Architect David Chipperfield receives this year's Pritzker Prize. The award, endowed with 100,000 dollars, is considered the "Nobel Prize for Architecture". Chipperfield is "subtle and powerful" in his architectural language, but above all "radical in his restraint", his buildings "demonstrate reverence for history and culture", according to the jury of the prize. In Germany, Chipperfield, who was born in London in 1953, demonstrated these qualities, especially in Berlin, in the magnificently successful renovation of the Neue Nationalgalerie and in the reconstruction of the Neues Museum, in which he artfully uncovered the traces of history and made them tangible.

Niklas Maak

Editor in the arts section.

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Other well-known buildings of his office are the James-Simon-Galerie on Berlin's Museum Island and the building for the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, both of which attract attention through modern abstractions of antique motifs: In Marbach, for example, it is the peristasis – the column wreath that surrounds the classical Ringhalle temples. In both buildings, these traditional forms are interpreted minimalistically and executed in modern materials such as exposed concrete.

Chipperfield, who grew up on a farm, received his diploma in architecture from the Architectural Association in his native London in 1977. Before founding his own architectural practice in 1985, he worked for Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, both of whom celebrated industrial steel modernism in powerful, machine-like glass-and-steel buildings.

Chipperfield quickly turned away from its architectural style towards traditional building materials; In addition to concrete, large wooden windows and washed masonry are used in his Galerihaus Bastian, which is modern in form, as always in the work of the office as perfectly processed as in a German premium automobile.

With the combination of modern form and traditional materials, Chipperfield also won the hearts of more avant-garde guardians of tradition. He was knighted by the Queen in 2010. Chipperfield is also politically active. His RIA Foundation is dedicated to the sustainable development of the region of Galicia in northern Spain, which is plagued by structural change; the architect is also among the first signatories of a call by British architects for a climate emergency and to save biodiversity – to which architects can contribute, given the ecological footprint of new buildings, especially if they are what the jury diagnoses in him, namely "radical in their restraint".

The Pritzker Prize was founded in 1979 by Hyatt hotel owner Jay A. Pritzker. Previous winners include Oscar Niemeyer and Zaha Hadid. What is striking is the low proportion of women among the Pritzker Prize winners as well as architects who work outside the Western world. At the moment, India and Bangladesh, Latin America and many African countries have award-winning, groundbreaking architecture and many architects who would have deserved the prize. Apparently, however, the jury was of the opinion that Africa had been sufficiently served by last year's award of the prize to Francis Kéré, who was born in Burkina Faso and has lived in Berlin for decades, who was stubbornly dubbed an "African architect" in the press releases, although he could just as well be called a German architect.

With the awarding of the prize to David Chipperfield, a classic European architect with a sense of material and spatial effect and a high ability to rethink traditional forms is now honoured. However, the Pritzker Prize 2023 is not an award that honors novel solutions to the pressing questions of building for billions of people in times of climate change, war and migration.