Berkeley Rupp Prize
The Berkeley Rupp Prize provides recognition and support of the special values that women bring to the built environment. An award of $100,000 is given to a distinguished practitioner or academic who has made a significant contribution to the areas of gender equity, environmentally sensitive use of resources, community, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), and/or innovation in their body of work.
Designed as a period for regeneration, this unique opportunity provides recipients with the chance to engage in creative scholarly pursuits during a period of residency at the College of Environmental Design (CED) at UC Berkeley. During their time at CED, recipients have access to the College’s resources and the broader University of California, Berkeley network of scholars. This time of reflection and inspiration is intended to inform the recipient's future contributions to their field.
The Berkeley Rupp Prize benefits the recipient as well as CED and the broader community. The terms of that negotiated mutual benefit are flexible and tailored to meet the needs both of the prize recipient and of CED, but may involve focused workshops, a research seminar, a semester-long studio, an exhibition, symposium, or some other set of activities that engage CED's architecture community.
Past Recipients
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2024–2025Sandhya Naidu Janardhan is an architect and advocate of community-led social impact design and sustainable architecture. Her work focuses on cultivating processes that provide marginalized communities with the agency to choose where and how they live, work, and play.
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2023–2024Sierra Bainbridge, an award-winning landscape architect and a co-founder of MASS Design Group, has worked at the forefront of initiatives that explore the role of design in cultural and environmental healing. Her projects, which emphasize dignity and truth-telling, address equity and justice in the context of a global community. “I am committed to design as a tool of healing and I am constantly rediscovering what that means,” Bainbridge says.
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2018–2019“There’s a lot happening in our industry right now, a consciousness-raising shift taking place that I’m excited to be a part of,” says Van Buren, “and The Rupp Prize means people see value in this type of thinking.”
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2016–2017Carme Pinós will bring her wide experience as an architect, urban designer and teacher to Berkeley. Her architecture is known for bold and vibrant forms yet her designs deeply engage the user, the city and the landscape. Whether designing a museum, or planning a factory in Burkina Faso to help boost the economy, her projects reflect a thoughtful connection to the poetry of place.
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2014–2015Design leadership that integrates systems, inspires collaboration, and honors culture is essential if we are to craft a sustainable future. Sheila’s creative work in inventing new links between urbanized and natural ecologies, and changing the ways in which we think about material culture and manufacturing in a society that is increasingly local and global, is the embodiment of what we strive to cultivate with this prize.
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2012–2013 Inaugural Berkeley Rupp Prize RecipientDeborah Berke exemplifies everything this prize is meant to celebrate. The excellence of her craft, her creative approach to sustainability, and her willingness to mentor women in the field and share her ideas and expertise make her the perfect person to receive the Berkeley-Rupp Prize.
Nominating Committee
- Lucy Berman, Sigrid Rupp Trustee
- Yung Ho Chang, AIA, former Chair and Professor of Architecture, MIT; Principal Architect, Atelier Feichang Jianzhu
- Renee Chow, William W. Wurster Dean; Principal, Studio URBIS
- Madhavi Desai, Partner, ARCHICRAFTS Studio
- Lisa Iwamoto, Chair and Professor of Architecture; David K. Woo Chair in Environmental Design; Principal, IwamotoScott Architecture
- Lisa Kleissner, Sigrid Rupp Trustee
- Cathleen McGuigan, Editor-in-Chief, Architectural Record
- Marilyn Jordan Taylor, Dean Emeritus, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
- Neyran Turan, Associate Professor of Architecture; Founding Partner, NEMESTUDIO
- Deanna Van Buren, Design Director and Executive Director, Designing Justice + Designing Spaces; 2018 Berkeley Rupp Prize Recipient
Lucy Berman began her career as one of the first salaried women employees at a major engine manufacturer. She went on to earn an MBA (as the only woman in her class), build a successful art consulting business and run an art gallery. After a 5-year return to the manufacturing sector, she made another career shift and became a realtor in 2004. Concurrently, she has been active in the non-profit sector as a co-founder, board member and Facility/Design Committee co-chair of Palo Alto’s Congregation Etz Chayim as well as a 10-year board member of the Palo Alto Art Center. Berman holds a BA in Economics and Sociology from Oberlin College and an MBA from IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Originally from Beijing and educated both in China and in the US, Chang received Master of Architecture degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. He has been practicing in China since 1992 and established Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ) in 1993. He has won a number of prizes, such as First Place in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition in 1986, a Progressive Architecture Citation Award in 1996, the 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts, and the Academy Award in Architecture from American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006.
He has published eight books and monographs, including Yung Ho Chang / Atelier Feichang Jianzhu: A Chinese Practice in English/French, and Yung Ho Chang: Luce chiara, camera oscura in Italian. He participated in many international exhibitions of art and architecture, including five times in the Venice Biennale since 2000. He has taught at various architecture schools in the USA and China; he was a Professor and Founding Head of Graduate Center of Architecture at Peking University from 1999 to 2005; he held the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard in 2002 and the Eliel Saarinen Chair at Michigan in 2004. Since 2011, became a Pritzker Prize Jury member.
