Professor Ruan Yisan
Professor of architecture at Tongji University and historic preservationist, Professor Ruan Yisan has been named the 2014 Henry Hope Reed Award laureate. Professor Ruan Yisan will receive the $50,000 Reed Award in Chicago at a March 29 ceremony in conjunction with the Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame, which will be presented to Pier Carlo Bontempi.
A native of Suzhou, China, Yisan supervised the Yangtze River Water Towns project and the Pingjiang Historic District project of Suzhou, both of which received Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards from UNESCO. He has been a consultant for conservation projects in numerous historic cities in China including Yangzhou, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Pingyao and Lijiang. He also has been honored by France’s culture ministry as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters for his contributions to the conservation of World Heritage sites.
Professor Ruan Yisan has, through example, shown us the importance of saving not just individual buildings, but whole environments, along with their culture, so that they become part of modern life, rather than isolated artifacts,” said Lykoudis.
“Through large-scale local interventions, Professor Ruan Yisan’s work has become a model for preservation that addresses context in the broadest sense of the term,” said Driehaus.
The Henry Hope Reed Award is given to an individual working outside the practice of architecture who has supported the cultivation of the traditional city, its architecture and art through writing, planning or promotion. It is presented annually through the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture, a national leader in incorporating the ideals of traditional and classical architecture into the task of modern urban development.
Recipients of this year’s Driehaus Prize and Reed Award were selected by a jury composed of Adele Chatfield-Taylor, president of the American Academy in Rome; Robert Davis, developer and founder of Seaside, Fla.; Paul Goldberger, contributing editor at Vanity Fair; Léon Krier, architect and urban planner; Demetri Porphyrios, principal of Porphyrios Associates; and Witold Rybczynski, Meyerson Professor Emeritus of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania.
To read the University of Notre Dame press release in its entirety, please visit Pier Carlo Bontempi Named 2014 Driehaus Prize Laureate.