's full profile.
Benard Acellam
Elaine Addison
Andrew Amara
Sangeeta Bagga
Erick Bernabe
Aleksis Bertoni
Paul Broches
Himanshu Burte
Thea Chroman
Benjamin Clavan
Roddy Creedon
Howard Davis
Charles Debbas
Lynne Elizabeth
Teddy Forscher
Dorit Fromm
Thomas Gensheimer
Ann Gilkerson
Alex Gonzalez
Nicole Graycar
Zachary Heiden
Ocean Howell
Neelakshi Joshi
Rachel Kallus
Daniel Karlin
Thomas-Bernard Kenniff
Barbara Knecht
Aboubacar Komara
Scott Koniecko
Malini Krishnankutty
Raymond Lifchez
Ian Mactavish
Christine Macy
Padma Maitland
John Q McDonald
Jason Miller
Anusha Narayanan
Maire O'Neill Conrad
John Parman
Helaine Kaplan Prentice
Ushna Raees
Clare Robinson
Daves Rossell
David Salazar
Magdalena Saura
Corey Schnobrich
Anthony Schuman
Murray Silverstein
Avikal Somvanshi
Preeti Talwai
Philip Tidwell
Robert Ungar
Leslie Van Duzer
Jan Wampler
Matt Werner
Cynthia Whitehead
Keith Wilson
Friedner Wittman
Bahram Hooshyar Yousefi
Ghina Kanawati, Architect and Researcher at CatalyticAction, Beirut, Lebanon; BP Essay Winner, 2018
Berkeley Prize In The News
Conversations on social justice and design.
The College of Environmental Design and the Department of Architecture hosted a day-long symposium in April 2022 titled Conversations on Social Justice and Design , to honor Professor Emeritus Raymond Lifchez, Founder and Chair of the BERKELEY PRIZE. The symposium featured a spectacular list of speakers who have been instrumental leaders in shaping contemporary practices addressing social justice, particularly in universal design.
Speakers included Darren Walker, Maddy Burke-Vigeland, Jeffrey Mansfield, Elaine Ostroff, Valerie Fletcher, Victor Pineda, and Susan Schwelk with a keynote talk by Christopher Downey, our inaugural Lifchez Professor of Practice in Social Justice.
Conversations on Social Justice and Design Part I
Conversations in Social Justice and Design Part II
Conversations on Social Justice and Design Part II
Conversations on Social Justice and Design Part III
IMAGES
COMMENTS
Each year the Berkeley Prize Committee invites a distinguished professor or scholar in the field of architecture or the related social sciences to write about some aspect of the year's Berkeley Prize topic. They are meant to help focus students' thoughts on the issues surrounding the year's Question. They are a model for excellence in writing.