World-famous architect Frank Gehry—legendary for his designs for buildings including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles—will receive the UC Santa Cruz Foundation Medal during the campus's seventh annual Founders Celebration Gala Dinner this fall.
Gehry, often described as one of the most important and influential architects of our time, will appear along with his fellow recipients at the dinner scheduled for October 18 at the Cocoanut Grove in Santa Cruz.
Also honored will be Don and Diane Cooley, Watsonville residents who are long-time advocates and supporters of UCSC; Jock Reynolds, a UCSC alumnus and director of the Yale University Art Gallery; and Howard Haber and Abraham Seiden, UCSC researchers.
The Foundation Medal, UCSC's equivalent to an honorary degree, recognizes individuals of exceptionally distinguished achievement whose work and contribution to society exemplify the vision and ideals of the university.
Gehry is being recognized as an outstanding exemplar of the 2013 Founders Celebration theme of "Creativity, Innovation and the Arts." Among the qualities being celebrated are his exuberant creativity, openness to collaboration, willingness to take risks, and his love of the interplay of the arts.
Earlier in the day for the annual UC Santa Cruz Foundation Forum, Gehry will be the featured guest in a conversation with Paul Goldberger, a leading architecture critic and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Goldberger is currently writing an authorized biography of Gehry.
For more information, and to register for Founders Celebration events, click here.
The Cooleys, who have deep roots in the Pajaro Valley, will receive the Fiat Lux Award, presented to alumni and friends of UCSC who have demonstrated outstanding achievement, dedication, and service in support of the campus.
The Cooleys are longstanding stewards and advocates of the UCSC Arboretum. They created the Thomas B. Porter Scholarship in honor of Diane's father, and they have donated to the UCSC Opera Theatre, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Long Marine Lab, the Natural Reserves, and the Robert Sinsheimer Chair in Molecular Biology.
Don Cooley is a former president and long-time trustee of the UC Santa Cruz Foundation, and Diane Cooley is a founder and member of the UCSC Opera Circle.
Jock Reynolds (Stevenson '69, psychology), artist and director of the Yale University Art Gallery, will receive the Alumni Achievement Award.
Reynolds has created and shown his own artwork widely while also promoting fellow artists by organizing scores of other exhibitions, publications, and artist-in-residence programs.
He received two National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists fellowships, among many other grants and honors accorded him. During the last 25 years, he has directed the highly regarded teaching museums at Andover and Yale, whose collections are among the nation’s finest.
Howard Haber and Abraham Seiden will be honored as Faculty Research Lecture awardees. Selected by UCSC's Academic Senate to deliver the annual lecture, both Haber and Seiden are celebrated physics professors and researchers.
Haber is particularly well known for his role in developing theories and the attendant phenomenology of the Higgs boson ("phenomenology" involves the application of theory to experiments in high-energy particle physics).
He coauthored the definitive book on searching for the Higgs boson, The Higgs Hunter's Guide, published in 1989. A fellow of the American Physical Society, Haber received a prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2009.
Seiden, distinguished professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz, led the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP) from its founding in 1981 until 2010, when he stepped down as director to return to full-time teaching and research.
Seiden is currently leading a consortium of U.S. physicists working on a new particle detector that will be the first major upgrade for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator.
The annual Founders Celebration will continue with the Maitra Lecture December 5, which will be delivered by renowned theater, opera, and festival director Peter Sellars, a professor in the department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA who is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, as well as a recent inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Gehry continues to make front page news with new, ongoing and future projects. Hired by Facebook to design its expansion at its Menlo Park headquarters, Gehry will also design Facebook’s New York City offices. This summer, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission unanimously approved Gehry’s design for a memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the nation’s 34th president, located across from the National Air and Space Museum.
