British architect David Chipperfield, known for his designs that respond to his local environment and for his elegant modernist interventions in historic buildings, has been named the winner of the 2023 Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in architecture. Among the museums built by Chipperfield are the Museo Jumex, in Mexico City; Turner Contemporary, Margate, England; Kunsthaus Zurich; the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin and the expansion of the Neue Nationalgalerie designed by Mies van der Rohe, also in Berlin. In 2017 he was chosen to restore the 16th century Procuratie Vecchie in Piazza San Marco in Venice. Other notable structures include the Americas Cup building in Valencia, Spain; the Inagawa Cemetery Chapel and Visitor Center in Hyogo, Japan; and the Central Branch of the Des Moines Public Library.
“[Chipperfield’s] the commitment to an architecture of discreet but transformative civic presence and the definition – even through private commissions – of the public domain, is always done with austerity, avoiding unnecessary movement and avoiding trends and fads, which is a most relevant message for our contemporary society”, commented the jury of the prize in a collective statement. “Such an ability to distill and achieve thoughtful design operations is a dimension of sustainability that has not been evident in recent years: sustainability as relevance not only eliminates the superfluous but is also the first step to creating capable structures to last, physically and culturally. .”
Born in London and raised on a farm in modest circumstances, Chipperfield graduated from the Kingston School of Art in 1976 and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in 1980. His first major commissions, in 1988 and 1989, respectively, were the Gotoh Museum in Chiba, Japan, and the River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames, England. Today, David Chipperfield Architects has offices in Berlin; London; Milano; Santiago de Compostela, Spain; and Shanghai.
Talk with the New York Times on the occasion of the award, Chipperfield expressed his pleasure in winning the honour, but was quick to use it to draw attention to architecture that was both sustainable and accessible to the masses. “It should be a civil right to have housing, to have a good physical environment,” he said. “It shouldn’t be the privilege of the rich alone. We cannot simply leave parts of society behind.
