Three Winners Share AIA Los Angeles Prize Award

The inaugural $10,000 Los Angeles Prize competition--”a look into the 21st Century”--sponsored by the Los Angeles chapter, American Institute of Architects, will be shared by three winners.

From among more than 500 entries from 29 nations, the winners were a faculty/student design team from the Institute of Future Studies at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica; a three-member team of architects from Ensenada, Mexico: Jose Sanchez Martin, Pedro Hoyos Ortega and Erich Herrmann Martinez, and English architect Peter Cook of London.

The five-member panel of judges consisted of Ray Bradbury, author and futurist, and four prominent architects, Arthur Erickson, Richard Meier, Richard Rodgers and Paolo Soleri. The chapter’s announcement of winners by Donald Axon, president, noted that the judges conceded early in their efforts that selecting one winner would be very difficult.

The faculty/student entry was an international space station module for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration due for construction for earth orbit beginning in 1993 by an eight-member crew.

The Mexican team’s entry was a construction system incorporating three technologies, sub-atomic mapping, lasers and holograms, while Cook’s plan was a building system featuring a permanent structure with changeable exterior and interior configurations and surfaces to suit various needs.

Three honor awards also were made. Winners were Jerry Exline of Archonics, a division of HNTB of Indianapolis; Robert Visser, Jewell, Visser and Visser Architects of Westhampton Beach, N.Y., and three architects from Madrid: Jose M. de Prada, Alicia Ozamiz Fertis and Roberto Goycoolea Prado.

Award presentations, attended by 200 persons, were made at the California Museum of Science & Industry last weekend.