Pritzker Prize

Purpose
To honor a living architect or 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.
The international prize, which is awarded each year to a living architect/s for
significant achievement, was established by the Pritzker family of Chicago
through their Hyatt Foundation in 1979. It is granted annually and is often
referred to as architectures Nobel and the professions highest honor.
The award consists of $100,000 (US) and a bronze medallion. The award is
conferred on the laureate/s at a ceremony held at an architecturally
significant site throughout the world.

History
Jay and Cindy Pritzker believed that a meaningful prize would encourage
and stimulate not only a greater public awareness of buildings, but also
would inspire greater creativity within the architectural profession.
The prize takes its name from the Pritzker family, whose international
business interests are headquartered in Chicago. Their name is synonymous
with Hyatt Hotels located throughout the world. The Pritzkers have long
been known for their support of educational, scientific, medical, and cultural
activities. Jay A. Pritzker, (1922-1999), founded the prize with his wife, Cindy.
His eldest son, Thomas J. Pritzker, the current president of The Hyatt
Foundation, explains, As native Chicagoans, its not surprising that our
family was keenly aware of architecture, living in the birthplace of the
skyscraper, a city filled with buildings designed by architectural legends
such as Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and many
others.
He continues, In 1967, we acquired an unfinished building which was to
become the Hyatt Regency Atlanta. Its soaring atrium was wildly successful
and became the signature piece of our hotels around the world. It was
immediately apparent that this design had a pronounced effect on the mood
of our guests and attitude of our employees. While the architecture of
Chicago made us cognizant of the art of architecture, our work with
designing and building hotels made us aware of the impact architecture
could have on human behavior. So in 1978, when we were approached with
the idea of honoring living architects, we were responsive. Mom and Dad
(Cindy and the late Jay A. Pritzker) believed that a meaningful prize would
encourage and stimulate not only a greater public awareness of buildings,
but also would inspire greater creativity within the architectural profession.
Many of the procedures and rewards of the Pritzker Prize are modeled after
the Nobel Prize. Laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize receive a
$100,000 grant, a formal citation certificate, and since 1987, a bronze
medallion. Prior to that year, a limited edition Henry Moore sculpture was
presented to each Laureate.

Ceremony and Medal

The official ceremony granting the award takes place every year, usually in
May, at an architecturally significant site throughout the world. The choice
of location of the ceremony reinforces the importance of the built
environment while providing a unique setting for the ceremony. The
presentation ceremonies move around the world each year, paying homage
to the architecture of other eras and/or works by previous laureates of the
prize. As the ceremony locations are usually chosen each year before the
laureate is selected, there is no intended connection between the two.
The invitation-only event is attended by international guests and guests
from the host country. The ceremony itself normally consists of welcoming
remarks usually from a dignitary of the host country; comments from the
jury chairman; the presentation of the prize by Tom Pritzker; and an
acceptance speech from the Laureate.
The laureate receives $100,000 and also a bronze medallion. The bronze
medallion awarded to each Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize is
based on designs of Louis Sullivan, famed Chicago architect generally
acknowledged as the father of the skyscraper. On one side is the name of
the prize. On the reverse, three words are inscribed, firmness, commodity
and delight, recalling Roman architect Vitruvius' fundamental principles of
architecture of firmitas, utilitas, venustas.

Jury
The independent jury of experts ranges from five to nine members. Jury
members serve for multiple years to assure a balance between past and
new members and are entrusted with selecting the laureate each year. No
members of the Pritzker family or outside observers are present during jury
deliberations which usually take place during the first months of the
calendar year. The jury members are recognized professionals in their own
fields of architecture, business, education, publishing, and culture.

Nomination Process
The prize is awarded irrespective of nationality, race, creed, or ideology.
Nominations are accepted internationally from persons from diverse fields
who have a knowledge of and interest in advancing great architecture.
The Executive Director actively solicits nominations from past laureates,
architects, academics, critics, politicians, professionals involved in cultural
endeavors, etc. and with expertise and interest in the field of architecture.
Additionally, any licensed architect may submit a nomination to the
Executive Director for consideration by the jury for the Pritzker Architecture
Prize. Nominations are accepted through November 1 of any given year. It is
sufficient to send an e-mail to the Executive Director with the nominees
name and contact information. Nominations that do not result in the award
are automatically carried over to the following year. The Jury normally
undertakes deliberations early in the calendar year and the winner is
announced in the spring.
Philip Johnson
1979 Laureate
Selected Works:
Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, 1949
AT&T Corporate Headquarters, New York, New York, 1984
Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove Community Church, California, 1980
University of Houston, Houston, Texas, 1985
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 1961/2001

Biography
Philip Johnson (1906-2005) was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1906, and in the
years since has become one of architecture's most potent forces. Before
designing his first building at the age of 36, Johnson had been client, critic,
author, historian, museum director, but not an architect.
In 1949, after a number of years as the Museum of Modern Art's first
director of the Architecture Department, Johnson designed a residence for
himself in New Canaan, Connecticut for his master degree thesis, the now
famous Glass House.
He literally coined the term "International School of Architecture" for an
exhibition at MOMA.
Johnson organized Mies van der Rohe's first visit to this country as well as Le
Corbusier's. He even commissioned Mies to design his New York apartment.
Later, he would collaborate with Mies on what has been described as this
continent's finest high-rise building, the Seagram Building in New York.
By the fifties, Johnson was revising his earlier views, culminating with a
building that proved to be one of the most controversial of his careerthe
AT&T headquarters in New York with its so-called "Chippendale" top.
Joining forces with partner John Burgee from 1967 through 1987, their
twenty year output has been nothing short of phenomenal.
The list of projects fills a volume, but suffice it to say, ranges from numerous
high-rise projects such as International Place in Boston; Tycon Towers in
Vienna, Virginia; Momentum Place in Dallas; 53rd at Third in New York; NCNB
Center in Houston; PPG in Pittsburgh; 101 California in San Francisco; United
Bank Center Tower in Denver; to the far flung National Center for Performing
Arts in Bombay, India; Century Center in South Bend, Indiana; a Water
Garden in Fort Worth, Texas; a Civic Center in Peoria, Illinois; the Crystal
Cathedral in California; and a Dade County Cultural Center in Miami. There
are many, many more.
Since 1989, Johnson, semi-retired, has devoted his time mainly to projects of
his own, but still is a consultant to John Burgee Architects. His most recent
design is for a new School of Fine Arts for Seton Hill College in Greensburg,
Pennsylvania.

Jury Citation
The Pritzker Architecture Prize was established in 1979 for the purpose of
encouraging greater awareness of the way people perceive and interact with
their surroundings.
The first award is being given to Philip Johnson, whose work demonstrates a
combination of the qualities of talent, vision and commitment that has
produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the
environment. As a critic and historian, he championed the cause of modern
architecture and then went on to design some of his greatest buildings.
Philip Johnson is being honored for 50 years of imagination and vitality
embodied in a myriad of museums, theaters, libraries, houses, gardens and
corporate structures.

Ceremony
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.
Dumbarton Oaks is a wonderful refuge in the Georgetown neighborhood of
Washington, D.C. Buildings on the grounds include the ninetieth century
Georgian style mansion, built in the early 1800s with subsequent additions
and modifications made throughout the twentieth century. The Museum of
Pre-Columbian Art (1959-1963) consisting of eight circular galleries,
designed by architect Philip Johnson, is widely considered among the
architectural masterworks of the twentieth century.
In 1920, diplomat Robert Bliss and his wife Mildred, prominent art collectors,
developed Dumbarton Oaks, their estate from 1920-40. The rough grounds
were transformed into gardens with elements of French, English, and Italian
formal gardens, however combined in a distinctive way by Beatrix Jones
Farrand, who also worked on the private gardens of John Rockefeller, Jr. and
the grounds at Yale University.
In 1940, the Blisses conveyed Dumbarton Oaks, together with a specialized
art research library of 50,000 volumes and a collection of medieval and
Byzantine art, to Harvard University. Today, the Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection is an international center for scholarship, providing
resources for Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Garden and Landscape Studies.
Begun as a private collection by the Blisses in 1920, the library and
collections include art, objects, artifacts, manuscripts, and rare books.
Because the Blisses were also lovers of music, they built a Music Room at
the main house and hosted private concerts there, including several by
musician friends, including Jan Paderewski and the composer Igor Stravinsky.
The ceremonies for the 1979 and 1980 Pritzker Architecture Prize were held
in this space.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Philip Johnson
The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next
to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must
have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of
our deepest convictions. Who among us, I would ask, does not feel more
religious after experiencing Chartres Cathedral, the Friday Mosque in
Isfahan, or Ryoanji Garden in Kyoto? Even more important than painting and
sculpture, it is the primary art of our or any other culture.
At the same time, the pursuit of architecture comprises a host of delicious
occupations. It is the necessary expression of all social considerationsno
new society without new kinds of buildings. All reformers, the Fabian
socialist as well as Franklin Roosevelt, always commissioned new
architecture. Next, there is a myriad of new technologies all expressed in
building techniques and, therefore, in architecture: the elevator; the steel
cage; and long before, the balloon frame; and long, long before that, the
beautiful brick of Assyria and Rome. Great technologies breed great
architecture. There are no visionary utopias in the minds of philosophers
that do not enter the realm of architecture.
It is also the most difficult of all the arts. How often I have envied my
colleagues who write, paint, or compose music. They live where they like,
they work when they wantno recalcitrant materials, no leaky roofs, no
stopped-up sewers. They tear up their mistakes.
And yet, what thrill can be as great as a design carried through, a building
created in three dimensions, partaking of painting in color and detail,
partaking of sculpture in shape and mass. A building for people, people
other than oneself, who can rejoice together over the creation.
It is no wonder to me that whole civilizations are remembered by their
buildings; indeed some only by their buildings. I think specifically of
Teotihuacan in Mexico, a people whose very name is lost, who had no wheel,
who wrote no books, who had no iron or bronze tools, no donkeys, no
horses. Yet they flourished for more than a thousand years and built a great
and unforgettable city. It was a religious city with pyramids that outclass the
Egyptian, with a ceremonial avenue wider than Park Avenue. This was a
pedestrian causeway with many stairs crossing the processional and lined
by religious pavilions; a neolithic monumental congeries of structures that
have defied time and science; courtyards and pathways and sloping walls
that spoke to us a thousand years after the Teotihuacan people disappeared
from the earth without a trace. The art of architecture is the only human
activity that can produce that miracle.
The ghost city of Fatehpur-Sikri in India also comes to mind; built of red
sandstone in fifteen years by the sixteenth century ruler, Akbar the Great,
and deserted by Akbar thirty years later. A city without street but build of
contiguous courts, colonnades, terraces, pavilions endlessly unfolding.
Preserved as if built yesterday, it was a sacred and ceremonial city built for
a saint. Only the art of architecture could create this wonder for Akbar.
But today architecture is not often acknowledged as basic to human activity.
Industry and science take up our energies. Our thinking is dominated by the
wordin prose or in poetry. Our philosophy is semantic, our metaphysics
irreligious. Our values beautifully inherited from Calvin and John Stuart Mill
are utilitarian, our hopes consumerist, materialistic; our way of thinking non-
mythic, rationalistic, pragmatic. We eschew old-fashioned words like God,
soul, aesthetics, glory, monumentality, beauty. We like practical words like
cost-effective, businesslike, profitable.
Architecture tends in our times to serve these ends. An unprofitable
skyscraper simply would not be built. An un-businesslike drafting office
would soon destroy an architect's practice. Architects no longer build Taj
Mahals, Versailles, or even extravaganzas like the Grand Central Station ...
they would cost too much.
Yet ars longa vita brevis. Values can change. Art, myth, religions can bloom
once again. We may, for example, want to rebuild America. We surely can if
we want to. We can do anything. We have the skill, the materials, the labor
force. Heaven knows, we have the need: our ugly surroundings, our
inadequate housing, our sad slums are testimony. We can, if we but will;
architecture, as in all the world's history, could be the art that saves.
But things can change; architects are ready. Here in the West we are blessed
with a great artistic heritage. In this century alone, we have Frank Lloyd
Wright, Le Corbusier, Lutyens, Mies van der Rohe, and our young architects
may be better than them. They have the good fortune to work in a period of
great change, a change in direction upsetting all the presuppositions of the
last century. New understandings are sweeping the art. New breezes are
blowing. The atmosphere is electric.
It is at this moment that The Pritzker Architecture Prize is founded. What a
symbol of impending change! Our Pulitzer Prizes and our Nobel Prizes are
never granted to a visual artist of any kind, much less an architect. Up until
tonight, we artists have felt we were second-class participants in society.
Scientists, writers, medical doctors are all important people held in high
regard in our society. Up to this night, we were not; from now on, architects
can feel prouder.
I, for one, realize the Prize is not for me; the Prize is for the art of
architecture, the art we used to call the mother of the arts. Within our
purview are the great arts of design, decoration, ornament as well as social
housing, city planning and structural design. Maybe we can, as in other
centuries, join painting and sculpture once more to enhance our lives ...

Ceremony Speech
Cesar Pelli
Chairman of the Jury
Thank you. I am particularly moved tonight by this occasion. I think it is a
very important occasion for architecture, the mother of the arts that it is
recognized in this manner. I am particularly moved to be here. I think it is
very appropriate that architecture, the mother of all arts be honored with
this award with which we are celebrating the first annual award. This is
thanks to the generosity of the Pritzker Family and the efforts of Mr. Carlton
Smith. I am particularly pleased to be here to give, on behalf of the jury, this
award to Phillip Johnson, a great architect, a person whom I consider a friend
although a friend that I see at some distance because I am always awed by
his wit, his brilliance, and his great capability. I think it is very appropriate
that he be the very first honored and the first person to receive this award. I
will give him three elements here. First of all, a photograph of a sculpture of
Henry Moores that I guess will be completed in six months, I believe, and
will be given to him physically.
Also, this has been written and states; The Pritzker Architecture Prize,
1979, Phillip Johnson. As a critic and historian championing the cause of
modern architecture and then went on to design some of his greatest
buildings. Now, in his seventies and the grandest of American architectures
grand old men, he is leading the way to new discoveries and revising the
history he helped to make. Through building and teaching he has made the
art of architecture even more important to the public. We honor him for fifty
years of imagination embodied in the beautiful museums, theaters, offices,
houses, and gardens he has given us.

Luis Barragn
1980 Laureate
Selected Works:
Barragan House, Mexico City, Mexico, 1948
Capuchinas Sacramentarias del Purismo Corazon de Maria, Mexico City,
Mexico, 1960
Las Arboledas, Mexico City, Mexico, 1962
Cuadra San Cristobal, Mexico City, Mexico, 1968
Fuente de los Amantes, Mexico City, Mexico, 1968

Biography
Luis Barragn (1902-1988) was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. His professional
training was in engineering, resulting in a degree at the age of twenty-three.
His architectural skills were self-taught. In the 1920s, he traveled
extensively in France and Spain and, in 1931, lived in Paris for a time,
attending Le Corbusier's lectures. His time in Europe, and subsequently in
Morroco, stimulated an interest in the native architecture of North Africa and
the Mediterranean, which he related to construction in his own country.
In the late 1920s, he was associated with a movement known as the Escuela
Tapata or Guadalajara School, which espoused a theory of architecture
dedicated to the vigorous adherence to regional traditions. His architectural
practice was based in Guadalajara from 1927 until 1936 when he moved to
Mexico City and remained until his death. His work has been called
minimalist, but it is nonetheless sumptuous in color and texture. Pure
planes, be they walls of stucco, adobe, timber, or even water, are his
compositional elements, all interacting with Nature.
Barragn called himself a landscape architect, writing in the book,
Contemporary Architects, (Muriel Emanuel (ed.) published by St. Martins
Press, 1980), "I believe that architects should design gardens to be used, as
much as the houses they build, to develop a sense of beauty and the taste
and inclination toward the fine arts and other spiritual values." And further,
"Any work of architecture which does not express serenity is a mistake."
A religious man, Barragn and his work have been described as "mystical"
as well as serene. His chapel for the Capuchinas Sacramentarias is evidence
of both qualities. Because of his interest in horses, he designed many
stables, fountains and water troughs that manifest many of these same
qualities.
Barragn has had a profound influence not only on three generations of
Mexican architects, but many more throughout the world. In his acceptance
of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, he said, "It is impossible to understand Art
and the glory of its history without avowing religious spirituality and the
mythical roots that lead us to the very reason of being of the artistic
phenomenon. Without the one or the other there would be no Egyptian
pyramids, nor those of ancient Mexico. Would the Greek temples and Gothic
cathedrals have existed?"
Further, he called it "alarming" that publications devoted to architecture
seemed to have banished the words, "Beauty, Inspiration, Magic,
Spellbound, Enchantment, as well as the concepts of Serenity, Silence,
Intimacy and Amazement." He apologized for perhaps not having done
these concepts complete justice, but said "they have never ceased to be my
guiding lights." As he closed his remarks, he spoke of the art of seeing. It is
essential to an architect to know how to seeto see in such a way that
vision is not overpowered by rational analysis."

Jury Citation
We are honoring Luis Barragn for his commitment to architecture as a
sublime act of the poetic imagination. He has created gardens, plazas, and
fountains of haunting beautymetaphysical landscapes for meditation and
companionship.
A stoical acceptance of solitude as man's fate permeates Barragn's work.
His solitude is cosmic, with Mexico as the temporal abode he lovingly
accepts. It is to the greater glory of this earthly house that he has created
gardens where man can make peace with himself, and a chapel where his
passions and desire may be forgiven and his faith proclaimed. The garden is
the myth of the Beginning and the chapel that of the End. For Barragn,
architecture is the form man gives to his life between both extremes.
Ceremony
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.
Dumbarton Oaks is a wonderful refuge in the Georgetown neighborhood of
Washington, D.C. Buildings on the grounds include the ninetieth century
Georgian style mansion, built in the early 1800s with subsequent additions
and modifications made throughout the twentieth century. The Museum of
Pre-Columbian Art (1959-1963) consisting of eight circular galleries,
designed by architect Philip Johnson, is widely considered among the
architectural masterworks of the twentieth century.
In 1920, diplomat Robert Bliss and his wife Mildred, prominent art collectors,
developed Dumbarton Oaks, their estate from 1920-40. The rough grounds
were transformed into gardens with elements of French, English, and Italian
formal gardens, however combined in a distinctive way by Beatrix Jones
Farrand, who also worked on the private gardens of John Rockefeller, Jr. and
the grounds at Yale University.
In 1940, the Blisses conveyed Dumbarton Oaks, together with a specialized
art research library of 50,000 volumes and a collection of medieval and
Byzantine art, to Harvard University. Today, the Dumbarton Oaks Research
Library and Collection is an international center for scholarship, providing
resources for Byzantine, Pre-Columbian, and Garden and Landscape Studies.
Begun as a private collection by the Blisses in 1920, the library and
collections include art, objects, artifacts, manuscripts, and rare books.
Because the Blisses were also lovers of music, they built a Music Room at
the main house and hosted private concerts there, including several by
musician friends, including Jan Paderewski and the composer Igor Stravinsky.
The ceremonies for the 1979 and 1980 Pritzker Architecture Prize were held
in this space.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Luis Barragn
I welcome the opportunity to express my admiration for the United States of
America, generous patron of the arts and sciences, whichas in so many
instanceshas transcended its geographical frontiers and purely national
interests to confer this high distinction on a son of Mexico, thus recognizing
the universality of cultural values and, in particular, those of my native
country.
But as no one ever owes all to his own individual effort, it would be
ungrateful not to remember all those who throughout my lifetime have
contributed to my work with their talents, assistance and encouragement:
fellow architects, photographers, writers, journalists, as well as personal
friends who have honored me by taking an active interest in my work.
I take this occasion to present some impressions and recollections that, to
some extent, sum up the ideology behind my work. In this regard, Mr. Jay
Pritzker stated in an announcement to the press with excessive generosity
what I consider essential to that ideology: that I had been chosen as the
recipient of this prize for having devoted myself to architecture "as a
sublime act of poetic imagination." Consequently, I am only a symbol for all
those who have been touched by Beauty.
It is alarming that publications devoted to architecture have banished from
their pages the words Beauty, Inspiration, Magic, Spellbound, Enchantment,
as well as the concepts of Serenity, Silence, Intimacy and Amazement All
these have nestled in my soul, and though 1 am fully aware that I have not
done them complete justice in my work, they have never ceased to be my
guiding lights.
Religion and Myth. It is impossible to understand Art and the glory of its
history without avowing religious spirituality and the mythical roots that lead
us to the very reason of being of the artistic phenomenon. Without the one
or the other there would be no Egyptian pyramids nor those of ancient
Mexico. Would the Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals have existed?
Would the amazing marvels of the Renaissance and the Baroque have come
about?
And in another field, would the ritual dances of the so-called primitive
cultures have developed? Would we now be the heirs of the inexhaustible
artistic treasure of worldwide popular sensitivity? Without the desire for God,
our planet would be a sorry wasteland of ugliness. "The irrational logic
harbored in the myths and in all true religious experience has been the
fountainhead of the artistic process at all times and in all places " These are
words of my good friend, Edmundo O'Gorman, and, with or without his
permission, I have made them mine.
Beauty. The invincible difficulty that the philosophers have in defining the
meaning of this word is unequivocal proof of its ineffable mystery. Beauty
speaks like an oracle, and ever since man has heeded its message in an
infinite number of ways: it may be in the use of tattoos, in the choice of a
seashell necklace by which the bride enhances the promise of her surrender,
or, again, in the apparently superfluous ornamentation of everyday tools
and domestic utensils, not to speak of temples and palaces and even, in our
day, in the industrialized products of modern technology. Human life
deprived of beauty is not worthy of being called so.
Silence. In the gardens and homes designed by me, I have always
endeavored to allow for the interior placid murmur of silence, and in my
fountains, silence sings.
Solitude. Only in intimate communion with solitude may man find himself.
Solitude is good company and my architecture is not for those who fear or
shun it.
Serenity. Serenity is the great and true antidote against anguish and fear,
and today, more than ever, it is the architect's duty to make of it a
permanent guest in the home, no matter how sumptuous or how humble.
Throughout my work I have always strived to achieve serenity, but one must
be on guard not to destroy it by the use of an indiscriminate palette.
Joy. How can one forget joy? I believe that a work of art reaches perfection
when it conveys silent joy and serenity.
Death. The certainty of death is the spring of action and therefore of life,
and in the implicit religious element in the work of art, life triumphs over
death.
Gardens. In the creation of a garden, the architect invites the partnership of
the Kingdom of Nature. In a beautiful garden, the majesty of Nature is ever
present, but Nature reduced to human proportions and thus transformed
into the most efficient haven against the aggressiveness of contemporary
life. Ferdinand Bac taught us that "the soul of gardens shelters the greatest
sum of serenity at man's disposal," and it is to him that I am indebted for my
longing to create a perfect garden. He said, speaking of his gardens at Ies
Colombiers, "in this small domain, I have done nothing else but joined the
millenary solidarity to which we are all subject: the ambition of expressing
materially a sentiment, common to many men in search of a link with
nature, by creating a place of repose of peaceable pleasure " It will appear
obvious, then, that a garden must combine the poetic and the mysterious
with a feeling of serenity and joy. There is no fuller expression of vulgarity
than a vulgar garden ...

Ceremony Speech
About Prizes
by J. Irwin Miller
Prizes have been awarded by humans to their fellows as far back as history
recordsfor achievements in war, in poetry, in music, in athletics, in
whatever fields were valued by particular generations at particular times.
The prize might be a laurel wreath, a medal, Blenheim Palace, the king's
daughter, or a duchy.
Prize ceremonies have been occasions for general celebration, or they have
expressed simple gratitude, but they have also in a very significant way
expressed the need to reward excellence, the human achievement at its
most creative.
Sometimes a generation's judgment of its own artists and creators has been
flawed. Socrates was put to death. Mozart buried in a pauper's grave, and
Wren discharged as architect of St. Paul's. The list is long, but so is the other
list. Ictinus and Callicrates were esteemed by 5th century Athens. The
honored names of the architects of Hagia Sophia survive to this day. And
during their lifetimes, Wright, Mies, and Corbusier were recognized publicly
as giants of their century.
It is a good thing for a society to rejoice in splendid achievements, to hold
up excellence to all its members, and to call attention to those who
accomplish great works. These rare person remind the rest of us what we
have in us to do if we will achieve only a portion of the commitment, the
discipline, the clear vision, and the taste for work (even to the threshold of
pain) which are invariable characteristics of the infinitesimal number of the
greatest in any time.
A world prize in architecture is long overdue. "First we shape our buildings,
then our buildings shape us." Architects have built slums and even whole
cities which crush the human spirit. But always a few have designed other
and better kinds of cities, more humane housing, cathedrals, colleges,
parks, centers of government, even factories and barns, which reveal truth,
which give us joy for centuries, and which shame us from sinking to our
meanest.
This prize gives a just and due reward to the small band of the best, but
even more it serves to remind every member of the discipline that
architecture can and should be more than a close professional guild.
Architecture, indeed every profession at its most admirable, is a calling, a
"vocation" in the root meaning of that ancient word.
James Stirling
1981 Laureate
Selected Works:
Engineering Building, University of Leicester, United Kingdom, 1963
History Faculty Library, Cambridge University, Cambridge, United Kingdom,
1967
St Andrews University, Fife, United Kingdom, 1968
Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany, 1983
Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1985
Clore Gallery, Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom, 1987

Announcement
New York, April 15: British architect James Stirling was named as the winner
of the third annual international Pritzker Architecture Prize at a press
conference held at New York's Museum of Modern Art. In making the
announcement, Jay A. Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation, which
administers and funds the prize, presented the 55-year-old Stirling with a
check for $100,000. The second award element, a cast of a Henry Moore
sculpture created especially for the purpose, will be presented at a
Washington banquet next month.
Stirling, a Scottish-born architect whose work includes museums,
educational institutions and private residences, was the 1980 recipient of
the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, presented by the Royal Institute of
British Architects. Among his current and upcoming projects are buildings for
the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, and Columbia University, New York, as well
as the new Turner Museum at London's Tate Gallery.
The first Pritzker Architecture Prize was presented in 1979 to Philip Johnson
of the United States, and the second, in 1980, was awarded to Mexico's Luis
Barragn. Stirling was chosen to receive the 1981 Prize by a distinguished
international jury: J. Carter Brown, Director, National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.; Lord Clark of Saltwood (Kenneth Clark), author and art
historian; Arata Isozaki, architect and critic; Philip Johnson, architect and
1979 Pritzker Laureate; J. Irwin Miller, chairman, executive committee,
Cumins Engine Company, and architecture patron; and Cesar Pelli, architect
and Dean of the School of Architecture, Yale University.
In announcing the Prize, Mr. Pritzker quoted from a statement by 1979
Laureate Philip Johnson: "James Stirling has been the Wunderkind of modern
architecture for some twenty years. Today he is a mature leader of world
architecture.
"He is probably best known for a series of un built competitive projects
culminating today in two great buildings actually under construction in
Germany: a Museum in Stuttgart and a Scientific Institute in Berlin, and
three in the United States.
"His work began at a time when the Modern Movement was still in
ascendance and his variations, angles, details in the style were
extraordinarily original. Today he is in the vanguard of the newer movement,
which includes historic allusion and contextual consideration.
"1981 is James Stirling's year."

Biography
James Stirling (1926-1992), of Great Britain is considered by many as the
premier architect of his generation, an unparalleled innovator in postwar
international architecture. Stirling was born in Glasgow in 1926. He was
educated at the University of Liverpool School of Architecture and began his
own practice in partnership with James Gowan in London in 1956. Over a
seven-year period they designed some of the most significant projects of the
time, most notably the garden apartments at Ham Common (1955-58), the
seminal Engineering Building at Leicester University (1959-63), and the
Cambridge University History Building (1964-67).
In 1971, Stirling began to work in association with Michael Wilford. From this
point on, the scale and number of his projects broadened to include
museums, galleries, libraries and theaters. Since 1980, he has completed a
major social sciences center in Berlin; a Performing Arts Center for Cornell
University; and such major museum projects as the Clore Gallery expansion
for the Tate Gallery in London; the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, an addition to
Harvard's Fogg Museum; and the competition winning design for the Neue
Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany.
In an article written in 1979 for the book, Contemporary Architects, Stirling
said, "I believe that the shapes of a building should indicateperhaps
displaythe usage and way of life of its occupants, and it is therefore likely
to be rich and varied in appearance, and its expression is unlikely to be
simple ... in a building we did at Oxford some years ago (the Florey Building,
Queens College, Oxford, 1971), it was intended that you could recognize
the historic elements of courtyard, entrance gate towers, cloisters; also a
central object replacing the traditional fountain or statue of the college
founder. In this way we hoped that students and public would not be
disassociated from their cultural past. The particular way in which
functional-symbolic elements are put together may be the art in the
architecture. ...If the expression of functional-symbolic forms and familiar
elements is foremost, the expression of structure will be secondary, and if
structure shows, it is not in my opinion, the engineering which counts, but
the way in which the building is put together that is important."
James Stirling was awarded the Alvar Aalto Medal in 1977, the RIBA Gold
Medal in 1980 and the Pritzker Prize in 1981. In addition to teaching in
Europe, he served as the Charles Davenport Professor at Yale University
from 1967.

Jury Citation
We honor James Stirlinga prodigy for so many yearsas a leader of the
great transition from the Modern Movement to the architecture of the New
an architecture that once more has recognized historical roots, once more
has close connections with the buildings surrounding it, once more can be
called a new tradition.
Originality within this tradition is Stirling's distinction: in the old "modern
times," 45 degree angles in plan and section; today, startling juxtapositions
and transpositions of clearly classical and nineteenth century references.
In three countriesEngland, Germany, and the United Stateshe is
influencing the development of architecture through the quality of his work.

Ceremony
National Building Museum, Washington, D.C.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony of 1981, honoring James Stirling,
was held in Washington, D.C. in the Pension Building, now the National
Building Museum. The red-brick building was designed in an Italianate
Renaissance Revival style in 1881 by civil engineer and U.S. Army General
Montgomery C. Meigs (1816-1892) and completed in 1887. It was originally
envisioned as both office space and as a monument to those who died
fighting in the U.S. Civil War. In 1980 an Act of Congress designated the
Pension Building as the site of a new museum celebrating American
achievements in the building arts.
The massive building, measuring 400 feet by 200 feet, occupies an entire
city block in downtown Washington, D.C. The lower exterior facades are
modeled after Antonio da Sangallos Palazzo Farnese in Rome. The exterior
walls are composed of common brick faced with pressed brick, decorative
masonry, and ornamental terra cotta. In commemoration of war heroes,
Caspar Buberl (1834-1899) sculpted a 1200-foot terra cotta exterior frieze,
which wraps the building, depicting the Unions Army and Navy.
The interior plan of the Pension Building is dominated by a full-height hall or
atrium at the center, with interconnecting rooms at the perimeter. The Great
Hall measures 316 feet by 116 feet, and 159 feet tall (approximately 15
stories) at its highest point. The eight Corinthian columns of the Great Hall
are among the tallest in the world at 75 feet high, 8 feet in diameter, 25 feet
in circumference and crowned by a molded plaster capital and an abacus of
cast iron. Each is built of 70,000 bricks.The building is widely recognized as
a marvel of engineering. An ingenious system of windows, vents, and open
archways allows the Great Hall to function as a reservoir of light and air. The
impressive Great Hall is used for the most important gala events, including
many Presidential Inaugural Balls, from 1885 to the present day.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

James Stirling
One of the continuities in the history of Architecture is that every now and
again a new patron and benefactor appears, and on behalf of my profession,
here and abroad, I would salute Jay Pritzkera most generous friend to
Architects.
Somehow I think it might have been easier for Philip Johnson who, on the
first occasion of the Prize giving, talked about the importance of the new
Prize to the Profession, and maybe easier for Luis Barragn, reviewing a
lifetime's work. Perhaps it's more difficult for meat any rate I feel it that
way. I can't talk about the Prize as a new event and I hope I'm not at the end
of my work, though I guess I'm somewhere past the midway.
It's always been difficult for me to see myself. I work very intuitively. I'm not
even sure whether I'm an English Architect, a European or an International
Architect. It is embarrassing to talk about myself and therefore I will quote
from a recent article written by Robert Maxwell especially about this third
Pritzker award. Maxwell was a fellow student at Liverpool School of
Architecture in the 1940s and is now Professor of Architecture at London
University:
"In England in particular there is a peculiar breath of scandal attaching to
the pursuit of architecture as Art. Criticism of architecture in the public mind
is broadly associated with sociological or material failure, and these specters
haunt the practice of architecture. Yet when such faults occur they are not
thought to be really scandalous except when associated with high
architectural aspirations."
The `high architectural aspirations' achieved in some of our earlier projects
were in a sense accidentsthe clients were not necessarily expecting a
work of art in addition to a well functioning buildingbut they got buildings
which have ever since been overrun with hordes of architectural students
pounding through, something the users didn't anticipate or now appreciate.
However, for me, right from the beginning the `art' of architecture has
always been the priority. That's what I trained to do (and incidentally its
what students are still trained to do), so it's particularly gratifying to feel
that the Pritzker Prize is being awarded annually to Architects who value the
art as highest and who have at the same time achieved a consistent
sequence of buildings.
I agree with Maxwell that by and large the UK situation is to rate artistic
content as coming rather far down the line of priorities (or as something
which, with a bit of luck, might just happen). So how do fine buildings get
built in the UK? Often subversively, I suspect. Certainly in my earlier days it
was never discussed that the buildings should also be beautiful. However,
I'm pleased to say that this situation has changed and our Patrons in
Germany and America and our single client in the UK have commissioned us
because they particularly value high quality architecture.
Historically, the quality of the art in the architecture, both at time of building
and in retrospect, is remembered as the significant element, however, with
the advent of modern architecture in this century, sociological, functional
and real estate values.

Ceremony Speech
Jay A. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
You know in this imposing structure with those awesome pillars and the
resounding voice, I wish I could invoke some unforgettable prose but Im
afraid Im unable to. Some five years ago, Carlton [Smith] came into the
office to discuss the possibility of establishing an award in a field that had
been overlooked by Nobel. As a result of our involvement in the planning,
design and construction of hotels, we became fascinated with the field of
architecture. The creation of a product, hopefully aesthetically beautiful, in a
living environment within commercial constraints seemed to us to combine
the highest attributes of mans achievements. I must admit that during the
periods between awards, we began to wonder how in the world Carlton had
convinced us of the advisability of such a project. The efforts involved in
choosing an awardee and preparing for the presentation involves an
enormous amount of time and energy, which fortunately Cindy engages in.
But each year this effort has been justified by the jurys selection of such
eminent architects and delightful gentlemen as Phillip, Luis Barragn and
now, James Stirling. Jim Stirling lives up to the highest standards set by his
predecessors and yet adds another ingredient to the mix.
Were all familiar with Phillip Johnsons work. In fact, were surrounded with
it throughout modern America. Luis Barragn provided another dimension
architecture that blends incomparably with its landscape. Now Jim Stirling
has demonstrated that its possible to harmonize modern and traditional
styles, an increasingly vexatious problem as we try to expand our existing
structures without destroying them physically or esthetically. Jim at this
point, we normally presented the awardee some tangible evidence of the
award. Its a statue done by Henry Moore and named by him, Ode to
Architecture. I promised Cindy I wouldnt explain what really happened but
I dont know which takes precedence, a promise to your wife or being honest
with 200 illustrious citizens. The truth is I left it at the apartment at home
and nobody was home today and I couldnt have it flown here. As a matter
of fact, Jim, youre probably lucky because it was quite heavy and I probably
would have dropped it on your foot. Therefore, were going to arrange to
have Tom and Margot bring it to London with them when they come in
several weeks.

Kevin Roche
1982 Laureate
Selected Works:
Ford Foundation Headquarters (interior), New York, New York, 1963
Knights of Columbus Headquarters, New Haven, Connecticut, 1970
College Life Insurance Company Headquarters, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1971
Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 1973
Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts,
1974
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lehman Pavilion, New York, New York, 1975
United Nations Plaza I & II and UNICEF Headquarters, New York, New York,
1976
Cummins Engine Company Headquarters, Columbus, Indiana, 1983

Announcement
American architect Kevin Roche, of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and
Associates, was today named the fourth annual recipient of the international
Pritzker Architecture Prize, specifically created in 1979 to honor a branch of
human endeavor overlooked by the Nobel Prizes. Along with the prestige of
recognition, Roche receives a specially created Henry Moore sculpture and
$100,000 tax-free.
In Europe, he has a number of completed projects that have won high praise
from critics, including a residence in Bordeaux, France; the Educatorium, a
multifunction building for Utrecht University in the Netherlands; the master
plan and Grand Palais for Lille, France which is his largest realized urban
planning project; and the Kunsthal, providing exhibition space, a restaurant
and auditoriums in Rotterdam.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation that administers and funds
the prize, made the announcement at a press conference at the Whitney
Museum of Art in New York City. He presented Roche with the check, and
promised delivery of the Moore sculpture at a formal banquet planned for
Chicago's Art Institute on May 19.
He also read the citation from the jury, as follows: "In this mercurial age,
when our fashions swing overnight from the severe to the ornate, from
contempt for the past to nostalgia for imagined times that never were, Kevin
Roche's formidable body of work sometimes intersects fashion, the Robert
Lehman Pavilion and the Michael C. Rockefeller Primitive Art Wing.
In California, Roche designed the innovative Oakland Museum. His arts and
education projects in other parts of the country include the Denver Center
for the Performing Arts; the Fine Arts Center of the University of
Massachusetts; the J.M. Moudy Building for Visual Arts and Communication
at Texas Christian University, Ft. Worth; and the Creative Arts Center,
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.
He has built a wide array of corporate structures, including the new
buildings of the John Deere Company in Illinois; the College Life Insurance
Company of America buildings in Indianapolis; Aetna Life and Casualty
Computer Building in Hartford, Connecticut; the headquarters of the Cumins
Engine Company in Columbus, Indiana; and Richardson-Vicks in Wilton,
Connecticut. Three other major projects are nearing completion: the
corporate headquarters for General Foods in Rye, New York; Conoco in
Houston; and Union Carbide in Danbury, Connecticut. In New Haven, he also
built the headquarters for the Knights of Columbus and the New Haven
Coliseum.
Among his most recent commissions are the Central Park Zoo, announced
just last week by the City of New York; and the De Witt Wallace Museum of
Fine Arts in Colonial Williamsburg.
Over the past two decades, Roche has designed some 51 major projects.
Arthur Drexler, director of the department of architecture and design of the
Museum of Modern Art, and consultant to the jury, has described Kevin
Roche as "an architect who makes technology serve his art. His quietly
spectacular buildings reveal the fantastic in twentieth century urban life."
Roche was chosen by a prestigious international panel: J. Carter Brown,
director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Lord Clark of
Saltwood (Kenneth Clark), British author and art historian; Arata Isozaki,
noted Japanese architect and critic; Philip Johnson, architect and 1979
Pritzker Prize Laureate; J. Irwin Miller, architectural patron; Cesar Pelli,
architect and Dean of the School of Architecture, Yale University; and
Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Chairman Emeritus, IBM Corporation. Carleton Smith,
to whom King Gustavus VI Adolphus of Sweden suggested the prize, serves
as secretary to the jury. Arthur Drexler, as consultant to the jury, reviews
and screens a1l those nominated.
In making the announcement, Pritzker restated the aims of the prize, saying,
"The Pritzker Architecture Prize was established in 1979 to honor the
achievements of pre-eminent architects all over the world. The award is
given annually to a living architect whose work demonstrates a combination
of talent, vision and commitment that has produced a consistent and
significant contribution to humanity and the environment."
The jury further amplified the purpose with the statement, "The Pritzker
Prize is given yearly to an architect in recognition of his or her contribution
to our society, as represented by the artistic merit of a substantial body of
built work. It is given for built architecture, and not for drawings, proposals,
theories or writings on architecture. It is given for architecture as art."

Biography
Kevin Roche, the 1982 recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, is no
stranger to awards and praise. With good reason, since the body of work
accomplished by him, and with his partner of 20 years, John Dinkeloo, who
died in 1981, is truly prolific.
Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1922, Roche received his undergraduate degree in
architecture from the National University of Dublin in 1945. He continued his
studies in the United States in 1948 with Mies van der Rohe at Illinois
Institute of Technology in Chicago, but left after only one semester. His
search for the humanist side of architecture led him to the office Eliel and
Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. His future partner, John
Dinkeloo, joined the firm in 1951, shortly after Roche. From 1954 until Eero
Saarinen's death in 1961, Roche was his principal associate in design.
Upon Saarinens death, Roche and Dinkeloo completed the ten major
projects underway, including the St. Louis Arch, the TWA Terminal at JFK
International Airport in New York, Dulles International Airport outside
Washington, D.C., Deere and Company Headquarters in Moline, Illinois, and
the CBS Headquarters in New York.
Roche's first design after Saarinen's death was the Oakland Museum. The
city was planning a monumental building to house natural history,
technology and art. Roche gave them a unique concept, a building that is a
series of low-level concrete structures covering a four block area, on three
levels, the terrace of each level forming the roof of the one belowa
museum (actually three museums) with a park on its roof. This kind of
innovative solution became Roche's trademark.
In Contemporary Architects, C. Ray Smith wrote that Roche "demonstrates a
kind of problem solving for each specific situation that has produced works
of distinct individuality and stylistic variety from project to project." And
further, he called Roche and Dinkeloo, "The most aesthetically daring and
innovative American firm of architects now working in the realm of
governmental, educational and corporate clients."
Roche firmly believes that architecture should not fall into a rigid mold.
There have been a number of attempts to label or categorize his workall of
which he rejects.
Speaking of his recent corporate headquarters for General Foods, in Rye,
New York, Roche says, "It is not post-modern or pre-modern. It is simply the
most obvious thing I could have done. It is an important center of economic
activity. The design began with a need, and it addresses the problem of
accommodating office workers in a suitable environment. I think the public
will identify with it."

Among Roche's acclaimed designs is the Ford Foundation in New York City.
The structure is of glass, rust-colored steel and warm brown granite,
providing offices around a spacious 12-story atrium. In all, Roche has been
responsible for some 51 major projects over the past twenty years. Critic
Paul Goldberger described Roche as "a brilliantly innovative designer; his
work manages to be inventive without ever falling into the trap of excessive
theatricality."
One of his early honors was the California Governor's Award for Excellence
in Design; a similar award came from New York State. There have been
honorary degreesone in 1977 from the National University of Ireland
where he had completed his undergraduate studies and another from
Wesleyan University. The American Institute of ArchitectsNew York Chapter
recognized him with the 1968 Medal of Honor, and in 1974 Roche and
Dinkeloo received the national AIA Architectural Firm of the Year Award. The
French Acadmie d'Architecture presented him with their Grand Gold Medal
in 1977, and elected him a member in 1979.

Jury Citation
In this mercurial age, when our fashions swing overnight from the severe to
the ornate, from contempt for the past to nostalgia for imagined times that
never were, Kevin Roche's formidable body of work sometimes intersects
fashion, sometimes lags fashion, and more often makes fashion.
He is no easy man to describe: an innovator who does not worship
innovation for itself, a professional unconcerned with trends, a quiet humble
man who conceives and executes great works, a generous man of strictest
standards for his own work.
In this award to Kevin Roche we recognize and honor an architect who
persists in being an individual, and has for all of us, through his work and his
person, made a difference for the better.

Essay
On Architecture
by J. Carter Brown
Architecture. Why does it fascinate us so, and why is quality in it so elusive?
We supposedly are in control of what we build, and yet what we build takes
us over. We walk around it, through it, it dominates our peripheral vision, our
feeling of space and volume, our ultimate sense of well-being or lack of it. To
experience it involves the dimension of time. Its very scale prohibits us from
ignoring it. No other art form can compete on these terms. Pictures,
sculpture, even earthworks, certainly no musical composition or piece of
poetry or drama played out on stage, screen or tube, can command the
sheer presence nor the sense of weightiness and weightlessness that
architecture provides.
Folk buildings, architecture without architects, can often qualify to the
highest levels of our built inheritance. Yet everything around us that gives us
shelter and therefore security had to be designed by someone.
But so much of what we see is mediocre at best. Why is the art of
architecture so difficult?
The basic explanation lies in the number of masters that architecture must
serve. The poet at his writing table, the painter at his easel has before him
an almost limitless freedom. The architect, however, has a client, be it
individual or collective. There are constraints, not only financial, but in
program, use, and in the very engineering fiber of what will or will not stand
and withstand forces bent on sooner or later destroying it.
Constraints can often help. As Chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts,
reviewing architectural proposals month after month, I have often watched
designs improve as the result of budgetary stringency. Sometimes one can
only wish that Vitruvius could have had his way, when he proposed a neat
system of fining the architect in proportion to cost overruns. Sometimes,
however, the client is better served the other way. The values of the society
are what make the ultimate decisions. Philip Johnson likes to point to what
must have been the percentage of the gross national product of the city-
state of Athens that was allocated to the design of the Parthenon. In the
renaissance, when Bernardo Rossellino was commissioned by Pope Pius II to
design the town of Pienza and spend 18,000 ducats, the bill came in at
55,000. Whereat the enlightened pontiff remarked, "Now that I have seen it,
it is worth all that and more."
Constraints are not just money. There is a sinew of realism in architecture.
The engineering must work; the heating and ventilating in an increasingly
energy conscious world must come out right; people and things must get in
and out and move through it commodiously; it must work for emergencies;
it must work often as part of the larger fabric of urban design in which it
stands.
Theophile Gauthier once wrote: L'art sort plus bel d'un forem au travail
rebel," or, roughly, "Art comes out more beautiful if from a refractory
medium."
In a period when the romantic vision of the artist in his garret still haunts us
with the drama of the persecuted avant garde, the architect of our own day
has to work more in the framework of the great old master painters and
sculptors and composers who had missions to fulfill and clients to please.
The resulting constraints often unleash creativity by freeing the artist,
paradoxically, from the paralysis of unlimited choice.
Constraints need not preclude diversity. At this moment, the variety of
architectural expression around the world is healthily profuse. Ultimately, it
is not the style that matters, but the quality with which that style is
practiced. We are lucky today to have so much ferment in the world of
architectural thought. But mere faddishness is no boon to standards.
The world deserves more architecture of the quality recognized by the
Pritzker prize. The hope of all of us concerned with the prize is that, by
example, a raising of the standards will come about, on the part both of the
architects, and of the clients, whose constraints and opportunities can help
make great and inspiring architecture happen.

Ceremony
The Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois
The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879 as both a museum and school,
opened on its present site in the heart of Chicago in 1893. Throughout its
history, it has grown extensively in response to the additions to its world-
renowned collections and expanding programs. The original building,
designed by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge forms the main entrance on
Michigan Avenue. However, other architects and firms such as Howard Van
Doren Shaw, Skidmore Owing & Merrill, Tom Beeby, C.F. Murphy Associates,
Dan Kiley, Renzo Piano, and others have made significant contributions this
institution.
When the Chicago Stock Exchange (189394) was demolished in 1972, one
of citys most important landmarks designed by Louis Sullivan with his
partner, Dankmar Adler, there was strong public outcry. Sections of
Sullivan's elaborate stenciled decorations, molded plaster capitals, and art
glass were preserved from the Trading Room, the magnificent centerpiece of
the original 13-story structure. Using these fragments, the Art Institute was
able to reconstruct the Trading Room in its new wing in 197677. The arch
from the main entrance of the Stock Exchange Building was also preserved
and graces the Art Institutes campus in homage to the original landmark.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremonies from both 1982 and 1988 took
place at the Art Institute of Chicago. The 1982 ceremony consisted of an
open air reception and ceremony and dinner in the Stock Exchange trading
Room. The 1998 presentation was officially made at a luncheon within the
museum.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Kevin Roche
First is the act of thanksgiving:
To the Pritzker family for its extraordinary foresight and generosity in
establishing this prize, and for its intention to "stimulate creativity and
contribute to a deeper sensitivity" to the environment.
To Carleton Smith whose energy and imagination brought this prize into
being and who sustains it with an extraordinary intensity of commitment.
To those who have the need to build, who select the services of architects
and make architecture possible in the first place. To be a good client
requires a great deal of patience, courage and stamina.
To those who write about architecture, both those who have been supportive
and those who have been critical. Your voice is always heard.
To those fine architects who have constituted our office over the years and
who are responsible for much of what is being honored here tonight.
To John Dinkeloo, dear friend for thirty years, without whose strength and
skill and many talents this work would never have happened.
To Eero Saarinen whose short life described for many of us the full
dimension and the true role of an architect and whose memory will be
honored by the generous gift that accompanies this prize.
And finally, to this great free community, the United States, and those other
free communities which make it possible for us all to live and work in
freedom in a world where the concept of individual freedom is given much
lip service but where it exists as a reality only in a few fortunate places.
Now, notoriety brings with it a certain amount of fan mail and there has
been much attending this event. It is stimulating, uplifting and rewarding to
receive such approbation. Let me read you a random sample so that you
may share my pleasure.
This letter comes from a lady in Las Vegas, New Mexico. She is one of those
people who likes to get to the heart of the matter in her opening paragraph:
"I think the members of the Pritzker Committee must be out of their minds
to honor, in the year 1982, an architect who is designing in glass and
masonry/steel. Such energy wasters are dated, old, dull and boring. Yes, I
read all that hot air about `sensual public space' and `exploring elegant
works'etc., etc. And what is still more maddening to one who loves her
country and artis that this prize will affect the teaching at architectural
schools and so promote more such moribund designs."
All this came in a large envelope across which was boldly hand-lettered the
question"What have you done today to prevent a nuclear war?"
Well, I was a little taken back by that. I didn't feel I had done anything to
prevent a nuclear war that day. But such is our human nature that I
immediately began to justify my actions. Is not the act of building an act of
faith in the future and an act of hope? Hope that the testimony of our
civilization will be passed on to others? Hope that what we are doing is not
only sane and useful and beautiful, but a clear and true reflection of our own
aspirations. And hope that it is an art which will communicate with the
future and touch those generations as we ourselves have been touched and
moved by the past.
That Architecture is an art we have the evidence of history; that it is an art
in our time we cannot yet judge. We can only desire to make it so. It is
presumptuous of us to will Architecture into being an art without fully
understanding its nature, and dangerous to speak so much about art lest we
confuse it with fashion. Art comes hard. It is the conclusion of profound
thought on the nature of things rather than on acceptability and acclaim. It
is so easy to forget that we build buildings for peoplepeople who must see
them and people who must use them. It is so easy to forget that those
people are individuals with a variety of needs and tastes and it is hard to
remember that they are not just numbers.

We should accept the responsibility to create our environment and use the
opportunity we have to lead and educate society into improving its habitat,
and let other times judge what was art and what was fancy. Let other times
measure our civilization. We should, all of us, bend our will to create a
civilization in which we can live at peace with nature and each other. To
build well is an act of peace. Let us hope that it will not be in vain.
I.M. Pei
1983 Laureate

Selected Works
National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, 1967
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, 1968
Paul Mellon Arts Center, Wallingford, Connecticut, 1972
Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York, 1973
OCBC Centre, Singapore, 1976
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1978
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, 1981

Announcement
New York, May 16Ieoh Ming Pei, architect of some of the world's most
acclaimed buildings, has been chosen the 1983 Laureate of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize.
I.M. Pei's structures have received global recognition for the past three
decades, beginning with the Mile High Center in Denver, Colorado in 1955,
and most recently, the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing, China, the country of
his birth.
Among his other renowned works in this country are the East Building of the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the West Wing of the Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, the New York City Convention and Exhibition Center,
the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and the
Texas Commerce Tower in Houston. Abroad, two of his well-known office
complexes are The Gateway and the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation
in Singapore. Pei was recently selected to design the headquarters for the
Bank of China in Hong Kong.
The international Pritzker Architecture Prize, consisting of $100,000 tax-free
and a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, was established in 1979 to reward a
creative endeavor not honored by the Nobel Prizes.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, which administers and
funds the prize, made the presentation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
today.
Carleton Smith, chairman of the International Awards Foundation and
secretary to the jury, announced the name of the Laureate, saying Pei was
unanimously elected to the honor by our distinguished panel of jurors: J.
Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art; Arata Isozaki, noted
Japanese architect; Philip Johnson, the first Pritzker Prize Laureate; J. Irwin
Miller, chairman of the executive and finance committees, Cummins Engine
Company; Kevin Roche, 1982 Pritzker Prize Laureate; and Thomas J. Watson,
Jr., chairman emeritus, IBM Corporation.
As spokesman for the jury, Smith quoted the official citation as follows: "Ieoh
Ming Pei has given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces
and exterior forms. The significance of his work goes far beyond them: for
his concern has always been the surroundings in which his buildings would
rise."
Further, "I.M. Pei has refused to limit himself to a narrow range of
architectural problems. His work over the past forty years includes not only
palaces of industry, government and culture, but also some of the best
moderate and low-income housing. Through his skill he has elevated the use
of materials to an art."
The citation concluded, "His personal qualities of diplomacy and patience
have enabled him to draw together disparate people and disciplines to
create an harmonious environment."

Biography
Ieoh Ming Peis architecture can be characterized by its faith in modernism,
humanized by its subtlety, lyricism, and beauty. Pei was born in Canton
China in 1917 and came to the United States in 1935 to study first at the
University of Pennsylvania and then at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (B. Arch. 1940) and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (M.
Arch. 1946). In 1948, he accepted the newly created post of Director of
Architecture at Webb & Knapp, Inc., the real estate development firm, and
this association resulted in major architectural and planning projects in
Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh and other cities. In 1955, he
formed the partnership of I.M. Pei & Associates, which became I.M. Pei &
Partners in 1966. The partnership received the 1968 Architectural Firm
Award of The American Institute of Architects. In 1989, the firm was
renamed Pei Cobb Freed and Partners.
Pei has designed over fifty projects in this country and abroad, many of
which have been award winners. Two of his most prominent commissions
have included the East Building of the National Gallery of Art (1978), in
Washington, D.C., and the extension of the Louvre in Paris, France. The need
to modernize and expand the Louvre, while respecting its history and
architecture, led to the centrally located glass pyramid which forms the new
main entrance and provides direct access to galleries in each of the
museum's three wings. The pyramid also serves as a skylight for a very
large expansion building constructed under the courtyard which provides all
public amenities and technical support for the museum.
Other outstanding examples of his work include: the Bank of China in Hong
Kong (1989), the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library (1979) near Boston, The
Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center (1989) in Dallas, Texas; the Society
Hill development in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, completed in 1964; the
Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation Centre (1976), the West Wing and
renovation of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1981 and 1986); the
Fragrant Hill Hotel (1982) near Beijing, China; Creative Artists Agency
Headquarters (1989) in Beverly Hills, California; an IBM Office Complex
(1989) in Somers, NY and another in Purchase, NY; the Everson Museum of
Art (1968), Syracuse, New York; and the Texas Commerce Tower (1982) in
Houston.
He has designed arts facilities and university buildings on the campuses of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Rochester,
Cornell University, Syracuse University, New York University and the
University of Hawaii.
As a student, he was awarded the MIT Traveling Fellowship, and the
Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship at Harvard. His subsequent honors include
the following: the Brunner Prize in Architecture from the National institute of
Art and Letters (1961); the Medal of Honor of the New York Chapter of the
American Institute of Architects (1963), the Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Medal for Architecture (1976), the Gold Medal for Architecture of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters (1979), the Gold Medal of The
American Institute of Architects (1979), and the Gold Medal of the French
Acadmie d'Architecture (1981).

Jury Citation
Ieoh Ming Pei has given this century some of its most beautiful interior
spaces and exterior forms. Yet the significance of his work goes far beyond
that. His concern has always been the surroundings in which his buildings
rise.
He has refused to limit himself to a narrow range of architectural problems.
His work over the past forty years includes not only palaces of industry,
government and culture, but also moderate and low-income housing. His
versatility and skill in the use of materials approach the level of poetry.
His tact and patience have enabled him to draw together peoples of
disparate interests and disciplines to create a harmonious environment.

Ceremony
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the world-renowned cultural institution,
was founded in New York in 1870 and moved to its current site in Central
Park ten years later. The original Gothic-Revival-style building has expanded
greatly in size since then, and the various additions now completely
surround the original structure. The present facade and entrance structure
along Fifth Avenue were completed in 1926.
The Sackler Wing (1978), designed by Kevin Roche, located to the north of
the original building, is a striking addition, which houses the Temple of
Dendur. The temple, built in 22 C.E., was dismantled and removed from its
original site, in 1963, in order to save it from being submerged by the
construction of the Aswan High Dam. In recognition of the American
assistance in saving various other monuments threatened by the dam's
construction, the temple was given to the United States of America by
Egypt. In 1967, the temple was awarded to The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
where it was installed in the Sackler Wing in 1978. A reflecting pool in front
of the temple and a sloping wall behind it, represent the Nile and the cliffs of
the original location. The glass on the ceiling and north wall of the Sackler is
stippled, in order to diffuse the light and mimic the extraordinary quality of
light in Nubia. The simplicity of its setting, like a minimal frame on a
painting, gives the temple a context which does not overwhelm it.
The 1983 Pritzker Architecture prize ceremony, honoring I.M. Pei, took place
in this setting.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Ieoh Ming Pei
It is a great honor to be here tonight to receive the 1983 International
Pritzker Architecture Prize. I take particular pleasure in thanking those who
conceived the prize, those who have administered it, and the distinguished
jurors who have seen fit to select me as this year's recipient.
During the preparation of the exhibits here, it was reassuring to observe
that quite a number of our projects actually led to finished buildings.
Especially vivid in my mind were the many social, economic, political as well
as esthetic constraints that architects have had to consider in the shaping of
their work. You may be amused to know, although it was not amusing to me
at the time, that a house I designed for a friend in Cambridge in the early
forties was denied a mortgage because it looked modern. In this sense I
belong to that generation of American architects who built upon the
pioneering perceptions of the modern movement, with an unwavering
conviction in its significant achievements in the fields of art, technology and
design. I am keenly aware of the many banalities built in its name over the
years. Nevertheless, I believe in the continuity of this tradition for it is by no
means a relic of the past but a living force that animates and informs the
present.
Only in this way can we develop and refine an architectural language,
responsive to today's values and allow for a variety of expressions in both
style and substance. How else can we hope to build a coherent physical
environment for our cities, towns and neighborhoods?
Italy's Siena and America's Savannah, Georgian London and Neoclassical
Paris are but of few of the more conspicuous examples. I believe that
architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a
foundation of necessity. Freedom of expression, for me, consists in moving
within a measured range that I assign to each of my undertakings. How
instructive it is to remember Leonardo da Vinci's counsel that "strength is
born of constraint and dies in freedom."
The chase for the new, from the singular perspective of style, has too often
resulted in only the arbitrariness of whim, the disorder of caprice. It is easy
to say that the art of architecture is everything, but how difficult it is to
introduce the conscious intervention of an artistic imagination without
straying from the context of life.
It is this fragility, this preciousness that elevates and distinguishes this art
form. It is this enfolding context that challenges us to transform planning
and building opportunities into the exalted realm of architecture. Architects
by design investigate the play of volumes in light, explore the mysteries of
movement in space, examine the measure that is scale and proportion, and
above all, they search for that special quality that is the spirit of the place as
no building exists alone.
The practice of architecture is a collective enterprise, with many individuals
of various disciplines and talents working closely together. And from the
commissioning to the completion of a project, there are also the many
individuals for whom architects work, whose contribution to quality is
frequently as crucial as that of the architect. So I accept this prize for all
who have worked with me in this unique undertaking. Let us all be attentive
to new ideas, to advancing means, to dawning needs, to impetuses of
change so that we may achieve, beyond architectural originality, a harmony
of spirit in the service of man.

Ceremony Speech
Jay A. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
First I want to express our thanks to our jurors who undertake the herculean
task of annually selecting an honoree from hundreds of nations around the
world. I also want to welcome our new juror, Giovanni Agnelli, the eminent
industrialist from Turin, Italy. Unfortunately, Mr. Ricardo Legorreta, the
architect from Mexico City, our other new juror was unable to be with us this
evening. Perhaps, its appropriate to comment on the significance of this
location for this years presentation. The space were dining in was designed
by Kevin Roche, last years prize winner, and Kevin, I wish you would also
design some squeak proof chairs. We could use them. Perhaps the analogy
is strange but we have here in the Temple of Dendera, a work preserved for
many millennia by an unknown architect. Even today despite their
enormous influence on our everyday lives, the designers of our
contemporary buildings remain largely anonymous. Perhaps architecture is
the most pertinent and significant of our art forms. I presume there are
people here who would debate that but its certainly the only one in which
the creator is not an everyday name. One of the purposes of presenting
these awards was to attempt to end such anonymity.
As if in anticipation of tonights presentation, the late Lord Clark of Saltwood
who was one of our original jurors said, A great historical episode can exist
in our imaginations almost entirely in the form of architecture. Very few of
us have read the texts of early Egyptian literature. Yet we feel we know
those infinitely remote people almost as well as our immediate ancestors
chiefly because of their sculpture and their architecture. Theres little doubt
that our civilization will be judged in the future at least to some degree by
the endeavors of men like Philip Johnson, Luis Barragn, James Stirling and
Kevin Roche. Tonight we add another illustrious name to that roster, Ieoh
Ming Pei. Were all grateful for his efforts throughout the world in making the
present more beautiful and livable. Ieoh Ming, if youll come forward I would
like to present the symbol of the Pritzker Prize, a bronze sculpture created
by your friend, Henry Moore.
Richard Meier
1984 Laureate

Selected Works:
Smith House (interior), Darien, Connecticut, 1967
Douglas House (interior), Harbor Springs, Michigan, 1973
The Atheneum, New Harmony, Indiana, 1979
Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut, 1981
High Museum of Art (interior), Atlanta, Georgia, 1983
Museum of Decorative Arts, Frankfurt, Germany, 1984

Announcement
New York, April 17Richard Meier, architect of the recently acclaimed High
Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as many other world-wide public
projects and private residences over the past two decades, was today
named the 1984 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. He is the sixth
architect in the world to be so honored.
Consisting of a $100,000 tax-free grant and a bronze sculpture by Henry
Moore, the international Pritzker Architecture Prize was established in 1979
to reward a creative endeavor not honored by the Nobel Prizes. Jay A.
Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, which established the prize,
presented the check today, and will present the sculpture in a ceremony at
the National Gallery of Art on May 15.
A prestigious panel of jurors reviews nominations from around the world
each year to make the selection. The jurors this year were Giovanni Agnelli,
Chairman of Fiat, Torino, Italy; J. Carter Brown, Director of the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Arata Isozaki, noted Japanese architect;
Philip Johnson, 1979 Pritzker Prize Laureate; J. Irwin Miller, Chairman,
Executive and Finance Committees, Cummins Engine Company; Kevin
Roche, 1982 Pritzker Prize Laureate; and Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Chairman
Emeritus, IBM Corporation. Jurors in years past have included the late Lord
Clark of Saltwood, England and Cesar Pelli, Dean of the School of
Architecture at Yale University.
Carleton Smith, secretary to the jury and chairman of the International
Awards Foundation, who announced the name of the Laureate at the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum today, stated that Meier was the
unanimous choice of the jury.
He quoted the jury's citation as follows: "We honor Richard Meier for his
single-minded pursuit of new directions in contemporary architecture. In his
search for clarity and his experiments in balancing light, forms, and space,
he has created works that are personal, vigorous, original.
"His houses, seminary, museums and public buildings have stretched and
enriched our imaging, our thinking, our wanting, and perhaps our doing.
They are intended not to overwhelm but to celebrate."
He concluded, "What he has achieved is only prologue to the compelling
new experiences we anticipate from his drawing board."
At 49, Meier is the youngest architect to receive the Pritzker Architecture
Prize. In addition to the Laureates already named as jurors, other previous
winners have been Luis Barragn of Mexico in 1980, James Stirling of Great
Britain in 1981, and Ieoh Ming Pei of the United States in 1983.
Meier, whose firm is in New York, has built museums, commercial buildings,
housing, educational and medical facilities, as well as residences. High Twin
Parks Northeast Housing in the Bronx, Smith House, Westbeth Artists'
Housing, Douglas House, Bronx Developmental Center, Hartford Seminary
and the High Museum of Art have all won National Honor Awards from the
American Institute of Architects.

Meier's numerous other awards include the Arnold Brunner Memorial Prize
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1972, the R.S. Reynolds
Memorial Award in 1977, and awards of excellence from both Architectural
Record and Progressive Architecture magazines.
His projects, furniture, collages and architectural drawings have been widely
exhibited throughout the world, and he has lectured extensively in this
country and abroad. His work has been published in many books and
periodicals. He became a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in
1976, and this past year was elected to the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters.

Biography
At 49, Richard Meier was the youngest architect to receive his profession's
highest accolade, the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Shortly after receiving that
honor, he was awarded what is probably one of the twentieth century's most
important commissions, the design of The Getty Center, the Los Angeles art
complex funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Explaining his own roots, Meier says, "Le Corbusier was a great influence,
but there are many influences and they are constantly changing. Frank Lloyd
Wright was a great architect, and I could not have done my parent's house
the way that I did, without being overwhelmed by Falling Water." Meier
continued, "We are all affected by LeCorbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar
Aalto, and Mies van der Rohe. But no less than Bramante, Borromini and
Bernini. Architecture is a tradition, a long continuum. Whether we break with
tradition or enhance it, we are still connected to that past."
In 1963, he established his private practice, and working from his
apartment, launched the business with a commission for his mother and
father, a residence in Essex Fells, New Jersey. In 1965, one of his early
residential commissions, Smith House in Darien, Connecticut propelled him
into national prominence. Looking back on it now, Meier spoke of "the clarity
of the building, the openness, the direct articulation of private and public
spaces, how it relates to the land and water." He added, "It's been over 17
years, and what was innovative and captured a great many people's
imagination and admiration then, is already a part of our language, and
somewhat taken for granted today."
Other commissions for private homes followed, along with some more public
projects. In 1967, he began work on the conversion of the old Bell Telephone
Laboratories in Manhattan's Greenwich Village to accommodate some 1200
people in 383 apartment units. The result was hailed in the architectural
community as the first evidence that ultimately, Meier's greatest
achievements might lie in larger-scaled more public works. "This too is an
example of how quickly we assimilate," said Meier. "'The phrase, 'adaptive
re-use,' wasn't even in the language then. We were really pioneering a new
area."
In 1979, after devoting nearly five years of work to it, Meier completed
another work, which prompted Ada Louise Huxtable to write in the New York
Times, that the building advances "conventional modernist practice
provocatively beyond established limits." The building referred to is known
as The Atheneum, situated on the banks of the Wabash River in the
restoration community of New Harmony, Indiana.
On an even grander scale, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia was
completed in 1983. It opened to enormous media attention and Paul
Goldberger, architecture critic of the New York Times, wrote in the June,
1983 issue of Vogue: "It is no accident, then, that Richard Meier is becoming
one of the preeminent architects of museums."
In addition to the High Museum, he has designed a major museum for
Frankfurt, Germany, an addition to the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa, as
well as many other types of commissions around the world.

Jury Citation
We honor Richard Meier for his single-minded pursuit of the essence of
modern architecture. He has broadened its range of forms to make it
responsive to the expectations of our time.
In his search for clarity and his experiments in balancing light and space, he
has created structures which are personal, vigorous, original.
What he has achieved is only prologue to the compelling new experiences
we anticipate from his drawing board.

Essay
About Architecture
by Arata Isozaki
Every civilization has a realm in which its essential qualities are crystallized.
In this realm architecture, gardens, furniture and even the manner of living
form a highly tensioned spatial integrity Most people would agree that the
Acropolis in Athens, Fatehpur-Sikri in Agra, the Temple of Heaven in Beijing
and the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto are examples of this idealized
relationship. (Should Versailles and Las Vegas be added to this list, I would
not object.)
An architectural gem outlives its age only when it is the confident and
passionate manifestation of a concept unique to its culture. The concept
must be held not only by the architect but also by the client and user. A
work of this excellence, even if unacknowledged in its own time, will, like
Katsura Villa, be celebrated by future generations.
Katsura Imperial Villa was rediscovered in the thirties by Bruno Taut, a
European architect working in Japan. It was acclaimed one ofjapan's most
eloquent works of architecture, but at that time it did not have the fame it
has today Academic research had yet to be started when Taut, examining
the legend, determined that Kobori Enshu was the architect for the Imperial
Villa. Enshu was an important architect, garden designer and tea master.
Also, he was governor of the outlying district of Kyoto where, in the mid 17th
century Katsura Imperial Villa was built.
Enshu created an austere and individual style of teahouse and garden which
appealed to the taste of the warrior class in the age of the Shogun's rule.
Therefore many imitators followed. He soon became a mythical figure and
numerous works of nameless carpenters and gardeners were attributed to
him.
The mark of Enshu canbe found at Katsura both in the house and the garden
and, since the designer was not known, Enshu was credited with these, also.
However, it now appears that Enshu was not directly engaged in the design
of Katsura. He did not even visit the site. It seems likely that the man
responsible was Prince Hachijo-no-miya the First who supervised the work,
and directed the carpenters and gardeners.
An anecdote concerning Enshu is that when asked what conditions are
necessary to create a masterwork of architecture, he answered that he
could produce as many masterworks as desired if the following conditions
were met:
There was no limit on expense.
There was no limit on time.
The client would not see the work until it was completed.
Although this story may be apocryphal it is ironic that even an architect of
mythical status suffered the frustrations we all feel in our daily lives.
In its present form Katsura is the product of extensive construction and
additions continuing over many generations. The last major construction at
the Imperial Villa, 150 years after its founding, is credited to Hachijono-riuya
the Seventh.
At Ise Shrine, another monument of Japanese architecture, the conflict
between the need for permanence and the temporal nature of the materials
is resolved by a form of rebuilding. This restoration resembles the method
employed by a gene replicating itself to transmit information to the next
generation. Two sites of similar shape are arranged side by side. Every
twenty years a new shrine is rebuilt. The original shape of the shrine,
developed in the 8th century remains essentially unchanged.
These examples suggest that architecture outlives its age not merely
because of its physical manifestation but, more importantly, because of the
transcendent vision behind it. Although we see a structure before us as an
edifice for practical use, in truth it is fragile and transient.
Nevertheless, a work of architecture can endure even if like Katsura and Ise,
it is not made of precious materials and is not monumental in scale. It can
survive, moreover if it exists only on paper; as do most of the works of
Palladio. Even the intangible inspiration of architecture can thus be
transmitted.
Perhaps it is true that ours is an unfortunate age in which to create.
Architecture as a visualization shared by architect, client and user remains
underdeveloped today.
The Pritzker Prize honors architects who pursue the art of architecture. It
should inspire the development, growth and maturity of concepts which
crystallize in noble and harmonious designs the finest qualities of our
civilization.

Ceremony
The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. was created in 1937 by a
joint resolution of Congress, accepting the gift of financier and art collector
Andrew W. Mellon. The paintings and works of sculpture given by Andrew
Mellon upon his death in 1937 have formed a nucleus of high quality around
which the collections have grown. Funds for the construction of the West
Building were provided by The A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust.
On March 17, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the completed
building and the collections on behalf of the people of the United States of
America.
The Gallery's East Building, located on land set aside in the original
Congressional resolution, was opened in 1978. Designed by Pritzker laureate
I.M. Pei, the dramatic geometry responds well to the imposing 1941 West
Building, which is situated across a plaza. To correspond in texture and color
to the original building, the new one is faced inside and out with lavender-
pink marble from the same quarry in Tennessee. Bridges and mezzanines
create powerful vertical spaces throughout the East Building. When visitors
leave one exhibition, they return to the atrium before entering another one.
The triangular layout of the floor plan generates a sense of exploration. The
atrium's indoor garden, which is larger than one-third of an acre, is roofed
by a "space-frame" of glass pyramids. It was in this impressive space that
the 1984 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony, honoring Richard Meier, was
held.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Richard Meier
I am extremely pleased and deeply honored to receive the 1984 Pritzker
Architecture Prize. It never occurred to me that I would be in the running this
year. I would like to thank The Hyatt Foundation for this prize for the art of
architecture; it is profoundly significant in influencing the quality of
architecture throughout the world.
I would like to share with you, tonight, the ongoing conversation that I have
with my children, Joseph and Ana. It revolves around the question "What is
your favorite color?" Joseph, who is four and three-quarters, always replies
green, and states when asked why, that "green is the color of grass, the
trees are green, green is all around us, it's the color of spring and dollar
bills."
Ana, who is three and doesn't like to be outdone by Joseph, replies that her
favorite color is blue, and that, "the sky is blue, the pools and ponds and
lakes are blue."
And then they turn to me and ask, "Daddy, what is your favorite color?" And
every time we play this game, my response is the same: "White is my
favorite color."
"But Daddy," Joseph says, "You can't have white. White is not a color; white
isn't in the rainbow; you have to take a color that is in the rainbow, like red
or green, or blue or yellow."
And I have to explain that for me, white is the most wonderful color because
within it you can see all the colors of the rainbow. For me, in fact, it is the
color which in natural light, reflects and intensifies the perception of all of
the shades of the rainbow, the colors which are constantly changing in
nature, for the whiteness of white is never just white; it is almost always
transformed by light and that which is changing; the sky, the clouds, the sun
and the moon.
White conventionally has always been seen as a symbol of perfection, of
purity and clarity. If we ask why this is the case, we realize that where other
colors have relative values dependent upon their context, white retains its
absoluteness. At the same time, it may function as a color itself. It is against
a white surface that one best appreciates the play of light and shadow,
solids and voids. Goethe said "color is the pain of light." Whiteness is
perhaps the memory and the anticipation of color. For me, the contrast
becomes the definition that which is natural, organic, changing, contains at
different times, all of the colors of the rainbow. And that which is man-made
should help to focus and intensify one's perception of all that is around us.
As I have said many times in describing my own aesthetic, mine is a
preoccupation with light and space; not abstract space, not scale-less space,
but space whose order and definition are related to light, to human scale
and to the culture of architecture. Architecture is vital and enduring because
it contains us; it describes space, space we move through, exit in and use. I
work with volume and surface, manipulating forms in light, changes of scale
and view, movement and stasis.
In this way whiteness has been one means of sharpening perception and
heightening the power of visual form. This is one of many ways of achieving
this and I hope to be able to explore a range of choices in the future. My
sources include many from the history of architecture, but my quotes and
allusions are never literal; my meanings are always internalized, my
metaphors purely architectural.
For me, part of the significance of an awareness of architectural history is
that we again value permanence, continuity and, therefore quality. I am
deeply concerned with the making of a building and prefer to think of myself
more as a master builder than as an artist, for the art of architecture
ultimately demands this.
Mine is an attempt to find and redefine a sense of order, to understand,
then, a relationship between what has been and what can beto extract
from our culture both the timeless and the topical. This, to me, is the basis
of style, the decision to include or exclude, choice, the final exercise of the
individual will and intellect. In this way, one might say that my style is
something that is born out of culture, and yet is profoundly connected with
personal experience. But to gain any sense of my involvement, it is
necessary to consult the work.
Fundamentally, my meditations are on space, form, light and how to make
them. My goal is presence, not illusion. I pursue it with unrelenting vigor and
believe that is the heart and soul of architecture.
Ceremony Speech
Jay A. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
In the short period that this prize has been in existence it seems that we are
establishing some instant traditions. Last year, the award was presented to
I.M. Pei in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
which was designed by Kevin Roche, the previous years laureate. This year
were in I.M. Peis beautiful East Building to bestow this years honor. In
some ways being in Washington points out one of the primary purposes of
this prize, which was among other things to overcome the relative
anonymity of architecture. In a city that is a showcase to the world filled
with beautiful buildings, I think few of us would know the names of any of
the architects responsible. This building and Mr. Pei are probably the single
exception, or certainly one of the few exceptions, and I think most of us
would be hard pressed to name John Russell Pope as the designer of the
original National Gallery. By focusing attention on these talented individuals
working in our period to surround our activities, we hope to foster
recognition, and stimulate greater creativity and an improved environment.
Its not easy to select one living architect from so many talented people
around the world. We have a panel of jurors, that Carlton [Smith] has
mentioned, who really have put in an enormous amount of effort in the past
to choose the former laureates and this year to choose Richard. I
understand that Aristotle some twenty-three centuries ago said that, The
aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things but their
inward significance. For this, and not the external mannerism and detail, is
true reality. That expresses as well as I could our view. On behalf of my
family and the Hyatt Foundation, I want to present to Richard Meier the
symbol of the prize. May you bring us much more true reality with your art
of architecture.
Hans Hollein
1985 Laureate
Selected Works:
Retti Candleshop (interior), Vienna, Austria, 1965
Jewellery Store Schullin I (faade), Vienna, Austria, 1974
Museum of Glass and Ceramics, Teheran, Iran, 1978
Austrian Travel Agency, Main Office, Vienna, Austria, 1978
Museum Abteiberg Moenchengladbach (view toward the entrance),
Moenchengladbach, Germany, 1982
Jewellery Store Schullin II, Vienna, Austria, 1983
The Gymnastic Lesson, Exhibition at the Museum Abteiberg
Moenchengladbach, Germany, 1984

Announcement
New York, April 3Hans Hollein, an Austrian architect whose work is
acclaimed around the world, was today named the 1985 Laureate of the
Pritzker Architecture Prize. He is the seventh architect to be so honored, and
the third from outside the United States.
Consisting of a $100,000 tax-free grant and a bronze sculpture by Henry
Moore, the international Pritzker Architecture Prize was established in 1979
to reward a creative endeavor not honored by the Nobel Prizes.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation that sponsors the prize,
presented the check to Hollein today at the Museum of Modern Art. The
sculpture will be presented in a formal ceremony at the Huntington Library,
Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California on May 10.
The distinguished international panel of jurors that made the selection this
year consists of J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C., who served as chairman; Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of
Fiat in Torino, Italy; J. Irwin Miller, chairman, executive and finance
committees of the Curnmins Engine Company of Columbus, Indiana; Thomas
J. Watson, chairman emeritus of IBM Corporation; and three architects,
Ricardo Legorreta of Mexico City; Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo; and 1982 Pritzker
Prize Laureate, Kevin Roche of Hamden, Connecticut.
In making the presentation, Pritzker quoted from the jury's citation which
describes Hollein as "an architect who is also an artist one who with wit
and eclectic gusto draws upon the traditions of the New World as readily as
upon those of the Old, " and further, saluting him "as a superb teacher, who
urges the young by his example to take big chances, and yet making sure
that the designed remains of paramount importance, not the designer.
Brendan Gill, noted author and journalist who is secretary to the jury, in
announcing the Laureate, praised Hollein as "that comparatively rare thing
in contemporary architecture, an artist-architect, combining great technical
prowess with a gift for astonishing the ' eye. His buildings, like his drawings,
have a playful seductiveness. One is happy in their presence."
Hollein, who is 51, recently won international competitions to design the
Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, and the Cultural Forum in Berlin. One of
his most famous commissions is the Municipal Museum Abteiberg at
Monchengladbach, near Dusseldorf, completed in 1982.
His first commission in 1965 was the small Retti Candleshop in Vienna,
which gained him worldwide recognition. He has since done a number of
stores, including two Schullin Jewelry Shops in Vienna, and a Beck
Department store branch in Trump Tower in New York. Another example of
his work in New York is the Richard L. Feigen Gallery completed in 1969. He
currently has projects in development for an apartment house in Berlin, a
social housing project in Vienna, and office buildings.

Although his architecture is relatively rare in the United States, he received

his Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Berkeley
in 1960, and had previously studied with Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois
Institute of Technology in Chicago, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright in
Wisconsin. He credits a Harkness Fellowship, which he won in 1956, with
making it possible to travel to this country following his graduation from the
Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.
He is a frequent visiting professor at Yale University in New Haven and
Washington University in St. Louis. He is an active teacher in his own
country as well, being a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, School of
Architecture in Dusseldorf, and head of the Institute of Design, Academy of
Applied Arts in Vienna.
In addition to his architectural accomplishments, he is a designer of not only
furniture and products, but of exhibitions. One of the latter has just opened
to critical praise in Vienna, titled "Dream and Reality,' an exhibit of Viennese
cultural history. He has many other exhibition design credits, including one,
for the opening of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York.
Art works by Hollein are in collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New
York; the Foundacion Miro, Barcelona; the Municipal Museum,
Monchengladbach; and the Padiglione dlArte Contemporanes, Milan; as well
as many private collections.
Hollein's numerous other awards include two Reynolds Memorial Awards in
the U.S., the City of Vienna's Architecture Prize, the German Architecture
Award, and the Austrian State Award for Environmental Design.

Biography
Hans Hollein was born in Vienna, Austria in 1934. From his earliest school
days, he manifested a talent for drawing. Although he chose architecture as
his profession, his works of art are in many public and private collections
around the world.
He has been described as far more than an architectartist, teacher,
author, and a designer of furniture and silverware. He graduated from the
Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, in Vienna in 1956. He was
awarded a Harkness Fellowship which afforded him the opportunity travel in
the United States. He undertook graduate work at the Illinois Institute of
Technology in Chicago, and completed his Master of Architecture degree at
the University of California, Berkeley in 1960. During those same years, he
was able to meet and study with some of the architects he most admired,
including Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra.
It is characteristic of his curiosity and humor that when he learned there are
seven towns or cities in the United States, all bearing the name, "Vienna,"
he took the time to visit all of them. This was while touring the country in a
second-hand Chevrolet.
After working in architectural firms in Sweden and the United States, he
settled in Vienna where his first commission in 1965 was what Architectural
Forum magazine described as "even smaller than most first commissions: a
shop and showroom 12 feet wide for a candle maker." They added however
that "it brought him an enthusiastic client and a prominent location on a
fashionable Vienna street."
Known as the Retti Candleshop, Hollein's accomplishment of this minor
commission brought him international attention, including the $25,000
Reynolds Memorial Award. It was the first time in a decade that the award
had gone to a work that cost less than the prize.
In 1970, he won praise for his first commission in New York, the Richard
Feigen Gallery. The February, 1970 issue of Progressive Architecture
headlined an article about the building, "Architectural Faberge," and further
that Hollein's design combined "an architect's sense of space with a
goldsmith's sense of craft to produce an exquisite ambiance for art."
The same article called Hollein "one of the few contemporary architects with
the skill, the wit, and the financial backing to recreate the intimate luxury of
Versailles' private chambers," and harked back to the Retti Candleshop as
"Hollein's earlier masterpiece." Not surprisingly, other commissions in this
very specialized genre of shops followed, including two jewelry stores for
Schullin in Vienna, which again gained international acclaim. More recently,
he completed a retail shop for the Beck Company in the Trump Tower in New
York.
Gradually, his numerous proposals and studies yielded other types of
structures as well, from single family residences, to apartment houses,
offices and museums. In 1978, he completed a Tourist Office in Vienna. By
1982, he had completed the Municipal Museum Abteiberg, in
Monchengladbach near Dusseldorf. This major work brought further acclaim
and additional opportunities for projects of a similar nature. The same year
that he was named Pritzker Laureate, he won two international
competitions, one for a Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt and another for a
Cultural Forum in Berlin. Also in that same year, he designed a major
exhibition on Viennese culture, entitled "Dream and Reality," which opened
in Vienna and then made several other stops around the world. One of his
best-known exhibits was for the opening of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in
New York, "MANtransFORMS," on the aspects of design.
Hollein has recently proposed, according to Bill Lacy, secretary to the
Pritzker Prize Jury "an audacious subterranean design for a branch of the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York for Salzburg. With its hybrid
manmade and natural forms of sheer cliff like rooms and with spectacular
light shafts, Hollein has once again demonstrated his penchant for the
elegant and the dramatic."

Jury Citation
The Pritzker Prize Jury honors Hans Hollein as a master of his profession
one who with wit and eclectic gusto draws upon the traditions of the New
World as readily as upon those of the Old. An architect who is also an artist,
he has the good fortune to design museums that are then eager to place
within their walls works of art from his hand, whether in the form of
drawings, collages, or sculpture. In the design of museums, schools, shops,
and public housing, he mingles bold shapes and colors with an exquisite
refinement of detail and never fears to bring together the richest of ancient
marbles and the latest in plastics. The Jury salutes him as a superb teacher,
who urges the young by his example to take big chances and yet make sure
that not the designer but the thing designed remains of paramount
importance. Unflaggingly, he continues to practice what he proclaimed upon
behalf of his fellow architects a quarter of a century ago, at the beginning of
his distinguished career: "We give back to man the joy of building."

Essay
Notes on Vienna
by Brendan Gill
Vienna, native city of Hans Hollein, is the sum of a series of errors that have
caused it to become the best-designed city on earth, as well as one of the
pleasantest to live in and visit.
Paradoxes irritate youfar better to give an example or two of the city's
errors? Very well, then: having foolishly preserved its ancient fortified walls
until well past the middle of the nineteenth century, Vienna at last tore them
down, providing space for an elegant "ring" of grand public buildings, park,
and promenades. Thus, a blunder became an act of wise city planning. But
just a moment, the newly laid out nineteenth-century city, suitable for the
capital of a vast empire, discovered after the Second World War that it was
the capital of a tiny country. Thus, an act of wise city planning became a
blunder.
Many such misfortunes have befallen Vienna over the centuries and from
each of them it has rebounded with an invincible exuberance. It is this
exuberance that has caused so many jokes to be told about the city, not
least by the Viennese themselves. One thinks of that perennially repeated
epigram to the effect that the condition of Vienna is hopeless but not
serious, and one thinks, too, of how the Congress of Vienna, meeting to
stitch Europe together after the downfall of Napoleon, was rebuked, in a
French pun, for dancing rather than getting on with its appointed labors.
Dance it did, to the scandal of onlookers, but we have no way of knowing
whether, if the Congress had danced less, more good would have flowed out
of its earnestness.

