Herman Hertzberger to judge AR Public 2022

Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger (Amsterdam, 1932) graduated in 1958 from what is now the Technical University of Delft, and his architectural practice, now called AHH, was established in 1960. Hertzberger is known for cultural buildings, schools and residential buildings, both in The Netherlands and further afield. His most famous designs include those for the Centraal Beheer head office in Apeldoorn, Music Centre Vredenburg in Utrecht, The Ministry of Social Affairs en Employment in The Hague and the Chassé Theatre in Breda.

In 2012, Hertzberger was awarded with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal, in 2015 he received the esteemed Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture, and in 2019, the ARC19 Oeuvre Award in The Netherlands, and in 2021 the Royal Scottish Academy Metzstein Discourse Medal for Architecture. He has lectured at the Academy of Architecture, Amsterdam (1965-69), was professor at the Technical University of Delft (1970-99), visiting professor at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) and chairman of the Postgraduate Berlage Institute (1990-95).

Enter the AR Public awards today – earlybird deadline 25 February

Hertzberger was one of the editors of the Dutch magazine FORUM, together with Aldo van Eyck and Jaap Bakema, and his projects have been published and exhibited all over the world – including in the pages of the AR. In AR September 2020, he wrote one of our Letters to a young architect, and we published a Reputations on Hertzberger in AR April 2013, and a Revisit by Peter Buchanan that looked back on Hertzberger’s architecture and influence in AR November 2018 – three decades after his review of Hertzberger’s De Overloop care home in AR April 1985. Read more about Herman Hertzberger in the AR here

Hertzberger’s book Lessons for students in architecture (1991) has been published in English, Dutch, Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, Persian, Korean, French and Czech, and the book Space and the Architect, Lessons in Architecture 2 (2000) contained elaborated versions of his lectures, charting the background to much of his work and the ideas informing it. In 2008, Space and Learning was published, a book that brought his knowledge and ideas together into a theoretical study of the spatial conditions of learning. In 2009, the book The Schools of Herman Hertzberger was published, containing a presentation of his built and unbuilt schools, along with an essay on his work by the sociologist Abram de Swaan, who paid tribute to him as a pre-eminently ‘sociological’ architect. Hertzberger’s latest book, Architecture and Structuralism, published in 2015, attempts to formulate what structuralism means in architecture and why that matters, giving a new impulse to the discussion about sustainability and a blueprint for a more democratic architecture.

Portrait by Miriam Guttman

AR Public

Public space is a stage for human life, a place of democracy and collectivity. Open, accessible and abundant public space is crucial to the civic health of our cities and shared landscapes – a critical communal resource. As these spaces become increasingly threatened in the face of darkening commercial and political forces, the new AR Public awards recognise the importance of creating, rescuing and renovating public spaces.

Early bird deadline: 25 February 2022
Standard deadline: 25 March 2022

Find out more and enter AR Public today