Sir David Alan Chipperfield CH Receives the 2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize

Jury Citation

The Pritzker Prize is conferred in acknowledgment of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which have persistently produced significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture . The career of David Chipperfield is marked by a long term, rigour and consistency in a body of work that has seamlessly integrated and balanced both terms of that equation .

The careful, well-crafted, precise and calm responses he has offered to the goals aspired to in
his buildings can only originate in a deep and sustained knowledge of the discipline . Yet, those responses are never self-centred, nor do they serve in any way as art for art’s sake: rather, they always remained focused on the higher purpose of the undertaking and on the pursuit of civic and public good .

David Chipperfield ‘does his job’, and he does it by balancing relevancy and stature . To operate anchored to the body of knowledge of the discipline or architecture requires both intelligence and modesty; to put such knowledge at the service of a given project requires talent and maturity .

He has in every case skilfully chosen the tools that are instrumental to the project instead of those that might only celebrate the architect as artist . Such an approach explains how it is that a gifted architect can sometimes almost disappear when working on the restoration or renovation of existing buildings and architectural masterpieces like those on Berlin’s Museum Island or even more in the case of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin . It also explains why the wide spectrum of David Chipperfield’s skills appears in full when he is called upon to create from scratch .

Royal Academy of Arts Masterplan, photo courtesy of Simon Menges

Always characterized by elegance, restraint, a sense of permanence, as well as clear compositions and refined detailing, his buildings each time exude clarity, surprise, sophisticated contextuality and confident presence . In an era of excessive commercialization, over-designing, and over-exaggeration, he can always achieve balance: between a modern minimalistic architectural language and freedom of expression, between abstract statements and rigorous elegance never devoid of complexity .

While preserving a meticulous yet consistent quality of design, David Chipperfield has continually worked across a wide array of building types from public civic buildings to commercial, residential and retail structures . But from early in his career, museums have been a particular focus . Ranging across small-scale works free standing in the landscape to large-scale monuments in prominent and often complex and delicate urban locations, his museum buildings have always defied the notion that a museum is a place for elite culture . Over and over, he has interpreted the demands of the museum program to create not only a showcase for art but also a place interwoven with its city, breaking down boundaries and inviting the public at large to engage . Over and over, his museum buildings have generated new civic spaces, new patterns of movement in the city and new ways of integrating existing fabric .

Saint Louis Art Museum, photo courtesy of Simon Menges

At once architectural and museological projects, in Chipperfield’s hands museums as institutions and buildings offer a transformation of the urban life of the cities where they are located . Generous outdoor spaces make them not fortresses but connectors, places for gathering and observing, such that the building itself is a gift to the city, a common ground even for those who never enter the galleries . In short, his buildings embody a commanding balance of the seemingly contradictory notions of being complete in and of themselves as architectural designs where every detail is conceived as a carefully studied part of a whole, and at the same time create interconnections to the city and to the society in such a way as to fundamentally transform a whole district .

Biography

Sir David Alan Chipperfield CH (b . 1953) was born in London and raised on a countryside farm in Devon, southwest England . A collection of barns and outbuildings, filled with childhood wonderment and recollection, shape his first strong physical impression of architecture .

“I think good architecture provides a setting, it’s there and it’s not there . Like all things that have great meaning, they’re both foreground and background, and I’m not so fascinated by foreground all the time . Architecture is something which can intensify and support and help our rituals and our lives . The experiences in life that I gravitate toward and enjoy most are when normal things have been made special as opposed to where everything is about the special .”

He graduated from the Kingston School of Art in 1976 and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in 1980, where he learned to become a critic, reenvisioning the potential of each element to stretch every project beyond the task itself .

“Designing isn’t coming up with colors and shapes . It’s about developing a series of questions and ideas which have a certain rigor and consequence to them . And if you can do that, it doesn’t matter which path you go down, as long as you go down the path well and have been consequential in the process .”

He worked under Douglas Stephen, Norman Foster, 1999 Pritzker Prize Laureate, and the late Richard Rogers, 2007 Pritzker Prize Laureate, before founding David Chipperfield Architects in London in 1985, which later expanded to additional offices in Berlin (1998), Shanghai (2005), Milan (2006) and Santiago de Compostela (2022) .

America’s Cup Building ‘Veles e Vents,' photo courtesy of Christian Richters

His early career began on Sloane Street, designing a retail interior for the late Issey Miyake, leading to architectural work in Japan . The River and Rowing Museum (Henley-on-Thames, United Kingdom, 1989–1997) marked his inaugural building in his native country . He continued his work abroad, to early success for the reconstruction and reinvention of the Neues Museum (Berlin, Germany, 1993– 2009) and the newly constructed James-Simon-Galerie (Berlin, Germany, 1999–2018) . He credits his heightened sense of responsibility to these formative professional years, building in other countries for other cultures .

Collaboration has always been fundamental to his practice, upholding with certitude that, “the reality is that good buildings come from good process and good process means that you are engaging and collaborating with different forces .” During four decades, he has produced over one hundred works, which are expansive in typology and geography, ranging from civic, cultural and academic buildings to residences and urban masterplanning throughout Asia, Europe and North America .

As his practice grew more prolific, so did his advocacy for social and environmental welfare, censuring the commodification of architecture that serves global power rather than local society, and the interrelated lack of permanence that contributes to the climate crisis . “Architects can’t operate outside of society . We need society to come with us . And yes, maybe we can provoke and complain, and we can find models . But we need a planning framework, we need ambitions, we need priorities . Essentially, what we have to hope now is that the environmental crisis makes us reconsider priorities of society, that profit is not the only thing that should be motivating our decisions .”

Amorepacific Headquarters, photo courtesy of Noshe

Over recent years, he has developed a profound fondness and devotion to the community of Galicia, one of Spain’s poorest regions that paradoxically prospers with a high quality of life . Establishing the Fundación RIA in 2017, Chipperfield sponsors research, promotes ideas and aligns future development fostering locally-focused protection to the natural and built environments related to global challenges along the coast of the Ría de Arousa .

Chipperfield has received awards including the RIBA Royal Gold Medal (United Kingdom, 2011), the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture—the Mies van der Rohe Award (Spain, 2011) and the Heinrich Tessenow Medal (Germany, 1999) . He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts (2008), awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2009), and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale for Architecture (Japan, 2013), and is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects and the Bund Deutscher Architekten .