To be earnest is to be tiresome, and there is nothing in Vienna's long history

to indicate that it has ever felt any greater desire to be earnest than a
beautiful woman feels to be plain.
Not without some reason, therefore, Vienna has come to seem in the world's
eyes a synonym for waltzing, for wine, women, and songindeed, for all the
flirtatious merriment that the music of Johann Strauss serves to evoke in us.
It is as if an entire city were capable of being summed up in terms of a
single preference, whether for dance, or, still more unlikely, for whipped
cream: pastry mit schlag and perhaps also art and architecture mit schlag.
Plainly, the threat is not substantial. At the risk of sounding earnest, one
may as well affirm that there is more to real life, even in Vienna, than
whipped cream.
The fact is, of course, that there are many Viennas, as there are many
Londons and New Yorks. The greater the city, the more we must be on our
guard against reducing it, for our convenience, to an instantly identifiable
stereotype. There is a dark Vienna as well as a dancing one, a Vienna of
ordinary, every-day misery as well as of joy, a Vienna (little as we may like
to admit it) of stolid, hard-working citizens, whose wit finds its source not in
the salon but in the barnyard. We do well to remember that the Vienna
which most of us elect to make our favorite is only that our favorite, and
not necessarily that of its inhabitants.
Nevertheless, one suspects that there is something intrinsically beguiling
about the very site of Vienna, for it is one of the oldest continuously
occupied localities in the world. Eight or ten thousand years ago, our
Neolithic ancestors had already settled on one or another of the natural
terraces that descend from the foothills of the Alps to the immense fertile
basin of Eastern Europe. Through the basin flows the broad (and perhaps
once upon a time the authentically blue) Danube, and near its banks the
first bumbling attempts at agriculture were carried out; stones were
polished to serve as tools and weapons, and clay pots were fashioned for
holding seeds and water.
Thanks to the indirect shorthand of history furnished by such artifacts, we
detect the presence of generations of Romans in that place, of their
reluctant retreat before the oncoming hordes of barbarians, and of the fierce
Turks, who in what amounts almost to our daythe seventeenth century
lay siege to Vienna, were turned back from its gates in the nick of time, and
left behind them, like so many accidental prizes of war, thousands of bags of
coffee beans, then and there kindling in the hearts of the Viennese a
passion for coffee that has never waned.
There are architects and city-planners to say nothing of priests and
professors, who in their idealism would like to assume that a city may
achieve greatness out of goodness, but alas! The evidence of history is
forcibly against them. Indeed, it is almost always the case that cities are
great in proportion to the amount of corruption they are able to sustain
without flinching. Though our Savonarolas would have it be otherwise,
Rome, Paris, and Vienna have counted for far more in the world when they
have been widely perceived to be sinks of iniquity than when periods of
comparative virtue have momentarily overtaken them; out of the compost
heaps of decadence leap up incandescent fleurs du mal. We forget at our
peril that the word "culture" is of the earth earthy and implies the need for a
continuous animal and vegetable enrichment. Yeats says of love that it
pitches its tent in the place of excrement; for better or worse, so does art.
Vienna at the turn of the century was notorious both for its corruption and
for the energy that this corruption provided its artists, authors, and
composers. Vienna was then the capital of an enormous empire, but the
intellectual ferment present in its coffee houses stood in vivid contrast to a
moribund court, upon whose throne sat a no less moribund emperor. The
battlements that defended his mind against change had outlasted the
ancient city walls he had ordered thrown down in youth ...

Ceremony
The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino,
California
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens are located
twelve miles from Los Angeles near Pasadena, California, in the city of San
Marino. It is a private, nonprofit research and educational center set amidst
120 acres of breathtaking gardens. Three art galleries and a library
showcase magnificent collections of paintings, sculptures, rare books,
manuscripts, and decorative arts. The botanical collection features over
14,000 different species of plants.
Originally the residence of Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927), the main
house was designed by Los Angeles architects Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey.
It was built during the years 1909-1911 with the Main Gallery added in
1934. Most of the interiors are modeled on French and English rooms of the
eighteenth century. Noted landscape designer, Beatrix Farrand, collaborated
on the grounds designs of the 1930s, which reflect themes from around the
world.
Henry Huntington, a key figure in the railroad and real estate development
of Southern California in the early twentieth century, was also an active
collector of rare books and manuscripts, art, and plants. By the time he
established the institution in 1916, he and his wife, Arabella, had amassed
an extensive collection focusing on British and American history, literature,
and art, as well as rare and spectacular plant specimens. Opened to the
public in 1928, the institution today serves scholars conducting advanced
research in the humanities. The librarys rare books and manuscripts
constitute one of the worlds largest and most extensively used collections
in America outside of the Library of Congress.
The 1985 ceremony and dinner celebrating the awarding of the seventh
Pritzker Architecture Prize took place on the spectacular and historic
grounds of the Huntington.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Hans Hollein
I am deeply honored to have been elected by a distinguished jury to be the
seventh recipient of the Pritzker Prize. I feel both proud and moved that my
endeavors and intentions in art and architecture have been understood and
appreciated in such a wonderful way at this point in my life and career.
This is a great moment and I am particularly happy that it happens here, in
Los Angeles, in the United States, this great country with which I have had
close ties since the late fifties-witnessed also today by the many friends who
are here to join in the celebration.
I want to thank the Pritzker family, not only for instituting this prizea prize
which in its short run has come to be considered the world's major
architecture award, but also for the detailed care they have taken to make
the formal presentation a real celebration and an event that will be imbued
in our memories. Years of intensive work receive joyful recognition in a
setting that could not be more appropriate.
Inaturallywant to thank the jury for their choice and also the officers of
the award for selecting such a prominent and diversified panel. That
architects, eminent art-historians, as well as international business leaders
make the judgment together, makes their verdict so valuable and
impressive vis--vis a wider public.
Thanks and praise also goes to the persons who administer the award, in
particular to Brendan Gill, whose impeccable prose and demeanor
embellishes this event, and Arthur Drexler, who since my early beginnings
has shown interest in my work and given encouragement.
I also want to thank all those people who have been instrumental in my
development, above all the teachersboth formal and informal ones, both
abroad and in this country, some of whom are here today. And, also very
importantly, I want to thank the clients who have given me the opportunity
to carry out the work that is now lauded. I am particularly moved that some
of those clients came over the Atlantic especially to be here today for this
event, an event which is also their day.
I am happy and proud that so many friends are here today who have gone a
long way beside me. The recognition I receive today is proving them right,
proving them right in giving me support, encouragement and opportunity.
The work I have done could not have been realized without the help of my
close collaborators and staff members. To them, I offer my sincere thanks on
this occasion.
Even though the Pritzker Prize is an award of the world, and I accept it as an
Austrian, and a Viennese, it is also an American prize, and I want to make
use of this occasion to acknowledge the profound effect the encounter with
this country has had on me and my work. Not only have I studied in this
country, but more important to me were the people and the spirit of this
country, its wide expanses and its persuasive landscape that have played a
major role in the formulation of my thoughts and attitudes about
architecture.
It is a fitting coincidence that my first two stations in this country, after
deciding not to disappear in the ivory towers of Ivy League universities, but
to confront myself with anothermaybe the realAmerica, have been
Chicago and California. Chicago has taught me lessons about the city the
people and great architecture. To California, I came out of a longing for its
lifestyle and its architectural and urban formulation, which to me was unlike
Europe and very much of the second half of our century. Los Angeles, to me,
was a fascinating phenomenon, a realization of a new approach, of a new
spirit. Of course it also has close invisible ties to Vienna, and one of the
reasons to come here in the first place had to do with these ties, when I first
advanced my research on Rudolph M. Schindler here.
Equally important to me has been the impact of the American landscape.
The vast expanses of this country have given me the impetus and the idea
of what it means to make man-made structures in space, a man-made
environment that not only is a continuation and a transformation of
something already existing, but the creation of something new, the artificial
in a dialectic with nature.
I have always considered architecture as an art. To me architecture is not
primarily the solution of a problem, but the making of a statement. Within
the two poles of architectural activity, architecture as ritual and architecture
as a means of preservation of body-temperature, my search is for the
absolute, as well as for the needs and constraints, which also generate form.
Similarly, I have tried to expand the scope and the range of artistic and
architectural intervention. Therefore my interests dwell not only on the
sizeable building proper, but on the utterances you can make on a small
scale as well, especially in relation to the needs daily life carries with it; the
room, the object you feel and touch. Not only do I deal with eternity, with
the permanent, but also with the ephemeral and the temporary.
As an artist, I am only responsible to myself and can make highly
individualistic manifestations. As an architect, I am responsible to the needs
of man and society. Man continuously designs for survival, for immediate
survival and for survival after death. The life and work of an artist and
architect mirrors this fundamental human situation.
Maybe this is a very European, very Viennese way of looking at things. This
dualistic approach, this Manichaean view has its correspondence in the
position of standing with one leg in the old world, in tradition, and with the
other in the new world, in the future ...
Ceremony Speech
Jay A. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
In the past seven years, weve had the pleasure of making these
presentations in a number of distinguished places that you might know like
Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, the National Building Museum in
Washington, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York and once we even braved the Indians and went out west to the Art
Institute of Chicago. I want to thank all of you at the Huntington for giving us
the opportunity to hold our ceremony in the real West. And, what an
incredible setting this is. I understand that the architect of this stately home
is Myron Hunt. Im sure he would approve of our efforts to further the cause
of architecture by encouraging a greater awareness of how people perceive
and interact with their surroundings. I understand that Mr. Hunt, too, came
from Chicago and in 1959 a young architectural student from Vienna came
to Chicago to study architecture with Mies van der Rohe at Illinois Institute
of Technology. That was Hans Hollein our laureate this evening. Hans sought
out other idols, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, both of whom I
understand have descendents with us here tonight. Hans also came west.
He went to Berkeley for a Masters and then back to Vienna where I
understand he quickly began receiving awards and commissions. Our
distinguished jury has seen fit to choose Hans Hollein as the laureate of this
years architectural prize.
Architecture is intended to transcend the simple need for shelter and
security by becoming an expression of artistry. John Ruskin in the last
century expressed it well when he said that, Architecture is the art which so
disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man that the sight of them
contributes to his mental health, power, and pleasure. With that thought in
mind it is our pleasure to present to Hans Hollein the symbol of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize.
Gottfried Bhm
1986 Laureate
Selected Works:
Dwelling house, Cologne Weiss, 1955
Neviges Pilgrimage Church, Velbert, Germany, 1968
City Hall, Bensberger, Germany, 1969
Museum of the Diocese, Paderborn, Germany, 1975

Announcement
German Architect Gottfried Bhm is the 1986 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureate
New York, April 17Gottfried Bhm, a third generation architect from
Cologne, Federal Republic of Germany, was announced today as the 1986
Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. He is the eighth recipient of the
prestigious international award, and the fourth to be selected from outside
the United States.
Bhm's work is primarily in Europe, but he has designed buildings in
Formosa and Brazil as well. Such projects as the City Hall of Bensberg, the
Church of the Pilgrimage at. Neviges, and the Zueblin corporate building in
Stuttgart have brought international acclaim.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, which established the
prize in 1979 to reward a creative endeavor not honored by the Nobel
Prizes, presented a $100,000 tax-free grant to Bhm today at The Museum
of Modern Art. A formal award ceremony will be held at the Goldsmiths' Hall
in London on May 7. At that time, Bhm will receive the symbol of the prize,
a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore.
Pritzker described Bhm as "an excellent choice by our distinguished jury.
Each of the Laureates has been honored for achievements demonstrating a
combination of talent, vision, and commitment that consistently produces
work to enhance the environment, and therefore humanity as well. Bhm's
buildings excel by all of these criteria."
Noted author and journalist Brendan Gill, secretary to the Pritzker jury,
announced Bhm as the 1986 Laureate to an impressive gathering of
architects and architectural writers. He praised Bhm's work, saying, "As
little known in the United States as he is well-known in Europe, for forty
years Bhm has succeeded in interpreting and transforming the
architectural riches of past centuries into contemporary structures, thrilling
in themselves."
The jury making the selection consisted of J. Carter Brown, director of the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., who served as chairman;
Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat in Torino, Italy; Thomas J. Watson,
chairman emeritus of IBM Corporation; and three architects, Ricardo
Legorreta of Mexico City, Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo; and 1982 Pritzker Prize
Laureate, Kevin Roche of Hamden, Connecticut.
In making the award to Bhm, the jury's citation read as follows: "Son,
grandson, husband and father of architects, Gottfried Bhm has reason to
recognize the nourishment that traditional ways and means, handed down
from one generation to the next, provide in architecture, as in all the arts.
"In the course of a career of over forty years, he has taken care to see that
the elements of his work which suggest the past also bear witness to his
ready acceptance, whether in the design of churches, town halls, public
housing, or office buildings, of the latest and best in our contemporary
technology.
The citation continued, "His highly evocative handiwork combines much that
we have inherited from our ancestors with much that we have but newly
acquiredan uncanny and exhilarating marriage, to which the Pritzker
Architecture Prize is happy to pay honor."

Bhm, who is 66, began his practice in 1947 working for his father,
Dominikus, famous throughout Europe primarily for his church designs. In
1948, he married Elisabeth Haggenmueller, also an architect. They now
have four, sons, three of whom are architects.
The recipient of many honors in his own country, he has been honored
around the world as a guest professor at many universities. His drawings
and renderings of preliminary designs have been highly praised and
currently a collection of these drawings is touring the United States. It was
most recently shown at the University of Pennsylvania and will open in
Chicago at the Graham Foundation on April 28. The University of Maryland
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also on the exhibition
schedule for later this year.

Biography
The work of Gottfried Bhm ranges from the simple to the complex, using
many different kinds of materials, with results that sometimes appear
humble, sometimes monumental. He has been described in the sixties as an
expressionist, and more recently as post-Bauhaus, but almost always he
stands alone in departing from the conventions of established architecture,
seeking to go one step beyond.
Bhm himself prefers to be thought of in terms of creating "connections"
for example, the integration of the old with the new, the world of ideas with
the physical world, the interaction between the architecture of a single
building with the urban environment, taking into account the form, material,
and color of a building in its setting.
Gottfried Bhm was born in Offenbach-am-Main on January 23, 1920, the
son of Dominikus Bhm, one of Europe's most respected architects of
Roman Catholic churches and ecclesiastical buildings. Since his paternal
grandfather had been an architect as well, it is not surprising that Gottfried
started on that path.
His academic career began in 1942, when he attended the Technische
Hochschule in Munich. He received degree in 1946. For another year, he
continued his education, studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Munich. That training has been important for the clay models he develops
during the design process of his buildings.
He worked in his father's office as an assistant architect from 1947to1950.
During that time he collaborated with the Society for the Reconstruction of
Cologne under the direction of Rudolph Schwarz. In 1948, he met and
married Elisabeth Haggenmueller, who is also a licensed engineer and
architect. They have four sons, three of whom have become architects.
Feeling the need for other points of view, in 1951, Bhm journeyed to New
York where he worked in the architectural firm of Cajetan Baumann for six
months. Several more months were spent on a study tour of the United
States, during which time he had the opportunity to meet Mies van der Rohe
and Walter Gropius, two of the architects for whom he holds great
admiration.
His study tour over, Bhm returned to work with his father in 1952. His
father's influence plus the ideas and theories of Bauhaus, were apparent in
his first independent projects. Nevertheless, his multiple skills enabled him
to overcome this phase quickly. He did not discover a different style; what
he discovered was a clear conviction of the importance of every single
architectural assignment, no matter how small, and he learned that, along
with the factors of time and place, man is the most important value to be
taken into consideration."
When his father died in 1955, Bhm took over the family firm. In the
following three decades he has accomplished many buildings, including
churches, museums, theatres, cultural and civic centers, city halls, office
buildings, public housing, and apartment buildings, many of the latter with
mixed use.
The Bensberg City Hall, as well as the restaurant he designed at Bad
Kreuznach, both built on historic ruins, illustrate his creativity in joining the
old with the new.
Some of the connections Bhm refers to are also between private and public
or semi-public spaces, new uses for deserted urban areas, and the analyzing
of a design problem as both a boundary and a link. One of his projects, the
Zueblin Corporate Headquarters in Stuttgart, straddling two newly
incorporated townships, embodies these connections.
Many of Bhm's projects and proposals illustrate his concern for urban
spaces. He undertook planning projects for the area around the Cathedral
and the Heumarkt area in Cologne, the Prague Square in Berlin and the area
around the castle at Saarbruecken, the Lingotto Quarter in Torino. Bhm has
said, "I think the future of architecture does not lie so much in continuing to
fill up the landscape, as in bringing back life and order to our cities and
towns."
In 1981, Peter Davey in Architectural Review, described some of Bhm's
buildings as "unique subjective works of art that showed Germanyand
Europethat the Expressionist tradition is still alive. His brut modern
concrete meets ragged medieval stone with contrast yet sympathy: the new
forms are as complex as the old..." Davey was referring in this instance to
the town hall at Bensberg and the Pilgrimage Church at Neviges. This article
went on to review a more recent building, the civic center at Bergisch
Gladbach. Davey acknowledged that "as usual with Bhm, everything new is
new: there is no attempt to copy." Bergisch-Gladbach marked a major
change in the materials used by Bhm, from molded concrete to glass and
steel. Of this change, Bhm has said simply, "I use different kinds of
materials on different kinds of projects. Today we can do things with steel
and glass that we could not do before."
In his teaching, Bhm warns against "the exaggerations of the historicizing
movement, and mindless imitation of earlier eras." He has insisted on
"spiritually enriching human values in architecture," speaking out against
"overcrowding the environment with unnecessary design features." He has
opposed both the reductive sterility, and the brutalism that reigned for a
time. Although the language of his forms is not in the of modernist" style, he
adheres to many of the ethical principles of the Bauhaus such as "austerity,
honesty, and expressing one's own time in one's work."

Jury Citation
Son, grandson, husband, and father of architects, Gottfried Bhm has
reason to recognize the nourishment that traditional ways and means
provide in architecture, as in all the arts. In the course of a career of over
forty years, he has taken care to see that the elements in his work which
suggest the past also bear witness to his ready acceptance, whether in the
design of churches, town halls, public housing, or office buildings, of the
latest and best in our contemporary technology. His highly evocative
handiwork combines much that we have inherited from our ancestors with
much that we have but newly acquiredan uncanny and exhilarating
marriage, to which the Pritzker Architecture Prize is happy to pay honor.

Essay
On Architecture
by Kevin Roche
I believe architecture is an art and that in practicing it one's ultimate
responsibility is to use every opportunity to create a work of art. And a work
of art is essentially a statement of a position; it is a statement about
something. And it is a statement of belief in something.
It is a reflection on the nature of things, or some aspect of the nature of
things. In addition to all of the justifications we make for a building's reason
for being, which we must do in practice, we have the additional
responsibility to make a statement.
The statement is not necessarily conscious; because it is an artistic effort
sometimes it may be more intuitive. Because one's beliefs when working on
a design are intensely held, one wants to make the statement as intense as
possible so that it is clear and understandable, a thoroughly refined
statementrefined in the sense of clarityas clear as it can be.
That may be why these buildings are so perceived, but if you do not hold
your beliefs intensely, if you do not believe that you are about something
important, then you cannot create a work of art.

Ceremony
Goldsmiths' Hall, London, England
Since the fourteenth century, the Goldsmiths' Company, originally founded
to regulate the trade, has been responsible for testing the quality of gold,
silver and, from 1975, platinum articles. Its headquarters, on the same site
in London since 1339, is near St. Paul's Cathedral. The magnificent
Goldsmiths Hall opened in 1835 and was designed by architect Philip
Hardwick. Although there have been some changes to the decorative
schemes and functions over the years, Goldsmiths Hall remains much as
Hardwick envisioned it. The Hall narrowly escaped complete destruction
during World War II, but has been faithfully restored on the exterior after the
War, retaining much of its charm as an urban palazzo.
The Livery Hall, the largest room in Goldsmiths Hall, was the site of the
1986 Pritzker Architecture Prize award ceremony. This magnificently
proportioned room is striking due to its Corinthian columns of scagliola and
richly decorated moulded ceiling. There are four matching chandeliers of
English glass, supplied by Perry and Co. in 1835, now electrified internally,
each holding forty-eight candles. Participating in the Ceremony were: the
Duke of Gloucester, Carter Brown, Chair of the Jury, Brendan Gill, Secretary
to the Jury, Jay Pritzker, President of the Hyatt Foundation, and giving his
acceptance speech, Gottfreid Bhm, the eighth Pritzker laureate.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Gottfried Bhm
Last year I built a small chapel with my son, Paul. It is almost four feet
square and not quite eleven feet high (47-" by 47-" by 10' 9-3/4" to be
precise). I mention this building because rarely did anything come so
naturally. I think I may say this because the chapel is so small and because
of my son's contribution.
The chapel shelters a figure of Christ for which it is both frame and habitat.
Figure and chapel have become one; indeed the figure is the heart of the
whole. And a little of the drama and love contained within the chapel is
expressed on the exterior.
The chapel has clean lines, not in the sense in which such lines today are
often equated with geometryeven a complex shape can have clean lines
but in the sense that you cannot add to it, and you would not want to take
anything away, either.
I think the influence of my father, Dominikus, who was my guide, can be
discerned in this small building. It seems to me a good thing when a building
has not been designed entirely on a moment's inspiration.
Although the chapel is clearly new and of our time, it has formed a bond
with the other buildings in the neighborhoodit seems to have been there
all the time. Despite its small size, it and the others form a living space.
Its details are not very complicated, but they were applied with great
feeling. In this too perfect, streamlined time details are especially important,
because by having to take a close look, we discover new things. Because of
this, details will remain part of the building in the mind's eye.
Fortunately, I have been entrusted with larger projects, including city
planning, yet all have presented me with the same problems as the little
chapel:
A building is a human being's space and the background for his dignity and
its exterior should reflect its contents and function. New buildings should fit
naturally into their surroundings, both architecturally and historically,
without denying or prettifying the concerns of our time. You cannot just
quote from history and above all you cannot take it out of context, in
however humorous a fashion. On the contrary history has a natural
continuity that must be respected.
Especially after World War II, we have cut wide gashes into the fabric of our
cities the world overwe put great traffic arteries through them and erected
buildings whose function, shape, size, materials, and colors had no bearing
on the existing urban environment.
It is therefore important today to heal these wounds, retaining the positive
aspects, and re-establishing the necessary cohesion of the urban
environment, so that we can once more experience the natural sense of
community which we so admire when strolling through old cities.
With her extraordinary straightforwardness my wifeto whom I owe much
professional gratitude, once said to our sons (three of whom are architects):
"Our generation has built a lot, but your generation will have to work hard to
heal all that."
I don't overestimate the influence of architecture on people, but I am sure
that the physical alienation of our cities contributes to our inability to live
together harmoniously.
It is clearly important to keep its integrity in mind when designing a
building, but it is especially necessary today to consider its neighbors and to
find out what they might have in common.
To be given this prize must mean that you have understood and accepted
my principles. That is a wonderful feeling. I thank you very much!

Ceremony Speech
Jay A. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
Some years ago, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe said that, Science and art
belong to the whole world and before them banish the barriers of
nationality. Your presence here from so many different countries is symbolic
of the various banishing of barriers of nationality and certainly the prize was
established as being for the whole world. Our jury has bestowed the prize on
architects from Mexico, Austria, Great Britain, the United States and tonight
the Federal Republic of Germany. Goethe however said, Science and art
belong to the whole world. I think more than any other profession
architecture can lay claim to both of those disciplines.
The late Lord Clark of Saltwood expressed the hope that establishing this
prize would focus public attention on what he and Your Highness described
as a human endeavor by which our civilization will be judged in the future.
Another famous English writer, John Ruskin said, Architecture is the printing
press of all ages and gives a history of the state of society in which it was
erected. When we build let us think we build forever.
This magnificent Goldsmith Hall designed by Phillip Hardwicke is testimony
to that. It stood here for over a century and a half and the founding guild
existed even earlier. I understand by nearly seven more centuries. We thank
Goldsmith for their hospitality and we do not overlook the significance of
hallmarking only those items up to standard. Instead of leopards head our
mark of excellence tonight is a sculpture by another Englishman, Henry
Moore, which is the symbol of the architecture prize. On behalf of my family,
I take great pleasure in presenting this to our 1986 Laureate, Gottfried
Bhm.
Kenzo Tange
1987 Laureate
Selected Works:
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Hiroshima, Japan, 1955
St Marys Cathedral, Tokyo, Japan, 1955
Yoyogi National Gymnasium for the 1964 Summer Olympics, Tokyo, Japan,
1964
Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan, 1989
Tokyo City Hall Complex, Tokyo, Japan, 1991

Announcement
New York, March 18Kenzo Tange, one of the world's most honored
architects, today became the 1987 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture
Prize. He is the ninth recipient of what has come to be known as the most
prestigious award in the profession. A native of Japan, Tange is the fifth
recipient from outside the United States.
Although the major portion of Tange's work has been in Japan, including the
world renowned stadiums for the 1964 Olympics held in Tokyo, he has
designed and built in China, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Nepal, Saudi
Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, Nigeria, Italy, Yugoslavia and the United States.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, which established the
prize in 1979 to reward a creative endeavor not honored by the Nobel
Prizes, presented a $100,000 tax-free grant to Tange today at The Museum
of Modern Art. A formal award ceremony will be held at the Kimbell Art
Museum in Fort Worth, Texas on May 2.
Pritzker praised Tange for his "wide-ranging creative activities, not only as
an architect and urban planner, but as a teacher and writer, researcher and
historian. His theories on the informational society, and his search for a
design expression for that society, have produced not only a great body of
built work, but also have stimulated the quest for an architecture that can
again elevate the human spirit. Mr. Tange has been quoted as saying,
'architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.' The
jury has unanimously agreed that this life's work has done that ... and
more."
In revealing the 1987 Laureate, noted author and journalist Brendan Gill,
who is secretary to the Pritzker jury, said of Tange, "He has shaped, as
architect, teacher, and philosopher of architecture, half a century of
Japanese building design and urban planning."
Gill continued, "In his youth, he was influenced by Le Corbusier, and later,
while teaching at MIT, by his close friend Eero Saarinen. Among his students
and colleagues in Japan, have been Fumihiko Maki and Arata Isozaki."
In making the award to Tange, the jury's citation read in part, as follows:
"Given talent, energy, and a sufficiently long career, one may pass from
being a breaker of new ground to being revered as a classic. This has been
the happy fate of Kenzo Tange, who in his seventh decade, is celebrated as
an architect of international stature. His stadiums for the Olympic Games
held in Tokyo in 1964 have been described as among the most beautiful
buildings of the twentieth century."
Tange, who is 73, became interested in architecture while studying in
another field. He entered the Architecture Department of Tokyo University in
1935, and began winning competitions and awards in his own country
shortly after graduating. He received his doctorate in 1959, followed by
numerous honorary doctorates around the world.
In 1973, when he received the French Architecture Academy's gold medal,
he was the only person in the world to have received as well, the gold
medals from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the American
Institute of Architects.
Biography
Kenzo Tange (1913-2005), winner of the 1987 Pritzker Architecture Prize, is
one of Japans most honored architects. Teacher, writer, architect, and urban
planner, he is revered not only for his own work but also for his influence on
younger architects. He was born in the small city of Imabari, Shikoku Island,
Japan in 1913. Although becoming an architect was beyond his wildest
dreams as a boy, it was Le Corbusiers work that stirred his imagination so
that in 1935, he became a student in the Architecture Department of Tokyo
University. In 1946, he became an assistant professor at Tokyo University,
and organized the Tange Laboratory. His students included Fumihiko Maki,
Koji Kamiya, Arata Isozaki, Kisho Kurokawa, and Taneo Oki.
Tange was in charge of the reconstruction of Hiroshima after World War II.
The Hiroshima Peace Center and Park begun in 1946 made the city symbolic
of the human longing for peace. Architecturally, the Peace Center shows a
deep understanding of traditional culture while at the same time is a
signpost in the search for a modern style in Japan.
Tange research and interest in urban planning extended throughout his
career. His doctorate, completed in 1959, was titled, "Spatial Structure in a
Large City," an interpretation of urban structure on the basis of people's
movements commuting to and from work. His "Plan for Tokyo 1960" was the
Tange Team's logical response to these problems, giving thought to the
nature of the urban structure that would permit growth and change. His
Tokyo Plan received enormous attention world-wide, for its new concepts of
extending the growth of the city out over the bay, using bridges, man made
islands, floating parking and mega structures. Other urban design and
planning projects were begun in 1967 for the Fiera District of Bologna, Italy,
and for a new town with residences for 60,000 in Catania, Italy.
For his Tokyo Cathedral of Saint Mary, he visited several medieval Gothic
examples. "After experiencing their heaven-aspiring grandeur and ineffably
mystical spaces," he says, "I began to imagine new spaces, and wanted to
create them by means of modern technology."
Yamanishi Broadcasting and Press Center (1966) in Kofu, Japan uses many of
Tange's new theoriescylinders house staircases, elevators, air conditioning
and electrical equipment systems. The horizontal spaces connecting them
are likened to the buildings along a street. Some plots are vacant and others
are occupied. An important aspect was the expansion potential of the
complex. Open spaces between floors, which now serve as terraces and roof
gardens, could be enclosed when needed.
In the year in which he won the Pritzker Prize, Tange revealed his plans for
the new Tokyo City Hall Complex. Since built, the complex comprises an
assembly hall, a civic plaza, a park, and two tower buildings. The Akasaka
Prince Hotel (1982) in Tokyo has become an important landmark. Others
include the Sogetsu Center (1957), the Hanae Mori Building (1979), the
Hyogo Prefecture Museum of History (1982), the Ehime Prefecture Culture
Center (1985), the Toin School (1986) in Yokohama,and new projects that
are still in the design stage, such as the Yokohama Museum of Art, and the
Tokyo Headquarters of the United Nations University.
Tange's only completed project in the United States, to date, is his
expansion of the Minneapolis Art Museum, originally designed in 1911 by
McKim Mead & White in the neoclassic style. Completed in 1975, the
expansion, almost doubling the size of the original 120,000 square foot
structure, was accomplished with large symmetrical wings. Other works
outside of Japan include major buildings in Singapore: the Overseas Union
Bank, the GB Building, the Telecommunications Centre, and the Nanyang
Technological Institute.
In all of his projects, there is a recurrent theme that Tange has verbalized,
"Architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart, but
even then, basic forms, spaces and appearances must be logical. Creative
work is expressed in our time as a union of technology and humanity. The
role of tradition is that of a catalyst, which furthers a chemical reaction, but
is no longer detectable in the end result. Tradition can, to be sure,
participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself."
In addition to his architectural practice, Kenzo Tange has been a guest
professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a lecturer at
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Washington University, Illinois Institute of
Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Universities of
Alabama and Toronto.

Jury Citation
Given talent, energy, and a sufficiently long career, one may pass from
being a breaker of new ground to becoming a classic. This has been the
happy fate of Kenzo Tange, who in his eight decade is celebrated as an
architect of international reputation. Along with his practice, he has been a
leading theoretician of architecture and an inspiring teacher; among the
well-known architects who have studied under him are Fumihiko Maki and
Arata Isozaki. His stadiums for the Olympic Games held in Tokyo in 1964 are
often described as among the most beautiful structures built in the
twentieth century. In preparing a design, Tange arrives at shapes that lift our
hearts because they seem to emerge from some ancient and dimly
remembered past and yet are breathtakingly of today.

Essay
Remarks on Kenzo Tange
by Fumihiko Maki
After 300 years of virtual isolation under the Tokugawa Shogunate, Japan
embarked on a remarkable process of modernization with the Meiji
Restoration. This process not only transformed the visible aspects of the
country, but wrought a profound change in the Japanese psyche. Until then,
a sense of the past had always been implicit in the Japanese notion of the
present. The acceptance of modernization added a new temporal dimension.
The here and now came to be colored by the anticipation of tomorrow.
For the last 120 years, a time marked by continual and radical change,
Japanese architects have attempted to chart the future, each in his own way.
The Japanese architect who has given expression to a personal vision of the
future with the greatest confidence and power of persuasion is undoubtedly
Kenzo Tauge.
For the Japanese of the early Meiji Era, the West was the future made
manifest, but this has not been the case for Tange. An ability to distill the
very essence of the modern spirit is wedded to a deep understanding of
traditional Japanese culture, and these two aspects of his character are
already evident in the early masterpieces such as the Hiroshima Peace
Center and the Kagawa Prefectural Government Office.
The National Gymnasium for the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 was a magnificent
product of twentieth century structural technology, as well as a bold and
original conception of space. It is one of the landmarks of modern
architectural history and assured the highest international reputation for
Tange.
In the twenty-odd years since then, Tange has been active on five continents
and has realized numerous major projects. Now in his eighth decade, he
remains, astonishingly, one of the most productive architects in the world.
The secret of his energy and youthful spirit is surely the confidence and
hope with which he always regards the future. The new Tokyo City Hall
Complex, soon to undergo construction, will no doubt be a splendid addition
to an already illustrious oeuvre and serve as an apt symbol for the
modernization of Japan.

Ceremony
The Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas
The Kimbell Art Museum is widely regarded as one of the most outstanding
examples of twentieth century American architecture. Designed by the
American architect Louis I. Kahn (19011974), the Museum has won wide
acclaim since its opening in 1972. In his design for the Kimbell, Kahn
emphasized the low, horizontal aspect of the building with separate
reinforced concrete vaults, forming two exhibition spaces and a central
entrance lobby, and creating three open porticos on the outside. The
120,000 square foot building is widely recognized for the powerful spaces
defined by parallel barrel vaults. The spatial rhythm extends to the exterior
water-features on the west side of the building, and resolves into a number
of paths and garden areas on the grounds.
Kahns innovative use of natural light greatly enhances the experience of
the art. Kahn envisioned a museum with the luminosity of silver. In his
design, narrow slits to the sky (as he described the skylights) admit
natural light, which is dispersed onto the underside of the rhythmic vaults
and down the walls. Courtyards, lunettes, and light slots vary the quality
and intensity of the light. The buildings gracious proportions, fine
craftsmanship, and beautiful landscaping add further to the sense of
serenity and restraint.
The 1987 ceremony awarding Kenzo Tange of Japan the prize took place on
May 2, 1987 at the Kimball Art Museum. Speakers included representatives
of the Kimball Museum, J. Carter Brown, Chair or the Pritzker Prize Jury,
Carlton Smith, Secretary to the Jury, Jay Pritzker, founder of the Prize and
Kenzo Tange, the 1987 laureate.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Kenzo Tange
It was more than a quarter century ago that I started talking about the
importance of communication and information in modern society. I said that
they would transcend the importance we place on production. In the 1970s,
because of the energy crisis, our valuesat least in Japanshifted from
material things to the non-physical, and even spiritual considerations.
That shift took place not just in architecture, but in daily life, as people
tended to prefer the immaterial to the material. With de-emphasis on
industrialization and the advent of the "information-communication society,"
the fundamentally rational and functional philosophy of the preceding period
changed, and people sought things that appeal to the emotions and the
senses.
In architecture, the demand was no longer for box-like forms, but for
buildings that have something to say to the human emotions. That new
demand has had an effect on the designs of everything, from small window
displays to streetscapes to buildings.
The term Post-Modernism is used to describe this trend in general. I feel,
however, that in its actual presentation, Post-Modernism is no more than a
mere eclectic mixture of aesthetic elementsmodern and ancient, or
Eastern and Westernthat have already reached an impasse.
My belief is that at present Post-Modernism has not found, but must find a
way out of that impasse. And since, I myself am seeking a clue, even a very
small one that will shed a little light on an answer, I know the task is not
easy.
I am aware of changes gradually taking place in my own designs as part of
my thinking on this matter. The Tokyo Headquarters of the United Nations
University and the new Tokyo Metropolitan Office Complex, reflect that
process. In both instances, there is a powerful need for symbolism and that
means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human
heart. Nevertheless, the basic forms, spaces, and appearances must be
logical. Designs of purely arbitrary nature cannot be expected to last long.
Technological considerations are of great importance to architecture and
cities in the informational society. The development of so-called "intelligent
buildings" is a natural consequence and today's society will demand that
whole districts and cities themselves become "intelligent" in the same way
as the individual buildings.
We then will require, and expect, advanced technological equipment that,
instead of finding expression in building exteriors, will be realized as part of
concealed, interior functions.
Still another aspect of architecture and cities in our
informational/communication society is inter-architectural relations. In the
industrial society, strong emphasis on costs and intense demand for
functional sufficiency of individual buildings meant that less thought was
given to large functional units, including the building's neighboring
structures and surroundings.

I think it is difficult to determine which of the two is more important, but in a

society that places great stress on communications, relationships with the
surroundings probably deserve as much consideration as the functional
sufficiency of the individual building.
I believe the development of a new architectural style will result from further
study and work on the three elements that I have discussed: human,
emotional, and sensual elements; technologically intelligent elements; and
social-communicational structure of the space.
In my opinion, further consideration of those views will help us find a way
out of the current impasse, and reveal to us the kinds of buildings and cities
required by the informational society. We must attempt to discover a new
style suitable for our time to express a system of consistent aesthetic
elements from the three that I have mentioned, if we are to overcome the
eclecticism of the present transitional architectural expressions.
I accept this award with humility because in some ways I am still in search
of an answer to what buildings will best serve in what I call the information
or communications society. And it is truly satisfying to receive this
acknowledgement of a distinguished jury panel, especially in this excellent
architectural space, I mean in this space by Louis Kahn, whose work I
admire, and until his death, was one of my close friends.

Ceremony Speech
Jay A. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
John Julius Norwich, the noted English architectural author and historian in
the foreword to his World Atlas of Architecture mentions two architectural
masterpieces of the last quarter century. He failed to mention the Kimball
unfortunately and I believe his error. One is the East Building of the National
Gallery of Art and the other is the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo. The former was
by IM Pei, a former laureate, and the latter is by the man we honor this
evening, Mr. Kenzo Tange, the 1987 laureate.
The author questions why architecture and the men who practiced it have
been so consistently underrated. One explanation offered is that theres so
much of it we take it for granted and one of our attempts has been to solve
that problem. In the few years since we began this prize, weve been
delighted to see it achieve the stature it has. But a prize, any prize, can only
be great by virtue of the people it honors and by who is capable of selecting
those honorees. Weve been fortunate to have a dedicated group of jurors
that has changed over the years but has not diminished one with that
stature. From the inception, Carter has chaired this jury and were extremely
grateful to Carter and the other members of the jury for the burdens that
theyve borne. No one would deny that the architects that have been
selected have been exceptional. Last year, it was Gottfried Bhm, who was
nice enough to come in from West Germany for this event this evening. Its
also significant to notice that both the laureates and the jurors come from
the international community.
Thereve been five laureates from Japan, England, Mexico, Austria and West
Germany and four others from the United States. In the Shock of the New,
you may recall the book by Time critic, Robert Hughes, he indicated how
worldly architecture has become. He was discussing who is French, whose
style would become known by a phrase coined by Americans, Phillip Johnson
and Hitchcock and how Meis Van Der Rohe, a German carried it forward
derivative of Frank Lloyd Wright, who had based his organic and spatial
concept on Japanese traditions. While its our primary mission to reward
achievements of living architects, we also honor all of those architects who
have gone before, who strove to elevate the human spirit. One such was
Louis Sullivan, a great American architect and a pioneer in the development
of the skyscraper, who happens to come from Chicago. We held one of these
ceremonies in a room from one of his buildings, The Stock Exchange, which
is now in the Art Institute in Chicago. Formerly, we had a symbol of the prize
consisting of work done by Henry Moore but we could only produce nine of
them and we used all nine. Were now introducing a new symbol, which is a
replica casting of an ornament that Mr. Sullivan did in a landmark building in
Chicago. Its the Carson Pirie Scott Building. Its this medallion. By virtue of
holding this ceremony in the Kimball, we also pay tribute to Louis Kahn, the
architect of this much acclaimed building. We also want to thank Kate
Fortson, Ted Pillsbury and the staff at the Kimball for making all of this
possible. There are some similarities between Louis Kahn and Kenzo Tange.
Kahn had been quoted as saying, Before functionalism, before design, even
before an understanding of the materials must come feeling. Kenzo Tange
has said, Architecture must have something that appeals to the human
heart. Kahn visited the ancient Greek and Roman buildings of Europe as did
Tange and both felt their influences in different ways. Had the Greeks
invented a muse for architecture shed be dancing with joy in the heights of
Mt. Olympus tonight. Professor Tange, on behalf of my family, wed like to
present you with the symbol of the prize, this piece by Louis Sullivan and
wish you many more years of beautiful buildings.
Gordon Bunshaft
1988 Laureate

Selected Works:
Lever House, New York, New York, 1952
Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, completed 1961 and officially
opened 1962
Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven,
Connecticut, 1963
Travertine House, Hamptons, New York, 1962
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., 1974
National Commercial Bank, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 1983
Announcement
The Pritzker Architecture Prize Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary Honoring
Two Laureates for 1988
Two architects, Gordon Bunshaft and Oscar Niemeyer, from North and South
America respectively, whose works have been among the most influential
and recognized in this century have been named Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureates of 1988. The awards will be presented on Monday, May 23, at a
ceremony at The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, which established the
prize in 1979, commented, "We are delighted that the jury has used the
occasion of the tenth anniversary of the prize to honor, not one, but two
masters of modern architecture."
Niemeyer, who lives in Rio de Janeiro and will be 81 this year, is perhaps
best known for designing most of the buildings in Brasilia, the capital city of
Brazil. He began his career in 1936, achieving his first taste of international
acclaim in a collaboration with Le Corbusier on the building for the Ministry
of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro. It attracted worldwide attention at
the time as one of the first buildings to express the emerging concepts of
the modern architectural movement. In thr late forties, the two again
worked together on the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. He is
the sixth architect from outside the United States to receive the prize.
Bunshaft, who celebrates his seventy-ninth birthday this year lives in New
York City. He has designed many buildings there, one of which, Lever House,
has been declared an historic landmark, and which Bunshaft calls "my first
real building." The sixty-story Chase Manhattan Bank, the Union Carbide
Building, and the original PepsiCo building are all Bunshaft additions to the
New York skyline. In Washington, D.C., the Hirshhorn Museum has become a
familiar addition to the cultural landscape. In his hometown of Buffalo, New
York, he designed another art museum, the addition to the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, described by another Pritzker Laureate as "the most beautiful
museum in the world." In Texas, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, and at
Yale, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, add to 'the distinction
of their designer, whose career at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, New York
spanned over four decades. His last building for that firm before retiring was
one he calls "one of my best and most unique projects," the National
Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The Purpose of the prize is to honor annually a living architect 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.
The prize consists of a $100,000 grant, a formal citation certificate, and a
medallion. When the Pritzker family established the prize, they wanted to
honor a creative endeavor not included in the Nobel Prizes. They modeled
their procedures and rewards after the latter. As with the Nobels, the two
Pritzker Laureates chosen by the jury in 1988 will share the prize equally.

The nominating procedure is continuous from year to year, with the final
selection being made by an international jury with all deliberation,
procedures and voting in secret.
The jury for the 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize consisted of J. Carter Brown,
director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., who has served
as juror since its founding, and is the chairman. The other citizens of the
United States on the panel are Ada Louise Huxtable, author and
architectural critic; and the architect Kevin Roche of Hamden, Connecticut,
who received the Pritzker Prize in 1982. Serving as jurors from other
countries are Jacob Rothschild, chairman of the board of trustees of the
National Gallery of Art in London, England; architects Ricardo Legorretaof
Mexico City and Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo, Japan; and from Torino, Italy,
Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat.
Bill Lacy, secretary to the jury and former president of the Cooper Union for
the Advancement of Science and Art, announced the selection with a
citation from the jury that reads as follows:
"As we approach a decade of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, it seems
appropriate to celebrate that milepost by honoring two masters of modern
architecture to whom the profession owes so much. The sharing of the prize
is unprecedented, but entirely warranted as a tribute to architects from
North and South America whose work has had worldwide influence in this
century, and doubtless will continue into the future."
The citation continues, "The distinguished careers of Oscar Niemeyer and
Gordon Bunshaft parallel the story of twentieth century architecture. Each
using a different palette, following sometimes the same and sometimes
different mentors, shaping their visions of the built environment in different
hemispheres, they have brought new dimension to the art that the Pritzker
Prize celebrates. The flowing curve and precise geometry characterize their
respective design approaches.
"Niemeyer's buildings are the distillation of the colors and light and sensual
imagery of his native Brazil. His is an architecture of artistic gesture with
underlying logic and substance.
"Bunshaft has created a rich inventory of projects that set a timeless
standard for buildings in the urban/corporate world. In a career that has
spanned forty years of accomplishment, he has demonstrated an
understanding of contemporary technology and materials in the making of
great architecture that is unsurpassed.
"Both men represent the philosophy of modernism that has given form to
the singular resources of the twentieth century. A great debt is owed to
these two men by their fellow architects as well as 'the public they serve. In
awarding this prize for lifetimes of achievement, we," concludes the jury
citation, "gratefully acknowledge that debt."
The first Pritzker Architecture Prize went to Philip Johnson in 1979. Kevin
Roche, leoh Ming Pei, and Richard Meier complete the list of prior U.S.
winners. Last year, Kenzo Tange of Japan received the prize, joining the list
of international architects, Gottfried Bhm of the Federal Republic of
Germany, Hans Hollein of Austria, James Stirling of Great Britain, and Luis
Barragn of Mexico.
Bill Lacy, secretary to the jury, added, "With the addition of the names
Bunshaft and Niemeyer to this list, the Pritzker Prize confirms that these two
illustrious architects will have a place in the story something their
outstanding buildings have already assured."
Biography
Gordon Bunshaft (1909-1990) has been credited with opening a whole new
era of skyscraper design with his first major design project in 1952, the 24-
story Lever House in New York. Many consider it the keystone of establishing
the International Style as corporate America's standard in architecture, at
least through the 1970s. In recent years, it has been declared a historic
landmark, New York's most contemporary structure to hold that distinction.
The late Lewis Mumford described Lever House in The New Yorker in glowing
terms, "It says all that can be said, delicately, accurately, elegantly, with
surfaces of glass, with ribs of steel...an impeccable achievement."
In reviewing the Johnson Library for The New York Times, Ada Louise
Huxtable described it as a new form of memorial, saying, "Architecture as
art and symbol is one of civilization's oldest games, and Mr. Bunshaft is one
of its most dedicated players."
Gordon Bunshaft was born in 1909 in Buffalo, New York. He studied
architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning his
bachelor's degree in 1933 and his master's degree in 1935. Bunshaft was
awarded both the MIT Honorary Traveling Fellowship and the Rotch Traveling
Fellowship, which allowed him to travel in Europe from 1935 until 1937.
Upon his return to the United States he took a job in the New York with
Edward Durell Stone. After a brief stint with Stone, he joined Louis Skidmore
of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he worked until 1942. One of his
earliest assignments was to work on designs for some of the buildings for
the New York World Fair of 1939. World War II intervened with Mr. Bunshaft
serving in the Army Corps of Engineers and upon his return in 1946 he
rejoined SOM, where he remained until 1979.
He was a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and served on the President's
Commission of Fine Arts (1963-72). Bunshaft was elected to the College of
Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 1958. He received the
Brunner Memorial Prize, the Gold Medal from the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters (1984), the Medal of Honor from the New York
chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the Pritzker Architecture
Prize (1988).
His last project before retiring from SOM was the National Commercial Bank
in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, completed in 1983. At three different levels, on
each side of the building are loggias that Mr. Bunshaft called "gardens in the
air." He acknowledged, "I think this is one of my best and most unique
projects."

Jury Citation
Gordon Bunshaft is an architect of modest claims and significant deeds.
When he states that he prefers that his buildings speak for him, he has
chosen eloquent spokesmen. From the landmark Lever House in New York
City to his crowning achievement in Saudi Arabia, his forty years of
designing masterpieces of modern architecture demonstrate an
understanding of contemporary technology and materials that is
unsurpassed.
His astute perception that architecture is a joint venture between client and
designer has generated mutual respect, and creative collaborations
producing great building with an appropriate fusion of humanity and
functionality for the people who inhabit and use his structures.
Perhaps no other architect has set such a timeless standard in the
urban/corporate world, a standard by which future generations will judge
this era, no doubt with acclaim, thanks to his abilities. Already
acknowledged by peers and critics of his own era, the bestowing of the
Pritzker Architecture Prize reaffirms his place in history for a lifetime of
creativity in beautifying and uplifting the environment.

Essay
On Awarding the Prize
by Ada Louise Huxtable
A lifetime in architecture is both short and long. It is short enough to build a
distinguished body of work that is clearly and unmistakably of its own time,
with the strengths and weaknesses that this implies, and long enough for
the ideals and principles upon which that work was built to go out of style. It
does not quite take a lifetime for tastes and beliefs to change. What does
not change is the quality of the work, and the passion and predictability with
which the present rejects the very recent past.
At a time when reputations are seesawing in and out of history, with the
modernists heading the list of outs, the selection of Gordon Bunshaft and
Oscar Niemeyer for this prize may seem reactionary to some, a bow to
nostalgia, or a rebuke to the new. To fly in the face of fashion, however, by
honoring two modernist masters while criticism is focusing on the revealed
flaws of the modern movement, is more of a radical than a reactionary act.
By suggesting the need to reassess, rather than to reject, the philosophy
and practice of the recent past, the intention is to make a revisionist gesture
as much as to bestow an overdue honor.
The award acknowledges the quality and importance of two parallel and
complementary contributions. Bunshaft and Niemeyer represent the
opposite sides of the modernist cointhe rational and the romantic, the
powerful and the poetic. A continent and culture apart, they have had a
profound impact through buildings that have defined twentieth century life
and architecture in a significant and irreversible way. Both have been
committed to the vocabulary and the ideals of Le Corbusier and Mies van
der Rohe and a movement that altered the nature of building, and of its
response to the technological and other factors that have made this century
unlike any other.
Gordon Bunshaft has defined the corporate headquarters building, a
structure as important for our commercial culture as the palace and the
church were for an earlier royal or religious age, with consummate art and
skill. If we demur at the symbolism we deny reality; it does not make these
suave skin skyscrapers and stunning office palazzi less dazzling
achievements. If Brasilia is trapped in the errors of early urban theory,
Niemeyer's domestic and recreational designs, in which flowing, free-form
spaces are so perfectly married to the exotic landscapes of Roberto Burle-
Marx, demonstrate a lyricism and a language unique in time and place.
Together, these two architects summarize and signify the range and
character of the modern movement. They have helped define and shape the
century's art and institutions.
In the haste to move on to another century, we often fail to understand our
own. It is appropriate to recognize a lifetime of work, while the life, and the
work, can still be celebrated.
Ceremony
The Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois
The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879 as both a museum and school,
opened on its present site in the heart of Chicago in 1893. Throughout its
history, it has grown extensively in response to the additions to its world-
renowned collections and expanding programs. The original building,
designed by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge forms the main entrance on
Michigan Avenue. However, other architects and firms such as Howard Van
Doren Shaw, Skidmore Owing & Merrill, Tom Beeby, C.F. Murphy Associates,
Dan Kiley, Renzo Piano, and others have made significant contributions this
institution.
When the Chicago Stock Exchange (189394) was demolished in 1972, one
of citys most important landmarks designed by Louis Sullivan with his
partner, Dankmar Adler, there was strong public outcry. Sections of
Sullivan's elaborate stenciled decorations, molded plaster capitals, and art
glass were preserved from the Trading Room, the magnificent centerpiece of
the original 13-story structure. Using these fragments, the Art Institute was
able to reconstruct the Trading Room in its new wing in 197677. The arch
from the main entrance of the Stock Exchange Building was also preserved
and graces the Art Institutes campus in homage to the original landmark.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremonies from both 1982 and 1988 took
place at the Art Institute of Chicago. The 1982 ceremony consisted of an
open air reception and ceremony and dinner in the Stock Exchange trading
Room. The 1998 presentation was officially made at a luncheon within the
museum.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Gordon Bunshaft
In 1928, I entered the MIT School of Architecture and started my
architectural trip. Today, 60 years later, I've been given the Pritzker
Architecture Prize for which I thank the Pritzker family and the distinguished
members of the selection committee for honoring me with this prestigious
award. It is the capstone of my life in architecture. That's it.

Ceremony Speech
Jay A. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
Our other laureate, Gordon Bunshafts 40 years of building began with a
now historic landmark in New York, Lever House and includes such famous
designs as the Hirshhorn in Washington, the LBJ Library in Texas and his own
favorite, his last design before retiring from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the
National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Gordon, if you will come
forward on behalf of my family wed like to present this symbol of the prize.
Oscar Niemeyer
1988 Laureate
Selected Works:
Congress (Chamber of Deputies and Congress Office Towers), Brasilia, Brasil,
1960
Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil, 1970
Niteri Contemporary Art Museum, Niteroi, Brazil, 1996

Announcement
The Pritzker Architecture Prize Celebrates its Tenth Anniversary Honoring
Two Laureates for 1988
Two architects, Gordon Bunshaft and Oscar Niemeyer, from North and South
America respectively, whose works have been among the most influential
and recognized in this century have been named Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureates of 1988. The awards will be presented on Monday, May 23, at a
ceremony at The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, which established the
prize in 1979, commented, "We are delighted that the jury has used the
occasion of the tenth anniversary of the prize to honor, not one, but two
masters of modern architecture."
Niemeyer, who lives in Rio de Janeiro and will be 81 this year, is perhaps
best known for designing most of the buildings in Brasilia, the capital city of
Brazil. He began his career in 1936, achieving his first taste of international
acclaim in a collaboration with Le Corbusier on the building for the Ministry
of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro. It attracted worldwide attention at
the time as one of the first buildings to express the emerging concepts of
the modern architectural movement. In thr late forties, the two again
worked together on the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. He is
the sixth architect from outside the United States to receive the prize.
Bunshaft, who celebrates his seventy-ninth birthday this year lives in New
York City. He has designed many buildings there, one of which, Lever House,
has been declared an historic landmark, and which Bunshaft calls "my first
real building." The sixty-story Chase Manhattan Bank, the Union Carbide
Building, and the original PepsiCo building are all Bunshaft additions to the
New York skyline. In Washington, D.C., the Hirshhorn Museum has become a
familiar addition to the cultural landscape. In his hometown of Buffalo, New
York, he designed another art museum, the addition to the Albright-Knox Art
Gallery, described by another Pritzker Laureate as "the most beautiful
museum in the world." In Texas, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, and at
Yale, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, add to 'the distinction
of their designer, whose career at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, New York
spanned over four decades. His last building for that firm before retiring was
one he calls "one of my best and most unique projects," the National
Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The Purpose of the prize is to honor annually a living architect 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.
The prize consists of a $100,000 grant, a formal citation certificate, and a
medallion. When the Pritzker family established the prize, they wanted to
honor a creative endeavor not included in the Nobel Prizes. They modeled
their procedures and rewards after the latter. As with the Nobels, the two
Pritzker Laureates chosen by the jury in 1988 will share the prize equally.
The nominating procedure is continuous from year to year, with the final
selection being made by an international jury with all deliberation,
procedures and voting in secret.
The jury for the 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize consisted of J. Carter Brown,
director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., who has served
as juror since its founding, and is the chairman. The other citizens of the
United States on the panel are Ada Louise Huxtable, author and
architectural critic; and the architect Kevin Roche of Hamden, Connecticut,
who received the Pritzker Prize in 1982. Serving as jurors from other
countries are Jacob Rothschild, chairman of the board of trustees of the
National Gallery of Art in London, England; architects Ricardo Legorretaof
Mexico City and Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo, Japan; and from Torino, Italy,
Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat.
Bill Lacy, secretary to the jury and former president of the Cooper Union for
the Advancement of Science and Art, announced the selection with a
citation from the jury that reads as follows:
"As we approach a decade of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, it seems
appropriate to celebrate that milepost by honoring two masters of modern
architecture to whom the profession owes so much. The sharing of the prize
is unprecedented, but entirely warranted as a tribute to architects from
North and South America whose work has had worldwide influence in this
century, and doubtless will continue into the future."
The citation continues, "The distinguished careers of Oscar Niemeyer and
Gordon Bunshaft parallel the story of twentieth century architecture. Each
using a different palette, following sometimes the same and sometimes
different mentors, shaping their visions of the built environment in different
hemispheres, they have brought new dimension to the art that the Pritzker
Prize celebrates. The flowing curve and precise geometry characterize their
respective design approaches.
"Niemeyer's buildings are the distillation of the colors and light and sensual
imagery of his native Brazil. His is an architecture of artistic gesture with
underlying logic and substance.
"Bunshaft has created a rich inventory of projects that set a timeless
standard for buildings in the urban/corporate world. In a career that has
spanned forty years of accomplishment, he has demonstrated an
understanding of contemporary technology and materials in the making of
great architecture that is unsurpassed.
"Both men represent the philosophy of modernism that has given form to
the singular resources of the twentieth century. A great debt is owed to
these two men by their fellow architects as well as 'the public they serve. In
awarding this prize for lifetimes of achievement, we," concludes the jury
citation, "gratefully acknowledge that debt."
The first Pritzker Architecture Prize went to Philip Johnson in 1979. Kevin
Roche, leoh Ming Pei, and Richard Meier complete the list of prior U.S.
winners. Last year, Kenzo Tange of Japan received the prize, joining the list
of international architects, Gottfried Bhm of the Federal Republic of
Germany, Hans Hollein of Austria, James Stirling of Great Britain, and Luis
Barragn of Mexico.
Bill Lacy, secretary to the jury, added, "With the addition of the names
Bunshaft and Niemeyer to this list, the Pritzker Prize confirms that these two
illustrious architects will have a place in the story something their
outstanding buildings have already assured."

Biography
Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012) was born in the hillside district of Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. Niemeyers
architecture, conceived as lyrical sculpture, expands on the principles and
innovations of Le Corbusier to become a kind of free-form sculpture.
In 1938-39 he designed the Brazilian Pavilion for the New York Worlds Fair in
collaboration with Lucio Costa. His celebrated career began to blossom with
his involvement with the Ministry of Education and Health (1945) in Rio de
Janeiro. Niemeyers mentor, Lucio Costa, architect, urban planner, and
renowned pioneer of Modern architecture in Brazil, led a group of young
architects who collaborated with Le Corbusier to design the building which
became a landmark of modern Brazilian architecture. It was while Niemeyer
was working on this project that he met the mayor of Brazil's wealthiest
state, Juscelino Kubitschek, who would later become President of Brazil. As
President, he appointed Niemeyer in 1956 to be the chief architect of
Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, his designs complementing Lucio Costas
overall plans. The designs for many buildings in Brasilia would occupy much
of his time for many years.

"As an architect," he states, "my concern in Brasilia was to find a structural

solution that would characterize the city's architecture. So I did my very best
in the structures, trying to make them different with their columns narrow,
so narrow that the palaces would seem to barely touch the ground. And I set
them apart from the facades, creating an empty space through which, as I
bent over my work table, I could see myself walking, imagining their forms
and the different resulting points of view they would provoke.
Internationally, he collaborated with Le Corbusier again on the design for
the United Nations Headquarters (1947-53) in New York, contributing
significantly to the siting and final design of the buildings. His own residence
(1953) in Rio de Janeiro has become a landmark. In the 1950s, he designed
an Aeronautical Research Center near Sao Paulo. In Europe, he undertook an
office building for Renault and the Communist Party Headquarters (1965)
both in Paris, a cultural centre for Le Havre (1972), and in Italy, the
Mondadori Editorial Office (1968) in Milan and the FATA Office Building
(1979) in Turin. In Algiers, he designed the Zoological Gardens, the
University of Constantine, and the Foreign Office.
"I have always," says Niemeyer, "accepted and respected all other schools
of architecture, from the chill and elemental structures of Mies van der Rohe
to the imagination and delirium of Gaudi. I must design what pleases me in
a way that is naturally linked to my roots and the country of my origin.
Niemeyer continues:
When I started to design the Museum of Modern Art for Niteroi, I already had
an idea in mind. An abstract circular form above the landscape, and the site
free of other constructions to better emphasize the building. I did not want
to repeat the usual solutions of a cylinder above another, but to move in the
direction of the design for the Caracas Museum (a design by Niemeyer from
1954), creating a line that would rise with curves and straight lines from the
ground up to the roof. The exhibition hall would be surrounded by straight
wallsI did not want it glazedbut with exits for the external gallery that
would encircle it, integrating it in the magnificent panorama.
As often happens, this solution calling for a central support sustaining only
the exhibition room was modified. With the addition of one meter in height
on the radial beams, measuring one meter and a half, we would add a new
floor, including the 'foyer,' the reception room, the auditorium, work rooms,
library and bathrooms. This would result in a more complete and economical
project.
My architecture followed the old examples -beauty prevailing over the
limitations of the constructive logic. My work proceeded, indifferent to the
unavoidable criticism set forth by those who take the trouble to examine the
minimum details, so very true of what mediocrity is capable of. It was
enough to think of Le Corbusier saying to me once while standing on the
ramp of the Congress: `There is invention here'.
Although semi-retired, he still works at the drawing board and welcomes
young architects from all over the world. He hopes to instill in them the
sensitivity to aesthetics that allowed him to strive for beauty in the
manipulation of architectural forms.

Jury Citation
There is a moment in a nation's history when one individual captures the
essence of that culture and gives it form. It is sometimes in music, painting,
sculpture, or literature. In Brazil, Oscar Niemeyer has captured that essence
with his architecture. His building designs are the distillation of colors, light
and sensual imagery of his native land.
Although associated primarily with his major masterpiece, Brasilia, the
capital city of Brazil, he had achieved early recognition from one of his
mentors, Le Corbusier, going on to collaborate with him on one of the most
important symbolic structures in the world, the United Nations
Headquarters.

Recognized as one of the first to pioneer new concepts in architecture in this

hemisphere, his designs are artistic gesture with underlying logic and
substance. His pursuit of great architecture linked to roots of his native land
has resulted in new plastic forms and a lyricism in buildings, not only in
Brazil, but around the world. For his lifetime achievements, the Pritzker
Architecture Prize is bestowed.

Essay
On Awarding the Prize
by Ada Louise Huxtable
A lifetime in architecture is both short and long. It is short enough to build a
distinguished body of work that is clearly and unmistakably of its own time,
with the strengths and weaknesses that this implies, and long enough for
the ideals and principles upon which that work was built to go out of style. It
does not quite take a lifetime for tastes and beliefs to change. What does
not change is the quality of the work, and the passion and predictability with
which the present rejects the very recent past.
At a time when reputations are seesawing in and out of history, with the
modernists heading the list of outs, the selection of Gordon Bunshaft and
Oscar Niemeyer for this prize may seem reactionary to some, a bow to
nostalgia, or a rebuke to the new. To fly in the face of fashion, however, by
honoring two modernist masters while criticism is focusing on the revealed
flaws of the modern movement, is more of a radical than a reactionary act.
By suggesting the need to reassess, rather than to reject, the philosophy
and practice of the recent past, the intention is to make a revisionist gesture
as much as to bestow an overdue honor.
The award acknowledges the quality and importance of two parallel and
complementary contributions. Bunshaft and Niemeyer represent the
opposite sides of the modernist cointhe rational and the romantic, the
powerful and the poetic. A continent and culture apart, they have had a
profound impact through buildings that have defined twentieth century life
and architecture in a significant and irreversible way. Both have been
committed to the vocabulary and the ideals of Le Corbusier and Mies van
der Rohe and a movement that altered the nature of building, and of its
response to the technological and other factors that have made this century
unlike any other.
Gordon Bunshaft has defined the corporate headquarters building, a
structure as important for our commercial culture as the palace and the
church were for an earlier royal or religious age, with consummate art and
skill. If we demur at the symbolism we deny reality; it does not make these
suave skin skyscrapers and stunning office palazzi less dazzling
achievements. If Brasilia is trapped in the errors of early urban theory,
Niemeyer's domestic and recreational designs, in which flowing, free-form
spaces are so perfectly married to the exotic landscapes of Roberto Burle-
Marx, demonstrate a lyricism and a language unique in time and place.
Together, these two architects summarize and signify the range and
character of the modern movement. They have helped define and shape the
century's art and institutions.
In the haste to move on to another century, we often fail to understand our
own. It is appropriate to recognize a lifetime of work, while the life, and the
work, can still be celebrated.

Ceremony
The Art Institute, Chicago, Illinois
The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879 as both a museum and school,
opened on its present site in the heart of Chicago in 1893. Throughout its
history, it has grown extensively in response to the additions to its world-
renowned collections and expanding programs. The original building,
designed by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge forms the main entrance on
Michigan Avenue. However, other architects and firms such as Howard Van
Doren Shaw, Skidmore Owing & Merrill, Tom Beeby, C.F. Murphy Associates,
Dan Kiley, Renzo Piano, and others have made significant contributions this
institution.

When the Chicago Stock Exchange (189394) was demolished in 1972, one
of citys most important landmarks designed by Louis Sullivan with his
partner, Dankmar Adler, there was strong public outcry. Sections of
Sullivan's elaborate stenciled decorations, molded plaster capitals, and art
glass were preserved from the Trading Room, the magnificent centerpiece of
the original 13-story structure. Using these fragments, the Art Institute was
able to reconstruct the Trading Room in its new wing in 197677. The arch
from the main entrance of the Stock Exchange Building was also preserved
and graces the Art Institutes campus in homage to the original landmark.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremonies from both 1982 and 1988 took
place at the Art Institute of Chicago. The 1982 ceremony consisted of an
open air reception and ceremony and dinner in the Stock Exchange trading
Room. The 1998 presentation was officially made at a luncheon within the
museum.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Oscar Niemeyer
First were the thick stone walls, the arches, then the domes and vaultsof
the architect, searching out for wider spaces.
Now it is concrete-reinforced that gives our imagination flight with its
soaring spans and uncommon cantilevers. Concrete, to which architecture is
integrated, through which it is able to discard the foregone conclusions of
rationalism, with its monotony and repetitious solutions.
A concern for beauty, a zest for fantasy, and an ever-present element of
surprise bear witness that today's architecture is not a minor craft bound to
straight-edge rules, but an architecture imbued with technology: light,
creative and unfettered, seeking out its architectural scene.
As Charles Baudelaire once said, "The unexpected, the irregular, the
surprise, the amazing are an essential part and characteristic of beauty."
And this, my friends, is what I have to say about architecture, a practice that
has held me fast over the years, to my drawing board, at the beck and call
of governments in compliance with the ruling classes, indignant at the
misery that weighs upon a world socially unjust, a misery ignored, which our
profession is powerless to better.
It is with regret that I am unable to attend the ceremony, and with great
pleasure that I receive the prize with which I have been honored.
Ceremony Speech
Jay A. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
If theres one thing Ive discovered in the first decade of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize, its that architecture has always been the orphaned art.
Its tended to be anonymous throughout history. Few scholars can tell us
who designed the Parthenon or the Great Pyramids or many other
landmarks of civilization, and yet these and other great structures
throughout our history are the books that everyone reads unconsciously and
generally remember. Its not surprising that John Ruskin called architecture
the printing press of all ages. Were all concerned with it and hence the
origin of the prize, ten years ago, to encourage great architecture. What is
surprising for such an anonymous art is that so much has been written
about it by so many. Coleridge said, Architecture exhibits the greatest
extent of the difference from nature that may exist in works of art. It
involves all the powers of design and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It
shows the greatness of man and should at the same time teach him
humility.
Today in all humility were here to honor the greatness of two men. Two
masters of modern architecture both of the western hemisphere; one from
North America, the other from South America. This is the first time two
laureates have been named in the same year but were delighted that the
jury has used this tenth anniversary to bestow double honors. Each of these
laureates is unique. Each uses a different palate to shape their visions of the
built environment. Our distinguished laureate from Brazil, Oscar Niemeyer,
is perhaps most famous for his countrys capital city, Brasilia. Hes also well
known for his work on the UN headquarters. Unfortunately, he couldnt be
with us today but his daughter, Anna Maria and his grandson, Oscar, are
here as his representatives. At this time, wed like to present the symbol of
the Pritzker Architecture prize, a medallion derived from designs of one of
Chicagos favorite architects, Louis Sullivan. Anna Maria, would you step
forward, please?
Frank Gehry
1989 Laureate

Selected Works:
Gehry Residence, Santa Monica, California, 1978
California Aerospace Museum, Los Angeles, California, 1984
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, 1997
DZ Bank, Berlin, Germany, 1999
Pritzker Pavilion, Chicago, Illinois, 2004

Announcement
California Architect Frank Gehry Named 1989 Laureate of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize
Frank Gehry of Santa Monica, California has been selected as the twelfth
Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate. Although born in Canada, he became a
citizen of the United States in 1950. He is the sixth American to receive the
prestigious prize since it was established by The Hyatt Foundation in 1979.
Architects from six other countries have also been so honored in the past
decade.
The prize, consisting of a $100,000 grant, a medallion and formal certificate,
will be presented in a ceremony on May 18 in Nara, Japan at Todai-Ji
Buddhist Temple, the world's largest and oldest wooden structure, with the
status of a National Treasure in that country.
Having just celebrated his sixtieth birthday, Gehry has achieved
considerable fame in recent years due in part to some of his more unusual
projects, making use of materials such as chain link fencing, cardboard, and
corrugated metal in unorthodox ways. His own home in Santa Monica is a
well-known example.
Gehry received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Southern
California in 1954, with further study at the Harvard Graduate School of
Design in 1956 and 1957.
His career was launched with the design of a highly regarded Los Angeles
landmark, the Danziger Studio/Residence in 1964. A retrospective exhibition
of his work, organized by the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, Minnesota,
toured major museums over the past two years, drawing record crowds.
In Los Angeles, the recent awarding of a commission to design the Walt
Disney Concert Hall for the Music Center, estimated to cost one hundred
million dollars to some of his more unusual projects, brought him added
acclaim. In the past year, he has also received a commission for a major
high-rise building for Progressive Corporation in Cleveland, and he won the
competition for another in New York.
Gehry has received more than 25 national and regional AIA Awards, the
Brunner Prize, and many others. He is a much sought after lecturer for
museums, architecture societies and universities. In addition to his building
designs, he has become widely known for his cardboard furniture concepts,
and for designing museum exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Artfrom Art Treasures of Japan to the Treasures of Tutankhamun as well as
for the works of contemporary artists.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, announced the 1989
choice of the jury, saying, "The great body of work of architect Frank Gehry,
which includes residences, museums, libraries, schools, shops, concert halls,
restaurants, all manner of public buildings, and even a hay barn,
demonstrates a range of styles that defies classification, but certainly
warrants recognition for his contributions to the art of architecture."
Bill Lacy secretary to the jury, reported the formal citation from the selection
panel, that reads as follows: "In an artistic climate that too often looks
backward rather than toward the future, where retrospectives are more
prevalent than risk-taking, it is important to honor the architecture of Frank
Gehry.

Refreshingly original and totally American, proceeding as it does from his

populist Southern California perspective, Gehry's work is a highly refined,
sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic that emphasizes the art of
architecture.
Bill Lacy, the executive director of the Pritzker Prize, wrote in his 1991 book,
100 Contemporary Architects, As an architect/philosopher/artist, Dutchman
Rem Koolhaas has expanded and continues to expand our perceptions of
cities and civilization.
Refreshingly original and totally American, proceeding as it does from his
populist Southern California perspective, Gehry's work is a highly refined,
sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic that emphasizes the art of
architecture.
His sometimes controversial, but always arresting body of work, has been
variously described as iconoclastic, rambunctious and impermanent, but the
jury in making this award, commends this rest less spirit that has made his
buildings a unique expression of contemporary society and its ambivalent
values.
Gehry's architecture reflects his keen appreciation for the same social forces
that have informed the work of outstanding artists through history, including
many contemporaries with whom he often collaborates. His designs, if
compared to American music, could best be likened to Jazz, replete with
improvisation and a lively unpredictable spirit.
Always open to experimentation, he has as well a sureness and maturity
that resists, in the same way that Picasso did, being bound either by critical
acceptance or his successes. His buildings are juxtaposed collages of spaces
and materials that make users appreciative of both the theatre and the
back-stage, simultaneously revealed.
Although the prize is for a lifetime of achievement, the jury hopes Mr. Gehry
will view it as encouragement for continuing an extraordinary 'work in
progress,' as well as for his significant contributions thus far to the
architecture of the twentieth century."
The jury that selected Gehry consists of its chairman and founding member,
J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.;
and (alphabetically) Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat, from Torino, Italy Ada
Louise Huxtable, author and architectural critic of New York; architect
Ricardo Legorreta of Mexico City; 1982 Laureate/architect Kevin Roche of
Hamden, Connecticut; and Jacob Rothschild, chair man of the board of
trustees of the National Gallery of Art in London, England.

Biography
Frank Gehry considers the recently commissioned Walt Disney Concert Hall
in Los Angeles to be his first major project in his hometown. No stranger to
music, he has a long association with the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Orchestra, having worked to improve the acoustics of the Hollywood Bowl.
He also designed the Concord Amphitheatre in northern California, and yet
another much earlier in his career in Columbia, Maryland, the Merriweather
Post Pavilion of Music.
The Museum of Contemporary Art selected him to convert an old warehouse
into its Temporary Contemporary (1983) exhibition space while the
permanent museum was being built. It has received high praise, and
remains in use today. On a much smaller scale, but equally as effective,
Gehry remodeled what was once an ice warehouse in Santa Monica, adding
some other buildings to the site, into a combination art museum/retail and
office complex.
The belief that "architecture is art" has been a part of Frank Gehry's being
for as long as he can remember. In fact, when asked if he had any mentors
or idols in the history of architecture, his reply was to pick up a Brancusi
photograph on his desk, saying, "Actually, I tend to think more in terms of
artists like this. He has had more influence on my work than most architects.
In fact, someone suggested that my skyscraper that won a New York
competition looked like a Brancusi sculpture. I could name Alvar Aalto from
the architecture world as someone for whom I have great respect, and of
course, Philip Johnson."

Born in Canada in 1929, Gehry is today a naturalized U.S. citizen. In 1954,

he graduated from the University of Southern California and began working
full time with Victor Gruen Associates, where he had been apprenticing part-
time while still in school. After a year in the army, he was admitted to
Harvard Graduate School of Design to study urban planning. When he
returned to Los Angeles, he briefly worked for Pereira and Luckman, and
then rejoined Gruen where he stayed until 1960.
In 1961, Gehry and family, which by now included two daughters, moved to
Paris where he worked in the office of Andre Remondet. His French
education in Canada was an enormous help. During that year of living in
Europe, he studied works by LeCorbusier, Balthasar Neumann, and was
attracted to the French Roman churches. In 1962, he returned to Los
Angeles and set up his own firm.
He has said on more than one occasion, "Personally, I hate chain link. I got
involved with it because it was inevitably being used around my buildings. If
you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
A project in 1979 illustrates his use of chain-link fencing in the construction
of the Cabrillo Marine Museum, a 20,000 square foot compound of buildings
that he "laced together" with chain-link fencing. These "shadow structures"
as Gehry calls them, bind together the parts of the museum.
Santa Monica Place, begun in 1973, has one outside wall that is nearly 300
feet long, six stories tall and hung with a curtain of chain link; a second
layer over it in a different color spells out the name of the mall.
For a time, Gehry's work used "unfinished" qualities as a part of the design.
As Paul Goldberger, New York Times Architecture Critic described it, "Mr.
Gehry's architecture is known for its reliance on harsh, unfinished materials
and its juxtaposition of simple, almost primal, geometric forms...(His) work is
vastly more intelligent and controlled than it sounds to the uninitiated; he is
an architect of immense gifts who dances on the line separating architecture
from art but who manages never to let himself fall."
One building in progress since 1985 is the Chiat/Day Office for Venice,
California. The proposed three-story, 75,000 square foot building will sit
above three underground levels of parking for 300 cars. The entry to the
building is through a pair of 45-foot tall binoculars designed by Oldenburg
and his wife Coosje van Bruggen. The shafts of the binoculars will contain an
office and a library.
A guesthouse he designed in 1983 for a home in Wayzata, Minnesota that
had been designed by Philip Johnson in 1952 proved a challenge that critics
agree Gehry met and conquered. The guesthouse is actually a grouping of
one-room buildings that appear as a collection of sculptural pieces.
In 1988, he did a monument to mark the centennial of the Sheet Metal
Workers' International Association. It was built by 600 volunteers from the
union in the cavernous central hall of the National Building Museum
(formerly known as the Pension Building) in Washington, D.C. The 65-foot
high construction was galvanized stainless steel, anodized aluminum, brass
and copper.
There is an interesting note regarding a statement Gehry prepared for the
1980 edition of Contemporary Architects , Gehry states, "I approach each
building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air,
a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this
container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and
interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can't do that, I've failed."

Jury Citation
In an artistic climate that too often looks backward rather than toward the
future, where retrospectives are more prevalent than risk-taking, it is
important to honor the architecture of Frank O. Gehry.
Refreshingly original and totally American, proceeding as it does from his
populist Southern California perspective, Gehry's work is a highly refined,
sophisticated and adventurous aesthetic that emphasizes the art of
architecture.

His sometimes controversial, but always arresting body of work, has been
variously described as iconoclastic, rambunctious and impermanent, but the
jury, in making this award, commends this restless spirit that has made his
buildings a unique expression of contemporary society and its ambivalent
values.
Always open to experimentation, he has as well a sureness and maturity
that resists, in the same way that Picasso did, being bound either by critical
acceptance or his successes. His buildings are juxtaposed collages of spaces
and materials that make users appreciative of both the theatre and the
back-stage, simultaneously revealed.
Although the prize is for a lifetime of achievement, the jury hopes Mr. Gehry
will view it as encouragement for continuing an extraordinary "work in
progress," as well as for his significant contributions thus far to the
architecture of the twentieth century.

Essay
On Awarding the Prize
by Ada Louise Huxtable
For Frank Gehry, like most architects, the art of building is a serious and
searching business. He pursues his muse with love and frustration, with a
sense of discovery in each undertaking, and an exceptional set of skills. At a
time when retro reigns, he follows the modernist route of an original vision
that postmodern traditionalists have tried so hard to give a bad name. He
takes chances; he works close to the edge; he pushes boundaries beyond
previous limits. There are times when he misses the mark, and times when
the breakthrough achieved alters everyone else's vision as well. And he
believes, as most architects do, that it is always the next project that will
realize his aims and ideals his own.
For those that work this wayexploring levels of philosophy and practice
that renew both the spirit and meaning of an ancient artthere is a quiet,
but genuine joy that is the architect's secret elixir. Delight breaks through
constantly; there are no gloomy Gehry buildings. One cannot think of
anything he has done that doesnt make one smile. There are the fish, as
pure sculpture or useful objects, ornamental or occupied, luminous or
glistening, a piscine preoccupation that has led to lamps, anthropomorphic
restaurants and skyscraper towers. There is the furniture of corrugated
cardboard, a welcome old shoebox presence, ingratiatingly paper-pompous
and comfortably user-friendly. There is wit, but no fashionable in-jokes or
one-liners; these are light and lively designs and buildings that lift the spirit
with revelations of how the seemingly ordinary can become extraordinary by
acts of imagination that turn the known into new configurations that engage
the mind and eye, that explore unexpected definitions of use and style. For
Frank Gehry, these explorations characteristically take place at the point
where architecture and sculpture meet in anxious and uneasy confrontation;
this is the difficult, dangerous and uncharted area that he has made his
own. That he has reconciled art and utility in a handsome, workable and
intensely personal synthesis of form and function is his singular
achievement. Gehry's work takes architecture a significant step farther as
an evolving, challenging and creative art.
But there is more to Gehry's work than an adventurous spirit and original
imagery. He combines building elements on a site in a way that is not only
intriguingly sculptural but also innovatively contextual, whether it is the
small gem of a law school at Loyola University in Los Angeles, an ambitious
American cultural center in Paris, or a commercial complex that suddenly
sparks a humdrum block. What may look like arbitrary, and to some, off-
putting, abstract geometry outside reveals itself inside as a series of
unusual and inviting relationships achieved through a thoughtful analysis of
the program in terms of a multidimensional concept of sensuously
orchestrated space.
If there are many facets to Gehry's work, there are also several Gehrys.
There is the media Gehry as defined and promoted by the press: the casual,
laid-back Californian whose work is touted as fashionably "pop" or "punk,"
who uses funny materialschain link, exposed pipe, corrugated aluminum,
utility-grade construction boardin a funky, easy, West Coast way. The
image is part of the media-chic of Venice and the seductive charms of Santa
Monica, the places he has made his habitat; this is nouveau California at the
cutting-edge of style. It is the fashion to admire his offbeat spirit but to
wonder how well the work will travel.
And then there is the real Frank Gehry, who is all and none of this: an
admirer of the quirky, the accidental and the absurd, tuned in to the
transient nature of much contemporary culture, while he is deeply involved,
personally and professionally, with the world of serious art and artists. There
is a closet elitist, if elitism is equated with a fierce admiration for the great
works of art, architecture and urbanism. Above all, he is an obsessive
perfectionist engaged in a ceaseless and demanding investigation of ways
to unite expressive form and utilitarian function. He practices architecture in
the most timeless and sophisticated sense, but with a very special spin.
The spin is that Gehry's work goes to the heart of the art of our time,
carrying the conceptual and technological achievements of modernism (as
real and instructive as its much better-publicized failures) to the
spectacularly enriched vision that characterizes the 1990s. He builds on the
liberated "box" that Frank Lloyd Wright broke open forever, and the liberates
spaces that Le Corbusier raised to luminous heights. ("Ronchamps humbles
us all," he says.) Gehry continues and personalizes the 20th century
tradition. This is a kind of architecture ultimately made possible and logical
only by modern technologies and lifestyles. He pushes the modern miracle
of radically redefined structure and space into sudden bursts of "pure" form
a surprising exterior stair, a sky-lit room that offers as much abstract art
as illumination in its crowning construction.
In every case, the building is painstakingly programmed, and the program is
the generator, or at least, the co-generator, of the solution. Sometimes the
parts are broken down into the "single room" elements that Gehry favors for
their plastic possibilities. But the choices are never arbitrary; he does not
seek novelty or superficial effect. He does not make sculpture and stuff it
with after-the-fact uses. Nor does he sheathe his unconventional forms and
spaces in trompe l'oeil masonry to suggest a weight and solidity of
construction that are not there. They are wrapped in skins of metal,
plywood, composition board or glass for flexibility and appropriateness of
scale, for transparency, opacity or reflection, for changes of color, climate
and light. As an alchemist of sorts, constantly changing dross into
something less than gold but much more than common aluminum, Gehry
professes to be unsure of what is ugly and what is beautiful. It is irrelevant;
he uses the everyday and ever-present stuff of the expedient and low-cost
construction of our immediate environment for surprising aesthetic
revelations and unexpected elegance. The cultural references of these
materials are as strong as the structural and aesthetic rationale ...

Ceremony
Todai-ji Buddhist Temple, Nara, Japan
Todai-ji, or Eastern Great Temple, a Buddhist temple complex in the city of
Nara, Japan, was originally founded in the year 743. At that time, Buddhism
was at its height and served as a state religion. The best-known statue at
Todai-ji Temple is Buddha Vairocana, known in Japanese as Daibutsu. It is a
giant gilded statue 49 feet tall. It was originally housed in an all-wood
building, the Daibutsu-den, 157 feet in height, reputedly the largest wooden
building in the world of its time. The statue has been recast several times
since for various reasons including earthquake damage, and the temple
rebuilt twice after fire. The current building, finished in 1709 although
immense, is about thirty percent smaller than its predecessor. The temple is
a listed UNESCO World Heritage site as "Historic Monuments of Ancient
Nara," together with seven other sites including temples, shrines, and
places in the city of Nara.
Also built around the middle of the eighth century at Todai-ji, the original
Shosoin, which is an architectural treasure in itself, served as the repository
for the temple treasure. It is made in the Azekura style, a log-house
construction that is often seen in old storehouses: the walls, intersecting at
corners, are built up of hewn logs laid horizontally on top of each other.
Shosoin safeguarded a heritage of around 9,000 different objects that date
back to the seventh and eighth centuries along with numerous works from
overseas, especially from Persia, China, and Korea.
Frank Gehry received the 1989 Pritzker Architecture Prize at the ceremony
at Todai-ji, Nara, Japan.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Colleagues and friends, I am very happy ... I am unbelievably happy ... I love
being here in Japan ... especially today at Todai-ji Temple. Today is a special
honor for me, to receive this important prize.
I am obsessed with architecture. It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself
as an architect, and how best to contribute in this world filled with
contradiction, disparity, and inequality, even passion and opportunity. It is a
world in which our values and priorities are constantly being challenged. It is
simplistic to expect a single right answer. Architecture is a small piece of
this human equation, but for those of us who practice it, we believe in its
potential to make a difference, to enlighten and to enrich the human
experience, to penetrate the barriers of misunderstanding and provide a
beautiful context for life's drama.
I was trained early in my career by a Viennese master to make perfection,
but in my first projects, I was not able to find the craft to achieve that
perfection. My artist friends, people like Jasper Johns, Bob Rauschenberg, Ed
Kienholz, Claes Oldenburg, were working with very inexpensive materials
broken wood and paper, and they were making beauty. These were not
superficial details, they were direct; it raised the question of what was
beautiful. I chose to use the craft available, and to work with the craftsmen
and make a virtue out of their limitations.
Painting had an immediacy that I craved for architecture. I explored the
processes of raw construction materials to try giving feeling and spirit to
form. In trying to find the essence of my own expression, I fantasized the
artist standing before the white canvas deciding what was the first move. I
called it the moment of truth.
Architecture must solve complex problems. We must understand and use
technology, we must create buildings that are safe and dry, respectful of
context and neighbors, and face all the myriad of issues of social
responsibility, and even please the client.
But then what? The moment of truth, the composition of elements, the
selection of forms, scale, materials, color, finally, all the same issues facing
the painter and the sculptor. Architecture is surely an art, and those who
practice the art of architecture are surely architects.
Our problems as architects increase in complexity as time goes on. We have
difficulty with the art of city building. We are finding ways of working
together, artists and architects, architects and architects, clients and
architects. The dream is that each brick, each window, each wall, each road,
each tree will be placed lovingly by craftsmen, client, architect, and people
to create beautiful cities. Adding the extra time and the money at the
beginning is essential. This very temple, Todai-ji, is a symbol of a great
collaborative effort in its time, bringing together many thousands of people
and talents to create incredible and lasting beauty.
It is coincidental but fitting for me to receive the Pritzker Award in Japan.
Trained in Southern California in the presence of many works inspired from
Japanese architectureGreen and Green, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Gordon
Drake, many others. Some of these were my teachers and they trained us to
look at Japanese architecture and understand it. I was seduced by the order
of Ryoanji long before the Parthenon, and to this day, I believe those early
foundations are in my work.
Today, American architects are working in Japan, Japanese architects are
working in America, and all of us are working everywhere around the world.
We are understanding and respecting each other and our values and
cultures.
Today, the Pritzker Prize brings me great honor. Acknowledgment by an
important jury for the work I have been doing is gratifying, but does not
engender complacency. I know these people, the jury that is, they have
expectationsdon't rest on your laurels, get to work.

