At its annual dinner in New York on Monday, architecture and design hub the World Around unveiled its inaugural Visionary Award for industry changemakers, honoring Serpentine artistic director and author Hans Ulrich Obrist. Presented in partnership with CULTURED at Home, which recently released its second volume, the evening brought together an international cast of creative heavyweights to toast to the ideas—and individuals—reshaping the future of design.
“I am thrilled to be the recipient of the World Around’s Visionary Award,” Obrist told the crowd. “The World Around shows us that in order to address the major challenges of the 21st century, we must go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge. New knowledge is produced when new, unexpected connections are forged.”
Memorable Moment: The World Around Founder and Executive Director Beatrice Galilee presented Obrist with the award, which was itself designed by Japanese architect Junya Ishigami. Galilee shared how Obrist “embodies everything we hope to celebrate with the World Around Visionary Award: boundless curiosity, a profound openness to new ideas, and an extraordinary generosity towards the work of others.”
The Crowd: A starry rolodex of architecture and design leaders showed out for the celebration, including World Around Chairman Adam Flatto; CULTURED at Home guest editor Alexandra Cunningham Cameron; curator Marc Benda; artists Marina Abramović, Julie Mehretu, and Rachel Rose; architects and designers Elizabeth Diller, Mariam Issoufou, Maya Lin, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Jayden Ali, and Sara Zewde; creative director Sara Meltzer; design industry leader Carlo Molteni; and writer Claude Grunitzky.
What You Missed: A dedicated mini-exhibition, “The Bookshelf Project,” displayed images of Obrist’s works on peers’ bookshelves around the world—including Ghanaian-Scottish architect Lesley Lokko’s copies of Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects and Ways of Curating, as well as Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao’s beat-up copy of Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews: Volume I—underscoring the international influence of his work.
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