Carme Pinós, the award-winning Spanish architect and academic, has been named the recipient of this year’s Berkeley-Rupp Architecture Professorship and Prize.

The award, bestowed by the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED), highlights the accomplishments of a “distinguished design practitioner or academic who has made a significant contribution to advancing gender equity in architecture, and whose work emphasizes a commitment to sustainability and community,” according to a press release by the CED. The prize includes a $100,000 award, a one-year professorship at the school, and a public lecture and gallery exhibition also to be held at the school. In announcing the prize, CED Dean Jennifer Wolch praised Pinós’s studied and broadly-based portfolio of work, stating, “Her outstanding design, vibrant intellectualism, dedication to public architecture and landscape in the public realm, and support of women-led economic development embody all that we strive to cultivate with this prize.”

Pinós founded her namesake firm in 1991 after garnering high regard with the designs for the Crematorium at Igualada Cemetery in Barcelona, Spain with Enric Miralles. Recent works include the Caixa Forum Zaragosa in Zaragosa, Spain as well as the Cube I and Cube II office towers in Guadalajara, Mexico. Among many other projects, Pinós’s office is currently designing a master plan the French town of Saint Dizier.

Pinós will begin her residence at CED during the spring semester of 2018 and will utilize a semester-long graduate research studio to conduct inquiries into one of her latest projects, which, through a partnership with Albert Faus and support from the Ministèrie de L’Habitat et de l’Urbanisme du Burkina Faso, will look into the development of a new, low-cost, sustainable thermal insulation made from peanuts. The project aims to utilize formal associations among the mostly-female peanut farmers of Burkina Faso to develop a production plant to produce the insulation. The project also aims to erect an agricultural training and investigation center to fuel the effort.

In 2012, Deborah Berke, founder of the award-winning firm Deborah Berke Partners and current Yale School of Architecture dean, was awarded the inaugural Berkeley-Rupp Professorship and Prize. Sheila Kennedy, founder of Portable Light Project, a venture that aims to bring solar textiles to the developing world, received the prize in 2014.