Former laureates have gone on to do magnificent projects, and that is the

challenge, to do better and finally bring greater honor to this prize, and that
is what I intend to do.
I thank the Pritzker family for supporting architecture with this prize. And to
all the people who have contributed in my life ... to making this honor
possible, the artists and the cultures that inspired me and to my family
whose loving attention and support has been extraordinary.
Since the announcement of this award, I have been asked many times by
reporters what I intend to do with the money. I have said, that of course I'm
going to finish my house and tear down the construction fence.
Aldo Rossi
1990 Laureate

Selected Works:
Drawing for San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, Italy, 1971
La Conica Espresso Coffee Maker, 1982
San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, Italy, 1984
Rebuilding of the Carlo Felice Theatre, Genoa, Italy, 1991
Bonnefanten Museum, Maastrict, Netherlands, 1995
Quartier Schtzenstrasse, Berlin, Germany, 1998

Announcement
Aldo Rossi of Italy Elected 1990 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
Aldo Rossi of Milan, Italy has been selected as the 1990 Pritzker Architecture
Prize Laureate. Twelve architects have been previously named over the past
eleven years, six from the United States and six from other countries. Rossi
is the seventh from the international community to receive the prestigious
prize, acknowledged as the Nobel of architecture.
The prize, consisting of a $100,000 grant, a medallion and formal citation,
will be presented by Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, in a
formal ceremony on Saturday, June 16 at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Italy.
Rossi, who will celebrate his fifty-ninth birthday on May 3, received his
architecture degree in 1959 at the Polytechnic University of Milan. In those
three decades since, he has achieved international recognition not only as a
practicing architect, but also as an artist and author of architectural theories
and urban design concepts.
In recent years, he has completed a number of significant projects around
the world, including the Toronto Lighthouse Theatre in Canada, the 11
Palazzo Hotel and Restaurant Complex in Japan, and in his native Italy
commercial centers, various types of housing, theatres, museums,
cemeteries, schools, and other public buildings. In the United States, he has
completed two projects, one in Galveston, Texas, a monumental arch; and in
Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, the Pocono Pines houses. He has a major
project underway in Coral Gables, Florida, the new School of Architecture for
the University of Miami.
A number of other major works are under construction or design phases in
Japan, France, England, the Netherlands, and West Germany. He has won
design competitions and lectured in major universities around the world
over the past thirty years. In the U.S. alone, he has been a visiting professor
at Harvard, Yale, Cooper Union, and Cornell.
His drawings and paintings have won him acclaim in exhibitions. His designs
for such objects as a coffee pot and furniture have given another added
dimension to his career.
As an architectural and urban design theorist, he wrote The Architecture of
the City in 1966. Originally published in Italy, it has since been translated
into seven languages and has become an international reference on the
subject. His A Scientific Autobiography which was first published in English
in 1981 has provided even further insight to his beliefs.
In announcing the 1990 choice of the Pritzker Prize, Bill Lacy, secretary to
the jury quoted from the formal citation:
"Aldo Rossi, the architect, has achieved acclaim as a theorist, philosopher,
artist and teacher. His words as well as his drawings and buildings have
distinguished him as great. He is a master draftsman, steeped in the
tradition of Italian art and architecture; his sketches and renderings of
buildings have often achieved international recognition long before being
built.
"Rossi has been able to follow the lessons of classical architecture without
copying them; his buildings cavy echoes from the past in their use of forms
that have a universal, haunting quality. His work is at once bold and
ordinary, original without being novel, refreshingly simple in appearance but
extremely complex in content and meaning. In a period of diverse styles and
influences, Aldo Rossi has eschewed the fashionable and popular to create
an architecture singularly his own.
"On a solid foundation of theory, he uses his talents and ability to solve
design problems in memorable and imaginative ways. His influence is
extensive and expands with every new commission. With this honor, Aldo
Rossi joins a dozen architects already singled out for their contributions to
humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture."

Biography
Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) has achieved distinction as a theorist, author, artist,
teacher and architect, in his native Italy as well as internationally. Noted
critic and historian, Vincent Scully, has compared him to Le Corbusier as a
painter-architect. Ada Louise Huxtable, architectural critic and Pritzker juror
has described Rossi as "a poet who happens to be an architect."
Rossi was born in Milan, Italy where his father was engaged in the
manufacture of bicycles, bearing the family name, a business he says was
founded by his grandfather. While growing up during the years of World War
II, Rossis early education took place at Lake Como, and later in Lecco.
Shortly after the war ended, he entered the Milan Polytechnic University,
receiving his architecture degree in 1959. Rossi served as editor of the
Architectural magazine Casabella from 1955 to 1964.
Although early film aspirations were gradually transposed to architecture, he
still retains strong interest in drama. In fact, he says, "In all of my
architecture, I have always been fascinated by the theatre." For the Venice
Biennale in 1979, he designed the Teatro del Mondo, a floating theatre, built
under a joint commission from the theatre and architecture commissions of
the Biennale. It seated 250 around a central stage. It was towed by sea to
the Punta della Dogana where it remained through the Biennale. Rossi
described the project in its site, as "a place where architecture ended and
the world of the imagination began." More recently, he completed a major
building for Genoa, the Carlo Felice Theatre which is the National Opera
House. In Canada, the first Rossi project in the Western Hemisphere was
completed in 1987 when the Toronto Lighthouse Theatre was built on the
banks of Lake Ontario.
In his book, A Scientific Autobiography, he describes an auto accident that
occurred in 1971 as being a turning point in his life, ending his youth, and
inspiring a project for the cemetery at Modena. It was while he was
recuperating in a hospital that he began thinking of cities as great
encampments of the living, and cemeteries as cities of the dead. Rossi's
design for the cemetery at San Cataldo won first prize in a competition in
1971, and is being built in stages.
At almost the same time period, Rossi's first housing complex was being
built on the outskirts of Milan. Called Gallaratese (1969-1973), the structure
is actually two buildings separated by a narrow gap. Of this project, Rossi
has said, "I believe it to be significant, above all, because of the simplicity of
its construction, which allows it to be repeated." He has since built a number
of solutions to housing, from individual homes to apartment buildings and
hotels.
The Pocono Pines Houses in Pocono, Pennsylvania represent one of his first
completed buildings in the United States. In Galveston, Texas, a
monumental arch for the city has been completed. In Coral Gables, Florida,
the University of Miami has commissioned Rossi to design the new School of
Architecture.
Other housing projects include an apartment building in the Berlin-
Tiergarten district of West Germany, and another called Sudliche
Friedrichstadt (1981-88). There have been numerous residence designs in
Italy. His Il Palazzo Hotel and Restaurant Complex in Fukuoka, Japan is still
another extension of his solutions for living quarters, completed in 1989.
When Rossi was introduced at Harvard to deliver the Walter Gropius Lecture,
the chairman of the architecture department, Jose Rafael Moneo said, "When
future historians look for an explanation as to why the destructive
tendencies that threatened our cities changed, Rossi's name will appear as
one of those who helped to establish a wiser and more respectful attitude."

Jury Citation
Architecture is a profession in which talent matures slowly. It is a discipline
which requires many years of thoughtful observation, of testing principles,
of sensing space, and experiencing the many moods necessary for
seasoning and nurturing. Wunderkind in architecture are extremely rare.
The array of abilities that permit an architect to work with a sure hand and
achieve the intended result allows for no shortcuts. An architect who would
be the best he can be must serve a lifetime apprenticeship, well beyond that
required for official licensing. He must know human behavior, understand
structures and materials, and how to shape forms and spaces to serve
intended purposes in inspired and original ways.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury has found these qualities and more in
Aldo Rossi, and have selected him as the 1990 Laureate.
Known for many years as a theorist, philosopher, artist and teacher, Rossi
has spent time developing his architectural voice, and pen. Words as well as
drawings and buildings have distinguished him as one of the great
architects. As a master draftsman, steeped in the tradition of Italian art and
architecture, Rossi's sketches and renderings of buildings have often
achieved international recognition long before being built.
His book, Architecture and the City, published in 1966, is a text of
significance in the study of urban design and thinking. Out of this theoretical
base came designs that seem always to be a part of the city fabric, rather
than an intrusion.
Each of Rossi's designs, whether an office complex, hotel, cemetery, a
floating theatre, an exquisite coffee pot, or even toys, captures the essence
of purpose.
Rossi has been able to follow the lessons of classical architecture without
copying them; his buildings carry echoes from the past in their use of forms
that have a universal, haunting quality. His work is at once bold and
ordinary, original without being novel, refreshingly simple in appearance but
extremely complex in content and meaning. In a period of diverse styles and
influences, Aldo Rossi has eschewed the fashionable and popular to create
an architecture singularly his own.
On a solid foundation of theory, he uses his talents and ability to solve
design problems in memorable and imaginative ways. His influence is
extensive and expands with every new commission. With this honor, Aldo
Rossi joins a dozen architects already singled out for their contributions to
humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.

Essay
Aldo Rossi's Architecture of Recollection:
The Silence of Things Repeated or Stated for Eternity by Kurt W. Forster
Director
The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities
One can wear a Rossi wristwatch, sit in a Rossi chair sipping espresso from a
Rossi coffee pot, don clothes from a Rossi armoire, promenade through a
Rossi mega-shopping center near Parma, see an opera in his Genoese
theatre, and even reserve a plot in the giant Rossi cemetery at Modena.
Soon sports fans in Milan and architecture students at the University of
Miami will use new quarters designed by an architect whose hotel in Japan,
schools and town halls in Italy, and housing estates in Milan and Berlin have
begun to rise, like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, from the immense
reservoir of his imagination. Rossi has also laid down his ideasmany
among them first expounded in the line of his editorial and teaching duties
in books, and over the years he has created an impressive body of drawings,
paintings, exhibitions, and product design. Only knowing this can we begin
to grasp how completely he manifests his profession, a profession that is
nothing without mastery of the crafts but never masterly without the arts.
It is startling that an architect of such capacity should have embarked on his
practice with a villa of strictly Loosian design, giving an early hint of the
lasting importance the Viennese architect and the sources of northern
classicism and poetry would command in his thinking. Even more startling is
the fact that he should advance ideas on the colossal scale of some of his
most recent projects while retaining a deep affinity for a world of toylike size
and silence. Rossi, whose early writings identified the city as the true
theatre of architecture, took the long road home and, along its lonely path,
remained identified for years with a single enigmatic monument at Segrate.
Cast in rough cement and composed of the parts of an ancient coffin, its
roof-shaped lid having slid off and come to rest on a stump of a column, this
monument to the resistance inscribes death into the time of passing
shadows and the flow of water into the solitude of its square. Rossi
articulated with precocious assuredness both the monument's pristine
volumescube, cylinder, and prismand a public arena for their elemental
identities as tower, column, and fountain. If Cezanne's dictum on the
pictorial reduction of nature to the sphere, the cube, and the cylinder was
intended to distill synthetic and lasting images, Rossi's affirmation of basic
stereometry springs from a resistant, even an archaic will. Against the
ravages of history and the corrosive consequences of functionalism, Rossi
poses his pure and simple shapes in an aura of wholeness which, exposed to
the razzle-dazzle of the contemporary city, tinges the surroundings with
their surreal presence, casting a spell of silence over them.
Rossi's buildings affirm themselves in the power of forgotten events. Time
has escaped, but the objects remain like childhood memories, at once tiny
and gigantic, or rather measured by an unchanging scale of their own. Like
toys and childhood memories, they survive traumatic experiences wholly
intact and resist change or resolution in adult thoughts. Instead of being
shattered or dissolved, they bob like corks on the water, tossed about but
impervious to disaster. No other work of Rossi's revealed the power of his
imagination so much as the Teatro del mondo of 1980, whose wood clad
tubular scaffold forming a tower had to be towed into Venice on a barge for
the Biennale. The fate of Rossi's objects may be fulfilled in their future role
as cenotaphs of our time, but in the present, they stand as beacons for the
city. Rossi's coffee pots shaped like domed towers, and his Teatro del mondo
tugged through the Venetian lagoon are only two of the phantom vessels he
has launched on the ocean of architectural imagination. They make their
appearance again and again, like mountebanks turning up at every fair, but
for the architect they are "the silence of things repeated or stated for
eternity."
In his search for norms, Rossi confronts the typological schemes of modern
architecture with their ancient and vernacular counterparts; in his
formulation of an architecture for present conditions, he plumbs the first
truly normative concepts that undergird neoclassicism. He has no use for
period ornament, no interest in cut-rate imitation; what he intimates,
instead, is the possibility of an order of things that allows us to experience
the present as a suspended moment in the passage from the past into the
future.
It is no accident that school buildings have been the testing ground for some
of Rossi's ideas about architecture's capacity to address the question of time
and the passage of generations with peculiar poignancy. For it is here that
the architect can allow his personal memory to mingle with collective
traditions, "under the huge clock, which indicates both a particular time and
also the time of childhood, the time of group portraits, with all the
merriment that such photographs usually cause. The building thus seems
pure theatre, but is the theatre of life." Photography and theatre constitute
the global media for Rossi's stage, upon which he captures the literary and
pictorial reflections of his native Lombardy in the figurations of a Pavese or a
Sironi. This rarest of architectural capacities, the power to be radically of a
place and to impart a meaning to objects far beyond their origin, makes of
Rossi an architect whose reflections, lectures, and buildings capture our
attention. He has escaped the sacrifice typically exacted for such ubiquity
uncritical servitude to economic interests and schematic reduction of ideas
to mere patterns and fadsand continues to expand the sheer magnitude
and depth of his projects across countries and continents ...

Ceremony
Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy
Located on the Grand Canal in Venice, the Palazzo Grassi design of the
building is attributed to Giorgio Massari (1687-1766), who was at that period
terminating Ca' Rezzonico on the opposite side of the Grand Canal. Palazzo
Grassi was the last palace to be erected in Venice before the fall of the
Republic and the largest sited on the Grand Canal. The building of
monumental marble palazzos, dominating a noble and panoramic site was
certainly one of the most recognizable and unmistakable signs of a family's
newly-acquired status and wealth. It is believed that the Grassi family began
to purchase land and buildings for their Palazzo beginning in the 1730s.
Having amassed enough land opening on to the Grand Canal in the early
1740s, they could undertake their ambitious building project.
The first great fondaco-houses along the Grand Canal were built in the
thirteenth century. It was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that
resplendent and colorful Venetian Gothic style was employed. During the
Renaissance, however, architectural orders and rules based both on Ancient
Roman as well as modern precepts were used.
The white marble palace for the Grassi family was completed by 1872. Its
architecture expresses an academic classicism that is somewhat out of
touch with the surrounding Venetian palazzos. It has a formal palace faade,
lacking the lower mercantile openings, with an especially rhythmic
arrangement of the bays.
After the Grassi family sold Palazzo Grassi in 1840, its ownership passed
through many different individual hands. In 1983, the Palazzo was
purchased by the FIAT group with the goal of transforming the building into
an exhibition space for the visual arts. Since 2006, the palace is owned by
the French entrepreneur Franois Pinault who exhibits his art collection
there.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony honoring Italian architect, Aldo
Rossi, took place at this palace in Venice in 1990.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Today is a very special day, and it is with a great pride and joy that I accept
this prize. However, in some way it is also difficult to receive this prize. In a
way, I feel like a schoolboy who is about to take an exam. A moment to
recollecta moment of guilta moment of truth.
I also take this opportunity to meditate on my architecture. I will not bore
you with a minute analysis; just a few words.
I have always felt that my architecture is timeless. I hope that this prize
bears witness to that thought. I have always stayed away from the gossip
that surrounds groups, school, magazines, newspapers, architects, and so
on. But above all, I have always rejected styles and fashions.
I am not obsessed with architecture, but I have always tried to make
architecture in an honest way, like all those that honestly practice their
profession. Like the stonemasons or workmen who build the cathedrals, the
factories, the big bridges, the big works of our time. Searching for truth in
my profession, I have ended up loving architecture. Maybe it is a simple but
strange satisfaction that makes one love his own profession. So let me call it
"cara architettura," or in English, "dear architecture," or with your
permission, "darling architecture."
I have never believed that any profession could be disjointed from culture,
and, for this reason, during my youth I had the privilege of studying the
relationship between theory and architecture, and I was happy to find
significance in those studies.
But today I prefer to design and build, and I am fascinated by the possibility
of building in different places and countries. It is as if all the cultures of
these diverse countries make up my architecture and come together to form
a whole. A unity that has the capacity to recompose the fragments of those
things that were originally lost. Like many architects today, I am working in
many places around the worldin Italy, Germany, England, America, and
Japan. This is a sign of a new architecture that supersedes style and
personal character, a universal architecture.

I'd like to speak about something like a contamination between different

cultures. We live in a time similar to the period of Palladio, when the
architecture of this city, of this country, made a special contamination in
Russia, in England, and in America. Every building is the same, but at the
same time, it is very different. For this reason, I believe in a great civic
architecture that has the capacity to recompose our cities, making our lives
more free, more visible, more beautiful.
During the development of my work I have been helped by many friends. As
friends, I would like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Pritzker who have honored me
with their prize, and the members of the jury, who represent a part of our
modern culture. And I'd like to say a special thank you to Americathe first
country to recognize my workand all the young students who filled the
American universities during my lectures, and the American press, like the
New York Times and Time, which published a lot of beautiful articles.
Ringrazio particolarmente (special thanks) to Signore Agnelli for the
opportunity to enjoy the ceremony here at the Palazzo Grassi, in this nice
building with the beautiful restoration done by my friend Gae Aulenti, and in
this city of Venezia, where I have worked as assistant professor, professor,
director of the Biennale, and architect. The city where I built the happy and
unhappy Teatro del Mondo. The city where I have lived a great part of my
life.
In conclusion, I thank all of you and I hope to be able to continue in my work
with the same dedication and persistence. And honor it, this prize, which I
have received today.
Grazie, thank you.
Robert Venturi
1991 Laureate

Selected Works:
Vanna Venturi House, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1964
Fire Station #4, Columbus, Indiana, 1968
Coxe-Hayden House and Studio, Block Island, Rhode Island, 1981
Gordon Wu Hall (interior), Princeton University, New Jersey, 1983
Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery (interior), London, United Kingdom, 1991

Announcement
Architect Robert Venturi Is Named the 1991 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureate
Robert Venturi, who has always identified himself as a Philadelphia architect,
but whose projects are international in scope, has been selected to receive
the Pritzker Architecture Prize of 1991, generally acknowledged as
architecture's highest award. Venturi, often described as one of the most
original talents in contemporary architecture, has not only made his mark
with built works, but with his writings, teaching and theories.
He has been credited with saving modem architecture from itself by making
it possible to accept the casual and the improvised. After Venturi issued his
now famous "Less is a bore," response to the Mies van der Rohe modernist
dictum, "Less is more," architecture has not been the same.
In making the announcement, Bill Lacy, secretary to the international panel
of jurors that elects the Laureate, quoted from the jury citation lauding
Venturi, "He has expanded and redefined the limits of the art of architecture
in this century, as perhaps no other has, through his theories and built
works."
The prize, consisting of $100,000 grant, a medallion and formal certificate,
will be presented by Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, in a
ceremony on May 16 at Palacio de Iturbide in Mexico City, Mexico. Robert
Venturi is the seventh American to become a Laureate since the prestigious
prize was established by The Hyatt Foundation in 1979. Seven other
architects from as many countries have been so honored in the same time
period, making him the fourteenth Laureate.
Venturi, who will be approaching his sixty-sixth birthday when he receives
the honor, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and received his
Bachelors and Masters degrees from Princeton University. He furthered his
studies as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
In the past three decades, his works have ranged from cups and saucers to
major buildings that are or will become landmarks. In his hometown, he is
designing a new Philadelphia Orchestra Hall. On Trafalgar Square in London,
a major addition to the National Gallery of Art will soon be opened. Halfway
around the world in Washington State, the Seattle Museum of Art will soon
be finished. Down the coast to the University of California at Los Angeles, a
new Medical Research Laboratory has just been completed.
Many of his projects are for institutions of higher learning, including his alma
mater, Princeton, where he has numerous completed projects, among the
most recent being the Fisher/Bendheim Halls. Other buildings are found on
the campuses of Oberlin College, University of Pennsylvania, Shippensburg
University and Dartmouth College.
One of his first projects to capture attention was a home built for his mother
in 1961 in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, the Vanna Venturi House
which just last year received the AIA's Twenty-Five Year Award for "enduring
significance that has withstood the test of time."
His first book published in 1966, Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture, looked with fresh eyes at the architectural landscape of
America and described the inherent honesty and beauty of ordinary
buildings.

As the jury citation states, 'The extent of influence which this treatise has
had on everyone practicing or teaching architecture is impossible to
measure, but readily apparent ... From this simple observation he wove a
manifesto that challenged prevailing thinking on the subject of American
functionalist architecture and the minimalism of the International School."
Lacy added, "No other book, with the possible exception of Le Corbusier's
Versune Architecture has had such power in diverting the mainstream of
architectural thought."
Denise Scott Brown has been his collaborator in the evolution of
architectural theory and design for the past 30 years. They have been
married for 24 years. They have written two other books, Learning from Las
Vegas (with Steven Izenour) and A View from the Campidoglio: Selected
Essays, 1953-1984 .
The distinguished jury that selected Venturi as the 1991 Laureate, including
consists of J. Carter Brown, director of the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C. (who is the chairman of the jury and founding member);
and alphabetically, Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat, from Torino, Italy; Ada
Louise Huxtable, author and architectural critic of New York; architect
Ricardo Legorreta of Mexico City; Toshio Nakamura, editor-in-chief of the
A+U architectural publications, of Tokyo, Japan; architect Kevin Roche of
Hamden, Connecticut (who is also a Pritzker Laureate of 1982); and Lord
Rothschild, chairman of the board of trustees of the National Gallery of Art in
London, England.

Biography
Robert Venturi has been described as one of the most original talents in
contemporary architecture. He has also been credited with saving modern
architecture from itself. He has done this by being eloquent verbally with his
writings and visually with the appearance of his buildings. Like other Pritzker
Architecture Prize Laureates before him, he is a writer, a teacher, an artist
and philosopher, as well as an architect.
Venturi graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1947 and
received his Master of Fine Art degree, also from Princeton, in 1950. He
furthered his studies as a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in
Rome from 1954 to 1956. Shortly after his return to the United States, he
taught an architectural theory course at the University of Pennsylvania,
School of Architecture. In the following three decades, he has lectured at
numerous institutions including Yale, Princeton, Harvard, University of
California at Los Angeles, Rice University and the American Academy in
Rome.
In his first book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in
1966 by the Museum of Modern Art, Venturi posed the question, "Is not Main
Street almost all right?" He was arguing for what he called "the messy
vitality" of the built environment. As he puts it, "We were calling for an
architecture that promotes richness and ambiguity over unity and clarity,
contradiction and redundancy over harmony and simplicity." He was
challenging Modernism with the multiple solutions available from historya
history defined as relating not only to the specific building site, but the
history of all architecture. He wanted architecture to deal with the
complexities of the city, to become more contextual.
In his original preface to the book, Venturi states, "As an architect, I try to be
guided not by habit but by a conscious sense of the pastby precedent,
thoughtfully considered." He continues later, "As an artist, I frankly write
about what I like in architecture: complexity and contradiction. From what
we find we likewhat we are easily attracted towe can learn much of what
we really are."
Venturi is an architect whose work cannot be categorized; to him, there is
never a single solution. Lest anyone try to pigeon-hole him as a
postmodernist, he declared that he was practicing modern architecture, and
paraphrased his own words earlier about Main Street, "the modern
movement was almost all right." emphasizing his close affinity to the basic
tenets of modernism, while still giving importance to human use, memories,
comfort and entertainment. Venturi has made it possible to accept the
casual and the improvised in the built environment.

Venturi's early professional work was in the office of Eero Saarinen, where
among other projects, he worked on the design of the Milwaukee County
War Memorial Center. He also worked in the offices of Louis I. Kahn and
Oscar Stonorov in Philadelphia.
One of his first projects to be built that captured the attention of the
architectural community was a house for his mother in the Chestnut Hill
section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1989, it received the American
Institute of Architectures Twenty-five Year Award as a design of "enduring
significance that has withstood the test of time." Other well-known works
include: Guild House (1964) in Philadelphia, comprised of 91 apartment
units for the elderly, the Allen Memorial Art Museum (1976) in Oberlin, Ohio,
the extension to Britains National Gallery of Art, begun in 1986 in London,
and the recent Seattle Art Museum (1991).
Robert Venturi's wife, Denise Scott Brown, is an architect, planner, author,
and educator. She has been a partner in the firm since 1969 and his
collaborator in the evolution of architectural theory and design for the past
30 years. She is noted for bringing particular attention to the relationship of
architecture, planning and social conditions, and is primarily responsible for
planning, urban design and architectural programming.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour collaborated on
another book, published in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas, a further
exploration of urban sprawl and the suburbs in relation to their architectural
theories. A collection of their writings was also published in 1984, A View
from the Campidoglio: Selected Essays, 1953-1984.
In one of the essays in the latter collection, Robert Venturi confessed, "Alvar
Aalto's work has meant the most to me of all the work of the Modern
masters. It is for me the most moving, the most relevant, the richest source
to learn from, in terms of its art and technique. Like all work that lives
beyond its time, Aalto's can be interpreted in many ways. Each
interpretation is more or less true for its moment because work of such
quality has many dimensions and layers of meaning." With a characteristic
Venturi human, humorous touch, he added, "But Aalto's most endearing
characteristic for me as I struggle to complete this essay, is that he didn't
write about architecture."
In one of his essays in A View from the Campidoglio, Venturi says, "When I
was young, a sure way to distinguish great architects was through the
consistency and originality of their work...This should no longer be the case.
Where the Modern masters' strength lay in consistency, ours should lie in
diversity."

Jury Citation
Architecture is a profession about wood, bricks, stones, steel and glass. It is
also an art form that is based on words, ideas and conceptual frameworks.
Few architects of the twentieth century have been able to combine both
aspects of the profession, and none have done so more successfully than
Robert Venturi.
He has expanded and redefined the limits of the art of architecture in this
century, as perhaps no other has through his theories and built works. Of
the former, his thin but potent volume, Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture, published in 1966, is generally acknowledged to have diverted
the mainstream of architecture away from modernism.
The extent of the influence that this treatise has had on everyone practicing
or teaching architecture is impossible to measure, but readily apparent. In
this landmark book, Venturi looked with fresh eyes at the architectural
landscape of America and described the inherent honesty and beauty of
ordinary buildings. From this simple observation he wove a manifesto that
challenged prevailing thinking on the subject of American functionalist
architecture, and the minimalism of the International School.
Not content with just theory, Venturi began to implement his convictions. He
provided full-scale illustrations of his ideas through his pioneering early
buildings. His first houses, including one for his mother in 1961, gave form
to his beliefs, confounding the critics and angering many of his peers. Over
the intervening years he methodically forged a career that established him
not only as a theorist of exceptional insight, but also as a master
practitioner of the arts.

His understanding of the urban context of architecture, complemented by

his talented partner, Denise Scott Brown, with whom he has collaborated on
both more writings and built works, has resulted in changing the course of
architecture in this century, allowing architects and consumers the freedom
to accept inconsistencies in form and pattern, to enjoy popular taste.
As an architect, planner, scholar, author and teacher, Robert Venturi has
distinguished himself as an architect with vision and purpose. His vision and
purpose are in accord with the tenets of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
qualifying him to take his place among those who are producing significant
contributions to humanity through the art of architecture.

Essay
Looking at Architecture with New Eyes
By Vittorio Lampugnani
Director of the German Architecture Museum
Frankfurt, Germany
In 1954, a twenty-nine year old architect from Philadelphia went to Rome on
a scholarship from the American Academy. In the course of the next two
years he traveled through Italy and in the cradle of the classical
Renaissance it was Mannerist and Baroque architecture that made the
deepest impression on him. Immediately after this he worked in the offices
of Eero Saarinen and Louis I. Kahn. In 1966 he published a book in which he
worked his thoughts into a theory of architecture which was soon to become
extremely influential. The book was called Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture, the young architect was Robert Venturi.
This heretic, romantic creed, which was a head-on attack on the whole of
twentieth century Modernism, found its most enthusiastic followers in the
United States of America. The anti-rationalist, anti-Classical and anti-
European attitude it expressed struck a chord in the land of the freely-
composed cabins and barns of the early pioneers, the Shingle Style
influenced by the Pittoresque and above all in a country permeated by the
influence of Frank Lloyd Wrights life-long polemic and his organic
architecture which was intended to provide an alternative to the Beaux Arts
school and later to dogmatic functionalism. But in a Europe which was tired
of the clichd, heavy-handed, anti-urban remake of the Modern Movement
of the twenties, the liberating bon mots of this obviously highly cultivated
rebel were also given an enthusiastic reception. When, a short time later,
the international Post-Modernist Movement was proclaimed, which after the
dogmatism of the Bauhaus doctrine and its successors was to propagate a
new unorthodox laissez-faire attitude, Venturi was almost unanimously
declared its heir apparent and main protagonist.
His impudent aphorisms (the bowlderizing of Mies van der Rohes famous
saying less is more into less is a bore, the provocative assertion that
Main Street is almost all right) were immediately taken up by the
advocates of the new niceness, but they found his articles and books on
the whole indigestible. The same fate befell his buildings. For Venturi was
not only an architectural theoretician, he was also a designing architect. He
had already designed a number of buildings: between 1960 and 1963, Guild
House, the older peoples home in Philadelphia (where Venturi would later
build his own house); 196164 the Vanna Venturi House in Chestnut Hill,
Pennsylvania; 1967 the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame for New
Brunswick, New Jersey (never built); 19681973 the Humanities Building of
the State University of New York in Purchase; and from 1970 to 1974 the
Dixwell Fire Station in New Haven, Connecticut. All the buildings which he
designed with his wife Denise Scott-Brown, who represented the social and
political commitment in the group around Venturi, became widely-
publicized, widely-discussed milestones in the history of Post-Modernist
architectureand yet they seemed strangely unwieldy and somehow out of
place there.
Indeed the brand of Post-Modernism through which Venturi tried to improve
the well-being of people and their environment and to reinvigorate a
Modernist tradition which was now de pass and sclerotic had little in
common with the trend which almost everywhere won cheap applause
simply by currying favor with populist taste. Some of the proponents of the
latter used the favorite images of the contemporary consumer society quite
literally, others filtered them through the amusing interpretation which Pop-
Art had already provided; some used direct but completely arbitrary
historical references, others felt obliged to be ironic in their treatment of
historical forms, silently implying that the connection to the original could
not be anything but fictitious, some fulfilled the expectations of the user and
above all of the client in a very direct way whereas others went along with
the clients wishes simply in order to question them cryptically, make good
hearted fun of them and gently change them.
The more Venturis work developed the more evident this discrepancy
became. In 1972, at the latest, it must have been crystal clear to anyone
who had closely followed the work of the thought-provoking enfant terrible.
For it was in that year that two works were created in the Philadelphia studio
which were as emblematic as they were provocative. One was the design for
Franklin Court and the other the book, Learning from Las Vegas co-authored
with Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour. For the first work he took the
site where the good citizens of Philadelphia had asked for a dignified and
prestigious memorial to their illustrious son and traced on it in a mildly
mocking spirit the banal outline of Benjamin Franklins demolished house,
whilst banishing the actual memorial below the ground. The second turned
polemically against the negation of what was misguidedly considered to be
the ugliness of North American everyday life and present it instead as an
artistic stimulus, even an iconographic model which one could perfectly well
learn from.
Both manifestos (which is what they in fact are) shocked not only the North
American middle class, whose aesthetic needs Venturi pretended to
champion, but also the majority of international architectural critics. For the
Modernist they were too impure, for the Post-Modernists, too prosaic. This is
exactly what Venturi wanted. Had he not confessed programmatically six
years earlier an architecture of complexity and contradiction must
rather be a realization of difficult uniformity by integration than easy
uniformity by elimination? Now he head reached this stage himself: he
integrated all manner of things into his architecture and architectural theory
and thus eluded any attempt to put him into a category.
Consequently, each of his subsequent works had a new surprise in store: the
extension to the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin College, Ohio (1973-
1976), the Faculty Club of the Pennsylvania State University (1974), the
Basco Showroom on the edge of Philadelphia (1978), the Molecular Biology
Building at Princeton University, New Jersey (1983-1985), and the Art
Museum in Seattle, Washington (1988-1991). Each building was different,
each was adapted to its surroundings like a chameleon, interpreted it and its
function in an unexpected and each fascinating way and yet each building
was unmistakably a real Venturi ...

Ceremony
Palacio de Iturbide, Mexico City, Mexico
El Palacio de Iturbide, located in the historical center of Mexico City, was
designed by architect Francisco Guerrero y Torres and completed in 1785.
The palace is an adaptation of the Spanish Barroque, as built in the New
World. It is considered a masterwork of civil architecture of its period due to
the richness of materials and sumptuous detailing. It is also the only
eighteenth century Mexican residence to have four floors. The immense
interior patio, recalling Italian villas, is defined by eighteen arches resting on
Tuscan columns.
The palace takes its name from Agustin Iturbide, an important military and
political leader (and first, but brief, Emperor of Mexico). The house was
given to him in 1821 to served as his residence until 1823. Over the years
the building has experienced many uses, including hotel, offices, and
workshops. It was declared a national monument in 1931. Finally, the Palace
of Iturbide was acquired in 1972 by Banamex, the National Bank of Mexico,
and since then has been restored and used for important cultural activities.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Robert Venturi
My thanks to Jay Pritzker for his most gracious and generous introduction
this evening.
My thanks also to President Salinas de Gortari and those officials of the
government of Mexico, young and creative, who were our gracious hosts
today, and to Ricardo Legorreta for his kindness to me, and from all of us
here our gratitude to him for the restoration of this Palacio de Iturbide with
its exquisite aesthetic, bold and delicate at once.
Frank Lloyd Wright said architects should design from the inside out. But we
now accept within our more complex view of things, as we acknowledge
context as an important determinant of design, that we design from the
inside out and the outside in, andas I said a long time agothis act can
create valid tensions where the wall, the line of change between inside and
out, is acknowledged to become a spatial recordin the end, an essential
architectural event.
And as a building is designed from the inside out and the outside in, so, one
can say, is an architect designed in that waythat is, his own development
as an artist can work through his development insidethrough his intuition,
ordered by means of analysis and discipline, but also through his
development outside, via the influence of persons and places. As I refer to
persons and places I borrow from George Santayanas title of his
biographical essays, but I shall include as well in this description of an
architects development from without, persons, places and institutions.
At this moment I feel a special obligation to acknowledge the needthe
need, psychological and materialfor support, for appreciation and
encouragementthis need, as significant for artists as for children in their
development. No matter how sublime your intuition as an artist might be,
and how disciplined and acute your own cultivation of that intuition inside,
your need for appreciation and recognition from the outside is crucial: as
growing children need loving parents and supportive home and school
environments, so do artists need their supporterstrusting patrons and
encouraging mentors, the latter sometimes in the historical form of the work
of artists of the past.
And so I appropriately and sincerely express at this moment my gratitude to
the sponsors of the Pritzker Prize as persons, and to The Hyatt Foundation as
institution, for their acknowledgement of good design in architecture and
their support, via recognition of architectsand then to the selection
committee of the Pritzker Prize that is particularly and signally honoring me
today. But I like to acknowledge here as well, as Ive said, those persons,
places, and institutions who and which, very simply, have meant much to
me as a growing artistand I shall focus on them as well at this moment.
I trust, as I satisfy this need to enumerate particular persons, places, and
institutions, that I shall appear not egotistical, but rather the opposite in
emphasizing my indebtedness to outside influences; also as I speak I might
enlighten younger architects via the example of my particular experiences
as these younger architects choose paths of their own as they work.
Firstchronologically and perhaps substantivelycome my parents without
whose intellect, integrity, aesthetic sense, and love I would not have
become me, my parents who supplied me with lots of blocks to build with
when I was little, and with whom I lived among beautiful objects and good
books. And with whom I could share their love of architecture. I remember
vividly on one of my first trips to New York Citymaybe I was 10 years old
my fathers impulsively instructing the cab driver to pull over and wait as we
approached the old Penn station on Seventh Avenue, and then conducting
me down the gallery that overlooked the great hall based on the Baths of
Caracalla. I shall never forget the breath-taking revelation of that
monumental civic space bathed in ambient light from the clerestories
above. And then my mother, whose sound but unorthodox positions,
socialist and pacifist, worked to prepare me to feel almost all right as an
outsider. And again my father through whose hard work I was left a modest
inheritance that allowed me to be braver and more independent as a young
thinking architect.

Princeton University where as an undergraduate in a beautiful environment I

walked on air as I could discover multitudes of things within many
disciplines hitherto not dreamt of in my philosophy; where Jean Labatut
whose vivid and creative historical analogies in his drafting room critiques
worked to enrich and expand my outlook; where Donald Drew Egbert, who
later became my closest mentor, described the glories of Modern
architecture, but always within the context of history, history employed to
discover and enlighten, never to justify or promotehistory that implicitly
acknowledged architectural Modernism as a valid direction for that time, but
a Modernism we students could evolve out ofnot a modernism as an end
of history, as an ideology: at Princeton I was truly a student and not a
seminarianone who receives the word that was to be universally
disseminated. At Princeton we students of architecture were encouraged to
go beyond.
Fellow students in that college community, especially my roommate, Everett
de Golyer who revealed to me by his example the attributes of grace, wit,
and understandingand whose widow, my friend Helen de Golyer, it moves
me to say is here tonight.
Rome, as I first saw that city that Sunday in August, 1948, as I walked on air
this time in a place rather than an institution -discovering unimagined
pedestrian spaces and richness of forms bathed in the golden air of
Rome ...
Alvaro Siza
1992 Laureate

Selected Works:
Restaurante da Boa Nova, Matosinhos, Portugal, 1963
Piscina Leca, Palmeira, Portugal, 1966
Boua Housing Complex, Porto, Portugal, 1973
Servei de Meteorologica, Barcelona, Spain, 1992
Centro de Art Gallego, Spain, 1993
Facultad de Arquitectura, University of Porto, Portugal, 1993
Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal, 1997

Announcement
Alvaro Siza of Portugal Is Named the 1992 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureate
Chicago, ILAlvaro Siza, who has been praised by his peers in Europe as
one this century's finest architects, but is relatively unknown to most of the
world, has been elected to receive his profession's highest honor, the 1992
Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, which established the
award in 1979, will present Siza with a $100,000 grant, a medallion and
certificate at a formal ceremony on May 14, to be held at the recently
dedicated Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago, Illinois.
In making the announcement from The Hyatt Foundation's headquarters in
Chicago, Pritzker hailed the choice of the jury that made the selection,
saying, "Not since the late Luis Barragn of Mexico was elected Laureate in
the second year of the prize have we honored someone whose work has so
eluded the international spotlight, but is none the less worthy. Bestowing
this prize will help focus public attention on yet another facet of excellence
in the profession."
Siza joins an exclusive fraternity of Pritzker Laureates that includes seven
architects from England, Italy, Japan, Austria, Germany, Mexico, Brazil and
seven more from the United States.
In making the announcement, Bill Lacy, secretary to the international panel
of jurors that elects the Laureate, quoted from the jury's citation: "The
architecture of Alvaro Siza is a joy to the senses and uplifts the spirit. Each
line and curve is placed with skill and sureness." And further, "his
enrichment of the world's architectural vocabulary and inventory over the
past four decades" justifies presentation of the Pritzker Prize.
A month after he receives the prize, Siza will celebrate his fifty-eighth
birthday on June 25. He has been practicing architecture from his own office
in Porto, Portugal for 38 of those years. He is a widower with two children,
Alvaro and Joana.

Biography
"Every design," says Siza, "is a rigorous attempt to capture a concrete
moment of a transitory image in all its nuances. The extent to which this
transitory quality is captured, is reflected in the designs: the more precise
they are, the more vulnerable."
While working on a sizable office building design for Porto, Siza discounted
any possibility of blending the new building by imitating its surroundings.
The area was too important since it was between the historic center of the
city and a bridge that has great significance because it was built by Eiffel in
1866. He explained, "We have gone beyond the stage whereby unity of
language was believed to be the universal solution for architectural
problems. Recognizing that complexity is the nature of the city,
transformational movements take on very different forms."
Siza, whose full name is Alvaro Joaquim de Meio Siza Vieira, was born on
June 25, 1933 in the small coastal town of Matosinhos, just north of Porto,
Portugal. Siza studied at the University of Porto School of Architecture from
1949 through 1955, completing his first built works (four houses in
Matosinhos) even before ending his studies in 1954. That same year he
opened his private practice in Porto.

In 1966, Siza began teaching at the University, and in 1976, he was made a
tenured Professor of Architecture. In addition to his teaching there, he has
been a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard
University; the University of Pennsylvania; Los Andes University of Bogota;
and the Ecole Polytechnique of Lausanne.
In addition, he has been a guest lecturer at many universities and
conferences throughout the world, from the United States, Colombia and
Argentina to Spain, Germany, France, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland,
Austria and England in Europe.
In recent years, he has received honors from foundations and institutions in
Europe, including, the Alvar Aalto Foundation Gold Medal in 1988, the
renowned Mies van der Rohe Foundation Award the Borges & Irmao Bank in
Vila do Conde, Portugal (1982-86). In the United States in 1988, the Harvard
University Graduate School of Design recognized Siza for his Malagueira
Quarter Housing Project in Evora, Portugal that began in 1977, presenting
him with the first Veronica Rudge Green Prize, often referred to as the Prince
of Wales Prize for Urban Design.
In 1977, following the revolution in Portugal, the city government of Evora
commissioned Siza to plan a housing project in the rural outskirts of the
town. It was to be one of several that he would do for SAAL (servicio de
apoio ambulatorio local), the national housing association, consisting of
1200 low-cost, housing units, some one-story and some two-story row
houses, all with courtyards.
Recent projects and buildings in Portugal include, a new College of
Education in Setubal, a new School of Architecture for Porto University, a
Modern Art Museum for Porto, the rebuilding of the Chiado, area of Lisbon,
damaged by fire in 1988, and a new Library for Aveiro University.
In Berlin, his competition winning entry for an apartment building,
Schlesisches Tor, Kreuzberg, was recently completed. He has participated in
and won numerous other competitions including the renovation of Campo di
Marte (1985) in Venice, the renewal of the Casino and Cafe Winkler (1986) in
Salzburg, and the cultural center of the Ministry of Defense (1988-89) in
Madrid. The Meteorological Centre for the 1992 Olympic Games, in
Barcelona, is currently nearing completion.
Siza's work ranges from swimming pools to mass housing developments,
with residences for individuals, banks, office buildings, restaurants, art
galleries, shops, virtually every other kind of structure in between.
Quoting from Casabella magazine, July 1986, in explaining Sizas insistence
on continuous experimentation, it was said, "Precisely for this reason his
architecture can communicate to us an extraordinary sense of freedom and
freshness; in it one clearly reads the unfolding of an authentic design
adventure. In accepting the risk of such adventure, Alvaro Siza has even
been able to bring to the surface, in his architecture, what one feared was in
danger of extinction: the heroic spirit of modern architecture."

Jury Citation
The architecture of Alvaro Siza is a joy to the senses and uplifts the spirit.
Each line and curve is placed with skill and sureness.
Like the early Modernists, his shapes, molded by light, have a deceptive
simplicity about them; they are honest. They solve design problems directly.
If shade is needed, an overhanging plane is placed to provide it. If a view is
desired, a window is made. Stairs, ramps and walls all appear to be
foreordained in a Siza building. That simplicity, upon closer examination
however, is revealed as great complexity. There is a subtle mastery
underlying what appears to be natural creations. To paraphrase Siza's own
words, his is a response to a problem, a situation in transformation, in which
he participates.
If Post Modernism had not claimed the term, and distorted its meaning,
Alvaro Siza's buildings might legitimately have been called by that name.
His architecture proceeds directly from Modernist influences that dominated
the field from 1920 to 1970.

While Siza himself would reject categorization, his architecture, as an

extension of Modernist principles and aesthetic sensibility, is also an
architecture of various respects: respect for the traditions of his native
Portugal, a country of time worn materials and shapes; respect for context,
whether it is an older building or neighborhood such as the Chiada Quarter
in Lisbon, or the rocky edge of the ocean in his swimming club in Porto; and
finally, respect for the times in which today's architect practices with all its
constraints and challenges.
Siza's characteristic attention to spatial relationships and appropriateness of
form are as germane to a single family residence as they are to a much
larger social housing complex or office building. The essence and quality of
his work is not affected by scale.
Four decades of patient and innovative form-making by Siza have provided
unique and credible architectural statements, while at the same time
surprising the profession with its freshness.
Siza is a teacher, not only at the university where he obtained his education,
but also as a guest lecturer throughout the world, fanning the intense
interest his designs generate, particularly in the younger generation.
Siza maintains that architects invent nothing, rather they transform in
response to the problems they encounter. His enrichment of the world's
architectural vocabulary and inventory, over the past four decades, provides
ample justification to present him with the 1992 Pritzker Architecture Prize,
as well as the good wishes of the jury that he continues his transformations.

Essay
Thoughts on the Works of Alvaro Siza
by Vittorio Gregotti
Architect, Professor of Architecture, University of Venice, Italy
I have always had the impression that Alvaro Siza's architecture sprang from
archaeological foundations known to him alonesigns invisible to anyone
who has not studied the site in detail through drawings with steady, focused
concentration.
Later on, those signs come together because they convey a feeling of
growing out of something necessary, of relating, connecting, establishing
and constructing, all the while maintaining the tender uncertainty of
hypothesis and discovery.
The construction is slow and intense. It is made of the discrete, if not
downright secret, signs of an attempt to start anew, based on establishing
some creative and apparently simple and explicit signs of a universal design
system.
Siza's work is characterized by just that sense of architecture as a means of
listening to the real, in that it hides at least as much as it shows. Siza's
architecture makes one see, and it reveals rather than interprets the truth of
the context.
It seems then, that he has very carefully removed parts from the design,
which is very clearly and harmoniously drawn, in order to create
expectations. All non-essentials have been removed, but even that, in turn,
has left its traces, like when pencil strokes are erased and redrawn in a
drawing. Sharp corners and sinewy curves are interwoven for an apparently
mysterious reason, something that has to do with the very history of the
design. Its thoughts, misfortunes and changes are not totally forgotten, but
are transformed in the construction of a mental site, of a context just as real
as the surrounding physical one.
Alvaro Siza Vieira is clearly considered one of today's greatest living
architects. He is an architect still able to make authentic affirmations with
his architecture, still able to surprise a culture as base as ours by coming on
stage from unexpected quarters. The interest in his architecture shown by
younger generations in particular results from the complex mixture of
meanings that emanates from his work. His architecture is formed in quiet
and seclusion; then there is the slight but ever precise touch of his works,
which seem to emerge as clean, precious points among the contemporary
urban blight, yet at the same time making one painfully responsible for
those problems. In addition to this mixture and the tradition of poverty and
the gentle melancholy of Portugal, his native country, there is the affection
that his architecture seems to bring to the conditions of the urban periphery.
On the other hand, the micro surgical confidence of his work, the emergence
of the extreme eternity of the elementary acts of building, the sense of
natural modification of that which exists, a suspended modification does not
erase the errors of the existing nor the uncertain course of the project, but
solidifies it into a single poetic objective.
Over the years, all of that has made him become more secure in the
methods and processes of his craft without eliminating his sense of
trepidation, of attempting to have his designs express the margins of an
architectural problem, when he checks with his hands and eyes.
The quality of the tensions which he draws up and details is touching (to use
a word out of fashion like him) and derives principally, in my opinion, from
two themes: attention and uneasiness; the clear certainty which is that the
essential is always a little different from the directions chosen, and from
possible explanations.
For Siza, even detail is not an incident or a technological exhibition, but a
dimension of the accessibility of architecture, a way of verifying by touch
the feel, the uniqueness of a thing made for a particular place with
contemporary techniques, to come into contact with the everyday things by
handling them. His is a technology of detail created from unexpected
distances between the parts which introduce a spatial tension between the
smallest and most commonplace elements, for their mutual placement,
superimposition and interconnectedness.
To speak about Siza's architecture, however, one must start by admitting
that it is indescribable. This is not critical or textual indescribability alone (in
fact the latter would certainly be one of the best means for the purpose,
perhaps in story-form), but the same inability of photography to
communicate the specific sense of his work. This is also because his design
includes a unique temporal dimension, resulting not only from the processes
required for coming into contact with his structures, but also from his ability
to establish a type of autonomous memory of the design, completely
present in the final structure, built by the accumulation and purification of
successive discoveries which are constituted as data of later structures.
Nothing is planned in and of itself, but always in relation to belonging.
Above all, for Alvaro Siza, coming from northern Portugalstony, clear, poor
and full of intimacy, where the light of the Atlantic is long and illuminates
poverty in an abstract way, reveals all the harshness of surfaces, each
change in the road around homes, every scrap, in a grandiose, dry and
bittersweet manner.
I believe that Alvaro Siza could be justifiably considered the father of the
new architectural minimalism, but a minimalism far from any abstraction or
perceptive radicalism, in which the architectural sign is incision and
superimposition. A timid, unequivocal, circumscribed assurance seems to
characterize the forms of his new minimalism. It is careful concentration, the
capacity for detailed observation and characterization. If it appears that the
use of elementary structures is most indirect, it is rather a hidden, precise
plot from which emerge by cancellation some signs suspended between the
memory of the plot's established order, and a new, stringent logic of
external and internal relations which the system renders clearer and more
evident, even in their wavering.
The first time I visited Portugal, I had met Alvaro Siza the year before in
Barcelona, a little more than twenty-five years ago. Then, the next summer
we spent a couple of days together in Oporto and went to see his works,
many still in progress: Banco do Oporto in Oliveira and the Vila do Conde,
his brother's house, the pool at the ocean and the Quinta da Conceiao in
Matosinhos, already completed in 1965 ...

Ceremony
The Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago,
A competition in 1988 led to the selection of the design of the Chicago firm
Hammond Beeby & Babka to build the new main library in downtown
Chicago. Opened in 1991, three of the four facades of the weighty building
recall neo-classical structures and Chicagos legacy of fine buildings, such as
the Auditorium Theater or the Monadnock Building. These facades are faced
in stone and brick with five-story tall architect windows. The west faade,
however, is sheathed in glass and steel creating a neutral backdrop for the
significant buildings across the street from the library. The building is
crowned with a prominent roof adorned with owls perched in foliage, giant
seed pods, symbolizing the crops of the Midwest and other classically
inspired details.
The grand space of the Library is found at the top of the building. The sky lit
Winter Garden recalls a generous exterior courtyard and formed the setting
for the 1992 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony when Alvaro Siza of
Portugal received the award.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Alvaro Siza
It is still hard for me to believe that I have been this year's recipient of the
Pritzker Prize, the prestigious award from The Hyatt Foundation already
given to some of the architects I admire most.
The aim of an architectural prize is supposed to be, above all, that of
supporting and celebrating perfection. I have yet not been able to reach
perfection.
I remember a talk that took place many years ago with my friend Fernando
Tavora, my teacher at the school of Porto. In it he mentioned his perplexity
at the imperfections of the Brunelleschi cupola when seen from a certain
angle. He expressed first a certain disappointment, which was followed by a
feeling of understanding, of discovery, of plenitude.
I am not, however, referring to the dissatisfaction of an artist, which is a
feeling that is often with me. I am referring to concrete and material
imperfections: cracks on walls, a certain discomfort, irregular stuccoes, or
bent woods, in sum, the rigor that has not been attained.
On the other hand, I am referring to the lack of sensitivity that either
hampers or despises the search for beauty, be it the beauty of harmony or
contrast.
The professional life of architects is nowadays affected not only by those
imperfections, but also by difficulties or impossibilities in the making of
architecture.
I always felt professionally divided between the hard and difficult challenge
to answer the needs of the greatest number of persons on the one hand;
and the attraction for single opportunities (which are apparently closer to
the viability of architecture).
In the end both hypotheses complement each other, being indispensable to
one another.
The various circumstances that surround architectural commissions, with
their stigmas of specialization led me until recently to project above allin a
fragmentary waythe urban tissue made of apparently banal elements that
shape the majority of the area of any city or territory.
This is far from being a modest task: it aims at re-encountering the lost
spontaneity, the joy of spontaneity and of difference; the uninhibited and
collective competence to find or model the place for exceptional urban
episodes.
I dream of the moment in which such an intimate and collective need will
not be dependent on a degree in architecture.
At the moment, and not only in my country, the need and the way to add
quality to things that are banal and repetitiveas a condition to enhance
the beauty of the city and of its monumentsis facing profound
transformations, that, perhaps at the moment, are quite painful, but which
are essentially more than promising, fascinating and creative transformation
beyond apparent frontiers:
neither high technology nor the sound knowledge of craftsmenthe old
support to architectural creationbut an in-between situation in which we
must be involved;
a situation of death and rebirth under a form which we nervously exploit,
questioning and dipping into the real.
I want to express that the Pritzker Prize gives my heart some serenity. The
message is clear to me: it is acknowledged that our condition is transitional,
different from environment to environment, yet universal; gradually freed
from the narrow concept of centre and periphery.
All my gratitude to the Pritzker family, who love architecture as Art,
celebrating it in that condition; who appreciate it by its integrity and not by
its lateral views.

I express my thanks to the members of the jury whoconstantly and

without reservesearch for that integrity.
My thanks to my family and to my friendscolleagues, collaborators in the
studio, clients and others here present or not, to all those that honor me
with their presence in this room.
After all I dare to understand the reason this prize has been granted to me. I
feel happy and proud. Thank you very much.

Ceremony Speech
J. Carter Brown
Chairman of the Jury
The Pritzker Architecture Prize
On behalf of our itinerant jury, we find ourselves on location in Chicago, and
I think it is very appropriate for an architecture prize. We are in this setting
of Burnham, Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe, and of
such contemporaries as Jahnthat fantastic airportand of course, Tom
Beebe and this wonderful building. Thank you for having us here at your
library, the Chicago Public Library, CPL. I should translate for those out-of-
townerseveryone in Chicago knows that CPL really stands for Cindy
Pritzker's Library.
It is fortuitous that we dine here in the year 1992, a Quincentennial year.
Some of you may not realize that Tom Beebe was born on Columbus day;
and Chicago has been associated with Columbus celebrations with an
enormous influence on American architecture. The great Columbian
commemoration held hereperhaps a year late in 1893but in honor of the
Quadricentennial affected the design of American cities all over the country,
and particularly the city that I happen to live in, our capital, Washington,
which captures the flavor of the "City Beautiful" movement, as it was called
as a result of the great Chicago Fair. It is therefore doubly fitting that we
celebrate this crossing of the Atlantic and commemorate someone who
learned his navigation in Portugal. Portugal was the pioneer under Prince
Henry the Navigator, and the advances that were made in navigation were
not lost on a man called Christopher Columbus.
Pioneering is what the Pritzkers have done with this extraordinary prize. All
of us owe a debt of gratitude to Jay and Cindy Pritzker, and to The Hyatt
Foundation, for making possible a prize that has truly become the Nobel
Prize of architecture. It has exerted an enormous influence, and we hope
motivation, for the world of architecture and architectural patronage.
And so the loop is completed; we reach this year across the Atlantic to the
great port of Porto, and welcome Alvaro Siza as our Laureate, and realize
that discoveries in architecture as well as everything else still happen.
Fumihiko Maki
1993 Laureate
Selected Works:
YKK Guest House, Kurobe, Japan, 1982
Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium, Fujisawa, Japan, 1984
Spiral, Tokyo, Japan, 1985
National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto, Kyoto, Japan, 1986
Iwasaki Art Museum Annex, Ibusuki, Japan, 1987
Makuhari Messe I, Tokyo, Japan, 1989
Tepia, Tokyo, Japan, 1989
Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium, Tokyo, Japan, 1990
Hillside Terrace Complex, Tokyo, Japan, 1992
Tokyo Church of Christ, Tokyo, Japan, 1995

Announcement
Japanese Architect Fumihiko Maki Is Named 1993 Laureate of the Pritzker
Archtecture Prize
Los Angeles, CA-Citing his work as "intelligent and artistic in concept and
expression, meticulously achieved," The Hyatt Foundation jury has named
Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki the sixteenth Laureate of his profession's
highest honor, the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Maki, whose modernist architectural achievements in Japan have been
raised throughout the world as highly successful fusions of the cultures of
east and west, is the second Japanese architect to win the Pritzker Prize, and
was a student of the first, Kenzo Tange, who received the honor in 1987.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, which established the
award in 1979, will present Maki with a $100,000 grant and medal at a
ceremony to be held at Prague Castle in the recently formed Czech Republic
on June 10.
In making the announcement from The Hyatt Foundation's office in Los
Angeles, Pritzker lauded the choice of the jury, saying, "Maki's roots are in
Japan, but his studies and early work in the United States have given him an
unique understanding of both eastern and western cultures evident in his
designs. He never loses touch with human scale, whatever the size of the
project."
Bill Lacy, secretary to the international panel of jurors that elects the
Laureate each year, quoted from the formal citation from the jury: "He uses
light in a masterful way making it as tangible a part of every design as are
the walls and roof. In each building, he searches for a way to make
transparency, translucency and opacity exist in total harmony. He uses
detail to give his structures rhythm and scale."
The prize is presented to him, Lacy continued, "For building works that are
not only expressions of his time, but that are destined to survive mere
fashion."
Lacy elaborated, "A group of young Japanese architects, bound by the past
and firmly committed to respect it, but determined to look to the future
emerged in the late 1940s. Their architecture was both experimental and
modernist with some European overtones that gradually gave way to a more
original and uniquely Japanese style. Their work was featured in the
international architectural press and soon they were the emulated, not the
emulators, with their inventive and artistic new shapes and pioneering use
of new materials. Fumihiko Maki was one of the leaders of this new wave
that would rebuild Japan."
Maki who was born on September 6, 1928 took his undergraduate degree in
architecture at the University of Tokyo before going on for Masters degrees
at both Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and the
Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Cambridge,
Massachusetts.

His first commission was in the United States at Washington University in St.
Louis, Missouri-Steinberg Hall, an arts center. It remains his only built work
in the U.S. until the completion of the Yerba Buena Gardens Visual Arts
Center currently under construction in San Francisco, scheduled to open this
fall.
At almost the same time, his first commission in Japan was also under
construction, the Toyoda Memorial Hall Auditorium at Nagoya University. In
1969, a project of major significance, the Hillside Terrace Apartment
Complex was begun in Tokyo. This project, which would be accomplished in
six phases over the next 25 years, has become a landmark of not only
Maki's architectural genius, but also a kind of history of modernism.
The National Museum of Modern Art has been called the most nearly
classical of Maki's works. The exterior of the museum is an opaque gray, but
in the atrium, wall surfaces of rough and polished marbles provide a
reflection of light patterns coming from above. The lobby is an extraordinary
example of the power of an empty space. The Iwasaki Museum for a private
collection of art was completed in 1979. This modern acropolis is built atop a
hill in southern Kyushu. YKK Guest House, built to provide lodging for visitors
to one of the world's largest fastener manufacturers, is a perfect example of
what was cited by Bill Lacy, writing in Space Design, as an example of a
great architect's understanding that "stone and steel, glass and concrete are
not what architecture is made of-they are only the means by which light is
allowed to create form and space."
Maki considers the Fujisawa Gymnasium project of 1980-84 a major turning
point in his career, leading him into increasingly complex forms. To quote
Maki, from an interview published in the book, Fumihiko Maki, An Aesthetic
of Fragmentation, "...many people say it looks like a helmet, or a ... frog, or
a beetle, or a spaceship I just wanted to make a very dynamic building. I
wanted to make rich interior spaces. Then to cover them, I needed certain
components ... the building has become complex enough to yield all kinds of
images according to the people who look at it." On much larger scales were
the Tokyo Gymnasium and the Nippon Convention Center. The former,
nearly half a million square feet in area consists of three main buildings-the
principal arena, a secondary arena, and a swimming pool. Maki describes it,
"The overall composition is an attempt to create a new urban landscape by
juxtaposing strongly geometric and symbolically charged pieces. The result
is a constellation of clearly defined geometric forms that make up an
indeterminate cloudlike whole."
The convention center, or Makuhari Messe, is built on land reclaimed from
Tokyo Bay. The total area of over 1.5 million square feet is divided into seven
identical units. Each unit of space is linked to its neighbor by a long spinal
axis that will be directly accessible from all adjacent areas.
The building has three main purposes-exhibition space, an amphitheatre
that will seat 5000, and a convention/banqueting center. Maki's first realized
project in Europe will be Isar Buro Park, an office park district near the new
Munich International Airport in Germany. The project is currently under
construction. The distinguished jury that selected Maki as the 1993 Laureate
consists of J. Carter Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C. (who is chairman of the jury and founding member); and
alphabetically, Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat from Torino, Italy; Charles
Correa, architect of Bombay, India; Frank Gehry, architect and 1989 Pritzker
Laureate of Los Angeles; Ada Louise Huxtable, author and architectural critic
of New York; architect Ricardo Legorreta of Mexico City; Toshio Nakamura,
editor-in-chief of A+U architectural publications of a Tokyo, Japan; and Lord
Rothschild, chairman of the board of trustees of the National Gallery of Art in
London, England.

Biography
Fumihiko Maki calls himself a modernist, unequivocally. His buildings tend to
be direct, at times understated, and made of metal, concrete and glass, the
classic materials of the modernist age, but the canonical palette has also
been extended to include such materials as mosaic tile, anodized aluminum
and stainless steel. Along with a great many other Japanese architects, he
has maintained a consistent interest in new technology as part of his design
language, quite often taking advantage of modular systems in construction.
He makes a conscious effort to capture the spirit of a place and an era,
producing with each building or complex of buildings, a work that makes full
use of all that is presently at his command. Maki often speaks of the idea of
creating "unforgettable scenes"in effect, settings to accommodate and
complement all kinds of human interactionas the inspiration and starting
point for his designs.
Maki, who was born in Tokyo on September 6, 1928, studied with Kenzo
Tange at the University of Tokyo where he received his Bachelor of
Architecture degree in 1952. Maki then spent the next year at Cranbrook
Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. After completing a Master of
Architecture degree at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard
University, he apprenticed at the firms Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, New
York and Sert Jackson and Associates in Cambridge.
In 1956, he took a post as assistant professor of architecture at Washington
University in St. Louis, where he also received his first design commission
for the Steinberg Hall (an art center) on that campus. Following his four
years there, he joined the faculty at Harvard's GSD from 1962 to 1965, and
has been a frequent guest lecturer at numerous other universities.
In 1965, he returned to Japan to establish his own firm, Maki and Associates
in Tokyo. In the 28 years since, his staff has grown to approximately 35
people, with an equal number having passed through to begin their own
practices. "I was never attracted to the idea of a large organization. On the
other hand, a small organization may tend to develop a very narrow
viewpoint. My ideal is a group structure that allows people with diverse
imaginations, that often contradict and are in conflict with one another, to
work in a condition of flux, but that also permits the making of decisions
that are as calculated and objectively weighed as necessary for the creation
of something as concrete as architecture."
While he was preparing to open his own office, Maki worked at, or observed,
numerous offices in Japan and other countries. One of the conclusions he
drew was that an office, and by extension, design itself, is a matter of
individual character, and that an office is itself a work of art. "Architectural
design is perhaps the strangest activity undertaken by the many
professions, and a group that engages in architectural design is likewise a
curious organization. Architecture is a highly ambiguous field," Maki
continued.
In Maki's Osaka Prefectural Sports Center, he unifies many separate spaces
with a central spine, much like a street with different levelsin this case
allowing access to the gymnasium at one end and to a restaurant,
observation deck at the other. Here the diner can look back over a roof
garden to an entrance plaza, in effect, looking through a layering of
transparent planes and spacesa concept that relates to many of Maki's
buildings.
In his Hillside Terrace Apartments, a complex of buildings developed over a
period of 25 years (and thus nearly spanning the firm's entire history), a
strategy of transparent layering creates a series of shared scenes or
landscapes within an urban context. Wandering through the complex, one
encounters intimate courtyards hidden away amid greenery, linked by
meandering passages and discovered only by accident of a sideways glance.
By articulating several layers of threshold spaces between the busy street
edge and the densely wooded interior of the block, Maki is able to impart a
sense of depth to spaces that physically are quite compact.
Subsequent decades have brought an even greater sense of lightness to
Maki's work. The Fujisawa Gymnasium is particularly illustrative of this freer
sensibilityits sharp, stainless steel clad roof seems virtually to float above
the main arena, separated from the spectator stands by a ribbon of light and
supported only at four points. Some critics have likened its complex metallic
form to a spaceship or a beetle, while others have deemed it reminiscent of
a medieval samurai helmet.
As a student of two cultures, whose fusion of the two influences has been
greatly acclaimed, Maki recently wrote of his native Tokyo with nostalgia and
hope. "Tokyo is the place where I was born, raised, and educated. It was also
in Tokyo that I became familiar with some of the few works of modern
architecture that existed in the 1930s in Japanthe white houses of such
modern pioneers as Kameki Tsuchiura (who was a student of Frank Lloyd
Wright when the latter was in Japan designing the old Imperial Hotel),
Sutemi Horiguchi, and Antonin Raymond ...

Jury Citation
Fumihiko Maki of Japan is an architect whose work is intelligent and artistic
in concept and expression, meticulously achieved.
He is a modernist who has fused the best of both eastern and western
cultures to create an architecture representing the age-old qualities of his
native country while at the same time juxtaposing contemporary
construction methods and materials.
His first exposure to modern architecture was in 1930s Tokyo where a few
pioneering architects departed from traditional and European styles.
Following his graduation from the University of Tokyo, he came to the United
States for further study at Cranbrook Academy of Art and at Harvard
University's Graduate School of Design under Jose Luis Sert. He later taught
at Washington University, where as a young professor, he designed his first
built work. These early experiences helped build the foundation for his own
unique style that would reflect his cosmopolitan view of the world.
Early in his career, he became a founding member of an avant garde group
of talented young Japanese architects calling themselves Metabolists, a
word derived from the Greek with various meaningsalteration, variation,
revolutionchangeability and flexibility being key elements of their view.
One aim was never to design in isolation from the city structure as a whole.
Maki has expressed his constant concern for the "parts" and the "whole
describing one of his goals as achieving a dynamic equilibrium that includes
sometimes conflicting masses, volumes, and materials.
He uses light in a masterful way making it as tangible a part of every design
as are the walls and roof. In each building, he searches for a way to make
transparency, translucency and opacity exist in total harmony. To echo his
own words, "Detailing is what gives architecture its rhythm and scale."
There is amazing diversity in his workfrom the awesome Nippon
Convention Center near Tokyo with its man-made mountain range of
stainless steel roofs to his earlier and smaller YKK Guest House or a planned
orphan village in Poland.
The dimensions of his work measure a career that has greatly enriched
architecture. As a prolific author as well as architect and teacher, Maki
contributes significantly to the understanding of the profession.
Maki has described creation in architecture as "discovery, not invention... a
cultural act in response to the common imagination or vision of the time."
Further, he believes, "it is the responsibility of the architect to leave behind
buildings that are assets to culture."
For building works that are not only expressions of his time, but that are
destined to survive mere fashion, the 1993 Pritzker Architecture Prize is
presented to Fumihiko Maki.

Essay
Thoughts On Fumihiko Maki
By Kenneth Frampton
Ware Professor of Architecture
The Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation
Columbia University, New York
Profoundly influenced by Jose Lluis Sert and hence steeped in the
ameliorative rationalism of the early modern movement, Fumihiko Maki
enjoys the reputation of consistently creating an architecture that aside
from responding to societys needs, also comprises a constructional fabric
which is durable and aesthetically vibrant. In this regard his practice may be
fairly compared to that of Norman Foster, Gunter Benisch and Renzo Piano,
all of whom, while expressively different, have displayed a similar penchant
for efficient, lucid, lightweight form.
Lightness, both in fact and in metaphor, has been an emerging theme in
Makis architecture for some time and today his work invariably manifests a
spatiality that derives in large measure from the immateriality of modern
material. Like much of todays production his work places a particular
emphasis on the membrane irrespective of whether this is an atectonic
layering of planes or a taut skin drawn over a vaulted superstructure. Either
way Maki gravitates towards an architecture that is both present and absent
at the same time, like the transitory illusions of the cinema screen for which
he retains a particular passion. This last came to the fore in 1990, when he
entered the competition for the Palazzo del Cinema in Venice. Of this he
wrote:
Our proposal for the Palazzo del Cinema attempts to express the spirit of
Venice, both external and temporal, in one striking entity: a glass palace on
the water, Changing from day to night; its solid mass is gradually
transformed and dissolved into a glowing festive illusion. Under the
glistening of twilight, appears an alluring image of glass, a reflection of the
ephemeral state of Venice seen through a screen of fog, or perhaps a vision
of a world that exists only through the magic of light as in the cinema itself.
This technocratic re-interpretation of the traditional Japanese Ukiyoe or
floating-world has hardly come easily to Maki, as we may judge from the
Hillside Terrace apartments in Tokyo with which his career began in 1966
and to which he would add one fragment after another, including a recent
phase, dating from 1992.
Needless to say, his syntax has changed across time, from the informal,
cubic rationalism of the initial buildings, evidently indebted to Sert, to the
tessellated minimalism of the middle period and the layered, light
membraceous character of the last. Throughout this long haul Maki has
maintained the sense of a loosely-assembled city-in-miniature in which
interlocking, in-between spaces, paralleling the street, assure the civic
character of the whole while subtly avoiding gratuitous aestheticism on the
one hand and simple-minded functionalism on the other.
Two works announce the emergence of lightness as an all-pervasive theme
in Makis architecture, the Fujisawa Gymnasium, completed in 1984, and the
Tepia Science Pavilion, built at Minato, Tokyo in 1989. Of the two it is the
gymnasium that takes its cue from the Japanese modern tradition by re-
interpreting the heavy-weight, catenary form of Kenzo Tanges Olympic
Stadia of 1960. Unlike Tanges anti-seismic, megastructural heroics,
however, Fujisawa is a light, athletic and critically responsive work, directly
related to the ephemeral character of the late modern world. Of this work
Maki has written:
If a strong totality, with suppressed parts and a hierarchical composition
are characteristic of classicist architecture, active and assertive parts are
characteristic of Gothic architecture, and the early works of modern
architecture. Today, I find myself more strongly attracted to the second
organizational type. One reason is that working from the parts permits a
freer formal interpretation of how various formal and environmental
demandsincluding those of a historical and symbolic natureare to be
met Elsewhere he will write of the profile of Fujisawa as symbolizing
through its sharp but simultaneously soft outline the fundamental ambiguity
of the modern world. However Fujisawa will only be the first in a series of
such thin shell structures in which layered, crustaceous membranes of
stainless steel are carried on long-span steel trusses, grounded in concrete
podia. Within this development both the Makuhari Messe, built at Chiba in
1989 and the Tokyo Municipal Gymnasium of 1990 are equally
dematerialized shell structures of a similar order.
Through such hovering forms, Maki has been able to render his concept of a
fragmentary urbanism at a higher symbolic level, in which these modern
cathedrals stand out against the chaos of the Megalopolis as civic
catalysts. The highly reflective shell roofs of Fujisawa and Makuhari imply, at
vastly different scales, a new kind of urban enclave with which to engender
and sustain a more fluid and shifting conception of public space. With its
540 meter-long undulating metal roof (40 meters short of Paxtons Crystal
Palace) and its 120 meter span, the Makuhari Exhibition Hall dwarfs the two-
way, shell roofed spans of the Fujisawa and Tokyo gymnasiums, so that one
spontaneously associates its vastness with such mega-engineering works as
the George Washington Bridge. Its length is such that the various ancillary
structures running down its side, entry-foyer, events hall, etc., recall nothing
so much as so many tugboats at the side of a transatlantic liner.
If the ultimate point of departure for Fujisawa Gymnasium resides in the
Gothic, the Tepia Pavilion finds its parti in the Rietveld/Schroeder House of
1924 and in Le Corbusiers Villa Shodan of 1956. And yet while Maki is
indebted to these canonically modern paradigms for the overall planar, pin-
wheeling, form assumed by the pavilion, the underlying order is classic,
even if the implicit cubic mass and the regular columnar grid never fully
materialize. Thus unlike the Iwasaki Museum and his own house, dating from
the late 1970s, where an asymmetrical mass is stabilized about an axis,
Tepia establishes its center of gravity in relation to a small triangular occulus
set in the center of its main facade. While Tepia is planned like a palazzo
about an atrium, little of this classicism prevails in the overall spatial
organization, so that it both evokes and denies the classic to an equal
degree. If, as Serge Lalat has argued, Maki proceeds by a process of
crystallization, he also undermines this procedure by simultaneously
engaging in an act of dematerialization. This is particularly true of his
orthogonal works, such as Tepia, where the detailing of the fenestration,
tends to dissolve the surface into which it is set. Thus, notwithstanding
Makis unwavering commitment to programmatic rationality, the final
expression is subtly mannered. It is, as Arata Isozaki once put it, an
architecture of quotation par excellence, so that Tepia recalls not only
Reitveld and Le Corbusier, but also Walter Gropius; in particular the thin-
oversailing roofs and transparent cylindrical stair towers of Gropius
Werkbund Building of 1914 ...

Ceremony
Prague Castle, Prague, Czech Republic
Prague Castle is a sprawling complex situated atop a large hill on the left
bank of the Vltava River. Dating back to the nineth century, several castles
have occupied the site of the current Prague Castle, which today is the seat
of the President of the Czech Republic, and serves as the historical and
political center of both the city and state.
A Romanesque palace was erected there in the twelfth century that was
rebuilt in the Gothic style in the fourteenth century, during the rule of
Charles IV. The Royal palace was re-built to the current shape under the
ruling Jagellos dynasty at the end of the fifteenth century. At that time,
renowned architect, Benedikt Rejt, added the now-famous Vladislav Hall,
also in the Gothic style. The castle was enlarged in the sixteenth century.
The Spanish Hall, in a new part of the castle, was added during the reign of
Rudolf II. Prague Castle took on a classical appearance in the eighteenth
century, which it maintains today, during the reign of Empress Maria
Theresa, under the direction of architect Nicol Pacassi. After World War I,
the gardens and the interior of the castle were renovated by Slovene
architect Joe Plenik. From 1920 until 1934, he completed numerous
projects at the castle, including the renovation of numerous gardens and
courtyards, the design and installation of monuments and sculptures, and
the design of numerous new interior spaces, including the Plenik Hall
completed in 1930, which features three levels of abstracted Doric
colonnades.
Speakers at the official presentation ceremony of the 1993 Pritzker
Architecture Prize were: Vclav Havel, President of the Czech Republic; Milan
Udhe, President, Chamber of Deputies, Parliament of the Czech Republic;
Adrian A Basora, US Ambassador ; Bill Lacy, Secretary to the Jury; J. Carter
Brown, Chairman of the Jury; and Jay A. Pritzker, President The Hyatt
Foundation.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Fumihiko Maki
First, I would like to express my many thanks to Mr. Jay Pritzker, the
members of The Hyatt Foundation, and the jury members of the Award
Committee, without whose support I would not have been here in the first
place. I am truly grateful for the honor that you are bestowing on me
tonight, which seems to validate and encourage the kind of interests and
endeavors I have been pursuing over nearly 40 years of work in
architecture. I am also acutely aware that there are many other deserving
candidates for this prize, and therefore it truly came as a surprise to be
picked from among such esteemed peers and colleagues. In receiving this
award, I want to acknowledge the mutual support and shared ideals
amongst this expanding group of friends, whose collaboration, criticism, and
camaraderie have made my work in architecture so personally rewarding.
I want to extend my deepest appreciation to all of youfriends, family,
peers and supporterswho have come to Prague Castle to share with me in
the award celebration this evening, and in particular I want to say how
honored I am that President Havel has taken time out from his busy
schedule to be here with us.
The opportunity to hold this ceremony in the city that to me is most beloved
in Europe is really quite a moving experience. And as I think about the fact
that we are here gathered from various parts of the world, representing so
many different cities, I am moved to say something about cities and their
role in inspiring not only architecture, but life and culture in general. In
retrospect, my whole life, both privately and professionally, has been and
still is continuously interwoven with of the lives of various cities, each with
its own lessons or messages. In my acceptance speech tonight I would like
to talk briefly on three cities that have made profound impact on my
thinking about architecture. In other words, this is a "tale of three cities."
The first city I would like to speak of is Tokyo where I was born and raised,
and where I still live with my family and practice architecture today. In the
early 30s, the time of my childhood years, Tokyo had much of the ambience
and the physical appearance that it had inherited from the previous century.
In the Yamanote, or "upper town", where I lived, streets were often
shadowed by big trees and were dark in evenings. Small streets and narrow
alleys were unpaved. After it rained, the smell of the earth and vegetation
permeated the air. Those streets where today we find heavy vehicular traffic
in those days were for people strolling and bicycling. In the summer, the
people came out of their houses and stores to get a bit of the cool air and
watched children playing with fireworks, whose sound could be heard even
from quite a distance away. These scenes were still reminiscent of the city
that nearly two-hundred years earlier had already become the biggest
metropolis in the world and was also at that time arguably the world's
greatest garden city.
The buildings of Tokyo in the 30s were mostly low in scale and subdued in
color and texture. Most residential houses had clay-tile roofs and wooden
finishes on the walls, sometimes cemented over on the street front. Public
buildings, banks and some important commercial structures such as
department stores were styled according to Western Neo-Classicism.
The same 30s did, however, witness the emergence of the first modern
architecture here and there. I still remember vividly those occasions when I
visited with my parents their friend's houses and small exhibition places and
tea parlors in public parks. Their very articulated cubic forms, whiteness,
floating interior spaces and thin metal railings were my first introduction to
modern architecture, and they made a strong impression on me, although
I'd never thought to become an architect at that time. Later, these fantastic
visual images had begun gradually to overlap with images of boats and
airplanes, the very symbols of modernity for children like myself at that
time.
Much has been changed since then. Today the city of Tokyo may be called
the world's largest assemblage of industrially produced artifacts (in
materials such as metal, glass, concrete, etc.). Having witnessed personally
this transformation from a garden city to an industrialized city within the
span of a mere fifty years, Tokyo presents for me a rich mental landscape at
an almost surrealistic level.
Tokyo, because of its capacity to meet all kinds of external demands and
pressures for change, is continuously a seductive and exciting place for the
creation of something new. The city simply excites the minds of architects
and artists. At the same time, however, Tokyo stands as a sober reminder of
what one would not do and should not. So many changes have been
enacted in the name of progress but at the expense of the city's rich cultural
legacy. Tokyo, in this respect, continues to serve me as example and teacher
for the navigation of a future course.
Next, I would like to move on to my second city, Chicago. Following my
graduation from the University of Tokyo in the early 50s, I decided to pursue
further graduate study in the U.S. Although I have never lived in Chicago,
throughout those years I spent in the United States, the city always
symbolized for me a city of architectural dreams. No city possessed a richer
collection of what one might call the genuine heritage of American
architecture. The great works of Richardson, Sullivan, Burnham and Root,
and Wright offer a rich panoramic view of American Modernism of that
period. Even to the eyes of a foreigner like myself, the sturdy, masculine
facades of Chicago architecture instantly seemed a mirror of the fierce,
proud individualism that is deeply rooted in American tradition ...

Ceremony Speech
J. Carter Brown
Chairman of the Jury
Mr. President, Chairman, Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and
gentlemen. I'm Carter Brown, the chairman of the jury for the Pritzker Prize,
and on behalf of that jury, it is my privilege to thank you, Mr. President, for
our being here. We like your house. You have given us perhaps, a new
definition of la vie da Boheme.
The Pritzker Prize is determined by a jury, many of whom are with us
tonight. They come, many of them from great distances, to be in Prague
tonight. Ada Louise Huxtable, distinguished architectural critic, formerly of
the New York Times. Charles Correa from India, distinguished architect and
winner of the Royal Institute of British Architect's Gold Medal. Frank Gehry, a
Pritzker Prize winner, from Los Angeles. Ricardo Legorreta, from Mexico City,
an architect very much in demand these days. Toshio Nakamura from Tokyo,
Japan, editor of A+U, the great encyclopedia in our fieldhe is a walking
encyclopedia. And we also have two former Pritzker Laureates with us: Hans
Hollein of Vienna, and Gottfried Bhm of Germany. Welcome all of you.
The idea of being in this castle, I think bears witness to the importance of
patronage, often unsung, to the art of architecture. Those of us in the art
world have grown up revering Rudolph II, and many of the other great
figures you have called into being in this great assemblage. But tonight, I
wanted particularly to pay homage to another great democratic president,
Jan Masyryck, who had first of all the intelligence to marry an American wife,
and secondly, the enormous intelligence to engage Jose Pletschnik whose
work you have experienced in entering here and whose architectural quality
bears witness to how important patronage can be in a democratic society.
Speaking of democracy, we are flattered to have not only the President here
which does such honor to the art of architecture, but also the Chairman of
the Chamber of Deputies, Mr. Milan Uhde, who has yet another distinction,
which in our world is particularly significant, he is a former Minister of
Culture. Chairman Uhde.

Christian de Portzamparc
1994 Laureate
Selected Works:
School of Dance of the Opra de Paris, Nanterre, France, 1987
Cit de la Musique, Paris, France, 199
Crdit Lyonnais Tower, Lille, France, 1995
LVMH Tower, New York, New York, 1999
French Embassy, Berlin, Germany, 2003
Luxembourg Philharmonie, 2005

Announcement
Parisian Architect Is Named 1994 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Los Angeles, CA-Christian de Portzamparc, a 50 year-old French architect
who lives and works in Paris, has been named the seventeenth Laureate of
the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The Hyatt Foundation jury described
Portzamparc as "a powerful poet of forms and creator of eloquent spaces,"
in announcing him as the sixth European architect to be selected for his
profession's highest honor.
Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, which established the
award in 1979, will present Portzamparc with a $100,000 grant and a bronze
medal at a ceremony to be held June 14 in Columbus, Indianaa community
that boasts more buildings by world-renowned architects than any other
small town. In making the announcement, Pritzker praised the choice of the
jury, saying, "Portzamparc is the first French architect to be so honored. It is
not only a tribute to him as an individual, but an homage as well, to the
great architectural traditions of France, and particularly Le Corbusier who
has forever influenced architecture everywhere."
Bill Lacy, secretary to the international panel of jurors that elects the
Laureate each year, quoted from the formal citation from the jury: "Christian
de Portzamparc's new architecture is of our time, bound neither by
classicism nor modernism. His expanded perceptions and ideas seek
answers beyond mere style. He is a part of a new generation of French
architects who have incorporated the lessons of the Beaux Arts into an
exuberant collage of contemporary architectural idioms, at once bold,
colorful and original." Lacy, who is an architect himself and president of the
State University of New York at Purchase, elaborated, "Every architect who
aspires to greatness must in some sense reinvent architecture; conceive
new solutions; develop a special design character; find a new aesthetic
vocabulary. Portzamparc has an unusually clear and consistent vision,
devising highly original spaces that serve a variety of functions."
Portzamparc, who was born in Casablanca, Morocco while his father served
in the French Army there, completed his architectural degree at the Ecole
Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 1969. His first commission was
for a water tower in a new community, Marne-La-Vallee, located
approximately 20 miles east of Paris. The water tower is unique in that it has
an outer skin offine mesh open trellis work covered with climbing plants, and
is modeled after the Tower of Babel. Its location in the center of town at a
crossroads makes it a focal point.
Most of his completed projects are in France, the most widely publicized
being the City of Music, a new music academy in the Parisian suburban park,
La Villette. It is one of the Grands Projets of President Mitterrand, a program
of commissioning new buildings which has stimulated an architectural
renaissance in his country. The first phase of the project was completed in
1991, and the final phase is scheduled to open in January.
Portzamparc has done other projects related to music: the Erik Satie
Conservatory of Music and Elderly Housing, which has been hailed as one of
Paris' best examples of contextualism; and the Dance School of the Paris
Opera located in Nanterre.

He has built numerous other housing developments, one of the most

notable being Hautes-Formes completed in 1979 in Paris. The project
consists of seven residential blocks containing 210 apartments, with a
central square and arcade. His first international project was completed in
Japan in 1991, four residential apartment buildings in the city of Fukuoka, an
experimental district where architects of different nationalities are designing
all the structures.
Portzamparc already holds his own country's highest honors in his profession
the Medal of the French Academy of Architecture; the Grand Prix National
de L'Architecture; the Grand Prix d'Architecture de la Ville de Paris; and the
Order of Arts and Letters from the French Ministry of Culture.
In addition to being an architect, Portzamparc has painted since 1960, doing
all of his own sketches and renderings, and sometimes murals in his
completed projects. His works have been exhibited in Paris, London,
Florence, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Brussels, Tokyo, and many other cities
around the world. He is also a furniture designer, writer, and lecturer.
The distinguished jury that selected Portzamparc as the 1994 Laureate
consists of J. Carter Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C. (who is chairman of the jury and a founding member); and
alphabetically, Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat from Torinol Italy; Charles
Correa, architect of Bombay, India; Frank Gehry, architect and 1989 Pritzker
Laureate of Los Angeles; Ada Louise Huxtable, author and architectural critic
of New York; Toshio Nakamura, editor-in-chief of A+U architectural
publications of Tokyo, Japan; and juror emeritus, Lord Rothschild, chairman
of the board of trustees of the National Gallery of Art in London, England.

Biography
Christian de Portzamparc will be celebrating his fiftieth birthday on May 5
(1994), an anniversary that will be made even more memorable by the fact
that he has just been named the 1994 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate.
He is the seventeenth person and the sixth European to be so honored since
The Hyatt Foundation established the award in 1979.
Highly respected by architectural cognoscente throughout the world, this
relatively young French architect explains that he was a designer who
painted before he decided to study architecture. While he still paints, he
says, I am not a painter or sculptor, yet. He is however a frequent lecturer
and author. Although he has no built works in the United States, he was one
of the finalists in the competition for Chicagos new Museum of
Contemporary Art and an Art Museum for Omaha. Most recently he has
gained recognition in Japan where he designed apartment buildings for the
city of Fukuoka.
Most of his completed projects are in France, perhaps the most visible being
the City of Music, a group of structures situated on the edge of the La
Villette suburban park in Paris. The project actually has two phases. The first
part, housing the National Conservatory of Music and Dance was completed
in 1990. The second part with public spaces for concerts will open next
January. Portzamparc says when he began work on the City of Music in 1984,
his thoughts were carried back to a house in Brittany, the first thing he ever
built, In that design, each room was like a separate little house, he says. I
have discovered that each new project is the sum of all my previous works.
No new work springs to life without some relationship to past inspiration.
President Mitterrand is credited with stimulating an architectural
renaissance in France with his international competitions for new buildings
in his country. He has made his position clear with the oft-quoted statement,
I believe that a people are great when their architecture is great. Perhaps
one of the most widely publicized of the Grands Projets has been the
addition to the Louvre Museum by the 1983 Pritzker Laureate, Ieoh Ming Pei.
City of Music, known throughout Europe as one of the Grands Projets, has
been praised in the architectural press around the world. Spains Interior
Architecture and Design (Diseo Interior) magazine said of City of Music: A
building with lyric qualities, full of whiteness and opacity, it is the antithesis
of the ethereal transparencies and other technological approaches so typical
of the new French academicism. The formal opening is scheduled for early
in 1995.

