(Illustration by Jim Frasier.)

His father, the late Rudy Bruner, immigrated to the United States from Romania in 1922, prospered as an inventor and steel-processing entrepreneur, and started a family foundation that Bruner now runs. Since 1987, the foundation has given the Rudy Bruner Awards for Urban Excellence to five recipients—one gold medal winner and four silver medal winners—every other year. The elder Bruner began talking about evaluating the performance of the nonprofits he funded in the 1970s, two decades before the idea of venture philanthropy came into vogue. The son developed an idea to evaluate buildings in a similar way to honor his late father. "The intention is to use the prize as a bully pulpit to advance the idea that architecture is more than just the design," Bruner explains. "I wanted to offer prizes to architectural structures that could prove their value not just in terms of form, but as an object with social and economic impact."

Because Bruner is a full-time architect with his firm, Bruner/Cott in Cambridge, Mass., he derives a great deal of inspiration from seeing the works of his prizewinners. However, from the inception of the award, when he sketched out the idea at an Irish pub in New York with a group of environmental designers, Bruner knew that he would have to be hands-off when it came to picking the winners.

The foundation awards the prizes to a building or complex, although the entrant can be the owner, the architect or even a city. The entrant also must submit a plan for using the prize money—gold medal winners receive $50,000 and each of the silver medal winners get $10,000, but the money must go back into the project. Bruner assembles a committee of accomplished experts to judge the submissions and give the prize the credibility that makes it worthwhile, he explains. For each two-year round, Bruner and Emily Axelrod, a city planner who is the director of the family foundation and the award program, assemble a group of six judges. The team always includes a mayor (Manuel Diaz, the mayor of Miami, held this position in 2007), as well as at least one architect or urban designer, a community activist and a financial administrator.

"Among them, they are aware of whole sets of problems a building might address that I’d never understand as an architect," Bruner says. He travels whenever he can with the selection committee members, who spend three days examining the sites they select as finalists. Other architectural design awards may go to buildings that the judges have examined only in photographs, but Bruner insists that his foundation does not scrimp on a travel budget, which runs around $200,000 for every two-year cycle.

Superfluity of Swag
Creating a prize with one’s name on it is not an easy route to immortality. The world is awash in prizes; globally, it is a $2 billion "industry" with private or public philanthropies bestowing some 30,000 awards every year. American philanthropists currently give more than 5,000 major prizes, with 90 percent of these created in the past 20 years, according to Larry Tise, who runs the International Congress of Distinguished Awards (ICDA) in Philadelphia, an organization he founded in 1994 to advise prize donors and establish standards for the field. But few U.S.-based prizes have risen to the level of the most sought-after international honors, including the Nobel Prize and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest prize for literature. These awards have served as great inspiration for entire generations of Americans, says Tise, who has noticed that the growth in the number of prizes correlates with the overall rise of wealth in this country. Tise sees that many individuals who put aside youthful ambitions to make money are now in a position where they can rub shoulders with some of the world’s most accomplished astronauts, biologists and performers by providing the funds for a prize.

TOP VIEW If You’ve Ever thought of discovering your own American Idol—of art, science, letters, human-itarian works or even showmanship—you could do a lot worse than look-ing to Alfred Nobel for inspiration. Philanthropists love giving prizes as much as recipients love getting them, but setting up a serious prize program takes full-time dedication and diligent planning. And, like everything else, it requires on target marketing.

Providing the capital for the awards and prizes is the easy part. More often, these programs fall short of the impact they could have when it comes to such goals as promoting the careers of promising individuals or encouraging research or creativity in a certain area, Tise says. He found his spark to start ICDA at a meeting of 12 award directors at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1991; he was director of the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which oversees the oldest science and technology awards program in the United States. The attendees decided they needed to provide more detailed direction for award-giving, improve standards and gather a body of knowledge about the field. "It was a eureka moment," Tise says. The directors realized that everyone who tries to start an award program faces virtually the same issues, so he decided to start his organization as a continuing forum. Since 2004, he has offered a training and certification program for administrators of award programs.