Berkeley Prize Announcement

BERKELEY PRIZE
1998 – 2023

Celebrating 25 years of the international Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence
Mourning our Founder, Chair and Benefactor, Raymond Lifchez

The Berkeley Prize has been “suspended” for the 2023-24 academic year. This is a pause to determine the future of the Prize and an acknowledgement of the huge gap left by the recent death of Raymond Lifchez (1932-2023).

Our website, www.BerkeleyPrize.org remains live as does our email account, [email protected]. In addition, the website has been updated to, first and foremost, reflect the incredibly wide history of the Prize.

  • During the past twenty-five years, the Prize has received 2985 Essay, Travel, and other Fellowship proposals from 3785 individual students representing dozens of schools of architecture in 88 countries. The Prize has responded by making 188 cash awards to individuals and teams of two, representing in total, 225 individual students.
  • Some of the world’s leading architects, architectural academics, and social scientists have been volunteers on the BP Committee as Readers and Jurors.
  • The range and success of the Prize has been acknowledged by awards and acknowledgements from professional organizations and academic institutions around the world.

Read about this history of the Prize and Ray’s unparalleled contributions to its success, now highlighted at the top of the website. Look for the original essays by scholars for each year’s topic. Most importantly, delve into the winning student Essays, Travel Fellowship and other Fellowship reports, and updates by past student winners about their current professional lives available on the website.

Are we going to close on a high (and a low)? Is it a good time to go? Is this now an opportunity to re-charge, perhaps focusing in a different way on the core purpose of the Prize? It will take some time to determine the answer. Meanwhile, the work of all those interested in the social art of architecture continues unabated.

Finally and we cannot say it enough, thanks to everyone who has participated in the Prize during the past twenty-five years!

Benjamin Clavan, Program and Content Coordinator
Thea Chroman, Administrator
Jessie Canon, Internet Technology and Website Design