Masonry Magazine October 1985 Page. 40
85 SULLIVAN AWARD FOR ARCHITECTURE
Faneuil Hall Marketplace restoration and revitalization of a six-acre historic market district in Boston. Architect Benjamin Thompson restored the stone building and used stone and brick paving to make the pedestrian street an extension of the character of the historic buildings. (Photo by Steve Rosenthal).
The 1985 Louis Sullivan Award for Architecture, one of the most prestigious architectural honors in the U.S. and Canada and one that recognizes an architect's body of work over his career rather than design of a single building, has been given to Benjamin Thompson, FAIA, Cambridge, Mass.
Announcement of the award and the $5,000 prize which accompanies it was made by the International Union of Bricklayers & Allied Craftsmen, sponsor of the award. The American Institute of Architects administers the award program.
The jury, chaired by the previous winner of the Sullivan Award, Robert Venturi, FAIA, cited the breadth of Thompson's architectural achievements over four decades, and singled out for special commendation recent work by Thompson and his firm on urban restoration/adaptation projects such as Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace and New York City's South Street Seaport.
These projects, the jury said, have created "a new awareness in the public of our architectural heritage and the tradition of masonry craftsmanship."
New buildings designed by Thompson have been recognized for decades by architectural critics as outstanding examples of contemporary design and for their humanistic and environmental concerns, and by the public for their sensitivity to the pleasure and comfort of those who use the projects, qualities that are enhanced by the appropriate use of many kinds of masonry.
Thompson's entry in the '85 Sullivan Award competition included dormitories at Colby College, Waterville, Me., which have walls of white painted brick; the recently completed Ordway Music Theater in St. Paul, Minn., which employs ornamental plaster on the interior of a textured brick structure, and the Opus Center in Minnetonka, Minn.
Thompson is a native of St. Paul. He graduated from the Yale University School of Architecture in 1941, and in 1945 founded The Architects' Collaborative with Walter Gropius. In 1963, he succeeded Gropius as chairman of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His present firm, Benjamin Thompson & Associates, was organized in 1966.
Thompson and his firm have designed academic and other institutional and public buildings as well as commercial structures. Their urban revitalization projects have included the restoration of old buildings, mostly brick and stone, and the adaptive use of such historic structures in conjunction with the construction of new buildings and open spaces to create multi-purpose urban centers that have been outstanding commercial and environmental successes.
The Sullivan Award is given once each two years to the practicing U.S. or Canadian architect whose career work is judged to best exemplify the architectural and environmental ideas of Louis Sullivan, father of modern American Architecture. The International Bricklayers Union established the award and prize in 1970 to demonstrate the concern of trowel trades craftsmen in the U.S. and Canada for architectural and environmental excellence.