While he also won a lifetime achievement award from the American Institute of Architects in 2015 for sponsoring competitions that produced better designs, he never formally trained in that field. “I believe architecture should be of human scale, representational form, and individual expression that reflects a community’s architectural heritage,” he told the architect and urban designer Michael Lykoudis in an interview for the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art in 2012. “The problem is there’s no poetry in modern architecture,” he said in an interview with Chicago magazine in 2007. It’s like my iPhone, which is beautiful, but I wouldn’t want the building I live in to look like that.” He added: “Architects build for themselves and build for the publicity. The first American laureate, in 2006, was the South African-born Allan Greenberg, who redesigned the Treaty Room Suite at the State Department.

Source: New York Times March 20, 2021 21:00 UTC