When the City of Music project was just beginning, another of Portzamparcs
important projects was being completed and hailed as one of the best
examples of contextualism in the city. It was the Erik Satie Conservatory of
Music and Elderly Housing. This project, which he began in 1981 after
winning a competition, has been described as being Post Modern, but the
architect himself prefers not to be categorized, and he calls attention to his
subsequent commissions as evidence of a much more personal style.
When I was about 13, I had already become interested in art. But I
remember seeing some sketches by Le Corbusier, says Portzamparc, and
this stimulated my interests not only in art, but it started my thinking about
architecture. It is not surprising that this most famous of French architects
has been an influence on a great many architects around the world,
including some prior Pritzker Laureates, including Richard Meier and Kenzo
Tange, who both cited Le Corbusier as their most important early influence.
Portzamparc began studying architecture in 1962 at the cole Nationale des
Beaux-Arts in Paris, first under Eugne Beaudouin who encouraged his taste
for formal expressionism, and then later under George Candilis who
emphasized systematic work on grids and networks.
While still in school in 1966, he had second thoughts about a career in
architecture. Architecture seemed to me to be too bureaucratic, and not
free enough compared to art; and the modernistic ideals which I worshiped
before, seemed to me unable to reach the richness of real life. I also began
to criticize my first influences like Le Corbusier. During this time of
reassessment, he traveled to New York. He spent nine months in the city,
living in Greenwich Village, enjoying the artists life, mingling with writers,
poets and other artists. I read and wrote and met people, he says, I was
fascinated by New York.
When he finished his degree in 1969, he still did not start working as an
architect immediately. I became involved with a group that was studying
how people interact with their neighborhoods, doing interviews and studying
the buildings and why people liked to live in them and why they didnt.
These sociologists and psycho-sociologists suffered with the hundreds of
people they were interviewing. I got a realistic idea of a concrete way to
understand architecture as a social responsibility. This was after three years
of political discussion about `architecture as an obsolete subjecta
discipline unable to change the world. I came to realize that architecture
might not be able to create utopia, but as an architect, I could help change
things for the better.
He continued the story, So I quit my vanguard position of the sixties to try
to work modestly on what appeared to me to be the great task of
architecture: to make a small neighborhood successful, which seemed to be
impossible after twenty years of reconstruction in Europe. Even now, I
always consider a building as a part of the whole, a piece which creates a
collective performance, which is the city. At the same time, the building
must also be a response to a client or users needs.

Jury Citation
Christian de Portzamparc's new architecture is of our time, bound neither by
classicism nor modernism. His expanded perceptions and ideas seek
answers beyond mere style. It is a new architecture characterized by seeing
buildings, their functions and the life within them, in new ways that require
wide-ranging, but thoughtful exploration for unprecedented solutions.
Every architect who aspires to greatness must in some sense reinvent
architecture; conceive new solutions; develop a special design character;
find a new aesthetic vocabulary. Portzamparc's work exhibits all these
characteristics. He has an unusually clear and consistent vision, devising
highly original spaces that serve a variety of functions on an urban scale in
the Cite' de la Musique, or a more personal individual scale in a housing
project or the delightfully chic Cafr Beaubourg.

He is a gifted composer using space, structure, texture, form, light and color
all shaped by his personal vision. This reinvented architecture, no matter
how idiosyncratic or original, still has its common source in modernism,
appropriately assimilated.
Portzamparc is the first French architect to be awarded the Pritzker Prize. It
is a fitting tribute to the individual and to the rich tradition of French
architecture that he represents. No other country, with the possible
exception of Italy, has made such a contribution to the field of architecture
through its buildings, its urban design and through the Beaux Arts
educational system.
The Ecoles des Beaux Arts held sway over the minds of generations of
architects for a century or more, and even in recent times has proven more
tenacious and pervasive in its influence than is generally acknowledged. Its
theories, doctrines and teaching methods still dominate architectural
education in many parts of the world.
Portzamparc is a prominent member of a new generation of French
architects who have incorporated the lessons of the Beaux Arts into an
exuberant collage of contemporary architectural idioms, at once bold,
colorful and original. His is an architecture that draws on French cultural
tradition while paying homage to the master architect and countryman, Le
Corbusier. It is a lyrical architecture that takes great risks and evokes
excitement from its audience.
Portzamparc is a high wire artist with sure and confident footwork.
Recognizing the talent of a powerful poet of forms and creator of eloquent
spaces, who is aware of the past, but true to himself and his time, the
Pritzker Architecture Prize honors Christian de Portzamparc, with the
expectation that the world will continue to benefit richly from his creativity.

Essay
Reinventing Architecture: Christian de Portzamparc
By Ada Louise Huxtable
Author and Architecture Critic
Pritzker Architecture Prize Juror
When Isaac Newton was asked how he saw so far into the cosmos, he
replied, by standing on the shoulders of giantsacknowledging all that he
owed to those who preceded him and made his own achievements possible.
Todays architects truly stand on the shoulders of giants. Their debt to Le
Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright is enormous; they are
the heirs of the broad and diverse contributions of those modernist
pioneers, from de Stijl to Alvar Aalto, who led a twentieth-century revolution
in the art and technology of building. Whatever one thinks of the world that
followed them and betrayed their dreams, architecture was never the same
again.
In their turn, todays architects are creating revolutionary change. Building
on, but transcending the modernist rationale of structure and function, they
are pursuing a new and equally radical kind of design: sensuous, poetic,
complex, often fiercely intellectual, frequently daunting, always eye-and-
mind opening, offering brilliant and beautiful alternatives to conventional
practice. There has never been amore extraordinary time for architecture
than right now, more creative and challenging, more filled with the promise
of great work and art.
Some of this new work has already been honored by the Pritzker Prize: Frank
Gehry and Alvaro Siza, an American and a Portuguese of similar aims and
strikingly disparate styles, have both been recent winners. This years
laureate, Christian de Portzamparc, is French, like the others, he explores
architecture in his own very original, distinctive, and one is tempted to say,
distinctively French, way. Like the others, he is pushing the frontiers of the
art. What all of these architects are doing, in a sense, is reinventing
architecture. They are stretching accepted limits, discovering new ways of
seeing and building, much as Mannerism and the Baroque stretched the
principles of the Renaissance, forever altering its vocabulary and range.

These buildings must be visited personally; what one usually sees in

pictures are strange shapes and stylistic mannerisms that merely hint at the
unusual design strategies underneath. Portzamparcs work, which invokes
the shapes, colors and images of the 1950s and 60s with unabashed elan, is
easily misunderstood. It would be simple to call it clever theater, an
example of the fashionable appropriation of the remote (for these younger
architects) near-past for its romantic and decorative appeal. His roofs soar,
swoop and hover; free-form shapes are lovingly recalled; nostalgic details
are reconstituted in aluminum, tile and concrete that honor Morris Lapiduss
architecture of joy. In addition to Miami-modern redux, there are echoes of
Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx in the undulating curves that
transform Corbusian austerity in Latin American exuberance. He clearly
loves it all, without condescension.
To dismiss this work as homage to a trendy vernacular, however, one must
overlook the logic and originality of Portzamparcs plans, the expert and
effective way in which his solutions flow and function, his sure grasp of scale
and proportion, his superior sense of urban amenity, his lyrical use of light
and color. Given cultural distance and European perspective, his sources
transcend shallow sentimentalism. This is no artfully retro exercise; the
timeless elements of architecture are being dramatically reinterpreted.
These colorful, light-filled forms serve a functional and social organization of
exceptional skill. Portzamparc transforms his obvious delight in Arp-like
curves and giant cones and candy colors into a pop monumentality that
takes serious high camp into the realm of serious high art.
Make no mistake; this is serious architecture. It is also serious hedonism and
profound French chic. But unlike so much French architecture, where the
chic is skin-deep, this is seriously innovative work with an impressive range
of invention.
Only a seriously assured architect could carry it off. Official French taste
tends to favor modish displays of real and faux engineering over a
humanisma loaded wordthat delights in subjective and evocative
images. But Portzamparc is not alone in the persistent incorporation of
personal stylistic iconsJames Stirling had his lighthouses and Aldo Rossi
has his haunting skeletal stairs and lonely lookout towers.
At 50a young age in a field where the more important commissions tend
to go to experienced, older practitionersPortzamparc is already the
accomplished designer of a series of major buildings. He has not yet
perfected the art of suavely flamboyant self-presentation of the celebrity
architect. Trailing a well-worn raincoat that is somewhat more, or less, than
Armani-casual, a gently beat-up fedora over curly dark hair and puppy-sad
eyes lit by an occasional wan smile, he has the look of a star-crossed, rather
than star architect. He is just as likely to wear out a visitor, preferably in
terrible weather, with earnestly commendable rehabs than his star turns.
But when one gets to them, they are breathtaking.
There have been approximately ten years between the start of the first part
of his competition-winning design of 1983 for the Cite de la Musique in the
redeveloped area of La Villette and the completion of the second half of this
very large complex in the Parisian outskirts. One of Mitterands grand
travaux, this national conservatory for music and dance is less well known,
but more interesting innovative than many of the projects to come out of
that imperial effort.
The completed structure, already in use, contains both performance and
student facilities. There is nothing conventional about this building. A
dramatic, multi-storied entrance serves as a circulation core; stairs,
corridors, and tiers of open balconies surround this central space, creating
visible stages at many levels on which people come and go. Natural light,
top to bottom interior views, generous vistas out to those controversial
cones and curving balconies (one is the organ recital hall, the other
connects the roofs of separate units) belie the fact that the building is
partially underground. Deco details beguile in colors that conquer an
institutional air.
The second structure, which houses a major concert hall, a museum and
studios, starts with a stunning public act. Visitors step down from several
entrances into a plaza that serves as a collecting point for pedestrian traffic,
which is then carried along a curving, covered promenade leading to and
circling the concert hall. One follows and narrowing sweep until the corridor
reaches the street. Walls change in hue as the corridor unfolds; Portzamparc
is also a painter, with an artists eye for what color does to a place and the
people in it ...

Ceremony
The Commons, Columbus, lndiana
Columbus, Indiana, a small town some 45 miles south of Indianapolis, is a
showcase of modern architecture with over fifty buildings designed by
internationally recognized firms. Architectural enthusiast and Chairman of
Cummings Engine Company, J. Irwin Miller was influential in bringing quality
architecture to the town. His support of modern architecture began in 1937
when Elliel Saarinen received the commission to design a church in
Columbus. In support of the concept that the built environment is crucial to
a quality community, patronage was moved from an individual effort to a
broader endeavor with the founding of the Cummings Engine Foundation.
Established in 1954, its mission was to pay architects fees for any civic
building designed by an architect selected from a list of approved
professionals. Professionals such as Harry Weese, Richard Meier, I.M. Pei,
SOM, and Venturi & Rauch, among others, have built in Columbus.
The glass enclosed Commons Centre was designed by Cesar Pelli in 1973
while he was with Gruen Associates in Los Angeles. The complex occupies
two blocks in the center of downtown. It is a bi-level public space with a
playground, performance stage, exhibition space, cafeteria and areas for
seating. The Centre also incorporates a large civic space where many
community events take place. The complex it is enlivened by Jean Tinguely's
Chaos I (1974).
The 1994 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony was held at the Commons
and included the participation of the Mayor of Columbus, The French
Minister of Culture, the Director of Architecture for the French Ministry of
Infrastructures, and representing the Pritzker Architecture Prize organization,
J. Carter Brown, Bill Lacy, and Jay Pritzker, President of the Hyatt Foundation.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Christian de Portzamparc
Today is a great day in my life, and I am an extremely happy man. To join
the list of architects this prize has honored, when only yesterday I still felt
personally that every project was for me a new experiment, has brought me
a strange mixture of excitement and serenity, while at the same time facing
me with a great responsibility: I can no longer afford to make any mistakes. I
have a duty of excellence towards you, and as we never know where that
lies, I shall never be able to stop.
I see the concern already on the face of Elizabeth, my wife, who, as well as
designing her own furniture, supports me so marvelously in my work. It is a
wonderful profession to be in, but it is often an uphill struggle.
Architecture is an art, but a public art. More often than not, the public does
not choose architecture as it would a museum to visit. Instead, architecture
is imposed on us, in our daily life, our homes and our places of work. And for
this reason, the architect-artist is accountable for his work; he owes an
explanation. We are asked to express ourselves all the time. And it's normal.
And because architecture is a public art, architects, unlike other artists, do
not enjoy complete personal creative freedom. They are expected to impart
a sort of legitimacy to their work by providing the right answers to the needs
of a particular era.
I have often felt, in this respect, that I am following a very personal path,
and perhaps more than others, I have had my doubts at times. Of course,
there was always support from friends, clients, decision-makers and
publications. But until now, in the face of doubt, I have only known a few
real moments of truth, times when I felt my objective was truly at my
fingertips; those moments when the users, the inhabitants of the Hautes
Formes, the teachers and students at the Opera School of Dance or the
National Music Conservatory expressed their enthusiasm at living in the
buildings I made.

But the honor of the Pritzker Prize is a confirmation of a different kind, from
people who have seen, experienced, felt and analyzed the best buildings in
the world, of our times.
So I should like to express my gratitude to the members of the jury, and my
pride at having been chosen by them, especially at a time when architecture
in France is so full of vitality.
I am proud to think that, through me, my country has been honored for
twenty years of effort in favor of architecture. I should like in particular to
thank Jacques Toubon, the French Minister of Culture, and Catherine Bersani,
Director of Architecture for the Ministry of Infrastructures, for being here
today at Columbus on this very special occasion. Jacques Toubon is also the
Mayor of a district in Paris where I built my first houses twenty years ago,
and together we are currently engaging in a very exciting new project, to
rehabilitate a complex of slabs built in the 1960s.
The numerous messages of joy and congratulations I have received from my
colleagues, and the numerous articles published recently in connection with
the prize, have shown us that the prestige of the Pritzker encourages
architecture through all the different partners involved; not only architects,
but also decision-makers, clients, builders. And in our world, architecture is
something, very frail. Tomorrow it could fall into oblivion. So I should like to
express my gratitude in the name of the joyous messages I have received,
to the Pritzker family, to Jay Pritzker, to The Hyatt Foundation, for this
tremendous boost, this burst of energy they give us every year by attracting
attention to architecture with their famous prize.
I should also like to thank all those who are at the origin of my work, and
who have helped me along the way. Some are here this evening. Friends
from the early days, stimulating colleagues, architects on my team, and
engineers who have worked on my buildings. I am moved that my parents
are here, my sister. And my parents, who without knowing it, steered me
towards this profession. My sons, too, who wisely look on from the sidelines.
And Elizabeth, who has shared the whole adventure with me.
I was thinking to myself only yesterday that it is always a special experience
to find myself back in the United States, even if getting through customs
takes longer than in other countries. A special experience because a certain
dream of America, with its multiple facets, marked our childhood, and to a
certain extent, helped to make us what we are today. Myths are made to
last, and the myth of the "new world" has made an indelible mark on history
and on our planet.
I remember it was only after a long stay in the United States, after the joy of
discovering the great cities of America, that I finally came to understand
Europe, and the treasures of its cities, stretched between the past and the
future. It was in 1966. I was a student then, beginning to wonder about the
legitimacy of the modern theory; and Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi were
sending out new glimmers of light from the United States.
It was then that, in this contrast between New York and Paris, when I forgot
for a while that I wanted to be an architect, the modern theory of city
planning that was spreading clumsily to every city in Europe suddenly struck
me as simplistic, even dangerous. The idea at that time was to destroy two
thirds of Paris and make it a clean, modern, homogenous city, and we
looked forward to it with relish ...

Ceremony Speech
J. Carter Brown
Chairman of the Jury
Well, Your Honor, I think that the gratitude is on the other foot. We are
delighted to be in your city. I come from the District of Columbia, which I
hope sounds a little like Columbus. Actually, you have it better here because
you have a state; we don't have a state. And yours at least recognizes the
role of those who were here before Columbus. But Indiana, after all, dons its
cap. But tonight we are celebrating something very transatlantic.
I am Carter Brown. I am here as chairman of the jury of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize. And I would like first of all to recognize those members of
the jury, past and present, who are here with us tonight. I am going to
impose on each of them to stand and ask the rest of you please to withhold
any applause until the end of that recitation.
The first is Ada Louise Huxtable of Marblehead, Massachusetts. No applause
please or we'll be here all evening. The next, Charles Correa, who's come
here from Bombay, India. And after that, Toshio Nakamura, who has come
here from Tokyo, Japan. And after that, we have Ricardo Legorreta, who
managed to make it from Mexico City, even though his luggage didn't. And
then among other former jurors, Ricardo is our most recent juror to have
rotated off, but we are very privileged to have with us the architect of this
building, Cesar Pelli, and another juror of the Pritzker Prize is also here. He
came all the way from Columbus, Indiana, J. Irwin Miller. Applause for all of
them.
I think that June of 1994 will go down in the annals as one of the high points
in the relations between France and America. I know that in the last weeks
many of us on this side of the Atlantic have been glued to our television,
reminiscing, or learning, as the case of most of you in this room I'm sure, the
first time about 1944 and the great Normandy invasion. And we have a
president, who had the opportunity, not only spending time with the
president of France (and hitting it off so well that they spent a great deal of
time upstairs in their White House, the Elysee Palace) before heading
downstairs. So the dinner didn't start `til late. And when it was over, the
president of France and our president, and their entourage, decided to visit
the Louvre. What else to do at midnight? They were there until almost two
o'clock, and were accompanied by a former Pritzker laureate, I.M. Pei, and
by the Minister of Culture in France, from whom we will be hearing shortly.
Well, that was in celebration of the Normandy invasion. Tonight, we are here
in celebration of the Brittany invasion. Christian de Portzamparc comes from
Brittany, and he is one of our youngest laureates, and therefore has not had
a chance, the French patronage system being so much more advanced than
our own, to build much outside of France, maybe Japan, but not yet in the
U.S. We think that needs remedying, and we are very much hoping that your
great artistry will be built on this side of the Atlantic as well.
And so I am now going to turn the podium over to a man who has been a
partner in crime in all kinds of plots and joint enterprises; he is the Minister
of Culture of a country that has one, which we ain't got. It does bring back
other reminiscences of a previous U.S. president and his beautiful, loving
wife and their visit to Paris, when a predecessor of Mister Toubon was invited
back by Jacqueline Kennedy to visit Washington, and specifically the
National Gallery of Art. And the two of them specified, or rather Andre
Malraux specified, that the then-director of the National Gallery would not
be included in this tour. But Mrs. Kennedy very sweetly said that his young
assistant, Carter Brown, could be. And so I had a wonderful morning with
just the three of us. And it brought back wonderful memories, and rather
sad memories a matter of weeks ago, when we were focused on a great visit
of a more recent president and his lady to France.
And so from France we have tonight the Minister of Culture, Jacques Toubon,
who will be followed by Catherine Bersani, who will represent the other
minister in France who deals with architecture, the Minister of Construction
and Public Works. She has the title of Director of Architecture. Wouldn't we
all love to be that? And we will hear from them, and then from the Secretary
of the Jury, Bill Lacy. So I now ask, would the minister Jacques Toubon come
to the podium. Thank you very much.
Tadao Ando
1995 Laureate

Selected Works:
Church on the Water, Tomamu, Hokkaid, Japan, 1988
Church of the Light, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan, 1989
Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Naoshima Island, Japan, 1992
Rokko Housing II, Kobe, Hyogo, Japan, 1993
Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Naoshima Island, Japan (aerial view),
1995
Rokko Housing I,II, and III, Kobe, Hyogo, Japan, 1999

Announcement
Tadao Ando, a 53 year-old architect who lives and works in Osaka, Japan,
was named the eighteenth Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. In
making the announcement, Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt
Foundation, which established the award in 1979, quoted from the jury's
citation which describes Ando's architecture as "an assemblage of
artistically composed surprises in space and form ... that both serve and
inspire ... with never a predictable moment as one moves throughout his
buildings.
"Ando is the third Japanese architect to be selected for his profession's
highest honor which carries a $100,000 grant. The formal presentation was
made on May 22 in the Grand Trianon Palace at Versailles, France.
Pritzker affirmed the jury's choice, saying, "Ando conceives his projects as
places of habitation not as abstract designs in a landscape. It is not
surprising that he is often referred to by his professional peers and critics as
being as much a builder as an architect. That emphasizes how important he
considers craftsmanship in accomplishing his designs. He requires absolute
precision in the making and casting of his concrete forms to achieve the
smooth, clean and perfect concrete for his structures."
Even though nearly all of his projects make use of cement as the primary
building material, he was a carpenter's apprentice for short time where he
learned the craftsmanship of traditional Japanese wooden construction. In
fact, one of his most widely known structures was built almost entirely of
wood, the Japanese Pavilion for Expo '92 in Spain.
Most of Ando's projects have been in Japan, concentrated mainly in the
Osaka area where he was born, raised and currently lives and works. In
addition to a number of inspiring religious structures, he has designed
museums, commercial buildings that include offices, factories and shopping
centers. His professional career began, however, with residential projects.
One of his first commissions was for a small row house in 1977 in his native
Osaka, called Azuma House, which received the top prize of the
Architectural Institute of Japan in 1979. He has designed a number of
significant homesfor single and multiple familiessometimes for mixed
commercial/residential use, as well as apartment complexes.
Bill Lacy, executive director for the international panel of jurors that elects
the Laureate each year, quoted further from the formal citation from the jury
which states, "Ando has accomplished an extraordinary body of work. His
powerful inner vision ignores whatever movements, schools or styles that
might be current, creating buildings with form and composition related to
the kind of life that will be lived there.
Lacy, who is an architect himself and president of the State University of
New York at Purchase, elaborated, "A key part of Ando's architectural
philosophy is the creation of boundaries within which he can create
introspective domains, encapsulating space where people can interrelate to
light and shadow, wind and water, away from the surrounding urban chaos.
The selection of Ando marks the third Pritzker Laureate from Japan. Kenzo
Tange was the first in 1987 and Fumihiko Maki in 1993 confirming that
country's indelible mark on twentieth century modernist architecture that
was previously almost exclusively American and European mainstream."
As a self-taught architect, with no architectural degree or even training with
a master architect, Ando attributes his development to extensive reading
and a number of study trips to Europe and the United States to see actual
buildings from history. He kept detailed sketch books of all his travels which
he still does to this day.
One of his most important housing projects is called Rokko Housing, which
was accomplished in two phases the first has twenty units each with a
terrace but differing in size and layout, the second, comprising 50 units, was
completed in 1993. While the units appear to be uniform on the outside,
each one has a unique interior. Built of reinforced concrete with a rigid
frame, the units are embedded in the side of sixty degree sloping hillside
with a panoramic view of Osaka Bay, and provide such amenities as a
swimming pool and a rooftop plaza. Ando received Japan's Cultural Design
Prize in 1983 for this project.
Ando's other residential projects include the three-story Ishihara House in
Osaka, another concrete bearing wall structure with a unique central court
surrounded by a glass block membrane. Another three-story residence is the
Horiuchi House, which uses a glass block wall as a freestanding screen
between the home and street traffic.
He continues to build residences, always with a sense of sanctuary, but he
has broadened his palette to include other types of structures. Some of
these new directions include the Church of Light and the Church on the
Water for Christian worshipers, and the striking Buddhist Water Temple,
entered through a staircase piercing a lotus pond. The Children's Museum at
Hyogo and the Forest of Tombs Museum at Kumamoto are remarkable
examples of his use of stairs and underground space.
In 1993, Ando received the Japan Art Academy Prize; in 1992, the Carlsberg
Architectural Prize in Denmark, adding to the honors already received,
including the French Academy of Architecture's Gold Medal in 1989; the
Alvar Aalto Medal in 1985; the Mainichi Art Prize in 1987 for the Chapel on
Mt. Rokko; the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize, and the Japanese Ministry
of Education's prize to encourage new talent in the fine arts in 1986. Ando is
an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the American
Institute of Architects, the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and
Letters.

Biography
Tadao Ando of Osaka, Japan is a man who is at the pinnacle of success in his
own country. In the last few years, he has emerged as a cultural force in the
world as well. In 1995, the Pritzker Architecture Prize was formally presented
to him within the walls of the Grand Trianon Palace at Versailles, France.
There is little doubt that anyone in the world of architecture will not be
aware of his work. That work, primarily in reinforced concrete, defines
spaces in unique new ways that allow constantly changing patterns of light
and wind in all his structures, from homes and apartment complexes to
places of worship, public museums and commercial shopping centers.
In all my works, light is an important controlling factor, says Ando. I
create enclosed spaces mainly by means of thick concrete walls. The
primary reason is to create a place for the individual, a zone for oneself
within society. When the external factors of a citys environment require the
wall to be without openings, the interior must be especially full and
satisfying.
And further on the subject of walls, Ando writes, At times walls manifest a
power that borders on the violent. They have the power to divide space,
transfigure place, and create new domains. Walls are the most basic
elements of architecture, but they can also be the most enriching.
Ando continues, Such things as light and wind only have meaning when
they are introduced inside a house in a form cut off from the outside world. I
create architectural order on the basis of geometry squares, circles,
triangles and rectangles. I try to use forces in the area where I am building,
to restore the unity between house and nature (light and wind) that was lost
in the process of modernizing Japanese houses during the rapid growth of
the fifties and sixties.

John Morris Dixon of Progressive Architecture wrote in 1990: The geometry

of Andos interior plans, typically involving rectangular systems cut through
by curved or angled walls, can look at first glance rather arbitrary and
abstract. What one finds in the actual buildings are spaces carefully
adjusted to human occupancy. Further, he describes Andos work as
reductivist, but the effect is not to deprive us of sensory richness. Far
from it. All of his restraint seems aimed at focusing our attention on the
relationships of his ample volumes, the play of light on his walls, and the
processional sequences he develops.
In his childhood, he spent his time mostly in the fields and streets. From
ages 10 to 17, he also spent time making wood models of ships, airplanes,
and moulds, learning the craft from a carpenter whose shop was across the
street from his home. After a brief stint at being a boxer, Ando began his
self-education by apprenticing to several relevant persons such as designers
and city planners for short periods. I was never a good student. I always
preferred learning things on my own outside of class. When I was about 18, I
started to visit temples, shrines, and tea houses in Kyoto and Nara, theres a
lot of great traditional architecture in the area. I was studying architecture
by going to see actual buildings, and reading books about them. He made
study trips to Europe and the United States in the sixties to view and
analyze great buildings of western civilization, keeping a detailed sketch
book which he does even to this day when he travels.
About that same time, Ando relates that he discovered a book about Le
Corbusier in a secondhand bookstore in Osaka. It took several weeks to save
enough money to buy it. Once in his possession, Ando says, I traced the
drawings of his early period so many times that all the pages turned black.
In my mind, I quite often wonder how Le Corbusier would have thought
about this project or that. When he visited Marseilles, Ando recalls visiting
Corbus nite dHabitation, and being intrigued by the dynamic use of
concrete. Although concrete (along with steel and glass) is Andos favorite
material, he has used wood in a few rare projects, including the Japan
Pavilion for Expo 92 in Spain.
Andos concrete is often referred to as smooth-as-silk. He explains that the
quality of construction does not depend on the mix itself, but rather on the
form work into which the concrete is cast. Because of the tradition of
wooden architecture in Japan, the craft level of carpentry is very high.
Wooden form work, where not a single drop of water will escape from the
seams of the forms depends on this. Watertight forms are essential.
Otherwise, holes can appear and the surface can crack.
His form moulds, or wooden shuttering (as it is called in Japan), are even
varnished to achieve smooth-as-silk finish to the concrete. The evenly
spaced holes in the concrete, that have become almost an Ando trademark,
are the result of bolts that hold the shuttering together. Andos concrete is
both structure and surface, never camouflaged or plastered over.
Although Ando has a preference for concrete, it is not part of the Japanese
building tradition. Most Japanese houses are built with wood and paper, he
explains, including my own. I have lived there since I was a child. It is like
my cave, Im very comfortable there. He explained that he was the
firstborn of twin boys. When he was two, it was decided that his maternal
grandmother would raise him, and he was given her name, Ando. They first
lived near the port of Osaka before moving to where he lives today.
Andos appreciation of the carpenters craft comes partially because as he
describes, I spent a lot of time as a child observing in a woodworking shop
across the street from the house where I grew up. I became interested in
trying to make shapes out of wood. With young eyes and sensitivities, I
watched how trees grew, altered by how the sun hit it, changing the
qualities of the lumber produced. I came to understand the absolute balance
between a form and the material from which it is made. I experienced the
inner struggle inherent in the human act of applying will to give birth to a
form ...

Jury Citation
Tadao Ando is that rare architect who combines artistic and intellectual
sensitivity in a single individual capable of producing buildings, large and
small, that both serve and inspire. His powerful inner vision, ignores
whatever movements, schools or styles that might be current, creating
buildings with form and composition related to the kind of life that will be
lived there.
At an age when most architects are beginning to do their first serious works,
Ando has accomplished an extraordinary body of work, primarily in his
native Japan, that already sets him apart. Working with smooth-as-silk
concrete, Ando creates spaces using walls that he defines as the most basic
element of architecture, but also the most enriching. In spite of his
consistent use of materials and the elements of pillar, wall, and vault, his
different combinations of these elements always prove exciting and
dynamic. His design concepts and materials have linked international
Modernism to the Japanese tradition of aesthetics. His dedication and
understanding of the importance of craftsmanship have earned him the
appellation of builder as well as architect.
He is accomplishing his self-imposed mission to restore the unity between
house and nature. Using the most basic geometric forms, he creates
microcosms for the individual with ever changing patterns of light. But far
more than achieving some abstract design concept, his architecture is a
reflection of a fundamental process of building something for habitation.
Ando's architecture is an assemblage of artistically composed surprises in
space and form. There is never a predictable moment as one moves through
his buildings. He refuses to be bound by convention. Originality is his
medium and his personal view of the world is his source of inspiration.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize honors Tadao Ando not only for works
completed, but also for future projects that when realized, will most
certainly further enrich the art of architecture.

Essay
Thoughts on Tadao Ando
By Kenneth Frampton
Ware Professor of Architecture
The Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation
Columbia University, New York
After an informal apprenticeship to a Japanese carpenter and a number of
independent study tours in Asia, Europe and the Americas, Tadao Ando first
came to public notice with his diminutive Azuma house realized in
Sumiyoshi in 1976 for which he received the Japanese Architectural
Association prize for architecture. This two-story dwelling, conceived as a
megaron inserted within a row of traditional terrace houses, already
established the essential principles of Andos architecture; his basic concept
of creating introspective microcosms to stand against the urban chaos of the
late modern world. This was a strategy as he put it, of using walls to defeat
walls. Thereafter this approach manifested itself in a series of reinforced
concrete houses each of which was focused in one way or another about an
atrium, in particular his Matsumoto and Ishihara houses of the late seventies
built in the suburbs of Osaka. Where the first of these focused about a
terrace, opening onto a forest reserve, the second number of features in this
small three story house established Andos basic syntax, comprising in the
first instance his habitual use of fair-faced in-situ concrete, inside and out,
either as a bounding wall or as a free-standing frame, combined with large
areas of plate glass or glass block, framed in steel and painted grey.
Evidently influenced to an equal degree by Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier
Ando evoked the Japanese tradition through subtle associations as one may
judge from the way in which the proportions of the shoji screens in the
Ishihara tatami room in the house were echoed by the steel framed, plate
glass windows opening on to the atrium, not to mention the affinity
obtaining between the shoji and the glass block in-fill above.

Where his houses were situated in the midst of nature as in the two-story
Koshino House built in the pine woods of Ashiya above Kobe in 1981, Ando
arranged for the atrium to flow out into the surrounding landscape. This
gesture was given a cross-cultural inflection, through a broad flight of stairs,
linking the atrium to the entry and the garden, situated on either side of a
narrow, steeply sloping site. This feature, combined with vertical slot
windows in the flanking concrete walls, was seemingly derived from the
architecture of Luis Barragn, as was the use of zenithal light in the living
room. This canonical house was further enriched by other transcultural
gestures, such as the built-in dining table that by virtue of a change in floor
level permitted one to adopt an oriental or occidental sitting posture at the
same table. Of more decisively Japanese provenance however was the
exposed skeleton frame of the bedroom wing. This flat roof was capped by a
steel rail in such a way as to suggest a traditional dry garden, just as the
dimly lit corridors within, evoked the traditional dark interiors, evinced by
Jun ichiro Tanizakis in his seminal book, In Praise of Shadows of 1933.
Notwithstanding his focus upon nature as the essential counterform to his
architecture, Andos concept of the natural has always been oriented
towards an ineffable manifestation, bordering on the animistic. Of this he
wrote in 1982:
Such things as light and wind only have meaning when they are introduced
inside a house in a form cut off from the outside world. The isolated
fragments of light and air suggest the entire natural world. The forms I have
created have altered and acquired meaning through elementary nature
(light and air) that give indications of the passage of time and the changing
of the seasons
The range and scale of Andos architecture began to expand in the mid-
eighties with two relatively large urban works; his Rokko Housing built on a
previously unbuildable hillside site overlooking Kobe Harbor and an eight
story commercial complex, known as the Festival, completed in downtown
Naha, Okinawa in 1984. While the first of these works clearly derived from
Le Corbusiers Roq et Rob terrace housing of 1949, the second was rendered
as an introspective seven story cube protected by perforated screen walls
from the chaotic metropolis surrounding it on every side. Within this seven
by seven bay concrete skeleton Ando stacked a number of open-planned,
commercial floors, fed by a narrow light-court housing the necessary vertical
circulation, stairs, escalators, etc. As in all of Andos buildings everything
depended on the way in which light and air were filtered through the
enclosing membrane; light entering in this instance through a continuously
perforated skin, thereby creating a changing chiaroscuro within the interior
of the structure.
Between 1985 and 1988 Ando realized four buildings that established him
definitively as a public architect of world stature; three of these structures
were ecclesiasticalthe so called Rokko Chapel and the churches of the
Light and the Water, while the fourth, the Childrens Museum in Hyogo, was
rendered, together with its spectacular site, as a generic monument. Of the
utmost simplicity each of these buildings posited a different theme by
treating light, water, wind and topography in a different way.
While the first in the series, the Rokko Chapel, transformed the type-form of
an early Christian basilica by the addition of a glazed loggia, that subtly
reinterpreted the traditional torii approach to a Japanese shrine, the second
a wedding chapel, was a minimalist reworking of Kaja and Heikki Sirens
Otaniemi church of 1968. However, unlike this minimalist Nordic essay in
brick and timber, the Church-on-the-Water was able to engender images of
symbolic power through extremely simple means; above all through an
ambiguous three-dimensional use of the cross motif clustered about the four
sides of a glazed belvedere so as to suggest the four quarters of an archaic
world. Ando set this iconic construction together with the chapel against an
expanse of water slowly descending through a set of shallow weips across a
carefully contoured landfall. Ando would adopt the same device in his
Childrens Museum, wherein sheets of shallow water cascade down the side
of the museum, towards the broad panorama of a reservoir backed by
mountains. This last, serving as borrowed scenery in the Shakkei tradition,
became part of the overall waterscape. The grandeur of this aquatic vista
was matched by a promenade architecturale articulating an undulating
verdant site with a cranked causeway linking the museum to a metaphysical
meditation place and a distant crafts center. Here the allusion was as much
indebted to archaic Crete as to the Shinto sites of Japan ...

Ceremony
The Grand Trianon and Chateau of Versailles, Versailles, France
Versailles is world famous as France's site of the most lavish palace and
gardens, possibly the greatest monument to absolute monarchy and the
culmination of French Classicism. In the twentieth century, it was the site of
the signing of a treaty in 1919, ending the First World War.
Originally, a hunting lodge built by Louis XIII was on the site in 1624. Over
most of the rest of that century, new structures were built and added by
Louis XIV, who in 1682 made it not only the court residence, but also the
seat of government. In fact, Versailles was the capital of France for nearly a
century. The architects of the Sun King Louis XIV were Louis Le Vau in the
early years, and then Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who added the enormous
north and south wings, the Chapel and the famous Hall of Mirrors. Charles Le
Brun supervised the decoration, and the landscaping was planned by Le
Notre, who also designed the Tuileries Gardens. It was Louis XIV who had the
small palace of stone and pink marble, known as the Grand Trianon, built in
1687 as a less formal retreat. Louis XV was still making additions to the
Chateau in 1770 when he had Jacques Gabriel design the opera house.
The presentation of the Pritzker Architecture Prize to architect Tadao Ando
was made by Jay A. Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation, in the Grand
Trianon which was being used for the occasion by special authorization of
the President of French Republic. It is usually reserved for official French
government functions.
Following the presentation, ceremony guests continued on to the south wing
of the Chateau of Versailles for a formal dinner served in the Hall of Battles.
This hall, some 390 feet long by 43 feet wide, and two stories tall, was
opened by King Louis Philippe in 1837 and contains 33 large paintings of
historic scenes depicting French victories, including the earliest by Clovis in
496 C.E. to the 1809 victory of Napoleon at Wagram.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Tadao Ando
Thank you very much. Thank you. For the past thirty years, I've been
engaged in architectural work, and I'm not at all a good speaker. And I feel
very sorry that it's so inconvenient for you to put on your headphones
because of my linguistic incapability. In 1965, I came to France to see the
architecture of Le Corbusier utilizing the Siberian train, and the first place I
visited in France was Versailles. And at that time, I never thought that I
would be awarded, here in this chateau.
Today I am overwhelmed by receiving the Pritzker Prize. From deep in my
heart, I would like to thank every member of the jury as well as the people
of the Hyatt Foundation who established and administer the prize.
I believe that there are two separate dimensions coexisting in architecture.
One is substantive and concerns function, security and economy, inasmuch
as architecture accommodates human living, it cannot ignore these
elements of the real. However, can architecture be architecture with this
alone? Since architecture is a form of human expression, when it steps out
of the exigencies of sheer construction toward the realm of aesthetics, the
question of architecture as art arises. It is at this point that the other
dimension, imagination, comes into play.
When the Hanshin Earthquake struck recently, causing such extreme
disaster, too many buildings and houses collapsed, and more than 5000
people lost their lives. Although more than thirty of my building projects
throughout that region were spared, this disaster is emphatically not
someone else's problem. For me, a person born, raised, and now practicing
in the Hanshin area, it is my sincere desire that after this earthquake, and in
acknowledgment of Japan's precarious geographical situation in general,
people will consider the security of architecture, specifically earthquake
engineering and contingency planning, much more seriously than before.
Originally architecture offered the most fundamental shelter from the
elements. Then, that architectural theoretician of ancient Rome, Vitruvius,
proposed three indispensable principles of architectureutilitas, venustas,
firmitas: utilitas is function (commodity) and firmitas is strength (firmness),
both are measures of architectonic potential, while venustas (delight or
beauty) resides in the dimension of imagination. (It is significant that these
three principles are inscribed on the Pritzker Architecture Prize medallion.)
The modern architecture that I have been weaned on also espouses (clear)
function, (exposed) structure, and (raw) material as principles
characteristics that tend to be accessed only from realistic or substantive
dimensions. Fictionality or imagination, the other dimension, is omitted
entirely. However, Vitruvius emphasized venustas, in other words attraction
or beauty as a necessity along with strength and function. That is to say that
he too, posed the fictional dimension of imagination combined with the
realistic dimension as that synthesis which deeply effects human spirituality.
Since the genesis of architecture, its fate has been that it connot be
constituted by functionality alone.
For me, making architecture is the same as thinking. For more than thirty
years, I have been making architecture by going back and forth between
ideals and reality, between the fictive and the substantive. My hope has
been and continues to be, not only to solve realistic problems, but also to
pursue the ideal by overlaying speculative imaginings. Furthermore, instead
of allowing the ideal to remain simply as the ideal, my goal is to go beyond
every obstacle and challenge, and realize a substantive architecture. That is
to say that I have been trying to achieve a fictionality on the premise of
constructing a space that humans actually use. Therefore, when I say
fictionality of architecture, it does not mean simply a story or superficial
decoration. It means the quality of a spatial experience composed of
architectonic elements aimed at aesthetic perfection.
What I have sought to achieve is a spatiality that stimulates the human
spirit, awakens the sensitivity and communicates with the deeper soul. In
order to construct the fictionality of architecture, one has to mobilize both
reason and intuition together, seeking a space that is a new discover for
oneself. This space must contain the notion of time as production of the new
epoch, and simultaneously introduce specific regionality, historicity,
geography and tradition. It is my pleasure as an architect to continue to
think, to build, by engaging my full body to combine fiction and the actual
into a space of a higher dimension.
Architecture is deemed complete only upon the intervention of the human
that experiences it. In other words, architectural space becomes alive only
in correspondence with the human presence that perceives it in our
contemporary culture, where all of us are subjected to intense exterior
stimulation, especially by the electronic environment, the role of
architectural space as a spiritual shelter is crucial. Here again,what is of
primary importance are the imagination and fictionality that architecture
contains beyond the substantive. Without stepping into the ambiguous
realm of the human spirithappiness, affection, tranquility, tension
architecture cannot achieve its fictionality. This is truly architecture's proper
realm, but it is also one that is impossible to formulate. Only after
speculating the worlds of both the actual and the fictional together can
architecture come into existence as an expression, and rise into the realm of
art.
More than 500 children under the age of 18 lost a parent in the Hanshin
Earthquake; 88 of them lost both parents and became orphans. I have
proposed the establishment of a foundation in order to support the
education of these children so that they can sustain their hopes for the
future. To that end, I would like to contribute the hundred thousand dollar
prize awarded to me today by The Hyatt Foundation towards this new
foundation for these young earthquake victims. I hope that for the next ten
years at least, with the help of five thousand colleagues and sympathizers
to whom I will appeal, we can continue to support these children
economically so that they can pursue their dreams. And I would like to
continue to pursue my dreams as well, instilling these three elements:
function, beauty, and strength in my architecture. Thank you very much.

Ceremony Speech
Philippe Douste-Blazy
French Minister of Culture
Mr. Minister, dear Jacques Toubon, Madame the Ambassador, ladies,
gentlemen, there are places where spirit flows. Versailles represents one of
the summits of French art, of Western art, and of universal art. But what is
the spirit presiding over the awarding within these walls, to an architect
from Japan, of the prestigious prize founded by an American? Well, it is the
spirit of architecture, none the less.
Here in Versailles we are reminded that the Egyptian tradition,
Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome made architecture the major mode of
expression for any civilization.
Gods, kings, and people, were served by the other arts, architecture is,
rightly, identified to the memory of these masters: Ramses, Pericles, and
here, Louis XIV. They would be little remembered outside the buildings that
their wonderful genius favored or, perhaps, imposed on their people.
No surprise, therefore, that the classic tradition of architecture was the first
of the fine arts. An art so deeply embodied, so ready to become the very
expressionand, if I may say sothe symbol of a nation. This art is also,
paradoxically, one of the most international ones. The dissemination of
models, the dissemination of treaties, the mobility of architects from Roman
times right through Classic times consecrated the privilege of talent over
nationality, over birth. Architecture has always been a classic art in the
sense of a universal art and, because of this tradition of universalism in
France, it is the major French art.
Architecture deals with the organization of space and spaces. France has
launched the building of major works such as the Pompidou Center by Renzo
Piano and Richard Rogers; the Grande Arche de la Defense by Paul Andreu
and J. C. von Spekelsen, and the buildings designed by Christian de
Portzamparc.
But architecture also deals with a space that has already been fashioned by
the past centuries. Even in our existing framework, we must find some sign
of continuity. There are grandiose gestures. But there are also more
sensitive, subtler works of art where there is a manifest and discreet sense
of humility. This humility and modesty are the quintessence of classic art.
And I think we can say that Tadao Ando makes this his characteristic. I would
like to say, on my own behalf, after Jacques Toubon, how much I admire him.
I know that he started designing very simple row houses. Then he worked on
temples. He worked on shrines. And he has also been remarkable in the
creation of places of culture. The Pritzker Prize, a really noble prize of
architecture, recognizes a witness of his times.
And, to finish, ladies and gentlemen, I want to say that I see a sign and a
promise in the fact that most of his works are religious, artistic, and cultural
places where the spirit flows. As Minister of Culture, I am particularly
satisfied that this is the case. Thank you for your attention.

Rafael Moneo
1996 Laureate

Selected Works:
Bankinter, Madrid, Spain, 1977
Logrono Town Square, Logrono, Spain, 1981
Prevision Espanola, Seville, Spain, 1988
Atocha Station, Madrid, Spain, 1992
L'illa Diagonal, Barcelona, Spain, 1993

Announcement
Rafael Moneo of Spain Named the 1996 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
Los Angeles, CAJos Rafael Moneo, a 58 year-old architect who lives and
works in Madrid, Spain, has been named the nineteenth Laureate of the
Pritzker Architecture Prize. In making the announcement, Jay A. Pritzker,
president of The Hyatt Foundation, which established the award in 1979,
quoted from the jury's citation which describes Moneo as "an architect with
tremendous range, each of whose buildings is unique, but at the same time,
uniquely recognizable as being from his palette." Moneo is the first Spanish
architect to be selected for his profession's highest honor which bestows a
$100,000 grant and a bronze medallion when the formal presentation is
made on June 12 in the construction site of The Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Pritzker affirmed the jury's choice, saying, "Moneo not only practices
architecture in the most real sense of designing buildings, taking into
account all aspects of their construction, but also, he teaches his theories
utilizing all his experience and knowledge, in effect sustaining these parallel
efforts by enriching each with the other." Moneo has taught on the faculties
of Spain's finest schools of architecture, the Universities of both Madrid and
Barcelona, and for five years was the chairman of the department of
architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he remains on
the faculty still, in addition to lecturing around the world at major colleges
and museums.
Most of Moneo's projects have been in his native country, but a fine example
of his work was completed in the United States in 1993: the Davis Museum
and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Another project
in Houston, Texas is on his drawing board for an addition to that city's Fine
Arts Museum, an existing Mies van der Rohe structure.
In Spain, his most critically acclaimed work is the National Museum of
Roman Art in Mrida. Completed in 1986, the museum, which has been
praised for its architectural monumentality that enhances the exhibits
within, is constructed over the site of archaeological excavations of what
was the most important city in Spain during the Roman Empire.
From his first work, which Moneo describes as "a transformer factory whose
brick and steel volumes produce a rich and varied profile," to the minimalist
monument under construction at San Sebastian, two translucent cubes that
will house the Kursaal Auditorium and Congress Center. Between these two
examples is an enormous range of designs encompassing residences and
apartments, art museums, a railway station, an airport, a factory, a hotel,
banks, a city hall and other office buildings.
Bill Lacy, executive director of the prize, quoted further from the formal
citation from the jury which states, "Moneo takes on each new commission
as a fresh exercise. He draws on an incredible reservoir of concepts and
ideas which he filters through the circumstances of the project."
Lacy, who is an architect himself and president of the State University of
New York at Purchase, elaborated, "In many of his writings and lectures,
Moneo has made it clear that he does not consider architecture as merely
the brilliant expression of an idea in the form of a drawing. He considers
construction an essential part of the design process; architecture must be
perceived as a built work to be reality." In fact, Moneo has said,
"Architecture only reaches its true status when it is realized, when it
acquires its being as an object, and when it is transformed into material
reality as a building."
Of his built works, the Pilar and Joan Mir Foundation which provides a study
center and exhibition space on the island of Mallorca is described by Moneo
as "reacting energetically against the world built around it. (He refers to the
encroaching construction of buildings nearby.) The gallery is something of a
military fortress." Another project for the housing of art was the
rehabilitation of the Villahermosa Palace in Madrid for the collection of
nearly 800 paintings of Baron von Thyssen. In this case, Moneo tried to
retain as much of the original architecture of the 18th century structure as
possible.
Another of Moneo's important projects that won an international competition
in 1986 is the Diagonal Building in collaboration with Manuel de Sol-
Morales, a mixed use structure for offices, apartment hotel, and commercial
center in Barcelona. The building, nearly a thousand feet long is parallel to
the Diagonal Avenue with a park behind. "In order that such an important
volume would not be perceived as an undifferentiated mass, both the plan
and profile are broken and segmented, and the building is perforated by
passageways in those places responding to a variety of urban
circumstances," explains Moneo.
Two of his major projects relate to air and rail transport. His first was for the
Spanish Ministry of Transportation which wanted a total overhaul of the
Atocha Railway Station in Madrid, quadrupling its capacity. The old canopy
which was retained with the addition of a clock tower is one of the key
elements of the project. Moneo's plan incorporated a station square, the
long distance and the commuter train stations. For his San Pablo Airport in
Seville, Moneo explains that the immense departure concourse with the
deep blue color of the vaults as its main feature, is meant to be the point of
encounter between the sky and the land.
In Jan, Spain, Moneo designed a branch office for the Bank of Spain which
was completed in 1988. He describes the project, "From the very start, the
idea was to fit the needs of the program into a single, closed, perfect solid.
The degree of diversity is achieved through a system of voids connecting
floors and spaces. The exterior maintains the character of a fortress."
Another project in Seville was a new branch office of the insurance
company, Previsin Espaola, a three story structure that fits into the
traditional architecture of the city.
In 1992, Moneo received the Spanish government's highest award, The Gold
Medal for Achievement in Fine Arts. The French Academy of Architecture's
Gold Medal and the International Union of Architects Gold Medal were both
presented this year. He received the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from
the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1993; that same
year he was awarded the Schock Prize in Visual Arts in Sweden, adding to a
list of numerous other fellowships and prizes, including the Royal Institute of
British Architects.
The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize is to honor annually a living
architect 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.
The distinguished jury that selected Rafael Moneo as the 1996 Laureate
consists of J. Carter Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C. (who is chairman of the jury and a founding member); and
alphabetically, Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat from Torino, Italy; Charles
Correa, architect of Bombay, India; Ada Louise Huxtable, author and
architectural critic of New York; Toshio Nakamura, editor-in-chief of A+U
architectural publications of Tokyo, Japan; Jorge Silvetti, architect and
chairman of the department of architecture Harvard Graduate School of
Design; and juror emeritus, Lord Rothschild, chairman of the National
Heritage Memorial Fund of Great Britain and formerly the chairman of that
country's National Gallery of Art.

Biography
Jos Rafael Moneo was born in the small town of Tudela, Navarra, Spain in
May of 1937. His mother, Teresa, was the daughter of a magistrate from
Aragn. His father, Rafael, whose family roots were in Tudela, worked there
all his life as an industrial engineer. He has a sister, Teresa, who studied
philosophy and literature. His late brother, Mariano, studied engineering.
Moneo confesses that as he grew up, he was first attracted to philosophy
and painting; he did not have a clear calling to be an architect, but
attributes his inclination toward architecture to his fathers interest in the
subject. It was with some difficulty that he left his close family ties in 1954
to go to Madrid to study architecture.
He obtained his architectural degree in 1961 from the Madrid University
School of Architecture. He credits his professor of the history of architecture,
Leopoldo Torres Balbs with influencing him greatly While still a student, he
worked with architect Francisco Javier Senz de Oiza, saying I wanted to
become an architect in the same fashion as Oiza with all of the enthusiasm
professed by him in his work. When Moneo completed his degree, he went
to Hellebaeck, Denmark to work with Jrn Utzon, whom I saw, says Moneo,
as the legitimate heir of the masters of the heroic period. Utzon was
working on the design of the Sydney Opera House in Australia. Before
returning to Spain in 1962, Moneo says, I traveled around the Scandinavian
countries where I was lucky enough to be received by Alvar Aalto in
Helsinki.
Once back in Madrid, Moneo won a contest to cover one of the architect
spaces at the Academy of Spain in Rome, Italy. He was able to combine his
trip to Rome with a honeymoon with his new bride, Beln Feduchi, daughter
of architect Luis Feduchi. It was wonderful, says Moneo, to be in Rome
with her, a person who shared my enthusiasm for architecture without being
an architect. Under a two year fellowship, he stayed on at the Spanish
Academy in Rome, a period that he calls fundamental to my career. It
allowed me to study, travel, visit schools, get to know Zevi, Tafuri,
Portoghesi, and others, but more than anything, to gain a knowledge of that
great city produced a great impact in my education as an architect. Life at
the academy allowed us to establish great friendships with musicians,
painters and sculptors.
Upon their return to Madrid in 1965, they settled in a house-studio in the
Madrid neighborhood of El Viso and were blessed with their first daughter,
Beln. That same year, he received his first important commission to design
the Diestre Factory in Zaragoza. The following year, he began teaching at
the Madrid University School of Architecture, as well as publishing articles
on architecture. During those years there, he actively participated in
gatherings of architects which they called Little Congresses that were
attended by the most active Spanish architects. Among them were Carlos de
Miguel, Oiza, Molezn, Corrales, Garcia de Paredes, etc. from Madrid, and
Oriol Bohigas, Federico Correa, Tusquets, Clotet, Bonet, etc from Barcelona.
Foreign architects attended as well, including Alvaro Siza of Portugal, Aldo
Rossi of Italy, (both of whom later were Pritzker Laureates), as well as Peter
Eisenman of the United States and Gregotti. Of these gatherings, Moneo
says, a new phase of architectural life in Spain was initiated.
In 1968, he received his second important commission, the Urumea Project,
an apartment building in San Sebastin. It was also the year of the birth of
his second daughter, Teresa. A third daughter, Clara Matilde, would be born
in 1975.
He describes the period in his own words: Life in schools during those years
was hard; the student agitation of 1968, and the political unrest during the
last years of Franco, contributed to making academic activity precarious. It
was a battle trying to make students understand architecture as interesting,
but gradually the environment changed. It was during this time that with a
group of architects, I founded the magazine <em>Arquitectura Bis</em>,
where many of my writings were published.
In 1974, he received his first commission for a work in Madrid, the Bankinter
Office Building, which was accomplished in collaboration with Ramn
Bescs. Shortly thereafter, he was commissioned to design the City Hall for
Logroo. These two works would allow me to clearly express by
architectural vision, says Moneo. In 1976, Moneo was invited to the United
States to be a visiting fellow for a year at the Institute for Architecture and
Urban Studies and to teach at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, both
in New York City. The experience for the whole family was profound
libraries, expositions, conferences, concertsand certainly marked our lives.
When they moved back to Madrid, they became totally absorbed in life
there. His wife, Beln Feduchi played an important role in activities related
to their founding of B.D. Madrid, a company dedicated to the design and
promotion of contemporary furniture.
It was during this same period, the late seventies and early eighties, that he
became a visiting professor at the schools of architecture of both Princeton
and Harvard Universities, as well as the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
In 1980 he became a chaired professor at the School of Architecture in
Madrid for five years. At that time, he received the commission for the
Museum of Roman Art at Mrida. Two years later, the Previsin Espaola
Building at Seville would become his project as well.
In 1984, Moneo was named chairman of the architecture department of the
Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a position he held until 1990.
He and his family moved to Cambridge where they lived for five years ...

Jury Citation
Jos Rafael Moneo is above all an architect of tremendous range. As an
eclectic, defined here as selecting and using what is best from all sources,
which includes his own creativity, his flexibility in varying the appearance of
his works based on their differing contexts is reflected in the way he takes
on each new commission as a fresh exercise. He draws on an incredible
reservoir of concepts and ideas which he filters through the specifics of the
site, the purpose, the form, the climate and other circumstances of the
project. As a result, each of his buildings is unique, but at the same time,
uniquely recognizable as being from his palette.
That palette has encompassed the ancient, the Museum of Roman Art at
Merida, which is one of his finest accomplishments, to the minimalist
monument planned for San Sebastintwo translucent cubes that will
house the Kursall Auditorium and Congress Center. There are infinite
variations between these two examples, embodied in everything from
residences and apartments, to art museums, a railway station, an airport, a
factory, a hotel, banks, a city hall and other office buildings. Each of his
designs has a confident and timeless quality indicative of a master architect
whose talent is obvious from the first concept to the last detail of the
completed building.
And the completed building is of utmost importance to Moneo, even to the
point of being self-effacing, he believes in the built work, and that once built,
the work must stand on its own, a reality that is far more than a translation
of the architect's drawings. He regards the materials and techniques of
construction to be just as important as the architect's vision and concept,
and therefore an integral part of making architecture lastinganother the
key attribute that he strives for in his work.
As a writer and critic, devoting almost as much time to education as he does
to design, he further shapes the future of architecture with his words. His
words as a teacher are most important, influencing faculties and students
alike with his steady commitment to the modernist tradition, both in the
United States and Spain. In the former, he served as Chairman of the
Department of Architecture Harvard Graduate School of Design for five
years, and in his native country, on the faculties of both the Madrid and
Barcelona Universities.
Moneo's career is the ideal example of knowledge and experience
enhancing the mutual interaction of theory, practice and teaching. The
Pritzker Architecture Prize honors Moneo for these parallel efforts of the
past, present and future.

Essay
Thoughts On Jos Rafael Moneo
by Robert Campbell
Architect and Architecture Critic, The Boston Globe
When you visit a building by Rafael Moneo, you are intensely aware of the
architecture. But you are equally aware of yourself as a presence within this
architecture. You find yourself turning and climbing. You emerge onto a high
bright overlook, or descend into a darker cave. You feel yourself to be
traversing a path, a path that is never fully mapped out but instead offers
choices. Having to choose, you explore, you witness, you quest.
When Moneo writes of his buildings, he behaves like a novelist. He tends to
establish a point of view from which the experience of the architecture is
perceived. The point of view is that of the visitor to the building, a fictional
character imagined by Moneo. Seldom does he describe a building as an
autonomous artifact. Instead it is an event in the life of a witness, or more
likely a sequence of events. For example:
At the Davis Museum: The stair becomes the home of the viewer inside
the stair, the viewer becomes the owner who possesses the collection.
At the Mir Foundation: The visitor following the entry path will be
surprised to find a beautiful, ample square. From here he can go on to
explore the garden.
But Moneos tendency to create fictional character goes beyond this
invention of an observing consciousness. The building, too, has feelings.
Of the Mir Foundation: Sharp and intense, the volume ignores its
surroundings or, better still, answers with rage the hostile buildings that
have worn down the previously beautiful slope.
Of Davis: And indeed, this Museum tries to reflect on, and to give
testimony, to, this particular collection.
Finally, writing about the Museum of Roman Art, Moneo describes the wish
of enclosure that is always present in the architecture of the Museum.
In this architects mind, what is taking place is a social and intellectual
encounter between two characters, the building and the visitor. They meet,
they exchange glances, they inquire of one another.
And like all meetings, this one occurs at a particular time and in a particular
place.
The embodiment in architecture of time and place is Rafael Moneos deepest
concern. It is not a fashionable concern today. To many designers and
students, the idea that a building should respond to the past, or to its
physical surroundings, is regarded as pass. We live in a single worldwide
culture, it is argued. A new scale and a new kind of architecture are
required. Indeed we may think of ourselves as existing not in time and place
at all, but rather in cyberspacethat electronic universe of signals and
impulses which, ideally at least, is both timeless and placeless. Being so, it
must also, of course, be immaterial.
Moneo is perhaps the single most important figure on the opposite side of
this question. For him, architecture does not exist except as built of
sensually apprehensible materials. A Moneo building is deeply embedded in
its time and place and is expressive of them. Architecture thus becomes a
way of knowing. Again, the best way to illustrate is to quote the architect,
whose writings are among the most eloquent by any artist of this century.
News, films, TV, advertisingeverything pushes us towards a life
understood as a continuous consumption of information received through
images. No wonder that architecture, in todays world, no longer represents
power. The media are the vehicle of power.
For others the reality of the building will be sought in its lasting tangible
presence, which speaks about the architectural principles behind its
construction. That is where I would like to be.
The site is an expectant reality, always awaiting the event of a prospective
construction on it, through which will appear its otherwise hidden
attributes.

The shadow of anywhere is haunting our world today architecture claims

the site from anywhere. Architecture is engendered upon it. The site is
where architecture is. It cant be anywhere.
Architecture has traditionally served to help us achieve presence in an
otherwise frightening cosmos. Within the infinite universe of time and space,
architecture creates one moment, one place. Moneo wishes it to continue to
perform this function, to be a prop to our identity, to our knowledge of
where and when we are, and therefore of who we are. A Moneo building
creates an awareness of time by remembering its antecedents. It then
layers this memory against its mission in the contemporary world. And it
creates a perception of place by seeming to look around it, exchanging
signals with the neighboring world as ships at sea might flash semaphores.
All these qualities are embodied in the Museum of Roman Art (illustrated in
the photos on this and the following three pages) at Merida in Spain, a work
that is so powerfully itself as to reduce the labels of criticism to nonsense. It
is implanted in its site in the most literal way, woven among Roman
foundations and roadways and connected by tunnel to the remains of an
ancient theater and arena. Rising from this past, Moneo builds his walls of
Roman brick. But, as is typical of him, he evokes a simultaneous sense of
the present by suppressing the mortar joints to create a modern, crisp,
abstract surface: the wall is a memory, not a replication. As always, the
handling of interior daylight is masterful, here an ever-changing golden
wash. The light contrasts with the ghostly paleness, therefore the pastness,
of the antiquities on display, which continue to bear witness when we are
not present. Beyond all this, Moneo constructs an astonishing conceit of
time and place. His museum, rising from the actual ruins, appears itself to
be older building that has been renovated for its present use. Modern
concrete slabs span between the arches, and balconies of steel thread
themselves among the walls of Roman brick as if they were recent inserts in
a previously existing fabric. The brick is deteriorating by spalling and
chippingnot an intended effect, perhaps, but one that adds to the sense of
the great masonry shell as something that has lived a long time and
experienced both decay and renewal. The museum is thus a conceit that
expresses three eras: a genuine past, a fictive past, and a candid present.
One detail is especially evocative. At a turn in the ramp that descends to the
lowest level, an actual Roman foundation is exposed and floodlit as an
artifact. Right beside it, presented in exactly the same manner, is the
exposed concrete footing of one of Moneos own columns. The architect is
presenting his own work as archeology. He intensifies your awareness of
time and materiality by proposing a metaphor that spans two millennia. This
is, indeed, architecture as a way of knowledge ...

Ceremony
The Getty Center, Los Angeles, California
The Getty Center sits on a hilltop in the Santa Monica Mountains from which
visitors see the disparate aspects of Los Angeles's landscapethe Pacific
Ocean, the San Gabriel Mountains, and the vast street-grid of the city.
Inspired by the relationship between these elements, architect Richard
Meier designed the complex to highlight both nature and culture.
The two naturally occurring ridges are used to organize the buildings that
make up the complex. The Museum houses the Getty collections of
European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, and
decorative arts as well as European and American and European. In addition
to the five pavilions for art, a circular building houses the Getty Research
Institute (GRI), used primarily by Getty scholars, staff, and visiting
researchers. Two buildings to the north and east of the Arrival Plaza house
the Getty Grant Program, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the J. Paul
Getty Trust administration offices.
Views, light and a rich variety of spaces are guiding principles of the
architecture of the Getty. The five galleries, offices, and the auditorium lead
out to courtyards and terraces. Much of the buildings are clad in a warm
beige travertine, a stone chosen for this project because it is often
associated with public architecture and expresses qualities the Getty Center
celebrates: permanence, solidity, simplicity, warmth, and craftsmanship.

The 134,000-square-foot Central Garden at the Getty Center was designed

by artist Robert Irwin. The design of the Central Garden highlights the
changing seasons and re-establishes the natural ravine between the
Museum and the Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities
with a tree-lined walkway.
The Getty Center opened in December 1997, however the Pritzker
Architecture Prize ceremony of 1996 was held there. An outdoor reception
on one of the terraces was followed by the presentation ceremony inside
what was to be a future restaurant space. Speakers included Harold
Williams, then president and CEO or the Getty Trust, Richard Meier,
architect, and for the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Bill Lacy, J. Carter Brown
and Jay Pritzker. Rafael Moneo pronounced an acceptance speech. The
dinner followed and was held in an outdoor space in a courtyard of the
Museum temporarily covered by a transparent tent.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Rafael Moneo
Thank you. What can be said after such kind words, after all these words of
praise from friends whom I have loved and respected during so many years.
I am touched. I am overwhelmed because I don't know why, but for some
reason my fate has become entwined with the city of Los Angeles. I am
waiting for the next four or five years to see why this has occurred, and to
find out what fate was looking for in bringing Los Angeles into my life and
what fate was asking me to do here.
I am indeed quite touched by both Jay Pritzker and Carter Brown, and
Richard Meier, because of this present [referring to the marble block of the
Getty that Meier has just presented to him] that will indeed hold memories
for me of this unforgettable day. But I don't want to extend myself too much.
My feelings are probably evident. Let me read what I have prepared. I will
try to brief.
I would like to tell all those who are here, witnesses of my happiness, how
profoundly I am touched by feelings of gratitude and joy. I owe my
happiness to architecture; to the activity that I have dedicated the best part
of my life. And I should start today by saying directly how much I love
architecture. It has taught me to look at the world seeking to understand
why animals, tools, plants, mountains, the clothes we wear and naturally the
buildings, appear to us in their specific forms.
Learning about the reasons behind the form helps the architect to produce
his work, the buildings which ultimately constitute the background where
men and women live. The opportunity to create the reality which surrounds
us is the greatest privilege that we as architects enjoy. I am immensely
grateful to architecture for allowing me to see the world through its eyes.
After declaring my love and my respect for architecture tonight, I would like
to remind you what Alberti, one of the greatest architects and theoreticians
in history thought about architecture. For him, architecture had to provide
beauty as well as satisfy necessity. These, indeed, are two objectives which
architecture used to accomplish and that today are, let us say it plainly,
often forgotten.
Beauty is not today familiar in an architectural vocabulary. Architects seem
to be absorbed by the idea that architecture is simply the reflection of a
culture at a specific time. So many architects now seek to manifest motion
instead of stability, the ephemeral instead of the perpetual, the fragmented
instead of the whole and the fictitious instead of the real. Even the city
which could be considered the most valuable contribution that architecture
has made to humankind is today endangered by the dispersion brought by
new means of communication and transportation. The increasingly familiar
concept of "virtual reality" speaks about a new idea of reality that has little
to do with the real world architecture helped to shape throughout history.

Years ago, Luis Barragn, asked for beauty in his address to an audience as
this one of today when celebrating the second Pritzker prize. I quote: "The
invincible difficulty that the philosophers have in defining the meaning of
this word, beauty, is unequivocal proof of its ineffable mystery. Human life,
deprived of beauty, is not worthy of being called so."
I understand and I share Barragn 's difficulties in defining beauty.
Obviously, it does not mean to me that architecture is fixed to an immutable
canon. It means rather to believe that the buildings are able to be masters
of themselves. Aristotle spoke of pleasure when talking about beauty.
Augustin was looking for truth. When the building enjoys being itself, both
concepts are still pertinent and then pleasure and truth engender the feeling
of plenitude that seems to me to be felt when we are close to something
that emanates beauty.
Architecture is not today so simply connected to necessity as it was in the
past. Once upon a time buildings were close to the idea of tools that helped
men and women to survive in the rigorous, natural world. Necessity was the
great architectural ally that united appropriateness both to the
accomplishment of the programs and the use of building techniques. Even
more, in the past the act of building implied the manipulation of the most
elaborate techniques. Today, these techniques have become trivialized
gestures with the help often of remote and sophisticated industries.
The fact that we live in a society where the rights of an individual prevail
has had a tremendous influence in architecture. Architecture seems to be
the ultimate expression of the individual's freedom. This has brought today's
architecture so close to the arbitrary that it seems to have lost the specific
condition it enjoyed until now. And while I am aware that form is not the
result of a set of deterministic factors and that men and women have always
been the ultimate master of form, I, indeed long for the times when
necessity was inevitably connected with architecture.
Why am I taken by this reflection about architecture tonight? I think that I
know why it happened. I declared and I tried to explain how much I love
architecture. I am aware of what doing architecture means today. I indeed
resist the idea that architecture is different from what it used to be. By
recognizing that architecture still could and should include in its agenda the
concepts of beauty and necessity, I am expressing my most profound wish
that architecture possess a long life ahead ...

Ceremony Speech
J. Carter Brown
Chairman of the Jury
On behalf of the Pritzker Jury and my fellow jurors, I wanted to add my
accolade to our prize winner and our thanks to Harold Williams and all of my
friends here at The Getty, including my former colleague, John Walsh, for the
fabulous opportunity to be in this site when it is all still crackling and
happening.
This is what architecture is all about. It's about building, and here we're part
of the process, not simply handed the product. And Richard, our hat is off to
you. I think there is not one of us that hasn't felt the tingle of being on this
site and in this setting.
Announcements have come thick and fast in the last 24 hours, and we all
know that Harold as announced that some time, way off into the future, he
will no longer be in charge of this institution. That is very hard to envision. I
think that we all recognize that part of the architectural process also
includes the patron. And Harold has been a fantastic patron. What you see
here is also largely due to him. So thanks for having us here, Harold.
I am also here to remind you that the Pritzker Prize is very much by intention
an international one. And tonight, I think this is reinforced. It's interesting to
see that a Richard Meier, an architect from the United States, is asked to do
buildings in Spaina fabulous museum in Barcelonaor in Frankfurt, or in
Rome. Now, Rafael Moneo, from Spain, is being invited more and more to
design buildings in this country. In fact, we have patrons of his here from
Houston, where he is doing an addition to their Museum of Art, and an
about-to-be patron, Your Eminence [nodding to Cardinal Mahony, who has
commissioned a new cathedral for Los Angeles. I think that is very exciting
to recognize how this global village we now live in has become so
international.
Moneo, as some of you may know, studied in Rome for a couple of years and
has done work in Spain which dramatizes the extent to which Roman culture
populated the Iberian Peninsula; and one is reminded constantly of the
wonderful reverberations back through time that architecture can give us.
We have it here. What from the model I thought originally would be rather
Greek, as a hill town, I think once we're here, and feel its grandeur, we
recognize is rather Roman.
We have a Moneo understanding the past and that great Latin tradition,
which is also part of the American tradition. I think his cathedral will bring us
into a realization of that in this city, which was named after all Los Angeles,
and is a city that very much represents the wonderful catholicity that our
nation of the U.S.A. embodies.
It is appropriate that in a City of Angels we should be celebrating great
patrons. And there are among us two of the greatest patrons of today,
because it is to them we owe the Pritzker Prize. Cindy Pritzker is very much
a part of this team. Cindy, why don't you stand? I think we should all thank
her.
Some of you were at the ceremony at the National Building Museum a few
weeks ago, when the prize this time went not to an architect, but to Mr. and
Mrs. Pritzker. It was a very moving evening, and we had many Pritzker
Laureates come and doff their caps. And so this podium is now rightfully
turned over to the President of the Hyatt Foundation himself, a very
international-minded man, Jay Pritzker, our angel.
Sverre Fehn
1997 Laureate

Selected Works:
Nordic Villa, Norrkoping, Sweden, 1964
The Bodker House, Oslo, Norway, 1967
The Hedmark Cathedral Museum, Hamar, Norway, 1979
Villa Busk, Bamble, Norway, 1990
Glacier Museum, Fjaerland, Norway, 1991
The Eco House, Norrkoping, Sweden, 1992
Aukrust Museum, Alvdal, Norway, 1995

Announcement
Sverre Fehn Is Named the 1997 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
Los Angeles, CASverre Fehn, a 72 year-old architect who lives and works in
Oslo, Norway has been named the 1997 Laureate of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize. In making the announcement, Jay A. Pritzker, president of
The Hyatt Foundation, which established the award in 1979, quoted from the
jury's citation which describes Fehn's architecture as "... a fascinating and
exciting combination of modern forms tempered by the Scandinavian
tradition ..." Fehn is the twentieth architect in the world to be selected for
his profession's highest honor which bestows a $100,000 grant when the
formal presentation is made on May 31 in Bilbao, Spain.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, J. Carter Brown, commented that Fehn's work
"... embodies the Pritzker Prize ideal of architecture as art." And from fellow
juror, author Ada Louise Huxtable, "Sverre Fehn represents the best of
twentieth-century modernism ... this is a unique life's work of extraordinary
richness, perception and quality." From juror Charles Correa, a much
honored architect from Bombay, India, comes the praise, "... a wonderfully
lyrical and inventive architectonic language which, like all true art, is both
rigorous and deeply humane." Juror Toshio Nakamura, editor and
architectural writer from Japan called Fehn's work "... remarkably specific in
his approach to design in terms of its regional inflection, material,
imagination, and implied geometry ..."
Most of Fehn's work is in his native Norway, with Sweden and Denmark
taking a close second. In 1958, he gained international attention for his
Norwegian Pavilion at the Brussels World Exhibition, and again in 1962 for
his Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
In recent years, two of his museum projects have captured widespread
attention: one completed in 1991 is the Glacier Museum built on the plain
carved out by the Jostedal Glacier at the mouth of the Fjaerland Fjord. The
museum is the center of a panorama formed by the steep mountainsides
and the fjord with the glacier on top. A second project, the Aukrust Museum,
celebrates the work of a famous Norwegian painter/writer, named Kjell
Aukrust. Both of these projects were preceded by another project called the
Hedmark Cathedral Museum in Hamar, Norway, which was completed in
1979. The latter is the site of an early fourteenth century manor house and
bishopric. Fehn built in and around the ruins to preserve this historic site.
He has designed numerous private residences, a home for the elderly, the
inspiration for which he credits Mies van der Rohe, and many other types of
buildings. One of the more controversial is the enlargement of the National
Theatre of Copenhagen, where critics have hailed the design as having "...
the magnificent spaciousness of cathedral-like character."
Bill Lacy, executive director of the Pritzker Prize, quoted further from the
formal citation which states, "Eschewing the clever, the novel and the
sensational, Fehn has pursued his version of twentieth century modernism
steadily and patiently for the past fifty years. With one carefully designed
project after another, he has displayed a virtuosity and creativity that now
ranks him among the leading architects of the world."

Lacy, who is an architect himself and president of the State University of

New York at Purchase, added his own comment, "Fehn's architecture is
poetic, thoughtful, even sentimentalbold and at the same time humble.
Not since Louis Kahn has an architect been so enthralled with materials and
their architectural consequences."
Fehn was one of the post World War II generation of architects who emerged
from the Architectural School of Oslo, receiving his diploma in 1949. At that
time, Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was a strong influence on European
architecture, and in particular, Arne Korsmo, one of Norway's leading
architects. Korsmo became a great friend and mentor to Sverre Fehn now
lives in a house designed by Korsmo.
The prize presentation ceremony moves to different locations around the
world each year, paying homage to historic and contemporary architecture.
This year, the award will be given in the nearly completed Guggenheim
Museum Bilbao in the Basque Country of northern Spain on Saturday, May
31. Designed by 1989 Pritzker Laureate Frank Gehry, the building is
scheduled to be completed for a formal opening in October. It has already
been hailed by King Juan Carlos of Spain as, "... the best building of the
twentieth century." This is the second consecutive year that the prize
ceremony has been held in a construction site. Last year, it was presented
to Spanish architect Jos Rafael Moneo at the unfinished Getty Center,
designed by yet another Pritzker Laureate who received the award in 1984,
Richard Meier.

Biography
Sverre Fehn (1924-2009) has long been recognized in Europe as one of
Norway's most gifted architects. Categorized as a modernist by most
architectural writers, Fehn himself says, I have never thought of myself as
modern, but I did absorb the anti-monumental and the pictorial world of
LeCorbusier, as well as the functionalism of the small villages of North
Africa. You might say I came of age in the shadow of modernism.
I always thought I was running away from traditional Norwegian
architecture, says Fehn, but I soon realized that I was operating within its
context. How I interpret the site of a project, the light, and the building
materials have a strong relationship to my origins.
Born in Kongsberg, Norway in 1924, he attended the Oslo School of
Architecture and received his degree in 1949.
Fehn, along with Norberg-Schulz, Grung, Mjelva and Vesterlid, all other
Norwegian architects of the same generation, and Jrn Utzon (the Danish
architect who later gained fame for the Sydney Opera House, Australia)
formed an organization which was the Norwegian branch of CIAM
(International Congress of Modern Architecture), called PAGON (Progressive
Architects Group Oslo Norway) that had a profound influence, creating
architecture which had a firm foundation in the Modern Movement, but was
expressed in terms of the materials and language of their own region and
time.
Fehn received the French State Scholarship which allowed him to live in Paris
in 1953 and 1954. In reminiscing about that period, Fehn recalls that it was
his generation that distanced itself from Le Corbusier and his urbanistic
world.
He received international attention for his Norwegian Pavilion at the World
Exhibition in Brussels, Belgium in 1958, and again in 1962 for his Nordic
Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
When asked what the most important part of his architecture is, Fehn has
replied that it is above all, the construction, be it wood or concrete, and
harmony, rhythm, and honesty in the use of those materials. He calls the act
of building brutal, and elaborates, When I build on a site in nature that is
totally unspoiled, it is a fight, an attack by our culture on nature. In this
confrontation, I strive to make a building that will make people more aware
of the beauty of the setting, and when looking at the building in the setting,
a hope for a new consciousness to see the beauty there, as well.

Jury Citation
The architecture of Norwegian Sverre Fehn is a fascinating and exciting
combination of modern forms tempered by the Scandinavian tradition and
culture from which it springs. He gives great primacy in his designs to the
relationship between the built and the natural environment.
Eschewing the clever, the novel and the sensational, Fehn has pursued his
version of twentieth century modernism steadily and patiently for the past
fifty years. With one carefully designed project after another, he has
displayed a virtuosity and creativity that now ranks him among the leading
architects of the world.
The Norwegian Pavilion at the 1958 Worlds Fair in Brussels gave early notice
of his special talents. The Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale a few years
later was a confirmation. Since those early works, Fehn has proven that he is
an architect for all seasons with many dimensions, allowing him to be as
comfortable with the design of furniture, exhibitions and objects as he is
with architecture. His eloquence with materials is easily matched by his
poetic command of words.
The geography of place and time, with a range of diversity that includes
primitive Morocco and today's New York City, as well as an amalgam of a
multitude of influences have played an important role in Fehn's
development. Some of the great architects of the century Louis Kahn, Frank
Lloyd Wright, LeCorbusier, Alvar Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, Jean Prouv, as
well as his fellow countryman and mentor Arne Korsmo have provided
inspiration, but Fehn's results have a singular individuality and originality.
He has avoided fads and fashions that have influenced much of
contemporary architecture, patiently evolving his own individual style,
always seeking improvement.
He has broken new ground in giving modern architectural form to elements
of his native Norwegian landscape northern light, grey stone and verdant
green forest blending fantasy and reality into buildings that are both
contemporary and timeless.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the museum at Hamar where in
addition to balancing the requirements of site and program, the combination
of ancient and contemporary had to be in harmony.
Sverre Fehn's body of work stands as testament to the talent, creativity and
sensitivity of one of the master architects of the world It is fitting that he
should be the 1997 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Fehn considers light another material of construction. And nowhere is this
more evident that in the Venice Biennale Nordic Pavilion. The building
consists of concrete bearing walls, with a two-way concrete clear-span roof
with openings for tree trunks where necessary. The building is literally built
around growing trees. The leafy branches of the trees, and the design of the
roof beams to diffuse the light from the sun, provide the interior exhibition
space with a soft light that has been characterized as Nordic.
His Glacier Museum has been hailed as a major landmark in contemporary
architecture. The building stands on the plain carved out by the Josstedal
Glacier at the mouth of the Fjaerland Fjord. The museum is the center of a
panorama formed by the steep mountainsides and the fjord with the glacier
on top. As you approach the site by boat, the white concrete of the museum
seems to lie as a rock on the mountainside, says Fehn. The rocks that lie on
the hills of the Scandinavian landscape have always had an attraction for
me. These rocks were the inspiration for building in concrete.
In 1971, he became a professor of architecture at his alma mater in Oslo,
where he taught until 1993. Fehn has lectured extensively in Europe;
including Vasa University, Finland, Denmark's Architectural School of Aarhus,
the Stockholm Architectural Association, the University of Trondheim, the
International Laboratory of Architecture & Design in Urbino, Italy, the
Architectural Association in London. He has also lectured in Paris, Stuttgart,
Germany; Barcelona, Spain; and Rome. In the United States, he has been a
guest lecturer at The Cooper Union in New York City, Cranbrook Academy of
Arts in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and
Harvard, Cornell, and Yale universities. His work was exhibited at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1968 ...

Essay
The Paradox of Sverre Fehn
By Ada Louise Huxtable
Author and Architecture Critic, The Wall Street Journal
Sverre Fehn is a builder, philosopher, and poet, and an extremely gifted
architect. Held in high esteem in professional circles, he is surprisingly little
known beyond them; the celebrity circuit seems to stop just south of
Norway. At a time when globe-circling stars promote signature styles, he
has devoted himself to the quiet, undeviating pursuit of a subtle, lyrical, and
still stringently rational architecture. His buildings, while well-published, are
neither numerous nor easily accessibledeep snow can make the roads to
his Glacier museum on the mountainous west coast impassable until May
nothing is exactly on the beaten track. Like the Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto,
Fehn has never fitted easily into the modernist canon; each has managed to
break the rules in a highly individual way, and each has had a singular
vision. Also like Aalto, Fehns buildings must be visited to understand their
conceptual brilliance and aesthetic pleasures, and the particular and
universal way they belong to the land.
Sverre Fehn is, in fact, something of a paradox; his self-engendered and
sometimes curious contradictions can throw even his admirers off base. A
respectful inquiry at the press conference for the announcement of his
Pritzker Prize, about his mastery of wood construction in the Scandinavian
tradition, brought his somewhat unsettling disclaimer, I have spent my life
running away from wood! and a brief discourse on his use of brick and
concrete. What he did not explain was how he utilizes concrete to anchor a
building to a rocky ridge or hold back a forested slope, or the way his brick
or concrete walls combine with a light and elegant wooden superstructure
for a perfect integration of traditional and modern materials. Praised for his
extraordinary sensitivity to nature, Fehn says that the very act of building
begins the process of destruction; that every intervention, no matter how
careful, contributes to the landscapes loss. Beyond Oslo, the forests seem
endless, only the trees interrupt the line between earth and sky. The
horizon, with its mysterious sense of limits and infinity, its mythic and
timeless connotations, is a constant presence in his art and life. But he sees
breaking the horizon line as an intrusive act of disruption and
transformation, although, in his hands, this violation turns infinity into
perceived and controlled space and establishes our perspective on the
world. He possesses an almost magical ability to emphasize and enhance
the natural settingthe work of Frank Lloyd Wright comes constantly to
mindand yet he insists that nature should never be regarded in a romantic
way, that the architect must create a tension between nature and his
intervention. There is nothing romantic about this idea; it poses one of
architectures most demanding and enduring challenges.
Fehn has built some of the most remarkable museums in the world, but the
very idea of a museum troubles him. He considers the museum an
instrument of a society that denies death and overvalues material things; he
is convinced that this secular age has transferred the idea of immortality to
objects, conferring on them a special power; that we give to museums the
position and respect accorded to cathedrals in earlier times. But this has not
kept him from creating buildings for this purpose that redefine the
museums role in the modern world.
Fehns style, so unaffected, so bound to the earth, is also a paradoxthese
deceptively simple designs masquerading as indigenous naturalism are a
skilled and sophisticated synthesis of many influences. Although his
architecture is rooted deeply in Norways forests, mountains and fjords, it
owes as much to European modernism as to his intimate understanding of
his native land. He came of age as an architect at the high point of the
modernist revolution. His teacher, Arne Korsmo, a Norwegian architect who
traveled widely and built the Norwegian pavilion for the 1937 Paris
Exposition, brought the radical new work to a post World War II generation
of young Norwegian architects still immersed in the nostalgia of
Scandinavian romantic nationalism. With a grant received from the French
government in 1952, Fehn and his wife, Ingrid, a musician, went to Paris,
where they stayed two years. Korsmo introduced Fehn to Le Corbusier,
whose atelier was open evenings to any who cared to come. He remembers
dinners with Fernand Lger, Alvar and Elissa Aalto, Peter and Alison
Smithson; he became a member of CIAM, the Congrs Internationale
dArchitecture Moderne, and was associated briefly with Jean Prouv. Today,
in an act of homage and continuity, he lives and works in the house and
studio Arne Korsmo built for himself on a quiet street in Oslo, part of a small
enclave of other International Style houses softened by time, remodeling,
and the nostalgia of a revolution grown old. The modest entrance leads into
a large, double-height, Corbusian space full of light, music, art and books,
and the collected artifacts of a creative life.
The winters of the Paris sojourn were spent in North Africa, discovering a
world completely different from anything he had known. The simple
geometry and rational design of indigenous Moroccan buildings, with their
flat roof terraces and unadorned walls, were a dramatic confirmation that
the aesthetic principles of functionalist doctrine existed long before
modernist theory embraced them. Like many northerners, he reacted
strongly to the intense southern light, comparing it to Norways horizontal
light and long shadowsa flickering, sensitive light, he explained later in
an interview with lArchitecture dAujourdhui (that) offers an infinite
number of variations architecture is frequently invisible, enveloped in
mist. Typically, he extended the description into an analogy of northern
light with northern character, where nothing is exact or direct situations
are not cut and dried, and to literature, Hamsun, Gogol, and Chekhov
described characters who are intuitive and dual-natured.

Ceremony
The construction site of The Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
The Guggenheim MuseumBilbao, in northern Spain, opened in the fall of
1997. On May 31, 1997, prior to the museums opening, the Pritzker
Architecture Prize ceremony honoring Sverre Fehn was held there in the
great central atrium space. Designed by architect Frank Gehry, it has been
hailed as one of the most important museum buildings of the twentieth
century. Sited along the Nervion River, the sculptural building was a key
element in the architectural and urban regeneration of the city. The exterior
is clad in titanium panels that reflect the varying conditions of natural night.
The hues and luminosity of the buildings finish appears to change
throughout the day and night. While the Guggenheim-Bilbao contains all the
necessary elements of a museumgalleries, temporary exhibition space,
visitor services and administration, the richness of spaces is unparalleled.
The galleries are organized around a vertical atrium that rises more than
150 feet high and bathed in light from its many windows. Three levels of
galleries connect to the atrium with catwalks and vertical circulation, further
animating the space as visitors flow in and out of the galleries.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Sverre Fehn
I am standing here tonight feeling honored and grateful to receive the most
important prize in our society of architecture. All my gratitude to Mr. and
Mrs. Pritzker and the members of The Hyatt Foundation.
It is characteristic that the Pritzker Prize is an American award. It is an
example of a society which has the generosity to let architectural freedom
be born.
And this museum by Frank Gehry expresses the instant of freedom, having
preserved the genius idea of the sketches. And by this process, it has
liberated itself from history. Thank you, Gehry.
I want to express my gratitude to all of you, collaboratorsclients, friends,
and family who are present here in Bilbao to share with me this important
event. And I thank especially Henrik Hille, who has worked out with me my
latest projects.

