LSDA 2008 goes to Ken Adam

The jury of the Raymond Loewy Foundation is awarding the leading international designer prize – the Lucky Strike Designer Award with its prize money of 50,000 euros – to Sir Ken Adam. With this year's award, the Foundation honours the work of a film production designer for the first time. "Ken Adam created unique cinematic worlds, illusions on film whose images, spaces and products remain alive in the collective memory of entire generations", thus the jury.

Ken Adam is a native of Berlin, where he was born in 1921. He emigrated to London with his family in 1934, and the British capital has remained his home to this day. The twice-over Oscar winner is regarded as one of the most influential production designers in modern cinema. His spectacular sets for the James Bond classics "Dr. No", "Goldfinger", "Thunderball", "You only live twice", The spy who loved me“ and "Moonraker" wrote film history. The gimmicks Adam created elevated agent 007 from a hero of spy novels to a silver screen legend. The unique sets and rooms he created are the nerve centres of evil – monstrous control centres, the rocket launch platform in the volcanic crater ("You only live twice" 1967 with Sean Connery and Karin Dor) or the treasure vault of Fort Knox in "Goldfinger" (1964, starring Sean Connery and Gert Fröbe). Ken Adam developed Bond's amazing weapons and gadgets, and equipped 007's famous silver Aston Martin with all manner of exciting accessories such as rocket launchers and an ejector seat. No less legendary is the huge war room that Adam designed for Stanley-Kubrick's 1963 movie "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb".

A total of over 80 international films, many of them major Hollywood productions, bear Ken Adam's signature. In addition to the Bond movies, they include "The Crimson Pirate", "Chitty chitty bang bang" and "Around the world in eighty days". Adam won an Oscar in the category Best Art Direction for "Barry Lyndon" and another in the same category for "The Madness of King George". He was also nominated for an Oscar on three other occasions.

The decision of the Raymond Loewy Foundation has a very special significance for Sir Ken Adam: "I am a great admirer of Raymond Loewy's work, and am very proud to be presented in recognition of my work with the Lucky Strike Designer Award by the foundation that carries his name".

By choosing Ken Adam as the prize winner of the 2008 Lucky Strike Designer Award, the Raymond Loewy Foundation is following its tradition of illuminating the entire spectrum of design, in terms of both content and form, in its full breadth, and making it known to the public at large.