YSoA’s David M. Schwarz wins prestigious award for excellence in traditional design
David M. Schwarz ’74 M.Arch., chair of the Yale School of Architecture (YSoA) Dean’s Council, and CEO and president of David M. Schwarz Architects (DMSA), has been named the 2015 recipient of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame. He will be honored during a ceremony in Chicago on Saturday, March 21.
Established in 2003, the $200,000 prize is presented annually to an architect whose work “embodies the highest ideals of traditional and classical architecture in contemporary society, and creates a positive cultural, environmental, and artistic impact.”
“David Schwarz has done as much as any architect today to bring traditional architecture into public view, and to make it part of living, active communities,” said Paul Goldberger ’72, a member of the Driehaus Prize jury. “His work has a remarkable range that encompasses arenas, schools, concert halls, apartment houses, a major league baseball park, a hospital, libraries, museums, small-town streetscapes and a vibrant urban square. He sees every building he designs as having a responsibility not just to the people who will use it but to everyone who will see it.”
Schwarz graduated from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, before attending Yale. After interning at firms such as Paul Rudolph and Russo & Sonder, Architects, he relocated to Washington, D.C., in 1977, to establish his own practice. Schwarz has lectured widely and taught architecture at Yale in 2008 as the William B. and Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Visiting Professor. For Yale, his firm has designed the Class of 1954 Environmental Science Center (ESC), which opened in 2001. ESC houses research in the earth and environmental sciences, and provides expanded space for collections of the adjoining Peabody Museum of Natural History.
His projects have received awards from the American Institute of Architects, the Society of American Registered Architects, the Masonry Institute, and the Art Deco Society of Washington.
Schwarz serves on the board of overseers for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., and is on the board of directors of the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, Florida. He is the jury chairman for the Vincent J. Scully Prize Fund Endowment of the National Building Museum. At Yale, Schwarz is also on the executive committee of the Yale University Capital Campaign.
Five of the previous twelve Driehaus Prize laureates have been Yale alumni: Thomas H. Beeby MArch ’65 (2013), adjunct professor of architecture at YSoA and dean of YSoA from 1985 to 1991; Robert A.M. Stern ’65 M.Arch. (2011), dean of YSoA; Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk MArch ’74 and Andrés Duany ’74 (2008); Jaquelin T. Robertson ’54 B.A., ’61 M.Arch. (2007); and Allan Greenberg March ’65 (2006).
