Andrew Zago Named
Winner of Rome Prize

May 31, 2002, Detroit - Detroit architect Andrew Zago, AIA, was recently named one of the winners of the 106th annual Rome Prize competition of the American Academy in Rome (www.aarome.org), a New York City- and Rome, Italy-based center for independent study and advanced research in the arts and humanities.

Zago is principal of Zago Architecture (www.zagoarchitecture.com) in downtown Detroit, and sometime visiting faculty in architecture at the University of Michigan College of Architecture and Urban Planning in Ann Arbor. He is known to GLFEA for his design of the Elizabeth Gordon Sachs Educational Pavilion at the Greening of Detroit Park on East Jefferson Avenue at Rivard Street. GLFEA donated approximately $30,000 of structural steel for the pavilion (www.glfea.org/html/wh-godpep.htm), and GLFEA member firm Davis Iron Works, Walled Lake, did the steel fabrication and erection. The pavilion was a cover feature in the August 2001 Architecture magazine. Zago's design of another pavilion in Detroit, the Detroit Pavilion, garnered the Progressive Architecture award in 2001 from Architecture magazine.

Zago said he plans to use the six-month Franklin D. Israel fellowship, named for a Los Angeles architect with whom Zago was acquainted when he practiced in the City of Angels, to continue work on a book he has started on the "urbanism" of Detroit. His analysis will focus on Detroit's growth in the 20th century, studying the city's urban form, namely its architecture, against its urban life, charting what he calls its "choreography." Zago proposes to use Rome, in which he says "… urban form achieves a degree of identity with urban life…" as a counterpoint. His book will attempt to understand the scale of urban abandonment in Detroit, and perhaps form new analytic tools with which to study cities.

The Rome Prize awards six-month to two-year fellowships for American artists and scholars to live and work at the Academy's 18-building, 11-acre site in Rome. Prizes are awarded in the fields of architecture, design, historic preservation and conservation, landscape architecture, literature, musical composition, visual arts and ancient studies, medieval studies, Renaissance and early modern studies, and modern Italian studies. Winners of the 2002-03 prizes range in age from 26 to 59 years and come from 16 states across the country. The Rome Prize is awarded through and annual, open competition juried by leading artists and scholars in the various disciplines.