US architect behind New York’s High Line among winners of Israel’s Wolf Prize

The American architect who designed New York’s High Line urban park and renovated the Museum of Modern Art and a Stanford University researcher were among the winners Tuesday of Israel’s prestigious Wolf Prize.

Elizabeth Diller, who also designed the US Olympic & Paralympic Museum, was recognized “for her exceptional and influential work connecting architecture to artistic practice, engaged in the public domain.” She shared the $100,000 prize in architecture with Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto.

The 2022 laureates were announced by the Wolf Foundation, a state-owned entity that issues the award to promote excellence in arts and sciences. About three dozen Wolf Laureates have gone on to win Nobel prizes in the 44 years that the prize has been awarded.

The other recipients of this year’s awards are Pamela C. Ronald in agriculture; Anne L’Huillier, Paul Corkum and Ferenc Krausz in Physics; George Lusztig in mathematics; Bonnie L. Basler, Carolyn R. Bertozzi and Benjamin F. Cravatt III in chemistry.

Bertozzi, a chemical biologist at Stanford, was recognized for work that “has opened up basic drug discovery and therapeutic targets associated with cancer, inflammation, bacterial infection, tuberculosis and most recently COVID-19,” the foundation said.

President Isaac Herzog hailed each of the winners as “a remarkable living testament to human ingenuity.”

“May we all draw strength and inspiration from your dreams and from your labors, and be moved to push the boundaries of our own imaginations, as we work to make the world a better place,” he said during the ceremony.

Past laureates include astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, artist Marc Chagall, conductor Zubin Mehta and musician Stevie Wonder.