SOM Foundation Announces Jury for the 2021 European Research Prize

Marco Ferrari is the cofounder of Studio Folder, an interdisciplinary design practice based in Milan, working both on commissions in the fields of culture and the arts and on research projects examining the politics and visualization of spatial data. Together with Elisa Pasqual and Andrea Bagnato, he is the coauthor of A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change, a book based on Studio Folder’s long-term project Italian Limes. He is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP in New York and a Visiting Tutor at Royal College of Art in London, where he coleads the architectural design studio “ADS7: Transboundary Geo-logics – Politics of the Atmosphere” together with Elise Misao Hunchuck and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng.

Iker Gil has been the Executive Director of the SOM Foundation since 2019. He is the founder of MAS Studio, Editor in Chief of the nonprofit MAS Context, and cocurator of Exhibit Columbus 2020–2021. Gil has edited or coedited several books including Radical Logic: On the Work of Ensamble Studio and Shanghai Transforming. He has curated multiple exhibitions including Nocturnal Landscapes, Poured Architecture: Sergio Prego on Miguel Fisac, and BOLD: Alternative Scenarios for Chicago, part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, and was Associate Curator of the US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT).

Kent Jackson is a Design Partner in SOM’s London office. Jackson’s creative approach to design responds to individual context and enables the integration of the natural and built environment. He is a leading advocate of the firm's pledge to meet the AIA 2030 Commitment toward a carbon-neutral built environment. He serves on the UK Advisory Board for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and is also a member of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects and the British Council of Offices.

Tim Marlow is Chief Executive and Director of the Design Museum in London. Formerly Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Arts and Director of Exhibitions at White Cube, Marlow has been involved in the contemporary art world for the past thirty years as a curator, writer, and broadcaster. He has worked with many of the most important and influential artists of our time to deliver wide-ranging and popular programs and brings a commitment to diverse and engaging exhibitions to his new role showcasing the transformational capability of design. Marlow sits on the Board of Trustees for the Imperial War Museum, Art on the Underground Advisory Board, the Design Age Institute and Cultureshock Media. Marlow was awarded an OBE in 2019.

Débora Mesa Molina is an architect and principal of Ensamble Studio, a cross-functional team she leads with her partner Antón García-Abril, based in Madrid and Boston. Balancing imagination and reality, art and science, their work innovates typologies, technologies, and methodologies. From their early works–Hemeroscopium House or The Truffle—to their most recent—Ca’n Terra and Ensamble Fabrica—every project makes space for experimentation aiming to advance their field. Currently, through their startup WoHo, they are developing ways to increase quality and affordability in architecture through the integration of offsite technologies. Mesa Molina is committed to sharing ideas and cultivating synergies between professional and academic worlds through teaching, lecturing, and researching. She has been the Ventulett Chair in Architectural Design at Georgia Tech since 2018 and previously served as research scientist at MIT where she cofounded the POPlab (Prototypes of Prefabrication) in 2012. Above all, she is a doer, committed to making poetic ideas happen.

Sumayya Vally is the Principal of Counterspace, a Johannesburg-based architecture and research studio. Vally’s design, research, and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. She is in love with Johannesburg. It serves as her laboratory for finding speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward, and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. She is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus 1. She has recently worked on initiating and developing Support Structures for Support Structures at the Serpentine, an initiative which supports and networks artists working at the intersections of arts and ecology, arts and social justice, and arts and the archive. Vally was recently named to the TIME100 Next list celebrating 100 emerging leaders shaping the future.

The new awards program, which comprises one €20,000 grant awarded annually to a faculty-led interdisciplinary team based in Europe, is designed to cultivate new ideas and meaningful research that addresses the critical issues of our time. The European Research Prize is an evolution of the former UK Prize and complement to the US-based Research Prize.