I am very pleased for the place chosen for this celebration, Spain, where the
big constructions hide in the shadow of the bullfight. My wife often tells me
that I must have been Spanish in my early life, so I feel at home.
I will now present some fragments from my life as an architect. Within
himself, every man is an architect. His first step towards architecture is his
walk through nature.
He cuts a path like writing on the surface of the earth. The crushing of grass
and brushwood is an interference with nature, a simple definition of man's
culture. His path is a sign to follow. And through this initial movement, he
requires the movements of others. This is a most elementary form of a
composition.
The globe is divided in longitude and latitude degrees. And each crossing
point has its certain climate, its certain plants and winds. As an architect,
you have to try to understand the difference of life in each point.
Independent of these geographical points, the human thoughts float like
clouds over the surface of Earth, and architecture is brought to life in the
duel between nature and the irrational.
My nearly fifty-years-long journey into the world of architecture I started by
winning a competition for a museum at Lillehammer, together with Geir
Grung, just after having finished the architectural studies in Oslo. I took an
advice from Jrn Utzon of going to Morocco to study so-called primitive
architecture.
I would like to read some words I put down during this winter in Africa:
"Traveling south today to Morocco to study primitive rural architecture is not
a journey of exploration to discover things. On the contrary, you recognize.
Frank Lloyd Wright's houses in Taliesin must seem like these, in disperse and
with the same roughness in the structure of the material, and Mies van der
Rohe's walls, with the same character of infinity. And here you find Le
Corbusier's poem about the terrace and the roof in the modern town plan."
This discovery became for me a tool to penetrate more deeply into
understanding of modern architecture. The architecture works within a
timeless space. Its signature is Anonymous.
In the year 1953, I got a French scholarship which gave me the possibility to
work without salary in the office of Jean Prouv in Paris. I visited frequently
the office of Le Corbusier in Rue de Sevre 36. At this time, I also experienced
the atmosphere of the CIAM in its last period. And I remember Le Corbusier
raising his left hand to say goodbye to the Organization and all of us, in the
corridor of the old UNESCO building.
My most important journey was perhaps into the past, in the confrontation
with the Middle Age, when I built a museum among the ruins of the Bishops'
Fortress at Hamar. I realized, when working out this project, that only by
manifestation of the present, you can make the past speak. If you try to run
after it, you will never reach it.
But the great museum is the globe itself. In the surface of the earth, the lost
objects are preserved. The sea and the sand are the great masters of
conservation and make the journey into eternity so slow that we still find in
these patterns the key to the birth of our culture.
I miss, actually, John Hejduk here today. His writing and drawings have
meant a lot to me.
I would like to end with some words I wrote in a book about the construction
Security, built in Oslo: "John Hejduk has created a world where the
boundaries are erased. The architecture floats in the universe, extending
from the cut of the surgeon's scalpel into the inner organ of a human body,
to his own cut through the veil of invisibility into the vast landscape where
the site is cleared for `The Cemetery of the Ashes of Thought'."
Thank you.

Ceremony Speech
Antonio Ardanza Garro
President of the Basque Country
Ladies and gentlemen, my most cordial welcome to the Basque Country,
Bilbao and to this building which will soon house the Guggenheim Museum.
Your selection of this site for the presentation of the prestigious Pritzker
Prize of Architecture constitutes a great honor for us as well as a motive of
profound satisfaction.
Many of you today visit this country for the first time. Let me present it to
you in great mass and brief words. The town in which you now find
yourselves, the Basque town, is known throughout the world, among other
things, because of two attributes that characterize it in a very special
manner: its antiquity and its closeness to its identity.
In truth, we are, the Basques, an ancient people, perhaps the people in
Europe which have remained identical to themselves for the longest time,
conserving alive their unique tongue and preserving their ancestral
costumes and institutions.
Therefore we are, as we are recognized, a people consisting only of
themselves and not exempt from a dash of pride and even a certain dose of
self-compliance. But this said, whoever would think that our conscience, our
pride and our self-compliance would be enough reasons to explain, by
themselves, our permanence as a people throughout the length of history
would be mistaken.
Because if history has taught us anything with its inexorable pace, it is
precisely that it has been able to slumber consciences just as much or more
rooted as ours, humiliate pride more indomitable and ridicule other self-
compliances, engulfing in the zenith of its oblivion identities of many, and
many peoples that barely have even left us a trace of their existence.
Renzo Piano
1998 Laureate

Selected Works:
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 1977
The Menil Collection Museum (interior), Houston, Texas, 1987
Columbus International Exposition, Genoa, Italy, 1992
Kansai International Airport Terminal, Osaka, Japan, 1994
The Beyeler Foundation Museum, Basel, Switzerland, 1997
Tjibaou Cultural Centre, Nouma, New Caledonia, 1998
Announcement
Renzo Piano of Italy is the 1998 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Los Angeles, CARenzo Piano, a 60-year-old Italian architect who builds all
over the world, has been named the 1998 Laureate of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize. In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the prize, the
formal presentation will be made at a ceremony hosted by President and
Mrs. Clinton at The White House on June 17.
In making the announcement, Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt
Foundation, which established the award in 1979, quoted from the jury's
citation which describes Piano's architecture as a "rare melding of art,
architecture, and engineering in a truly remarkable synthesis." Piano is the
twenty-first architect in the world to be selected for his profession's highest
honor which bestows a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion. He is the
second Italian to become a Pritzker Laureate, the first being the late Aldo
Rossi, who was honored in 1990.
Piano first achieved international fame for the Centre George Pompidou in
Paris completed in 1978, a collaborative effort with another young architect
from England, Richard Rogers. Since then, Piano has gone on to higher
critical acclaim for a much wider range of building types with greater
diversity and subtlety that include among many others, the Menil Museum
and its Cy Twombly addition in Houston, and the Beyeler Museum in Basel,
Switzerland.
On a grand scale, he designed a spectacular soccer stadium for his native
Italy in Bari, an eye-popping shopping center called Bercy in Paris that has
been likened to a giant space ship that has just landed. Perhaps one of his
most remarkable projects is the Kansai Air Terminal, the world's largest, built
on a man-made island in Osaka Bay, Japan.
Born and raised in Genoa, Italy, Piano divides his time between a home
there and another in Paris when he is not traveling to the many world-wide
sites of his projects. He currently is working in Berlin on the Potsdamer Platz
redevelopment; in Sydney, Australia on a mixed use tower; in New
Caledonia on a Cultural Center; with projects just beginning at Harvard in
Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church in Foggia, Italy;
and other continuing projects in Rome, Paris and Stuttgart.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, J. Carter Brown, commented, "Renzo Piano's
command of technology is that of a true virtuoso; yet he never allows it to
command him. Deeply imbued with a sense of materials and a craftsman's
intuitive feel for what they can do, his architecture embodies a rare
humanism." And from fellow juror, author Ada Louise Huxtable, "Renzo Piano
celebrates structure in a perfect union of technology and art." From juror
Charles Correa, a much honored architect from Bombay, India, comes the
praise, "He brings to each project a great seriousness of purpose, combined
with a lyrical understanding of materials (and how they might come
together)-so that what emerges is an architecture of extraordinary clarity
and finesse." Juror Toshio Nakamura, editor and architectural writer from
Japan, said, "Piano's approach to design is always imaginative and inventive,
technologically oriented, yet with the hand-crafter's attention to detail. His
capacity for architectural problem-solving tempered by a poetic sensibility
has made possible his wide diversity of projects, from temporary exhibition
halls to the world's largest air terminal, from museums to apartments, and
from factories to high rise towers."
Bill Lacy, the executive director of the Pritzker Prize, quoted further from the
jury citation which states, "Piano has, over three decades of his career,
relentlessly searched for new dimensions in his structures, both literally and
figuratively."
Lacy, who is an architect himself and president of the State University of
New York at Purchase, added, "Renzo Piano's body of work is reminiscent of
the Roman god Janus, represented by two conjoined heads facing in
opposite directions, one looking forward, the other backward. This year's
Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate embodies that dichotomy. It was
appropriate on this occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Prize, to
select an architect whose work is such an apt representation of the purpose
of the prize."

Biography
Renzo Piano, the 1998 Pritzker Prize winner, is perhaps best known for his
controversial design of the Centre Georges Pompidou, located in the heart of
Paris and completed in 1978. Conceived in collaboration with English
architect, Richard Rogers and described by Piano as a joyful urban machine
... a creature that might have come from a Jules Verne book, Beaubourg, as
it is called, has become a cultural icon, expressive of Pianos love of
technology.
Born in Genoa in 1937, Piano comes from a family of builders. Following his
graduation from Milan Polytechnic Architecture School in 1964, he worked in
his fathers construction company and later was associated with the offices
of Louis Kahn in Philadelphia and Z.S. Mackowsky in London. He formed
Renzo Piano Building Workshop in 1980, which now has offices in Paris,
Genoa and Berlin.
Piano is a prolific architect whose wide-ranging repertoire includes a housing
complex on the rue de Meaux, Paris (1988-91); the worlds largest air
terminal, built on a man-made island in Osaka Bay in Japan (1988-94); the
conversion of a 1920s Fiat manufacturing plant in Turin into a multifaceted
center for technology and trade fairs (1985-93); and the San Nicola Soccer
Stadium in Bari, Italy (1987-90), site of the 1990 World Soccer
Championships.
In 1992, he embarked on the $500 million rehabilitation of Genoas ancient
harbor, a gigantic urban reclamation project conceived in celebration of the
five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. His respect for the
character of older cities won him the international competition to develop
the master plan for the reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz, which was the
center of Berlins social and cultural life before World War II ...

Jury Citation
Renzo Piano's architecture reflects that rare melding of art, architecture, and
engineering in a truly remarkable synthesis, making his intellectual curiosity
and problem-solving techniques as broad and far ranging as those earlier
masters of his native land, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. While his
work embraces the most current technology of this era, his roots are clearly
in the classic Italian philosophy and tradition. Equally at ease with historical
antecedents, as well as the latest technology, he is also intensely concerned
with issues of habitability and sustainable architecture in a constantly
changing world.
The array of buildings by Renzo Piano is staggering in scope and
comprehensive in the diversity of scale, material and form. He is truly an
architect whose sensibilities represent the widest range of this and earlier
centuries-informed by the modern masters that preceded him, reaching
back even to the fifteenth century of Brunelleschi-he has remained true to
the concept that the architect must maintain command over the building
process from design to built work. Valuing craftsmanship, not just of the
hand, but also of the computer, Piano has great sensitivity for his materials,
whether using glass, metal, masonry or wood. Such concepts, values and
sensitivities are not surprising for someone whose father, uncles and
grandfather were all builders.

By choosing a career as an architect rather than contractor, he may have

broken with a family tradition in one sense, but in fact, he has enhanced
that tradition in ways his forebears could only have imagined.
Always restless and inventive, Piano has, over three decades of his career,
relentlessly searched for new dimensions in his structures, both literally and
figuratively. His early Pompidou Centre in Paris, which brought the first
international recognition of his talent and promise, could have been a
stylistic end in itself. Instead Piano persevered with unrelenting
experimentation that resulted in subsequent works that included the
Houston Menil Museum along with its exquisite Cy Twombly addition, and
the more recent Beyeler Museum in Switzerland. These three museums
show his unerring sensitivity for site, context and a remarkable mastery of
form, shape and space.
Piano proved himself a master of the gigantic project with Kansai, the
world's largest air terminal in Osaka Bay, Japan, and again with the imposing
Bercy Shopping Center in Paris, as well as a massive and beautiful National
Science Museum in Amsterdam. His soccer stadium in Bari, Italy is like no
other in the world, with its great swaths of blue sky interrupting the usual
monotony of stadia seating.
His versatility is displayed further in such projects as the beautiful sweep of
a nearly one thousand foot long bridge that curves across Ushibuka Bay in
Southern Japan; again with the design of a 70,000-ton luxury ocean liner; an
automobile; and with his own hillside-hugging transparent workshop. All of
his works confirm his place in the annals of architecture history, and the
future holds even greater promise.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize applauds Renzo Piano's work in redefining
modern and post-modern architecture. His interventions, contributions, and
continued explorations to solve contemporary problems in a technological
age, add to the definition of the art of architecture.

Essay
The Architecture of Renzo PianoA Triumph of Continuing Creativity
By Colin Amery
Author and Architectural Critic, The Financial Times
Special Advisor to the World Monuments Fund
It was modern architecture itself that was honored at the White House in
Washington, D.C. on June 17, 1998. The twentieth anniversary of the Pritzker
Prize and the presentation of the prestigious award to Renzo Piano made for
an extraordinary event. Pianos quiet character and almost solemn, bearded
appearance brought an atmosphere of serious, contemporary creativity to
the glamorous event. The great gardens and the classical salons of the
White House were filled with the flower of the worlds architectural talent
including the majority of the laureates of the previous twenty years. But
perhaps the most significant aspect of the splendid event was the
opportunity it gave for an overview of the recent past of architecture at the
very heart of the capital of the worlds most powerful country. It was rather
as though King Louis XIV had invited all the greatest creative architects of
the day to a grand dinner at Versailles. In Imperial Washington the entire
globe gathered to pay tribute to the very art of architecture itself.
Renzo Piano was not overwhelmed by the brilliance of the occasion, on the
contrary he seized his opportunity to tell the world about the nature of his
work. In his own words, he firmly explained that architecture is a serious
business being both art and a service. Those are perhaps two of the best
words to describe Renzo Pianos work. He was honored by the Pritzker jury
because his work has achieved a balance between art and function. It has
also always succeeded in being humane, intelligent and resourceful.
Building is in Pianos blood. He is the true scion of a male line of builders his
grandfather, father and brother were all involved in construction as were his
four uncles. He is also Italiana member of that nation that brought
Western architecture to utter maturity. As Piano said at the White House any
architect born in Italy is literally, swimming in tradition. But there was
never any question of Piano drowning(he is after all a good and practical
Genoese sailor) but he is as interested in invention as in observing
architectural convention.
Pianos Italian roots are very key in understanding his work. In Italy it is
easier than in many countries for architects and engineers to be closely
involved in the construction process and to become developers. His family in
Genoa were constructors and his decision to become an architect and to
train professionally in Milan could have separated him from the daily
realities of construction. In fact there was no chance of that because the joy
of building had been bred into him from childhood. Piano still talks warmly of
his youthful visits to his fathers building sites where he saw the entire
process of building as something of a miraculous event. He was born in
1937 and so his formative years were spent seeing a country reconstruct
itself after the war. It was not just the buildings that were being replaced or
renewed it was, what Renzo Piano calls the re-establishment of a normal
life.
I think that this idea of the normal is a very important one in relation to
Pianos career. He has been original but not revolutionary. His design
solutions are the result of analysis and research and are the best, practical
answers to specific problems. There is a sense in all his works of a problem
solvedsometimes in a way that is aesthetically thrilling or even strange-
but always you know that he just wants to make the building work as well as
it possibly can. He may try an experiment to solve the problem but he will
not build anything that is not an intelligent solution.
Renzo Piano became famous at a relatively young age for an architect. He
was only 35 when he won, with Richard Rogers, the competition in 1971 to
build the Pompidou centre in Paris. One of his original ideas for the Centre
had been to build a giant inverted pyramid but his clear belief in
functionality and logic led him and Rogers to opt for the clarity of the giant
rectangle of a city block. The Pompidou has been very controversial but it
has become during its lifetime exactly what Piano and Rogers wanted it to
bea joyful urban machine. Interestingly Piano gets very annoyed if the
Pompidou Centre is described as High Tech. Instead he sees it as a parody of
the technological obsessions of our times. One of the most important results
of the winning of the competition was the meeting between Renzo Piano and
the engineer Peter Rice of Ove Arup and Partners. There was instant rapport
between this brilliantly inventive British engineer and the young Italian
architect, and Peter Rice was to be Pianos engineer until his premature
death in 1992.
There was to be a curious time after the Pompidou Centre opened in 1977.
Piano felt a sense of exhaustion and fatigue. It had been an enormous
lesson in both architecture and life and a triumph for teamwork and
constructional innovation. It must have seemed to the young architect that
this would never be repeated. In some ways he would have been right. He
was never to build with Richard Rogers again and he was to abandon the
kind of colourful anarchy of the sixties that infused the Pompidou ...

Ceremony
The White House, Washington, D.C
Although grand plans were originally envisioned by artist and engineer
Pierre Charles LEnfant for a presidential residence in Washington D.C., Irish-
born architect James Hobans more modest design for a refined Georgian
mansion in the Palladian style was ultimately selected. The White House was
built between 1792 and 1800 and has served as the residence of every U.S.
President since John Adams.
In 1801 under the direction of Thomas Jefferson, the White House was
expanded with the addition of two colonnades, designed by Benjamin Henry
Latrobe (who would later design the US Capitol). Damaged during the War of
1812, the residence was reconstructed and later the south and north
porticos were added. Throughout the twentieth century, improvements and
additions were undertaken; however, the sandstone exterior walls are
originally from Hobans time. Today, the White House is a complex of six
floors and over 130 rooms.

Although the White House grounds have had many gardeners through their
history, the general design, still largely used as master plan today, was
designed in 1935 by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. of the Olmsted Brothers firm,
under commission from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize events of June 17, 1998 began with a
reception inside the White House with all of the state rooms open for
viewing by the guests. The ceremony and dinner followed on the south lawn
within a tent that had been erected for the occasion. Speakers included
President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, architectural
historian and Sterling Professor Emeritus, Vincent Scully, J. Carter Brown,
Chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury, Jay Pritzker, President of the
Hyatt Foundation, and laureate, Renzo Piano.

Acceptance Speech
Renzo Piano
Mr. President, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. and Mrs. Pritzker, it is naturally a great honor
for me to be awarded the 1998 Pritzker Prize. And first of all I would like to
thank the members of the jury. They have taken on a tremendous
responsibility in opening the doors of the temple to someone like me who
has always lived outside of it.
I am very happy, proud and grateful to have been nominated architect of
the yearwhatever that means. It does sound a bit odd, this years best-
seller, the seasons hit, the record of the month. Does this mean that
architects have a sell-by date; that you throw away the architect at the end
of the year?
But what exactly is an architect? What is architecture? I have been in this
trade for thirty years and I am only just beginning to understand what it is.
Firstly, architecture is a service, in the most literal sense of the term. It is an
art that produces things that serve a purpose. But it is also a socially
dangerous art, because it is an imposed art. You can put down a bad book;
you can avoid listening to bad music; but you cannot miss the ugly tower
block opposite your house. Architecture imposes total immersion in ugliness;
it does not give the user a chance. And this is a serious responsibilityfor
now and for future generations. And architecture is an ancient profession,
perhaps the worlds oldest; or the second oldest if you prefer, a little like
hunting, fishing, farming, exploring the seas. These are mans original
activities from which all others stem. Immediately after the search for food,
we find the search for shelter; at a certain point, man was no longer content
with the refuges offered by nature and became an architect.
Finally, architecture mixes things up: history and geography, anthropology
and the environment, science and society. And it inevitably mirrors all of
them.
Perhaps I can explain myself better with an image. Architecture is like an
iceberg. Not in the sense of the Titanic, that will take you down if you bump
into it, but in the sense that the rest is submerged and hidden. In the seven
eighths of the iceberg that lie below water, we find the forces that push
architecture up, that allow the tip to emerge: society, science and art.
Architecture is society, because it does not exist without people, without
their hopes, aspirations and passion. Listening to people is important. And
this is especially difficult for an architect. Because there is always the
temptation to impose ones own design, ones own way of thinking or, even
worse, ones own style. I believe, instead, that a light approach is needed.
Light, but without abandoning the stubbornness that enables you to put
forward your own ideas whilst being permeable to the ideas of others.
I am no boy scout, and my appeal to the sense of service is not intended as
moralistic. It is, very simply, an appeal to the dignity of our profession.
Without this dignity, we risk losing ourselves in the labyrinth of fads and
fashions. Reading architecture as a service certainly means limiting its
creative freedom, constraining it. Yet whoever said that creativity had to be
free of any constraint? I would like to say more: the interpretation of society
and its needs is the richness of architecture. Florence is beautiful because it
is the image of Renaissance Italy, its artisans, its merchants, its patrons of
the arts. Its streets, squares and palaces reflect Lorenzo de Medicis vision of
society.

Architecture is science. To be a scientist, the architect has to be an explorer

and must have a taste for adventure. He has to tackle reality with curiosity
and courage to be able to understand it and change it. He has to be a
homo faber, in the Renaissance sense of the term. Think of Galileo: the
telescope was invented to look out for ships, certainly not to study the
movement of the stars. Theologians worried about the stars. He, instead,
wanted to understand the heavens, and he fought against the most
powerful lobby of his time to do it. This image represents a lot for me: a
formidable lesson in curiosity for anything new, an independence of thought
and courage in exploring the unknown.
Architects have to live on the frontier, and every so often they have to cross
it, to see what is on the other side. They, too, use the telescope to look for
what is not written in the sacred texts. Brunelleschi did not just design
buildings, but also the machines to build them. Antonio Manetti recounts
how he studied the mechanism of the clock in order to apply it to a system
of large counterweights: this was how the structure of the cupola was
raised. This is a lovely example of how architecture is also research. And it
makes us think about an important thing: all of those whom we look up to as
classics, were in their own time great innovators. They were the cutting
edge. They found their way by experimenting and taking risks.
In explaining their reasoning in assigning this prize, the jury makes a
reference to Brunelleschi which fills me with pride and embarrassment at
the same time. He is a model that cannot be reached, but only approached.
If I have to compare myself to someone, I prefer Robinson Crusoe, an
explorer capable of surviving in foreign lands ...

Ceremony Speech
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Thank you, and please be seated once again. This is the formal welcome to
the White House on behalf of the President and myself. We are delighted to
be hosting the 1998 Pritzker Architecture Prize. You know it was at
Dumbarton Oaks, just a few miles from here that the first Pritzker Prize was
awarded. Now on its twentieth birthday we are very pleased to bring this
extraordinary prize back to its Washington roots to celebrate the celebration
of architecture that it has helped to nurture. There are many, many people
in this audience who have made a great contribution to not only
architecture, but to our understanding of architecture, our appreciation of
architecture, to the support of great architecture, and to the quality of life
that our architecture around us represents. But there is no group of people
who are more responsible for our being here this evening than the
extraordinary Pritzker family. I would like to thank the Pritzker family who
like a certain basketball team, come from my home town of Chicago. And
who like that basketball team, the Bulls, keep proving time and time again
that they are champions, champions of architecture, champions of all that it
represents and so committed to preserving, improving and recognizing
significant architecture. This event this evening combines not only the
prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize but also our efforts to celebrate and
acknowledge the millennium.
Now, whether we do anything or not, the century will turn and the
millennium will come to pass. But the President and I believe that it provided
us an opportunity here in our country to perhaps take stock of where we are
and where weve come from and where we are going. So to that end, weve
had a series of events and efforts, that are designed to help us as Americans
and we hope even internationally, mark this passage of time. We have had a
number of millennium evenings and we have tried in those evenings to
highlight issues of importance. Whether or not they are the kinds of issues
that would make headlines, or be carried on the television news, but
nevertheless, they were ones that were of significance in defining who we
are as a people.
For example, when Professor Steven Hawking spoke, we talked about and
speculated over the future of cosmology going into the twenty-first century
in front of the largest group of physicists ever to assemble in the White
House. Then when Robert Pinsky, and our two former poet laureates
gathered to read American poetry and celebrate the importance of poetry in
our history, we hosted the largest group of poets ever in the history of the
White House.

I have not done an official head count, but Im fairly certain we have the
honor of welcoming the largest group of architects ever in the White House.
I want to recognize all of the Pritzker laureates who are with us this evening
and thank them for joining us from literally across the globe. Each of you,
with glass, metal, stone and imagination have helped to shape not only the
history of architecture, but the physical and spiritual landscape of our
civilization. I also want to say a personal word of appreciation to Vincent
Scully whom you will hear from in a few minutes. Professor Scully has made
extraordinary contributions to our understanding of the communities that
create and are created by the structures, the buildings, around us. And we
are very grateful that he brings his knowledge and experience to us tonight
because in addition to the awarding of the Prize, we will have the special
treat of hearing from Professor Scully who will in a short lecture tell us
something of the significance of what we are gathered here to honor. I also
want to thank and recognize all the cabinet members, the members of
Congress, the leaders of cultural institutions, members of the media, other
distinguished guests who are here with us this evening. I want to say a
special word of appreciation to the members of the jury who have the
difficult task of choosing the award winners, not only this year, but in years
passed and years to come.
As some of you may know, we have recently launched a program as part of
the White House millennium council entitled To Save Americas Treasures.
We decided that we wanted, as part of our celebration of marking this
passage of time, to recognize the contributions of the past and what better
way to do that than to honor, preserve and protect the artifacts, the
documents, the monuments and historic sites that express the spirit of our
nation. And so in the next weeks, I will be visiting, as I have already done, a
number of these sites to bring public attention to them, their historical
significance and also their needs because so many are in need of repair and
other help so that they do not further deteriorate. But I also hope to make
the point that we are not just honoring the past when we visit, for example,
James and Dolly Madisons home, Montpelier, or the simple adobe churches
of New Mexico, or the cobblestone buildings of upstate New York, or the
shotgun houses of the Farish Street historic district in Jackson, Mississippi.
These monuments also can help guide us toward the future. They comprise
the fabric of our everyday lives and they tell us about who we are and what
our aspirations were and give us both information and guidance about
where we go from here. Now we are on the grounds of a monument of
American architecture that for almost two hundred years has been the most
powerful symbol of our democracy. I think it is a delicious coincidence that in
the year 2000, the White House will celebrate its 200th birthday, the Capitol
will celebrate its two-hundredth anniversary of holding a meeting of our
Congress, the District of Columbia will celebrate two-hundredth anniversary
as our capital city, and the Library of Congress will similarly mark its two-
hundredth birthday, as well. Im hoping that we can draw attention of
Americans to our capital city and all that it contains. This particular house is
here in part because of the vision of George Washington. Also, he
understood how important it was to have a symbol of this new democracy.
Now for all of our British friends, we have long forgiven you for burning it in
1814 ...
Norman Foster
1999 Laureate

Selected Works:
Willis Faber and Dumas, Ipswich, United Kingdom, 1975
Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norfolk, United
Kingdom, 1978
Century Tower Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan, 1991
Carre d'Art, Nimes, France, 1993
Metro Station, Bilbao, Spain, 1995
Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1995
Commerzbank Headquarters, Frankfurt, Germany, 1997
The Reichstag New German Parliament, Berlin, Germany, 1999
The Great Court, The British Museum, London, UK, 2000

Announcement
Sir Norman Foster of Great Britain Is the 1999 Laureate of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize
Los Angeles, CASir Norman Foster, a 63 year-old architect from Great
Britain, has been named the 1999 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture
Prize. Among the many Foster and Partners on-going projects throughout the
world, some of the highest profile are the world's largest airport in Hong
Kong, which opened this past year; the new Great Court for the British
Museum; and the creation within Berlin's historic Reichstag of a new German
Parliament.
Other major projects in various phases of design or construction include a
headquarters tower for Daewoo Electronics in Seoul, Korea; a museum of
prehistory in the Gorges du Verdon, France; a new regional Music Center,
planned for a dramatic riverside site in Gateshead, North-east England; a
great glass house for the new National Botanic Gardens of Wales; a service
station concept for the petroleum company Repsol in Spain and Latin
America; and a new university campus in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In London, the practice has many projects either newly-completed or under
development. These include a Bio-Medical Sciences Building for Imperial
College; headquarters towers for Citibank and the Hong Kong and Shanghai
Bank at Canary Wharf; the Millennium Pedestrian Bridge across the River
Thames forming a new route between St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tate
Gallery of Modern Art and the Globe Theatre on Bankside; the World Squares
For All Central London master plan, yet another facet of the firm's work in
urban planning with the goal to reclaim Trafalgar Square and Parliament
Square for pedestrians while respecting the demands of traffic; a new
Wembley Stadium; and a parliament building for the Greater London
Authority on the banks of the Thames adjacent to Tower Bridge. In the
United States, Foster completed a new wing for the Joslyn Museum in
Omaha, Nebraska in 1994. Nearing completion in Palo Alto, California is a
214,000 square-foot Center for Clinical Sciences Research at Stanford
University's Medical School.
As the Pritzker Architecture Prize begins its third decade of honoring great
architecture throughout the world, Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt
Foundation, spoke of the jury's choice, saying, "The jury has chosen an
architect who cares passionately about the future of this planet, an avowed
optimist with a firm belief in technological progress, but who also believes
that architecture is about people and the quality of life. He makes buildings
that will not only last, but will work for the people that use them, and in the
process provide an uplifting experience."
The formal presentation of what has come to be known throughout the
world as architecture's highest honor will be made at a ceremony in Berlin
on June 7, 1999. At that time, Sir Norman will be presented with a $100,000
grant and a bronze medallion. He is the second Englishman to become a
Pritzker Laureate, the first being the late Sir James Stirling who was honored
in 1981, and who encouraged a young Foster as he began his career in the
early sixties.

Foster has designed and built office towers in Tokyo, Japan and Frankfurt,
Germany and Hong Kong as well as a communications tower in Barcelona,
Spain. The world's largest airport in Hong Kong was presaged by London's
Third Airport at Stansted. He designed a rapid transit system for Bilbao,
Spain and has recently completed a station for London's underground
Jubilee Line, Canary Wharf , as well as the transport interchange at
Greenwich. His global output includes furniture, offices, showrooms,
warehousing facilities and industrial buildings, single residences and
multiple housing units, schools, bridges, art museums and galleries,
universities, sports stadia, research laboratories, shops, cultural centers,
and libraries. And he designed one project that is capable of moving all
around the world, a180-foot private motor yacht.
Foster attracted attention in 1971 when he was able to deliver a permanent
office building to IBM in Cosham, at the cost and within the time-frame of
temporary quarters. In 1975, Foster's modernist solution for an office
structure in Ipswich, England for Willis Faber & Dumas brought the first
international attention to his work. The three-storey, glass-clad exterior
followed irregular street patterns, reflecting its surroundings by day, but
becoming transparent at night to reveal the two open plan office floors and
a swimming pool on the ground level. The project is considered a model of
social responsiveness, as well as being ecologically efficient. Within two
years, he confirmed his ability to bring innovation in both materials and
design to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East
Anglia, Norwich. On a much larger and international scale, in 1979, he
received the commission for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking
Corporation's headquarters, for which he designed a tower 47 stories above
a ground floor plaza. Foster's life comes close to being a Horatio Alger story.
He was born into a working class family in a suburb of Manchester, England
in 1935, where the odds of his making a career in a profession were highly
unlikely. He attended a local high school and did well, showing an early
interest in architecture. After a series of odd jobs, and after his national
service in the Royal Air Force, he enrolled in Manchester University where he
won nearly every scholarship and fellowship available, eventually winning
one to attend Yale University in the United States.
Since his first commission some 35 years ago, he has won worldwide
acclaim for his modernist buildings, including his profession's highest
honors. In 1990, he received a Knighthood from the Queen of England and in
1997 was appointed by the Queen to the Order of Merit. Pritzker Prize jury
chairman, J. Carter Brown, commented, "Rooted in the grand tradition of
20th century modernism, Sir Norman Foster transcends categorization. At
whatever scale, from a glass elevator to an airport, his vision forges the
materials of our age into a crystalline, lyrical purity that is highly personal,
brilliantly functional, andshy as we are about using the wordjust
downright beautiful."
Bill Lacy, the executive director of the Pritzker Prize, quoted from the jury
citation which states, "His design objectives are guided not only toward the
overall beauty and function of a project, but for the well-being of those
people who will be the end-users. This social dimension to his work
translates as making every effort to transform and improve the quality of
life. In the early seventies, he pioneered the notion that the workplace could
be a pleasant environment."
Lacy, who is an architect himself and president of the State University of
New York at Purchase, added, "Sir Norman Foster's buildings set a standard
for design excellence in the use of modern technology pushed to its artistic
limits. His buildings represent the highest attainment of contemporary
architecture in the twentieth century and will undoubtedly be the design
standard for much of the architecture of the next century."

Biography
Norman Foster was born in Manchester in 1935. After graduating from
Manchester University School of Architecture and City Planning in 1961 he
won a Henry Fellowship to Yale University, where he gained a Masters
Degree in Architecture.
He is the founder and chairman of Foster and Partners. Founded in London in
1967, it is now a worldwide practice, with project offices in more than
twenty countries. Over the past four decades the company has been
responsible for a strikingly wide range of work, from urban master plans,
public infrastructure, airports, civic and cultural buildings, offices and
workplaces to private houses and product design.
Foster has established an international reputation with projects as diverse as
the New German Parliament in the Reichstag in Berlin, Chek Lap Kok
International Airport and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in Hong Kong,
Commerzbank Headquarters in Frankfurt, Willis Faber & Dumas Head Office
in Ipswich, and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. Since its
inception, the practice has received more than 400 awards and citations for
excellence and has won numerous international and national competitions.
He became the 21st Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate in 1999. He has
been awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal for
Architecture (1994), the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture (1983), and the
Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture (1991). In 1990 he was
granted a Knighthood in the Queens Birthday Honours, and in 1999 was
honored with a Life Peerage, becoming The Lord Foster of Thames Bank.
Foster has lectured throughout the world and has taught architecture in the
United Kingdom and the United States. He has been Vice-President of the
Architectural Association in London, Council Member of the Royal College of
Art and was a founding trustee of the Architecture Foundation of London ...

Jury Citation
Sir Norman Foster's pursuit of the art and science of architecture has
resulted in one building triumph after another, each one in its own way,
unique. He has re-invented the tall building, producing Europe's tallest and
arguably the first skyscraper with an ecological conscience, the
Commerzbank in Frankfurt. He cares passionately for the environment,
designing accordingly. From his very first projects, it was evident that he
would embrace the most advanced technology appropriate to the task,
producing results sensitive to their sites, always with imaginative solutions
to design problems. His design objectives are guided not only toward the
overall beauty and function of a project, but for the wellbeing of those
people who will be the end-users. This social dimension to his work
translates as making every effort to transform and improve the quality of
life. In the early seventies, he pioneered the notion that the workplace could
be a pleasant environment with one of his first notable projects, the Willis
Faber and Dumas offices, that included a swimming pool and grassy rooftop
park for employees.
In the three decades since, Sir Norman has produced a collection of
buildings and products noted for their clarity, invention, and sheer artistic
virtuosity. His work ranges in scale from the modest, but exquisite new
addition of the Sackler Galleries to the existing galleries of the Royal
Academy of Arts in London, and the serenely simple limestone addition to
the Joslyn Museum in Omaha, Nebraskato a pair of grand mega-projects,
both in Hong Kong, the world's largest air terminal, and the much-acclaimed
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
Proof of his ability to produce remarkable solutions for diverse programs in
urban settings is his sensitive placement and design of the Carr d'Art, a
cultural center next to a revered Roman temple, dating from 500 BC, in the
heart of Nmes, France. Such a juxtaposition of contemporary and ancient
architecture has rarely been achieved so successfully. His transformation of
more recent historic iconsthe Reichstag in Berlin and the new Great Court
of the British Museumare brilliant redesign-renovations.

His design versatility is further demonstrated with his experimentation and

innovation in designing a wide range of products from a simple door handle,
to tables and tableware, chairs and other furniture for storage systems,
book stacks, desks, exhibition stands, and street furniture as well as a solar
powered bus and private motor yacht. His is a continuing process of
discovery, inspiration, invention and innovation.
For Sir Norman's steadfast devotion to the principles of architecture as an
art form, for his contributions in defining an architecture with high
technological standards, and for his appreciation of the human values
involved in producing consistently well-designed projects, he is awarded the
Pritzker Architecture Prize, with warm wishes for continued success in the
new millennium.

Essay
The Architecture of Sir Norman Foster
by Joseph Giovannini
Architect and Critic
Sir Norman Foster is celebrated for designing buildings detailed with the
finesse of a trapezedaring and even majestic high-wire apparatuses of
steel parts tensed between articulate joints. Whether in projects built for
small English towns or outposts of the global economy, the technological
imagery is so consistent that his approach amounts to both an architectural
signature and a design paradigm.
Ironically, the poetics of structure in a Foster buildingthe forces, their
convergence, the expressionare based on the prosaics of componentry.
From the firms first years in the late 1960s, Foster Associates produced
award-winning buildings put together systematically from off-the-shelf parts:
the stock turn-buckles, cables, web joists and I- beams were assembled into
structures at prices competitive with contractor buildings. The beauty of
Fosters structures was cool, and even tough in the way athletes exhibit
grace under pressure. The designs are gymnastics frozen in steelstrong,
taut, lean.
But people working today in Fosters Commerzbank in Frankfurt appreciate
the 53-story building for other reasons. Finished in 1997, the tallest office
tower in Europe may project technological prowess, but occupants know the
building better for its neighborly intimacies. The tower allows daily acts of
freedom unusual for people confined to the closed environmental canisters
that pass today for skyscrapers. Employees can meet for sandwiches and
coffee in terraced gardens adjacent to their offices, enhanced by long vistas
in nearly all directions. More remarkably, they can simply reach over and
open a window to let in fresh air that will cross the floor and rise up through
the flue-like atrium, to waft out windows lining other gardens spiraling up
the tower. Natural cross ventilation may be a commonplace assumption in a
house, but in high-rise architecture, where it has invariably been engineered
out, the ordinary window is a tender mercy.
Breezes, an espresso and some chatter are the tip of a different kind of
architectural iceberggentle, humanistic signs that Foster has predicated
the Frankfurt tower on premises belied by the buildings urbane
technological detachment. Lobby, skin and a logo crown are among the few
sections of a high-rise left for the architect to design after the cost engineers
and real estate consultants run their figures. As a building type, the high-
rise is the most formulaic of all, a tightly wrapped package with an elevator
core centered in a stack of pancake floors sealed off from the environment
by a curtain wall. But at the Commerzbank, Foster rearranged the usual
anatomy of a skyscraper. He moved the elevator core with its bathrooms
and stairwells from the center, leaving it vacant for the 53 stories, and then
triangulated the three sides of the tower around the atrium while carving
four-story gardens out of each side. The terraces, each a small, vertically
local park serving its district of offices, fosters a democratic sense of village-
like community within the larger geography of the building. By redistributing
the central core to the corners of the triangular plan, Foster broke up the
normally monolithic mass of the point tower so that each facade varies from
the others in height and volume.

Many successful architects accept the conceptual envelope of a given

building type, perhaps pushing it in certain places, but Foster has dared
rethink the whole package, including what he calls the social dimension.
The Manchester-born architect first radicalized the morphology of the high-
rise with the completion of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking
Corporation building in 1986. At a time when many architects were figuring
out how to slip classicized suits over the steel cage, Foster relegated the
usual core of elevators to the corners of a four-poster scheme, liberating the
center for a partial-height atrium. The building became a more porous
structure with open plateaus on each floor that allowed easy expansion and
contraction within column-free spaces. Foster designed the tower as a stack
of bridge trusses supported at the ends by steel masts, and he kept the
perimeter walls back from a revealed edge. He lifted the banking hall off the
ground with a glass-bottomed underbelly that sheltered a public plaza
whose angled escalators dramatize the entry.
Though simple in its systematicity, the 47-story cross section was rich and
varied, with double-height stories regularly interspersed among single-
height spaces. By building the structure from an assembly of parts that are
not wrapped within a continuous skin, Foster opened what is usually a
closed form, creating an armature of changeopen, free-span decks filled
with light and supplied with conduits for squadrons of mobile computers. He
mixed notions of the point tower and office block with principles of the
megastructure developed during the 1960s and 70s, in which fixed structure
was conceived as a support system for changing configurations. Although
the final use of the building remained only offices, Foster originally planned
the tower as a small vertical city with restaurants, pool, gym and outdoor
gardens. As built, an executive restaurant at the top overlooks a helipad,
and the glass-roofed plaza has proved popular for demonstrations as well as
picnics.
Foster is an architect of flexibility, and his instincts to design for the
inevitability of change are rooted both in the unselfconscious factory sheds
of Englands industrial revolution and in the modest steel Case Study
Houses of Los Angeles by Pierre Koenig, Raphael Soriano, Craig Ellwood, and
Charles and Ray Eames. While a student at Yales architecture school in the
early 1960s, Foster found the direction he would pursue for most of his
career in an industrialized, off-the-peg approach conceived to raise
construction standards and minimize costs. In the 1960s such assumptions
were common, but instead of following the idealism of Mies van der Rohes
classicized steel structures, Foster pursued prefabrication. Rather than Mies
godly joints, he preferred California detailsthat is, more casual connections
often determined in the field without any attempt at abstract purity. The Los
Angeles houses did not have the closure of Mies classical structures but
were more open-ended and even ad hoc. Mies had cut such a wide swath
that an architect of Fosters generation had more creative room in adjacent
territory, and Foster found his path in an architecture built up from parts
rather than deduced from any sense of a perfectible whole. Instead of the
Miesian temple, Foster adopted the Eamesian Tinker Toy model, which
allowed a much looser, more spontaneous approach that also meant plans
could be easily changed ...

Ceremony
Altes Museum, Berlin, Germany
The Pritzker Architecture Prize award ceremony for 1999 was held at the
Altes Museum on the Museum Island in Berlin. It was followed by a reception
in another significant space, the New National Gallery by Mies van der Rohe.
Finally, the formal dinner took place in the Hyatt Hotel, designed by 1996
Pritzker Laureate Rafael Moneo.
The Altes Museum, designed by Freidrich Schinkel (1781-1841) architect,
painter, and stage designer, is located on a prominent site in the heart of
Berlin. When built, the relationship with surrounding buildings was not only
one of position and scale but highly symbolic as it faced the Royal Palace
and was flanked by two churches. When opened in 1830, it was one of the
most influential buildings of its time. It was also one of the earliest buildings
specifically designed for the public display of works. Employing a
neoclassical vocabulary, the imposing building uses 18 Ionic columns to line
the front faade, creating a colonnade to lend grandeur to the museum. The
central rotunda, which Schinkel reverently called a pantheon, is an inspiring
space in which the Pritzker Architecture Prize Ceremony took place.
The 1999 award ceremony included the participation of Eberhard Diepgen,
Mayor of Berlin, Wolfgang Thierse, President of the German Parliament, J.
Carter Brown, Chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury, Thomas J. Pritzker,
President of the Hyatt Foundation and Sir Norman Foster, 1999 Laureate.
Ceremony Acceptance Speech
Norman Foster
Mr. President, Mr. Mayor, My Lords, Mrs. Pritzker, ladies and gentlemen. As
individuals, were all shaped by the diversity of our background, our history,
influences, education, experience. Both personally and professionally, I
continue to be so fortunate to have that many generous colleagues and
collaborators, patrons and clients, and above all, wonderful parents. In that
sense, the Pritzker Prize is widely shared. Because like the production of any
architectural project, there are many parties involved. And tonight, I would
like to try to pay tribute to them.
I have very special debts to America and to Europe, which probably started
when I was a teenager. Because through my local library, I discovered the
very different worlds of Frank Lloyd Wright, of Le Corbusier. Imagine the
contrast of a home on the prairie with a villa and a Paris boulevard. And yet,
I remember being equally fascinated by both of them. Ten years later as a
graduate student at Yale, those pages were to come alive through one of the
several, great teachers that Ive been privileged to learn from.
It was the insights of Vincent Scully that opened my eyes to the interaction
between the old world and the new. He made more meaningful those
European cities whose urban spaces and modern works Id studied on my
travels as a student at Manchester. A vital part of the Yale experience was
the total immersion in the work of great and talented designers, across the
breadth of America from coast to coast.
Architects learn from architects, past and present. But the two other
dominant teachers at Yale polarize for me the cultures of America and
Europe. Paul Rudolph had created a studio atmosphere of fevered activity,
highly competitive, and fueled by a succession of visiting luminaries. The
crypts were open and accessible and often combative. And it was a can-do
approach in which concepts could be shredded one day to be reborn
overnight. But the only criteria was the quality of the work presented; the
architecture of the drawings and the models. There was no room for
excuses. No substitute of rhetoric.
The emphasis on tangible results in the studio summed up an American
world in which everything was possible if you were willing to try hard
enough. For me, that was a breath of fresh air. I felt less like the loner whod
left Britain. America gave me a sense of confidence, freedom and self-
discovery. My timing of Yale in 1961 was more fortunate than I could ever
have foreseen, because it marked a change of leadership from Paul Rudolph
to Serge Chermayeff. So we had half the year of one and half the year of the
other. He was as European as Rudolph was American, not just in dress or
manner, but deeply rooted differences in philosophy.
For Chermayeff, debate and theory took precedence over imagery.
Questioning was to the fore, analysis dominated action. But I really warm to
this approach because Manchester had been more about the tools of the
trade, the disciplines of drawing, of putting materials together. There was
little time for conversation, let alone debate.
Incidentally, I remain grateful for the grounding in the basics. Chermayeff
opened me up to his researches with Christopher Alexander on community
and privacy. And at his invitation, I was tempted with an academic career at
Yale helping to pursue city planning studies, a subject which is still very
close to my heart. Of course, the relationships are really more complex. In
some ways, I went to Yale to discover a European heritage because America
had embraced those migrs such as Gropius who taught Rudolph at
Harvard, and was for Rudolph, I quote, his point of reference in the same
classes with I.M. Pei, Harry Seidler, Ed Barnes, a list of a whole generation of
American architects coming out of that European tradition.
But looking back with the perspective of nearly fourty years, I can see that
our practice has been inspired by these polarities of action and research,
which means trying to ask the right questions with an insatiable curiosity
about how things work, whether theyre organizations or mechanical
systems. A belief in the social context that buildings are generated by
people and their needs, and those needs are spiritual as well as material.
Never taking anything for granted, always trying to probe deeper, to access
the inner workings behind the many branches of human activity for which
we, as architects, are charged to explore and respond to.
So it is the marriage of analysis with action that is at the core of our studio.
And Im deeply grateful to my partners who have helped me develop the
roots of this approach over the past twenty-five or thirty years: Spencer de
Grey, David Nelson, Graham Philips, Ken Shuttleworth, and more recently
Barry Cook. But all of us have a very special debt to my late wife, Wendy.
Because together we formed the basis of the present practice in 1967. For a
brief period, Michael Hopkins joined us as a partner. Hes still a kindred spirit
and Im very grateful for his support then as now. Wendy instigated the
move to our present studio at Riverside on the Thames. Its a powerhouse of
youthful energy with an average age of just over thirty, and commanding as
many languages. Its spirit in so many ways is similar to that Yale studio.
Sadly, Wendy never lived to see its realization. But for her, for me, her
memory lives on in my sons.
If 1967 was the start of our practice, then it also marked the end of a brief
but intense and inspirational period, nearly four years which Wendy and I
shared with my former Yale classmate, Richard Rogers, under the title of
Team IV. Richard is still a dear friend, and its wonderful to share so many of
those same values more than thirty years later ...

Ceremony Speech
Thomas J. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
Thank you very much, Carter, appreciate it. Mr. President, ladies and
gentlemen, were here in Berlin at the end of a remarkable century for
architecture. Were here in a city that has truly seen both the best of times
and the worst of times. Yesterdays tour left no doubt that we are witnessing
the construction of a unique built environment. We saw the fundamental
rebuilding of a city by the great architects of this moment at the end of the
twentieth century.
Not coincidentally, the beginning of this same century saw the
reconstruction of our hometown of Chicago after its great fire. That
rebuilding saw the beginning of high rise architecture and it set the
standards for all other modern cities. Today, and for the coming century,
Berlin sets a new standard.
As you know, the Pritzker has taken on a tradition of being a ceremony that
has traveled to places of historical value. Weve gone to the eighth century
Buddhist temple of Todai-ji in Nara, Japan, in order to present the prize to my
friend, Frank Gehry. Weve gone to the Palace of Versailles, which was the
venue for the presentation to Tadao Ando, in 1995. In other years, we visited
the works of previous Laureates that had been executed subsequent to their
receiving the prize. In Bilbao, in 1996, we pre-inaugurated Franks
Guggenheim Museum for the purpose of inducting Sverre Fehn as a
Laureate. Our ceremony at Richard Meiers unfinished Getty Museum was to
honor Rafael Moneo, who incidentally has designed tonights dinner venue
at the Grand Hyatt, Berlin.
I would just like to point out because Rafael designed the hotel here that
were having dinner in, if theres a problem with the food, if its not so hot,
dont worry about calling Rafael in his room after dinner.
Well, you can see the Pritzker has traveled from the White House to now
Berlin, or perhaps this will become the site for future venues. Tonight we
have a group that is truly a remarkable set of the best. Many of our
Laureates are here tonight and I would like to introduce them and thank
them for their contributions to our built environment.
Ladies and gentleman, I would like to introduce the past Laureates who are
here tonight. I would ask that you remain standing after youve been called,
and for the audience to do two things: First, Id like you to hold your
applause till were completed, and second, Id like you to think about the
fact that every one of these Laureates is either working on a new project or
has recently completely a project here in this wonderful City of Berlin. To
each of you, I hope youve got those construction projects correctly.
In order of seniority as a Laureate, we begin with our seventh Laureate,
Hans Hollein of Austria. Gottfried Bhm of Germany. We then go to Frank
Gehry of the United States, and Jose Rafael Moneo of Spain. And finally, last
years recipient, Renzo Piano. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a hand to
our millennium pioneers.
Before discussing Norman, I want to say that tonight could not have taken
place without the gracious help of Wolf-Dieter Dube. And thank you very
much. He has orchestrated our use of this magnificent rotunda of the Altes
Museum, as well as an opportunity to experience the New National Gallery
as we progress through the evening. By using these venues, we pay homage
to Karl Friedrich Schinkel, as an architect from the previous century, and to
Mies van der Rohe, whose post-war buildings can be seen throughout our
hometown of Chicago. And of course, when we talk of the Pritzker, we must
pay homage to our chairman Carter Brown. Who has provided a guiding
spirit to all of us who have been involved since the inception of the prize in
1979. He and his jurors over the years have defined the Pritzker by the
character of their selections. Thank you all very much.
And now theres Norman, Sir Norman. He is Norman Foster of the United
Kingdom, but actually hes Sir Norman of the world. Listen to the works hes
done. Hes done two major works in Hong Kong, a bank and an airport. He
has given us beautiful office towers in Japan and here in Germany. In
England, he continues to redefine daily life for museums, commerce and
industry. Hes engaged in infrastructure; works such as bridges and urban
planning that will change traffic patterns, Im told, in central London. And as
a result, we can all assume that the day of congested traffic in London will
be put to an end.
In addition to the above, Sir Norman is doing the new Wembley Stadium and
has mustered the courage to lay his hand onto the Round Reading Room in
the British Museum. The list goes on with works underway from a university
in Kuala-Lumpur to prehistory museum in France, and a recently received
commission for an addition to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. But quantity
does not get you the Pritzker. No, the mantra requires consistent and
significant contributions to humanity and the built environment to the art of
architecture. So lets see how Sir Norman has addressed this requirement. It
has been 35 years since Sir Normans first commission. By the early 70s, he
had pioneered the idea that the work place could actually be a pleasant
environment. His work continues to reflect his commitment to that idea.
Hes also pioneered the use of cutting-edge technology to make buildings,
provide an uplifting experience for its users and for generations of the
future. These were both conceptual leaps at their time, but that wasnt
enough. No, what he really did that put him over the top, was he did these
things and then as Carter has said, he did them downright beautiful ...

Rem Koolhaas
2000 Laureate

Selected Works:
Netherlands Dance Theatre, The Hague, Netherlands, 1988
Nexus Housing, Fukuoka, Japan, 1991
Villa dallAva, Paris, France, 1991
Dutch House, Netherlands, 1993
Kunstal, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1993
Grand Palais, Lille, France, 1994
Educatorium, Utrecht, Netherlands, 1997
Maison Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, 1998

Announcement
Rem Koolhaas of The Netherlands Is the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
for the Year 2000
Los Angeles, CARem Koolhaas, a 56 year-old architect from the
Netherlands, has been named the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate for
the year 2000.
In Europe, he has a number of completed projects that have won high praise
from critics, including a residence in Bordeaux, France; the Educatorium, a
multifunction building for Utrecht University in the Netherlands; the master
plan and Grand Palais for Lille, France which is his largest realized urban
planning project; and the Kunsthal, providing exhibition space, a restaurant
and auditoriums in Rotterdam.
In a development in Fukuoka, Japan, his Nexus Housing is a project
consisting of 24 individual houses, each three stories high. Koolhaas also
has projects in Portugal, Korea and Germany, the latter being a new
embassy for the Netherlands in Berlin, which is currently under construction.
He has a number of major commissions in the United States that will come
to fruition within the next two years: a student center for the predominantly
Mies van der Rohe campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago
and a new central public library for Seattle, as well as buildings in San
Francisco and Los Angeles. Koolhaas has also been working for Universal
Studios, owned by the Seagram Company, on a master plan and
headquarters buildings.
Koolhaas work and ideas often spark critical debate in areas in which he has
been working. While his radical design for the Seattle Public Library has won
praise there, initial reports described Seattle as bracing for a wild ride with
a man famous for straying outside the bounds of convention.
It seems fitting that as we begin a new millennium, the jury should choose
an architect that seems so in tune with the future, says Thomas J. Pritzker,
president of The Hyatt Foundation, In fact, Koolhaas has been called a
prophet of a new modern architecture. Its not surprising that the Museum of
Modern Art has had not one, but two exhibitions devoted to his ideas.
The Bordeaux house, named as Best Design of 1998 by Time magazine, is
one of his most important works, designed to fill the needs of a couple
whose old house had become a prison to the husband who has been
confined to a wheel chair following an automobile accident. Koolhaas
proposed a home in three sections, actually what he prefers to describe as
three houses, one on top of the other. The lowest part he calls cave-like, a
series of caverns carved out from the hill for the most intimate life of the
family. The top house is divided into spaces for the couple, and spaces
for their children. Sandwiched in between is an almost invisible glass room,
half inside, half outside, meeting the grade on one side, where the client has
his own room for living. This room is actually a vertically moving platform, 3
X 3.5 meters (10 X 10.75 feet ), functioning as an elevator, which allows the
man access to all levels. One wall of the elevator is a continuous surface of
shelves providing access to books for his work.

Biography
Born in Rotterdam, Rem Koolhaas spent four years of his youth in Indonesia,
where his father served as director or a newly formed cultural institute.
Following in the footsteps of his literary father, Koolhaas began his career as
a writer. He was a journalist for the Haase Post in The Hague, and later tried
his hand at writing movie scripts.
Koolhaas's writings won him fame in the field of architecture before he
completed a single building. After graduating from the Architecture
Association School in London in 1972, he received the Harkness Fellowship
for travel and research in the United States. During this period, he wrote
Delirious New York, which he described as a "retroactive manifesto for
Manhattan" and which critics hailed as a classic text on modern architecture
and society.
In 1975, Koolhaas founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in
London with Madelon Vriesendorm and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis. Focusing on
contemporary design, the company won a competition for an addition to the
Parliament in The Hague and a major commission to develop a master plan
for a housing quarter in Amsterdam.
In 1987, Koolhaas was hired to design and build the Netherlands Dance
Theater in The Hague. Composed of three areas, including a stage and
auditorium, a rehearsal studio, and a complex of offices and dressing rooms,
the theater garnered Koolhaas immediate acclaim.
Delirious New York was reprinted in 1994 under the title Rem Koolhaas and
the Place of Modern Architecture. The same year, he published S,M,L,XL in
collaboration with the Canadian graphic designer Bruce Mau. Described as a
novel about architecture, the book combines works produced by Koolhaas's
Office for Metropolitan Architecture with photos, plans, fiction, cartoons and
random thoughts. The title refers to the way the architect decided to
arrange the book: instead of a chronological timeline, it is organized by
project size.
Koolhaas has designed a number of residences, cultural buildings and an
educatorium a name alluding to a factory of learning, a shared facility at
Utrecht University, among many other projects and planning commissions.
In a major competition, Koolhaas was selected to design the new Campus
Center at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, one of the first new
structures on the historic campus designed by Mies Van der Rohe. In 1999,
he was awarded the commission to design the new main library for the city
of Seat ...
Koolhaas published his first book, Delirious New York , in 1978. Author James
Steele described it as an offbeat but well-expressed and incisive look at the
pattern of urban growth. A Los Angeles Times article described the book as
bulging with novel theories and images about that cityamong them an
image of the Chrysler Building in bed with the Empire State Building.
More recently, he wrote S, M, L, XL, which Time magazine called the
ultimate coffee-table book for a generation raised on both MTV and
Derrida. The Pritzker jury considers Koolhaas writings so important that the
prize citation says he is as well known for his books, plans and academic
explorations as he is for his buildings.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, J. Carter Brown, commented, Rem Koolhaas is
widely respected as one of the most gifted and original talents in world
architecture today. The leader of a spectacularly irreverent generation of
Dutch architects, his restless mind, conceptual brilliance, and ability to make
a building sing have earned him a stellar place in the firmament of
contemporary design.
Bill Lacy, the executive director of the Pritzker Prize, wrote in his 1991 book,
100 Contemporary Architects, As an architect/philosopher/artist, Dutchman
Rem Koolhaas has expanded and continues to expand our perceptions of
cities and civilization.
Lacy, who is president of the State University of New York at Purchase,
added, Koolhaas has amassed an intriguing array of brilliant projects that
continually blur the line between urban design and architecture. He has a
rare talent and ability to think in design terms that range from the smallest
construction detail to the concept for a regional master plan.
The formal presentation of what has come to be known throughout the
world as architecture's highest honor will be made at a ceremony in
Jerusalem, Israel on May 29, 2000. At that time, Koolhaas will be presented
with a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion. He is the first Pritzker
Laureate from the Netherlands, and the 23rd to be honored.

Jury Citation
Rem Koolhaas is that rare combination of visionary and implementer
philosopher and pragmatisttheorist and prophetan architect whose ideas
about buildings and urban planning made him one of the most discussed
contemporary architects in the world even before any of his design projects
came to fruition. It was all accomplished with his writings and discussions
with students, many times stirring controversy for straying outside the
bounds of convention. He is as well known for his books, regional and global
plans, academic explorations with groups of students, as he is for his bold,
strident, thought provoking architecture.
His emergence in the late seventies with his book Delirious New York was
the start of a remarkable two decades that have seen his built works,
projects, plans, exhibitions and studies resonate throughout the professional
and academic landscape, becoming a lightning rod for both criticism and
praise.
One of his earliest plans for the expansion of the Dutch Parliament aroused
such interest that other commissions followed. The Netherlands Dance
Theatre in The Hague was one of the first completed projects to garner
critical acclaim from many quarters. Since then, Koolhaas commissions
have ranged in scale from a remarkably inventive and compassionate house
in Bordeaux to the master plan and giant convention center for Lille, both in
France. The Bordeaux house was designed to accommodate extraordinary
conditions of use by a client confined to a wheel chair without sacrificing the
quality of living. Had he only done the Bordeaux project, his niche in the
history or architecture would have been secure. Add to that a lively center of
educational life, an Educatorium (a made up word for a factory for learning)
in Utrecht, as well as housing in Japan, cultural centers and other residences
in France and the Netherlands, and proposals for such things as an Airport
Island in the North Sea, and you have a talent of extraordinary dimensions
revealed.
He has demonstrated many times over his ability and creative talent to
confront seemingly insoluble or constrictive problems with brilliant and
original solutions. In every design there is a free-flowing, democratic
organization of spaces and functions with an unselfconscious tributary of
circulation that in the end dictates a new unprecedented architectural form.
His body of work is as much about ideas as it is buildings.
His architecture is an architecture of essence; ideas given built form. He is
an architect obviously comfortable with the future and in close
communication with its fast pace and changing configurations. One senses
in his projects the intensity of thought that forms the armature resulting in a
house, a convention center, a campus plan, or a book. He has firmly
established himself in the pantheon of significant architects of the last
century and the dawning of this one. For just over twenty years of
accomplishing his objectivesdefining new types of relationships, both
theoretical and practical, between architecture and the cultural situation,
and for his contributions to the built environment, as well as for his ideas, he
is awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Essay
The Architecture of Rem Koolhaas
By Paul Goldberger
Architecture Critic, The New Yorker
Executive Editor, Architecture, Architectural Digest
There is Rem Koolhaas the architect, there is Rem Koolhaas the writer, there
is Rem Koolhaas the urban theoretician, and there is Rem Koolhaas the
figure to whom younger architects are drawn as moths to a flame. The
Pritzker Prize jury has taken note of every one of these aspects of Koolhaass
rich talent, but to its credit, it has honored Koolhaas as much for his built
work as for his ideas. For the truth about Rem Koolhaas is that he is, at
bottom, an architect, a brilliant maker of form whose work has done as
much to reinvigorate modernism as any architect now living. His statements
about the inability of architecture to respond to the problems of the
contemporary city may have gained him fame, but his best buildings belie
his own message, for they prove that architecture can, in fact, continue to
have meaning, that the possibilities of formal invention are far from
exhausted, and that in an age of the virtual, there is a profound need for the
real.
In this sense, it is hard not to think of Koolhaas in the same way one thinks
of Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, other architects who could speak in
brilliant sound bites (New York is a catastrophe, but a brilliant catastrophe,
said Le Corbusier) which so easily distract from the originality, richness and
complexity of their buildings. Unlike Le Corbusier, whose urban theories
have turned out to be utterly misguided, Koolhaass rhetoric about the city
which could probably be summed up as a celebration of what he has called
the culture of congestion, and a recognition that technology has made
both urban and architectural form vastly more fluid and less rigid than it
once wasgives every indication of being completely true. Unlike Le
Corbusier, Wright, and most other urban theorists, Koolhaas is less
interested in creating a universal model as he is in describing the
unworkability of universal models; his is a kind of urban design for the age
of chaos theory, and he has made much of the notion that in an age of
cyberspace, conventional kinds of urban form, not to mention conventional
kinds of architecture, cannot function as they once did, and therefore can no
longer be expected to have the meanings they once did, either. Koolhaas
wrote in 1994: If there is to be a new urbanism it will not be based on the
twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of
uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or
less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it
will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling
fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into
definitive form.it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the
manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and
diversifications, shortcuts and redistributionsthe reinvention of
psychological space.
In a time when it is fashionable to decry the increasing sameness of places
the homogenization of cultureKoolhaas has had the courage to inquire
as to whether the generic city, as he has called it, is entirely a bad thing.
How much does physical form have to determine identity, he asks, and he
has argued persuasively that an exaggerated belief in the value of the old
urban center, far from helping urban identity, has so weakened peripheral
areas as to assure their deterioration. The Generic City, Koolhaas has
written, is the city without history. It is big enough for everybody. It does
not need maintenance. If it gets too small it just expands. If it gets old it just
self-destructs and renews. It is superficiallike a Hollywood studio lot, it
can produce a new identity every Monday morningThe Generic City is
what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace.
As Le Corbusier made much of dismissing the architecture of the past as
irrelevant to the future, Koolhaas takes a certain pleasure in his own
rhetorical excesses, but they often tend to contain blunt and astonishingly
simple truths. The future is here, it just hasnt been evenly distributed
(yet), he has written. Or: The elevatorwith its potential to establish
mechanical rather than architectural connectionsand its family of related
inventions render null and void the classical repertoire of architecture. On
the subject of Atlanta: Atlanta is not a city; it is a landscape. Atlanta was
the launching pad of the distributed downtown; downtown had exploded.
Once atomized, its autonomous particles could go anywhere,
opportunistically toward points of freedom, cheapness, easy access,
diminished contextual nuisance. And on the contemporary condition of
urbanistic thinking: We were making sand castles. Now we swim in the sea
that swept them away.
It is not so much the clever phrasemaking as the fact that Koolhaass writing
and his thinkingare so blunt and determinedly non-linear that accounts,
surely, for his immense appeal to younger architects; they see in Koolhaas a
fearless critic of the socio-economic and political forces that have shaped
the modern city, a figure who professes indifference to power and yet
seems, paradoxically, able to accept many things as they are. Koolhaas
declaims in every direction at once, one part Jeremiah, proclaiming
imminent ruin, and one part Robert Venturi, viewing the world with a
fascination bordering on love that implicitly connotes a degree of
acceptance. Never mind the contradictionthere is no contradiction, for this
is how the world is, Koolhaas is saying, and how we must deal with it. Above
all Koolhaas is an observer of reality, and he is utterly unsentimental. His
deepest scorn, it would seem, is for those who would respond to the
urgencies of this moment by retreating into the nostalgia of the past ...

Ceremony
Jerusalem Archaeological Park, Jerusalem, Israel
The Jerusalem Archaeological Park, Israels most important antiquity site,
extends to the Temple Mount on the north, the slope of the Mount of Olives
and the Kidron Valley on the east, and the Valley of Hinnom on the west and
the south. This exceptional area, which has captivated the worlds
imagination throughout history, has been designated as an archaeological
park and open museum. The Park bears witness to events spanning some
5000 years, beginning with the Bronze Age and continuing through the days
of the Israelite monarchy in the First Temple period. The splendors of the
Second Temple and the impressive architecture of King Herod, dating to the
second half of the first century B.C.E. are key elements in the park. Remains
and monumental structures dating to the Christian and Muslim periods are
also clearly visible.
Jerusalems Archeological Park provided the most ancient of the venues for
the award ceremony of the Pritzker Architecture Prize on May 29, 2000. The
event began with a reception on a landing at the top of the monumental
staircase along the south wall of the Temple Mount. The presentation
ceremony took place at Herodian Street, which was followed by dinner in the
courtyard of Umayyad Palace. Participating in the ceremony were J. Carter
Brown, Chair of the Jury, Ehud Olmert, Mayor of Jerusalem, Thomas J.
Pritzker, President of the Hyatt Foundation, and the 2000 Laureate, Rem
Koolhaas.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Rem Koolhaas
I have prepared a short speech. And maybe I should start with an anecdote.
It may be a strange anecdote, but coming from the Netherlands, and being
born in 1944, meant paradoxically that I was ignorant of the issue of
Jewishness until the age of twenty-one. In my youth, in my country, it was,
completely unusual to indicate anyones religious or racial background, and
it was an issue that we never spoke about. That changed drastically when I
first came to New York, and was welcomed, on the Institute for Architecture
and Urban studies, led by the architect Peter Eisenman, who deserves, in
my view, the Pritzker Prize even more than me.
The first time I was there, Peter Eisenman took me by my coat like this, in a
very aggressive way, and said, Do you know why youre here, Koolhaas?
And I said, No. You are here to represent the Gothic element. So that put
me in my place, and probably explains some of the feelings of my situation
here.
Anyway, I want to begin by performing my thank yous. I thank Cindy
Pritzker and the Pritzker Family and its foundation for their exceptional
identification with architecture. I thank the jury who make such an inspired
decision this year. I thank my partners at my office O.M.A. Each and every
five-hundred-fifty of them have made the contribution that now turns out to
be critical. I thank the Harvard Design School for supporting my double life
as a futurist. And I thank my clients who triggered our work by burdening us
with their needs.
After my thank yous I have written three little anecdotes, or three little
episodes that for me indicate both the recent past of architecture, the
current situation of architecture and the perhaps imminent, future of
architecture. And, I want to discuss some of the potential evolutions that I
if Im not careful it will blow away the evolution that may happen in the
imminent future. I want to start in 1950fifty years ago.

Fifty years ago, the architectural scene was not about a unique individual,
the genius, but about the group, the movement. There was no scene. There
was an architectural world. Architecture was not about the largest possible
difference, but about the subtleties that could be developed within a narrow
range of similarities within the generic. Architecture was a continuum that
ended with urbanism. A house was seen as a small city. The city was seen as
a huge house. This kind of architecture saw itself as ideological. Its politics
stretched all the way from socialism to communism and all the points in
between. Great themes were adopted from beyond architecture, not from
the imagination of the individual architects brain. Architects were secure in
their alignment with what was then called society, something that was
imagined and could be fabricated. It is now 2000, fifty years after the idyllic
caricature that I just described for you. We have Pritzkers, there is a fair
amount here sitting on the first rowtherefore we have unique and singular
identities, signatures even. We respect each other, but we do not form a
community. We have no project together. Our client is no longer the state or
its derivations, but the private individuals often embarked on daring
ambitions and expensive trajectories, which we architects support whole
heartedly.
The system is final: the market economy. We work in a post- ideological era
and for lack of support we have abandoned the city or any more general
issues. The themes we invent and sustain are our private mythologies, our
specializations. We have no discourse about territorial organization, no
discourse about settlement or human co-existence. At best our work
brilliantly explores and exploits a series of unique conditions. The fact that
this sites archeological aspect is emphasized above its political charge,
shows the political innocence is an important part of the contemporary
architects equipment.
I am grateful that the jurys text for the 2000 prize, casts me as defining
new kinds of relationships, both theoretical and practical, between
architecture and the cultural situation. That is indeed a sense of what Im
trying to do. Although I am very bad at predicting the future, too
preoccupied by the present, let us speculate for a moment about the next
fifty years intervalarchitecture as it will be practiced in two thousand fifty,
or if we are lucky, a little bit sooner.
One development is certain. In the past three years, brick and mortar have
evolved to click and mortar. Retail has become e-tail and we cannot
exaggerate the importance of those things enough. Compared to the
occasional brilliance of architecture now, the domain of the virtual has
asserted itself with a wild and messy abandon and is proliferating at a speed
that we can only dream of. For the first time in decades, and maybe in
millennia, we architects have a very strong and fundamental competition.
The communities we cannot imagine in the real world will flourish in virtual
space. The territories and demarcations that we maintain on the ground are
merged and morphed beyond recognition in a much more immediate,
glamorous and flexible domainthat of the electronic.
After four thousand years of failure, Photoshop and the computer create
utopias instantly. At this ceremony in this location, architecture is still
fundamentally committed to mortar, as if only the proximity to one of the
largest piles assembled in the history of mankind reassures us about
another two thousand years of lease on our particular niche, and our future
credibility. But the rest of the world has already liberated architecture for us.
Architecture has become a dominant metaphor, a controlling agent for
everything that needs concept, structure, organization, entity, form. Only we
architects dont benefit from this redefinition marooned in our own Dead Sea
of mortar.
Unless we break our dependency on the real and recognized architecture as
a way of thinking about all issues, from the most political to the most
practical, liberate ourselves from eternity to speculate about compelling and
immediate new issues, such as poverty, the disappearance of nature,
architecture will maybe not make the year two-thousand-fifty. Thank you.

Ceremony Speech
Thomas J. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
Thank you very much, Carter. Mr. Mayor, ladies and gentlemen, for my
family, as for many Jewish families, the route to Jerusalem has been a
somewhat circuitous route, and as you might suspect it took us a bit more
time than perhaps it should have to get here.
I suppose it could be said that our journey started here in this place in the
year 70 when Titus breached the walls and burned the city and the temple.
In more recent times our family was exiled from Kiev by the pogroms in the
early eighteen eighties. That exile led us to Chicago, where we had the
great fortune to find opportunity and freedom. And so after a journey of
many, many generations, and many years, weve ended up back here in
Jerusalem at the Temple Mount, where time, space and ideas meet as one.
Each year the site for this presentation is discussed, debated and then
chosen. In each instance, we hope that the site will lend some of its ideals to
the creation and appreciation of architecture. We now sit at one of the three
centers of Western civilization. Western civilization has grown up on the hills
of three cities: the Seven Hills of Rome, the Acropolis of Athens and here,
the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Rome has given us the practice of
government and law, and in the field of architecture its given us the arch.
Athens has given us philosophy, democracy and theater, and in the field of
architecture its given us the column.
Yet Jerusalem has given us no indigenous architecture. None, whatsoever.
When Solomon built the first temple in the tenth century, B.C.E., he had to
get it done by commissioning his friend Hiram, a foreigner from Tyre. Hiram,
in turn, had to send his architects and builders to Jerusalem. And here what
you see is Herods second temple. Herod, who built a thousand years after
Solomon, had to send to Rome for his architects and for his engineers. Still
no Jewish architecture. In fact, one might argue that its really only with the
Supreme Court Project of our friend, Jacob Rothschild, and the Karmis, when
Jewish architecture took on any real meaning whatsoever. Think of it. All
around us here in Jerusalem are examples of Canaanite architecture, Greek,
Roman and Byzantine architecture, several forms of Islamic architecture,
and wonderful examples of Ottoman architecture, and yet nowhere is there
to be found in the ancient city of Jerusalem any identifiable Jewish
architecture. So why this year in Jerusalem? Its because Jerusalem has
given us the word.
It has given us values and ideals. What came forward from this Temple
Mount was the word and the ideal that all human beings are of ultimate
sanctity, because all are created in the image of one God. Its this idea and
the belief in the absolute worth of the individual and of humanity that the
Prize seeks to recognize in its recipients work. Great works of architecture
should express their commitment to the service of humanity and the
celebration of the individual. Its here that the meaning of this place
intersects with the aspirations of architecture.
While we stand here at the foot of the essential concepts of Western
civilization, we also stand in the shadow of a unique concept of architecture.
Lets look at this great building for a moment. These walls are in fact
retaining walls of the Second Temple. Atop the Temple sat a courtyard,
which had a section of building called the Holies.
Within that was a centerpiece structure which was called the Holy of Holies.
Inside of the Holy of Holies, was the Golden Ark and inside of the Golden Ark
were the Ten Commandments. Now comes the question of designing a
space thats worthy of holding the word of the Ten Commandments.
The Herodian Temple Mount as it stood prior to its destruction in 70 C.E. A
virtual reality computer model as constructed by the Urban Simulation Team
at UCLA and the Israel Antiquities Authority. The Bible tells us that the Holy
of Holies was a perfect cube, twenty cubits by twenty cubits, by twenty
cubits. But the Talmud goes on to describe the space of the Golden Ark that
held the word was a space that was measureless. How can a space be
measureless? Well, apparently this was a space that had no volume. The
Talmud describes how that worked. According to the Talmud, the Holy of
Holies was a cube of twenty cubits, yet the distance from any wall to the
side of the Ark was ten cubits. So we have an Ark designed of the ultimate
architectural spacea space that has no volumeand that was the space
which was designed to hold the Ark that enshrined the word.
At this place we can also move from the sublime of architectural concepts to
the reality of our architectural environment. Above me is one of the worlds
great pieces of graffiti. Thats right, graffiti. As best we can tell, it was
probably engraved in these Herodian stones by a Jew, who came to these
walls during the second century Hadrianic persecutions, when pilgrimage
was forbidden. Our anonymous pilgrim took a verse from the book of Isaiah
to express his thoughts and feelings about these walls and this place. The
verse describes both the success of architecture and the ultimate
aspirations of people. Its from Isaiah, Chapter Sixty-Six, Verse Fourteen, and
it says, And you shall see and your heart shall rejoice And your limbs shall
blossom like new grass ...
Jacques Herzog + Pierre de Meuron
2001 Laureates

Selected Works:
Ricola Storage Building, Laufen, Switzerland, 1987
Apartment Building along a Party Wall, Basel, Switzerland, 1988
Central Signal Tower SBB, Basel, Switzerland, 1997
Model for the Cottbus University Library, Cottbus, Germany, 1997
Kppersmhle Museum, Grothe Collection, Duisburg, Germany, 1999
Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, 2000
Laban Dance Theater, London, United Kingdom, 2003

Announcement
Two Swiss Architects Share the 2001 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Los Angeles, CATwo architects were chosen to share the 2001 Pritzker
Architecture Prize, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Basel,
Switzerland. The two men, both born in Basel in 1950, have nearly parallel
careers, attending the same schools and forming a partnership architectural
firm, Herzog & de Meuron in 1978. Perhaps their highest profile project was
attained with the completion last year of the conversion of the giant
Bankside power plant on the Thames River in London to a new Gallery of
Modern Art for the Tate Museum. It has been widely praised by their peers
and the media.
In the United States, they have completed a winery in the Napa Valley of
California that utilizes a mortarless wall of stones encased in wire mesh, and
are currently building the Kramlich Residence and Media Collection in that
same region. They have three other projects in work in the United States
the headquarters of Prada in New York, the New de Young Museum in San
Francisco which is scheduled for completion in 2004, and the Extension for
the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, scheduled for completion in 2005.
They have projects in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan, and
of course, in their native Switzerland. There they have built residences,
several apartment buildings, libraries, schools, a sports complex, a
photographic studio, museums, hotels, railway utility buildings as well as
office and factory buildings.
Among their completed buildings, the Ricola cough lozenge factory and
storage building in Mulhouse, France stands out for its unique printed
translucent walls that provide the work areas with a pleasant filtered light. A
railway utility building in Basel, Switzerland called Signal Box has an exterior
cladding of copper strips that are twisted at certain places to admit daylight.
A library for the Technical University in Eberswalde, Germany has 17
horizontal bands of iconographic images silk screen printed on glass and on
concrete. An apartment building on Schtzenmattstrasse in Basel has a fully
glazed street facade that is covered by a moveable curtain of perforated
latticework. It is impossible to list here all of their noteworthy building
projects.
While these unusual construction solutions are certainly not the only reason
for Herzog and de Meuron being selected as the 2001 Laureates, Pritzker
Prize jury chairman, J. Carter Brown, commented, One is hard put to think
of any architects in history that have addressed the integument of
architecture with greater imagination and virtuosity
In announcing the laureates for 2001, Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The
Hyatt Foundation, spoke of the jury's choice, saying, Only once before in
the history of the prize has the jury seen fit to select two architects in the
same year to share the award. That was in 1988. The decision was made
then that since it was the tenth anniversary of the prize, we would celebrate
two laureates. In this case, the jury felt that these two architects work so
closely together that each one complements the abilities and talents of the
other. Their work is the result of a long term true collaboration making it
impossible to honor one without the other.

The formal presentation of what has come to be known throughout the

world as architecture's highest honor was made at a ceremony on May 7,
2001 at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. At that
time, Herzog and de Meuron were presented with a $100,000 grant and
each received a bronze medallion. They are the first Swiss to become
Pritzker Laureates, and the 24th and 25th honorees since the prize was
established in 1979. The only other year that the jury selected two
architects to share the prize was 1988 when the late Gordon Bunshaft of the
United States and Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil were chosen. The selection of
Herzog and de Meuron continues what has become a nine-year trend of
laureates from the international community. In fact, architects from other
countries chosen for the prize, now far outnumber the U.S. recipients,
eighteen to seven.
Bill Lacy, who is an architect and president of the State University of New
York at Purchase, spoke as the executive director of the Pritzker Prize,
quoting from the jury citation which states, The architecture of Jacques
Herzog and Pierre de Meuron combines the artistry of an age-old profession
with the fresh approach of a new centurys technical capabilities. Both
architects' roots in European tradition are combined with current technology
in extraordinarily inventive architectural solutions to their clients' needs.
Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic and member of the juror,
commented further about Herzog and de Meuron, They refine the traditions
of modernism to elemental simplicity, while transforming materials and
surfaces through the exploration of new treatments and techniques.
Another juror, Carlos Jimenez from Houston who is professor of architecture
at Rice University, said, One of the most compelling aspects of work by
Herzog and de Meuron is their capacity to astonish.
And from juror Jorge Silvetti, who chairs the Department of Architecture,
Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, ...all of their work
maintains throughout, the stable qualities that have always been associated
with the best Swiss architecture: conceptual precision, formal clarity,
economy of means and pristine detailing and craftsmanship.

Biography
Herzog & de Meuron Architekten is a Swiss architecture firm, founded and
headquartered in Basel, Switzerland in 1978. The careers of founders and
senior partners Jacques Herzog (born 1950), and Pierre de Meuron (born
1950), closely paralleled one another, with both attending the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zrich. They are perhaps best known for
their conversion of the giant Bankside Power Station in London to the new
home of the Tate Museum of Modern Art (2000). Jacques Herzog and Pierre
de Meuron have been visiting professors at the Harvard University Graduate
School of Design since 1994 and professors at ETH Zrich since 1999.
Herzog & de Meuron received international attention very early in their
career with the Blue House in Oberwil, Switzerland (1980); the Stone House
in Tavole, Italy (1988); and the Apartment Building along a Party Wall in
Basel (1988). The firms breakthrough project was the Ricola Storage
Building in Laufen, Switzerland (1987). Renown in the United States came
with Dominus Winery in Yountville, California (1998). The Goetz Collection, a
Gallery for a Private Collection of Modern Art in Munich (1992), stands at the
beginning of a series of internationally acclaimed museum buildings such as
the Kppersmhle Museum for the Grothe Collection in Duisburg, Germany
(1999).
In many projects the architects have worked together with artists, an
eminent example of that practice being the collaboration with Rmy Zaugg,
Thomas Ruff and with Michael Craig-Martin.
Professionally, the Herzog & de Meuron partnership has grown to become an
office with over 120 people worldwide. In addition to their headquarters in
Basel, they have offices in London, Munich and San Francisco. Herzog has
explained, We work in teams, but the teams are not permanent. We
rearrange them as new projects begin. All of the work results from
discussions between Pierre and me, as well as our other partners, Harry
Gugger and Christine Binswanger. The work by various teams may involve
many different talents to achieve the best results which is a final product
called architecture by Herzog & de Meuron.

Jury Citation
The architecture of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron combines the
artistry of an age-old profession with the fresh approach of a new centurys
technical capabilities. Both architects' roots in European tradition are
combined with current technology in extraordinarily inventive architectural
solutions to their clients' needs that range from a modest switching station
for trains to an entirely new approach to the design of a winery.
The catalogue of their work reflects this diversity of interest and
accomplishment. Through their houses, municipal and business structures,
museums and master planning, they display a sure command of their design
talent that has resulted in a distinguished body of completed projects.
The beginnings of most architects practices consists by necessity of small
projects with budgets to match. It is these early buildings with great
constraints that test an architects talent for original solutions to often
ordinary and utilitarian commissions. In the case of Jacques Herzog and
Pierre de Meuron, the railroad signal box was such a project. They
transformed a nondescript structure in a railroad yard into a dramatic and
artistic work of industrial architecture, captivating both by day and night.
The two architects have created a substantial body of built work in the past
twenty years, the largest and most dramatic in size and scale being the
conversion of a giant power plant on the Thames into the new Tate Gallery
of Modern Art, a widely hailed centerpiece of Londons millennium
celebration.
This kind of ingenuity and imagination continues to characterize their work,
whether it is a factory building in Basel with silk screened facades or a
winery in California with thick medieval walls made of stacked stones that
allow air and light patterns to permeate the building, giving wine making a
hallowed aura. Students of architecture with keen antennae discovered this
duo long before the rest of the world. Both of the principals have been
internationally sought after as lecturers at prestigious universities where
they have followed the tradition in architecture of passing the experience of
one generation on to another.
The Rudin House in France is yet another representation of their teaching
extended by example. Here, they set themselves the task of building a small
house that would stand for the quintessential distillation of the word
house; a childs crayon drawing, irreducible to anything more simple,
direct and honest. And they set it on a pedestal to emphasize its iconic
qualities.
These two architects, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, with their
intensity and passion for using the enduring palette of brick, stone, glass
and steel to express new solutions in new forms. The jury is pleased to
award the 2001 Pritzker Architecture Prize to them for advancing the art of
architecture, a significant contribution to furthering the definition of
architecture as one of the premier art forms in this new century and
millennium.

Essay
The Architecture of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron
By Carlos Jimenez
Pritkzer Architecture Prize Juror
Professor, Rice University School of Architecture
Principal, Carlos Jimenez Studio, Houston, Texas
One of the most compelling aspects of the work of Herzog and de Meuron is
its capacity to astonish. They transform what might otherwise be an
ordinary shape, condition or material into something extraordinary. Their
relentless investigation into the nature of architecture results in works
charged by memory and invention, reminding us of the familiarity of the
new. The originality of their constructions stems primarily from the
intellectual rigor and sensual intuition that they bring to each work, an
enthralling combination that can be discerned in the taut discipline of a wall
and roof connection or in the layered transposition of one planar detail to
another, to mention just two such conditions prevalent in their work. When
experiencing Herzog and de Meurons work one becomes aware of such
conditions as natural extensions of the architects lucid tenacity. One is also
able to understand the architects piercing reading of site by the way they
disclose its hidden or obvious specificity, initially manifested through a
detail, a material, a texture, a scent, or a wedge of light.
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, childhood friends since the mid fifties,
founded their partnership in 1978 in their native city of Basel. Since they
began working together, a common interest has linked them as they sought
the potential for beauty in the fusion of function and site. In examining the
trajectory of their built and unbuilt work, one finds ample evidence of this
fusion. Often the desire for functionality results in a bureaucratic and inert
architecture. Yet, in the hands of Herzog and de Meuron, the pursuit of
functionality leads to a dynamic prism, emitting unforeseen subtleties as
they come in contact with a site and program. This can be observed in two
of their best-known works: the Ricola storage building and the train station
signal box in Basel. The task of storing goods or of directing traffic acquires
a beauty that transcends and singles them out amid their utilitarian
progeny. The overlapping cementious planks of the Ricola shed ventilate
and lighten the storage volume while weaving an object of startling beauty.
The same can be said of the signal box, whose copper ribbons vibrate amid
the rumble of trains and tracks, transforming the infrastructural object into a
talismanic icon.
Another work that demonstrates the architects assertive lyricism in merging
function, site and beauty is the Dominus Winery in the Napa Valley. Here one
encounters a building whose earth-like fortification marks the ground, a
gateway, an enclosure for producing, administering and storing an exquisite
wine. The timeless echo of stone retaining walls combines with the alluring
refraction of light to render a building like no other in the area, yet one
seemingly familiar. The neighboring wineries, content in their Arcadian
facsimiles, seem remote and out of place once one experiences the full
realm of the Dominus Winery. Rooted conceptually and physically in its site,
the stone wrapped winery acquires strength from the essentiality of its
formal character, from the stirring play of light across the porous basalt
walls, and from the seeming inevitability of its solution. Although an
abrasive object in a field of delicate vineyards, the building is beautiful
because of the clarity and power of its resolution. One comes to realize that
the buildings expressiveness is what it is because it couldnt have been any
other way.
The persistent essentiality that runs through Herzog and de Meurons work
emerges from the architects acute understanding of construction as
architectures most basic and catalytic condition. They build ideas whose
formal characteristics often surprise precisely because of this essentiality.
The House in Tavole, Italy, one of their earliest and most significant works is
a project of great subtlety and strength because of the manner in which it is
built. One senses the architects total immersion in the culture of native
materials and construction traditions common to the region. Aware of
neighboring stone houses, Herzog and de Meurons design Stone House in
Tavole, Italy does not dwell on literal appropriations of matter or type but
aspires to reveal the intelligence of an alternate construction strategy.
Employing the freedom of a slender modern concrete framework filled with
the regions dry fieldstone, the house achieves an unparalleled tectonic
sophistication. The effect is the more compelling as the architecture affirms
the vitality of an inquisitive present while recalling the venerable hands of
millennial stonemasons.
Much has been written about the architects proficiency with materials, to
the extent that their work might at times be perceived as an obsession with
tactile properties, surface, or textural potential. To some degree this can be
true. Jacques Herzog has even expressed a predilection for fashion, clothes
and textiles. He is quick though to differentiate Herzog and de Meurons
position on this matter: It is not the glamorous aspect of fashion which
fascinates us. In fact, we are more interested in what people are wearing,
what they like to wrap around their bodies. We are interested in that
aspect of artificial skin which becomes so much an intimate part of people.
The architects fascination with the properties of materials has resulted in an
impressive catalogue of research and experimentation while contributing a
collection of images that have become deeply minted in the contemporary
imagination (i.e., the serene almost ethereal Goetz Gallery in Munich,
glowing in a dense morning dew; the incandescent light beam spanning the
Tate Gallerys gigantic mass; or the stenciled polycarbonate panels of the
Ricola storage building in Mulhouse, radiating their explosive light in a deep
blue night). The concern for materiality and its effect in experiencing
architecture have been a constant passion for Herzog and de Meuron as
early as the Frei Photographic studio (a palette of refined arte povera
materials) to one of their most recent works for the fashion house of Prada
(a grid of diamond shaped glass panels permutating into an enveloping
screen of light. In the architects hands materials become sumptuous by
their imaginative juxtaposition, eliciting the power to evoke and emit
innumerable possibilities ...

