Teatro Malibran, Venice
November 8, 2006
The President of the Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia Davide Croff and the Director of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition Richard Burdett are glad to announce that, for the first time ever, the awarding ceremony took place during the final part of the exhibition. This is one of the most important changes introduced on occasion of this 2006 edition, since in the past years the ceremony was held during the official opening. On November 8, at the Teatro Malibran in Venice, 15 prizes and three mentions were awarded in the presence of 500 international guests. Among them, the representatives of the participating countries, exhibitors and professional architects.
Whilst on September 10, during the official opening to the public in the Giardini della Biennale, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement was awarded by the Board of La Biennale di Venezia to Richard Rogers (Florence, 1933), on November 8 the international Jury of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition awarded the following official Prizes: three Golden Lions for national pavilions, for cities and for urban projects and a Special Award for schools of architecture. The Juries in charge for Cities of Stone and City-Port awarded new prizes: 7 Stone Lion Awards for the Venice section and Portus Architecture Award for the Palermo section. Moreover, the Jury of the Italian Pavilion awarded three prizes to a young designer, a theorist and a critic.
Golden Lions and Special Awards
Cities. Architecture and society
The Jurors, Richard Sennett (President), Amyn Aga Khan, Antony Gormley, Zaha Hadid, awarded the following prizes:
Golden Lion Award for cities
Golden Lion Award for national pavilions
Golden Lion Award for urban projects
Special Award for schools of architecture
The 10th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia addresses a great problem and a great opportunity. By 2008 the majority of the world’s people will live in cities. They will live, increasingly, in cities of enormous size, cities of five to thirty million people, cities on a scale never seen before in human history. In these cities, social problems of health, wealth and opportunity become extreme. How can architecture address this monumental event? How can the art of architecture serve society? These are the questions the Biennale explores, in contributions from cities and nations around the world.
The Awards celebrate those contributions, particularly in cities which are the most rapidly developing today. The Jury of the Biennale wishes to acknowledge new ideas for environmental planning, for housing, and for transport. We wish to celebrate the participation of people, of urban dwellers themselves, in creating an architecture for their own lives. We have awarded prizes to architects and planners who have enabled them to do so, by making buildings and plans which can be diffused, adopted, and adapt to the diversity of the world’s cities.
