The Yale Henry Koerner Center is pleased to announce that Dolores Hayden, professor emerita of architecture and American studies, was recently honored with two distinguished awards: the 2022 Vincent Scully Prize and the 2022 Matilde Ucelay Award.
Established in 1999, the Vincent Scully Prize recognizes excellence in practice, scholarship, or criticism in architecture, historic preservation, and urban design. Professor Hayden was awarded the prize by the National Building Museum and announced as the twenty-fourth recipient of the prize on Wednesday, September 7. “With her focus on the politics of place, gender studies, and urban planning, Dolores Hayden is a true pioneer in using the built environment to document the history of gender, class and race,” said Aileen Fuchs, National Building Museum president and executive director. “We are excited to recognize her achievements and impact, which align closely with the work and mission of the Museum around equity and promoting social justice in the built environment.” The award will be presented to Professor Hayden at a ceremony on Monday, October 3, and will include a presentation by Professor Hayden which will discuss the “urbanism of care,” the idea that cities’ investments in public infrastructure could extend beyond water supply systems, paved streets, schools, and transit to include child care centers in workplaces, free kindergartens, and public kitchens. For further information about the ceremony, to be held in person and live-streamed, click here.
Named for the first woman licensed architect in Spain in 1936, the Matilde Ucelay Award was presented by the Spanish Ministry of Transport and Urban Agendas and accepted by Professor Hayden at an online award ceremony on Tuesday, September 13. The award, which was open to architects worldwide for the first time this year, recognizes the work of those who advance gender equity internationally through infrastructure, transport, mobility, and housing and urban planning.
Dolores Hayden writes about the politics of place. As an urban historian and architect, her interests span architecture, urban planning, and cultural history as well as gender studies. Beginning in the 1970s, she pioneered the analysis of American built environments to document the history of gender, class, and race. Three of her six award-winning books critique speculative tract housing and commercial development: Redesigning the American Dream, Building Suburbia, and A Field Guide to Sprawl. Nineteenth-century socialists’ model towns anchor Seven American Utopias; material feminists’ ideal neighborhoods appear in The Grand Domestic Revolution. Hayden founded a non-profit in the 1980s to celebrate the labor of women, men, and children of all ethnic backgrounds in downtown Los Angeles. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History documents that work and makes the case for landmarks that recognize the history of women and diverse ethnic groups in the labor force of Los Angeles.
A graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the Harvard GSD, Hayden has taught at UC Berkeley, MIT, UCLA, and Yale, where she was professor of architecture, urbanism, and American studies until her retirement in 2017. The NEA, NEH, Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Radcliffe Institute, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences have supported her interdisciplinary research on American urban and suburban landscapes. Her books and articles have been translated into a dozen languages. She’s also a poet, and her most recent collection, Exuberance, engages the voices of female and male stunt pilots from the early years of American aviation.