The holder of the Driehaus Prize 2020 is Ong-ard Satrabhandhu

Thai architect Ong-ard Satrabhandhu was announced as the laureate of the Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture on January 16, 2020. The most prestigious global award for contemporary traditionalist architects, associated with a cash prize of $200,000, was bestowed upon him by a commission established by the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame in the USA. Its members include architects Michael Lykoudis, Léon Krier, and Demetri Porphyrios, architects Melissa DelVecchio and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, architect and writer Witold Rybczynski, and the founder of the city of Seaside, Robert Davis. The award was to be presented on March 28, 2020, at a ceremony in Chicago; however, the ceremony was canceled due to the COVID-19 epidemic and will likely be replaced by a virtual broadcast on March 27.

At the same time, Henry Hope Reed Prize ($50,000) for the cultivation and promotion of traditional building and arts was awarded to Clem Labine from New York, founder and editor of the magazines Old-House Journal, Traditional Building, and Period Homes, as well as the initiator of the Palladio Award for outstanding traditional design and the Clem Labine Award for significant contributions to the creation of a humanist environment (among the recipients of this award in 2018 are, for example, well-known theorists of architecture and urbanism in the Czech Republic, Nikos A. Salingaros and Michael Mehaffy: https://www.archiweb.cz/eshop/sjednocena-teorie-architektury-forma-jazyk-komplexita).

Ong-ard Satrabhandhu was born on February 8, 1944, in Bangkok. He studied architecture in the USA at Cornell University (Bachelor's in 1965) and Yale (Master's in 1967). He was interested in Palladian buildings in Italy, traditional architecture in China, and Southeast Asia, and since the 1990s, he has been striving for a synthesis of these inspirations in his projects. However, his earlier buildings possess a brutalist and postmodern stylistic character. He leads the architectural office Ong-ard Architects in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand. Its realizations primarily include residences, hotels, and office buildings in Bangkok, Phuket, Chiang Mai, and other locations in Thailand.

> http://ongardarchitects.com
> https://news.nd.edu/