Pritzker Prize 2023

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About the prize-

• It is the highest international honour for architects whose built work demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.
• It is considered to be one of the world’s premier architecture prizes, and is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture.
• The award was founded in 1979 by Jay A. Pritzker and his wife Cindy.
• The award is funded by the Pritzker family and sponsored by the Hyatt Foundation
• The Pritzker Architecture Prize is said to be awarded “irrespective of nationality, race, creed, or ideology”.
• The recipients receive US$100,000, a citation certificate, and, since 1987, a bronze medallion.

Contributions of sir David-

• With over 100 works from museums and civic buildings to offices and residences, his studio, David Chipperfield Architects (DCA), has been re-imagining buildings and working on renovations and restorations with climate and site context at the forefront. 
• Mindful of the way architecture contributes to climate change and social inequality, Chipperfield has been a tireless advocate of transforming spaces and reinvigorating cities.
• Chipperfield, who grew up on a farm in Devon, south-west England, went to boarding school in Somerset, where he was nudged by his art teacher to join the Kingston School of Art. 
• His skills took him to the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, where his classmate was another well-known architect, Zaha Hadid. 
• Chipperfield worked with British-Italian architect Richard Rogers before setting up his own studio in 1985.
• The master architect — winner of many competitions and curator of the 2012 Architecture Venice Biennale and a year-long guest editor of the Italian design magazine Domus in 2020 — has also been an advocate for political causes, protesting Brexit, and pointing to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in which more than 70 people were killed, to demonstrate the damage an absence of regulations can do.
• His most famous reconstruction is The Neues Museum (Berlin, 2009), the mid-19th century structure which was in disrepair after World War II. 
• The outdoor spaces were made so generous that it acts today as a social connector in the German capital.
• Much of Chipperfield’s design sensibilities owe to his early years spent in Japan, where he worked on fashion designer Issey Miyake’s retail outlets.  
• In 2022, the DCA completed restoration of the Procuratie Vecchie in Venice’s iconic St Mark’s Square.
• Chipperfield’s other significant works include the BBC’s Scotland headquarters (Glasgow, 2007); Campus Saint Louis Art Museum (Missouri, 2013); Museo Jumex (Mexico City, 2013); One Pancras Square (London, 2013), Royal Academy of Arts masterplan (London, 2018) and Kunsthaus Zürich (Zurich, 2020). 
• He has been working with the government in Galicia, Spain, since 2017 to strengthen the region’s economic and cultural bases by reviving processes and building connections among land, food and environment.
• The prize, which will be conferred on him at a ceremony in Athens in May, is in recognition of his four-decade practice in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Note: 

DCA has been collaborating with Sourabh Gupta of the Noida-based architecture studio Archohm on the Mughal Museum (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum) in Agra, on a site close to the Taj Mahal.  

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