The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has named the 2023 winners of its two lifetime achievement awards: Carol Willis and Patrick Bellew. Willis, the founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum in New York City, will be awarded the 2023 Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award, while Bellew, the founding director of the environmental design and engineering consultancy Atelier Ten, will receive the 2023 Fazlur R. Khan Lifetime Achievement Award.
“This year’s lifetime achievement awardees represent some of the most vibrant minds in the field of sustainable vertical urbanism,” explained CTBUH CEO Javier Quintana de Una in a press release. “Carol Willis has been a steadfast champion for the critical role high-rise buildings play in tackling population density in cities around the world, both today and historically. And there is perhaps no one more well-versed in the integration of environmental and building systems with architecture than Patrick Bellew. We look forward to honoring their enduring commitment to these estimable undertakings in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.”
Willis is well versed in the history of the American city building, having not only researched, taught, and written about the topic as an architectural and urban historian, but also through research in her acclaimed book, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago. Additionally, in her role at the Skyscraper Museum, she has personally curated close to 30 exhibitions.
As the recipient of the 2023 Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors an individual’s extraordinary contributions to the advancement of tall buildings and the urban environment, Willis is invited to give the opening keynote presentation, “Density Is Human by Definition: Key Issues and Vertical Solutions,” at CTBUH’s upcoming conference in in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia The two awardees will deliver their keynote presentations and receive their awards in October at CTBUH’s annual international conference. This year’s event is titled Humanizing High Density—People, Nature & the Urban Realm and will happen on October 6–21.
Bellew also has a strong professional background, with more than 40 years of experience in environmental building design. He has expertise in thermal mass energy storage technologies and high-efficiency building conditioning systems. He is a Carter building Services Engineer and one of the U.K.’s Royal Designers, and his consultancy pioneered many innovations in the built environment, and worked on high performance buildings such as the Comcast Center with Robert A.M. Stern Architects in Philadelphia and The Visionaire with Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects in Manhattan.
He will receive the Fazlur R. Khan Lifetime Achievement Award, which recognizes an individual making strides in the design of tall buildings and the built urban environment. Bellew will give the closing keynote address at the CTBUH conference, titled “Living Environments: Building Systems Around Nature and High-Performance.”
