Australian architect Philip Cox has been presented with an international fellowship from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).
RIBA has named 12 international fellowships, which are awarded to non-UK architects, for 2017. The lifetime honour rewards the particular contributions non-UK architects have made to architecture.
Cox was presented with his international fellowship at a presentation at RIBA in London on 30 January. The ceremony is part of Royal Gold Medal Week, honouring 2017 Royal Gold Medal recipient, Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
Cox was decribed by the jury as “the doyen of Australian architecture.”
The citation noted: “His career has spanned the range of late-twentieth-century architecture from rustic early houses of the ‘Sydney School’, via hi-tech to tensile structures. Nowadays Cox’s practice employs more than 350 staff and has completed projects in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, China and South-East Asia where he has designed the Helix Bridge and the Marina Bay Promenade, both in Singapore, and the Convention Centre in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.”
Cox co-founded Ian McKay and Philip Cox Architects in Association in 1963 before going on to establish his own firm, Philip Cox and Associates (now Cox Architecture), in 1967.
Cox received the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) Gold Medal in 1984 and was awarded RAIA Life Fellowship in 1987. He was also awarded Honorary Fellowship of the American Institute of Architects in 1987. He was given an Order of Australia for services to architecture in 1988.
The list of 2017 RIBA international fellowship recipients also includes two international architects who were in Australia in 2016 to complete pavilion projects: Bijoy Jain, founder of Indian practice Studio Mumbai and the architect of the 2016 MPavilion in Melbourne; and Vo Trong Nghia, founder of Vietnamese studio Vo Trong Nghia Architects and architect of Fugitive Structures 2016 at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.
The 2017 Life Fellowships are Johan Celsing (Johan Celsing Arkitektkontor, Sweden), Izaskun Chinchilla (Izaskun Chinchilla Architects, Spain), Frederick Cooper (Cooper Graña Nicolini Architects, now CGGMS architects, Peru), Philip Cox (Cox Architecture, Australia), Tom de Paor (dePaor, Ireland), Francisco Vieira de Campos and Cristina Guedes (Menos é Mais, Portugal), Bijoy Jain (Studio Mumbai, India), Siv Helene Stangeland and Reinhard Kropf (Helen and Hard, Norway and Austria), Vo Trong Nghia (Vo Trong Nghia Architects, Vietnam) and Marie Jose Van Hee (MJose Van Hee Architecten, Belgium).
The 2016 RIBA Honours Committee, which selected the fellows, was chaired by RIBA President Jane Duncan with Sir Peter Cook, Neil Gillespie, Victoria Thornton and 2015 RIBA Royal Gold Medallist (awarded with O’Donnell and Tuomey partner John Toumey) Sheila O’Donnell.
Past Australian recipients of RIBA International Fellowships include Peter Stutchbury (2016) and Richard Leplastrier and Peter Wilson (with Bolles and Wilson partner Julia Bolles) (2015).
