The American Institute of Architects (AIA) College of Fellows has awarded the 2013 Latrobe Prize of $100,000 for the proposal, “Urban Sphere: The City of 7 Billion.” The research will study the impact of population growth and resource consumption on the built and natural environment at the scale of the entire world as a single urban entity. An antidote to the fragmentary analyses of current practices, this project will remove arbitrary boundaries and reframe the entire world as a continuous topography of development: the city of 7 billion. One result of the research will be a website architects can use to retrieve multiple datasets on a specific site anywhere on the globe.
The grant, named for architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, is awarded biennially by the AIA College of Fellows for research leading to significant advances in the architecture profession.