For Immediate Release: September 15, 2010
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National Building Museum Names Adele Chatfield-Taylor as the Twelfth Laureate of the Vincent Scully Prize
Award presentation and lecture will be held at the National Building Museum on November 8, 2010
Washington, D.C.— The National Building Museum will present its twelfth Vincent Scully Prize to Adele Chatfield-Taylor, president of the American Academy in Rome, on November 8, 2010 at the National Building Museum. In announcing her selection, members of the Vincent Scully jury—jury chair David Schwarz, Deborah Berke, Ned Cramer, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk—noted that through a variety of positions in her career, Ms. Chatfield-Taylor has consistently promoted excellence in the design world, while ensuring that the planning, architecture, and historic preservation disciplines remain connected to the public.
Ms. Chatfield-Taylor has had a long career in the arts. After over a decade on the staff of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, she won the Rome Prize in 1983, returning to the U.S. in 1984 to become director of the Design Arts program at the National Endowment of the Arts. While there, she helped establish the Mayors’ Institute on City Design. That program continues to thrive today and has inspired many municipal leaders and their staffs to transform their communities through high-quality design and planning. Since 1988, she has been president of the American Academy in Rome, where she advances the mission of this critically important institution by inspiring designers, artists, and scholars to pursue innovative research and creative activity while immersed in the city of Rome. She has taken an institution rooted in the 19th century and revealed its relevance to present and future generations while also working to restore and update the historic campus in Rome.
The Vincent Scully Prize and endowment were established by the National Building Museum in 1999 to recognize exemplary practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design. The National Building Museum honored Scully himself with the first Vincent Scully Prize in 1999. The prize grew rapidly in international prominence with the selection of laureates known for their advocacy of thoughtful urban spaces and historic preservation, exemplary practice of planning and design, commentary on design in contemporary life, and promotion of traditional arts in architecture.
The prize is known as one of the most important awards in the field, recognizing ideas and scholarship that lead to great built places. The award value has reached approximately $45,000. Of the Scully Prize, Jaquelin T. Robertson of Cooper, Robertson & Partners commented, “The Scully Prize is thus, in the larger order of things, infinitely more important than…other prominent design awards precisely [because] it is not primarily about our individual work, but how we and our work makes us feel more at home in our communal settings, our built culture, the house as the city, and vice versa.”
A public award ceremony to celebrate Chatfield-Taylor’s receipt of the prize will be held at the National Building Museum on Monday, November 8, 2010 from 6:30 to 8:00 pm. As part of the ceremony, Chatfield-Taylor will give a lecture on historic preservation and the American Academy in Rome in the 21st century.
Chatfield-Taylor follows eleven other internationally acclaimed authors, scholars, educators, and practitioners in the fields of architecture and urbanism who have been awarded the Vincent Scully Prize. The past recipients are Vincent J. Scully, Jane Jacobs, Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, His Highness the Aga Khan, His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, Phyllis Lambert, Witold Rybczynski, Richard Moe, Robert A.M. Stern, and Christopher Alexander.
About Adele Chatfield-Taylor, Twelfth Laureate of the Vincent Scully Prize
Since December 1988, Adele Chatfield-Taylor has been president of the American Academy in Rome. The Academy is a center for independent study and advanced research in the fine arts and humanities. Every year, through a competition open to all United States citizens, the Academy awards up to thirty Rome Prize Fellowships in the following subjects: architecture, landscape architecture, design, historic preservation and conservation, visual arts, music, literature, and ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern Italian studies.
Ms. Chatfield-Taylor, a Virginian, has lived and worked in New York or Washington since 1967, as a professional historic preservationist and arts administrator. In 1973, she joined the staff of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission where she served in various capacities until 1980, when she established and became the first executive director of the New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation. She was an adjunct assistant professor of architecture at Columbia University from 1976 to1984. From 1984 to 1988, she was director of the Design Arts Program for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, which supported projects in all areas of design through grants and advocacy activities, including the first Mayors’ Institutes on City Design.
She was vice-chairman of the Policy Panel for the Design Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1978 to 1982. She has been a member of numerous boards having to do with the arts and preservation, including the National Building Museum, Preservation ACTION, the National Alliance of Preservation Commissions, the US/International Council on Monuments and Sites, the International Design Conference at Aspen, the Center for Building Conservation, the Architectural History Foundation, the Spoleto Festival, the Jeffersonian Restoration Advisory Board at the University of Virginia, the Tiber Island History Museum, the Editorial Advisors of the American Institute of Architects Press, the California Institute of the Arts, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, The Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, the Institute for Classical Architecture and Classical America, and the Presidio Council in San Francisco; she was a member of the Commission of Fine Arts in Washington from 1989 to 1994, and has been an advisor to the architecture schools at Yale University, Princeton University, the University of Virginia, the University of Miami, and Harvard University.
Ms. Chatfield-Taylor received a B.A. from Manhattanville College in 1966, and an M.S. from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Historic Preservation at Columbia University in 1974. She was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1978-79, a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 1983-84, and a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities 1983-90; she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. In 2002, she was decorated by the Presidente della Repubblica Italiana with the award of “Grand Officer of the Ordine al Merito.”
About Vincent J. Scully and the Scully Prize
The Vincent Scully Prize was instituted in honor of Vincent J. Scully, the Sterling Professor Emeritus of the history of art at Yale University and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Miami and one of the country’s leading architectural historians and critics. For more than six decades his teaching and scholarship have profoundly influenced prominent architects and urban planners.
A scholar whose work covers both ancient and modern architecture, Scully is a leading commentator on the changing design of urban areas and its effect on the populace. As a popular teacher, Scully has taught thousands of undergraduates about architectural history. His courses are credited with introducing some of Yale’s most famous alumni to architecture and art history. He was twice selected by Time magazine for its survey of "Ten Outstanding American College Teachers." Scully retired in 1991 but still teaches one of his lecture courses at Yale University every fall and, as Distinguished Visiting Professor, at the University of Miami in the spring. Scully was also a Mellon Visiting Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology and a Louis I. Kahn Professor at the American Academy in Rome. He is a former member of the Board of Trustees of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Scully’s numerous awards include the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor for artists and arts patrons.
The National Building Museum is grateful for the generous donations to the Vincent Scully Prize received since its inception, which sustain the program.
Event Information
Twelfth Vincent Scully Prize Award Presentation and Lecture
Monday, November 8, 2010
Tickets for the public lecture are $12 for Museum members and students, and $20 for non-members. Pre-registration required. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.nbm.org or call 202.272.2448.
The National Building Museum is America’s leading cultural institution dedicated to advancing the quality of the built environment by educating people about its impact on their lives. Through its exhibitions, educational programs, online content, and publications, the Museum has become a vital forum for the exchange of ideas and information about the world we build for ourselves. Public inquiries: 202.272.2448 or visit www.nbm.org. Connect with us on Twitter: @BuildingMuseum and Facebook.
