The holder of the Driehaus Prize 2021 is Sebastian Treese

German architect Sebastian Treese was announced as the laureate of the Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture on February 8, 2021. This is the most prestigious global award for contemporary traditionalist architects, associated with a financial reward of $200,000, given to him by a committee established by the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame in the USA. Its members include architects Michael Lykoudis, Léon Krier, and Demetri Porphyrios, architects Melissa DelVecchio and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, architect and writer Witold Rybczynski, and founder of Seaside Robert Davis. The award will be presented during a virtual ceremony on March 26, 2021.

At the same time, he received the Henry Hope Reed Award ($50,000) for cultivating and promoting traditional construction and the art of John Reps in memoriam (1921-2020), an American urban historian. His most famous and widely read work among academics and practicing architects is the book The Making of Urban America from 1965.

Sebastian Treese was born in 1977 in West German Mainz. He studied architecture at the University of the Arts in Berlin from 1997 to 2004, completing his diploma project under the supervision of professor Adolf Krischanitz. During his studies, he worked at the architectural office Hilmer & Sattler, and subsequently from 2005 to 2008 at Hans Kollhoff’s office. In 2008, he founded the studio Neumeyer Treese Architekten with Berlin architect Fritz Neumeyer, and in 2011 he established his own office, Sebastian Treese Architekten. One of the other two leading partners in the office later became his wife Julia Treese. Among the firm’s realizations are mainly residential buildings and villas in Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, and other German cities. Treese is characterized by the development of traditional urban typologies (block, street, square) and the classicizing architectural language of the first third of the 20th century, as well as its prototype in the art of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and his contemporaries.

Treese is the architect who received the Driehaus Prize at the youngest age since its first year in 2003.