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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.