Jury Members

Architect, founder of Artes Roots (Goa) and professor involved in research and environmental advocacy. He served as Amabassador for RIBA International Awards Jury (2024) and is senior advisor to United Nations bodies. Balsavar has worked with Atelier Bernard Kohn and B.V. Doshi, among others, and has authored several books. He actively contributes to various international forums, universities and journals.

He is the Principal of Studio Barnes, and Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Architecture Graduate Program at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Barnes’ practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency. His work has recently been exhibited in the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, and the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. He is a winner of the Architectural League Prize and is a Rome Prize Fellow. His work has also been featured and acquired to the permanent collections of international institutions. 

He was one of the fouders of Gruppo A12, with which he promoted research, exhibitions, and installations on the contemporary urban condition. In 1999, with Giovanni La Varra and Stefano Boeri, he founded Boeri Studio in Milan. Finally, in 2008, together with Giovanni La Varra he opened the professional studio Barreca & La Varra. He combines his professional activity with academia, teaching architectural design at the University of Genoa from 2009 to 2023, and at the Italian-Chinese Curriculum at the University of Pavia from 2015 to 2018; he was Visiting Professor from 2014 to 2016 at Syracuse University in Florence. From 2006 to 2015, he was director of Domus Academy's Master in Urban Vision and Architectural Design. Barreca is also architecture and urban design consultant for Le Fond Belval. The firm has published the monographs Barreca & La Varra. Questioni di facciata – A matter of façade (2012) and The Superfluous and the Necessary. Architectures of Barreca & La Varra (2024). In 2015 he received the Global Design and Innovation Award from NewSchool of Architecture & Design. From 2018 to 2023, he was a member of the Ministry of Culture’s Technical and Scientific Committee for Contemporary Art and Architecture.

Beningfield is an architect and the founding principal of London-based Openstudio Architects. The work of the practice reflects her interest in collaboration, research and landscape, as well as sustainable design strategies, materials and technologies. The award-winning work of the studio engages with spatial layering and a hierarchy of texture and materials, which contributes to an intense sense of place. Beningfield was educated in South Africa, the US and the UK – and holds a PhD in architecture and landscape from The Bartlett, UCL. She has been a visiting critic, lecturer and external examiner at universities in South Africa, the USA and the UK. The Frightened Land, her book on the layered meaning of place, buildings and landscapes in 20th century South Africa, was published in 2006.

After obtaining a PhD in Architecture from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, she now lives and works in Mexico City. She received the Emerging Voices award from The Architectural League of New York and was recognized by The New York Times as one of the 10 female figures changing the landscape of leadership in the world. She has held exhibitions at The Royal Academy of Arts in London, the ifa-Gallery in Stuttgart and the Venice Biennale. Canales is author of the books My House, Your City (2024), Shared Structures. Private Spaces (2020) and Architecture in Mexico 1900-2010 (2013), among others. She has been visiting faculty at Harvard University GSD, Princeton, and Yale School of Architecture.

She has a diverse background in the arts, with experience across galleries, museums, and publishing. She has worked at institutions including Phaidon Press, Vito Schnabel Gallery, The Royal Academy of Arts, Sotheby’s, Whitechapel Gallery, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Foster completed her undergraduate studies in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She serves as a committee member for the Future Contemporaries of the Serpentine in London and as a Trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation. 

Other than being Principal at Izquierdo Lehmann Arquitectos, in 2022 he founded Tecton Taller, a company that designs, manages and builds low-emission buildings through protocols that integrate analysis, design, coordination, management and manufacturing in a continuous process. He has published the book Composición Centralizada. Ensayos en torno a ocho casas de madera, the monograph El material de lo construido and participated in exhibitions in New York City, Tokyo and Chicago, among other cities. His awards include: House of the Year, Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard, Young Architects Award sponsored by AIA and finalist of the MCHAP.emerge prize. He has taught courses and lectured at various institutions around the world. He is special professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

With the Philadelphia office of Mitchell/Giurgola as predecessors, Kelley founded MGA Partners in 1990. Following the original commitment to design excellence through applied practice in architecture, today his firm creates distinguished university and public buildings in the USA through a focus on contextual relevance and material craft. His academic connections are to Drexel University and to the University of Pennsylvania, where he, respectively, taught design studios and a popular seminar on urbanism. Kelley is a graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Design and Georgia Institute of Technology.

Venelin Kokalov leads Revery Architecture, a Vancouver-based, internationally recognized practice with focus on cultural, academic, and community buildings. The firm’s name reflects its mission: to create a harmony balance between creative reverie and technical precision in every project. With a background firmly rooted in art and craftsmanship, Kokalov is respected for his distinctive ability to seamlessly weave together established and emerging technologies in engaging and innovative ways. He believes that the built environment must connect to nature, and that form and function should serve as a medium to stimulate human interactions, meaningful experiences, and joy. His creative vision is evident in numerous award-winning projects.

Dean and Professor of history, theory and criticism at Tongji University’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning, he has lectured widely on contemporary Chinese architecture and urbanism and published on these topics in international architecture journals. He has been a visiting scholar at MIT, a fellow at MAK Center of Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, and a visiting professor at TU Darmstadt. He has curated the Chengdu and Shenzhen Biennale exhibitions, among various distinctions.

