The prize in the amount of 55,000 euros was established in 1997 on the initiative of the wife of the famous American sculptor and architect of Austrian origin Friedrich Kiesler (1896-1965). It is awarded every two years by the Austrian government and the Vienna City Council, and all organizational matters are handled by the Kiesler Foundation. The next laureate is selected by an international jury of architects, artists and theorists, evaluating his innovative approach to creative practice.
Andreas Mailat-Pokorni, Cultural Councilor of the Vienna Municipality, called Toyo Ito a “visionary and courageous thinker”, and the jury described his work as follows: “regardless of fashion trends, [the architect] solves the fundamental issues of architecture in terms of their socio-cultural problems”.
Ito's works of the 1980s "conveyed the nomadic lifestyle and mediatization of our world through conceptual lightness, encompassing their design, choice of materials and color scheme." Since the 1990s, Toyo Ito has set himself the task of "re-linking architecture and nature outside the discourse of modernism."
The award ceremony will take place on October 19, 2008 at the Vienna City Hall, and Ito will also read the Kisler Lecture on this day at the Vienna University of Technology. An exhibition of his selected projects "Toyo Ito _ Fluid Space" will be timed to coincide with this event.
Previous Kiesler Prize winners include Frank Gehry, Hani Rashid and Liz-Anne Couture (Asymptote), Cedric Price and Olafur Eliasson.
