The British architect David Chipperfield has been announced as the winner of the 2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize, arguably the highest international honour in the discipline. In its citation, the jury highlighted the elegance, restraint and permanence that have consistently characterised Chipperfield’s oeuvre, “an architecture of understated but transformative civic presence”.
Born in London in 1953, Chipperfield graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in 1980, after undergraduate studies at the Kingston School of Art. He started out working for seminal British architects Douglas Stephen, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, before founding his own firm in London in 1985. With additional offices now in Berlin, Shanghai, Milan and Santiago de Compostela, his output has spanned civic, cultural, academic and residential buildings, as well as urban planning throughout Asia, Europe and North America.
Chipperfield’s driving ethos, as the Pritzker jury members emphasised, has always been to choose the tools needed for the project at hand. As opposed to the “starchitect” impulse to create something iconic and instantly recognisable – to stamp their mark on a place – architecture, for him, is a vehicle to pursue civic and public good, even if that means “almost disappearing” behind it. Here are five projects that embody that classic imperative: to achieve something that will stand the test of time in serving the people who need it.
