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The 2012 Essay Prize Competition

Essay Question Rural School, Tamil Nadu, India

Stage 1: Enter Salvation Army Ray & Joan Kroc Corps Community Center, 2008 San Francisco, CA, USA

Stage 2: Semifinalists Dalian Preschool, 2009,Dalian, Liaoning Province, People's Republic of China, DEBBAS ARCHITECTURE

Stage 3: Finalists Butaro Hospital, 2010, Butaro, Burero District, Rwanda, MASS DESIGN GROUP, Architects, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Winning Essays PATH Villas Osage, 2011 City of Inglewood, Los Angeles, California, USA, JEFFREY M. KALBAN & ASSOCIATES

Jury Mills Building, South Carolina State Hospital, 1827, South Carolina, USA, ROBERT MILLS, Architect, USA

Background

The Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Design Excellence endowment was established in the Department of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design to promote the investigation of architecture as a social art.  Each year  the PRIZE Committee selects a topic important to the understanding of the interaction of people and the built world that becomes the focus of the Essay Competition. This year the topic is: Architecture for the Public Good.

The Committee poses a Question on this website related to the topic. Students enrolled in any accredited undergraduate architecture program or diploma in architecture program throughout the world are invited to submit a 500-word essay proposal in English responding to the Question (see eligibility requirements).  Undergraduate architecture students may team up with undergraduates from allied arts and social sciences programs.  

From the pool of essay proposals received, approximately 25 are selected by the PRIZE Committee as particularly promising. The 25 selected individual students, or student teams, become Semifinalists.

These Semifinalists are invited to submit a 2,500-word essay, again in English, expanding on their proposals. A group of readers, composed of Committee members and invited colleagues, selects five-to-eight of the best essays and sends these Finalist essays to a jury of international academics and architects to select the winners.

At the conclusion of the Essay Competition submittals, all Semifinalists are also invited to submit for one of two BERKELEY PRIZE Fellowships: the Travel Fellowship, or the Architectural Design Fellowship. Details for each will be announced in the Spring, 2012. Past Fellowship Competition requirements, winning submissions, and follow-up reports by the winners are available to read here on the website.

Architectural history, theory and practice are rich with ideas and actual buildings that exemplify the importance of architecture as a social art. In addressing the Question posed by the BERKELEY PRIZE 2012 Essay Competition, you will consider this legacy and its relevance to you as future architects.

2012 Dedication

To those architects and their clients around the world who commit themselves to creating architecture for the public good and to the first major portrait  of such projects  from the United States showcased in the recently published, The Power of Pro Bono, edited by BERKELEY PRIZE Committee member John Cary.