The Driehaus Prize is awarded to an architect whose work embodies the principles of traditional and classical architecture in contemporary society.
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Jaquelin T. Robertson, an architect and urban planner whose distinguished career has spanned continents, received the fifth-annual Richard H. Driehaus Prize. A partner in the firm Cooper, Robertson & Partners, Mr. Robertson founded the New York City Urban Design Group. He served under John Lindsay as the Director of the Mayor’s Office of Midtown Planning and Development and worked as a New York City Planning Commissioner. In 1975, Mr. Robertson directed the design of Iran’s new capital center, Shahestan Pahlavi.
Committed to introducing “human values into urban plans,” he founded the Jeffersonian Restoration Advisory Board and the Mayor’s Institute on City Design. He has been a consultant to the Ford Foundation, the Government of Jamaica, the Federal Highway Administration, and the National Capitol Development Commission in Canberra, Australia. To “learn more about the DNA of American architecture,” Mr. Robertson accepted an appointment as Dean of the School and Commonwealth Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia in 1980, a position he held for eight years.
Mr. Robertson has received numerous design awards, including the 1998 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture and the 2002 Seaside Prize for his contributions to American urbanism. A Richmond, Virginia native, Mr. Robertson received his B.A. and M.Arch. from Yale University and was a Rhode Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Edward Perry Bass, president of Fine Line, Inc., a private diversified investment and venture capital firm in Fort Worth, Texas, received the $25,000 Henry Hope Reed Award in association with the Driehaus Prize. Mr. Bass is recognized as a leader in one of the most successful urban revitalization efforts in the nation. He and his family developed Sundance Square into a successful mixed-use urban core in Forth Worth. As chairman of Performing Arts Fort Worth, Mr. Bass led the development of the Nancy Lee and Perry R. Bass Performance Hall, which opened in 1998 to international acclaim.
Richard H. Driehaus, the founder and chairman of Driehaus Capital Management in Chicago, endowed both awards through the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture because of its reputation as a national leader in incorporating the principles of traditional and classical architecture into the task of modern urban development.
