SOM Foundation Announces Jury for the 2023 European Research Prize

Nana Biamah-Ofosu is an architect, writer, and researcher. She is the director of YAA Projects, an architecture, design, and research practice dedicated to exploring counter-histories, material, and diasporic culture through making, speaking, and writing architecture. Alongside practice, Biamah-Ofosu teaches at the Architectural Association and Kingston School of Art and has lectured widely in the UK and internationally. Recently, she has worked on the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale as a research assistant to the curator, a tutor in the inaugural Biennale Architettura College, and as a co-curator and designer of Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Power in West Africa, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Applied Arts Pavilion.

Meredith Bowles is the founding director of Mole Architects. He is Visiting Professor at The University of Suffolk and teaches a sustainability masterclass at the University of Cambridge Department of Architecture. He is cochair of the Cambridge Quality Panel and the Suffolk Design Review Panel. His twin passions are designing characterful places and reducing the environmental impact of construction. Mole Architects was founded in 1997 and has been noted for its distinctiveness, originality, and a commitment to low energy design. The practice has won many awards, including The RIBA Manser Medal, RIBA Stephen Lawrence Prize, Richard Fielden Prize, RTPI Jubilee Cup, the William Sutton Prize for Sustainability and Placemaking, and longlisted for the European Mies Van de Rohe Prize.

Iker Gil (Chair) has been the executive director of the SOM Foundation since 2019. He is the founder of MAS Studio and editor in chief of the nonprofit MAS Context. 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. He was cocurator of Exhibit Columbus 2020–2021 and associate curator of the US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Escola da Cidade (São Paulo). Gil has been selected as one of “Fifty Under Fifty: Innovators of the 21st Century” by a jury composed by Stanley Tigerman, Jeanne Gang, Qingyun Ma, and Marion Weiss, named New Progressive by Architect Magazine, and included in the Hall of Fame in Newcity’s annual Design 50.

Kieran Long is the director of ArkDes, The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design. Long has twenty years of experience within the realm of architecture and design, first as a writer, critic, and teacher and more recently as a curator. In 2012 he worked with David Chipperfield to curate the Venice Architecture Biennale, and in 2013 became the Keeper of the department of Design, Architecture and Digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He has been a tutor at the Royal College of Art, a writer in journals across the world, and has been a television presenter for the BBC. He took up his position at ArkDes in Stockholm in 2017. Since 2022, he has been a member of the board of Victoria and Albert Dundee and a part of the strategic advisory group formed for the new architecture and design museum planned in Helsinki.

Tatjana Schneider is a Professor for Architectural Theory and Head of the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture and the City (GTAS) and the Architecture and Engineering Collection (SAIB) at the Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany. In the face of climate emergency, wider epochal transformations, and increasing socio-spatial inequalities, her work is concerned with case studies that promote principles of common good and justice. It focuses on how we can resist violent—exploitative, speculative, and exclusionary—productions of architecture, city, and space. As coauthor or coeditor, she has published books such as Flexible Housing (2007), This Building Should Have Some Sort of Distinctive Shape. The Story of the Arts Tower in Sheffield (2008), Agency. Working With Uncertain Architectures (2009), A Right to Build. The next Masshousebuilding Industry (2011), Spatial Agency. Other Ways of Doing Architecture (2011, 2016), Living the City. Of Cities, People and Stories (2020), and Making Futures (2022). She is currently working on a series of research projects that focus on spatial practice in the face of the climate emergency, most notably Architecture after Architecture. In 2021, she ran for mayor of Braunschweig, the city where she lives.