[NEA Press Release excerpt]

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman congratulates NEA Design Director Maurice Cox on receiving the Edmund N. Bacon Prize. This annual honor bestowed by the Ed Bacon Foundation is awarded to "an outstanding national figure who has advocated for excellence in urban development, planning and design." Past recipients of the prize include John O. Norquist (2008), president of the Congress for the New Urbanism and former mayor of Milwaukee; Paul Goldberger (2007), Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic at The New Yorker; and Robert A.M. Stern (2006), celebrated architect and dean of Yale's school of architecture.

Receipt of this award comes as Mr. Cox prepares to leave the NEA to return to teaching at the University of Virginia-Charlottesville, from which he took a two-year leave in 2007 to join the National Endowment for the Arts.