Adele Chatfield-Taylor
Vincent Scully Prize
November 8, 2010 6:30 - 8:00 pm
On November 8, 2010, the National Building Museum presented the twelfth Vincent Scully Prize to Adele Chatfield-Taylor. In announcing her selection, members of the Scully Prize 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.
About Adele Chatfield-Taylor
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.”
The National Building Museum is grateful for the generous donations to the Vincent Scully Prize received since its inception, which sustain the program.
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