Renee Chow joined the faculty in the Department of Architecture in 1993 and currently serves as Dean of the College of Environmental Design. Both her practice and her research focus on the intersection between architecture and its locale. One problem for contemporary design is to link the structure of the city and landscape with its individual pieces — to design how each affects and is affected by the other. In making pieces of our cities — highways and streets, parks and buildings — our current architectural culture too often strives for a degree of formal autonomy from surrounding circumstances. The experience of a city becomes a cacophony of competing markers. The local experiences of neighborhood textures, district orientations, and collective practices of dwelling disappear as our design practices increasingly lose the tools to make them.
Professor Chow is also principal of Studio URBIS, an architecture and urban design practice formed in collaboration with her partner, Thomas Chastain.
Professor Chow was recently named a 2021 ACSA Distinguished Professor. She has been honored by the College of Environmental Design with the Eva Li Chair in Design Ethics from 2005 to 2010, by Architecture Magazine as one of its “Ten Top Architectural Educators” and by the AIA California Council with its Research and Technology Honor Award. She received her SBAD and M.Arch. from, as well as previously taught at, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Madhavi Desai is an architect, researcher, writer and teacher based in India. She received her M.Arch from the University of Texas at Austin and is a partner in ARCHICRAFTS studio since 1981. She has an appointment as adjunct faculty at CEPT University, Ahmedabad since 1986. She has had Research Fellowships from ICSSR, New Delhi, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, USA, SARAI, New Delhi and the Getty Foundation, USA. She is a founding member of Women Architects Forum.
She is the co-author of Architecture and Independence: A Search for Identity, India 1880 to 1980, OUP (1997), Architectural Heritage of Gujarat: Interpretation, Appreciation, Values, Gujarat Government (2012) and The Bungalow in Twentieth Century India: The Cultural Expression of Changing Ways of Life and Aspirations in the Domestic Architecture of Colonial and Post-Colonial Society, Ashgate (2012). She is the editor of Gender and the Built Environment in India, Zubaan (2007) and the author of Traditional Architecture: House Form of the Islamic Community of the Bohras in Gujarat, Council of Architecture (2007). Her most recent book is Women Architects and Modernism in India: Narratives and Contemporary Practices, Routledge (2017). She was a visiting scholar in the department of gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 2014.
Lisa Iwamoto teaches design studios and graduate seminars. Her research focuses on digital fabrication and material technologies for architecture, and includes development of the CAD/CAM lab in the Department of Architecture. Her book, Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques was published in Spring 2009 by Princeton Architectural Press as part of their series Architecture Briefs. Iwamoto received her Master of Architecture degree with distinction from Harvard University where she was recipient of the Faculty Design Award, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Structural Engineering from the University of Colorado. She has taught previously at the University of Michigan where she was Mushcenheim Fellow, and at Harvard.
Iwamoto is principal of IwamotoScott Architecture, a practice formed in partnership with Craig Scott. Committed to pursuing architecture as a form of applied design research, it engages in projects at multiple scales and in a variety of contexts consisting of full-scale fabrications, museum installations and exhibitions, theoretical proposals, competitions and commissioned design projects.
Lisa Kleissner is the President of the KL Felicitas Foundation, dedicated to supporting programs that enable social entrepreneurs and enterprises worldwide to develop and grow sustainably, with an emphasis on rural communities and families; and advocating the Foundation’s Impact Investing Strategy. She provides pro bono architectural, project and construction management services for nonprofits both locally and internationally with a focus on culturally appropriate and sustainable design. Additionally, Kleissner has led fund raising efforts for local and international nonprofits focusing on capital and endowment campaigns.
She currently serves on several boards: Aqua-Spark, a global aquaculture investment fund; Real Good Fish, a California based sustainable community supported fishery; Hawaiʻi Investment Ready, a nonprofit capacity building Native Hawaiian and Kamaʻaina social entrepreneurs; and the Community Association of Big Sur, a nonprofit community action board for the Big Sur community. Kleissner was the Vice President of an architectural firm in Hawaii doing work in India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Malaysia. More recently she was the president of The Kleissner Group, an architectural and project management firm in Silicon Valley. Kleissner graduated from the University of Hawaii at Manoa with a B.Arch in Environmental Design.
Cathleen McGuigan is editor-in-chief of Architectural Record, the nation’s leading architecture publication for more than a century. McGuigan, who is the second woman to serve as editor in chief, was named to the post in 2011. Under her leadership, Record, won the 2012 Grand Neal award, the top American Business Media award for overall excellence, as well as being named to the Media Power 50 list in B to B Magazine, among other honors. She also serves as editorial director of SNAP, a products publication that debuted in 2009. McGuigan, a former Newsweek architecture critic and arts editor, has more than three decades of cultural journalism experience.
