Yesterday in Paris the architect Roger Diener, head of the firm Diener & Diener, was awarded the Grand Médaille d’Or from the French Academy of Architecture.

The achievements of this Swiss architect, who was born in Basle in 1950, include the extension to the Museum of Modern Art in Rome, the Rosengart Museum in Lucerne, and the controversial enlargement of the Swiss Embassy in Berlin. Since 1999 he has taught at the ETH in Zurich and, with Herzog & de Meuron and Marcel Meili, Diener founded “Studio Basel”, an experimental architectural workshop for the development of new forms and methods of teaching.