French lighting designer Hervé Descottes has been awarded the Architecture Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the first time this prestigious honour has gone to a lighting designer.
Descottes, founder and director of the lighting design studio L’Observatoire International, is also the first French recipient of this distinction since Jean Nouvel, who received the Arnold W Brunner Memorial Prize in 2006.
The award ceremony will take place on 20 May at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. It comes with a prize of $10,000.
The awards honour both practising architects and those who have contributed to the field through other mediums of expression, the academy said.
Hervé Descottes has been at the cutting edge of lighting design for the past three decades, and his work includes collaborations with many of the world’s leading architects and designers, including Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Jean Nouvel, Thomas Heatherwick and James Turrell, among others.
Recent and notable projects include the Fondation Cartier, the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, The Frick Collection (pictured above), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the British Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Eisenhower Memorial, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, again among many others.
Image: The Frick Collection, photograph by Joseph Coscia Jr
