THE ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL BERKELEY UNDERGRADUATE PRIZE FOR ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN EXCELLENCE

The Berkeley Prize has been suspended for the 2023-2024 academic year.

Explore the past 25 years of the Prize through the pages below.

Overview of the Berkeley Prize

About The Prize

Raymond Lifchez
Raymond Lifchez
1932-2023

The international Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence (BERKELEY PRIZE) was founded by Raymond Lifchez, Emeritus Professor of Architecture and City & Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design (CED), through the result of a generous gift to the CED's Department of Architecture by the late Judith Lee Stronach.

During the past twenty-five years, the Prize has received 2985 Essay, Travel, and other Fellowship proposals from 3785 individual students representing dozens of schools of architecture in 88 countries. The Prize has responded by making 188 cash awards to 225 individual students.
Please See, In Memoriam: Raymond Lifchez

The Endowment Berkeley Prize Through The Years Book In Progress
Student Participants
Countries
Awards Granted
Individual Winners

Berkeley Prize Through The Years

Question To Past Winners: How do you think the Prize has influenced your professional life as an architect or in any other profession or career pursuit?

Benard Acellam, Assistant Architect at DE-ZYN FORUM LTD; Assistant Lecturer in Architecture at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda; BP Essay Prize Winner, 2015.

"Working in a developing country context such as Uganda provides a myriad of problems, but also opportunities to tailor-make architectural solutions that show that people and the environment matter. My professional life as an architect is about tackling these challenges and opportunities through each project I undertake."

Essay Prize

Each year, the PRIZE Committee selects a topic critical to the investigation of the social art of architecture and poses a Question based on that topic. Full-time undergraduate students in an architecture degree program or majoring in architecture in accredited schools of architecture throughout the world, including Diploma in Architecture students, may submit a 500-word essay proposal responding to the Question. Entries by teams of two students are encouraged and the second team member can be an undergraduate studying in fields related to architecture.

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Question To Past Winners: How do you think the Prize has influenced your professional life as an architect or in any other profession or career pursuit?

Philipp Goertz, Graduate Student at RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany; BP Travel Fellow, 2018

"During my time working on the essay and my visit to Japan, I felt that in architecture there is the possibility to genuinely engage with people and create a world in which people matter. This attitude carries on in my architectural works."

Travel Fellowship

Semifinalists who select this option are invited to submit proposals demonstrating how they would use the opportunity to travel to an architecturally-significant destination of their choosing, preferably to participate in a hands-on service-oriented situation. This is an exciting opportunity to explore a different part of the world and to participate in an organized project that will assist the winner in gaining a deeper understanding of the social art of architecture.

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Past Fellowships

Community Service Fellowship Competition

Semifinalists who select to compete for a Community Service Fellowship are invited to submit proposals demonstrating how they would use the opportunity to initiate a program or join an on-going program that reflects the content of their Essay proposals. This is an exciting opportunity to explore how to start and/or to participate in an organized project that will assist in the overall understanding and application of the social art of architecture.

Architectural Design Fellowship

From 2008 to 2011 the BERKELEY PRIZE Committee offered students the opportunity to compete in the Architectural Design Fellowship Competition to foster the study of the social art of architecture by helping to sponsor local and regional architectural student design competitions that were run by students themselves. This competition challenged the candidates to produce a thorough and practical proposal for a design competition that would benefit their community and bring attention to the resources available to the community from their school.

Teaching Fellowship

From 2013 to 2014 a new BERKELEY PRIZE Teaching Fellowship was offered to undergraduate architecture studio design faculty from around the world. The primary goal of this Fellowship was to support innovative thinking by faculty as they work to focus their students' attention on the social, behavioral, and physical characteristics of the users of the buildings and spaces being designed.

Each year the Berkeley Prize Committee invites a distinguished professor or scholar in the field of architecture or the related social sciences to write about some aspect of the year's Berkeley Prize topic.

  • They are meant to help focus students' thoughts on the issues surrounding the year's Question.
  • They are a model for excellence in writing.
  • They exhibit both how defined and how broad the range of possible response to a Question.
Learn more

The social art of architecture encompasses a large field of inquiry that links design studies to people studies. In an ever-growing corpus of published work, researchers from a variety of disciplines work with architects to investigate how to make architecture better for all people. The various topics of the history of the BERKELEY PRIZE give a glimpse into the range of these studies. Each year, the PRIZE publishes "resources" to help participants further understand the specific topics. Included in The LIbrary is a selection of these resources as well as other articles and links that detail why architecture is and must be, first and foremost, about people.

Learn more

Committee Members

Question To Past Winners: How do you think the Prize has influenced your professional life as an architect or in any other profession or career pursuit?

Ghina Kanawati, Architect and Researcher at CatalyticAction, Beirut, Lebanon; BP Essay Winner, 2018

"These experiences led me to my current work position as an architect and researcher at CatalyticAction, a charity that empowers vulnerable children and their communities through participatory built interventions in public spaces across Lebanon... The most rewarding feeling is when a child feels heard and happy to see a project to which they contributed become a reality."

Berkeley Prize In The News

Conversations on Social Justice and Design

The College of Environmental Design and the Department of Architecture hosted a day-long symposium in April 2022 titled Conversations on Social Justice and Design, to honor Professor Emeritus Raymond Lifchez, Founder and Chair of the BERKELEY PRIZE. The symposium featured a spectacular list of speakers who have been instrumental leaders in shaping contemporary practices addressing social justice, particularly in universal design.

Speakers included Darren Walker, Maddy Burke-Vigeland, Jeffrey Mansfield, Elaine Ostroff, Valerie Fletcher, Victor Pineda, and Susan Schwelk with a keynote talk by Christopher Downey, our inaugural Lifchez Professor of Practice in Social Justice.