FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Winners Announced in the Berkeley Prize Essay Competition and the Berkeley Prize Travel Fellowship Competition


(May 1, 2005) The University of California, Berkeley - Winners of the Seventh Annual Berkeley Prize Essay Competition http://www.berkeleyprize.org and the Second Annual Berkeley Prize Travel Fellowship are announced today by Professor Raymond Lifchez, Chair of the Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence.

Prizes for the 2005 Essay Competition are awarded to:


[Left to right: Brian Knight, Sarah Schaefer, Kamana Dhakhwa, Swasti Bhattarai, Andri Haflidason]

First Prize ($3500 USD):
Brian Knight, Southern California Institute of Architecture, USA   read essay
Second Prize ($1,000 each)
Sarah Schaefer, Dalhousie University, Canada   read essay
and to the team of Kamana Dhakhwa and Swasti Bhattarai, Institute of Engineering, Nepal   read essay
Third Prize ($500):
Andri Haflidason, University of Strathclyde, UK   read essay


The 2005 Prize Competition attracted 126 entries from students representing 29 countries and 70 undergraduate architecture programs on 6 continents. There were 11 team entries, representing the further importance of collaborative effort in addressing a serious, difficult question about the role of the architect in society.

The 2005 Berkeley Prize Essay Competition Question concerns the Public Place:

What makes a place truly public? Go out into a community that you know well and find an exceptional, built example of one such place. In most likelihood, among other attributes, this place will embody the traditions of local culture and be a reflection of the world at large. Describe this place in a way that makes it a compelling demonstration of how other places might remain similarly vital to their own communities. Be both evocative and specific in your tribute to this place.

Jurors for the 2005 competition are: Lesley Naa Norle Lokko (Accra, Ghana), Architect, Visiting Professor, University of Westminster, UK, and Visiting African Scholar, University of Cape Town, South Africa; Donlyn Lyndon (Berkeley, USA), Architect, Eva Li Professor in the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and Editor of Places; Rahul Mehrotra (Bombay, India and Ann Arbor, USA), Architect, Planner, and Associate Professor, University of Michigan; and Giles Oliver (London, UK), Architect, and Visiting Tutor, University of Cambridge, UK.

The Berkeley Prize Travel Fellowship recognizes the vital role that exposure to other cultures and environments plays in helping to demonstrate importance of the social art of architecture. Finalists in the Essay Competition were asked for open-ended proposals that would demonstrate how the opportunity to visit Istanbul would help them expand their research and understanding of the issues they explored in their essays.

This year's Berkeley Prize is dedicated to the work of Forum UNESCO - University and Heritage (FUUH) (www.forumunesco.upv.es/), striving to connect the resources of universities, teachers, and students worldwide in the preservation of our cultural heritage.

The Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence is an endowment established in 1996 in the Department of Architecture, College of Environmental Design, at the University of California, Berkeley. Through essay writing, design competitions, and now the travel fellowship, the Berkeley Prize endowment aspires to encourage students to embrace social ideals as fundamental to making buildings of worth.

All aspects of the 2005 Competition and the archive of the Berkeley Prize Endowment may be viewed online at http://www.berkeleyprize.org.

The Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence Competition 2006 will be announced September 1, 2005.