Hasta La Ideas

The Los Angeles Conservancy has announced the winners of their annual Preservation Awards, given to those who have helped protect or restore great pieces of architecture throughout Southern California. While the list of recipients is interesting and it’s terrific to see dedicated preservationists being congratulated, one particular winner sticks out: Mad Men winning the Media Award. Isn’t it set in New York, you ask? The arch-nemesis of Los Angeles? Well yes, but you see, not all filmed entertainment is produced where the action takes place (for reference, see: everything shot in the last 75 years). Mad Men shoots in LA and besides having a one of the best art directing teams in the business, creator of the show, Matthew Weiner, has apparently been very dedicated in not just using LA’s available midcentury sites to film in, but has attempted to work preservation issues into the show as well. So now does it all make sense? Good. Here’s a bit from the award announcement:

Creator and executive producer Matthew Weiner has gone even further in supporting historic preservation. He hosted opening night of last year’s Last Remaining Seats series and spoke out in support of our efforts to preserve La Villa Basque restaurant, a 1960 hidden gem in Vernon.

Mad Men had filmed key scenes in Season 4 episode “The Suitcase” at the restaurant because of its pristine condition. When new management began removing original elements of the restaurant in a plan to “make it more Mad Men,” Mr. Weiner urged them to keep La Villa Basque intact.

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Like we said last week when the shortlist was released for the Mies van der Rohe Award, ’tis the season for big architecture prize announcements. Early this week and we already have a winner named for one of the biggest. Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura has been named the winner of the 2011 Pritzker Prize. His name might not be immediately recognizable to Americans, compared to former Prtizker winners like Renzo Piano or Rem Koolhaas, as most his work has largely been in his native Portugal (though you may remember back in 2005 when he collaborated with his former boss and now-fellow Portuguese Pritzker-winner, Alvaro Siza, on that year’s temporary Serpentine Gallery Pavilion). To get you up to speed on his work, Architectural Record has posted a quick slideshow of some of his work, as well as the full jurors’ statement about Souto de Moura’s win. Here’s a bit:

Pritzker Prize jury chairman, The Lord Palumbo, spoke from his home in the United Kingdom, quoting from the jury citation that focuses on the reasons for this year’s choice: “During the past three decades, Eduardo Souto de Moura has produced a body of work that is of our time but also carries echoes of architectural traditions.” And further, “His buildings have a unique ability to convey seemingly conflicting characteristics — power and modesty, bravado and subtlety, bold public authority and a sense of intimacy — at the same time.”

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The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced this year’s slate of freshly elected members, and Robert A.M. Stern is the sole architect to make the cut (the 250-member organization, established in 1898 to “foster, assist, and sustain an interest in literature, music, and the fine arts,” has previously welcomed the likes of Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, and Steven Holl into the fold). Among the other newbies are artists Walter De Maria, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Malcolm Morley, and James Turrell. They’ll be inducted in May, along with writers Louis Begley, Michael Cunningham, and Rita Dove and composers Martin Boykan and Aaron Jay Kernis. South African artist William Kentridge is among those who will join as an American Honorary member.

The May ceremony is also when the Academy will present its 2011 architecture awards, which are chosen from a group of 30 architects nominated by members. Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam are the recipients of this year’s Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture for their “significant contribution to architecture as an art.” Earning props for “work characterized by a strong personal direction” are William E. Massie of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Julie VandenBerg Snow of Minneapolis, while UCLA architectural historian and critic Sylvia Lavin and Cooper Union dean Anthony Vidler will take home awards for “exploring ideas in architecture through any medium of expression.”

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‘Tis the season and here we are with another week and another big architecture prize picking their big name finalists for their potential big wins. This time around it’s the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, also known as the Mies van der Rohe Award. Now in its twenty-fourth year (even though they only give out an award every two years), the six chosen finalists, out of 343 submissions, included those you’d expect, like David Chipperfield for the Neues Museum in Berlin, Jean Nouvel for his concert hall in Copenhagen, and Zaha Hadid for her MAXXI in Rome (she’s already won once before, back in 2003, for her car park in Strasbourg, France). Seems like, with any award, it’s often difficult to compete with those high-profile, household names, but we think Bernard Tschumi is the closest to taking down the upper-echelon starchitects with his Acropolis Museum. However it pans out, the winner will be announced at a ceremonyat the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona on June 20th and the winner will take home £60,000 and whoever lands the “Special Mention” also getting a none-too-shabby £20,000.

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Hey Mayor Bloomberg, doesn’t “Tim Brown Day” have a nice ring to it? The IDEO president and CEO (pictured) is in New York today to accept the first annual Havemeyer Award, an honor established by the local chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers’ Education Legacy Fund (ELF) in honor of Metropolis founder and publisher Horace Havemeyer III. At the direction of Havemeyer, the award will recognize “a major contributor to the global conversation about design and its growing importance.” First up is Mr. Design Thinking himself—Brown—who receives the award from its namesake tonight at “State of Design,” an event sponsored by ELF and Metropolis. Brown will chat with MASS Design Group cofounder Michael Murphy and Metropolis editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy about what shapes twenty-first century design and how designers respond to our evolving culture.

In other IDEO-related event news, Bill Moggridge, co-founder of the global design firm and now director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, will sit down with YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley to discuss the role of the revolutionary video sharing platform within the changing world of mainstream media (see also: Moggridge’s new book, Designing Media). And fear not, non-New Yorkers, the museum has announced that this installment of “Bill Design’s Talks” will be webcast. Tune in here at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 24, to watch the event live. But be careful: watching an online video about the role of online video may make your brain explode.

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