Jeremy Melvin, Curator of WAF, in discussion with Bob van Bebber on the Business of Awards

In his role as Curator of the World Architecture Festival since it founded 12 years ago, Jeremy Melvin and his team have built the world’s largest live architecture awards program and festival. In the process he has engaged with the worlds’ leading architects and architecture practices. We have asked him to share some insights on the process of the last 12 years and also to reflect on the business impact that winning a WAF trophy brings to an architectural practice.

Jeremy Melvin is an architectural historian, a curator, a writer, a journalist, and a regular consultant to the profession and broader audiences on matters of architectural history, politics, and practice. He has held a number of key influential roles including; 1996-7, Director, the Architecture Foundation, 2000-2014, Development of architecture programme, Royal Academy of Arts, and 2007- present: Curator World Architecture Festival. He curated ‘Richard Rogers: Inside Out’ (2013) – the RA’s first large scale exhibition on contemporary architecture for more than 10 years. He is the author of six books on architecture, several key research papers the Journal of Architecture, and the Journal of the 20th Century Society, and 100’s of articles in leading professional journals, broadsheets, and magazines. In 2016 he edited ‘175 Years of Architectural Education at UCL’, a publication that traced the pioneering history of The Bartlett School of Architecture and contextualized it recent international acclaim within the progression of the profession and its links to UK academia. It was published as a special edition of The Architectural Review with 15,000 copies distributed worldwide. Jeremy has also recently founded ‘Thinkspace’ a new event series for UCL led by The Bartlett School of Architecture, and supported by The Backstage Trust.