Marion Weiss + Michael Manfredi 2020 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medalists in Architecture Public Talk

Architects Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, co-founders of the New York-based architectural design firm named one of North America’s “Emerging Voices” by the Architectural League of New York, are the 2020 recipients of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture.

Their multidisciplinary practice, WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, is at the forefront of redefining the relationships between landscape, architecture, infrastructure and art. Their award-winning projects include the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, which Time Magazine identified as one of the top 10 projects in the world. Integrating art, architecture and ecology, the park has won numerous other honors, and was the first project in North America to win Harvard University’s Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design. Most recently, WEISS/MANFREDI was selected through an international competition to lead to re-envision the world-renowned 12-acre La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles.

WEISS/MANFREDI is known for placing environmental stewardship and sustainability at the core of their work, and for their design projects that require progressive ecological and infrastructural frameworks. In addition to the Seattle Museum of Art’s Olympic Sculpture Park, these frameworks are evident in their award-winning and public-facing projects such as Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park on the East River in New York, winner of the 2019 Masterworks Award for “Best Urban Landscape” and one of four projects selected as “Best Architecture of 2018” by The Wall Street Journal. The Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology, a state-of-the-art lab facility at the University of Pennsylvania, earned WEISS/MANFREDI an AIA Institute Honor Award. The firm’s design for the visitor center at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden won the NY Public Design Commission Award for Excellence in Design and an American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award.

Other built works include the Tata Innovation Center at Cornell Tech in New York City; the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, New York; and the Women’s Memorial and Education Center at Arlington National Cemetery, winner of a Federal Design Architectural Award. WEISS/MANFREDI’s current projects include Yale University’s Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking, The Tampa Museum of Art expansion, and the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India, which breaks ground in spring 2020.

WEISS/MANFREDI won the 2018 Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Institution’s National Design Award, the New York AIA Gold Medal and the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. They have been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the National Building Museum, the Essen Design Centre in Germany, the Louvre Museum and the Venice Biennale. Princeton Architectural Press has published three monographs on their work, including Public Natures: Evolutionary Infrastructures.