Ceremony
Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia
Monticello, located near Charlottesville, Virginia, was the estate of Thomas
Jefferson, author of the United States Declaration of Independence, the third
President of the United States, and founder of the University of Virginia. The
house, the center of a plantation of 5,000 acres, is of Jefferson's own design
and is situated on the summit of an 850-foot-high peak. Its name
appropriately coined, means "little mountain" in Italian. The home, is the
remarkable integration of Jeffersons love of classical architecture and his
passion for what were at the time, modern innovations. The latter included
louvered Venetian enclosures on the south side of the house, dumbwaiters
and double-acting glass paneled doors into the parlor.
Construction began in 1769 according to Jefferson's first neoclassical design,
which was basically completed when he left for Europe in 1784. As a result
of Jeffersons extended travels in Europe, he expanded his vision for
Monticello to incorporate features of Palladian buildings and ruins he
admired overseas. Further work on the new design began in 1796 and
construction of Monticello was substantially completed in 1809 with the
erection of the dome.
The original main entrance is through the portico on the east front. The west
front gives the impression of a villa of very modest proportions, with a lower
floor disguised in the hillside. The south wing includes Jefferson's private
suite of rooms. Its library holds many books from Jeffersons collection. The
north wing includes the dining room and two guest bedrooms.
Monticello was designated a World Heritage Site in 1987. In 2001, the
Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony honoring the Swiss team of architects
Herzog and de Meuron was held at Monticello. The ceremony and dinner
took place on the grounds adjacent to Jeffersons house.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Jacques Herzog
Dear Mrs. Pritzker and all of the Pritzker family, dear members of the jury,
dear friends, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for so many things. Thank
you for your ongoing and uncompromising commitment to architecture.
Thank you for choosing us for this prize which we were longing for and
hoping to get, like only children can wish to get things deep in their hearts.
Thank you to our clients and friends, some of whom are here this evening,
for their support and their willingness to dialog also in difficult phases of a
project.
Thank you to those who have opened us the door at the GSD many years
ago. That has proved to be a critical step for us into this country quite some
time before we, actually, were given the chance to realize some of our best
work here. Thank you to our partners, Harry and Christine, and to all our
collaborators who have been working with us for many years with an
unbelievable commitment.
In 1978, Pierre and I opened our joint architectural offices, but it was neither
a historical decision nor a momentous founding event. During our last
semester at the Federal Institute Of Technology, we had already realized
that we had a great deal in common. The fact that we struck out on our own
was more or less an act of rebellion and desperation. What else were we to
do?

The economy was not very rosy and architecture both at home and abroad
seemed foreign to us. We had no idea what we wanted, we only knew what
we didnt want. A few semesters with Aldo Rossi who was forty at the time
had filled us with enthusiasm.
In his earliest buildings made of poorly processed concrete, we discovered
an affinity something that swung to rest between Pasolini and Arte Povera.
And we loved his dry dictum architecture is architecture because it seems
to be so provocatively simple minded and pinpoints something that is still
vital to us today: architecture can only survive as architecture in its physical
and central diversity and not as a vehicle for an ideology of some kind. It is
the materiality of architecture that paradoxically conveys thoughts and
ideas. In other words, its immateriality. Thats an old story, but it is more
relevant today than ever before: architecture lives and survives because of
its beauty, because it seduces, animates and even inspires people, because
it is matter and because it canif only sometimestranscend matter.
But this anarchist and poetic side of Rossi, which we loved so much as
students, was gradually assimilated into the postmodernist Zeitgeist. What
remained was an academically rigid ideology of permanence and typology,
and a sudden dominance of decorative historical elements of style, a kind of
coming-out of the decorative, which had beaten an embarrassed retreat
since the rise of Modernism.
In the fine arts which are usually more critical, more radical and ahead of
architecture in adopting artistic and social changes of paradigm
representatives of the Transavanguardia and the so-called Wild Painting
came up with so many new pictures that in spite of or, perhaps, because of
this inundation, there was no room left for our own. Nor did we see any
latitude of this kind in deconstructivism; although we were fascinated by its
chief philosophical exponents, we were bored to tears by its architectural
advocates and their explanations. In the early years, we experimented with
all kinds of forms and materials trying to subvert their conventional usage
as if to squeeze something hidden, something invisible out of them that
would breathe life into our architecture. Yes, that was what we wanted: to
breathe life into architecture although we could not specifically describe
what we meant by that, despite endless attempts to put it into words. There
was no philosophy that we felt we could embrace unconditionally although
phenomenological questions have always played a salient role, for instance,
questions of sensual perception or of signified and signifier.
The artist Rmy Zaugg with whom we have often collaborated over the
years relentlessly asks questions that address our concerns as well. Obvious
perhaps and simpleminded, but all the more profoundwhat, where, how,
who? Our designs became increasing minimal, radically minimal. Suddenly,
the room for action became huge. At the beginning of the eighties, no one
used a rectangle as ground plan and section, that is, a box as the basis of
design. We wanted architecture without any distinguishable figuration, but
with a hesitant non-imitating analogy. We were looking for a hint of memory,
of association. We did not want complete reduction or pure abstraction. We
were not trying to simplify the world or to reduce it to so- called essentials.
There was no religion, no ideology at stake.
We did not want a sect of Minimalists. On the contrary, we were aghast at
the ravages caused by so-called Minimalism in architecture, which was
linked with morals and perfection and had the imprint of latent Protestant
zeal. We in turn began to have more and more doubts about the dominance
of the rectangle in our designs.
It had become too confining. Paradoxically, the box, conceivably the
simplest and most basic architectural shape had acquired the value of its
own like a stylistic device And that was exactly what we always tried so
assiduously to avoid. But there may be another entirely different
explanation. The reasons for the supposed breaks and changes of style in
our work may not only be design-motivated, but also psychological. The
supposed objectivity of the modernist formal canon may merely have served
to simply the workings of our long-term cooperative venture and the
discussion of projects; it may actually have held us together as a team. The
fact is that weve worked as a duo since our youth and have in recent years
involved two other partners, Harry Gugger and Christine Binswanger, who
are also here in Monticello today and rightfully so ...

Ceremony Speech
Thomas J. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
Thank you, Carter. Carter is too fantastic. He can give an eloquent speech at
the drop of a hat and we appreciate everything youve done. When the prize
was established twenty-two years ago, it was determined that it would be
for living architects. At the same time, understanding our debt to the past,
we decided to hold ceremonies in various places of historic or architectural
significance. Last year, we were presenting the prize in the shadow of the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a two thousand year old street. Another year,
we were in Japan at a thousand year old Buddhist temple called Todai-ji. I
think those two places certainly filled the bill for historical places. As for
architecturally significant places, two years ago, I think it was, we presented
the prize at Carl Friedrich Schinkels Altes Museum and had the reception at
the New National Gallery by Mies van der Rohe in Berlin.
Schinkel has been called the father of the modern movement and Mies van
der Rohe, of course, has made significant contributions to our skyline in
Chicago. We used both of their buildings in ninety-nine when we presented
the prize to Lord Foster of the United Kingdom, and somewhere, Norman is
here and were delighted that you could be with us here tonight. Lord Foster
designed a beautiful cultural center in Nmes, France adjacent to the Maison
Carre, a Roman Corinthian temple that was an important influence on
Thomas Jefferson when he was Ambassador to France. Jefferson wrote to his
friend: Sitting here, Im gazing whole hours at the Maison Carre like a
lover at his mistress. Theres no question that being here in Thomas
Jeffersons Monticello is a special treat. Its both historically and
architecturally significant. Were most grateful to the Thomas Jefferson
Foundation and to Dan Jordan and his associates for welcoming us in this
beautiful example of Jeffersons work. I also want to thank the University of
Virginia for the opportunity to visit some of the wonderful buildings done by
Jefferson. Had there been a Pritzker prize two hundred years ago, Jefferson
certainly wouldve been selected as one of its Laureates.
Carter Brown is chairman of the jury and our family owes Carter our undying
gratitude for being the guiding light for our juries for the past twenty-two
years. He took his task on when he still had the enormous responsibility for
directing the National Gallery of Art and yet he did it with a seriousness of
purpose that really has resulted in the Prize as we know it today. Theres no
question that the jury is the most important aspect of this prize. Although
the various members of the panel have changed over the years, the quality
of their selections has never wavered, nor have they ever been predictable.
They never go for the obvious and this year is no exception. In fact, the
history of the prize, weve only awarded it to two architects in the same year
once before.
That occasion was the tenth anniversary of the prize when the jury was
deadlocked on two totally different architects, one from Brazil, Oscar
Niemeyer and the other from this country, Gordon Bunshaft, so they decided
to give the prize to both of them. This year, two architects work so closely
together that each one compliments the abilities and talents of the other.
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have a long-term, true collaboration
making it impossible to honor one without the other. Their story is well
known by now.
In the middle of our country, theyll be working on an addition to the Walker
Art Center Complex in Minneapolis and those are just the tip of the iceberg.
They have numerous other projects here and abroad that will keep us
watching with interest for many years to come. As one of our jurors put it,
they have the capacity to astonish. If youll please join me here, on behalf
on our family and the Hyatt Foundation, Id like to present the Pritzker
Architectural Prize of 2001 to Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.
Glenn Murcutt
2002 Laureate

Selected Works:
Fredericks House, New South Wales, Australia, 1982
Magney House, New South Wales, Australia, 1984
Done House, New South Wales, Australia, 1991
Marika-Alderton House, Northern Territory, Australia, 1994
Simpson-Lee House, New South Wales, Australia, 1994
Arthur & Yvonne Boyd Education Centre, New South Wales, Australia, 1999
Bowral House, New South Wales, Australia, 2001

Announcement
Australian Architect Becomes the 2002 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture
Prize
Los Angeles, CAAn Australian architect, Glenn Murcutt, who works as a
sole practitioner, primarily designing environmentally sensitive modernist
houses that respond to their surroundings and climate, as well as being
scrupulously energy conscious, has been named to receive the 2002 Pritzker
Architecture Prize. The 66 year-old Murcutt lives and has his office in
Sydney, but travels the world teaching and lecturing to university students.
In announcing the jurys choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt
Foundation, said, Glenn Murcutt is a stark contrast to most of the highly
visible architects of the dayhis works are not large scale, the materials he
works with, such as corrugated iron, are quite ordinary, certainly not
luxurious; and he works alone. He acknowledges that his modernist
inspiration has its roots in the work of Mies van der Rohe, but the Nordic
tradition of Aalto, the Australian wool shed, and many other architects and
designers such as Chareau, have been important to him as well. Add in the
fact that all his designs are tempered by the land and climate of his native
Australia, and you have the uniqueness that the jury has chosen to
celebrate. While his primary focus is on houses, one of his public buildings
completed in 1999, the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre, has
achieved acclaim as well, critics calling it a masterwork.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, J. Carter Brown, commented, Glenn Murcutt
occupies a unique place in todays architectural firmament. In an age
obsessed with celebrity, the glitz of our starchitects, backed by large staffs
and copious public relations support, dominates the headlines. As a total
contrast, our laureate works in a one-person office on the other side of the
world from much of the architectural attention, yet has a waiting list of
clients, so intent is he to give each project his personal best. He is an
innovative architectural technician who is capable of turning his sensitivity
to the environment and to locality into forthright, totally honest, non-showy
works of art. Bravo!
The formal presentation of what has come to be known throughout the
world as architecture's highest honor will be made at a ceremony on May
29, 2002 at Michelangelos Campidoglio in the heart of Rome. At that time,
Murcutt will be presented with a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion.
Murcutt is the first Australian to become a Pritzker Laureate, and the 26th
honoree since the prize was established in 1979. His selection continues
what has become a ten-year trend of laureates from the international
community. In fact, architects from other countries chosen for the prize now
far outnumber the U.S. recipients, nineteen to seven.
Bill Lacy, who is an architect, spoke as the executive director of the Pritzker
Prize, quoting from the jury citation that states, His is an architecture of
place, architecture that responds to the landscape and the climate. His
houses are fine tuned to the land and the weather. He uses a variety of
materials, from metal to wood to glass, stone, brick and concretealways
selected with a consciousness of the amount of energy it took to produce
the materials in the first place.

Lacy elaborated, Murcutts thoughtful approach to the design of such

houses as the Marika-Alderton House in Eastern Arnhem Land; the Marie
Short House in New South Wales; and the Magney House at Bingie Bingie,
South Coast, New South Wales, are testament that aesthetics and ecology
can work together to bring harmony to mans intrusion in the environment.
Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic and member of the jury, commented
further saying, Glenn Murcutt has become a living legend, an architect
totally focused on shelter and the environment, with skills drawn from
nature and the most sophisticated design traditions of the modern
movement.
Another juror, Carlos Jimenez from Houston, who is professor of architecture
at Rice University, said, Nurtured by the mystery of place and the continual
refinement of the architects craft, Glenn Murcutts work illustrates the
boundless generosity of a timely and timeless vision. The conviction, beauty
and optimism so evident in the work of this most singular, yet universal
architect remind us that architecture is foremost an ennobling word for
humanity.
And from juror Jorge Silvetti, who chairs the Department of Architecture,
Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, The architecture of Glenn
Murcutt surprises first, and engages immediately after because of its
absolute clarity and precise simplicitya type of clarity that soon proves to
be neither simplistic nor complacent, but inspiringly dense, energizing and
optimistic. His architecture is crisp, marked and impregnated by the unique
landscape and by the light that defines the fabulous, far away and gigantic
mass of land that is his home, Australia. Yet his work does not fall into the
easy sentimentalism of a chauvinistic revisitation of the vernacular. Rather,
a considered, serious look would trace his buildings lineage to modernism,
to modern architecture, and particularly to its Scandinavian roots planted by
Asplund and Lewerentz, and nurtured by Alvar Aalto.

Biography
Glenn Murcutt, the son of Australian parents, was born in London in 1936.
He grew up in the Morobe district of New Guinea, where he developed an
appreciation for simple, primitive architecture. His father introduced him to
the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the philosophies of Henry
David Thoreau, both of which influenced his architectural style.
Murcutt studied at the University of New South Wales, graduating in 1961
with a degree in architecture. After completing his university studies,
Murcutt traveled for two years, returning to Sydney in 1964 to work in the
office of Ancher, Mortlock, Murray and Woolley. He remained with this firm
for five years before he established his own practice in 1970. His small, but
exemplary practice is well known for its environmentally sensitive designs
with a distinctive Australian character. His architecture has remained
consistent over time. His buildings, which are principally residential, are a
harmonious blend of modernist sensibility, local craftsmanship, indigenous
structures, and respect for nature. They are both unusual in character, and
yet curiously familiar. He has been a visiting professor at many schools of
architecture, most recently at Yale and Washington universities in the United
States. His work is internationally acclaimed and he is a highly regarded as a
teacher, critic, and lecturer around the world ...
Jury Citation

Glenn Murcutt is a modernist, a naturalist, an environmentalist, a humanist,

an economist and ecologist encompassing all of these distinguished
qualities in his practice as a dedicated architect who works alone from
concept to realization of his projects in his native Australia. Although his
works have sometimes been described as a synthesis of Mies van der Rohe
and the native Australian wool shed, his many satisfied clients and the
scores more who are waiting in line for his services are endorsement enough
that his houses are unique, satisfying solutions. Generally, he eschews large
projects which would require him to expand his practice, and give up the
personal attention to detail that he can now give to each and every project.
His is an architecture of place, architecture that responds to the landscape
and to the climate.

His houses are fine tuned to the land and the weather. He uses a variety of
materials, from metal to wood to glass, stone, brick and concretealways
selected with a consciousness of the amount of energy it took to produce
the materials in the first place. He uses light, water, wind, the sun, the moon
in working out the details of how a house will workhow it will respond to its
environment. His structures are said to float above the landscape, or in the
words of the Aboriginal people of Western Australia that he is fond of
quoting, they touch the earth lightly. Glenn Murcutts structures augment
their significance at each stage of inquiry. One of Murcutts favorite
quotations from Henry David Thoreau, who was also a favorite of his father,
Since most of us spend our lives doing ordinary tasks, the most important
thing is to carry them out extraordinarily well. With the awarding of the
2002 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the jury finds that Glenn Murcutt is more
than living up to that adage.

Essay
The Architecture of Glenn Marcus Murcutt
By Kenneth Frampton
Ware Professor of Architecture
The Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation
Columbia University, New York
Im very interested in buildings that adapt to changes in climatic conditions
according to the seasons, buildings capable of responding to our physical
and psychological needs in the way that clothing does. We dont turn on the
air-conditioning as we walk through the streets in high summer. Instead, we
change the character of the clothing by which we are protected. Layering
and changeability: this is the key, the combination that is worked into most
of my buildings. Occupying one of these buildings is like sailing a yacht; you
modify and manipulate its form and skin according to seasonal conditions
and natural elements, and work with these to maximize the performance of
the building. This involvement with the building also assists in the care for it.
I am concerned about the exploitation of the natural environment in order to
modify the internal climate of buildings. Architects must confront the
perennial issues of light, heat, and humidity control yet take responsibility
for the method and the materials by which, and out of which, a building is
made. The considerations, context, and the landscape are some of the
factors that are constantly at work in my architecture.
Glenn Murcutt, 1996
Seventeen years serve to separate the award of the Pritzker Prize to Glenn
Murcutt from the first comprehensive monograph on his work; Philip Drews
Leaves of Iron published in Sydney in 1985. Despite its somewhat indifferent
distribution, this book had the effect of consolidating the nascent Murcutt
myth which was by then already an indicator of the resurgence of Australian
architecture. Just over a decade before, that is to say, by the earlier 70s,
Murcutt had already established something of a reputation as a designer of
elegant Neo-Miesian houses culminating in his single storey, steel framed
Laurie Short house, built in the Terry Hills near Sydney, a work which already
departed in significant ways from the abstract purity of Mies van der Rohes
Farnsworth House (1950) by which it had been inspired. Apart from its
empirical spatial organization, this distanciation was never more evident
than in two seemingly inconsequential but nonetheless telltale features;
first, the relatively intimate use of terra-cotta and brick paving, a treatment
reminiscent of Philip Johnsons Glass House, New Canaan (1949), and
second, the provision of sliding louvred screens on the eastern faade in
order to shield the living room and patio from the low-angle sun.
The three and a half month world tour that Murcutt undertook in 1973,
beginning in Mexico City and Los Angeles, traversing the States and going
on to Western Europe with a stop-off in Mykonos before returning to
Australia, had a catalytic impact on the rest of his career, most decisively
perhaps because of three experiences; his passing encounters with the
Californian and Catalan regionalists Craig Ellwood and Jos Antonio
Coderch and the epiphany of Pierre Chareaus Maison de Verre in Paris
(1932) that in effect demonstrated the possibility of evolving an astylistic
architecture in which tectonic invention was inseparable from poetic form.
One should also mention in passing the one other French influence that
deeply affected Murcutts parti pris in the mid-70s, namely, Jean Prouvs
Maison Tropicale of 1949.
Murcutts brief contact with the Greek island vernacular took him back to his
roots, to the relatively primitive environment of his childhood in New
Guinea, to the nature writings of Thoreau much cherished by his father, and
above all, to the realization that a revitalized Australian architecture would
have to be grounded not only in its greatly varying climate and landscape,
together with its exotic flora and fauna, but also in the repressed Aboriginal
culture that was to have such a decisive influence on the evolution of
Murcutts domestic architecture. It was this plus a profound respect for the
traditional Aboriginal ethic of touching the earth lightlythe moral
principle of not disturbing nature more than is absolutely necessarythat
led to Murcutts conception of a new Australian domus in the form of a long
and narrow, light-weight, roof work, comparable in its sheltering function to
the bower of a tree or, in more morphological terms, to the turned up collar
of an overcoat that shelters from the wind while subtly opening its front
towards the sun.
Lastly, there was the ubiquitous, long forgotten, corrugated iron roof
vernacular of the Australian outback to which Murcutt turned immediately
after his world tour to create the louvered Maria Short farmhouse at
Crescent Head, overlooking the Maria River in 1974, his second house for
the Short family in less than two years. In this canonical piece, he
succeeded in combining the Semperian primitive hut of 1852 with the
tectonic refinement of Mies Farnsworth House, along with a vertebrae
approach to basic structural frame taken from Prouvs Maison Tropicale. It
is just this somewhat unlikely conjunction that inaugurated a spectacular
series of light-weight, single-storey houses, elevated clear of the ground,
framed in either timber or steel, or in a mixture of both and invariably
roofed and/or clad in corrugated metal. It is important to note that the linear
room arrangement and the shallow depth derived from the need to
maximize cross-ventilation for every room while simultaneously deploying
the roof overhang and the back of the house, facing south, in such a way as
to eclipse the noonday high summer sun and to admit at the same time in
winter. Over the next fifteen years, he would build well over thirty houses in
this unique outback manner, ringing the changes on every conceivable
frame, truss, louver, vent, gutter, down-pipe, and roof profile, varying from
mono- to double-pitch, to arcuated form before arriving at the metal-roofed
but otherwise totally timber-clad, Marika-Alderton House, completed in East
Arnheim Land in 1994 ...

Ceremony
Michelangelo's Campidoglio, Rome, Italy
The Capitoline Hill or Campidoglio is the smallest of Rome's seven hills, but
it was the religious and political center of the city since its foundation more
than 2500 years ago.
A few years after he arrived in Rome, Pope Paul III (born Alessandro Farnese)
decided to reshape the Capitoline Hill into a monumental civic piazza;
Michelangelo designed the project and his Piazza del Campidoglio is one of
the most significant contributions ever made in the history of urban
planning. The hill's importance as a sacred site in antiquity had been largely
forgotten due to its medieval transformation into the seat of the secular
government and headquarters for the Roman guilds. Michelangelo took
charge of reorganizing the area as a dynamic new center of Roman political
life. His design included not only the piazza or open square, but also
redesign of the Palazzo Senatori, a new faade for the Palazzo dei
Conservatori and opposite it, the new Palazzo Nuovo. The project went
forward slowly and in stages with many interruptions. It was begun in 1538,
little was completed before Michaelangelos death in 1564, and the entire
project was not completed until the seventeenth century.
The 2002 ceremony counted with the participation of the Mayor of Rome,
the Undersecretary of the Minister of Fine Arts and Cultural Affairs, Bill Lacy,
executive Director of the Pritzker Prize, Thomas J. Pritzker, President of the
Hyatt Foundation and Glenn Murcutt, Pritzker Prize Laureate.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Glenn Murcutt
Mayor Veltroni, distinguished guests, friends, fellow architects, ladies and
gentlemen. To Mrs. Pritzker, the Pritzker family, and members of the Hyatt
Foundation, you have honored me with the 2002 Pritzker Architecture Prize,
and I cannot tell you just how happy I am to be receiving it. Thank you.
On entering private practice in late 1969, my father said, son, remember,
you must start off the way you would like to finish. And he added, for
every compromise you knowingly make, the resultant work will represent
your next client. Tough yet good advice.
Although I have worked as a sole practitioner without staff now for nearly 32
years, I am supported by many others who have contributed to my love of
architecture. To fail to recognize those people would be unjust. Mies van der
Rohe said, and I quote, that with every good building, there was a very
good client.
I have had so many wonderful clients throughout my career. There are
others today that have to wait for more than three years for me to start
work on their projects. I have worked with two engineers, a father and his
son, and how could our thinking be realized without fine builders. There are
writers, photographers and academics, fellow architects, architecture
schools in Argentina, Chile, Denmark, Finland, the United States of America,
and Australia, collaborators including my wife and family. Each has been
wonderfully supportive and many are here this afternoon to celebrate with
me this incredible event. Thank you, all of you. And what more wonderful a
space and place could there be to celebrate this event than the Campidoglio
in Rome? Just how fortunate can one be? The jury each year considers
hundreds of architects for the Pritzker Prize, many of whom are worthy of
receiving it. But, on the whole, only one is selected. Thats how fortunate
one can be.
As you may imagine, Ive had hundreds of interviews, letters and telephone
calls of wonderful support, but I cannot tell you how many times it has been
said, congratulations also go to the Jury. I start to wonder just whose prize
is this? Yet such awards tell us much about the jury as it does about the
recipient. I am fully aware of the effort and feelings of responsibility borne
by each jury member for such a prize.
To each member of this years Pritzker Prize Jury, I am honored, greatly
honored, to have been considered worthy of this prize. It is humbling to
become a Pritzker Laureate. I join recipients for whom I have the deepest
respect, and today, several I count as great friends. And this afternoon, they
are here, as each of you, in my honor. Thank you.
I grew up in Sydney about seven kilometers north of the city. The landscape
was typical of the coastal Sydney sandstone basin with its abundance of
eucalyptus and other remarkable native Australian plants. In this
environment, I learned about the propagation of the flora. I learned about
which plants grew where, and which drew the superb native birds, insects
and animals. I learned about how a particular species of plants grew
differently, very differently, from the lowlands where the water table was
higher, where the wind pressures were less, where the nutrients were
greater from the very same type of plant at the top of a hill which was
shaped by wind shear, less moisture and few nutrients. This was about
place, and was, for me, extremely important. I learned about the strength,
the delicacy, and the transparency of much of the Australian landscapes,
where the clarity of the light level separates the elements compared to
much of Europe where the light level serves to connect those elements in
the landscape. This gave me a clearer understanding of the legibility of
elements, of structure and delicacy within the Australian landscape which
has informed my work.
I grew up in a family of five children. There were seven pianos in a house of
three levels. The noise was terrible. There was always something being
designed and built around the housecanoes, racing skiffs, houses. I
learned I needed silence, much silence, to work. This was a very important
lesson for me. The amount of noise made me want silence.
I was conscripted to the joinery shop of my father during school holidays
which I tended to resent at the time, but I did join in the construction of
boats, building staircases, windows and more. This was an extraordinary
training though very tough at times. From 1946 onwards, my father brought
into Australia a number of journals, particularly from the United States, and
from them I learned about the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der
Rohe, Gordon Drake, Charles and Ray Eames and others. There were so
many architects that I had learned about by the time that I was 15 or 16.
This had enormous influence on me.
I had difficulty with my education, but I finally entered the University of
Technology in 1956 where I undertook the part-time course in architecture. I
was fortunate enough to have had a teacher by the name of Noel Bazeley,
who taught building construction. He was largely dismissed by most
students, but whilst the other groups studied the construction of footings
and foundations, floors, walls, ceiling joists and roofs for the whole year of
three terms, Bazeley gave us the subject continuity in nature. What a
wonderful subject, continuity in nature, discussed for a full term. Having
understood the importance of continuity in nature, the second term was
devoted to the understanding of continuity in nature related to the built
environment. For term three, we studied foundations, floors, walls and so on
...

Ceremony Speech
Walter Veltroni
Mayor of Rome
Were very honored to host here in Campidoglio, in this square, such an
important prize for worldwide architecture. To talk about the possibility of
holding this event here on this square was the Honorable Giovanni Agnelli
who talked to me about this on the phone a few months ago. He has been
for a long time an outstanding member of the jury for this prize. We can all
wish him a quick recovery from his disease because he is, uh, for our
country, for the economy of our country, one of the biggest resources. This
square was designed by Michelangelo and Michelangelos design is very
strong in the history of architecture of Rome. All the architecture of this city
was developed by people of very high standing, very high level and
prestige. But to tell the truth, as of the 60s, it was quite difficult for
contemporary architecture to leave a mark on the architecture and the
buildings of this great city. And the impression is that development had been
marked by a quiet kind of quantitative rather than qualitative idea thereby
ignoring the idea of leaving a mark on architecture.
But now things are starting to change and I had the chance of showing to
Mrs. Pritzker and all of the people who came to my office, I showed them a
unique view of the city, and I could present them with a medal which has on
its backside the original design of the auditorium which was designed and
built by Renzo Piano who is here with us today.
And a sign on the mark of contemporary architecture will be soon seen in
the Municipal Gallery Of Modern Art and the National Gallery Of Modern Art
which will be designed by Fuksas and also in the new Congress Center which
will be soon designed and built in Rome.
Architecture is a project, is creativity which turns into reality into a
dimension, into space. Therefore, its a way of designing and planning a city.
Rome will be for future generations the City of Michelangelo, the City of
Campidoglio, but also the City of the auditorium designed by Renzo Piano,
and it is precisely in this double dimension which the greatness of
architecture lies. And this is the reason why we are very honored to host this
prize here in this city, in this square, and we wish you successful work and
we hope that this prize will, in the next few years, be able to aid the
qualitative growth and development of town planning and architecture.

Jrn Utzon
2003 Laureate

Selected Works:
Fredensborg Housing, Fredensborg, Denmark, 1962
Education Centre, Prototype House, Herning, Denmark, 1967
Can Lis (architect's house), Majorca, Spain, 1973
Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia, 1973
Bagsvaerd Church, Copenhagen, Denmark, 1976
Kuwait National Assembly, Kuwait, 1982

Announcement
Danish Architect Jrn Utzon Becomes 2003 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureate
Los Angeles, CADanish architect Jrn Utzon, who designed what has
arguably become the most famous building in the world, the Sydney Opera
House in Australia, has been chosen as the 2003 Laureate of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize which marks its twenty-fifth anniversary this year. The 84
year-old Utzon has retired to a house he designed for himself on the island
of Majorca, but his two sons, Jan and Kim, continue the practice of Utzon
Architects in Haarby, Denmark.
In announcing the jurys choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt
Foundation, said, Jrn Utzon has designed a remarkably beautiful building
in Australia that has become a national symbol to the rest of the world. In
addition, in a most distinguished career, he has designed several other
significant works, including housing complexes, a church, residences, and
other commercial buildings. We are delighted that the jury has seen fit to
recognize this great talent as we celebrate our first quarter of a century.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, Lord Rothschild, commented, Jrn Utzon
created one of the great iconic buildings of the twentieth century, an image
of great beauty known throughout the world. In addition to this masterpiece,
he has worked throughout his life fastidiously, brilliantly, quietly and with
never a false or jarring note. He is therefore a most distinguished recipient
of the Pritzker Prize.
The formal ceremony for what has come to be known throughout the world
as architecture's highest honor will be held on May 20, 2003 in Madrid,
Spain. At that time, a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion are bestowed.
Utzon is the first Dane to become a Pritzker Laureate, and the 27th honoree
since the prize was established in 1979. His selection continues what has
become a ten-year trend of laureates from the international community.
Bill Lacy, an architect, spoke as the executive director of the Pritzker Prize,
quoting from the jury citation which states, Utzon has always been ahead
of his time. He rightly joins the handful of Modernists who have shaped the
past century with buildings of timeless and enduring quality.
Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic and member of the jury, commented
further saying, It has taken half a century to understand the true path of
architecture in our time, to pick up the threads of continuity and the
signposts to the future, to recognize the broader and deeper meaning of
20th century work that has been subjected to doctrinaire modernist criticism
and classification, or tabled as history. In this light, the work of Jrn Utzon
takes on a particular richness and significance.
Another juror, Carlos Jimenez from Houston who is professor of architecture
at Rice University, said, Singular is an attribute that embodies the life and
work of Jrn Utzon. The unique resolve and erudition of this architects few
but compelling works have captured the imagination of architects and the
public alike ever since his brilliant debut in the international scene almost
fifty years ago.

And from juror Jorge Silvetti, who chairs the Department of Architecture,
Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Paradoxically, while the
act of awarding in 2003 the Pritzker Prize to Jrn Utzon may be perceived as
long overdue, it comes at such a particular moment in the development of
architecture as to be timely and exemplary. In the current frenzy of unbound
personal expressionism and blind subordination to attention-grabbing
production techniques, his explorations remind us that both expression and
technique are servants and secondary to more profound and foundational
architectural ideas. His work shows us that the marvelous and seemingly
impossible in architecture depend still on genial minds and able hands."

Biography
Danish architect Jrn Utzon was born in 1918. While in secondary school, he
began helping his father, director of a shipyard in Alborg, Denmark, and
brilliant naval architect, by studying new designs, drawing up plans and
making models. This activity opened another possibilitythat of training to
be a naval architect like his father.
However, one of his fathers cousins, Einar Utzon-Frank, was a sculptor as
well as a professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He influenced Jrn,
who took an interest in sculpting, and after secondary school, he won
admission to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
When he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1942, he, like many
architects affected by World War II, fled to neutral Sweden where he was
employed in the Stockholm office of Hakon Ahlberg for the duration of the
war. He then went to Finland to work with Alvar Aalto.
An admirer of the ideas of Gunnar Asplund, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright
while still in school, Utzon acknowledges that Aalto, Asplund and Wright
were all major influences in his own work. Over the next decade, he traveled
extensively, visiting Morocco, Mexico, the United States, China, Japan, India,
and Australia, the latter destined to become a major factor in his life.
Most of Utzons projects have been completed in his native Denmark, but he
is best known for the Sydney Opera House, an iconic building of curving roof
forms. Construction began in 1959 and was not complete until 1973, and
Utzon left the project in 1966 after bitter arguments with Australian officials
regarding cost and schedule issues.
His other well known projects include the Fredensborg Housing Estate (1959-
62), the Kingo Housing Estate (1956-58), Bagsvaerd Church (1973-76), and
the Skagen Nature Center (2001), all in Denmark.
The Kingo Houses in Helsingr are sixty-three L-shaped houses that were
built in rows following the contours of the site, providing views for each
house, and access to sunlight and shelter from the wind. The Kingo Houses
are often praised for their combination of simplicity and inventiveness.
Utzon's next major design, after returning to Denmark from Sydney, was the
Bagsvaerd Church in Copenhagen. Utzon planned the interior vaults after
being inspired by banks of clouds.
Utzon moved to the Spanish island of Majorca in the early 1970s. With his
wife he lived in a house designed by himself, Can Feliz, until his death in
2008. The architecture is very solid and simple. A small window allows light
to funnel in to the living space and views toward the sea ...

Jury Citation
Jrn Utzon is an architect whose roots extend back into historytouching on
the Mayan, Chinese and Japanese, Islamic cultures, and many others,
including his own Scandinavian legacies. He combines these more ancient
heritages with his own balanced discipline, a sense of architecture as art,
and natural instinct for organic structures related to site conditions. The
range of his projects is vast, from the sculptural abstraction of the Sydney
Opera House to handsome, humane housing; a church that remains a
masterwork with its remarkably lyrical ceilings; as well as monumental
public buildings for government and commerce.

His housing is designed to provide not only privacy for its inhabitants, but
pleasant views of the landscape, and flexibility for individual pursuitsin
short, designed with people in mind. There is no doubt that the Sydney
Opera House is his masterpiece. It is one of the great iconic buildings of the
20th century, an image of great beauty that has become known throughout
the worlda symbol for not only a city, but a whole country and continent.
I like to be on the edge of the possible, is something Jrn Utzon has said.
His work shows the world that he has been there and beyondhe proves
that the marvelous and seemingly impossible in architecture can be
achieved. He has always been ahead of his time. He rightly joins the handful
of Modernists who have shaped the past century with buildings of timeless
and enduring quality.

Essay
The Architecture of Jrn Utzon
By Kenneth Frampton
Ware Professor of Architecture
The Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation
Columbia University, New York
It seems to me that past, present and future must be active in the minds
interior as a continuum. If they are not, the artifacts we make will be without
temporal depth or associative perspective ... Man after all has been
accommodating himself physically in this world for thousands of years. His
natural genius has neither increased nor decreased during that time. It is
obvious that the full scope of this enormous environmental experience
cannot be combined unless we telescope the past ... Architects nowadays
are pathologically addicted to change, regarding it as something one either
hinders, runs after, or at best keeps up with. This, I suggest, is why they
tend to sever the past from the future, with the result that the present is
rendered emotionally inaccessible, without temporal dimension. I dislike a
sentimental antiquarian attitude toward the past as much as I dislike a
sentimental technocratic one toward the future. Both are founded on a
static, clockwork notion of time (what antiquarians and technocrats have in
common), so lets start with the past for a change and discover the
unchanging condition of man.
Aldo Van Eyck
It is an embarrassment that the first edition of my Modern Architecture: A
Critical History (1980), made no reference to the work of Jrn Utzon. Even
within the constraints of a concise history such an omission now seems
inexcusable and in subsequent editions I have attempted to redress this.
Over the past decade the canonical importance of Utzon has become
increasingly evident, not only because of his authorship of one of the most
significant monuments of the twentieth century but also because both
before and after the realization of the Sydney Opera House he would project
a wide range of equally seminal works, together with a number of
compelling realizations. Given the exceptionally fertile character of his
career, he is, in his eighty-fifth year, a fitting recipient of the Pritzker Prize.
Comparable in subtle ways to the protean achievements of Le Corbusier,
Utzons architecture emerges today as paradigmatic at many levels not
least of which is the manner in which, from the beginning of his career, he
would challenge the assumed superiority of Eurocentric culture.
The other equally basic postulate of his architecture, which remains as
challenging now as when it first appeared around 1947 turns on its
irreducible grounding in the opposition of earthwork versus roof-work. Two
seminal preconditions attend this principle; first, the recovery of the roof-
form, hitherto largely repressed in the Modern Movement with its fixation on
the flat roof, and, second, the equally intrinsic import of the earthwork as a
necessary landform capable of integrating a structure into the surface of the
earth.
Aside from their mutual preoccupation with the inherently topographic
aspect of architecture, Utzon came to share with Frank Lloyd Wright, whom
he met in 1949, a common drive to project a global building culture which,
while equally inspired by both occidental and oriental paradigms, would
nonetheless exploit the technological capacity of the epoch while
simultaneously responding to the contours of a particular site and the latent
expressivity of a specific program. In the last analysis we can say that the
tectonic potential of advanced engineering form perhaps played a more
decisive role in the evolution of Utzons architecture than it did in the case
of Wright, so that shell concrete construction, after the exemplary work of
Maillart, Candela and Torroja, and folded plate construction in post-
tensioned reinforced concrete, after the inventions of Pier Luigi Nervi,
patently informed the earliest flights of his imagination, not only in his
remarkable proposal for the Crystal Palace site in London, designed with
Tobias Faber in 1947, but also in his equally epic studies of the time for a
permanent world exhibition site in Copenhagen (1959) and for a utopian
settlement in the turbulent mountain landscape around Elvira in Spain
(1960). Apart from the shell concrete roofs that became the touchstone of
his early style, the Elvira project was also directly inspired by experiencing
the Mayan ruins in Chicen Itz, Monte Alban and Uxmal; a civilization that
provided him with the essential format of the stepped platform or podium to
which he would return repeatedly throughout his career.
For Utzon, as for Wright and Aalto, there would be no necessary
contradiction between an unequivocally modern architecture and a building
culture that hypothetically would be more generally accessible to the
society at large, just as for him there was no inherent rupture between
modernity as such and the more enduring and inspiring continuity of
universal civilization, seen as a differentiated whole. The subtlety of this
position is brilliantly exemplified by Utzons 1953 project for a restaurant
tower which was envisaged as being built on the Langelinie promontory in
Copenhagen; a proposal as much inspired by the antique form of the
Chinese pagoda as by Wrights S.C. Johnson laboratory tower built at Racine,
Wisconsin in 1947. Utzon aimed at realizing a popularly accessible work in
much the same sense as Wrights Guggenheim Museum would be well
received by the general public a few years later.
The validity of this subtle approach would never be more convincingly
demonstrated than by the two low-rise, medium density housing schemes
that Utzon built in North Zealand, Denmark between 1956 and 1963, the
first at King near Helsingr and the second at Fredensborg. Both of these
single-story residential communities were based on an atrium typology
comprising an L-shaped dwelling in plan, set within a square court and
enclosed on all sides by brick walls. Featuring mono-pitched roofs capped by
Roman tiles and draining into the private courtyards, these standard
dwellings, virtually square in plan, were assembled into continuous chevron
formations and fed by automobiles in such a way as to conform to the
American Radburn principle of separating vehicular and pedestrian
movement. In both settlements each house, attached to its neighbor, is
accessed in two ways; first from the relatively blank, brick-faced exteriors
fronting onto streets feeding into the fabric and second from an interstitial
greensward permeating the settlement, exclusively restricted to pedestrian
use. What Utzon was able to postulate with these two interrelated schemes
was an alternative suburban land settlement pattern for a megapolitan, ex-
urban world, one that has never been equaled, neither culturally in terms of
accessible imagery nor environmentally from an ecological standpoint. He
would proceed to show in a remarkable proposal for Odense University,
dating from 1967, how this same typology could be deployed to achieve a
city-in-miniature by replacing the interstitial greensward with public courts
and vehicular-free pathways leading into the res publica of a civic center,
flanked by civic facilities and crowned by a shell concrete assembly hall ...

Ceremony
The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, Madrid
His Majesty King Juan Carlos I of Spain presided over the ceremony honoring
Jrn Utzon of Denmark as the 2003 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate. The
ceremony took place in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in
Madrid on Tuesday, May 20, 2003.
The Royal Academy is one of the most important museums in Madrid with
an outstanding collection of European and Spanish paintings, sculptures,
drawings, and prints from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. The
institution, founded in 1752, was moved to its current site in 1774, originally
a palace with a Baroque faade. Redesigned in the neoclassical style by
architect Juan de Villanueva, architect of the Prado Museum and other
important buildings of the eightieth century, the Royal Academy has
remained in this building to the present.
The guests assembling from around the world for the Pritzker Prize had an
opportunity to see some of the Academy's fine art collection. There are five
remarkable Zurbarn life-size portraits of monks, as well as several still-life
paintings. There are also works by Velzquez, Rubens, and Goya, to mention
a few. The Academy, home to the national print collection, is Spain's most
important center for the study of art printing processes, such as engraving
and etching. Some of Goya's copper plates (among 8000 printing plates
archived there) are displayed in rotating exhibitions.
Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, in expressing
gratitude to the Royal Family for making it possible to hold the event in
these historic settings, stated, This is the second time we have had the
great pleasure to come to Spain. The first was in 1997 when we went to
Bilbao, where the Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim Museum was nearing
completion. While that building is a celebration of contemporary art, this
year at the Fine Arts Academy, we will be paying homage to a repository of
historic masterpieces." The collection began with Spanish and foreign artists
working in Madrid. On being admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of
San Fernando, new members contribute a piece of their own work. The
collections have grown substantially from private legacies; today it numbers
over a thousand paintings and sculptures dating from the sixteenth century.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Jan Utzon speaking on behalf of his father, 2003 Laureate.
Your Majesty, your Royal Highness, we are greatly honored by your presence
here. I want in the name of my father Jrn Utzon, to apologize for his
absence. It is for reasons completely independent of his own wish that
unfortunately he cannot come here today. I thank you all for your wonderful
and kind words to him and about my father. Words Ill convey to him, words
he will cherish as part of the prize.
It is with great joy I stand here today receiving the Pritzker Prize for
Architecture on my fathers behalf. My father has asked me to express his
happiness and his gratitude to the Pritzker family and to the members of the
Pritzker jury for honoring him this way.
As his son for nearly 60 years and his professional associate for more than
30 years, I feel deeply grateful to represent him as some of the honor of the
Pritzker Prize also rubs off on the past and present staff in our office and
myself.
When my father was in his final year in school after a not terribly successful
time in that institution he told one of his teachers that he might want to try
to become an architect. The teacher responded that she thought that that
was possibly the only profession he might be able to cope with.
However, as he entered The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen he
entered a whole new world. Suddenly he found himself surrounded by like
minds and subjects that he was able to soak up like intellectual nourishment
after the boring school years.
His career is indebted to many things, other architects, artists, nature,
diversity of cultures and of course his parents who infused him with a
healthy outlook on life. He would also be the first to point to my mother Lis,
his wife for more than 60 years, as the one person who has supported him
throughout his whole career enabling him to pursue his profession with the
intensity needed to achieve the results we can all enjoy today.
It is indeed my fathers good fortune that enables me to stand here today.
When he commenced practicing architecture in the early post war years in
Denmark, the countrys economy was at an all time low and work was hard
to come by. He therefore participated in a lot of architectural competitions
and winning the competition for the new Sydney Opera House was a major
turning point in his career. From practicing in a small Nordic country with
little possibility of working outside Denmark, even though inspired by a
multitude of other persons and cultures, he experienced that the world
suddenly opened to him in a way, unheard of at the time.
This project has been the stepping stone, admittedly a large one, for an
international practice which has brought him and us as a family in contact
with a multitude of opportunities around the world. My father has always
been very inspiring for people around him and for us, his children. His joy
over other people and peoples, over beautiful places, over nature, color,
light, etc. spills over onto those surrounding him. The enthusiasm he always
expresses over things that he likes or admires has had a very positive effect
upon the rest of us. I often hear from former employees how positive an
influence in their lives it has been to have worked with my father.
But when you grow up in such an environment you hardly recognize the
situation as a special one. And it was not until we approached Sydney that I
began to realize that my childhood environment was unique. From then on
our lives were filled with a succession of wonderful experiences only
temporarily to be interrupted by the unfortunate termination of my fathers
work in Sydney. It is therefore a great joy for my father to have been asked
back to Sydney to act as a consulting architect in the planning of the future
of the Sydney Opera House.
When I hear him speak of the then Premier of New South Wales Joe Cahill
with great fondness and when I think of how his love for Australia and the
many wonderful people he encountered while we were living there, it makes
me very happy on his behalf that he is again involved in this most important
work in his life. As his son and his associate it has been a great privilege
working with him for all these years and it is my great fortune to be involved
in the continued development of the Sydney Opera House as his partner.
After our family left Sydney my father worked in Denmark, in Switzerland
and, the United States. Following some years teaching at the School of
Architecture in Honolulu he won a competition for a new parliament building
in Kuwait. Around this time my parents decided to build their first home in
the beautiful island of Mallorca. This was first to be a holiday home but it
soon turned out to be the permanent residence. My father loved working
with the local craftsmen among whom he found a parallel to the many
craftsmen he knew from his boyhood in Denmark.
When my father appeared at the building site with some bottles of wine the
craftsmen knew that he had new ideas during the night and that some of
the work already done would have to be changed. And the mild climate, the
generous people, the nature and culture of Mallorca and Spain became an
integral part of my parents lives. And after living in this wonderful place for
about 25 years they can think of no other place they would rather be. So I
would like to end this speech by reading to you my fathers own words of
thanks for the Pritzker Prize ...

Ceremony Speech
King Juan Carlos I of Spain
I feel very honored to preside over the award ceremony of the prestigious
Pritzker Architecture Prize which this year goes to Jrn Utzon, Danish
architect of universal renown who has lived for many years in Mallorca and
to whom I direct my most sincere salutations. I very sincerely appreciate
The Hyatt Foundation and its President, Mr. Thomas J. Pritzker for offering
this opportunity to me and to have selected for the setting in which to award
The Pritzker Architecture Prize 2003 the capital of Spain, and specifically, at
the site of The Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, a royal academy
that was created to promote a program of learning and a program of
renovation and whose special sensibility regarding architecture is well
evidenced by the renovation of the facade of this building, a work by one of
the most outstanding Spanish architects of the 18th century, Juan De Villa
Nueva.
Spanish architecture lives today during a time that is especially important,
characterized by its creativity, ambition and mutually beneficial dialogue
with the most innovative and attractive trends of our time. Work which is
highlighted by numerous figures of important works. The Pritzker Prize has
been sensitive to this reality with the awarding of the annual prize in 1996
to Rafael Moneo and with the selection of the Guggenheim in Bilbao, for the
award ceremony in 1997 to Sverre Fehn. It has become the most prestigious
international award in the field of architecture. This prize has consolidated
into an essential household reference of respect, admiration and recognition
that the greatest architects of today deserve.
The Pritzker Prize this year finds a laureate of the first magnitude in Jrn
Utzon, who we send our best wishes, lamenting his absence because of
health reasons. Without linguistic worries, without the obsession to make an
architecture marked by the submission of one style, his works are direct and
refreshing, respectful and daring, unexpected and logical at the same time.
Within his characteristic traits he fits his independence and his willingness
to reach a characteristic expression, always attentive to the society which
he serves. Those who have had the opportunity to personally contemplate
the Sydney Opera House with which he excelled as figure of the first order,
admire the prodigious integration of this work with its surroundings, which
beauty he has been able to enhance.
With this work, Utzon has achieved one of the loftiest goals to which an
architect can aspire, to transform oneself into a symbol of a city and even of
the country in which it is erected. Few have had a historical vision of
architecture so ecumenical and so broad as Utzon. I am a builder, he said
recently. He is, specially, of dreams transformed into realities. We rejoice
that an architect of the stature of Utzon has found in Baleares his place of
residence, showing a special closeness to the aforementioned land, in the
houses that he has built for himself and his own in Mallorca, without seeking
applause or external recognition. Be it the first one in Porto Petro, situated
on the coast without harming it, or the present, in Sahorta, that celebrates
the integrity of that land and its scenery.
I conclude my words expressing our congratulations to the Pritzker family for
their decisive contribution to the encouragement of contemporary
architecture, counting with the support of The Hyatt Foundation. Our
congratulations as well to the distinguished members of the jury of this
Prize, who with such certainty is preceded by Lord Rothschild. The Queen
joins me in thanking all of you for your presence and to reiterate to Jrn
Utzon our most sincere congratulations. Thank you very much.
Zaha Hadid
2004 Laureate

Selected Works:
Vitra Fire Station, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1993
LFone Landesgartenschau, Weil am Rhein, Germany, 1999
Car Park and Terminus Hoenheim North, Strasbourg, France, 2001
Bergisel Ski Jump, Innsbruck, Austria, 2002
The Richard and Lois Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati,
Ohio, 2003
BMW Central Building, Leipzig, Germany, 2004
Phaeno Science Center, Wolfsburg, Germany, 2005

Announcement
Zaha Hadid Becomes the First Woman to Receive the Pritzker Architecture
Prize
Los Angeles, CAZaha Hadid, an Iraqi born British citizen has been chosen
as the 2004 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize marking the first time
a woman has been named for this 26 year old award. Hadid, who is 53, has
completed one project in the United States, the Richard and Lois Rosenthal
Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio; and is currently developing
another to co-exist with a Frank Lloyd Wright structure, the Price Tower Arts
Center in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Her other completed projects in Europe include a fire station for the Vitra
Furniture Company in Weil am Rhein, Germany; LFone/ Landesgartenschau,
an exhibition building to mark the 1999 garden festival in that same city; a
car park and terminus Hoenheim North, a park and ride and tramway on
the outskirts of Strasbourg, France; and a ski jump situated on the Bergisel
Mountain overlooking Innsbruck, Austria.
She has numerous other projects in various stages of development,
including a building for BMW in Leipzig, and a Science Center in Wolfsburg,
both in Germany; a National Center of Contemporary Arts in Rome; a Master
Plan for Bilbao, Spain; a Guggenheim Museum for Taichung, Taiwan; and a
high speed train station outside Naples; and a new public archive, library
and sport center in Montpellier, France.
In announcing the jurys choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt
Foundation, said, It is gratifying to us as sponsors of the prize to see our
very independent jury honor a woman for the first time. Although her body
of work is relatively small, she has achieved great acclaim and her energy
and ideas show even greater promise for the future.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, Lord Rothschild, commented, At the same time
as her theoretical and academic work, as a practicing architect, Zaha Hadid
has been unswerving in her commitment to modernism. Always inventive,
shes moved away from existing typology, from high tech, and has shifted
the geometry of buildings.
Continuing, Lord Rothschild said, In her fourth year at the Architectural
Association in London, as a student of Rem Koolhaas (himself a recent
recipient of the Pritzker Prize) her graduation project was called Malevichs
Tectonik. She placed a hotel on the Hungerford Bridge on the Rivers
Thames, drawing from suprematist forms to meet the demands of the
program and the site. Its a happy coincidence therefore that this years
prize ceremony should be taking place in St. Petersburg, Russia, where
Malevich lived and worked, a city of extraordinary beauty and originality.
The formal ceremony for what has come to be known throughout the world
as architecture's highest honor will be held on May 31, 2004. At that time, a
$100,000 grant and a bronze medallion will be bestowed in the State
Hermitage Museum followed by a reception and dinner in the Grand
Peterhof Palace. The prize presentation ceremony moves to different
locations around the world each year, paying homage to historic and
contemporary architecture.

Juror Frank Gehry, who is also the 1989 Pritzker Laureate, said, The 2004
laureate is probably one of the youngest laureates and has one of the
clearest architectural trajectories weve seen in many years. Each project
unfolds with new excitement and innovation." A new juror this year,
journalist Karen Stein who is editorial director of Phaidon Press, commented,
Over the past 25 years, Zaha Hadid has built a career on defying
conventionconventional ideas of architectural space, of practice, of
representation and of construction.
Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of the board of Vitra, who also became a juror this
year, said, Without ever building, Zaha Hadid would have radically
expanded architectures repertoire of spatial articulation. Now that the
implementation in complex buildings is happening, the power of her
innovation is fully revealed."
Juror and architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable said of the choice, Zaha
Hadid is one of the most gifted practitioners of the art of architecture today.
From the earliest drawings and models to current buildings and work in
progress, there has been a consistently original and strong personal vision
that has changed the way we see and experience space. Hadids
fragmented geometry and fluid mobility do more than create an abstract,
dynamic beauty; this is a body of work that explores and expresses the
world we live in.
Another juror, Carlos Jimenez from Houston, who is professor of architecture
at Rice University, said, Presaged by an inimitable graphic and formal
exuberance, Zaha Hadids work reminds us that architecture is a siphon for
collective energies, a far cry from the stand alone building, perennially
oblivious to the vitality of the city. And from juror Jorge Silvetti, who is a
Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Design at Harvard University,
Zaha Hadids buildings are today among the most convincing arguments
for the primacy of architecture in the production of space. What she has
achieved with her inimitable manipulation of walls, ground planes and roofs,
with those transparent, interwoven and fluid spaces, are vivid proof that
architecture as a fine art has not run out of steam and is hardly wanting in
imagination."
Bill Lacy, an architect, spoke as the executive director of the Pritzker Prize,
Only rarely does an architect emerge with a philosophy and approach to
the art form that influences the direction of the entire field. Such an
architect is Zaha Hadid who has patiently created and refined a vocabulary
that sets new boundaries for the art of architecture.

Biography
Born in Baghdad Iraq in 1950, Zaha Hadid commenced her college studies
at the American University in Beirut, in the field of mathematics. She moved
to London in 1972 to study architecture at the Architectural Association and
upon graduation in 1977, she joined the Office of Metropolitan Architecture
(OMA). She also taught at the Architectural Association (AA) with OMA
collaborators Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis.
She began her own practice in London in 1980 and won the prestigious
competition for the Hong Kong Peak Club, a leisure and recreational center
in 1983. Painting and drawing, especially in her early period, are important
techniques of investigation for her design work. Ever since her 1983
retrospective exhibition at the AA in London, her architecture has been
shown in exhibitions worldwide and many of her works are held in important
museum collections.
Known as an architect who consistently pushes the boundaries of
architecture and urban design, her work experiments with new spatial
concepts intensifying existing urban landscapes and encompassing all fields
of design, from the urban scale to interiors and furniture.
She is well-known for some of her seminal built works, such at the Vitra Fire
Station (1993), Weil am Rhein, Germany, the Mind Zone at the Millennium
Dome (1999) Greenwich, UK, a ski jump (2002) in Innsbruck, Austria and the
Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (2003) in Cincinnati, Ohio. Parallel
with her private practice, Hadid has continued to be involved in academics,
holding chairs and guest professorships at Harvard University, Yale
University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Columbia University, the
University of Visual Arts in Hamburg and the University of Applied Arts in
Vienna.

Jury Citation
The architectural career of Zaha Hadid has not been traditional or easy. She
entered the field with illustrious credentials. Born in Baghdad, she studied at
the highly regarded Architectural Association in London, was a partner in the
avant-garde Office of Metropolitan Architecture with Rem Koolhaas, and has
held prestigious posts at one time or another at the worlds finest
universities including Harvard, Yale, and many others. Much admired by the
younger generation of architects, her appearance on campuses is always a
cause for excitement and overflowing audiences.
Her path to worldwide recognition has been a heroic struggle as she
inexorably rose to the highest ranks of the profession. Clients, journalists,
fellow professionals are mesmerized by her dynamic forms and strategies
for achieving a truly distinctive approach to architecture and its settings.
Each new project is more audacious than the last and the sources of her
originality seem endless.
Ms. Hadid has become more and more recognized as she continues to win
competition after competition, always struggling to get her very original
winning entries built. Discouraged, but undaunted, she has used the
competition experiences as a laboratory for continuing to hone her
exceptional talent in creating an architectural idiom like no other.
It is not surprising that one of the architects whose work Ms. Hadid admires
is another Pritzker Prize winner, the preeminent South American author of
Brasilia, and other major worksOscar Niemeyer. They share a certain
fearlessness in their work and both are unafraid of risk that comes inevitably
with their respective vocabularies of bold visionary forms.
The competition winning phase of Ms. Hadids career gradually began to
result in built works such as the Vitra Fire Station, the LFone in Weil am
Rhein, the Mind Zone in the Millennium Dome and reached a recent high
point with the opening of the critically acclaimed Rosenthal Center for
Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The full dimensions of Ms. Hadids prodigious artistic outpouring of work is
apparent not only in architecture, but in exhibition designs, stage sets,
furniture, paintings, and drawings.
The jury is pleased to acknowledge one of the great architects at the
dawning of the twenty-first century by awarding the 2004 Pritzker
Architecture Prize to Zaha Hadid, to commend her extraordinary
achievements, and to wish her continued success.

Essay
The Architecture of Zaha Hadid
By Joseph Giovannini
Architect and Critic
Very few buildings can stand up to the Alps without retreating into modesty,
but Zaha Hadids dynamic and lyrical Bergisel Ski Jump in Innsbruck, Austria,
completed in 2002, confronts the surrounding mountains with an equivalent
architectural majesty. At the top of a hill, the structure occupies the sky, a
free-standing silhouette. Within the bowl of a valley ringed by hills and
vertiginous mountains, the turning form of the clubhouse seems to gather
and funnel the aerial energy of the mountainscape to the long, bowed ramp
that lofts jumpers toward the city below. Hadid designed the sweeping
structure from top to bottom as one fluid gesture that both summarizes the
surrounding landscape in a sweep of movement, and sends skiers down a
jump conceived in an act of fluid geometric empathy akin to flight.As in
Michelangelos Sistine Ceiling, where God nearly touches Adams hand to
spark life, Hadid has provided the index finger that makes a visual
connection between the sky and the ground. Here the spark of life is
completed in the jump. The sensuous forms visualize and poeticize the leap,
spiraling the mountainscape, sky and ground into a fluid continuum.
Air is Hadids element: she floats buildings that reside aloft. At a time, in the
early 1980s, when architects were concerned about manifesting the path of
gravity through buildings, Hadid invented a new anti-gravitational visual
physics. She suspended weight in the same way dramatists suspend
disbelief. In 1983, she won a much-published international competition for a
sports club on the Peak above Hong Kong with a crystalline structure that
seemed to explode from the mountainside, creating in the fragmentary fall-
out a structure that evaded any sense of a unitary whole. Eruption rather
than gravity was the defining force directing the path of a building that
thrived in the air. Floor planes were no longer extruded up from a single
foundation, stacked atop one another, but beamed out in different
directions, shifting as they rose in a complex section. A highway curved
through the building in the space between the splayed, airborne volumes.
Historically, the proposal broke new ground in the field, and did so radically.
As original to architecture as the twelve-tone scale once was to music, the
design represented architecture of a wholly different and very unexpected
order. Whatever the metaphorexplosion, implosion, fragmentationthe
design favored open forms rather than closed, hermetic volumes; it offered
breathing porosity rather than sealed fortification. The design quickly proved
a foundational thesis for architecture, an unexpected precedent for shifting
Modernisms paradigm from simplicity to complexity. The theory behind the
building moved away from modernisms ideas of mass production, received
typologies and the normative, to a more complex order of a kind that
privileged the unique and the fragmentary. The scheme signaled a shift in
sensibilities not only from truisms of the past but also from set tenets of
industrial modernism, toward an indeterminate complexity sited on shifting
ground somewhere between order and chaos.
In the 1980s, many people mistakenly believed that the Peak was influenced
by the use of the computer. But the influence was historical, and in the
context of the Pritzker Prize, awarded this year in St. Petersburg,
coincidental. The imperial Russian capital was the seat of the Russian Avant-
Garde artists who inspired Hadid very early in her career.
Vladimir Malevich, who pursued a mystic fourth dimension in his paintings
and architectural schemes, had studied here, and he and his pupil El
Lissitzky embarked on a remarkable journey into spatial mystery in the
1910s and 20s. Their promising experiments were aborted by a Soviet state
that adopted Soviet Realism in art as official policy, and a bombastic version
of classicism in architecture.The flame of discovery went out for decades.
In the 1970s, however, Hadid, a student at the Architectural Association in
London, took Malevichs abstract compositions and, giving them scale and
function, turned them into architectural projects that gave life again to the
vision. Courageously she set off on a course to realize ideas, such as
fragmentation and layering, never built by the Suprematists themselves.
Inspired by Malevichs ethereal paintings, she took up the brush as a design
tool, and for her, painted tableaux became a locus of spatial invention. With
this methodology, applied in the elusive pursuit of almost intangible form,
she escaped the prejudice latent in such design tools as the T-square and
parallel rule, traditionally used by architects. Hadid came off the drawing
boards, much as Frank Gehry did when, influenced by artists, he left behind
the usual drawings to conceive his buildings sculpturally, often with his
hands. Hadid abandoned the regularity of the T-square and parallel rule in
buildings emancipated from the right angle.
Adopting isometric and perspectival drawing techniques used by the
Suprematists to achieve strangely irrational spaces that did not add up to
Renaissance wholes, she entered an exploratory realm where she developed
forms distorted and warped in the throes of Einsteinian space. Hadid
transformed traditional drawing conventions, sometimes grafting several
techniques and viewpoints together in the same multi-dimensional tableau.
She often layered drawings done on sheets of transparent acrylic, creating
visual narratives showing several spatial strata simultaneously. Applying
Suprematist painting approaches to reconceive architecture, she developed
an aesthetic that seemed to challenge the inertia of material reality, with
dynamic forms subject to visual acceleration and a sense of take-off. Just as
the entasis of a classical column connotes the feeling of weight carried by
the shaft, Hadids forms were ideated: she shaped forms to cultivate a
perception of speed communicated by the eye to the body. Concept
translated to experience: the shapes conveyed a sense of physical thrill as
the body empathized with form ...

Ceremony
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
The unique architectural ensemble of the State Hermitage Museum is
formed by several magnificent buildings situated along the embankment of
the River Neva, in the heart of St. Petersburg. The Winter Palace, the
centerpiece of the complex, which served as residence of the Russian tsars,
was designed and built by Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli in 1754-62. More
buildings were added to the ensemble in the eighteenth and nineteeth
centuries, such as the Great Hermitage, the Small Hermitage, the eastern
wing of the General Staff building, and the Menshikov Palace.
The museum was founded in 1764 when Empress Catherine the Great
purchased a collection of 225 Flemish and Dutch paintings from the Berlin
merchant Johann Ernest Gotzkowski. It is estimated that by 1800 the
collections contained 4000 works. The imperial Hermitage was proclaimed
property of the Soviet state after the Revolution of 1917. Today, the
Hermitage holdings, which have grown continuously, number over
3,000,000 works. Together form an encyclopedic collection of the
development of culture and art from the Stone Age to the twentieth century.
Strengths of the Hermitage collection of Western art include Michelangelo,
Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Claude Lorrain,
Watteau, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Canova, Rodin, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir,
Czanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse. Also noteworthy are the
collections of Russian imperial regalia, Faberg jewelry, and the largest
existing collection of ancient gold from Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
The 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony honoring Zaha Hadid, with
the participation of the Director of the Hermitage Museum, the Governor of
St. Petersburg, the Minister of Culture and Mass Communication of the
Russian Federation, Lord Rothschild, Chair of the Jury, Thomas J. Pritzker,
President of the Hyatt Foundation, and Zaha Hadid.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Zaha Hadid
Dear Cindy Pritzker, Tom Pritzker and Pritzker Family, dear members of the
jury, friends and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, this is a great honor, and
to be honest ... it is a delicious pleasure to receive this very special award.
We all have to thank the Pritzkers for promoting innovative architecture in
this special way.
When I met Jay and Cindy Pritzker with the Palumbos at Miess Farnsworth
House seven years ago I had no idea that I myself would one day be able to
enjoy their generous sponsorship of architecture.
The honor of this prize comes at a very busy time, and affords me a
welcome break for reflection.
I would like to take this moment as an opportunityI guess long overdue
to thank my family, friends, teachers, students, collaborators and clients
who supported me for so many years, who share my passion for
architecture, and who continue to encourage me in my ambitions. Thank
you allI really appreciate this.
There are some names I should mention in particular: Rem Koolhaas and Elia
Zenghelis have been crucial as my teachers. Their understanding and
enthusiasm for architecture first ignited my ambition and their
encouragement taught me to trust even my strangest intuitions.
The late Alvin Boyarskythe fantastic chairman of the Architectural
Association during my student years and years as teacheroffered me my
first platform to expose my ideas. He cut a clearing into the professional
world of architectureto erect a platform for experimentation.
The late Peter Rice deserves acknowledgement as a brilliant engineer who
gave me his weighty support and encouragement early on, at a time when
my work seemed difficult to build.
I would like to thank Rolf Fehlbaum for his commitment and faith as the
client who granted me the time and artistic freedom to cast my vision of
space into concrete for the first time. Naturally my oeuvre is the work of
many talents and many more hard working hands.

As the work expands one of the prime tasks is to forge a group of inspired
collaborators: Michael Wolfson and Brian Ma Siy at the beginning, Markus
Dochantschi, as well. Currently my team leaders include among others:
Graham Modlen, Woody Yao, Jim Heverin, Christos Passas, Stephane Hof,
Sarah Klomps, Gianluca Racana, Paola Cattarin, Ken Bostock and Jan
Hbener.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the tremendous contribution of Patrik
Schumacher. As a congenial collaborator for many years and years to come,
he brings a substantial influence to the work. There are many more people
who have a share in the efforts which have been awarded with this great
prize. Many of those are here today. Thank you all!
Before I outline my current ambitions, I would like to reflect upon some
formative influences in the development of my career. The first thing I might
mention is my secular modern upbringing in Iraq. I have to thank my
parents for their enlightened open-mindedness and selfless support.
As in so many places in the developing world at the time there was an
unbroken belief in progress and a great sense of optimism about the
potential of constructing a better world. Although the historical momentum
of this period could not be sustained, I never lost this underlying sense of
optimism.
It seemed my elder brothers shared this spirit. I wonder which clues inspired
them when they suggested that I should become Iraqs first woman
astronaut, or study architecture in Russia.
The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the
power of invention indeed attracted me to the Russian Avant-Garde. This
was when I joined Rem and Elias studio at the AA in London in the mid-
seventies.
Studying the revolutionary Russian work I realized how Modern architecture
built upon the break-through achieved by abstract art as the conquest of a
previously unimaginable realm of creative freedom. Art used to be re-
presentation rather than creation. Abstraction opened the possibility of
unfettered invention.
The engagement with Malevitch and El Lissitzky in my early work at the AA
allowed me to relive this exhilarating historical moment. It was important to
go back to this original fountain of energy that had inspired modern
architecture. In fact, here was an unbelievable enthusiasm and an
unexpected diversity of approaches. (I very much hope that these treasures
of the early avant-garde architecture can survive the current surge of
economic expansion we are witnessing in Russia today.)
One concrete result of my fascination with Malevitch in particular was that I
took up painting as a design tool. This medium became my first domain of
spatial invention. I felt limited by the poverty of the traditional system of
drawing in architecture and was searching for new means of representation.
The obsessive use of isometric and perspective projection led to the idea
that space itself might be warped and distorted to gain in dynamism and
complexity without losing its coherence and continuity. Despite its
abstractnessthis work was always aimed at architectural reality and real
life.
One of the tasks I set for myself was the continuation of the unfinished
project of modernism, in the experimental spirit of the early avant-garde
radicalizing some of its compositional techniques like fragmentation and
layering.
The meaning of fragmentation is to open the hermetic volumes, to offer
porosity instead of fortification.
I have always been concerned with the animation of the ground condition.
The ground has the highest urban potential and has been neglected by
traditional architecture. The ground plane should open up and multiply. I use
the concept of artificial landscape and topography as a means to
impregnate the ground with activities without losing the fluidity and
seamlessness of the urban geometry. Ultimately architecture is all about the
creation of pleasant and stimulating settings for all aspects of social life.
However, contemporary society is not standing still. Spatial arrangements
evolve with the patterns of life ...

Ceremony Speech
Thomas J. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
Governor, Mr. Minister, Professor Piotrovsky, ladies and gentlemen, each
year I have the pleasure of writing a speech for this great event. The effort
affords me the opportunity to learn something new. To learn more about the
recipient and more about the venue for the presentation.
I have no problem waxing eloquent about this years recipient for I have no
doubt that she is one of the great architects of our time. I will address this in
a few moments. My challenge is to speak about this enchanting venue that
has been made available to us by the Governor of St. Petersburg and
Professor Piotrovsky, its director.
For the Americans in the audience, the temptation was great to open my
remarks with the phrase Four score and seven years ago, that, of course,
should evoke images of the Winter Palace in the year of 1917. But for The
Winter Palace, 1917 is more like recent history.
In fact, its journey begins in 1703, when Peter the Great stood astride the
muddy marshes of the Neva River delta and dreamed a city into being. If
ever there was a city whose vision was given shape and form, by architects,
it is St. Petersburg. From the very beginning, Peter the Great relied on
Domenico Trezzini, a 33 year-old Italian-Swiss architect from Lugano. A
parade of the greatest architects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
was to follow him.
This is the city that used architecture to open Russia to the West and to
open the West to Russia. We who come to this place from across continents
and oceans of time acknowledge this history with respect and with awe. We
listen carefully to the old voices that come down to us from decades and
centuries past. My own familys journey was shaped by the history of this
very building. It was in St. Petersburg, in the Winter Palace, that Alexander II
freed the serfs and began to open Russias cities to the Jewish population. In
fact, this made it possible for my family to move from a small Ukrainian
village to Kiev, and from there, in 1882, to the United States.
Tonight we celebrate an architect in a city that summoned architects to its
very birth. This is a special celebration. Zaha Hadid is the first woman to be
so honored with the Pritzker Architecture Prize. And tonight there is an
elegant meeting between two great women.
The soul of Russia and of the Russian people is carried in its poetry. And this
great city, St. Petersburg, has its own poet, a woman who suffered in
difficult times, and who gave voice to all the beauty, grandeur and courage
that was St. Petersburg, from Empire to Revolution, to Seige.
So tonight, St. Petersburgs Poet Laureate, Anna Akhmatava and Zaha Hadid
meet, here, in the halls of the Hermitage. Akhmatava saw the city as
ethereal. She saw its buildings touching eternity, and dancing with the
landscape, anticipating Zaha Hadids production of the Ballet Meta-Polis.
Listen to her words:
How I love,
how I loved to look At your chained shores,
At the balconies,
where for hundreds of years
No one has set foot.
And verily you are the capital
For us who are mad and luminous;
But when that special, pure hour
Lingers over the Neva
And the May wind sweeps
Past all the columns lining the water,
You are like a sinner turning his eyes,
Before death to the sweetest dream of paradise . . .

It is written of Zaha Hadid that although most of her recent works are large
buildings, she draws them as transparent volumes. Instead of the weighty
presence of tectonic plates, she now suggests that the manipulation of
geometry and structure could liberate a space from its confines. The
preoccupation with the continuity of a landscape becomes recast as open
reaches and interior volumes.
She is an architect whose buildings are shadows emerging out of
landscapes. And thus it is fitting to celebrate her with the words of
Akhmatova, who speaks to her beloved St. Petersburg:
Our separation is imaginary:
We are inseparable,
My shadow is on your walls,
My reflection in your canals,
The sound of my footsteps in the Hermitage halls
Zaha Hadid choreographs land, space, structure, and person, so that each is
inseparable from the other, and each calls to the other, My Shadow is on
your walls, My reflection in your canals.
Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight it is the footsteps of Zaha Hadid that are
heard in the Hermitage halls.
Thom Mayne
2005 Laureate

Selected Works:
Blades Residence, Santa Barbara, California, 1995
Diamond Ranch High School, Pomona, California, 1999
University of Toronto Graduate Student Housing, Toronto, Canada, 2000
Hypo Alpe-Adria Center, Klagenfurt, Austria, 2002
Tsunami Asian Grill, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2002
Caltrans District 7 Headquarters, Los Angeles, California, 2004
Science Center School, Los Angeles, California, 2004
University of Cincinnati Campus Recreation Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2006
Wayne L. Morse United States Courthouse, Eugene, Oregon, 2006
United States Federal Building, San Francisco, California, 2007

Announcement
California Architect Thom Mayne Becomes the 2005 Pritzker Architecture
Prize Laureate
Los Angeles, CAThom Mayne, who founded his firm Morphosis to surpass
the bounds of traditional forms and materials, while also working to carve
out a territory beyond the limits of modernism and postmodernism, has
been chosen as the 2005 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The
Pritzker Prize caps a three-decade career in which Mayne has received 54
AIA Awards, some 25 Progressive Architecture Awards, as well as numerous
other honors around the world. The sixty-one year old architect is the first
American Laureate in 14 years.
Maynes most recent built works to capture major media attention include
the Caltrans District 7 Headquarters and the Science Education Resource
Center / Science Center School, both completed in 2004 in Los Angeles.
Mayne has numerous other Southern California landmarks: the Diamond
Ranch High School in Pomona, two Salick Medical Office buildings on Beverly
Boulevard in Los Angeles, and several distinctive private residences. Mayne
is also currently working on the Cahill Center for Astrophysics at the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Nationally, Mayne
is completing three projects of major importance for the United States
General Services Administrations Design Excellence program including a
Federal Office Building in San Francisco, California, the Wayne L. Morse
United States Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon, and the NOAA Satellite
Operation Control Facility in Suitland, Maryland. Two major competitions in
New York City were also recently awarded to his firm: the New Academic
Building for The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; and
the NYC2012 Olympic Village, a project in association with NYCs bid for the
2012 Olympics. His most recent commission, granted just this month as the
result of a winning competition design is for the new Alaska State Capitol
building to be constructed in Juneau, Alaska. On the world stage, he has the
Hypo Alpe-Adria Center in Klagenfurt, Austria; the ASE Design Center in
Taipei, Taiwan; the Sun Tower in Seoul, South Korea; and a Social Housing
project slated for completion next year in Madrid, Spain.
Throughout his career, Mayne has remained active in the academic world.
He currently holds a tenured professorship at the University of California in
Los Angeles and is a founder of the influential and progressive Southern
California Institute of Architecture. He has been a visiting professor and/or
lecturer at institutions and universities around the world. In announcing the
jurys choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, said,
When this prize was founded in 1979, Thom Mayne had just received his
Master of Architecture degree from Harvard the year before. The intervening
years have seen 28 Laureates chosen. Thom Mayne is the twenty-ninth, and
only the eighth American to be so honored.

The formal ceremony for what has come to be known throughout the world
as architectures highest honor will be held on May 31, 2005 in Chicagos
Millennium Park in the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a structure named for the
founder of the prize and designed by juror and 1989 Pritzker Laureate, Frank
Gehry. At that time, a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion will be
bestowed.
Lord Palumbo, beginning his term as Pritzker Jury Chairman, spoke of the
jurys choice, Every now and then an architect appears on the international
scene, who teaches us to look at the art of architecture with fresh eyes, and
whose work marks him out as a man apart in the originality and exuberance
of its vocabulary, the richness and diversity of its palette, the risks
undertaken with confidence and brio, the seamless fusion of art and
technology.
Bill Lacy, an architect, speaking as the executive director of the Pritzker
Prize, quoted from the jury citation which states, Thom Mayne is a product
of the turbulent 60s, who has carried that rebellious attitude and fervent
desire for change into his practice, the fruits of which are only now
becoming visible in a group of large scale projects.
Frank Gehry, in his capacity as Pritzker Juror, said, I was thrilled that our
new laureate hails from my part of the world. Ive known him for a long time,
watched him grow into a mature and, I like to say, authentic architect. He
continues to explore and search for new ways to make buildings useable
and exciting.
Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic and member of the jury, commented
further saying, The work of Thom Mayne moves architecture from the
twentieth to the twenty-first century in its use of todays art and technology
to create a dynamic style that expresses and serves todays needs.
Another juror, Carlos Jimenez from Houston who is professor of architecture
at Rice University, said, Thom Maynes work exemplifies an astonishing
level of consistency and conviction. The dynamics of this focused pursuit do
not result in predictable or rarefied architecture, but produce an architecture
that invites us to be full participants and recipients of the architects
abundant inventiveness. In the process we come to experience architecture
anew: from how it is imagined to how it is drawn, to how it is constructed
and becomes a collective experience.
And from juror Victoria Newhouse, architectural historian, author, and
founder and director of the Architectural History Foundation, I feel that in
the past few years Thom Maynes work has shown an impressive
development, from being merely good to being outstanding. Diamond Ranch
High School (2000) was for me the benchmark. I visited it the year of its
completion and found not only the original design admirable, but the way in
which the architect adapted that design to the governments financial
limitations was ingenious.
Juror Karen Stein, who is editorial director of Phaidon Press in New York,
commented, Thom Mayne sees architecture as a contact sporta group
activity that pushes physical limits, in this case of form making. From his
earliest complex, multi-layered drawings to his more recent completed
buildings, he has used the latest technologies as both theme and apparatus
of his designs, creating a body of work that has consistently explored and
expressed architecture as a risk-taking, visceral experience.

Biography
Thom Mayne, the 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize laureate, is a founder and
design principal of Morphosis, an interdisciplinary and collectively organized
architecture firm. Morphosis has always been known for uncompromising
designs and a drive to surpass the bounds of traditional forms and
materials, while also working to carve out a territory beyond the limits of
modernism and postmodernism. The firm was founded in 1972 by Mayne
and Jim Stafford and one year later Michael Rotondi joined them and
remained as partner until 1991. Types of buildings undertaken by Morphosis
range from residential, institutional, and civic buildings, to large urban
planning projects.
Thom Mayne was born in Westbury, Connecticut in 1944. He lived for part of
his childhood in Gary, Indiana. When he was ten, his mother moved the
family to Whittier, California. Although he enrolled in California State
Polytechnic University, Pomona, he received his bachelor of architecture
degree from the University of Southern California in 1968. He then worked
for two years as a planner for Victor Gruen. He began his teaching career at
Cal Poly at Pomona, but soon he, along with six colleagues, was fired. That
was the genesis of the founding of the Southern California Institute of
Architecture (SCI-Arc) in 1972. He returned to school and received his
master of architecture degree from Harvard University in 1978. He has held
teaching posts at Columbia University, Harvard University, Yale University,
the Berlage Institute in the Netherlands and the Bartlett School of
Architecture in London.
In addition to being the 2005 Pritzker Architecture prize laureate, his honors
include the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Design in Rome
(1987), Member-Elect of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the
2000 American Institute of Architect-Los Angeles Chapter Gold Medal in
Architecture ...

Jury Citation
Morphosis, the name of Thom Maynes firm, means to be in formation, and
is a particularly apt description of this architects professional career journey
and struggle. Until the mid-80s he was a largely unknown, revolutionary
young West Coast architect with an Architecture degree from the University
of Southern California, a Masters degree from Harvard, and a great deal of
promise. The firm was known primarily to aficionados and students of
architecture for a few exceptional small projectstwo pace-setting
restaurants, a residence, and a medical clinic. All that was destined to
change. Having survived a dearth of projects in the early 90s, Mayne
stormed into the new century with a vengeance and began to win
competitions and commissions for ever more important projects, all noted
for their audacious character, bold designs, and originalityboth in their
form and in their use of materials. Maynes distinguished honors include the
Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy of Design in Rome
(1987), Member Elect from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
(1992), the 2000 American Institute of Architects/Los Angeles Gold Medal in
Architecture, and the Chrysler Design Award of Excellence (2001).
Thom Mayne is a product of the turbulent 60s who has carried that
rebellious attitude and fervent desire for change into his practice, the fruits
of which are only now becoming visible in a group of large scale projects
including the Student Recreation Center at the University of Cincinnati, a
federal courthouse in Eugene, Oregon, a new art and engineering building
for the venerable Cooper Union in Manhattan, and the mammoth
headquarters building for Californias Department of Transportation (District
7) in Los Angeles.
Maynes approach toward architecture and his philosophy is not derived
from European modernism, Asian influences, or even from American
precedents of the last century. He has sought throughout his career to
create an original architecture, one that is truly representative of the
unique, somewhat rootless, culture of Southern California, especially the
architecturally rich city of Los Angeles. Like the Eameses, Neutra, Schindler,
and Gehry before him, Thom Mayne is an authentic addition to the tradition
of innovative, exciting architectural talent that flourishes on the West Coast.
Following the firms early projects and his role in founding an unorthodox
school of architecture, SCI-ARC, he and his partner in Morphosis, Michael
Rotondi, separated and Mayne entered a period of few built projects, which
tested his mettle, determination and passion for his chosen profession.
Gradually, however, clients both public and private began to acknowledge
and be attracted to Maynes bold forms, original palette of materials and
design authenticity.
Mayne has now moved to the front ranks of the profession. He is a vigorous
participant in many design competitions worldwide, winning the firms fair
share. Additionally, through lectures, writings, and his professorship at UCLA
he has become a spokesman for architecture, a mentor and example to the
younger generation of architects.
For having the qualities that superbly match the credo of the Prizetalent,
vision, and commitment to furthering the art of architecture, and for an
outstanding body of work and future promise, the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Jury is pleased to award Thom Mayne the 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Essay
An Essay on Thom Mayne
By Lebbeus Woods
Lebbeus Woods is an architect and teacher who has known Thom Mayne
since they shared space in the 1974 awards issue of Progressive
Architecture magazine. Over the years since that time, they have
encountered each other professionally at the MAK Vienna symposium The
End of Architecture, in 1992, the Sarajevo: Reconstruction and Resistance
workshops in 1994, and the Again Architecture conference in Havana, in
1995, as well as numerous other public and private occasions. Their many
opportunities to exchange ideas and opinions, as well as the authors first-
hand familiarity with the projects discussed, have informed this article.
After a century of global violence, cultural upheaval, and technological
transformations that have radically restructured everyday life, architecture
remains a monumental art securely rooted in its traditions. Great buildings
are still defined as singular, exceptional objects, set into landscapes of the
ordinary. In the utopian dreams of modernists and post modernists alike,
architecture with a capital A was to have dispersed itself by now into the
fabric of everyday life, acquiring a small a without giving up a shred of its
aesthetical and ethical missionbut this has not occurred. At the same
time, we can observe that a generation of fiercely independent architects,
now approaching or entering their sixties, who were the great hope of
architectures future, are now entrusted with the design of large pubic
projects. Confronted by clients whose wealth and power enables them to
commission significant buildings, this generation faces a crisis. They can
accept the mantle of their maturity and take on the ages-old task of
designing monuments valorizing hierarchies of power and authority, or they
can seek ways to carry forward their former ideas, whichin one way or
anotheraimed at realizing a transformation of architecture, and of its
meaning in society. Thom Mayne is one of this generation, and not just any
one, but particularly prominent, celebrated and influential. In very tangible
terms, he personifies the crisis of thought, and of conscience, in architecture
today.
Thom Mayne has been, throughout his career, regarded as a rebel. Even
today, after his recognized success as an architect of major building
projects, requiring the management of a large officeMorphosisand a
world-wide practice, terms like maverick and bad boy and difficult to
work with still cling to his reputation. Part of this is the attraction of the
popular press, where he appears frequently, to anything racy and even
slightly scandalous. Part of it is a sign of respectwe want our American
heroes to be tough and independent, having their own ideals, charting their
own paths. Part of it is, in Maynes case, simply true. The profession of
architecture is so filled with gray personalities, corporate equivocators
willing to say and do anything it takes to get commissions, that when an
architect comes along who is uncompromising and determined to make the
architecture he wants, he inspires both love and hate, not to mention
resentment and envy. Maynes early years as an architect were filled with
conflicts and struggleswith clients, potential clients, and the builders of
the few small projects he was able to get to the stage of realization. There
are stories, apocryphal and not, of him walking out of meetings with clients
who demanded some unacceptable compromise, and blowing the
commission; of his going to a construction jobsite, demanding changes in
what the contractor had built and, when refused, returning with his own
crew to tear it down. There are stories of his telling journalists to go to
blazes when they asked what he thought were stupid questions, and tales of
his aggressive behavior at conferences and other public events. Anyone who
has known Mayne well over the years recognizes that most of the stories are
exaggerated, if true at all, though he is the first to admit that in recent years
he is more relaxed and open than he once was. And there is another factor:
at a broad-shouldered, lanky six feet five inches tall, with a chiseled face,
and a direct, unblinking manner, he makes a physically intimidating figure,
without his saying a word. In the 70s and 80s he wore longish dark hair and
beard, which added to the effect and used to get him regularly searched as
a potential terrorist by airport security people whenever he traveled. Today,
with very close-cropped hair and beard, leavened by gray, his presence is
softer, a bit, but he is, as they say, nobody you would want to mess with.
Still, the most forceful thing about Thom Mayne has been, and remains to
this day, his architecture. His perceived rebel persona has been perhaps
inevitable, given his personality and convictions, and has worked both for
and against his career, but at the same time it is quite different from his
work as an architect. Far from being volatile and openly rebellious against
the norm, the work has been, above all things, deeply thoughtful and
reflective. This may seem incongruous to those who see only bold forms and
spaces in his architecture, which are indeed its most obvious feature, but
the clue to its essential inwardness, in a conceptual sense, is its steady
evolution over the more than three decades of his working life. Not only
steady, but slow, thoughtful, questioning, always questioning of itself. The
work has evolved not in flashes of inspiration or one-off projects that grab
headlines, but rather in restrained, sometimes almost reticent advances in a
realm of ideas he has nurtured from the beginning. Maynes architecture
does not rebel against conventions so much as it absorbs and transforms
them and moves on in a direction that demonstrates how buildings and the
spaces they provide, both within and without, can engage the unpredictable
yet highly tangible dynamics of the present. He accepts the conventional
typologiesbank, high school, courthouse, office buildingof the programs
his clients hand to him, with a generosity that speaks of his respect for the
needs of others, even those with whom he shares little in the way of outlook
and sensibility. He accepts, but does not believe in merely clothing the
conventional in new fashions, creatingas many architects dothe illusion
of innovation. He accepts a given program, but then interrogates its
contents first by rigorous analysis, then by testing them (perhaps measuring
is a more accurate term) against his radical architectural forms ...

