David Chipperfield Named 2023 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate

The 2023 Pritzker Prize laureate is David Alan Chipperfield, Hon. FAIA, of the United Kingdom.

Chipperfield opened his first office in 1985 following studies at the Kingston School of Art and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. The architect currently has offices in London, Berlin, Milan, Shanghai, and Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Long known for his bold, elegant, and refined sensibility, Chipperfield has maintained a strong sense of materiality throughout his oeuvre.

He received the 2011 RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture and the 2013 Praemium Imperiale, two accolades that often point to future Pritzker laureates. Chipperfield was also selected by Elizabeth II as a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2021.

Chipperfield’s longtime signature project, a comission that his firm won through an an international competition in 1997 and completed in 2009, is the Neues Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island. Built in collaboration with Julian Harrap Architects, the project weaves meticulously reconstructed historical 19th century architecture with Chipperfield’s striking, yet simple interventions. His stark white colonnades for the James-Simon Galerie were added to the complex in 2018.

In the United States, Chipperfield is known for works including the 2006 Des Moines Public Library, which was designed in collaboration with Herbert Lewis Kruse Blunck Architecture. The two-story concrete structure is shaped to create multiple outdoor areas that connect to the library’s interiors. Sheathed in a composite glass-metal skin, the building’s unique forms connect Des Moines Western Gateway Park with the city’s downtown. Chipperfield also collaborated with the locally based HOK on the 2013 Saint Louis Art Museum, a dark concrete and glass addition to Cass Gilbert’s original limestone 1904 structure.

More recently in 2021, Chipperfield realized a six-story apartment block at 11-19 Jane Street in New York’s West Village, which recasts the neighborhood’s red brick and stone townhouses as an elegant contemporary minimal composition of the same traditional materials. Also completed in 2021, The Bryant overlooks New York’s Bryant Park and the New York Public Library. The 32-story building’s simply gridded, classical façades enclose apartments and a hotel.

Chipperfield’s work constantly asserts its contemporaneity while deploying abstract universal forms that play well with past, present, and future. Not limited to new construction, Chipperfield has successfully applied his spare and minimal formal approach to fundamentally different older structures such as Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in, Berlin, Germany (built 1968, refurbished 2021) and the Procuratie Vecchie (built early 16th century, remodeled 2022) on Venice’s Piazza San Marco.

While embracing more social issues in recent years, the Pritzker Prize jury has resolutely held the line on defining architecture as first and foremost a formal pursuit. The selection of Chipperfield continues the prize’s focus on the making of strong and enduring places of evocative and powerful forms. In a statement through the Pritzker Prize, Chipperfield said, “We know that, as architects, we can have a more prominent and engaged role in creating not only a more beautiful world but a fairer and more sustainable one too. We must rise to this challenge and help inspire the next generation to embrace this responsibility with vision and courage.”

The jury adds: “This commitment to an architecture of understated but transformative civic presence and the definition—even through private commissions—of the public realm, is done always with austerity, avoiding unnecessary moves and steering clear of trends and fashions, all of which is a most relevant message to our contemporary society. Such a capacity to distill and perform meditated design operations is a dimension of sustainability that has not been obvious in recent years: sustainability as pertinence, not only eliminates the superfluous but is also the first step to creating structures able to last, physically and culturally.”

Chipperfield is the 52nd Laureate of the Pritzker Prize. This year’s jury was chaired by 2016 Laureate Alejandro Aravena in Santiago, Chile, and included Barry Bergdoll in New York; Deborah Berke, FAIA, in New York; the former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in Washington, D.C.; André Aranha Corrêa do Lago in Brasília, Brazil; 2010 Pritzker Laureate Kazuyo Sejima, in Tokyo, Japan; 2010 Pritzker Laureate Wang Shu in Hangzhou, China; Benedetta Tagliabue in Barcelona, Spain; and executive director Manuela Lucá-Dazio in Paris.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.