A Michigan native, she holds a BA degree in English, with a minor in art history, from Brown University. In 1992-93, she was a Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Besides her career at Newsweek, where she was on staff from 1977 to 2008, McGuigan has worked as a consultant for various clients, including the Syracuse University School of Architecture. She served as an executive editor of HQ: Good Design Is Good Business, a McGraw-Hill pilot project. Her freelance articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, and Harper’s Bazaar, among other periodicals. McGuigan has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale. She sits on the board of trustees of the Skyscraper Museum in New York.
Marilyn Jordan Taylor was Dean of The School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania after spending more than twenty years as partner, architect and urban designer at Skidmore Owings & Merrill, where she led the firm’s practices in airports, transportation, and urban design and served as its first woman Chairman. She is internationally known for her distinguished and passionate involvement in the design of large-scale urban projects and civic initiatives.
Taylor is distinguished as well for her civic and professional leadership, having served as a member and Rockefeller Fellow of The Partnership for New York City, President of the American Institute of Architects (NYC Chapter), visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Chairman of the New York Building Congress, founding (2001) member of the New York New Visions, and as Chairman of ULI Worldwide (2005–2007). Taylor attended Harvard University, The MIT Graduate School of Architecture and the University of California, Berkeley where she received her Masters of Architecture. PennDesign provides masters and PHD degrees to outstanding students in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, city and regional planning, historic preservation, and the fine arts.
Neyran Turan is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley and founding a partner at NEMESTUDIO.
Turan’s scholarship draws on alternative forms of environmental imagination within architecture and urbanism and their capacity to prompt new aesthetic and political lines of inquiry for the design disciplines. Her research and creative work take on this task by presenting a set of unconventional collisions between architecture and climate change, which reflect on broader concerns of the city, environment, and geography through the lens of specific architectural questions such as representation and materiality. On the one hand, these collisions stage and speculate about the critical issues of our present condition, such as resource extraction and waste. On the other, they aspire to prompt new directions for resituating architecture’s engagement with the world through a set of renewed relationships between the architectural and the planetary. Her most recent book Architecture as Measure (Actar Publishers, 2020) elaborates on the cultural and disciplinary potentials of a new architectural planetary imagination.
Prior to joining the University of California-Berkeley, Turan was Assistant Professor at Rice University’s School of Architecture. She holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard University, a Master of Environmental Design from Yale University’s School of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Istanbul Technical University.
Deanna Van Buren is one of the national leaders researching, formulating, and advocating for restorative justice centers, a radical transformation of the criminal justice system. She is the design director and executive director of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, an architecture and real estate development firm innovating in the built environment to end mass incarceration.
Deanna’s professional career spans 16 years as a design lead in the offices of Eric R. Kuhne & Associates London, The Buchan Group Sydney, Michelle Kauffman Designs, and Perkins + Will on urban design, domestic, institutional and education projects in the Bay Area, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Recent work with her practice includes Restore, a multi-use hub for restorative justice and restorative economics, the Pop-Up Village, a mobile site activation tool, and The Hope Re-entry Campus. Deanna is a recent awardee of the Berkeley-Rupp Professorship Prize, The Royal Society of Arts Bicentenary Medal and the Women in Architecture Awards Honoring Pioneering Professionals. Deanna received her BS in Architecture from the University of Virginia, M. Arch from Columbia University and is an alumnus of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
Sigrid Rupp
In an effort to foster a holistic approach to architecture and professional practice, Sigrid Lorenzen Rupp created the Berkeley Rupp Architecture Professorship and Prize.
The intent of the Berkeley Rupp Prize is to give recipients the resources and time necessary for reflection, and to share their knowledge and passion with students of architecture.
Ms. Rupp’s generous bequest to UC Berkeley makes possible the Berkeley Rupp Prize at the College of Environmental Design on the University of California, Berkeley campus.
- About Sigrid Rupp
Ms. Rupp believed that practitioners would benefit greatly from an opportunity to engage in creative and scholarly work away from traditional practice, research and/or teaching. Ms. Rupp was a champion of women’s rights, especially in the profession of architecture, and was a mentor to many women and minorities wanting to succeed in the field. She believed that women bring special values to architecture that emphasize a “triple-bottom-line,” which includes economic, environmental, and social approaches to design and a commitment to sustainability and the community.
Sigrid Rupp was a Palo-Alto-based architect. Her fascination with architecture dated back to her childhood in postwar Germany where she witnessed an intensive building boom under way. She later studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was mentored by Joseph Esherick, Harold Stump, and Donald Reay. After graduation, she went on to work for several Bay Area firms.
In 1976, Ms. Rupp founded her own firm, SLR Architects, for which she served as president until her death. Some of her significant projects include the Press Building and Storey House at Stanford University; a testing facility for Apple Computer that won an American Institute of Architects (AIA) Honor award; and a factory retrofit and rehab for Raychem Corporation. Her work also included retail stores, offices, private residences, and remodels of older buildings.
Ms. Rupp was a member of the Organization of Women Architects, the AIA, and the Union Internationale des Femmes Architectes. In 1998, the International Archive of Women in Architecture honored Ms. Rupp by including her body of professional work in their collection.
Contact Monica Renner, CED Development Associate, at monicarenner@berkeley.edu