Ceremony
The Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Chicago, Illinois
Stainless steel ribbons soar and twist to create an urban scale sculpture that
is the Jay Pritzker Pavilionan outdoor concert venue, and the site of many
music festivals, concerts and other events in Millennium Park, Chicago.
Constructed between 1998 and 2004, the 24-acre park in the heart of the
city reflects the successful partnership between the city and the private
sector. Those efforts enabled Millennium Park to become an unprecedented
combination of distinctive architecture, monumental sculpture, and
innovative landscaping by world renowned artists and designers.
The Jay Pritzker Pavilion, designed by architect Frank Gehry, is named in
honor of the Chicago business leader, who with his wife Cindy founded the
Pritzker Architecture Prize. The Pavilion, using Gehrys signature sculptural
style, rises 120-feet high with the curving brushed stainless steel forms
framing the stage, which can accommodate 120 musicians and a choral
terrace of up to 150 performers. The backstage area is shared with the
nearby Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance. A steel
structure fans out over the 4,000 fixed seats and the Great Lawn creating a
trellis to support a state-of-the-art sound system.
The 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony was open to all who wished
to attend. It consisted of welcoming remarks by Chicagos Mayor Richard M.
Daley and speeches by Lord Palumbo, Chair of the Jury, Thomas J. Pritzker,
President of the Hyatt Foundation, and the new laureate, Thom Mayne. The
ceremony was followed by a reception and dinner on the terrace to the
north of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Thom Mayne
From my childhood I have these wonderful memories of weekend trips to
Chicago with my mother and my brother. It was through these early
excursions that I was first initiated to, and forever intoxicated by the city. I
cant imagine a better way to return to my first cityhere, on this occasion,
in this Pavilion Frank, I know I speak for all of us when I say that we are
filled with the optimism, the energy, the complete and total commitment of
your artistic enterprise. For me, standing here at this moment, it feels as
though your pavilion was made for this event.
I would like to thank Mayor Daley, Lord Palumbo, Tom and Cindy Pritzker,
and the whole Pritzker family for your support of architectureyour
contributions elevate the entire fields power and visibility in this country
and in the world; to the members of the jury for your faith in me; to my
clients, who what can I say? ... Through your suspension of disbelief, you
transported visions into realities ... and now youre all here trading stories.
To my Morphosis colleagues, our work is a result of a collective engagement.
I thank you all, and I receive this prize in honor of your commitment and
energythe 35 of you here this evening represent 200 years of collective
work. To my friends, it means so much that youre here with me this
evening, our relationships have shaped who I am and why Im here today. To
my family, my sons Richard, Sam, and Cooper, Im proud to be your dad.
And to my wife, Blythe, I met my match and more, youre everywhere in my
life this prize we completely share.
Architecture is a way of seeing, thinking and questioning our world and our
place in it. It requires a natural inquisitiveness, an openness in our
observations, and a will to act in affirmation. The growth of an architect
takes quite a bit of time. One thinks, constructs, assembles, thinks, repeats
the process again and again, until a personal vision of reality emerges and
becomes the basis of the work. The great power of architecture is to take
that personal vision out of the realm of the private and into something
immersed in the complexities, conflicts and tensions that define the human
character and our communities. These connections and intersections are
where the generative material, the DNA matter of the work exists for me.
One begins intuitively, through a hunch, looking for some essential part of
the problem that can be grasped and nurtured, teased into development.
I have no preconceived idea of what any of my projects will be. I need only a
beginning embryonic impression which, when worked on in collaboration
with other forces will develop in a unique way. The outcome of the process
will be intensely specific to the project and its circumstances. This is the
value in architecture that I most strive for.
Of course, there are inevitable similarities among my projects and buildings,
characteristics that make them recognizable as the work of Morphosis. But
that is not what interests me. I am engaged more by the process than by
the result. I am captivated by what emerges and develops from the smallest
piece of information as it absorbs the huge number of realities that come to
impact it. In this process, the end cannot be known at the beginning. Like
life, it is evolutionary, adapting, transforming, growing out of, but not
enslaved by our professions over-investment in history with its a priori
solutions.
Which takes me back to the City; to me, the city is the most profound
creation of humanity, continuously changing, evolving, mysterious and
therefore in important ways unknowable. In its lack of fixity; in the
unthinkable number of its random interactions, exchanges, encounters in
the sheer magnitude of the variety of intelligences. Here rests the potential
of a true creativity where serendipity and spontaneous combustion take
place. This, I believe, is why cities are the stronghold of our liberal tradition
in this country. Our cities are the location of continuous regeneration, places
of infinite possibilities, demanding from us an attitude of expansiveness. Yet
we seem to find ourselves, in this first decade of the twenty-first century,
infused by fear, immobilized by the complexity of the realities that come
with living in the present the now ... insisting instead on seeing our
diverse society through a simplistic lens ... resistive to reality, demanding
uniformity in the face of diversity.

And the refuge, as its always been within these cycles, is in nostalgiaa
desire for an illusion of order, consistency and safety, qualities we last
enjoyed in childhood.
This is temporary. Ive lived during periods of great cultural expansion and
optimism. Ive felt the intoxication that happens when an entire generation
decides to stop looking backward for its direction. I see in this pavilion, in
the work of my peers a harbinger of better things, a fierce optimism about
looking forward. Isnt it always this way? One looks to the artists to remind
us that we are all moving forward, empowered and able.
Im chasing an architecture that engages and demands inquiry. Architecture
is not passive, not decorative. It is essential, it affects us directly and
profoundlyit has the potential to impact behavior and the quality of
everyday life.
As architects, our work is embedded with our values: we cannot escape
societys layered problems. Early in our careers, we start with smaller work,
which allows us to tune our artistic skills and hone our internal aesthetic. At
this early point these values are implicit. As the work grows in magnitude
and becomes directly engaged with a broader range of issuesfor me this
has happened in the past five yearsthe embedded values become more
explicit, and the contribution to society, more substantial ...

Ceremony Speech
Thomas J. Pritzker
President
The Hyatt Foundation
I'd like to thank Lord Palumbo for assuming the chairmanship of the Pritzker
Prize Jury. It is a job that requires frequently a lot of skill and nuance
because we have some preeminent jurors each of has very strong and
educated opinions. And Lord Palumbo's job is to navigate us to the point at
which the jury is able to come to a decision and choose a laureate each
year.
Today, we bring the Pritzker Architecture Prize back to its birthplace and to
our home, Chicago. It has wandered the globe, from the power centers of
the White House to Versailles and from spiritual centers of Japan's great
Buddhist Temple of Todai-ji to the Wall of the Temple in Jerusalem. Last year
this ceremony was held in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. There is
a bit of irony in this as our family settled in Chicago as a result of fleeing the
pogroms in Russia in 1881. We, like hundreds of thousands of other
immigrants landed in Chicago and we settled in Chicago, and for several
generations, have built a wonderful life in this great city.
We bring the Prize home today, to this place, Millennium Park, bordered on
one side by Lake Michigan and on the other side by the city where the
skyscraper was born. Today, thanks in no small part to Mayor Daley, we live
in the midst of one of America's greenest cities. And perhaps most exciting,
we gather underneath the visual wonder of Frank Gehry's pavilion, which is
dedicated to the memory of my father, Jay Pritzker.
While I know that tonight we celebrate Thom Mayne, I would like to take a
moment to reflect on Chicago and particularly on our family's relationship to
the city and to Millennium Park. For more than a century, Chicago has given
our family a home and a community. As a family, we believe that we have
an obligation to give back to that community. We have come a long way
from our early days in Chicago and this pavilion is an opportunity to express
our appreciation for the opportunities that this city has afforded our family. It
is not so much a gift from us to the City, as it is a wonderful occasion to say
thank you to the people of Chicago for creating a vibrant community of
unlimited opportunity.
Chance makes it possible for us to work throughout the world, yet we have
never forgotten our home base and its values; hard work, warmth, and the
obligation to touch the life of each person whom we serve. For those of you
who are not from Chicago, look around you . This Park is the result of the
drive and vision of our mayor. He recognizes the value of a partnership
between the City, the private sector, and the community and what you see
is the realization of that collaboration.

What could be a more fitting place in which to honor Thom Mayne. I can
think of no better way to give voice, to this space and the moment it makes
possible, than to quote from Chicago's poet Carl Sandburg. Sandburg had an
eye for architecture, and in his famous poem "Skyscraper" he celebrates the
skyscraper that has made Chicago America's first city of architecture:
Hour by hour the girder's play as ribs and reach out and hold together the
stone walls and floors.
Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the
pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted.
And whom do we celebrate today? A man who has voted and voted clearly.
We celebrate the ninth American architect to be honored as a Pritzker
laureate, Thom Mayne.
Critics and scholars of architecture have told us that he has carved out a
territory beyond the limits of modernism and even post-modernism. Thom
Mayne is also an academic who reflects philosophically on his art. He has
written, "We have attempted to unite two prevalent ideas regarding the
production of architectural form, ideas that are generally considered to be
mutually exclusive." He then proceeds to consider architecture based on
universal systems and principles, and architecture based specifically on the
locale, its culture, and its historic precedents. Universalism vs. Particularism.
The yin and the yang. Each is limited. Rightfully, he argues that taken alone,
the universal approach tends to homogenize the singularity of the human
experience and suppress the idiosyncratic. On the other hand, an
architecture that focuses exclusively on the particular, on the local
circumstance, will remain narrow. We live in a world in which cultures excite
each other. Thom Mayne sees the universal as negating that which is unique
in each circumstance, and he sees the particular as functioning in isolation
from the world, and hence incomplete. He mission is the union of these two
ideas.
And so Thom Mayne has written, "Our methodology proceeds through a
constant oscillation between what exists and what could be, realism and
idealism."
His firm and its regular publication bear the same name, Morphosis. Thom
Mayne rises to the challenge of Kafka's "Metamorphosis." He creates
buildings that acknowledge and celebrate the excitement of urban chaos,
and yet at the same time provide space created for the individual to
celebrate his or her uniqueness. He has articulated this vision in buildings so
very diverse in purpose, yet so necessary to achieve the qualities of
decency and enlightenment that we seek from our cities. He has lent his
architecture to education, to athletics, to mass transportation, to research,
to governmentin short, the fundamental elements of what we know as
contemporary urban culture. Ladies and Gentlemen, here in Chicago, in this
exciting urban space, we celebrate an architect who does not shrink from
the urban challenge, instead immersing himself in it for the sake of the
individual, for the sake of the community, and for the sake of culture itself.
Thank you very much. Thom Mayne, please come forward.

Paulo Mendes da Rocha

2006 Laureate

Selected Works:
Paulistano Chaise Lounge, furniture design, 1957
The Paulistano Athletic Club, So Paulo, Brazil, 1958
Chapel of Saint Peter, Campos de Jordo, So Paulo, Brazil, 1987
Forma Store, So Paulo, Brazil, 1987
Brazilian Museum of Sculpture, So Paulo, Brazil, 1988
Patriarch Plaza and Viaduct do Cha, So Paulo, Brazil, 1992
The State Museum of So Paulo, So Paulo, Brazil, 1993
Residence for Mario Masetti, Cava Estate, Cabreuva, So Paulo, Brazil, 1995

Announcement
Paulo Mendes da Rocha of Brazil Becomes the 2006 Pritzker Architecture
Prize Laureate
Los Angeles, CAPaulo Mendes da Rocha has been chosen as the 2006
Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The 77-year old architect
becomes the second laureate from Brazil, Oscar Niemeyer being the first,
chosen in 1988.
In announcing the jurys choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt
Foundation, said, Mendes da Rocha has shown a deep understanding of
space and scale through the great variety of buildings he has designed, from
private residences, housing complexes, a church, museums and sports
stadia to urban plans for public space. While few of his buildings were
realized outside of Brazil, the lessons to be learned from his work, both as a
practicing architect and a teacher, are universal.
The formal ceremony for what has come to be known throughout the world
as architectures highest honor will be held on May 30, 2006 in Istanbul,
Turkey. At that time, a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion are bestowed.
The new laureate began his career in the 1950s and was part of what was
then considered the avant-garde in So Paulo, known loosely as creators of
the Paulist brutalist architecturepracticioners whose work, often using
simple materials and forms, emphasized an ethical dimension of
architecture. He is widely considered the most outstanding architect of
Brazil. He has steadfastly devoted his career to the creation of buildings and
spaces guided by a sense of responsibility toward the residents of his
buildings and the broader society.
During a career that spans six decades, he has maintained his own practice,
taught for many years at the University of So Paulo, and contributed to the
professional community through his work as president of the Brazilian
Institute for Architects. He has lectured extensively throughout South
America and Europe. He has received many awards, but it was the Mies van
der Rohe Prize for Latin American Architecture in 2000 that brought
international recognition.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, Lord Palumbo, commented, Mendes da Rocha
brings the joyful lilt of Brazil to his work...never afraid of innovation or of
taking risks...indeed, a worthy choice.
Among his most widely known built works is the Brazilian Sculpture
Museum, a non-traditional concept of a museum, nestled partly
underground in a garden in So Paulo. He made bold use of a giant concrete
beam on the exterior that traverses the site. His Forma Furniture Showroom
in the same city is considered an icon of his approach to architecture. The
front has a window that spans the length of the building, opening the
building to the cityscape, a recurring theme of his work.
His renovation of So Paulos oldest Fine Arts Museum, the Pinacoteca do
Estado, affirmed his understanding and respect for Brazils legacythe basic
structure of the nineteenth century building was simply restored with some
striking new functional additions.

Mendes da Rocha revitalized a square in the heart of So Paulo, called

Patriarch Plaza, adding an enormous steel canopy that appears to float over
the square. Internationally, he was a finalist in the competition for the
Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1972, and was the architect of Brazils Pavilion
at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan in 1970. Currently, in Galicia in the northwest
part of Spain, he is developing a master plan for the Technological City, part
of the University of Vigo. His task is to integrate new buildingslibrary,
engineering departments, student residences, administration offices
designed by several different Spanish architects into an overall landscape
scheme that also fosters connections between buildings.
Martha Thorne, speaking as the executive director of the Pritzker Prize,
quoting from the jury citation which states, Inspired by the principles and
language of modernism, he brings a renewed force to each of his projects
through his bold use of simple materials and a deep understanding of the
poetics of space.
Juror Carlos Jimenez from Houston, who is professor of architecture at Rice
University, said, ...he builds with exceptional economy to achieve an
architecture of profound social engagement, an architecture that transcends
the limits of construction to dazzle with poetic rigor and imagination.
Balkrishna Doshi, Pritzker Juror from India, spoke of Mendes da Rochas
work, It is not impossible to create generous architecture even in situations
with minimum resources and numerous constraints. What one needs is a
largeness of vision and a desire to create something that people can touch,
feel, and in which they can participate.
For Mendes da Rocha, the meaning of architecture is not to create isolated
buildings, but to respond to the eternal question of human habitation. His
answers are at the same time classical and audacious: a new fora
geogrfica for a new society, is juror Rolf Fehlbaums comment.
Another juror, Victoria Newhouse, says, The jury was deeply impressed by
this practitioners ability to create powerful structures working within the
technical limitations of his culture.
Juror Karen Stein commented, As the translation of his surnameof the
rockimplies, he has steadfastly adhered to the experimental approach
upon which he established his own architectural practice over half a century
ago, consistently pushing the sculptural limits of structural form to
surprising and often poetic effect.

Biography
Born in Brazil in 1928, Mendes da Rocha began his career in So Paulo in the
1950s as a member of the Paulist brutalist avant-garde. He received a
degree in architecture in 1954, opened his office in 1955 and soon
thereafter created an early masterpiece, the Athletic Club of So Paulo
(1957).
Mendes da Rocha has maintained a private practice, taught at the University
of So Paulo and acted as President of the Brazilian Institute for Architects.
He has received many awards, including the Mies van der Rohe prize for
Latin American Architecture (2000). The award paid tribute to the architects
respectful renovation of the Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paulos oldest fine
arts museum.
One of the most consistently daring of twentieth century architects, Mendes
da Rocha has worked notably in the public realm, creating concrete and
steel forms of immense power and grace. For the Brazilian pavilion at Expo
70 in Osaka, Japan, he balanced a building on a single point of terrain with
audacious elegance. The next year, he placed as a finalist in competition for
design of the Centre George Pompidou, Paris. Among his widely known built
works is the Museum of Contemporary Art (1975) at the University of So
Paulo, the Forma Furniture showroom (1987) in So Paulo and the Brazilian
Sculpture Museum (1987-1992). Recent projects include a master plan for
Vigo University in Galicia, Spain, and the Boulevard des Sports in Paris, a
complex intended to receive the 2008 Olympic Games.
In the imaginative modernist spirit that marks his buildings, Mendes da
Rocha designed the Paulistano Armchair (1957) to be part of the living
rooms of the Athletic Club of So Paulo. Made by bending a single steel bar
and attaching a leather seat and back, the elegant sling chair pushes the
limits of structural form, yet remains completely comfortable and functional.
In 2006, Mendes da Rocha received the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The jury
cited his deep understanding of the poetics of space and an architecture
of profound social engagement.

Jury Citation
Paulo Mendes da Rocha of Sao Paulo, Brazil, inspired by the principles and
language of modernism, as well as through his bold use of simple materials,
has over the past six decades produced buildings with a deep understanding
of the poetics of space. He modifies the landscape and space with his
architecture, striving to meet both social and aesthetic human needs.
Whether individual homes or apartments, to a church, sports stadium, art
museum, kindergarten, furniture showroom or public plaza, Mendes da
Rocha has devoted his career to the creation of architecture guided by a
sense of responsibility to the inhabitants of his projects as well as to a
broader society.
Adhering to a social vision commensurate with the new world, he reminds us
that architecture is foremost a human endeavor inspired by natures
omnipresence. The vast territory of his country has given this architect a
rich lineage to harness and reconcile nature and architecture as congruent
forces.
His signature concrete materials and intelligent, yet remarkably
straightforward construction methods create powerful and expressive,
internationally-recognized buildings. There is no doubt that the raw
materials he uses in achieving monumental results have had influences the
world over.
He has also proven his mastery of restoration and renovation, reaffirming his
understanding and respect for his countrys legacy and his own belief in the
relevancy of the architecture of our time. Mendes da Rocha looks at history
as it relates to the future. He has dedicated himself to a search for a
synthesis of design and form that is as beautiful as it is technically perfect.
In his own words, his definition of architecture is the transformation of
nature, a total fusion of science, art and technology in a sublime statement
of human dignity and intelligence through the settlements we build for
ourselves
All of these qualities and accomplishments have qualified him as the
recipient of the 2006 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Essay
Paulo Mendes da Rocha: Listen to and observe a master
By Francesco Dal Co
Writer, critic and professor at the School of Architecture, University IUAV,
Venice
Unlike many people who are afraid of poverty, I have always been attracted
to it, to simple things, without knowing why. Not hardship, but the humility
of essential things. I think everything superfluous is irritating. Everything
that is not necessary becomes grotesque, especially in our time.
Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Cultura y Naturaleza in Helio Pin, Paulo Mendes
da Rocha, Escuela Tcnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB),
Barcelona, 2003
Toward the end of the 1950s the first photographs began to circulate of the
Paulistano Athletic Club Gymnasium, (Ginsio do Clube Atltico Paulistano),
which had been recently built in So Paulo by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. They
showed a unique, disturbing construction: on top of a suspended platform
you could see six slender concrete blades, with elegant profiles and
elemental forms. The blades rested on the platform and were attached using
a minimal surface area for the union, almost a single line. They were
triangular in form and the long side of the isosceles triangles supported a
remarkably slender circular roof made with pre-stressed, reinforced
concrete. Those supports, all equal, extended beyond the roof line; cut
diagonally to make the overhangs more evident thanks to the exposed
corners. They supported twelve cables to which a steel cap was attached,
detached from the ring of the concrete roof of the gymnasium below.
Constructed of exposed concrete, the entire building seemed like the result
of a skillful balancing act made possible by an ingenious structural concept,
destined to open up new prospects for research and experimentation which
would be later carried out by Brazilian architects.
At the time, in 1958, Paulo Mendes da Rocha was thirty years old. Even
more than from his university studies, the lesson he put into practice in the
gymnasium came from his father, an engineer and designer of hydraulic
works and port facilities. For Mendes da Rocha, as he explained once while
speaking about the Portuguese Pavilion for the Lisbon Expo by Alvaro Siza,
learning is not imitation, but a matter of learning how to think. He likes to
say his father taught him to respect technique, giving the word a
predominantly constructive meaning, using it as a synonym for structural
coherency. Architecture is doing not seeing, making not impressing,
blending reason and freedom resulting in an architecture that is extremely
concrete, sound, and with reduced the meanings of expression. This lesson
was enriched thanks to his association with Joo Villanova Artigas. After
graduating with a degree in 1954, Mendes da Rocha worked with Villanova
Artigas at the Department of Architecture of the University of So Paulo from
1959 until the advent of the military regime that forced the two to abandon
teaching, Artigas reinforced Mendes da Rochas conviction that architecture
must be practiced in sua dimenso humana guided by a commitment to
society, the times, life, using the tools at hand, and in awareness of the fact
that you can never build anything finished.
In spite of adversities throughout his career, and the trouble during the
recent history of his country, Mendes da Rocha has put his name on many
works and projects that have contributed to make Brazilian architecture one
of the liveliest and original expressions of the architectural culture of the
second half of the twentieth century. Among the many works we can
mention are the Villa Maria school at Jos dos Campos (1962), the Brazilian
Pavilion at the Osaka Expo in 1970, the Saint Peter Chapel (Capela de So
Pedro, 1987) at Campo do Jordo, the Forma showroom (1987), the Brazilian
Museum of Sculpture (Museo Brasilero de Escultura, 1988), the Itaquera
Public Service Center (Poupatempo Itaquera, 1988), So Paulos State
Museum (Pinacoteca do Estado, 2003) and the organization of the Patriarch
Plaza (Praa do Patriarca, 2002) in So Paulo , as well as the Mendes da
Rocha, Mazetti, King and Gerassi houses, built starting in 1960 also in So
Paulo, his residential projects, and the many urban planning projects ( such
as, the riverfront city of Tiete, 1980,or the Bay of Vitoria, 1993).
Faced with different topics, Mendes da Rocha has simply developed what
had already been announced in the Paulistano Athletic Club Gymnasium.
Proof can be seen by comparing works mentioned above with the most
recent construction (shown in Casabella758) of the Park School for Art and
Science (Sabina Escola Parque Do Conhecimento) designed in 2003 and
completed in 2007. The building stands in the town of Santo Andre in the
state of So Paulo. It contains a science museum, exhibition spaces, and
different zones for educational activities. Its objective is to expand and
complete the educational opportunities offered by the local school system.
The construction is close to the street that surrounds an urban park, which is
bordered by poor neighborhoods that may seem excessive to define as
residential.
From the parking area one enters the museum along a ramp that leads to an
underground tunnel along which service spaces are organized. To enter, one
must descend through the entrance which is arranged to fit the morphology
of the site. The entire building seems to conform to the curves of the terrain,
to make the geography architectonic, Mendes da Rocha might say. The
building appears as a taut, oblong parallelepiped, devoid of commentary.
Actually, what one observes at first glance is the continuous elevation of a
long beam whose supporting points are not visible. Approaching the
entrance, one sees that the beam rests only on three triangular supports,
while the two ends are each cantilevered about twenty meters. The
thickness of the beam corresponds to that of the interior spaces and the end
offers a view of its deformed H section. On the opposite side of the building,
the beam is double, so that between the two long lateral elevations there is
an internal space, measuring 160 x 30 meters and segmented at different
intervals. The water collected by the roof is discharged into the sections of
the two beams and then runs into four fountains located at the edges of the
construction.

Ceremony
Dolmabahe Palace, Istanbul, Turkey
The Dolmabahe Palace on the European shore of the Bosphorus in Istanbul
is a fitting symbol of the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. The word
"Dolmabahce" in English means "the filled garden," an appropriate name for
the palace sited on land reclaimed from the sea. Built between 1843-1856,
the architecture of the palace reflects a blend of various European styles
with strong influence from France. This and other palaces, kiosks and
summer residences for the Sultans were designed by the Balyan family of
court architects. Some members of this Armenian family trained in Europe.
Upon completion, the Sultans moved to Dolmabahce Palace and never
resided again at Topkapi Palace, which had hosted them for nearly four
centuries.
The three-storied Dolmabahe Palace has a symmetrical plan with over
three hundred rooms and halls. The entrance section of the palace was used
for the receptions and meetings of the Sultan. The middle is the large
ballroom, and the wing behind it, was used as the harem. There are two
monumental gates, one, on the land side, is extremely ornate. Beautiful
gardens surround this seaside palace. This palace holds special significance
for Turks as Mustafa Kemal Atatrk, the founder of modern Turkey, died here
on November 10, 1938.
The 2006 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony began with a reception and
tour of the Palace, followed by the ceremony and dinner on the grounds.
Participants in the official ceremony were the Prime Minister of Turkey, the
Mayor of Istanbul, and representing the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Martha
Thorne, Executive Director, Lord Palumbo, Chair of the Jury, and Thomas J.
Pritzker, President of The Hyatt Foundation. Paolo Mendes da Rocha, as is
customary of all laureates, pronounced an acceptance speech.
Ceremony Acceptance Speech
Paulo Mendes da Rocha
Distinguished Governor, Prime Minister, Mr. Mayor, distinguished Mrs. Cindy
Pritzker, Mr. Thomas Pritzker, their family, the Pritzker Foundation, and dear
friends who are enjoying with me this magnificent event. I would like to first
of all say that it is wonderful that we are in this place. The fact that the
Pritzker Foundation should have chosen this setting for the ceremony is
magnificent, because this place has a rich history of so many years. I think it
evokes the greatest emotion in all of us, especially in us Americans. What do
we want? We want to build America, and places such as these are examples.
Clearly, it is impossible to compete with history. Its really impossible. It is
also impossible not to take advantage of this experience with the freedom
we want to defend in order to build our America. Were talking about three
or four hundred years of history in Brazil and Latin America, but that is
nothing when compared it to human experience. So, the issue in
architecture is how to continually absorb this human experience. When we
say how, it means what policies do we use and that is really a political issue.
A ceremony such as this, a prize such as this is a stimulus. It is the basis for
us to make sure that we can develop independent politics and policies about
urban space. We cannot imagine so much history, so much experience, so
much knowledge that we have in our hands, and in turn imagine the idea
that the city could be a disaster or that the city would not be a refuge for all.
Therefore, when we are able to realize mankinds dreams together of
designing an America that has not yet made the bridge from the Atlantic to
the Pacific, we are asking for peace as the cornerstone of architecture. It
moves us. It is important for us to work in the spirit of solidarity that was
expressed by the Pritzker Foundation. I hope that this flame will be always lit
so that architecture can be seen as a unique and indispensible path of
knowledge for mankind to develop in the future.

I believe that as we build contemporary cities we are realizing human

beings highest desires. Architecture has a new impetus. It has a vision to
transform the space. It has to work with nature as it establishes designs and
takes advantage of the virtues of this, our planet. We must have an
awareness of our human dimension, the dimension of human beings who
are part of nature and architecture, and who are linked to the establishment
of space vis a vis nature. This is what I wanted to share with you tonight.

Ceremony Speech
Martha Thorne
Executive Director
The Pritzker Architecture Prize
Good evening and welcome to the 2006 ceremony of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize. (Said in Turkish, Portuguese, and English.) I am Martha
Thorne, executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and it is my
distinct privilege and pleasure to be here to welcome you here tonights
event.
Tonight we are here to celebrate architecture; the architecture of this
wonderful city, the architecture of the past Pritzker Architecture Prize
laureates, who are represented tonight by Mr. Gottfried Bhm, laureate of
1985, Professor Hans Hollein, 1986, and Mr Thom Mayne, 2005; and of
course, we are here to celebrate the newest member of the Pritzker
community, Mr. Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
I am sure you know that the Pritzker Architecture Prize was founded in 1979
through the vision and generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Jay Pritzker and continues
to be supported by the family and the Hyatt Foundation. Cindy Pritzker is
here with us tonight.
The prize is granted for an outstanding body of built work that reflects the
highest degree of the art of architecture and that makes a of the City of
significant contribution to humanity. As we remember the beginnings of the
prize we can see that the criteria have remained stable and firm. Today, we
honor the newest laureate. And, as we look to the future, we are optimistic,
as one purpose of the prize is to inspire those who practice architecture
today and the many who will become future creators of our built
environment.
It is now my privilege to introduce Mr. Topba, Mayor Istanbul.

Richard Rogers
2007 Laureate

Selected Works:
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 1977
Lloyds of London, London, United Kingdom, 1986
Millennium Dome, London, United Kingdom, 1999
Minami Yamashiro School, Kyoto, Japan, 2003
Terminal 4, Madrid Barajas Airport, Madrid, Spain, 2005
National Assembly for Wales, Cardiff, Wales, 2005
175 Greenwich Street, World Trade Center Site, New York,
New York, 2006
The Leadenhall Building, London, England, 2006

Announcement
Richard Rogers of the UK Becomes the 2007 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureate
Los Angeles, CARichard Rogers, whose firm Richard Rogers Partnership is
headquartered in London, has been chosen as the 2007 Laureate of the
Pritzker Architecture Prize. The formal ceremony for what has come to be
known throughout the world as architectures highest honor will be held on
June 4 in London. At that time, a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion will
be bestowed on the 73-year old architect at The Banqueting House,
designed in 1619 by Inigo Jones.
In announcing the jurys choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt
Foundation, quoted from the jury citation, Born in Florence, Italy, and
trained as an architect in London, at the Architectural Association, and later,
in the United States at Yale University, Rogers has an outlook as urbane and
expansive as his upbringing. In his writings, through his role as advisor to
policy making groups, as well as his large-scale planning work, Rogers is a
champion of urban life and believes in the potential of the city to be a
catalyst for social change.
In Rogers own words, his vision is that cities of the future will no longer be
zoned as today in isolated one-activity ghettos; rather they will resemble the
more richly layered cities of the past. Living, work, shopping, learning, and
leisure will overlap and be housed in continuous, varied and changing
structures.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, Lord Palumbo elaborated with more of the
citation: Throughout his distinguished career of more than forty years,
Richard Rogers has consistently pursued the highest goals for architecture.
Key Rogers projects already represent defining moments in the history of
contemporary architecture. The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1971-
1977), designed in partnership with Renzo Piano, revolutionized museums,
transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of
social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city. Lloyds of
London in the City of London (1978-1986), another landmark of late
twentieth century design, established Richard Rogers reputation as a
master not only of the large urban building, but also of his own brand of
architectural expressionism. As these buildings and other subsequent
projects, such as the recently completed and acclaimed Terminal 4, Barajas
Airport in Madrid (1997- 2005) demonstrate, a unique interpretation of the
Modern Movements fascination with the building as machine, an interest in
architectural clarity and transparency, the integration of public and private
spaces, and a commitment to flexible floor plans that respond to the ever-
changing demands of users, are recurring themes in his work. Terminal 4,
Barajas Airport won the 2006 Stirling Prize.
Rogers is the fourth laureate to be chosen from the United Kingdom, the first
three being the late James Stirling in 1981, Lord Foster (Norman Foster) in
1999, and Zaha Hadid in 2004. He is the thirty-first laureate since the prize
was founded in 1979. Rogers was appointed a Labour life peer in 1996
taking the title, The Lord Rogers of Riverside. In addition to London, Richard
Rogers Partnership (which will be renamed Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners
in the UK next month) has offices in Barcelona, Madrid and Tokyo. Some of
the major projects that span the globe include: in New York, the design for a
71-story tower for the World Trade Center site at 175 Greenwich Street; in
Washington, D.C., an office building under construction at 300 New Jersey
Avenue; in UK, mentioning just a few worksthe Leadenhall Building; the
Millennium Experience; and an early project, Wimbledon House, a home for
Rogers parents in the late 1960s; the National Assembly for Wales in
Cardiff; the Nippon Television Headquarters in Tokyo, as well as several other
projects there and in South Korea.
Biography
Richard Rogers is best known for such pioneering buildings as the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, the headquarters for Lloyds of London, the European
Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the Millennium Dome in London.
His practice, Richard Rogers Partnership (RRP), was founded in 1977 and has
offices in London, Barcelona, Madrid and Tokyo. RRP has designed two major
airport projectsTerminal 5 at Londons Heathrow Airport and the New Area
Terminal at Madrid Barajas Airport, as well as high-rise office projects in
London, a new law court complex in Antwerp, the National Assembly for
Wales in Cardiff, and a hotel and conference centre in Barcelona. The
practice also has a wealth of experience in urban master planning with
major schemes in London, Lisbon, Berlin, New York and Seoul.
He was born in Florence, Italy in 1933 to British parents. He studied at the
Architectural Association School (1953-1959) in London and received the
Diploma of Architecture in 1959. The following year he studied at the Yale
University School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut on a Fulbright
scholarship, and received the Master of Architecture degree in 1962.
Returning from America, Rogers formed a partnership with Norman and
Wendy Foster and Su Rogers (1963-1968) in London, called Team 4. They
completed an industrial building (1967) at Swindon, Wiltshire, England, for
Reliance Controls Ltd. The Team 4 arrangement was followed by the
partnership of Richard and Su Rogers (1968-1970) and subsequently Richard
Rogers Partnership (RRP), founded in 1977.
In 1996, Rogers was introduced into the House of Lords, taking the title "The
Lord Rogers of Riverside." The following year, Rogers received an honorary
professorship from the Thames Valley University. He was awarded the
Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Art Association in 2000 in addition to the
RIBA Gold Medal that he received in 1985 and the 1999 Thomas Jefferson
Memorial Foundation Medal. In 1998, he was appointed by the Deputy Prime
Minister to chair the UK Governments Urban Task Force and he is currently
Chief Advisor on Architecture and Urbanism to the Mayor of London ...

Jury Citation
Throughout his distinguished career of more than forty years, Richard
Rogers, The Lord Rogers of Riverside, has consistently pursued the highest
goals for architecture.
Key Rogers projects already represent defining moments in the history of
contemporary architecture. The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1971-
1977), designed in partnership with Renzo Piano, revolutionized museums,
transforming what had once been elite monuments into popular places of
social and cultural exchange, woven into the heart of the city. Lloyds of
London in the City of London (1978-1986), another landmark of late
twentieth century design, established Richard Rogers reputation as a
master not only of the large urban building, but also of his own brand of
architectural expressionism. As these buildings and other subsequent
projects, such as the recently completed and acclaimed Terminal 4, Barajas
Airport in Madrid (1997-2005) demonstrate, a unique interpretation of the
Modern Movements fascination with the building as machine, an interest in
architectural clarity and transparency, the integration of public and private
spaces, and a commitment to flexible floor plans that respond to the ever-
changing demands of users, are recurring themes in his work. Rogers
buildings span numerous types, scales, and continents. All of his projects,
however, are united by a formal rigor as well as a commitment to the user.
Over the years, he has collaborated with a range of associates on projects
large and small, though his steady hand remains evident in each.
Rogers combines his love of architecture with a profound knowledge of
building materials and techniques. His fascination with technology is not
merely for artistic effect, but more importantly, it is a clear echo of a
buildings program and a means to make architecture more productive for
those it serves. His championing of energy efficiency and sustainability has
had a lasting effect on the profession.
Born in Florence, Italy, and trained as an architect in London, at the
Architectural Association and, later, in the United States at Yale University,
Rogers has an outlook as urbane and expansive as his upbringing. In his
writings, through his role as advisor to policy-making groups, as well as his
large-scale planning work, Rogers is a champion of urban life and believes in
the potential of the city to be a catalyst for social change.
We know that architecture is a discipline of enormous political and social
consequence. And today we celebrate Richard Rogers, a humanist, who
reminds us that architecture is the most social of arts. Throughout his long,
innovative career, Rogers shows us that perhaps the architects most lasting
role is that of a good citizen of the world. For all of these outstanding
qualities, the Jury awards Richard Rogers the 2007 Pritzker Architecture
Prize.

Essay
Revitalising Modernity
By Deyan Sudjic
Writer, architecture critic and Director of the Design Museum, London
Richard Rogers collected the Pritzker Prize in 2007 in London in the
magnificent setting of the banqueting hall designed by Inigo Jones, for the
royal palace that he was never to finish for Charles I. The 17th century
monarchs reign came to an abrupt end when Oliver Cromwell had the New
Model Army march him under the great ceiling painted by Rubens, through
one of the halls windows, and onto a scaffold outside to be beheaded in the
climactic episode to the English Civil War. Given that the kings 20th century
descendant, the Prince of Wales, the future Charles III, has been the most
highly visible critic of contemporary architecture in Britain, it was perhaps a
somewhat unlikely setting for a ceremony honouring one of Britains most
prominent architects, especially for one associated with an embrace of
modernity. Rogers has been the target of the princes criticism more than
once. It was the prince who put an end to Rogers chances of winning the
commission to rebuild Paternoster Square, the flawed 1950s setting for St.
Pauls Cathedral. Rogers entry was one of the competitions most talked
about submissions to build an extension on the National Gallery in Trafalgar
Square. The competition precipitated the Prince of Waless intervention into
the architectural debate with a famous speech in 1984, in which he called
the project a carbuncle on the face of an old and familiar friend. The
bitterness of those conflicts has faded, but at the time, they were vivid, and
very real. And they certainly shaped British architecture for a decade, or
more. Careers were put on hold because of them.
As a member of the House of Lords, Rogers now has a seat in the upper
chamber of the British parliament. He has won the Royal Gold Medal for
Architecture, the Stirling Prize, and just about every conceivable honour and
distinction in the architectural world. His practicethe name was changed
to Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners in 2007through which many hundreds
of people have passed over the years, is active across the world, from
Taiwan to Ground Zero. In Britain he built two of the defining landmarks of
Tony Blairs government: the new parliament for Wales in Cardiff and the
Millennium Dome in London, as well as the headquarters of the public
broadcaster, Channel Four, and the new fifth terminal at Heathrow airport.
The outsider had become an insider.
The most eloquent of several speeches at the Pritzker ceremony in May
2007 was made by the then mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. He was there
because of his close working relationship with Rogers, who had spent the
previous eight years as the mayors advisor on architecture and urbanism. It
was a partnership that oversaw a radical transformation of the city. It
reflected a degree of political sophistication unusual among Britains
architects who have mostly been content to preach to the converted within
the professional ghetto, rather than engage with the wider world. After he
helped frame the urban and architectural policy for the Labour government
of Tony Blair, Rogers served as the mayors advisor for two terms.
Urbanism has been a continuing preoccupation of Rogers over the years. He
has consistently campaigned for compact, high density cities that celebrate
the quality of urbanity, and encourage their ability to support street life,
social diversity, and high quality public transport. Its a stance based as
much on an idea of what the city can be in an aesthetic and social sense, as
it is on sustainability.
Inigo Jones brought the architecture of Italy to England in his rediscovery of
the language of Andrea Palladio. And in a way, Rogers, too, has brought
something of Italy to England. His ideas of urbanism are rooted in the
monumental Italian cities, the Galleria in Milan, the arcades of Bologna,
markets and pavement cafes, rather than their bleak new suburbs. Like the
River Caf, the restaurant run by his wife, Ruthie, and based in the complex
of wharf side buildings in which his practice is located, which has tried to
inject a taste of flavours richer than Britain is used to into its food, so Rogers
has attempted to go back to some of the fundamental pleasures of urban
life. Rogers looks for streets full of people, casual interactions with
strangers, and a public realm that creates a strong sense of civic identity.
Rogers, the older of two sons, was born in 1933 in Florence into a family,
which despite its British roots and its Anglo-Saxon name, had lived in Italy
for two generations. His father was a doctor and his mother Ermenegilda
was a potter ...

Ceremony
The Banqueting House, London, England
Originally part of the expansive Palace of Whitehall, the Banqueting Hall was
designed by Inigo Jones in 1619 and completed in 1622. It was to replace a
previous one destroyed by fire. For the overall building design, Architect
Jones followed the principles of classical architecture of Rome and the
Renaissance ideas of Palladio. The somber, stone Banqueting House formed
a startling contrast to brightly painted Tudor buildings that surrounded it.
Perhaps because of this or its association with masques (a popular form of
court entertainment combining elements of a costume ball and theater), its
architecture failed to attract much admiration in its day.
The fine proportions of the building are evident on the exterior and interior.
The exterior elevation has three levels: a rusticated base; a first story with a
series of windows crowned by alternating segmental and triangular
pediments separated by Ionic columns, and pilasters that; and a second
story with Corinthian columns and pilasters that correspond to those below,
as do the windows and with a garland swag tying the capitals together
beneath the flat balustraded roof. The Banqueting Hall underwent its most
complete restoration in 1829 under Sir John Soane, and the uniform Portland
stone on the exterior is due to his hand.
Inside at street level is the Undercroft which was originally designed as a
drinking den for James I. Upon ascending the staircase, the magnificence of
the Banqueting Hall is revealed. The hall measures 55 feet wide by 110 feet
long and 55 feet high. For the elaborately decorated architrave, cornice, and
frieze, Inigo Jones followed Venetian models.
However, the outstanding aspect of the Banqueting Hall is the ceiling,
painted by Peter Paul Rubens. Commissioned by Charles I, the canvasses
were painted by Rubens and his studio in Antwerp 1630 to 1634 and
installed in the Banqueting Hall in 1636. Using a vocabulary of allegory and
symbol, he created dramatic scenes that celebrate the monarchy.
The 2007 Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony took place in the Banqueting
Hall with the participation of the Mayor of London, Martha Thorne, Executive
Director, Lord Palumbo, Chair of the Jury ,Thomas J. Pritzker, President of The
Hyatt Foundation, and of course, Sir Richard Rogers, the 2007 laureate.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Richard Rogers
Good evening.
I am honored and delighted to receive the Pritzker Prize for Architecture.
FirstI must say that I accept it, not for me alone, but for the community of
designers who have inspired me, and collaborated with me through the
years. I want to thank Ken Livingstone, Lord Palumbo and Tom Pritzker for
their praise, and for the great contributions that they, Cindy Pritzker and her
family have made, to architecture and the arts.
It is deeply emotional for me to accept the awardsurrounded by the
friends and family I lovein the Banqueting Hall of Inigo Jonesa building
that marks the first flowering of the Renaissance in Britain and a truly
revolutionary building in its time. The architecture of Inigo Jones was
inspired by his visits to Florence. I too owe a debt to that city, the city of my
birth, the city where Donatello, Massaccio and Brunelleschi revived and
rediscovered the classical tradition.
Florence set the standards for cities that we still aspire to. It is also where
my parents instilled in my brother Peter and me a love of beauty, a sense of
order, and the importance of civic responsibility. Cities are the heart of our
culture, the engines of our economy and the birthplace of our civilization.
There is little that makes me happier than getting lost in a beautiful city:
following its narrow passages to the grand tree lined avenues; stumbling
across street theatre, sitting in a caf with Ruthie watching people go by.
This is my idea of heaven.
But cities do not just happenthey are made. Designed and managed well
they civilize. Neglected, they quickly lose their vitality. And where cities
become run-down, they brutalize. There are neighborhoods in cities all over
the world that lie derelict because the wealthy and skilled have moved out,
leaving behind only the poorThe people who have no choicein desolate,
and fearful spaces.
Our present Government was the first to encourage people to move back
into our cities, rather than letting them spill out into sprawling suburbs and
the countryside. John Prescotts powerful leadership and creation of the
Urban Task Force, which I chaired, helped start this Urban Renaissance.
I am proud to be a citizen of London. I am awed by our great parks and by
the beautiful Thames, and I rejoice at Londons human scale, at the vitality
of the South Bank and at Wrens Royal Hospital, which I see every morning
from my home. Under our brave and visionary Mayor, Ken Livingstone,
London has a growing population, economic success and a progressive
outlook. To me, the city has never been more exciting than it is now.
London is also where I have watched my children grow into the
extraordinary adults they are. They and their partners are my pride and my
joyBo, Ben, Harriet, Zad, Lucy, Ab, Sophie, Roo, and Bernie. You can see
my contribution to Londons population growth! All of them play their parts
as citizens, too. Now it is their children who go to local schools and play in
Londons parks.
It was Milan Kundera who said history looks sunlit, clear, and obvious only
in hindsight. The same could be said of any career, including my own.
Looking back I realize that it is the people I have worked withnot just
architects, but enlightened clients, and brilliant engineers like the late Peter
Ricewho have taught me the most.
Norman Foster has been an inspiration and a close friend, since the first day
we met at Yale in 1961. We took a road trip across America, excited by
everythingfrom Frank Lloyd Wright in Wisconsin to the Case Study Houses
in California. Fuelled by Normans intellectual rigor, we passionately
discussed everything we saw, forging an architectural language that has
evolved through my career. You can see that language in the work of Team
Four, the practice Norman and Wendy Foster, Su Rogers and I set up when
we came back from Yale, and later in the partnership Richard and Su Rogers
with John Young and Laurie Abbott. Our architecture was born of social
change and the excitement of new technology, which could create buildings
that were legible in structure and flexible in use. As technology developed,
we opened up the possibility of realising these forms on a larger and more
complex scale. But the fundamentals have remained constant. One of those
fundamentals in my life and work has been John Young. We have worked
together on every project. His love and understanding of the process of
construction, the quality of materials, and the beauty of design make him
unique.
The Pompidou Cultural Centre in 1971 gave me the good luck to work with
Renzo Piano. Renzo is a brother to me, a constant source of inspiration, fun
and friendship. Hardly a week goes by without us exchanging ideas. In the
universe of architecture, he is a true poet. The Pompidou was our first major
commission. It is perhaps less well known that I nearly stopped us entering.
Fired up by the political tumult of the late sixties, I wrote a memo arguing
that we should not get involved in anything as elitist as a Centre for Culture
commissioned by a President. Fortunately, I was outvoted. You can imagine
our excitement at winning a competition of this scale. It is a credit to the
French Government that they kept faith with this young team, and let us re-
model a whole piece of city, designing a public space that extended from a
great square to the escalators that snaked up the steel-framed open faade.
The first sentence of our submission still describes accurately how we
approached the project: as a place for all people, all ages, and all creedsa
cross between the British Museum and Times Square ...

Ceremony Speech
Martha Thorne
Executive Director
The Pritzker Architecture Prize
Madame Secretary of State, Your Excellencies, Mr. Mayor, My Lords and
Ladies, good evening.
As executive of the Pritzker Prize it is my distinct pleasure to open this
evenings event and welcome you to the 29th ceremony of the awarding of
the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
It is truly a joy to be in London for the prize ceremony. The last time the
festivities were held in London was in 1986. It is also special because when
the venue was decided, it was not known that the laureate would be from
the same city. Thus, we have a very happy coincidence.
As you probably know, the prize is conferred annually to a living architect
whose built work embodies a combination of those qualities talent, vision,
and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant
contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of
architecture.
Often spoken of as the Nobel Prize of architecture, not only because of its
importance in the field, but also because of the independent nature of the
prize, supported by the Hyatt Foundation, but not controlled or influenced
by any institution or organization. The gathering of the nominations comes
from around the world: from architects, past laureates, opinion-makers,
academics, historians, business people and even politicians. The role of the
outstanding jury in the prize is that it alone analyses works, visits buildings,
and passionately debates about architecture until a laureate is selected
each year.
Of course those are the parameters of the prize. Yet it would not or could not
exist had it not been for the vision and continued support of the Pritzker
family. Tonight it is wonderful to have so many members of the Pritzker
family here. And in particular Mrs. Cindy Pritzker, who, with her late
husband, Jay, founded the prize in 1979.
This evening is a celebration of Richard Rogers: his building, writings,
influence, and continuing commitment to architecture in the broadest spirit
of the word. It is also an opportunity to recall the contributions of past
laureates. The community of Pritzker laureates is represented by some
previous winners who are here tonight. I would like to call the names of past
laureates who are present here tonight and kindly ask them to stand. Please
hold you applause until I say the last name: Kevin Roche, 1982; Hans
Hollein, 1985; Renzo Piano, 1998; Norman Foster, 1999; Jacques Herzog and
Pierre De Meuron, 2001; Zaha Hadid, 2004; and Thom Mayne, 2005.
Once again, welcome and thank you for joining in this celebration of the art
of architecture, a constant striving for excellence and a commitment to the
built environment and embodied in the work and inspiring career of Richard
Rogers. Thank you.

Jean Nouvel
2008 Laureate

Selected Works:
Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA or Arab World Institute), Paris, France, 1987
Nemausus I public housing, Nimes, France, 1987
Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris, France, 1994
Cultural and Conference Center, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2000
Agbar Tower, Barcelona, Spain, 2005
Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2006
Quai Branly Museum, Paris, France, 2006
Tour de Verre, New York, New York, 2007 (in progress)
Announcement
Jean Nouvel of France Becomes the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
Los Angeles, CAJean Nouvel of Paris, France has been chosen as the 2008
Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The formal ceremony for what
has come to be known throughout the world as architectures highest honor
will be held on June 2 in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress. At that
time, a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion will be bestowed on the 62-
year old architect.
Nouvel who came to international attention with the completion of his
Institut du Monde Arabe (usually referred to as IMA) in 1987 as one of
President Francois Mitterands Grands Travaux in Paris, now has several
projects in the United States, including the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis
completed in 2006, a 75-story tower (Tour Verre) next door to MOMA in New
York, and recently announced plans for a high rise condominium (Suncal
Tower) in the Century City district of Los Angeles. In Europe, some of his
other important works are the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art
(Paris 1994), the Branly Museum (Paris 2006), the Agbar Tower (Barcelona
2005), a Courthouse (Nantes 2000), a Cultural and Conference Center
(Lucerne 2000), an Opera House (Lyon 1993), and Expo 2002 (Switzerland).
Also currently under construction is a concert hall in Copenhagen.
Although the bulk of his work is in France, he has designed projects all over
the world, including Japan, Spain, England, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy,
Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Korea, Mexico, Israel,
Brazil, Qatar, Lebanon, Cyprus, Iceland, UAE, Taiwan, Malaysia, Portugal,
Kuwait, Morocco, Russia and the U.S.well over two hundred in all.
In announcing the jurys choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt
Foundation, quoted from the jury citation, Of the many phrases that might
be used to describe the career of architect Jean Nouvel, foremost are those
that emphasize his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of
accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field. And further,
Pritzker added, The jury acknowledged the persistence, imagination,
exuberance, and, above all, an insatiable urge for creative experimentation
as qualities abundant in Nouvels work.
In Nouvels own words, My interest has always been in an architecture
which reflects the modernity of our epoch as opposed to the rethinking of
historical references. My work deals with what is happening nowour
techniques and materials, what we are capable of doing today.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, Lord Palumbo elaborated with more of the
citation: Since establishing his Paris based practice in the 1970s, Nouvel
has pushed himself, as well as those around him, to consider new
approaches to conventional architectural problems.
For Nouvel, in architecture there is no style a priori. Rather, a context,
interpreted in the broadest sense to include culture, location, program and
client, provokes him to develop a different strategy for each project.

Nouvel is the second laureate to be chosen from France, the first being
Christian de Portzamparc in 1994. Although 2008 marks the thirtieth
anniversary, he is the thirty-second laureate since the prize was founded in
1979. There were two laureates chosen in 1988 and again in 2001.

Biography
Since the beginning of his architectural career in the 1970s, Frenchman
Jean Nouvel has broken the aesthetic of modernism and post-modernism to
create a stylistic language all his own. He places enormous importance on
designing a building harmonious with its surroundings, said Bill Lacy in his
book, One Hundred Contemporary Architects. Lacy, who was executive
director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize from 1988 until 2005 when he
retired, continued, In the end that buildings design may borrow from
traditional and non-traditional forms, but its presentation is entirely unique.
Jean Nouvels projects transform the landscapes in which they are built,
often becoming major urban events in their own right. His unique approach,
driven by the specificities of context, program, and site has proven effective
in numerous successes around the world.
One such success, a building that first brought Nouvel international
recognition is the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris where one of its
facades is made entirely of mechanical oculi operated by photoelectric cells
that automatically open and close in response to light levels. The French
critic, Alain de Gourcuff, said of it, The overall effect is at once highly
decorative in a Middle Eastern way and projects state-of-the-art electronics.
Commissioned in 1981 as one of the first Grand Projects initiated by
President Francois Mitterand, IMA was completed in 1987 and consists of a
museum, a library, temporary exhibit spaces, childrens workshops, a
documentation center, an auditorium and a rooftop restaurant. A+U
described the building as a modern western building that pays tribute to
Arabic culture.
The Arab World Institute is just one of more than two hundred projects by
Jean Nouvel that the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury has singled out in its
formal citation.
The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota is another of the projects
mentioned in the citation. The Pritzker Jury says of the Guthrie, The iconic
Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota both merges and contrasts with
its surroundings. It is responsive to the city and the nearby Mississippi River,
and yet, it is also an expression of theatricality and the magical world of
performance.
That theatricality is no accident. Nouvel has often compared his role as
architect to that of the film director. In an interview published in El Croquis
in 2002, he said, Everything is theatrical. I have worked for a long time as a
scenographer, even on social housing ... scenography is the relationship
between objects and matter that we want to display to somebody who is
watching. In effect, in every building there is a way of proving a three-
hundred-and-sixty degree view over the landscape, as in Lucerne. The use
of the word scenography doesnt bother me as long as it is used in the right
sense. In other interviews, he has often said that architecture and the
cinema are very close.
Architecture exists, like cinema, in a dimension of time and movement. One
thinks, conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences. To erect a
building is to predict and seek effects of contrast and linkage bound up with
the succession of spaces through which one passes, Nouvel explains.
The reference to Lucerne is to his Cultural and Conference Center completed
in 2000 in that Swiss city. Nouvel has described it as an example of the
principle of framing the landscape. It is a building on an exceptional site, by
the lake, facing the town. The entire town can be seen from the foyer.
The Lucerne Cultural and Conference Center along with the Cartier
Foundation in Paris are two more of Nouvels completed projects that the
Pritzker Jury mentions in their citation as making dematerialization
palpable. The citation calls attention to Nouvels Endless Tower, a 400-
meter-high structure for Paris intended to be the tallest building in Europe.
For the jury, that projects importance was the buildings skin, which
changed materials as it progressed upwardfrom granite to aluminum to
stainless steel to glassbecoming increasingly diaphanous before
disappearing into the sky.
Although that tower has never been realized, Nouvel has a project underway
in New York City, a mixed use tower next door to the Museum of Modern Art,
called Tour de Verre. It was also recently announced that he has designed a
high-rise condominium, Suncal Tower, for the Century City area of Los
Angeles.
In the book titled Jean Nouvel: Elements of Architecture, Conway Lloyd
Morgan writes, Nouvels buildings engage our interest through their
consistency of purpose, within the range of their visual or technical
complexities. Very often the sequence of impressions one of his buildings
createsfrom distance to detail, through the arrangement, proportions, and
linking of interior elements, in the handling of mass and faade, by the use
of color and lightworks in harmonious parallel with the purposes and
functions of the building: the qualities of commodity, firmness and delight
cited centuries ago by Vitruvius.
The Vitruvius reference was perhaps prophetic. It refers to Ten Books on
Architecture dedicated some 2000 years ago to the Roman Emperor
Augustus, which Henry Wotton in his 1624 treatise, The Elements of
Architecture, translated as: The end is to build well. Well-building hath
three conditions: commodity, firmness and delight. Those three words,
firmness, commodity and delight, are inscribed on the Pritzker Medal.
In his own words, Nouvel says, Critics have defined me as a conceptual
architect, that is, one who works more with words than with drawings. I
mistrust drawings as fixing things too early in the creative process, while
words liberate. I believe the architect is a man who says something ...

Jury Citation
Of the many phrases that might be used to describe the career of architect
Jean Nouvel, foremost are those that emphasize his courageous pursuit of
new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the
boundaries of the field. For over 30 years, Jean Nouvel has pushed
architectures discourse and praxis to new limits. His inquisitive and agile
mind propels him to take risks in each of his projects, which, regardless of
varying degrees of success, have greatly expanded the vocabulary of
contemporary architecture.
Since establishing his Paris-based practice in the 1970s, Nouvel has pushed
himself, as well as those around him, to consider new approaches to
conventional architectural problems. He is not interested in a unified
approach or accepted typologies. He likes ruptures of scale and form that
move the viewer from one aesthetic sensibility to another. I am glad if a
project can be ten thousand projects simultaneously, Nouvel has said.
The manipulation of light and of layers of transparency and opacity are
recurring themes in Nouvels work. His Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World
Institute), built in Paris 1987, was designed with adjustable metal lenses
embedded in its south-facing glass faade to control light to the interior, a
modern twist on traditional Arab latticework. His Tour Sans Fins (Endless
Tower) was selected as the winning entry of a 1989 competition to construct
a skyscraper in the La Defense area near Paris. More important than the
height of the proposed 400meter high structure, intended, at the time, to
be the tallest tower in Europe, was the buildings skin, which changed
materials as it progressed upwardfrom granite to aluminum to stainless
steel to glassbecoming increasingly diaphanous before disappearing into
the sky. Here, as with the KKL Luzern (Cultural and Conference Center) of
2000 in Lucerne and the Fondation Cartier pour lart Contemporain (Cartier
Foundation for Contemporary Art) of 1994 in Paris, dematerialization is
made palpable.
For Nouvel, in architecture there is no style a priori. Rather, context,
interpreted in the broadest sense to include culture, location, program, and
client, provokes him to develop a different strategy for each project. The
iconic Guthrie Theater (2006) in Minneapolis, Minnesota both merges and
contrasts with its surroundings. It is responsive to the city and the nearby
Mississippi River, and yet, it is also an expression of theatricality and the
magical world of performance.
In his recently completed Muse du Quai Branly (Quai Branly Museum) for
Pariss significant collection of indigenous art of Africa, Oceania, Asia, and
the Americas, Nouvel designed a bold, unorthodox building with unusual
spaces in which objects are displayedand understoodin new ways. Many
of the materials used in the interiors, including wall and ceiling decorations
by native artists, evoke the countries of their origin.
We, as a jury, recognize that architecture is a field of many challenges and
complexities and that the career of an architect does not always follow a
linear path. In the case of Jean Nouvel, we particularly admire the spirit of
the journeypersistence, imagination, exuberance, and, above all, an
insatiable urge for creative experimentationqualities that are abundant in
the work of the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate.

Essay
Jean Nouvel: The Allure of Modernity
By Stefano Casciani
Author, critic and Deputy Editor of Domus
Even a critic who is entirely enamoured with architecture, and the last great
modern utopia that it pursuedto truly help its intended users to live a
better lifecannot pretend to ignore his beloveds defects. This social
Sleeping Beauty has finally succumbed to the fleeting and superficial
dimension that defines all of mans actionspsychological and concrete
beginning with the most intimate spaces of dwelling and arriving at the
unsettling scale of the city, which simultaneously exposes individuals and
their associations, positive and negative, for better or worse. Of the many
definitions of contemporary civilization, from which the city derives its
name, the most appropriate now seems to be that of the liquid modernity
defined by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman: a modernity centred on the
economy and its fluctuations, where people and spaces are akin to islands in
a river. However, these islands are necessarily mobile and neither
interpersonal relationships, forms of expression (a sublimated variation of
this type of relationship), and perhaps even structures, buildings included,
are able to assume stable configurations. In a society where loyalty, the
attachment to a person, an ideology or even a genre or style of
architecture may be seen as dangerously negative, coherencebe it
existential, artistic or design-basedhas become a serious weakness,
capable of undermining the system of power that we are constantly obliged
to construct and modify to ensure our own salvation, and perhaps that of
those most dear to us. Long gone is the time when modernist architects and
designers, not the dreamers, but rather the concrete utopians, sought to
configure the space of dwelling as dynamic and mobile, undoubtedly flexible
and, at the same time, faithful to the choice of a new architecture as a
lifestyle. The future is now and the utopias of the 20th century are capable,
at best, of generating nostalgia as we perpetrate a system in which
merchandise continuously attempts to surpass expression. This system may
have succeeded had it not been for the existence of artists such as Jean
Nouvel.
Utopia and Destiny
Nouvel is the most important contemporary architect to have survived the
period of modernism, inhaling and becoming slightly intoxicated by the last
vapours of the Modern Movement before definitively sublimating them into a
new and painful understanding of the objective limits of reality. The latter is
much faster and more imposing and pervasive than design, any form of
design. This human condition, which we can call post-modern, where real
destiny prevails over its ideal utopian counterpart, could not have hoped for
a better architect as its present day representative. In the face of the
sophisticated intellectualism of many of his peers and colleagueswho
often produce bizarre buildings with an unfinished nature that results from
their uncertain existence as form or meaningNouvel appears to move with
the natural elegance of an acrobat, walking the unstable tightrope that
unites the two extremes of the dilemma faced by any contemporary
architect or builder: real or virtual?

Almost obliged by the digital evolution of the tools of the trade (capable of
producing images and structures once unthinkable) to generate
progressively more unusual forms, architecture is now forced to use its
image to compete against the immense universe of new media, where
thousands of other parallel worldsfrom reality shows to Second Life
condition the existence, culture and lifestyle of millions of people, in many
cases, more than any work of architecture.
Similar to a mantra to be recited during this acrobatic competition, Nouvel
appears to have captured one of John Lennons aphorisms: Life is what
happens to you while youre busy making other plans. It is precisely what
happens outside of any program or plan that Nouvel believes to be the
responsibility of architecture: When presenting the enormous complexity of
the projects that he has designed and continues to design and the necessity
of dealing with the real conditions of the city and its spaces, he does not rail
against its unhappy and ungrateful inhabitants or curse the mythological
figure of the European or global City and its unavoidable reproach of the
ultimatum and opposition between center/periphery, ancient/contemporary,
beautiful/ugly, hi/low or sprawl/monument. Nouvel prefers instead to
present the image of the built and the buildable based on principles that are
more ethical than aesthetical, more pedagogical than economic, making
architecture and its mutations appear even to those incapable of
understanding it, either because they have no need to make the effort or
simply because they inhabit it each day as an urban or rural dweller,
optimist or pessimist, enthusiastic or worried, perhaps indifferent to what, in
many cases, may seem to be simple formal exercises in academic
architecture even when concealed behind the mask of contemporary
language.
Undoubtedly even this attempt by Nouvel to overcome the division between
the intellectual/inventor and the profane/consumercreating projects that
also speak for the observer and the useris just one of the many
unavoidable paradoxes of the work of any artist. The buildings that he
designs and builds are also a triumph of form, or better yet, of forms.
Nevertheless, for Nouvel this does not seem to be an end in and of itself.
Even more paradoxically, notwithstanding the infinite possibilities of
materials, treatments, techniques, maquillage and metamorphoses of
construction, Nouvel chooses only those solutions that allow him to create
buildings in which reality manages to surpass itself, where the final result
describes another world that is infinite and without restrictions, obligations
or confines: the world of imagination.
More than an architect, Nouvel is perhaps best defined as an experimental
philosopher of construction. He is capable of overcoming dichotomies,
impossible to resolve for a simple designer, based on the strength of a
visiona visionary approachthat results from a politically oriented
artistic education marked by the concrete utopian ideal of restoring the
twofold nature of architecture as both art and concrete social action ...

Ceremony
The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
The Library of Congress building, today known as the Thomas Jefferson
Building, was opened in 1897 and touted as "the largest, the costliest, and
the safest" library building in the world and a national temple to the arts.
In response to the rapid and substantial growth of the holdings and mission
of the Library, a competition for the design of a new Library building was
held in 1873. After many proposals and much controversy, construction of a
new Library building was authorized in 1886, using designs inspired by the
Italian Renaiassance prepared by Washington architects John L. Smithmeyer
and Paul J. Pelz. Others later involved in the design and construction
included General Thomas Lincoln Casey, chief of the Army Corps of
Engineers, his chief assistant Bernard R. Green, and beginning in 1892, his
son, Edward Pearce Casey, who supervised the interior work and its
elaborate decoration.

Striking architectural features of this Beaux-Arts building include the double

staircase rising to the arcaded entrance, the pairs of giant columns
supporting the portico, and the dome of copper crowning the building. The
scale of the Library matched that of the largest libraries in Europe of its
time.
The 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize used the Great Hall for much of the
celebration. This space, constructed of white Italian marble, rises 75 feet
high. Two grand staircases flank the hall and lead to the upper level where
the dinner was held. The colorful interior decoration, undertaken by
numerous American painters and sculptors, is akin to the ornate and
classically inspired decoration used at the Great White Citythe
Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Jean Nouvel
My speech seems too long and a bit strange but tradition needs to be
respected. My two friends Frank and Renzo explained to me that every year
they have to check and approve the acceptance speech of the laureate.
They cancelled part, modified and added others but I appreciate that they
kept some of my original ideas ...
As 2008s laureate I would like to thank you, Mrs. Cindy Pritzker, for your
warmth in welcoming me to the foundation you created with your husband
Jay Pritzker. I would also like to thank you Margot and Tom Pritzker for the
Foundation that has allowed architecture to take its luminous place in
todays culture.
Thank you to the members of the jury for acknowledging, or rather
identifying me, and for understanding that, behind the man with a hundred
different facesthere is only one architect. I would like to thank Frank Gehry
for always putting forward and supporting my candidacy too early and for
too long, and for being eventually proven right today. Many thanks to all of
you for attending the thirty-year anniversary celebrations, here in
Washington.
Well, here I am before you tonight. I know why: lets make it clear: I am mad,
mad about architecture ... But, I suspect many of my friends and heroes who
have preceded me on this stage suffer from the same affliction. But me, I
am here by mistake. My parents, both teachers wanted me to become a
teacher. I wanted to be a visual artist, a painter. My parents were against
this, considering it too risky. A compromise was called for: I began studying
architecture at lEcole des Beaux Arts with the intention to go back to visual
arts as soon as possible ... but passion came in the way. Very early on, I
started working for Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, the former enthralled me,
and the latter enrolled me. I became an architect. It is the reason why I am
here tonight. My father is a doctor in history and geography, and lives with
my mother in the Perigord region of France. They taught me to look, to read,
to think and to express what I think. I am grateful to them for my presence
here tonight, as much as I am indebted to them for my ability to question
teaching at the Beaux Arts, and projects with no sense of context. It was
because of them that I criticized international style, and the first universal
models that were imposed on cities across the main continents. And they
are also the reason why I handed in a typewritten architectural project
instead of the large drawings expected of me, and stayed for six months
more at the school.
That is also why I was curious enough to start reading Michel Foucault. He is
probably the greatest skeptic of our times, believing only in the truth that
lies in myriad historical facts, not in ideologies. The theorist of dispersion
and singularity, an empirical anthropologist, his work is rooted in critique.
Thank you Michel Foucault, you are also a reason why I am here tonight. It is
also because of you that, towards the end of the seventies, I exposed
ideologies in architecture with a capital A as irrelevant, and wrote the text
The future of architecture is not Architectural. It denied the idea that
architecture was an autonomous discipline, and asserted the need to look
outside the architectural field for the future of architecture. That is why I am
here tonight, to hear from the jury that I may have contributed to the
widening of this field.

I completed many projects at that time, lost many competitions, and used
each project to draw up formative rules; I listed what should be done, and I
listed what should not be done. The best way to resolve contradictions
might be brainstorming meetings. I decided to surround myself with
advisers: Jacques Le Marquet, stage-designer and author, Olivier Boissire,
architecture critic and writer, Hubert Tonka, philosopher and publisher and
Jos Miguel Iribas, sociologist. Thanks to these teams, these advisers,
difficult syntheses came to life; my projects followed one after the other,
always different. In no way they were the same: the method in itself calls for
singularity. Thanks to them, my advisers.
It is because no two projects have resembled one another, and never will
do, that I am here tonight. For each project, each achievement, I looked at
the poetics of the situation. I read Gilles Deleuze, and tried to determine
through displacementwhat a concept in architecture would be. I met with
Jean Baudrillard and, fatally, did come across the pitfalls of fatality. In the
early nineties, I gave a lecture at the Pompidou centre, After the
architectural mists have cleared. It acknowledged the necessary
acceptance of urban chaos on a planetary scale, the scale of the nebulous
urban sprawl, that new historical and geographical layer encompassing the
area around cities. It was the discovery of a new poetics for tracks,
punctuated landscapes, networks and lights. It was a time of friendship with
Wim Wenders, the realization that architecture, whatever the scale, could
only, from then onwards, be modification, mutation. I now think in terms of
the planet as a whole. I combine an outside and an inside perspective on the
cities I work in. That is why I am here tonight.
An exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, which later toured Europe and Japan,
was an opportunity for me to show the virtues of situational, contextual
architecture, also as a moment of culture frozen in time. But the galloping
globalization, discouraged me and then, came the emotional shock caused
by the architecture of the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. Once again, I
decided to speak out, express my opposition and put forward ideas.
For me, here was the living proof of a forgotten truth: architecture has the
power to transcend. It can reveal geographies, histories, colors, qualities of
light. Impertinent and natural, it is in the world. It lives. It is unique. It is a
microcosm, a bubble. It is an expansion of our world at a time when that
world is getting smaller ...

Ceremony Speech
Martha Thorne
Executive Director
The Pritzker Architecture Prize
Good evening. As executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, I'd like
to extend a very cordial and warm welcome to the Pritzker family, Pritzker
laureates, past and present, Pritzker jury members, ladies and gentlemen,
distinguished guests. Thank you very much for attending this, the 30th
celebration of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Tonight we honor the work and contributions of Jean Nouvel, but it is also an
opportunity to look back at some of the rich history of the Prize. This is the
sixth time that the ceremony has been held in Washington, D.C. It's
noteworthy to recall that the very first Pritzker Prize ceremony honoring
Philip Johnson was held here in Washington at Dumbarton Oaks, as was the
second. The third year was celebrated at the National Building Museum. The
1984 ceremony took place at the National Gallery of Art, and the 20th
anniversary was also held here in Washington at the White House when
Renzo Piano received the award. So, it is significant that on this occasion,
this momentous occasion of the 30th year, the ceremony should come back
to that city where was it first celebrated. At that ceremony, Cesar Pelli,
representing the jury, spoke some words (and Cesar, if youre here, perhaps
you will remember them). He said, I think it's a very important occasion for
architecture. Im particularly moved to be here. I think it is very appropriate
that architecture, the mother of all the arts, be honored with this award,
with which we are celebrating at that time, the first annual award. This is
thanks to the generosity of the Pritzker family. I would like to echo those
words and say it is an honor and a privilege to be here and it is quite
astounding and quite wonderful that this is the 30th year. And once again, it
is thanks to the generosity of the Pritzker family.
In 1987, Jay Pritzker spoke, as was the custom at the ceremony, and he said,
again, words that are perhaps worth recalling tonight. He said that, In the
few years since we began the Prize, we've been delighted to see it achieve
the stature it has, but a prize, any prize can only be as great as it is by
virtue of the people it honors and those who are capable of selecting the
honorees. Over its 30 years, Pritzker Laureates have shown great diversity
in their approaches to architecture. Certainly diversity can be seen in the
buildings they've designed, the countries from which they hail. However, all
of the laureates reflect the highest qualities of the profession and excellence
in architecture. And with us tonight, we have several past laureates present
who are certainly worth recognizing once again and again and again. We
have Kevin Roche, Hans Hollein, Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano,
Zaha Hadid, Thom Mayne, and Richard Rogers.
The Pritzker Prize was originally established to annually honor a living
architect 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. I think that you'll agree with me that the prize has done
that admirably, while it has also fostered other goals: of recognizing the
importance and commitment of the profession of architecture as a whole; of
encouraging the discussion and debate about architecture in many spheres;
and last but not least, by providing a yearly venue in an outstanding site
such as this, where we gather for a wonderful evening in the spirit of
cordiality and of celebration. With that, I would like to introduce our second
speaker, Jeremy Adamson, Director of Collections and Services of the Library
of Congress. Thank you.

Peter Zumthor
2009 Laureate

Selected Works:
Protective Housing for Roman Excavations, Chur, Graubnden, Switzerland,
1986
Zumthor Studio, Haldenstein, Graubnden, Switzerland, 1986
Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Graubnden, Switzerland, 1988
Homes for Senior Citizens, Chur, Masans, Graubnden, Switzerland, 1993
Thermal Bath Vals, Graubnden, Switzerland, 1996
Spittelhof Estate, Biel-Benken, Baselland, Switzerland, 1996
Kunsthaus Bregenz, Vorarlgerger Landesgalerie, Bregenz, Austria, 1997
Swiss Sound Box, Swiss Pavilion, Expo 2000, Hanover, Germany 2000
Brother Klaus Field Chapel, Wachendorf, Eifel, Germany, 2007

Announcement
Peter Zumthor of Switzerland Becomes the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureate
Los Angeles, CAPeter Zumthor of Switzerland has been chosen as the
2009 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The formal ceremony for
what has come to be known throughout the world as architectures highest
honor will be held on May 29 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At that time, a
$100,000 grant and a bronze medallion will be bestowed on the 65-year old
architect.
Although most of his work is in Switzerland, he has designed projects in
Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, England, Spain, Norway, Finland and the
United States. His most famous work is in Vals, Switzerlandthe Thermal
Baths, which has been referred to by the press as his masterpiece. Most
recently critics have praised his Field Chapel to Saint Nikolaus von der Fle
near Cologne, Germany. The jury singled out not only those buildings, but
also the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, calling the latter a startling
contemporary work, but also one that is completely at ease with its many
layers of history.
In announcing the jurys choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt
Foundation, quoted from the jury citation, Peter Zumthor is a master
architect admired by his colleagues around the world for work that is
focused, uncompromising and exceptionally determined. And he added, All
of Peter Zumthors buildings have a strong, timeless presence. He has a rare
talent of combining clear and rigorous thought with a truly poetic dimension,
resulting in works that never cease to inspire.
In Zumthors own words as expressed in his book, Thinking Architecture, I
believe that architecture today needs to reflect on the tasks and possibilities
which are inherently its own. Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for
things that do not belong to its essence. In a society that celebrates the
inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of
forms and meanings, and speak its own language. I believe that the
language of architecture is not a question of a specific style. Every building
is built for a specific use in a specific place and for a specific society. My
buildings try to answer the questions that emerge from these simple facts
as precisely and critically as they can.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, The Lord Palumbo elaborated with more of the
citation: Zumthor has a keen ability to create places that are much more
than a single building. His architecture expresses respect for the primacy of
the site, the legacy of a local culture and the invaluable lessons of
architectural history. He continued, In Zumthors skillful hands, like those
of the consummate craftsman, materials from cedar shingles to sandblasted
glass are used in a way that celebrates their own unique qualities, all in the
service of an architecture of permanence.

The Zumthor choice marks the second time in three decades of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize that Switzerland has provided the laureate. In 2001,
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were the honorees.
The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize is to honor annually a living
architect 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.
The distinguished jury that selected Zumthor as the 2009 Laureate consists
of its chairman, Lord Palumbo, internationally known architectural patron of
London, chairman of the trustees, Serpentine Gallery, former chairman of
the Arts Council of Great Britain, former chairman of the Tate Gallery
Foundation, and former trustee of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York; and alphabetically: Alejandro Aravena,
architect and executive director of Elemental in Santiago, Chile; Shigeru
Ban, architect and professor at Keio University, Tokyo, Japan; Rolf Fehlbaum,
chairman of the board, Vitra in Basel, Switzerland; Carlos Jimenez, professor,
Rice University School of Architecture, principal, Carlos Jimenez Studio in
Houston, Texas; Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, professor and author of
Helsinki, Finland; Renzo Piano, architect and Pritzker Laureate, of Paris,
France and Genoa, Italy; and Karen Stein, writer, editor and architectural
consultant in New York. Martha Thorne, asssociate dean for external
relations, IE School of Architecture, Madrid, Spain, is executive director.
There have been two Pritzker Prize Laureates from South America, but we
have never held the ceremony there, explained Pritzker. The first was
Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil in 1988, and then another Brazilian in 2006, Paulo
Mendes da Rocha. We held their ceremonies in Chicago and Istanbul
respectively. The venues change every year, moving around the world
focusing on historic and architecturally significant sites. Weve held
ceremoies in Asia, Europe and North America, including Mexico, so it is time
to visit South America.
The late Philip Johnson was the first Pritzker Laureate in 1979. The late Luis
Barragn of Mexico was named in 1980. The late James Stirling of the United
Kingdom was elected in 1981, Kevin Roche in 1982, Ieoh Ming Pei in 1983,
and Richard Meier in 1984. Hans Hollein of Austria was the 1985 Laureate.
Gottfried Bhm of Germany received the prize in 1986. The late Kenzo Tange
was the first Japanese architect to receive the prize in 1987; Fumihiko Maki
was the second from Japan in 1993; and Tadao Ando the third in 1995.
Robert Venturi received the honor in 1991, and Alvaro Siza of Portugal in
1992. Christian de Portzamparc of France was elected Pritzker Laureate in
1994. The late Gordon Bunshaft of the United States and Oscar Niemeyer of
Brazil, were named in 1988. Frank Gehry of the United States was the
recipient in 1989, the late Aldo Rossi of Italy in 1990. In 1996, Rafael Moneo
of Spain was the Laureate; in 1997 the late Sverre Fehn of Norway; in 1998
Renzo Piano of Italy, in 1999 Sir Norman Foster of the UK, and in 2000, Rem
Koolhaas of the Netherlands. In 2001, two architects from Switzerland
received the honor: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Australian Glenn
Murcutt received the prize in 2002. The late Jrn Utzon of Denmark was
honored in 2003; Zaha Hadid of the UK in 2004; and Thom Mayne of the
United States in 2005. Paulo Mendes da Rocha of Brazil was the Laureate in
2006, and Richard Rogers received the prize in 2007. Jean Nouvel of France
was the Laureate last year.
The field of architecture was chosen by the Pritzker family because of their
keen interest in building due to their involvement with developing the Hyatt
Hotels around the world; also because architecture was a creative endeavor
not included in the Nobel Prizes. The procedures were modeled after the
Nobels, with the final selection being made by the international jury with all
deliberations and voting in secret. Nominations are continuous from year to
year with hundreds of nominees from countries all around the world being
considered each year.

Biography
Peter Zumthor was born on April 26, 1943, the son of a cabinet maker,
Oscar Zumthor, in Basel, Switzerland. He trained as a cabinet maker from
1958 to 1962. From 1963-67, he studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Vorkurs
and Fachklasse with further studies in design at Pratt Institute in New York.
In 1967, he was employed by the Canton of Graubnden (Switzerland) in the
Department for the Preservation of Monuments working as a building and
planning consultant and architectural analyst of historical villages, in
addition to realizing some restorations. He established his own practice in
1979 in Haldenstein, Switzerland where he still works with a small staff of
fifteen. Zumthor is married to Annalisa Zumthor-Cuorad. They have three
children, all adults, Anna Katharina, Peter Conradin, and Jon Paulin, and two
grandchildren.
Since 1996, he has been a professor at the Academy of Architecture,
Universit della Svizzera Italiana, Mendrisio. He has also been a visiting
professor at the University of Southern California Institute of Architecture
and SCI-ARC in Los Angeles in 1988; at the Technische Universitt, Munich in
1989; and at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University in 1999.
His many awards include the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art
Association in 2008 as well as the Carlsberg Architecture Prize in Denmark in
1998, and the Mies van der Rohe Award for European Architecture in 1999.
In 2006, he received the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture
from the University of Virginia. The American Academy of Arts and Letters
bestowed the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture in 2008.
In the recent book published by Barrons Educational Series, Inc. titled,
Architectura, Elements of Architectural Style, with the distinguished
architectural historian from Australia, Professor Miles Lewis, as general
editor, the Zumthors Thermal Bath building at Vals is described as a
superb example of simple detailing that is used to create highly atmospheric
spaces. The design contrasts cool, gray stone walls with the warmth of
bronze railings, and light and water are employed to sculpt the spaces. The
horizontal joints of the stonework mimic the horizontal lines of the water,
and there is a subtle change in the texture of the stone at the waterline.
Skylights inserted into narrow slots in the ceiling create a dramatic line of
light that accentuates the fluidity of the water. Every detail of the building
thus reinforces the importance of the bath on a variety of levels.
In the book titled Thinking Architecture, first published by Birkhauser in
1998, Zumthor set down in his own words a philosophy of architecture. One
sample of his thoughts is as follows: I believe that architecture today needs
to reflect on the tasks and possibilities which are inherently its own.
Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its
essence. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up
a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings, and speak its
own language. I believe that the language of architecture is not a question
of a specific style. Every building is built for a specific use in a specific place
and for a specific society. My buildings try to answer the questions that
emerge from these simple facts as precisely and critically as they can.

Jury Citation

Peter Zumthor is a master architect admired by his colleagues around the

world for work that is focused, uncompromising and exceptionally
determined. He has conceived his method of practice almost as carefully as
each of his projects. For 30 years, he has been based in the remote village
of Haldenstein in the Swiss mountains, removed from the flurry of activity of
the international architectural scene. There, together with a small team, he
develops buildings of great integrityuntouched by fad or fashion. Declining
a majority of the commissions that come his way, he only accepts a project
if he feels a deep affinity for its program, and from the moment of
commitment, his devotion is complete, overseeing the projects realization
to the very last detail.

His buildings have a commanding presence, yet they prove the power of
judicious intervention, showing us again and again that modesty in
approach and boldness in overall result are not mutually exclusive. Humility
resides alongside strength. While some have called his architecture quiet,
his buildings masterfully assert their presence, engaging many of our
senses, not just our sight but also our senses of touch, hearing and smell.
Zumthor has a keen ability to create places that are much more than a
single building. His architecture expresses respect for the primacy of the
site, the legacy of a local culture and the invaluable lessons of architectural
history. The Kolumba Museum in Cologne, for example, is not only a startling
contemporary work but also one that is completely at ease with its many
layers of history. Here, Zumthor has produced a building that emerges from
the remains of a bombed church in the most inevitable and lyrical of ways,
intertwining place and memory in an entirely new palimpsest. This has
always been the compelling character of this architects work, from the
singular yet universal breath of faith inscribed in the tiny field chapel in the
village of Wachendorf, Germany, to the mineral mist in the thermal baths at
Vals, Switzerland. For him, the role of the architect is not just to construct a
fixed object but also to anticipate and choreograph the experience of
moving through and around a building.
In Zumthors skillful hands, like those of the consummate craftsman,
materials from cedar shingles to sandblasted glass are used in a way that
celebrates their own unique qualities, all in the service of an architecture of
permanence. The same penetrating vision and subtle poetry are evident in
his writings as well, which, like his portfolio of buildings, have inspired
generations of students. In paring down architecture to its barest yet most
sumptuous essentials, he has reaffirmed architectures indispensable place
in a fragile world. For all of these reasons, Peter Zumthor is the recipient of
the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Essay
Earthworks: The Architecture of Peter Zumthor
By Philip Ursprung
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Zrich
More than the legendary episode at the beginning of Marcel Proust's novel
Remembrance of Things Pastwhen the narrator dips a madeleine into a
cup of tea and experiences a flashback to his childhoodwas always
intrigued by another, less-known episode at the end of the novel. Namely,
the moment when the narrator gives way to an approaching carriage in a
courtyard in Paris, steps back, and stumbles against some unevenly placed
paving stones. He remains there, repeating the movement, one foot upon
the higher flagstone and the other on the lower. He tries to figure out what
this movement reminds him of, while the passers-by watch him with
amusement. Eventually, he recalls the same sensation he had many years
ago and is overwhelmed with happiness: It was Venice. The occurrence in
the courtyard evoked the feeling he had experienced as he stood on two
uneven stones in the baptistery of St. Marks. What Proust describesthe
tactile sensation of the uneven ground under his slow moving feetis
intrinsically connected to what Maurice Halbwachs described as spatial
memory. And this spatial memory, I would argue, is a crucial component of
the architectural experience.
Peter Zumthor is among those architects who consider more than just the
visual aspects of a project. For him, it is not only important how a floor, stair,
wall, room or faade look, but also how they feel when one touches them
with his or her finger tips, how they smell, how they resonate and sound,
and what kind of associations, mental images, expectations and memories
they evoke. His buildings always revolve around the relationship between
the human body and its environment, and the way the individual subject
experiences very specific situations. However, it took me some time to
realize this. Until recently, I had a very clear yet narrow image of his
architecture. I had much respect for the beauty and atmospheric effects of
his buildings. I admired the calm and steady pace with which his small team
produced projects, uninterested in expansion and spending more inventive
energy on seemingly marginal projects than many international architects
invest in spectacular skyscrapers. Nevertheless, I could not subscribe to
Zumthors idea of authenticity, his anachronistic conception of nature, and
his romantic impulse that I felt pervaded his oeuvre. Although I had visited
some of his buildings, my image of his work was mainly influenced by
photographs, especially those of the Saint Benedict Chapel (1987) in
Sumvitg in the Swiss Alps, taken by the Swiss photographer Hans Danuser in
the late 1980s. Danusers interpretation, depicting the chapel in misty black
and white photographs, had shaped my image of Zumthor as an
earthbound, quasi-romantic architect, working far from urban centers in the
remoteness of an untouched landscape.
Then, in early 2004, I went to visit Saint Benedict Chapel. I walked through
the tiny hamlet above Sumvitg, passing farmhouses, stables and vacation
homes. A narrow gravel road leads up to the chapel. The effort of walking
uphill, the crunching gravel under my shoes, the smell of fresh pines in the
nearby forest, and the arrangement of the small stables and vacation
houses shaped my perspective. I was waiting for my mental image of a
remote chapel hovering in the sublime Alpine landscape to materialize. Then
suddenly the building appeared before me, much smaller and much more
elegant than expected. The shingle surface of the outer skin was burned
black by the sun, just as the stables and wooden huts in the area. The few,
narrow concrete steps that led to the door of the chapel felt not only firmer
than the gravel road but also more comfortable. After the ascent on the
rough path, the steps to the chapel required no effort. My impression was
not so much to ascend the steps but to descend toward the chapel. My
strenuous walking turned into relaxed striding. My movements became
more measured, more rhythmically structured, more focused. They became
appropriate to the building, so to speak. I immediately remembered the
episode by Proust, and I recalled various moments when one or two steps
had led to a radical shift of my spatial experience. Almost automatically, my
hand followed the thin metal handrail the way one holds onto a gangway
before boarding a ship. I was now facing the door panel made from vertical
wooden laths. It appeared lighter and more welcoming than the usual
massive doors barring church entrances, but I had a brief moment of
hesitation. Will the chapel be locked? Did I make the long journey in vain?
Then the door swung open, almost by itself. The unexpectedly long and
narrow doorknob, which increased the leverage and lay in the hand like a
comfortable tool, facilitated the entry further. From the very beginning, I was
already involved in the chapels spatiality. I became part of choreography of
everyday movements and gestures. I was neither impressed nor dwarfed by
the building. On the contrary, it made me pay attention because of its
fragility. The details of the building subtly guided the way I moved and
helped me become familiar with the environment. Later, Peter Zumthor told
me that he always developed his spaces from a bodily experience and "a
feeling for the body, for a physical presence, or a certain aura" motivated
the design process ...

