It was the architect Gianni Botsford, who was awarded for the Casa Kike villa he built in Costa Rica for his father, the writer Keith Botsford.
The house, built on the Caribbean coast, in the resort of Cahuite, consists of two pavilions connected by an open passage. The main material of the building raised on low piles is hard wood. Outside, the walls of the house are sheathed with corrugated steel sheets, and glazing is also widely used.
The main pavilion faces the sea and houses the master's office; the second “building”, smaller in size, contains a bedroom and a bathroom.
A building with slightly sloping roofs relies entirely on natural ventilation; it almost merged with the natural environment: both visually and in terms of environmental cleanliness.
One of the most important functions of the house is the storage space for Keith Botsford's library; for this, bookcases for 17,000 books were incorporated into the building's supporting structure, and they became a structural element of the house.
The jury of the award, headed by RIBA President Sunand Prasad, noted the high goals set and brilliantly executed by the architect while working on the most modest scale. Botsford Jr.'s rivals for the award were Cullum & Nightingale Architects (British Embassy in Uganda) and Coop Himmelb (l) ay (Ekron Museum of Art, USA).
The Lyubetkin Prize was awarded by RIBA for the third time this year (the winners of the previous years were Noero Wolff Akitects and Nicholas Grimshaw). It is awarded to a RIBA Member Architect for construction outside the European Union.
The prize was founded in memory of Berthold Lyubetkin (1901-1990), a native of Tbilisi, a graduate of VKHUTEMAS, who left Russia in the early 1920s, and worked in France and Germany. But his main merit is the discovery for Britain of the architecture of the modern movement in the pre-war decade. Lyubetkin also worked actively in England in the 1950s and 1960s.
