Charles Knevitt

Charles Knevitt is Director of the RIBA Trust, which manages the cultural assets and delivers the public outreach and educational programme of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The cultural assets include more than four million books, drawings, photographs and other archives in the British Architectural Library, at the RIBA's headquarters (66 Portland Place, London W1B 1AD) and the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London SW7. The outreach programme includes the annual RIBA Stirling Prize for Architecture, broadcast live on BBC2; the Royal Gold Medal, Honorary and International Fellowships; the RIBA Manser Medal; and an extensive series of talks and exhibitions, in London, around the RIBA Regions and overseas. Recent exhibitions include Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture seasons in Venice, Liverpool and London, 2008-09; the Palladio 500 touring exhibition (with the Royal Academy) in Vicenza, London, Barcelona and Madrid (2008-10), and Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey, in New York, Washington DC, Notre Dame University (Indiana) and Pittsburgh (2010-11) - the last two based on the RIBA's unique collection of original drawings by the sixteenth-century architect.

Before joining the RIBA in 2004, he was an award-winning journalist, author and broadcaster, including Architecture Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph (1980-84) and The Times (1984-91). He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Community Architecture (Penguin, 1987, with Nick Wates), Shelter: Human Habitats from around the World (Polymath, 1994; US edition by Pomegranate, 1996) and the Top 20 best-selling One's Life: A Cartoon Biography of HRH The Prince of Wales (Michael Joseph, 1988) with a Foreword by Spike Milligan. He has also written and presented television series for Anglia, Granada, Thames and Channel 4, including acting as series consultant to one of the first documentary programmes on architecture - Space on Earth (Anglia Television for Channel 4, 1985) - for which he also wrote the accompanying book. He is Chairman of the Swiss Cultural Fund in Britain. In 2008 he was named by Design Week as one of the 'Hot 50' people making a difference in design.