photograph courtesy La Biennale di Venezia
THE AWARDS – Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement to Frank O. Gehry. With this award, the desire is to stress, in line with the spirit of the 11th International Architectural Biennale, how much Gehry’s work is the significant result of years of experimentation. “Frank Gehry has transformed modern architecture”; writes Aaron Betsky in his motivation. “He has liberated it from the confines of the ‘box’ and the constraints of common building practices. As experimental as the art practices that have been his inspiration, Frank Gehry’s architecture is the very modern model for an architecture beyond building.”