Roberta Lucente, architect, PhD (Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, 1997), is associate professor of Architectural and Urban Composition and coordinator of the Building Engineering/Architecture program at the University of Calabria. Since 2005, she has been co-director of the international master’s degree in Management of Architectural and Urban Complexity at Sapienza Università di Roma. She has numerous publications to her credit, including: La memoria dell'impegno civile. Il progetto dei BBPR per la tomba di Rocco Scotellaro a Tricarico (with M. Sabini, 2024); Abitare Acciaio (2020); Disaster Otherwhere. New Forms of Complexity for Architecture (with N. Trasi, 2019); Il progetto come fonte, come metodo, come prassi (2014). She is a member of the editorial board of the international journal Metamorfosi quaderni di architettura. She has received awards and recognition for her design research work. She has been invited to teach and conduct research in France, Spain, the Czech Republic, and the USA.

Mehrotra, born in New Delhi in 1959, is a Professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. His firm, RMA Architects, was founded in 1990 and has designed and executed projects for government and private institutions, corporate workplaces, private homes, and unsolicited projects driven by the firm’s commitment to advocacy in the city of Mumbai. Mehrotra’s most recent books are Working in Mumbai (2020) and The Kinetic City and Other Essays (2021). The former, a reflection on his practice and the second book presents his writings over the last 30 years and illustrates his long-term engagement with and analysis of urbanism in India.

He is Founding Partner and Design Principal of URBANUS, where he leads the design and research team to focus on Shenzhen as a future urban laboratory, and seek architectural strategies based on its research of urban problems. Other than having become cultural and civic landmarks for Shenzhen, the practice’s works are featured in the permanent collection of the MoMA and the M+ Museum in Hong Kong. Meng served as Chief Curator of the 2017 Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, and has been a visiting professor at Syracuse University in New York and the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Architecture.

Peter Rich is a South African-based architect who attributes his learning to African space-making as being central to his career. His extensive African and global portfolio of built work has received numerous awards and prizes, e.g. WAF’s World Building of the year, the UK Earth Award, the International Sustainable Architecture Award and the Wienerberger Brick Award. Rich also received the Gold Medal of Architecture from the South African Institute of Architecture for his contribution to African space-making, and is an International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture. As far as exhibitions are concerned, Rich’s work was displayed at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, among others. In addition to his career as an architect that specializes in community-based projects, he teaches and develops new curricula in Africa, India, Europe and the US. In his words, he would like to “share with students that architecture should have an inclusive approach, drawing on a community’s needs, aspirations and cultural heritage through social interaction in the design process, and working towards a ‘new urbanism’ that embraces both diversity and a sense of identity”.

An architectural curator and critic, he is originally from Ireland and looks at the city as both insider and outsider, bringing the international design scene into dialogue with the Pittsburgh region.

Rungger graduated with a master’s degree in architecture from Graz University of Technology, Austria. He began his professional career in Graz collaborating with Prof. Hans Gangoly, later in London working for Jestico + Whiles and Softroom. He then went on to collaborate with Matteo Thun's studio in Milan. After passing the state exam at IUAV University of Venice, Lukas eventually returned to Bolzano and co-founded NOA with Stefan Rier. Today, NOA is an architecture and interior design studio encompassing over 30 creatives, headquartered in Bolzano with additional offices in Milan, Turin, and Berlin. The studio develops projects across a wide range of sectors, including hospitality, urban design, housing, mixed-use, cultural projects and public spaces.

An internationally renowned critic of art and architecture, he has taught at the Architectural Association, Goldsmith’s College of Art, the Royal College of Art, the Jan van Eyck Academie, Harvard University Graduate School Of Design, and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of the Columbia University. His essays are published in numerous international sector magazines and journals. I have a weakness for a touch of Red, his most recent book, comprises a selection of all his texts published on artists and architects in Portugal.

In 1997, having graduated from the University of Parma in hydraulic engineering, she joined Impresa Pizzarotti, holding various roles before moving to Engeco SAM in the Principality of Monaco. Over 12 years in Monaco, she has been involved in numerous projects, in an array of roles. She is currently heading up FPMC, a Monaco-based company that focuses on marketing luxury real estate developments. She is also responsible for a real estate development team that operates abroad, notably in France and the United States.

She is a Partner in the architectural design studio Williamson Williamson. She holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University and is a registered architect with the Ontario Association of Architects. She is a Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, and in 2024, she was awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal for her contributions to architecture in Canada. Her work has been published widely and earned numerous awards, including the RAIC Emerging Architectural Practice Award and the Prix de Rome from the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2024, she was awarded a Governor General's Medal in Architecture for her Garden Laneway House. Beyond her design practice, Williamson actively contributes to excellence in urban design as vice-chair of the Waterfront Toronto Design Review Panel and advocates for equality in architecture through BEAT, Building Equality in Architecture Toronto.

As Design Director of the Yazdani Studio based in Los Angeles, he brought a consistent and clear design sensibility characteristic of small design studios to a broad portfolio of significant education, institutional and cultural buildings both domestically and internationally. Yazdani’s work has garnered more than 150 major design awards and publications in national and international media; it has also been exhibited around the world and is held in permanent collections at the Albright Knox Gallery, the Library of Congress, MoMA and SFMOMA. He published a first monograph in 2005 and he is a frequent lecturer at architecture schools throughout North America.

Full Professor of architectural history and theories at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Her field of research is on architecture and urbanism in contemporary China, especially focusing on modern architecture and transformation of urban space in Shanghai. She published articles and books on these topics. She was one member of curator team of the China Pavilion at the 2018 International Architecture Exhibition in Venice and has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University.