•Notícia

The Prize is held in memory of Professor Manuel de Solà-Morales, a master of urban planning, which he understood as a creative intellectual activity committed to improving the city through “persistent research”. The prize of €7,000 is awarded every two years for the best research in the field of urban planning and is open to all doctoral theses that have obtained a high mark at a European university within the two previous years.

The prize for the first edition will be awarded in February 2017. In each edition, the prize may be shared ex aequo but may also be declared void. The jury may also award as many secondary prizes as it considers appropriate. In the first edition, the jury will be chaired by Professor Jean Louis Cohen, doctor in Architecture, professor of History of Architecture and a specialist in urbanism at New York University of Fine Arts and the Collège de France, Paris. The other members of the jury will be Kris Scheerlinck, doctor in Architecture, professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the KU Leuven, and Maria Rubert de Ventós, doctor in Architecture and professor of Urban Planning at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), who represents the Barcelona Urbanism Laboratory (LUB).

The Prize is an academic initiative of the LUB, which Solà-Morales founded in 1969 at the ETSAB, where he taught for more than forty years. The Prize's organising committee is formed by the UPC professors Joan Busquets, Josep Parcerisa and Carles Crosas.

The Prize was introduced by the architect Joan Busquets, professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University and founder of the LUB. Other speakers were the wife of Solà-Morales, Rosa Feliu; the UPC's vice-rector for University Policy, Antoni Ras; the dean of the COAC, Lluís Comerón; the director of the ETSAB, Jordi Ros; the manager of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB), Josep Parcerisa; and the director of the UPC's Department of Urbanism and Regional Planning, Estanislao Roca.

An architect and urban planner dedicated especially to the problems of urban design, Manuel Solà-Morales (1939-2012) studied under the architects and planners Ludovico Quaroni in Rome and Josep Sert at Harvard.

He was emeritus professor of Urban Planning at the ETSAB. In 1968 he founded and directed the LUB, a research group on urban morphology. He was the author of many studies, articles and books, including Les formes de creixement urbà, Deu lliçons sobre Barcelona and De Cosas Urbanas, and curated many exhibitions. He was also the editor of the collections Materiales de la ciudad and Ciencia urbanística (CG); founder and editor of Arquitectura Bis and UR-Urbanismo Revista; and a contributor to Quaderns d'Arquitectura i Urbanisme, Lotus, Casabella, Perspecta, Archis and Daidalos.

His work achieved recognition at home and abroad, and he received major prizes for his designs and for his contributions to urban planning research. His architectural firm in Barcelona was very influential in the planning of the city, in designs related to the 1992 Olympic Games, and in later projects that were built in various European cities.

The LUB is a research centre at the UPC attached to the Department of Urbanism and Regional Planning and located in the ETSAB. It was founded in 1968 by Solà-Morales, in collaboration with the ETSAB professors Joan Busquets, Antonio Font, Miquel Domingo and José Luís Gómez Ordóñez.

Since 2004, this research group has organised the “Observatory of urbanism in cities” programme. Its main areas of study are forms of growth and urban morphology, the development of modern Barcelona, the theory and practice of urban design, and the teaching of urbanism in the world.

In 2010 the Laboratory began to publish the digital journal D’UR, as a continuation of UR-Urbanismo Revista (1985-1992). Other publications of the LUB include the collection D’A-Laboratori d’Urbanisme, which publishes the main doctoral theses written over more than 30 years.