David Chipperfield (b. 1953, London) was named the 2023 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, receiving the architecture field’s arguably highest honor. The architect known for the America’s Cup Building in Valencia, the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, and the Museo Jumex in Mexico City took the announcement as an opportunity to emphasize the need for architecture to address social inequality and sustainability. He encouraged the next generation of architects to forge their own path, one that will need “vision and courage.”
After he established his eponymous firm in London in 1985, Chipperfield’s first designs were in Japan. Beginning his career as an outsider in a culture different from his own informed his approach over the next nearly forty years—across continents and more than a hundred projects—establishing a method that addressed site-specificity rather than a signature style.
Now with offices in London, Berlin, Milan, and Shanghai, Chipperfield still firmly believes in architecture’s promise of enhancing quality of life. And given our current climate crisis, that means rethinking if something even needs to be built at all. Recognizing that architects indeed play a part in the major carbon footprint of the construction industry, tougher questions need to be asked, and the driving force should be one that’s ethical rather than economic and in service of the market.
He cites his renovation of sites like the Procuratie Vecchie in Venice and the Neues Museum in Berlin as examples of reusing existing spaces to not only make them more efficient but maintain a sense of identity for a community. Chipperfield argues that when a balance is struck between natural and built environments, the resulting spaces are beneficial to our welfare now and in the future.
Chipperfield’s dedication to a sustainable and equitable future takes root in a project in the Galicia region of Spain. He had a personal relationship to the area initially, and his firm was asked in 2015 to conduct an architectural study of abandoned buildings in Ría de Arousa’s town centers. He soon realized that location was a microcosm for the current social, economic, and environmental concerns. Chipperfield founded Fundación RIA in 2017 as a nonprofit focused on the development and protection of the local economy and environment.
