Scholar and educator David Leatherbarrow has won this year’s Award for Outstanding Achievement from the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum (ACSF). The purpose of the award is to recognize, celebrate, and raise public awareness of exceptional work that significantly advances the mission of the ACSF in architecture, landscape architecture, art, design, urbanism, planning, and related fields. Leatherbarrow was chosen for his “scholarship, writing, and teaching in the fields of architectural phenomenology and history,” according to the ACSF Board of Directors.
Leatherbarrow is Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught architectural design, history, and theory since 1984, and served as Chair of the Ph.D. program for approximately two decades. Before his tenure at Pennsylvania he taught in England, at Cambridge University, and the Polytechnic of Central London. He has also visited and taught at many universities throughout the world, and has held guest professorships in Europe, South America, and Asia. Leatherbarrow studied architecture at the University of Kentucky, where he earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree. He completed his Ph.D. in Art at the University of Essex under the supervision of Joseph Rykwert and Dalibor Vesely.
Leatherbarrow’s research has focused on various topics in the history and theory of architecture, gardens, and urbanism; more recently his work has concentrated on ecological issues and the impact of contemporary technology on architecture and the city. When his latest book, Building Time, appears this fall, he will have published ten books, including: Three Cultural Ecologies (co-authored with William Wesley); 20th Century Architecture; Architecture Oriented Otherwise; Uncommon Ground: Architecture; Technology and Topography; The Roots of Architectural Invention: Site, Enclosure and Materials; On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (co-authored with Mohsen Mostafavi, which won the 1995 International Book Award in architectural theory from the American Institute of Architects); and Surface Architecture (also with Mostafavi), which won the Bruno Zevi Prize from the International Congress of Architecture Critics. Leatherbarrow has published scholarly articles in many architecture journals, such as, AA Files; arq: Architectural Research Quarterly;l’Architecture d’Aujuord’hui; Daidalos; Nordic Architecture; Shinkenchiku; Journal of Garden History; Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; and Rassegna. This year AIA and ACSA awarded him the Topaz Medallion for Architectural Education.
Leatherbarrow delivered his award lecture online in July, 2020. You can watch it here.
