KU architecture professor wins award for international work

Peter Pran, professor of architecture at KU and design principal with the international architecture firm NBBJ, has been named winner of the 2004 American Institute of Architects Design Honor Award.

The award is being made to an architecture team led by Pran for its work on the headquarters for Scandinavian telecommunications giant Telenor in Oslo, Norway.
The project was an international joint venture by NBBJ, a Seattle-based architectural firm, and two collaborating Norwegian firms, HUS and PKA.

The Design Honor Award is the highest recognition the 70,000-member AIA gives to an architect. It will be presented to the NBBJ-HUS-PKA design team and Pran, who served as the project’s design principal and design leader, June 10 in Chicago at the AIA annual national convention.

The AIA has called the Telenor headquarters one of the preeminent buildings of recent times. The structure has been lauded in publications including Architectural Record, Metropolis, Deutsche Bauzeiting and Architectural Review and has been called an innovative structure that promotes human interaction.

Projeto, the leading architectural journal for Latin America, will focus on the Telenor headquarters in its spring 2004 issue. Two books dealing with the creation of the Telenor headquarters—one from Norway and one from the United States—are being produced. A third monograph covering Pran’s work will be published this year with supporting essays written by a group of leading critics and architects in the United States and abroad.

Pran, who first came to KU in 1997 as the Rose Morgan distinguished visiting professor of architecture, has lived in the United States for 40 years and is a U.S. citizen. He teaches architectural design studios at KU and is working on the design of a 70-story tower in Singapore. Pran has worked with Mies van der Rohe, one of the leading architects of the 20th century.