Ceremony

Legislative Palace of the City of Buenos Aires

By the first decades of the 20th century, Argentina ranked among the
richest countries in the world. This amazing progress was set in motion by
the Generation of the 80s, statesmen determined to build a replica of
modern Europe in Argentina with Buenos Aires symbolizing this dream. It's
not surprising that many of the buildings constructed in Argentina during
the last decades of the 19th century and in the early 20th century looked to
European models for inspiration. The Legislative Palace in the city of Buenos
Aires is but one example. Designed by Hctor Ayerza (1893-1949), who
trained in Buenos Aires and France, it was built between 1927 and 1931 in
Louis XIV neoclassical style. The heart of the building is the Sessions
Chambers and its many sumptuous salons. The Salon Dorado (Golden
Salon), inspired by the Palace of Versailles and specifically the Gallery of
Mirrors, is perhaps the most famous of these salons.
The building, with its triangular plan, is recognized from a distance by its
approximately 310-foot (95 meters) clock tower. There are five large bells
associated with the clock and a carillon of 30 bells, each with a distinct tone
for more complex music. The main part of the building, consisting of a
ground floor and five stories, is a rich composition of many traditional
architectural elements. Soaring Corinthian columns mark the entrance, and
at the top floor, the exterior of the building is decorated with 26 statues
representing such concepts as the city, social order, justice, vigilance, and
many other themes associated with knowledge and industry, such as music,
history, commerce, and agriculture.
The official ceremony for the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize is held in this
landmark.
Palacio San Martin
Originally the Palacio Anchorena, Palacio San Martin was purchased by the
Ministry of Foreign Relations in 1936 and named in honor of Jos de San
Martn, the leader of the independence of Argentina. Designed in 1906 by
architect Alejandro Christophersen (1866-1946), it was conceived as a
hotel particular, containing three residences organized around a central
patio. The architecture, as in many residences of wealthy Argentine families
at that time, is historicist eclecticism, and in the early years of the 20th
century, the influence was clearly French. It combines organizational
elements of classicism along with the lyricism of Art Nouveau. The architect,
whose father was in the Norwegian diplomatic corps, was born in Spain,
trained in Paris and Antwerp, and settled in Argentina soon after completing
his studies. In an almost sculptural way, the Palacio combines convex
mansards, cupolas, chimneys, columns, and balconies. The central patio or
cour dhoneur has an impressive double staircase that led to the individual
residences. In addition to the famous Palacio San Martin, Alejandro
Christophersen designed other notable residences, hotels, banks, and
offices and is also known for his paintings, teaching, and writings.
The Palacio San Martin is the site of the 2009 Pritzker Architecture Prize
celebratory dinner.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Peter Zumthor
Thank you. Its a wonderful moment, of course, to get such a prize. There
was a journalist, a couple of weeks ago back in Switzerland, asking me:
Now that youre getting the biggest prize in architecture, will this change
your life? Then I said, Of course not. And then I added, Maybe, I dont
know. Maybe something will change, but I would like to say it wouldnt. So,
Im a little bit older nowa couple of weeks olderand something has
changed a little bit. Let me try to explain.
As you just heard, when I was a boy, there was no architecture. There were
architects. Some of them my father liked, some of them he didnt like. But
architecture didnt exist. Only later looking back I asked myself, was there
architecture in my life? At first I thought, I dont see anything. Perhaps just
our house But architecture? A school? I grew up in a village, in a town five
kilometers outside of the city of Basel. So, I looked around, and there was
not much. Keep in mind that this is me later looking back. And then all of a
sudden, one Saturday evening, we took the little train and went to the
movies. Then I started to remember there were all these movie theatres in
the streets, and they had a beautiful kind of feeling. They had a beautiful
feeling when you got in. There was a really marvelous world of kitsch, really
marvelous. And when you went down to the bathroom, the colors were
yellow and black. And then all of a sudden, I realized there were this and
that, and the balustrades, which had polka dotspolka dot kind of holes
and so on. So, I imagined that this must have been architecture. It was
something special. And then later, I remembered that once a year we went
to a monastery, a baroque church, nearby. And there were monks singing
Gregorian chants in this beautiful Baroque church. Architecture. And then
this was the bestat the end of the service, the family always went down
into the rocks, and you came to a very small chapel built or excavated in the
rocks. There were a lot of candles and those typical smells and all these
things. Architecture! Architectural atmosphere! So, I was glad to discover it.
There are other things, of course. But I was glad to discover there was
architecture in my youth. I just didnt know it.
A little bit later10 years or 15 yearsall of a sudden I decided that I
wanted to become a real architect, which was sort of a lonely decision in the
kitchen. And I started to do my work. I started to enter competitions. I won a
competition. I did my first two buildings. The two buildings started to grow.
And I remembered at the time we looked at these two buildings, Annalisa
and I. I got really depressed. It was terrible. I saw the buildings, and I could
see the models of the buildings. This was terrible. I could hear the
architectural discussion of the time in my buildings. This was the last time
that this should happen to me. The last time that Im not being myself.
So what is this being myself? It is interesting that in these buildings, which
gave me this headache, heart ache, there were things I liked, such as things
that did not come from a magazine or from a discussion that I can talk about
with somebody. Rather, this is me! What is this me? Of course, I dont
know exactly. But I can try to explain a little about the process of what I feel
when this happens, when I have the feeling this is me. Maybe those of you
who play tennis, you know. You have to concentrate on the ball. If you start
to think just for a moment, Oh, my friend is looking at how I play, then you
are lost, right? You have to keep this total concentration on what you want
to do. This is one thing. The other thing is you have to be loose. Now, Im
talking about myself. I should say I have to be loose. I go to the place. I
listen to the client. I walk around. I hang around. Im not going to do
research.
When I start to do research, Im really bad. This I know from studying. No
research. You are just hanging out, listening, feeling, having the place
resonate a little bit. And then all of a sudden, ideas come naturally. I dont
know when and where. I think this is a very natural process. Everybodyall
of you, all of uswe experience this. And what I discovered was that when I
have these feelings, it is like being a boy again. All of a sudden, I think this
is me when I was 10 years or 12 years old. Im dreaming. Im there and
something comes to me, but its not, of course, nave dreaming. Everything,
which is part of my biography, is there. But its not there as a research
product or as reference material. It went into me, as part of my life. Then it
comes out from somewherefrom my emotions or whatever, my feelings.
So, Im at the same place as at the time when I experienced architecture as
a boy without knowing it. This is what I love. These beginnings, these
moments of the beginning. And then comes the really hard task when I have
to take care that nobody destroys my first image. Because, as you know,
were doing a job as architects. We are surrounded by politics, by laws, by
money, by clients who have weak moments, and all these things.
Sometimes people want to take away or harm my image, my baby. So, this
needs a little bit of persistence. Maybe thats where my reputation comes
from that Im a stubborn guy, which Im not, of course.
As I get older, I think I got some kind of a Im sort of secure that I can do
thisbe a boy, and in being a boy and dreaming, doing something. Then I
say, When I like it, you will like it, too, because Im not so special. Now
comes this moment when I get this prize. And I think now, and I start to feel
that dreaming becomes even easier. Maybe I can. You help me to go on
dreaming even stronger. Thank you.

Ceremony Speech
Martha Thorne
Executive Director
The Pritzker Architecture Prize
Good evening and welcome to the ceremony for the presentation of the
Pritzker Architecture Prize. It is the first time that this event is celebrated in
South America, and it is an honor to be in such a beautiful and friendly city
as Buenos Aires. I would like to extend special thanks to the Head of the
Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Mr. Mauricio Macri,
and the President of the Legislature, Mr. Diego Santilli, for all their support in
organizing this event and for hosting us in this building, which is a beautiful
setting for the ceremony.
As many of you know, the Pritzker Architecture Prize was founded in 1979
for the purpose of annually recognizing an architect for the exceptional
quality of his/her body of built work. The Prize has remained loyal to its
original objectives. This is a testimony to the vision and strength of the
initial ideas developed and fully supported by the generosity and dedication
of the Pritzker Family, and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Pritzker, who are with us
tonight.
I would like to briefly share with you some facts about the Pritzker Prize and
the reasons that it is such a special and internationally recognized prize.
Please allow me to changes languages and continue in English. (First part
spoken in Spanish.)
Each year since 1979, one architect or two, as was the case in 1988 and in
2001, have received the award. The youngest at the time of receiving it was
Richard Meier, who was 49 years old, followed by Christian Portzamparc, age
50. To respect the modesty of our laureates, I will not reveal who was the
oldest. They have come from 17 different countries and represent a rich
variety of approaches to architecture. Tonight we are honored to have with
us, representing the community of past laureates, Glenn Murcutt, the 2002
winner.
The high quality of the Prize is in large measure, undoubtedly due to the
independent jury. There were 19 past jury members who, in addition to the
eight current ones, have had the enormous responsibility to select a
laureate each year. Jorge Silvetti is here tonight representing the past jurors,
as is Bill Lacy, Executive Director and Secretary of Jury for some 18 years
until 2005. We are delighted that they are here and thank them once again
for their service and for getting the Prize off to such a good start.
The Prize is also special because of celebrations like these. Ceremonies have
been held all across the globe in historic sites as well as contemporary ones.
For example, from the Jerusalem Archeological Park representing thousands
of years of history and Todai-ji Temple originally founded in the eighth
century to two very contemporary sites that hosted the ceremony while
under constructionthe Getty Center and the Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao. All are selected for the outstanding quality of the place and the
possibility to experience the warmth and joy of the setting. I am certain that
Buenos Aires will be remembered as one of the most memorable sites in the
life of the Prize.
Tonight you will see that the 2009 laureate will receive a bronze medallion
commemorating the Prize. The first eight laureates received a Henry Moore
sculpture. Or, I believe that they did. The reason I say this is that during the
ceremony for Jim Stirling in 1981, the founder of the Prize, Jay Pritzker, much
to the chagrin of his wife, Cindy Pritzker, admitted that he had forgotten the
sculpture at home in Chicago, and Jim Stirling would have to wait for a
future date to receive it. Tom you have the medal and check, dont you?
Levity aside, I would just like to close by paraphrasing some words by a
former laureate Kevin Roche from 1982. When speaking at a ceremony such
as this about the enormous challenges faced by all those involved in the
making of architecture and those who seek to inspire, such as the Pritzker
Architecture Prize does, he said:
We should accept the responsibility to create our environment and use the
opportunity we have to lead and educate society into improving its habitat.
We should, all of us, bend our will to create a civilization in which we can live
at peace with nature and each other. To build well is an act of peace.
Now, it is my pleasure to turn the podium over to the Head of the
Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and Civil Engineer, Mr.
Mauricio Macri.

Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa

2010 Laureate

Selected Works:
O-Museum, Iida, Nagano, Japan, 1999
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa, Japan,
2004
Zollverein School of Management and Design, Essen, Germany, 2006
Glass Museum, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, 2006
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, New York, 2007
The Rolex Learning Center, Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne,
Switzerland, 2009

Announcement
Architectural Partners in Japan Become the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureates
Los Angeles, CAKazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, partners in the
architectural firm, SANAA, have been chosen as the 2010 Laureates of the
Pritzker Architecture Prize. The formal ceremony for what has come to be
known throughout the world as architectures highest honor will be held on
May 17 on historic Ellis Island in New York. At that time, a $100,000 grant
and bronze medallions will be bestowed on the two architects.
In announcing the jurys choice, Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt
Foundation, elaborated, This marks the third time in the history of the prize
that two architects have been named in the same year. The first was in 1988
when Oscar Niemeyer of Brazil and the late Gordon Bunshaft were so
honored, and the second was in 2001, when Jacques Herzog and Pierre de
Meuron, partners in a Swiss firm, were selected.
He continued, Japanese architects have been chosen three times in the
thirty year history of the Pritzker Architecture Prizethe first was the late
Kenzo Tange in 1987, then in 1993, Fumihiko Maki was selected, and in
1995, Tadao Ando was the honoree.
The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize is to honor annually a living
architect 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.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, The Lord Palumbo quoted from the jury citation
to focus on this years selection: For architecture that is simultaneously
delicate and powerful, precise and fluid, ingenious but not overly or overtly
clever; for the creation of buildings that successfully interact with their
contexts and the activities they contain, creating a sense of fullness and
experiential richness; for a singular architectural language that springs from
a collaborative process that is both unique and inspirational; for their
notable completed buildings and the promise of new projects together,
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa are the recipients of the 2010 Pritzker
Architecture Prize.
While most of their work is in Japan, Sejima and Nishizawa have designed
projects in Germany, England, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the
United States, under their combined name SANAA. The first SANAA project
in the United States began construction in 2004 in Ohioa Glass Pavilion for
the Toledo Museum of Art. Completed in 2006, it houses the museums vast
collection of glass artworks, reflecting the citys history when it was a major
center of glass production.
While that building was still under construction, the New Museum of New
York City broke ground in 2005 at 235 Bowery. Completed in 2007, the
building has been described as a sculptural stack of rectilinear boxes
dynamically shifted off-axis around a central steel core.
The jury citation specifically mentions these projects as well as two projects
in Japan: the O-Museum in Nagano and the 21st Century Muscum of
Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. The Ogasawara Museum was one of their
first projects together.

The De Kunstline Theater and Cultural Center in Almere, the Netherlands,

and a more recent Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne, Switzerland are also
major projects of SANAA. Other works in Japan include the Naoshima Ferry
Terminal and the Christian Dior Building in Tokyo.
In Essen, Germany, in 2006, the Zollverein School of Management and
Design was inaugurated in a new building designed by SANAA on an
historical coal mining site. The building is described as an oversized cube
(approximately 114 feet in each dimension) with an unusual arrangement of
openings and windows of four different sizes.
The Serpentine Pavilion in London, their first built project in the United
Kingdom, was in place for three months on the gallerys lawnthe ninth
such commission in the Serpentines series of pavilions. In France, a branch
of the Louvre Museum in Lens will comprise some 300,000 square feet of
construction.
In Valencia, Spain, SANAA provided a unique expansion solution to IVAM
(Valencian Institute of Modern Art) in which their existing building housing
eight galleries will be completely enclosed by a translucent skin covering an
entire block, and thus creating new indoor/outdoor public spaces between
the building and the skin. The proposed skin is a light weight perforated
metal that allows daylight, wind and rain to pass through. Construction has
not yet begun.
Both architects have extensive lists of completed works and projects as
individual architects.
Upon learning that she was being honored, Kazuyo Sejima had this reaction:
I am thrilled to receive such an honor. I would like to thank the Pritzker
foundation, the jury members, the clients who have worked with us, and all
of our collaborators. I have been exploring how I can make architecture that
feels open, which I feel is important for a new generation of architecture.
With this prize I will continue trying to make wonderful architecture.
And a similar reaction from Ryue Nishizawa: I receive this wonderful prize
with great humility. I am very honored and at the same time very surprised.
I receive and understand this prize as encouragement for our efforts. Every
time I finish a building I revel in possibilities and at the same time reflect on
what has happened. Each project becomes my motivation for the next new
project. In the same way this wonderful prize has given me a dynamic
energy that I have never felt before. I thank you very much.
The distinguished jury that selected the 2010 Laureates consists of its
chairman, Lord Palumbo, internationally known architectural patron of
London, chairman of the trustees, Serpentine Gallery, former chairman of
the Arts Council of Great Britain, former chairman of the Tate Gallery
Foundation, and former trustee of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York; and alphabetically: Alejandro Aravena,
architect and executive director of Elemental in Santiago, Chile; Rolf
Fehlbaum, chairman of the board of Vitra in Basel, Switzerland; Carlos
Jimenez, professor, Rice University School of Architecture, principal, Carlos
Jimenez Studio in Houston, Texas; Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, professor and
author of Helsinki, Finland; Renzo Piano, architect and Pritzker Laureate, of
Paris, France and Genoa, Italy; and Karen Stein, writer, editor and
architectural consultant in New York. Martha Thorne, associate dean for
external relations, IE School of Architecture, Madrid, Spain, is executive
director.
In addition to the previous laureates already mentioned, the late Philip
Johnson was the first Pritzker Laureate in 1979. The late Luis Barragn of
Mexico was named in 1980. The late James Stirling of the United Kingdom
was elected in 1981, Kevin Roche in 1982, Ieoh Ming Pei in 1983, and
Richard Meier in 1984. Hans Hollein of Austria was the 1985 Laureate.
Gottfried Bhm of Germany received the prize in 1986. Robert Venturi
received the honor in 1991, and Alvaro Siza of Portugal in 1992. Christian de
Portzamparc of France was elected Pritzker Laureate in 1994. Frank Gehry of
the United States was the recipient in 1989, the late Aldo Rossi of Italy in
1990. In 1996, Rafael Moneo of Spain was the Laureate; in 1997 the late
Sverre Fehn of Norway; in 1998 Renzo Piano of Italy, in 1999 Sir Norman
Foster of the UK, and in 2000, Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands. Australian
Glenn Murcutt received the prize in 2002. The late Jrn Utzon of Denmark
was honored in 2003; Zaha Hadid of the UK in 2004; and Thom Mayne of the
United States in 2005. Paulo Mendes da Rocha of Brazil was the Laureate in
2006, and Richard Rogers received the prize in 2007. Jean Nouvel of France
was the Laureate in 2008. Last year, Peter Zumthor of Switzerland received
the award.
The field of architecture was chosen by the Pritzker family because of their
keen interest in building due to their involvement with developing the Hyatt
Hotels around the world; also because architecture was a creative endeavor
not included in the Nobel Prizes. The procedures were modeled after the
Nobels, with the final selection being made by the international jury with all
deliberations and voting in secret. Nominations are continuous from year to
year with hundreds of nominees from countries all around the world being
considered each year.
Biography
In 1995, Kazuyo Sejima (born in 1956) and Ryue Nishizawa (born in 1966)
founded SANAA, the Tokyo architecture studio that has designed innovative
buildings in Japan and around the world. Examples of their, groundbreaking
work include, among others, the Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne,
Switzerland; the Toledo Museum of Art's Glass Pavilion in Toledo, Ohio; the
New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, NY: the Serpentine Pavilion
in London; the Christian Dior Building in Omotesando in Tokyo; and the 21st
Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. The latter won the
Golden Lion in 2004 for the most significant work in the Ninth International
Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
Born in Japans prefecture of Ibaraki (northeast of Tokyo), Kazuyo Sejima
received a degree in architecture at the Japan Women's University. Upon
completion of her studies, she began working in the office of architect Toyo
Ito. In 1987, she opened her own studio in Tokyo, and in 1992, she was
named the Japan Institute of Architects Young Architect of the Year in Japan.
Kazuyo Sejima has taught at Princeton University, the Polytechnique de
Lausanne, Tama Art University, and Keio University.
Ryue Nishizawa hails from the Kanagawa prefecture (just south of Tokyo),
where he graduated from Yokohama National University with a masters
degree in architecture in 1990. He established the office Ryue Nishizawa in
1997, and he holds a professorship at Yokohama National University.
Together, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa were awarded the Arnold
Brunner Memorial Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in
2002, a design prize from the Architectural Institute of Japan in 2006, and
the Kunstpreis Berlin of 2007 from the Berlin Academy of Arts. In addition,
they have presented their work throughout the United States and Europe in
exhibitions and as visiting lecturers at numerous prestigious universities.

Jury Citation
For more than 15 years, architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have
worked together in their collaborative partnership, SANAA, where it is
virtually impossible to untangle which individual is responsible for what
aspect of a particular project. Each building is ultimately a work that comes
from the union of their two minds. Together they have produced major
commissions, such as the O-Museum in Nagano and the 21st Century
Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (both in Japan), the Glass Pavilion
at the Toledo Museum (Ohio), De Kunstline Theater and Cultural Center
(Almere, the Netherlands), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York,
NY), and the recent Rolex Learning Center (Lausanne, Switzerland).
The buildings by Sejima and Nishizawa seem deceptively simple. The
architects hold a vision of a building as a seamless whole, where the
physical presence retreats and forms a sensuous background for people,
objects, activities, and landscapes. They explore like few others the
phenomenal properties of continuous space, lightness, transparency, and
materiality to create a subtle synthesis. Sejima and Nishizawas architecture
stands in direct contrast with the bombastic and rhetorical. Instead, they
seek the essential qualities of architecture that result in a much-appreciated
straightforwardness, economy of means, and restraint in their work.

This economy of means, however, does not become a simple reductive

operation in the architects hands. Instead, it is an intense and rigorous
investigation anchored in hard work and steely determination. It is a
constant process of refinement, where each clients program is fully
investigated and multiple design possibilities are explored through
numerous drawings and models that check every alternative. Ideas are
considered and discarded, reconsidered and reworked until only the
essential qualities of a design remain. The result is a deft union of structure
and organization, of logical purpose and precise beauty.
It may be tempting to view Sejima and Nishizawas refined compositions of
lightness and transparency as elitist or rarefied. Their aesthetic, however, is
one of inclusion. Their approach is fresh, always offering new possibilities
within the normal constraints of an architectural project as it systematically
takes the next step. They use common, everyday materials while remaining
attuned to the possibilities of contemporary technology; their understanding
of space does not reproduce conventional models. They often opt for non-
hierarchical spaces, or in their own words, the equivalence of spaces,
creating unpretentious, democratic buildings according to the task and
budget at hand. One example is the Almere project in the Netherlands, with
its many simple classrooms and workshops, all presenting privileged views
of the sea. Another example is the Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne, a
space to be used by students day and night. Sejima and Nishizawa originally
conceived it as a multi-story building, but, in the course of their deliberation,
it became a single yet vast, flowing space. The buildings many spaces
(library, restaurant, exhibition areas, offices, etc.) are differentiated not by
walls but by undulations of a continuous floor, which rises and falls to
accommodate the different uses, while allowing vistas across this internal
landscape for people.
The relation of the building to its context is of utmost importance to Sejima
and Nishizawa. They have called public buildings mountains in the
landscape, believing that they should never lose the natural and
meaningful connection with their surroundings. The New Museum in New
York feels at home in the rough Bowery area of the city. Their glass-enclosed
museums, such as the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio,
blur the borders between inside and out, providing direct and changing
views to the surroundings.
While Sejima and Nishizawa have not published theoretical treatises to date,
they are cerebral architects, whose work is based on rigorous investigation
and guided by strong and clearly defined concepts. The appointment of
Kazuyo Sejima as the director of the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale is a
tribute to this.
For architecture that is simultaneously delicate and powerful, precise and
fluid, ingenious but not overly or overtly clever; for the creation of buildings
that successfully interact with their contexts and the activities they contain,
creating a sense of fullness and experiential richness; for a singular
architectural language that springs from a collaborative process that is both
unique and inspirational; for their notable completed buildings and the
promise of new projects together, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa are
the recipients of the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Essay
Inventing New Hierarchies
By Eve Blau
The approach is carefully choreographed. As always, there are many
options. The building has glass walls and many points of entry. Pathways
woven among carefully preserved memorial trees (their twisted trunks
braced by bamboo poles), curve in intersecting arcs across the grass and
around the circumference of the perfectly cylindrical building, and toward
the four entrances that make the building accessible from multiple
directions. The glass outer walls are both reflective and transparent
depending on the time of day, angle of the sun, and weather. At times they
allow one to see deep into the center of the building and, in places, through
to the opposite side. At other times they become reflective, bouncing back
refracted images of trees, houses, and bodies moving among them; their
glass surfaces layering glimpses of nature with self-reflection as they project
images of the minds eye through the spaces of the building and into the
imagination.
Inside, the options multiply. Each space is shaped into an independent
volume with its own distinctive proportions, visual access, and scale in
relation to the spaces around it. Yet, each particularized space is also
intricately interwoven with those around it through a carefully calibrated
network of transparent, interstitial spaces. It is a non-hierarchical structure
a field configurationthat operates in terms of two orders of transparency.
The first is a functional transparency that articulates the programmatic logic
of the plan and clarifies patterns of movement through it. The second is a
visual transparency, which cuts across the logic of the plan and introduces a
contradictory optical pattern of connections and disconnections that adds
layer upon layer of visual information to the abstract information figured in
the plan. Because of the many layers of glass, the walls not only reflect and
refract the spaces they enclose, they also visually project those spaces onto,
through, and beyond one another. The effect creates visual complexity and
spatial layering. But, the multilayered transparencies also articulate the
architecture and reveal its social agenda; they show the potential of each
space to be open and closed, to be connected and separate from the others,
to offer solitude and society, and to create places of rest and activity. The
transparencies allow users of the architecture to orient themselves while
heightening their awareness of their own relationships to things and spaces
around them. All of this can be read from the architecture itself.
The building is the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa,
Japan, which was designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the
architectural firm, SANAA. Completed in 2004, the museum was SANAAs
first major public building. The museum itself is a hub of activity at all times
of the day. It is a place where visitors, mostly urban citizens of all ages
preschoolers transported in lightweight wagons, mothers with infants, well-
behaved groups of school children in uniforms, 20-something art students,
office workers stopping for lunch, shoppers meeting between errands for
tea, old age pensioners observing the scenecome to spend a part of their
day. The building contains exhibition galleries, a small permanent collection
(including commissioned works by James Turrell, Patrick Blanc, Olafur
Eliasson, and Mathieu Briand), a restaurant-cafe, shop, and other museum
amenities, but also a nursery, day care facility, public library, lecture hall,
theatre, and meeting rooms. The museum-specific functions are clustered in
the center of the building, the communal functions around the periphery.
When it rains, which it often does in Kanazawa, the museum building comes
alive as the outer public zones fill with people and organized activities. At
dusk, one can see deep into the central core, and along the grid of glazed
corridors and passageways that penetrate the exhibition zone.
When it opened, the Kanazawa 21st Century Museum was celebrated as a
new kind of cultural institution in Japan in which high art and daily life mix.
In fact, that synthesis has deep roots in traditional Japanese culture. The
involvement of art in daily life is ritually enfolded in the Japanese Tea
Ceremony in which aesthetic forms shape social and cultural practices into a
mode of being in which art and life are inextricably intertwined. As it
developed in the 17th century, the Japanese Way of Tea was understood
as bringing the aesthetic and lived worlds together into a unified, if
ritualized, practice. At Kanazawa, that synthesis is never ritualized. Instead,
it permeates the consciousness, influencing it subtly. (1) The originality of
the Kanazawa Museum is not a function of the program, but of the
architecture.
Sejima and Nishizawa are concerned with exploring the cognitive
possibilities of architecture, how the built work can impact the way in which
we know our world and ourselves and the processes by which knowledge
and understanding are acquired through experience. Analysis goes far
beyond the functional considerations of program; it is based on intimate
engagement with the details and dynamics of lived experience in all its
multiscalar contemporary complexity. The capacity to make the strange
seem familiar makes the architecture itself at once accessible and remote.
No matter how abstract the forms, there is always something familiar about
the spaces they create. In referencing SANAAs buildings, Koji Taki has said,
Ones body slips into, without any resistance, the abnormality of
contemporary society (2)...
(1) Quotation from Yuko Hasegawa, Polyphony, in Kanazawa Nijisseiki
Bijutsukan, Encounters in the 21st Century: PolyphonyEmerging
Resonances, (Kanazawa: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art and
Tankosha Publishing Co., 2005), p. 34.
(2) Koli Taki quoted in Yuko Hasegawa, New Flexibility, Kazuyo Sejima +
Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art,
Kanazawa, ed. Meruro Washida (Kanazawa: 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2005), p. 100.

Ceremony
Ellis Island
The recorded history of Ellis Island dates back to the 1600s when it was
called Gull Island and only about 2 acres in size. At various times, it has
served as a fort, munitions deport, and detention center, but it is most
famous for its role as a port of entry for 12 million U.S. immigrants. The 27-
acre landmass we see today, with its main reception building and other
support facilities, has its roots in the early 20th century.
In 1897 after the first immigration facilities burned down, an architectural
competition was held between five firms, including McKim Mead and White,
to create a new and more complete immigration center. New York firm
Boring and Tilton designed the winning entry. The architects, who trained in
the U.S. and Paris, proposed a main reception building in a French
Renaissance style, along with other buildings for a kitchen, laundry, and
hospital. They also took into account the landscape plan, calling for the
creation of a new island to the south, a ferry slip, and extensive ornamental
plantings laid out in a Beaux Arts style.
A year later, The New York Times magazine announced the ideas for the new
building: The immigration station on Ellis Island ... will be a palace 386 feet
in length and 162 feet in width, with towers rising to the height of 120 feet
at their apexes of gilded copper, and entrance arches 40 feet to the
keystone. Owing to the tides, the first floor will be eight feet above the
present level of the island, so that on calm days the structure will mirror
itself on the smooth waters of the bay. The main body of the building will be
of red brick, the corners of the towers and buildings and the framework of
the windows will be a broad ashlar of gray limestone, while the roofs will be
of green copper. The most impressive room in the building was the registry
room, which went into service in 1900. It measured 200 feet by 100 feet and
had a grand, 56-foot vaulted ceiling. In 1905-06 a third island, measuring
five acres in size, was created.
In 1954, Immigration Services closed Ellis Island. In 1965, the Island was
declared part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument and was opened to
the public on a limited basis until 1984. During the past 30 years, Ellis Island
has undergone major architectural and engineering efforts funded by both
public and private entities, and today the main reception building is the Ellis
Island Immigration Museum. This May, the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize
ceremony and dinner will take place at this significant and historic site.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa
Dear ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honor for us to be invited to this
wonderful place. We are extremely delighted to be here with you tonight.
We would like to sincerely thank the Pritzker family, especially Mrs. Cindy
Pritzker and Tom and Margot Pritzker. Thank you also to the Hyatt
Foundation. To the members of the jury, thank you for selecting us. To our
dear clients, thank you for giving us the opportunity to think and to realize
our works. We would also like to thank all of our staff over the years,
together with whom we have gone through many good and hard times.
Thank you to all of the consultants and engineers who were involved in our
projectswe have been deeply inspired by your expertise and passion. We
are overwhelmed with our gratitude to all of you.
We would also like to take this moment to thank two special people in
particular: Mr. Mutsuro Sasaki, who is here with us tonight, and Mr. Toyo Ito.

Throughout the years, Mr. Sasaki has been influential in many of our projects
for structural planning and almost all of our designs have been realized
together with him. Our collaboration cannot be described simply as a
business relationship where he calculates the structure and we make the
design. It is much more a union of creative visions through which he has
helped us to see infinite possibilities. Without Mr. Sasaki, our architecture
might have developed into something completely different. So we would like
to thank you very much, Mr. Sasaki. We greatly appreciate everything that
you have done for us.
As you know, Mr. Toyo Ito has been an immensely influential figure for both
of us since we first entered into the world of architecture. Once again, we
would like to express our deepest appreciation and respect for Mr. Ito. His
wonderful works, words, and critiques have given us direction, which has
affected us in immeasurable ways in the past and this will no doubt continue
in our future. Words are not enough to express our gratitude and great
admiration for Mr. Ito.
It has been fifteen years since we founded an architecture studio called
SANAA. Back then, we did not imagine working on so many projects around
the world and we did not even dream of standing here tonight to receive
such an honor. The reason we started SANAA was because of a competition
for an extension at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia.
Since it was our first opportunity to work on an international project, and it
being the largest-scale project for the firm until that time, we thought it
would be fun to form a team and did so in a rather light-hearted manner.
The project was never realized, but together as SANAA, we won
competitions for a theater in Almere, Holland, and a museum in Kanazawa,
Japan. SANAA continues to exist today because we had the great fortune of
working on projects like these.
As we continued, through trial and error, our direction, interests, and
passions became clearer as we continued. Looking back, one of the major
projects that defined our direction was the design for the 21st Century
Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. This is a museum positioned in
the very center of the city. We began with the concept of an open museum
so that it is not only for art experts but also for the people of the city, who
do not necessarily have a professional connection with art. We proposed a
museum without a front or back so that people can enter freely from any
direction. We also thought carefully about its effect on the surroundings and
the relationship of the building with its context, because of the historical
background of the region. When the building was completed and we saw
that people enjoyed using the museum, we truly realized how wonderful it is
for architecture to be open. A great deal of our aims became more obvious
to us because of this museum; therefore we would like to express our
gratitude to the museum, Kanazawa city, the mayor, and the people of
Kanazawa for this great opportunity.
Since then, we have been involved in the project for The Toledo Museum of
Art Glass Pavilion in Ohio, and here in New York, we were given a fantastic
chance to design the New Museum of Contemporary Art. In this project, we
wanted to create a building that relates closely to the dynamics of Bowery
Street and echoes the philosophy of the museum. The building
accommodates the program vertically and has become rather tall because
of the limited size of the site. Despite its height, the museum aimed to
absorb and respond to the activities of New Yorkers and the animated
atmosphere of the city.
The Rolex Learning Center at the Ecole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne
(EPFL), which opened this year, is a building with a three-dimensional
spatial composition. One large room undulates up-and-down and the
building itself becomes a landscape whose topography provides various
kinds of spaces. Again, our aim was to produce a building that is open to the
people and creates different environments. The ideas we had been thinking
about since the museum in Kanazawa developed to become a more organic
and three-dimensional building.
As well as running the SANAA studio together, we both simultaneously lead
our own individual architectural offices. So, there are three studios in total
working together, all under one roofwhich sounds rather confusing. SANAA
works mainly on international projects and competitions and our individual
firms work on friends houses and private galleries. There are exceptions but
it basically works like this. People often ask us why we work in such a
complicated way or criticize that it is confusing or does not look very
efficient. But we continue to work like this because we like working this way.
In the individual firms, we each think about architecture on our own and
struggle with our own ideas. At the same time, we inspire and critique each
other at SANAA. We believe working this way opens up many possibilities for
both of us. The fact that we have both been awarded the prize gives us so
much confidence and we are very happy and truly touched. Again, thank
you very much.
We understand this award is not only in recognition of our past works but
rather an encouragement toward new architectural creations. Our aim is to
make better, innovative architecture and we will continue to put forth our
best effort to do so.
Thank you very much.

Ceremony Speech
Martha Thorne
Executive Director
The Pritzker Architecture Prize
Good evening and welcome to the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Ceremony. Tonight we recognize two architects who have worked together
for over 15 yearsKazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.
Before the speeches by the Chair of the Jury and the President of the Hyatt
Foundation, I would briefly like to recognize some other special guests here
tonight. We are pleased to have the following former laureates with us:
Kevin Roche 1982, Richard Meier 1984, Hans Hollein 1985, Frank Gehry
1989, Christian de Portzamparc 1994, Rafael Moneo 1996, Renzo Piano
1998, Glenn Murcutt 2002, Thom Mayne 2005, and Jean Nouvel 2008.
Of course, the Pritzker Prize would never be complete without its jury. We
are honored to have three former jurors with us tonight: Cesar Pelli, Jorge
Silvetti, and former Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Bill
Lacy. Thank you for your years of service.
Finally, a few words about the prize itself and the nature of architecture
prizes. Today there are numerous awards for architecture, for individual
buildings, typologies, materials, styles and so on. It is heartening to see so
much attention paid to this field. However, there are several reasons that
the Pritzker Architecture Prize stands apart. I admit that I am biased, but I
truly believe that this award is at the top of its field. The award was founded
in 1979 as an independent award, not reflecting the goals or values of an
industry, collective, professional association, or institution. The jury is
independent. Each jury member serves a minimum three-year term, and
does so on a pro-bono basis. The nominations procedure is extremely open
and streamlined. There are no cumbersome letters to write or application
forms with weighty portfolios to submit. Nominations are accepted from any
architect anywhere in the world. And, just to keep things in perspective, a
lot of non-architects are asked by me for their suggestions and advice.
Today the Pritzker Architecture Prize is revered at the top of the list of
architecture awards.
But, there is one more important reason for the strength, longevity, and
continued relevance of the prize. And that is due to the generosity and
support of the Pritzker Family and especially due to a person who is here
tonight with us. An award-winning person in her own right, please join me in
thanking and congratulating the founder of the Pritzker Prize, Mrs. Cindy
Pritzker.
Now, I would like to thank you for your attention and I will turn the podium
over to the Chair of the Jury, the Lord Palumbo.

Eduardo Souto de Moura

2011 Laureate
Selected Works:
House in Serra da Arrbida, Portugal, 2002
House in Cascais, Cascais, Portugal, 2002
Cinema House Manoel de Oliveira, Porto, Portugal, 2003
Municipal Stadium, Braga, Portugal, 2003
Burgo Tower, Porto, Portugal, 2007
House in Bom Jesus, Braga, Portugal, 2007
House in Maia, Maia, Portugal, 2007
Paula Rego Museum, Cascais, Portugal, 2008
Hotel and Tourism School, Portalegre, Portugal, 2009

Announcement
Portuguese Architect Will Be Presented the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize
in Washington, D.C.
Los Angeles, CAEduardo Souto de Moura, a 58 year old architect from
Portugal, is the jurys choice for the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize, it was
announced today by Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation
which sponsors the prize. The formal ceremony for what has come to be
known throughout the world as architectures highest honor will be in one of
Washington, D.C.s finest classical buildings, the Andrew W. Mellon
Auditorium on June 2.
In announcing the jurys choice, Pritzker elaborated, This marks the second
time in the history of the prize that a Portuguese architect has been chosen.
The first was in 1992 when Alvaro Siza was so honored.
The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which was founded in 1979 by
the late Jay A. Pritzker and his wife, Cindy, is to honor annually a living
architect 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. The laureates receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze
medallion.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, The Lord Palumbo, spoke from his home in the
United Kingdom, quoting from the jury citation that focuses on the reasons
for this years choice: During the past three decades, Eduardo Souto de
Moura has produced a body of work that is of our time but also carries
echoes of architectural traditions. And further, His buildings have a unique
ability to convey seemingly conflicting characteristicspower and modesty,
bravado and subtlety, bold public authority and a sense of intimacyat the
same time.
As a student, Souto de Moura worked for Alvaro Siza for five years. Since
forming his own office in 1980, Souto de Moura has completed well over
sixty projects, most in his native Portugal, but he has designs in Spain, Italy,
Germany, United Kingdom and Switzerland. The projects include single
family homes, a cinema, shopping centers, hotels, apartments, offices, art
galleries and museums, schools, sports facilities and subways.
His stadium in Braga, Portugal was the site of European soccer
championships when it was completed in 2004, and gained high praise.
Nearly a million and a half cubic yards of granite were blasted from the site
and crushed to make concrete for the stadium. Precise explosions of a
mountain side created a hundred foot high granite face that terminates one
end of the stadium. Souto de Moura describes this coexistence of the
natural with the man made construction as good architecture. In his own
words, It was a drama to break down the mountain and make concrete
from the stone. The jury citation calls this work, ...muscular, monumental
and very much at home within its powerful landscape.
Another of his projects, the Burgo Tower, completed in 2007, constructed in
the city where he lives and works, Porto, Portugal, is described by the jury
as, ...two buildings side by side, one vertical and one horizontal with
different scales, in dialogue with each other and the urban landscape.
Souto de Moura commented that a twenty story office tower is an unusual
project for me. I began my career building single family houses.
Souto de Moura has designed numerous residences, one of which, House
Number Two built in the town of Bom Jesus, was singled out by the jury for
its uncommon richness throughout the subtle banding in the concrete of its
exterior walls. Souto de Mouras comments on the project: Because the
site was a fairly steep hill overlooking the city of Braga, we decided not to
produce a large volume resting on a hilltop. Instead, we made the
construction on five terraces with retainer walls, with a different function
defined for each terrace-- fruit trees on the lowest level, a swimming pool on
the next, the main parts of the house on the next, bedrooms on the fourth,
and on the top, we planted a forest.
Another project in his native city, Porto, is the Cultural Center completed in
1991, which the jury describes as a testament to his ability to combine
materials expressively. He used copper, stone, concrete and wood.
A convent and monastery in a mountainous terrain near Amares, Portugal,
called Santa Maria do Bouro was a project for Souto de Moura from 1989 to
1997, in which he converted the centuries old structure into a state inn. He
recalls the walls were over four feet thick. Originally built in the 12th
century, the jury declares in their citation that Souto de Moura has created
spaces that are both consistent with their history and modern in
conception.
Souto de Moura, in describing another of his projects, has said, After the
painter Paula Rego chose me as her architect, I was lucky to be able to
choose the site. It was a fenced off forest with some open space in the
middle. On the basis of the elevation of the trees, I proposed a set of
volumes of varying heights. Developing this play between the artificial and
nature helped define the exterior color, red concrete, a color in opposition to
the green forest. Two large pyramids along the entrance axis prevent the
project from being a neutral sum of boxes. The Paula Rego Museum
completed in 2008, is cited by the jury as both civic and intimate, and so
appropriate for the display of art.
Often described as a Miesian architect, the jury acknowledged this
influence with the words, He has the confidence to use stone that is a
thousand years old or to take inspiration from a modern detail by Mies van
der Rohe.
Upon learning that he was being honored, Souto de Moura had this reaction:
When I received the phone call telling me I was to be the Pritzker Laureate,
I could hardly believe it. Then I received confirmation that it was actually
true, and I came to realize what a great honor this is. The fact that this is
the second time a Portuguese architect has been chosen makes it even
more important.
The distinguished jury that selected the 2011 Pritzker Laureate consists of
its chairman, The Lord Palumbo, internationally known architectural patron
of London, chairman of the trustees, Serpentine Gallery, former chairman of
the Arts Council of Great Britain, former chairman of the Tate Gallery
Foundation, and former trustee of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York; and alphabetically: Alejandro Aravena,
architect and executive director of Elemental in Santiago, Chile; Carlos
Jimenez, professor, Rice University School of Architecture, principal, Carlos
Jimenez Studio in Houston, Texas; Glenn Murcutt, architect and 2002 Pritzker
Laureate of Sydney, Australia; Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, professor and
author of Helsinki, Finland; Renzo Piano, architect and 1998 Pritzker
Laureate, of Paris, France and Genoa, Italy; and Karen Stein, writer, editor
and architectural consultant in New York. Martha Thorne, associate dean for
external relations, IE School of Architecture, Madrid, Spain, is the executive
director of the prize.
In addition to the previous laureates already mentioned, the late Philip
Johnson was the first Pritzker Laureate in 1979. The late Luis Barragn of
Mexico was named in 1980. The late James Stirling of the United Kingdom
was elected in 1981, Kevin Roche in 1982, Ieoh Ming Pei in 1983, and
Richard Meier in 1984. Hans Hollein of Austria was the 1985 Laureate.
Gottfried Bhm of Germany received the prize in 1986. Robert Venturi
received the honor in 1991, and Alvaro Siza of Portugal in 1992. Christian de
Portzamparc of France was elected Pritzker Laureate in 1994. Frank Gehry of
the United States was the recipient in 1989, the late Aldo Rossi of Italy in
1990. In 1996, Rafael Moneo of Spain was the Laureate; in 1997 the late
Sverre Fehn of Norway; in 1998 Renzo Piano of Italy, in 1999 Sir Norman
Foster of the UK, and in 2000, Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands. Australian
Glenn Murcutt received the prize in 2002. The late Jrn Utzon of Denmark
was honored in 2003; Zaha Hadid of the UK in 2004; and Thom Mayne of the
United States in 2005. Paulo Mendes da Rocha of Brazil was the Laureate in
2006, and Richard Rogers received the prize in 2007. Jean Nouvel of France
was the Laureate in 2008. In 2009, Peter Zumthor of Switzerland received
the award. Last year, two Japanese architects were honored, partners
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, Inc.
The field of architecture was chosen by the Pritzker family because of their
keen interest in building due to their involvement with developing the Hyatt
Hotels around the world; and because architecture was a creative endeavor
not included in the Nobel Prizes. The procedures were modeled after the
Nobels, with the final selection being made by the international jury with all
deliberations and voting in secret. Nominations are continuous from year to
year with hundreds of nominees from countries all around the world being
considered each year.

Biography
Eduardo Souto de Moura was born in Porto, Portugal in 1952. His father was
a doctor (ophthalmologist) and his mother a home maker. He has one
brother and one sister. The sister is also a doctor and his brother is a lawyer
with a political careerformerly he was Attorney General of Portugal.
Following his early years at the Italian School, Souto de Moura enrolled in
the School of Fine Arts in Porto, where he began as an art student, studying
sculpture, but eventually achieving his degree in architecture. He credits a
meeting with Donald Judd in Zurich for the switch from art to architecture.
While still a student, he worked for architect No Dinis and then lvaro Siza,
the latter for five years. While studying and working with his professor of
urbanism, Architect Fernandes de S, he received his first commission, a
market project in Braga which has since been demolished because of
changing business patterns.
After 2 years of military service he won the competition for the Cultural
Centre in Porto. The beginning of his career as an independent architect.
He is frequently invited as a guest professor to Lausanne and Zurich in
Switzerland as well as Harvard in the United States. These guest lectures at
universities and seminars over the years have afforded him the opportunity
to meet many colleagues in the field, among them Jacques Herzog and Aldo
Rossi.
He is married and he has 3 daughters: Maria Luisa, Maria da Paz e Maria
Eduarda. His wife, Luisa Penha, and the eldest daughter are architects, the
second is a nurse and the third is on the Faculty of Architecture of the
University of Oporto for the 3rd year.
Along with his architecture practice, Souto de Moura is a professor at the
University of Oporto, and is a visiting professor at Geneva, Paris-Belleville,
Harvard, Dublin and the ETH Zurich and Lausanne.
Often described as a neo-Miesian, but one who constantly strives for
originality, Souto de Moura has achieved much praise for his exquisite use
of materialsgranite, wood, marble, brick, steel, concreteas well as his
unexpected use of color. Souto de Moura is clear on his view of the use of
materials, saying, I avoid using endangered or protected species. I think we
should use wood in moderation and replant our forests as we use the wood.
We have to use wood because it is one of the finest materials available.
In an interview with Croquis, he explained, I find Mies increasingly
fascinating ... There is a way of reading him which is just to regard him as a
minimalist. But he always oscillated between classicism and
neoplasticism ... You only have to remember the last construction of his life,
the IBM building, with that powerful travertine base that he drilled through
to produce a gigantic door. Then on the other hand, he arrived in Barcelona
and did two pavilions, didnt he? One was abstract and neo plastic and the
other one was classical, symmetrical with closed corners ... He was
experimenting. He was already so modern he was post.
Souto de Moura acknowledges the Miesian influence, speaking of his Burgo
Tower, but refers people to something written by Italian journalist and critic,
Francesco Dal Co, its better not to be original, but good, rather than
wanting to be very original and bad.
At a series of forums called the Holcim Forum on sustainable architecture,
Souto de Moura stated, For me, architecture is a global issue. There is no
ecological architecture, no intelligent architecture, no sustainable
architecturethere is only good architecture. There are always problems we
must not neglect; for example, energy, resources, costs, social aspectsone
must always pay attention to all these.

Jury Citation
During the past three decades, Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de
Moura has produced a body of work that is of our time but also carries
echoes of architectural traditions. His oeuvre is convincing proof of modern
idioms expressive potential and adaptability to distinct local situations.
Always mindful of context, understood in the broadest sense, and grounded
in place, time, and function, Souto de Mouras architecture reinforces a
sense of history while expanding the range of contemporary expression.
Already in his first works, undertaken in the 1980s, Souto de Moura had a
consistent approach that never adopted the trends of the moment. At that
time, he was intensely out of fashion, having developed his individual path
during the height of postmodernism. As we look back today, the early
buildings may seem normal, but we must remember how brave they really
were back then.
The versatility of his practice is evident in the variety of commissions he has
undertaken with success. He is capable of designing from domestic to urban
scale. Many of his early works in the 1980s were single-family houses and
remain among his seminal works. However, the scope of his work has
expanded: the Braga Municipal Stadium, Portugal, designed in 2000 is
muscular, monumental and very much at home within its powerful
landscape; the Burgo Tower, Portugal, designed at the beginning of the
1990s and built a decade later, consists of two buildings side by side, one
vertical and one horizontal with different scales, in dialogue with each other
and the urban landscape; the Paula Rgo Museum, completed in 2008, a
grouping of volumes interspersed in the trees at its site in Cascais, Portugal,
is both civic and intimate, and so appropriate for the display of art.
In their apparent formal simplicity, Souto de Mouras buildings weave
together complex references to the characteristics of the region, landscape,
site, and wider architectural history. Often simple geometries are underlined
through interplay of solid and void or light and shadow. The restoration and
adaptation of the Santa Maria Do Bouro Monastery into a hotel has taken a
building from ruble to reinterpretation. Souto de Moura has created spaces
that are both consistent with their history and modern in conception. The
effectiveness of his works usually stems from the juxtaposition of elements
and concepts. His unique capacity to embrace reality while employing
abstraction creates an architectural language that transforms physicality
into the metaphysical.
Souto de Moura is an architect fascinated by the beauty and authenticity of
materials. His knowledge of construction and skill with materials are always
visible in his buildings. He has the confidence to use stone that is a
thousand years old or to take inspiration from a modern detail by Mies van
der Rohe. The thoughtful use of copper, stone, concrete and wood in the
Cultural Center in Porto, completed in 1991, for example, is a testament to
his ability to combine materials expressively. By modifying pavements,
textures, pathways and public spaces for the subway system of Porto, he
has granted new significance to public spaces. House Number Two, built in
the town of Bom Jesus, Portugal, in 2007, has achieved an uncommon
richness through the subtle banding in the concrete of its exterior walls.

Eduardo Souto de Mouras architecture it is not obvious, frivolous, or

picturesque. It is imbued with intelligence and seriousness. His work
requires an intense encounter not a quick glance. And like poetry, it is able
to communicate emotionally to those who take the time to listen. His
buildings have a unique ability to convey seemingly conflicting
characteristicspower and modesty, bravado and subtlety, bold public
authority and sense of intimacyat the same time. For architecture that
appears effortless, serene, and simple, and for the care and poetry that
permeates each project, Eduardo Souta de Moura receives the 2011 Pritzker
Architecture Prize.

Essay

Modern Project and Ancient Architecture

By Carlos Machado
Professor of Contemporary Architecture, Oporto University.
The Modern Movement is a project and not a language. As yet, nothing has
appeared to replace it. It is only the means that have changed. I think that
Aldo Rossi was one of those who recovered components that had apparently
been forgotten: History, which was implied, but never evoked. Eduardo
Souto de Moura
In considering the Modern Movement as a project, Eduardo Souto de Moura
sets out to evaluate the coherence and applicability of its principles, seeking
to identify those elements that are enduring. He then compares these
principles with the history of architecture. In no way is he attempting a
nostalgic return to the early 20th century, nor is he defending any
supposedly heroic avant-garde theory based on the idea of permanent
ruptures with the past. Rather, he is looking for correlation between building
forms and techniques (their appropriateness or their necessity) and between
responding to a program brief and demonstrating functional versatility. In
each case, Souto de Moura is seeking to understand how formal structures
endure over time, discovering their role in the transformation of territory
and the reasons for their continued persistence throughout the history of
cities.
Eduardo Souto de Moura and six other architects from Porto refused to
participate in the exhibition After Modernism (Lisbon, 1983). Nevertheless,
they wrote a joint text for the catalogue. Following a brief description of the
characteristics of 20th-century Portuguese architecture, they reached the
conclusion that there was nothing to be gained by discussing the future of
Portuguese architecture from the perspective of contrasting the modern and
post-modern, as the promoters of this later movement proposed. And yet, if
there was a fundamental problem underlying all projects that Souto de
Moura had undertaken until then, it was precisely the relationship of modern
architecture with the past, or the presence of the pastthe theme of the
1980 Venice Biennale that probably lay at the foundation for the After
Modernism exhibition undertaken in Portugal.
I have always understood the Modern Movement as a continuation of
Classicism. Souto de Moura said in 1994. Basically, it is a discourse of
continuity with different techniques and intentions, but with common
underpinnings: proportions, the relationship between structure and form, a
refined language.
New means include industrialized construction systems, concrete and iron,
the skeleton structure, etc., as well as abstraction, which is considered
necessary for a non-figurative formalization of architecture, as a way of
overcoming historic eclecticism. Hence, the acceptance of the hypothesis of
a (modern) Architecture for Museumsthe title of a text by Aldo Rossi that
returns to Czannes announcement of the need for an art whose meaning is
derived from the confrontation with its past that only the organized
temporal succession of museums enables us to understand.
Souto de Moura is only interested in a modern architecture that, just like the
painting that Czanne set out to produce, is something solid and lasting,
like the art of museums. Consequently, he immediately understood from
the very beginning, when working with lvaro Siza, that for architecture,
cities are in fact like museums, since they are places where different periods
are all present at the same time. They accompany one another, overlap with
one another, establishing crossovers and giving rise to the city as we know
it. Our fascination with cities lies in the infinite variety of its possible
correspondences, in both near and distant allusions, in the limitless
possibilities for imports and intertwinings. They confront us with the
different and even with the exotic. But it is a fascination that also lies in
those similarities that seem fatal and necessary, arising from the universal
human condition that, in a surprising demonstration of empathy, absorbs
everything that is apparently strange or alien. It returns us to ourselves as
the heirs of a way of living and giving shape to the things of life that is born
with us, recognized as such through different times and places.
For Souto de Moura, this city/museum must be upturned and examined in all
of its stratificationsproduced by permanent confrontation and overlapping
layersto reveal a past that is also a presence. These successive
accumulations carry, if not the material presence of forms and spaces, at
least evidence or memories that are also an important part of the city as we
know it today.
It is a clinging to the past that necessarily involves abstraction as a way of
thinking, both as a way of seeing and as a formal result. We must treat
nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, said Czanne to
his disciple Emile Bernardan aim that Le Corbusier returned to some years
later in the first issue of LEsprit Nouveau (1920) All is but spheres and
cylinders. There are simple forms that provoke constant sensations. The
same simple or elementary forms are found in Aldo Rossis first architectural
designs, simultaneously abstract and evocative of the architecture of the
past.
Abstraction and the city as a museum are therefore the two
complementary terms that enable us to understand Eduardo Souto de
Mouras first works, in which he outlines some of the premises that will later
remain with him as firm convictions and will be successively revisited and
questioned throughout his career.
For him, abstraction is understood, just as it is by Czanne, as something
that is deduced through observation of the real. That, in turn, leads to a
simplification of forms, enabling us to see, for example, cylinders beneath
columns, just as Le Corbusier did when visiting Roman houses at Pompeii.
Figuration in architecture of the past is replaced by proportion and
geometry. It is an attempt to get at the essence of historic forms reducing
architecture to its most elementary components, to its volumetric and basic
construction principles: The spirit manifests itself in geometry, proportions
are the language of architecture Le Corbusier also said (leaving in
abeyanceas if it has been momentarily ignoredthe problem of
decoration that will find a variety of solutions in Souto de Mouras work.)
Proportion can be seen as a language, and geometry as a means of
organizing space, a tool for rationalizing formal and spatial relations,
encapsulating, as lvaro Siza states in Imaginar a Evidncia (Imagining
Evidence), the projects essential coreArchitecture is geometry.

Ceremony
Mellon Auditorium, Washington D.C. | Photo by Greg HickmanPhoto by Greg
Hickman
Mellon Auditorium, Washington D.C.
The Mellon Auditorium, located within Washington D.C.s monumental
Federal Triangle, is the site of the 2011 Pritzker Architecture Prize Ceremony.
Since its inauguration in 1935, the auditorium has provided a magnificent
setting for many important functions.
Originally known as the Department Auditorium, the building was renamed
to honor Secretary of Treasury Andrew W. Mellon who was a supporter of
planning efforts for the Federal Triangle, a 24-block area of the city, and a
proponent of a unified aesthetic for government buildings in Washington,
D.C.
The auditorium is the centerpiece that sits between two office buildings
(Interstate Commerce Commission and Department of Labornow the
Environmental Protection Agency). San Francisco architect Arthur Brown, Jr.
(1874-1957), who studied in Paris at the cole des Beaux-Arts, designed the
three-building group in a neo-Classical style. The great portico of the
auditorium buildingwith its six Doric columnssupports a pediment
depicting carvings of the goddess Columbia, once a symbol for the United
States. Colonnades link the auditorium to the buildings on the east and west
to form a unified and majestic whole. As with many government buildings,
the seven-story Mellon Auditorium is clad with Indiana limestone. The grand
interior, which seats 2,500 and rises to four stories, features Doric columns,
gilded relief carvings, and polished oak woodwork.
Architect Brown is also known for other notable buildings. With professional
partner, John Bakewell, they won a competition in 1912 to design the San
Francisco City Hall and were hired as design architects and master planners
for Stanford University in 1913. Later Brown, with his own firm, designed
Pasadena City Hall (1928), Coit Tower, San Francisco (1932) and St. Marks
Cathedral, Seattle (1934) among others.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Eduardo Souto de Moura
Mr. President of the United States, Pritzker Family, honorable president of
the jury, distinguished members of the jury, my friends, ladies and
gentlemen,
It wasnt until I received the invitation that said Eduardo Souto de Moura of
Portugal that I really realized I had won the 2011 Pritzker Prize. I will not
deny that I was delighted, not only for myself, but for my family, my staff,
friends and clients. On behalf of them all, my sincere thanks.
I learned to draw in the Italian School of Porto, the place where I was born,
and in high school I decided I would become an architect. It was not that I
strongly felt the pull of Architecture, but during my teenage agnostic crisis I
started to wonder whether or not God should really have rested on the
seventh day. Giving it a second thought, He would have realized that a site
like Delphi was still lacking; the Acropolis had yet to receive its Parthenon; a
swamp in Illinois needed drying so that the Farnsworth House could be
correctly placed there.
In 1975, following the Carnation Revolution, I started working with architect
Siza Vieira. It was an exceptional experience, not only for his understanding
of architecture, but especially for the person he is. To this day, our
collaboration is something I enjoy. I left his studio in the 1980s, to become
an architect on my own. It was difficult to begin; using Sizas language
seemed like treason, and even if I had wanted to, I would not have been
able to, out of modesty.
After the Revolution, and the re-establishment of Democracy, there were
many opportunities to re-design a country in need of schools, hospitals,
other equipments, and above all, half a million housing units.. Clearly, Post-
Modernism, so trendy back then, was not the answer to our problems. To
build half a million homes with pediments and columns would be a wasted
effort - something that moreover, had already been rehearsed in the days of
dictatorship. Post-Modernism came to Portugal almost without the country
having experienced a Modern movement. And there lies the irony of our
fate: we were already there, even before making the journey to get there.
What we needed was a clear, simple and pragmatic language to rebuild the
country and a culture - nothing better than the forbidden Modern
Movement to step up to that challenge. It was not solely an ideological
problem, but more of all a matter of coherence between material,
construction and language. If architecture is the will of an epoch translated
into space, as Mies van der Rohe put it, then he opened the doors for us to
redefine the discipline that, until that point, was under dispute by linguistics,
semiotics, sociology and other related sciences. The important thing was
that architecture is construction, and that is what the country urgently
asked of us..
With ten centuries of history, Portugal today faces great social and economic
crises, similar to what were faced in other periods. Today, as yesterday,
Portuguese architects find that they must emigrate in order to build. As Paul
Claudel stated: Le Portugal est un pays en voyage, de temps en temps il
touche lEurope. (Portugal is a country on a voyage; from time to time it
sets foot in Europe.) As architects we must change. In that word, we also
find the Greek root crisis. We must decipher and seek to understand the
meaning of the two Chinese characters that compose the word crisis: the
first means danger and the second opportunity (1). In Africa and in other
emerging economies those opportunities will surely be plenty for architects
who look there. The future awaits for us right there. To embrace change,
transformation and metamorphosis is to build our own destiny (2).
Thank you.

Ceremony Speech
President Barack Obama
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Tom, for that introduction. Thank you to the entire Pritzker family
for your friendship and incredible generosity towards so many causes. I want
to welcome as well the diplomatic corps that is here, as well as Secretary
Arne Duncan.
On behalf of Michelle and myself, I want to begin by congratulating tonights
winner, Eduardo Souto de Moura. And I also want to recognize the members
of the prize jury, who I think have a very difficult task in choosing from so
many outstanding architects all around the world.
Now, as Tom mentioned, my interest in architecture goes way back. There
was a time when I thought I could be an architect, where I expected to be
more creative than I turned out, so I had to go into politics instead.
And as the Pritzkers and so many others here can attest, if you love
architecture there are few better places to live than in my hometown of
Chicago. It is the birthplace of the skyscraper a city filled with buildings
and public spaces designed by architects like Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd
Wright and Frank Gehry, who is here tonight.
In fact, the headquarters of our last campaign was in a building based on a
design by Mies van der Rohe. And for two years, we crammed it full of
hundreds of people working around the clock and surviving on nothing but
pizza. I am not sure if that is what Mies had in mind, but it worked out pretty
well for us.
And that is what architecture is all about. It is about creating buildings and
spaces that inspire us, that help us do our jobs, that bring us together, and
that become, at their best, works of art that we can move through and live
in. And in the end, that is why architecture can be considered the most
democratic of art forms.
That is perhaps why Thomas Jefferson, who helped enshrine the founding
principles of our nation, had such a passion for architecture and design. He
spent more than 50 years perfecting his home at Monticello. And he spent
countless hours sketching and revising his architectural drawings for the
University of Virginia a place where he hoped generations would study and
become, as he described it, the future bulwark of the human mind in this
hemisphere.
Like Jefferson, tonights honoree has spent his career not only pushing the
boundaries of his art, but doing so in a way that serves the public good.
Eduardo Souto de Moura has designed homes, shopping centers, art
galleries, schools and subway stations all in a style that seems as
effortless as it is beautiful. He is an expert at the use of different materials
and colors, and his simple shapes and clean lines always fit seamlessly into
their surroundings.
Perhaps Eduardos most famous work is the stadium he designed in Braga,
Portugal. Never one to settle for the easy answer, Eduardo wanted to build
this particular stadium on the side of a mountain. So he blasted out nearly a
million and a half cubic yards of granite from the mountainside, then
crushed it to make the concrete necessary to build the stadium.
He also took great care to position the stadium in such a way that anyone
who couldnt afford a ticket could watch the match from the surrounding
hillsides. Kind of like Portugals version of Wrigley Field.
And that combination of form and function, of artistry and accessibility, is
why today we honor Eduardo with what is known as the Nobel Prize of
architecture. As Frank Gehry, a former winner of this prize, said,
Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for
timelessness. I want to thank all the men and women who create these
timeless works of art not only to bring us joy, but to help make this world a
better place.
And, Tom, thank you again for your extraordinary patronage of architecture.
It makes an enormous difference. Thank you very much.
Wang Shu
2012 Laureate

Selected Works:
Library of Wenzheng College, 1999-2000, Suzhou, China
Vertical Courtyard Apartments, 2002-2007, Hangzhou, China
Xiangshan Campus, China Academy of Art, Phase II, 2004-2007, Hangzhou,
China
Ceramic House, 2003-2006, Jinhua, China
Ningbo History Museum, 2003-2008, Ningbo, China
Five Scattered Houses, 2003-2006, Ningbo, China
Ningbo Tengtou Pavilion, Shanghai Expo, 2010, Shanghai, China

Announcement
Wang Shu of The Peoples Republic of China Is the 2012 Pritzker Architecture
Prize Laureate
Los Angeles, CAWang Shu, a 48 year old architect whose architectural
practice is based in Hangzhou, The Peoples Republic of China, will be the
recipient of the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize, it was announced today by
Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation which sponsors the
prize. The formal ceremony for what has come to be known throughout the
world as architectures highest honor will be in Beijing on May 25.
In announcing the jurys choice, Pritzker elaborated, The fact that an
architect from China has been selected by the jury, represents a significant
step in acknowledging the role that China will play in the development of
architectural ideals. In addition, over the coming decades Chinas success at
urbanization will be important to China and to the world. This urbanization,
like urbanization around the world, needs to be in harmony with local needs
and culture. Chinas unprecedented opportunities for urban planning and
design will want to be in harmony with both its long and unique traditions of
the past and with its future needs for sustainable development.
The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which was founded in 1979 by
the late Jay A. Pritzker and his wife, Cindy, is to honor annually a living
architect 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. The laureates receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze
medallion.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, The Lord Palumbo, spoke from his home in the
United Kingdom, quoting from the jury citation that focuses on the reasons
for this years choice: The question of the proper relation of present to past
is particularly timely, for the recent process of urbanization in China invites
debate as to whether architecture should be anchored in tradition or should
look only toward the future. As with any great architecture, Wang Shus
work is able to transcend that debate, producing an architecture that is
timeless, deeply rooted in its context and yet universal.
Wang earned his first degree in architecture at the Nanjing Institute of
Technology, Department of Architecture in 1985. Three years later, he
received his Masters Degree at the same institute. When he first graduated
from school, he went to work for the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in
Hangzhou undertaking research on the environment and architecture in
relation to the renovation of old buildings. Nearly a year later, he was at
work on his first architectural projectthe design of a 3600 square meter
Youth Center for the small town of Haining (near Hangzhou). It was
completed in 1990.
For nearly all of the next ten years, he worked with craftsmen to gain
experience at actual building and without the responsibility of design. In
1997, Wang Shu and his wife, Lu Wenyu, founded their professional practice
in Hangzhou, naming it Amateur Architecture Studio. He explains the
name, For myself, being an artisan or a craftsman, is an amateur or almost
the same thing. His interpretation of the word is relatively close to one of
the unabridged dictionarys definitions: a person who engages in a study,
sport or other activity for pleasure rather than for financial benefit or
professional reasons. In Wang Shus interpretation, the word pleasure
might well be replaced by love of the work.
By the year 2000, he had completed his first major project, the Library of
Wenzheng College at Suzhou University. In keeping with his philosophy of
paying scrupulous attention to the environment, and with careful
consideration of traditions of Suzhou gardening which suggests that
buildings located between water and mountains should not be prominent,
he designed the library with nearly half of the building underground. Also,
four additional buildings are much smaller than the main body. In 2004, the
library received the Architecture Arts Award of China.
His other major projects completed, all in China, include in 2005, the Ningbo
Contemporary Art Museum and five scattered houses in Ningbo which
received acknowledgment from the Holcim Awards for Sustainable
Construction in the Asia Pacific. In that same city, he completed the Ningbo
History Museum in 2008. In his native city of Hangzhou, he did the first
phase of the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art in 2004, and
then completed phase two of the same campus in 2007.
True to his methods of economy of materials, he salvaged over two million
tiles from demolished traditional houses to cover the roofs of the campus
buildings. That same year in Hangzhou, he built the Vertical Courtyard
Apartments, consisting of six 26-story towers, which was nominated in 2008
for the German-based International High-Rise Award. Also finished in 2009 in
Hangzhou, was the Exhibition Hall of the Imperial Street of Southern Song
Dynasty. In 2006, he completed the Ceramic House in Jinhua.
Other international recognition includes the French Gold Medal from the
Academy of Architecture in 2011. The year before, both he and his wife, Lu
Wenyu, were awarded the German Schelling Architecture Prize.
Since 2000, Wang Shu has been the head of the Architecture Department of
the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, the institution where he did research
on the environment and architecture when he first graduated from school.
Last year, he became the first Chinese architect to hold the position of
Kenzo Tange Visiting Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also a frequent visiting lecturer at many
universities around the world, including in the United States: UCLA, Harvard,
University of Texas, University of Pennsylvania. He has participated in a
number of major international exhibitions in Venice, Hong Kong, Brussels,
Berlin and Paris.
Upon learning that he was being honored, Wang Shu had this reaction: This
is really a big surprise. I am tremendously honored to receive the Pritzker
Architecture Prize. I suddenly realized that Ive done many things over the
last decade. It proves that earnest hard work and persistence lead to
positive outcomes.
The distinguished jury that selected the 2012 Pritzker Laureate consists of
its chairman, The Lord Palumbo, internationally known architectural patron
of London, chairman of the trustees, Serpentine Gallery, former chairman of
the Arts Council of Great Britain, former chairman of the Tate Gallery
Foundation, and former trustee of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York; and alphabetically: Alejandro Aravena,
architect and executive director of Elemental in Santiago, Chile; Stephen
Breyer, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Washington, D.C.; Yung Ho Chang,
architect and educator, Beijing, The Peoples Republic of China; Zaha Hadid,
architect and 2004 Pritzker Laureate; Glenn Murcutt, architect and 2002
Pritzker Laureate of Sydney, Australia; Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, professor
and author of Helsinki, Finland; and Karen Stein, writer, editor and
architectural consultant in New York. Martha Thorne, associate dean for
external relations, IE School of Architecture, Madrid, Spain, is the executive
director of the prize.
The late Philip Johnson was the first Pritzker Laureate in 1979. The late Luis
Barragn of Mexico was named in 1980. The late James Stirling of the United
Kingdom was elected in 1981, Kevin Roche in 1982, Ieoh Ming Pei in 1983,
and Richard Meier in 1984. Hans Hollein of Austria was the 1985 Laureate.
Gottfried Bhm of Germany received the prize in 1986. The late Kenzo Tange
was the first Japanese architect to receive the prize in 1987; Fumihiko Maki
was the second from Japan in 1993; and Tadao Ando the third in 1995.
Robert Venturi received the honor in 1991, and Alvaro Siza of Portugal in
1992. Christian de Portzamparc of France was elected Pritzker Laureate in
1994. The late Gordon Bunshaft of the United States and Oscar Niemeyer of
Brazil, were named in 1988. Frank Gehry of the U.S. was the recipient in
1989, the late Aldo Rossi of Italy in 1990. In 1996, Rafael Moneo of Spain
was the Laureate; in 1997 the late Sverre Fehn of Norway; in 1998 Renzo
Piano of Italy, in 1999 Sir Norman Foster of the UK, and in 2000, Rem
Koolhaas of the Netherlands. In 2001, two architects from Switzerland
received the honor: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Australian Glenn
Murcutt received the prize in 2002. The late Jrn Utzon of Denmark was
honored in 2003; Zaha Hadid of the UK in 2004; and Thom Mayne of the U.S.
in 2005. Paulo Mendes da Rocha of Brazil was the Laureate in 2006, and
Richard Rogers received the prize in 2007. Jean Nouvel of France was the
Laureate in 2008. In 2009, Peter Zumthor of Switzerland received the award.
In 2010, two Japanese architects were honored, partners Kazuyo Sejima and
Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, Inc. Last year, Eduardo Souto de Moura of
Portugal was the laureate.
The field of architecture was chosen by the Pritzker family because of their
keen interest in building due to their involvement with developing the Hyatt
Hotels around the world; and because architecture was a creative endeavor
not included in the Nobel Prizes. The procedures were modeled after the
Nobels, with the final selection being made by the international jury with all
deliberations and voting in secret. Nominations are continuous from year to
year with hundreds of nominees from countries all around the world being
considered each year.

Biography
Architect and Professor Wang Shu was born in 1963 in Urumqi, a city in
Xinjiang, the western most province of China. He received his first degree in
architecture in 1985 and his Masters degree in 1988, both from the Nan
Nanjing Institute of Technology.
Wang Shu and his wife, Lu Wenyu, founded Amateur Architecture Studio in
1997 in Hangzhou, China. The office name references the approach an
amateur builder takesone based on spontaneity, craft skills and cultural
traditions. Wang Shu spent a number of years working on building sites to
learn traditional skills. The firm utilizes his knowledge of everyday
techniques to adapt and transform materials for contemporary projects. This
unique combination of traditional understanding, experimental building
tactics and intensive research defines the basis for the studios architectural
projects.
The studio takes a critical view of the architecture professions part in the
demolition and destruction of large urban areas. At the 2006 Venice
Architecture Biennale, Amateur Architecture Studio expressed views of on-
going demolitions in Tiled Garden, an installation made from 66,000
recycled tiles salvaged from demolition sites. Rather than looking toward the
West for inspiration, as many of Shus contemporaries do, his work is rooted
in the context of Chinese history and culture.
Wang Shu has often explained in lectures and interviews that to me
architecture is spontaneous for the simple reason that architecture is a
matter of everyday life. When I say that I build a house instead of a
building, I am thinking of something that is closer to life, everyday life.
When I named my studio Amateur Architecture, it was to emphasize the
spontaneous and experimental aspects of my work, as opposed to being
official and monumental."
Wang Shu is Professor and Head of the Architecture School at China
Academy of Art, Hangzhou. In 2011, he became the first Chinese Kenzo
Tange Visiting Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
He has exhibited individually and participated in several major international
exhibitions including: the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale at which he
received a special mention for the Decay of a Dome installation a project
whose light, mobile and utterly simple structure can be speedily constructed
or returned to nothingness; the 2009 Architecture as a Resistance solo
exhibition at the BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels; the 2007 Shenzhen
& Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture; the 2003 Alors, La
Chine? exhibit at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the 2002 Shanghai Biennale
at the Shanghai Art Museum; the 2001 TU MU-Young Architecture of China
exhibit at AEDES Gallery, Berlin; and the 1999 Chinese Young Architects
Experimental Works Exhibition, UIA Congress, Beijing.
In 2011, Wang Shu received the Gold Medal of Architecture (grande mdaille
dor) from the l'Acadmie d'Architecture of France. In 2010, Wang Shu and
Lu Wenyu were awarded the Schelling Architecture Prize, which goes to
individuals who have responsibly advanced architecture's development with
significant designs, realized buildings or with profound contributions to
architectural history and theory. The Vertical Courtyard Apartment, in
Hangzhou was nominated for the 2008, German-based International
Highrise Award. In 2005, the project Five Scattered Houses in Ningbo
received an acknowledgement from the Asia Pacific Holcim Awards for
sustainable construction, and in 2003, the Wenzheng Library received the
Architecture Art Award of China.
Wang Shu/Amateur Architecture Studio is known for the following built
works: Library of Wenzheng College, Suzhou University, China (2000);
Ningbo Contemporary Art Museum, Ningbo, China, (2005); Five Scattered
Houses, Ningbo, China (2005); Xiangshan Campus, China Academy of Art
(Phase I) Hangzhou, China (2004); Xiangshan Campus, China Academy of
Art (Phase II) Hangzhou, China (2007); Ceramic House, Jinhua, China (2006);
Vertical Courtyard Apartments, Hangzhou, China (2007); Ningbo History
Museum, Ningbo, China (2008); and, Exhibition Hall of the Imperial Street of
Southern Song Dynasty, Hangzhou, China (2009).

Jury Citation
The architecture of the 2012 Pritzker Prize Laureate Wang Shu, opens new
horizons while at the same time resonates with place and memory. His
buildings have the unique ability to evoke the past, without making direct
references to history. Born in 1963 and educated in China, Wang Shus
architecture is exemplary in its strong sense of cultural continuity and re-
invigorated tradition. In works undertaken by the office he founded with his
partner and wife Lu Wenyu, Amateur Architecture Studio, the past is literally
given new life as the relationship between past and present is explored. The
question of the proper relation of present to past is particularly timely, for
the recent process of urbanization in China invites debate as to whether
architecture should be anchored in tradition or should look only toward the
future. As with any great architecture, Wang Shus work is able to transcend
that debate, producing an architecture that is timeless, deeply rooted in its
context and yet universal.
Wang Shus buildings have a very rare attributea commanding and even,
at times, monumental presence, while functioning superbly and creating a
calm environment for life and daily activities. The History Museum at Ningbo
is one of those unique buildings that while striking in photos, is even more
moving when experienced. The museum is an urban icon, a well-tuned
repository for history and a setting where the visitor comes first. The
richness of the spatial experience, both in the exterior and interior is
remarkable. This building embodies strength, pragmatism and emotion all in
one.
Wang Shu knows how to embrace the challenges of construction and employ
them to his advantage. His approach to building is both critical and
experimental. Using recycled materials, he is able to send several messages
on the careful use of resources and respect for tradition and context as well
as give a frank appraisal of technology and the quality of construction
today, particularly in China. Wang Shus works that use recycled building
materials, such as roof tiles and bricks from dismantled walls, create rich
textural and tactile collages. Working in collaboration with construction
workers, the outcome sometimes has an element of unpredictability, which
in his case, gives the buildings a freshness and spontaneity.
In spite of his age, young for an architect, he has shown his ability to work
successfully at various scales. The Xiangshan Campus of China Academy of
Arts in Hangzhou is like a small town, providing a setting for learning and
living for students, professors and staff. The exterior and interior
connections between buildings and private and public spaces provide a rich
environment where an emphasis on livability prevails. He is also capable of
creating buildings on an intimate scale, such as the small exhibition hall or
pavilions inserted into the fabric of the historic center of Hangzhou. As in all
great architecture, he does this with a masters naturalness, making it look
as if it were an effortless exercise.
He calls his office Amateur Architecture Studio, but the work is that of a
virtuoso in full command of the instruments of architectureform, scale,
material, space and light. The 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize is given to
Wang Shu for the exceptional nature and quality of his executed work, and
also for his ongoing commitment to pursuing an uncompromising,
responsible architecture arising from a sense of specific culture and place.

Essay
The Infinite Spontaneity of Tradition
By Grace Ong Yan
Through the thick, humid air in the seaside city of Ningbo, China an
unexpectedly singular architecture stands out from a bland commercial
district. Comprised of an accumulation of materials, the Ningbo Historic
Museum rises up from the ground as a squared geometry, then angles
outward towards the top. Architecture as mountains (1) is how its
architect, Wang Shu describes his design for the Ningbo Historic Museum.
The matter-of-fact, yet monumental manner in which his architecture sits on
the barren plaza is no mistake. Envisioning a natural formation is, in fact, a
re-instatement of the rural past into what has become a hyper-urbanized
context, devoid of history. The museums site is a flat, paved landscape,
dotted by nondescript buildings. By creating an artificial mountain, Wang
has shaped an architectural topography that is filled with an abundance of
nature-inspired experiences. The building massing appears monumental but
once inside, Wangs architecture is focused around experience. The museum
as a mountain is composed of three valleys, four caves, four sunken
courtyards, a body of water with reed covered banks, as well as a
mountainous topography. Wang expresses the buildings key moments of
space and circulation as natural phenomena. Understanding Ningbo Historic
Museum as a landscape is key to perceiving the projects meaning.
Movement through the building is not expeditious, but slow and thoughtful,
as if we have been transported to a past, pre-technological time. Wang has
imagined his architecture as a kind of Chinese garden where a likely
scenario involves a thoughtful scholar meandering through the landscape.
The buildings circulation was conceived as a labyrinth of pathways, (2)
which means that multiple paths interconnect with public spaces. As a
result, inhabiting the building is wonderfully cinematic.
The exterior of the Ningbo Historic Museum was conceived as a kind of
mountainous topography. Through different devices, Wang Shus allusion to
nature occurs on both the interior and the exterior of his building. Its walls
have been built with what Wang calls, Chinese vernacular sustainable
construction. (3) In response to the large-scale demolitions and
reconstructions in China, millions of pieces of bricks and roof tiles from
different decades are salvaged from demolition sites all over the province to
construct the new building.(4) The collected building rubble is used in the
construction of new walls with the rammed earth wall technique. While
quarried earth is traditionally used to fill the walls, Wang has re-invented the
technique by using rubble from demolished villages as fill. It is at once a
rejection of Chinas demolition and renewal projects, and a way to ensure
continuity of the regions history in its new construction. Additionally, the
appeal of rammed earth walls as a sustainable building technology is
recognized as intelligent and timely.
Another major project designed by Amateur Architecture Studio, Wang Shus
architectural practice with his partner and wife, architect Lu Wenyu, is the
Xingshan Campus of the China Academy of Art, in Hangzhou China. Wang
Shu has served as the head of China Academy of Arts architecture
department at the since 2000. Xingshan Campus is not contained as a
single mass as at Ningbo, but an accumulation of more than twenty discrete
buildings that make up a campus for studying, working, and living. Wangs
approach was to allow the pastoral site, composed of a large hill, rivers, and
trees, to inform how the architecture would be situated. As a result, nature
and architecture not only co-exist but also complement one other. While
Xingshan Campus is vast in size, its scale does not feel this way and can be
described as an architecture of accumulation and variation. While the
complex demonstrates a consistency of design, it also possesses the
bricolage of a rural village in its use of a variety of local and available
materials and siting. Again, as with the Ningbo Historic Museum and other
projects, Wang utilized Chinese vernacular sustainable construction. Bricks
and tiles collected from the Zhejiang province which would have been
otherwise treated as garbage, were reused.
Xingshan Campus planning is not grid-based, but a tight layout of scattered
architecture. This approach, like that of the Greek tradition, gives
experiential views of buildings as three-dimensional rather than as frontal.
As well, picturesque views are offered through idiosyncratically shaped
openings. Through these openings, one sees compositions of building
facades, and courtyards, as well as glimpses of the fertile landscape
beyond. These framed views are rich and complex, highlighting the variety
of light, materials, and shapes seen throughout the campus. Building
profiles and roofs are reminiscent of Chinese temple roofs, yet firmly
contemporary. At the Xingshan campus, architecture has achieved the
variance found only in nature. Textures, shapes, and colors are defined by
the natural landscape and the architecture.
(1)Wang Shu quoted in Wang Shu & Lu Wenyu, Ningbo History Museum,
GA Document 112(2010): Featuring: China Today(Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 2010),
95.
(2)Ibid.
(3)Wang Shu quoted in Wang Shu & Lu Wenyu, Xiangshan Campus, China
Academy of Art, GA Document 112(2010): Featuring: China Today (Tokyo:
A.D.A. Edita, 2010), 112
(4)Ibid.

Ceremony
Great Hall of the People, Beijing, The Peoples Republic of China
Located at the western edge of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the imposing
Great Hall of the People is used for legislative and ceremonial activities.
Completed in 1959, this building is one of the "Ten Great Constructions" built
to commemorate the 10th Anniversary of the People's Republic of China.
Tiananmen Square, while historically a gate to the city, became the
symbolic birthplace of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949 when Mao rose
to power. In the following years, it was greatly expanded to include new
buildingsthe Great Hall of People and the Museum of History (now National
Museum of China) and a new memorial monument located in the center of
the square.
Designed by architect Zhang Bo, and constructed in less than a year, the
Great Hall of the People uses an architectural vocabulary of Chinese
architectural tradition mixed with classicism. The flat roof has a cornice
decorated with yellow tiles set above green lotus petal shaped eaves. The
tripartite granite building is comprised of three sections including a stately
central structure flanked by extensive lower wings on either side. The main
faade, featuring massive marble columns, each resting on a decorated
base of a darker color, measures over 100 feet (325 meters) long. The whole
complex contains about 1,850,000 square feet (over 170,000 square
meters).
The interior spaces are numerous and many are enormous. By some counts
the complex contains over 300 meeting halls, lounges and offices. The Great
Auditorium, which seats over 10,000 people between the main floor,
balcony, gallery and dais, features a large red star surrounded by a galaxy
of lights in the ceiling. The State Banquet Hall can accommodate 5,000
dinersa fact that was proved during Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972.
The official ceremony for the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize will be held in
the Great Hall of the People.

Ceremony Acceptance Speech

Wang Shu
2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
Winning this award is something that I had not expected. For many years, I
have been pursuing my dream on a solitary course. Before this award, I had
never published any architectural design collections or designed any
buildings outside of China. I always see myself as an amateur architect, so it
was a huge and pleasant surprise for me to receive this honor. I wish to
thank the judges for their insight and comments.
As the first architect born and educated in China to win this award, I accept
with both honor and reverence. You should know that China, despite its
great architectural tradition, has not had an official system for professional
architects over the past thousands of years. Modern architecture as a
profession, starting from my teacher's teacher, has only been in existence
for three generations, making this award one of special importance for
Chinese architects. A young architect myself, I have to say that I owe this
award to the age we now live in. It is in this golden age that China has
achieved unprecedented prosperity and openness, giving me so many
opportunities to make difficult architectural experiments in a short span of
time. Here, I wish to thank my partner Lu Wenyu and all my friends who
have helped me before. Yes, I can see some of you in this room today.
Maybe it is because the professional architecture system in this country is
still in its infancy stage, or maybe it is because so many things have
happened in the past decades, but I still remember that 30 years ago, when
I was studying at the architecture department of Nanjing Institute of
Technology, "What is architecture?" was the question most often raised.
Once, Mr. Tong Jun, my respected professor, who is also the first architect in
modern China to study traditional gardens, was asked this same question by
a humble student. His answer was simple, "Architecture is just a small
thing."
Yet, it is this small thing that has profoundly changed the outlook of China
and the lives of the Chinese people over the past 30 years. It has been a
process full of experiments and confusions. As an architecture student who
had read too much philosophy at school, I first embraced modern
architecture with full passion, and then quickly turned my attention to post-
modern architecture. Just as I was starting to feel bored about the
extensively artificial features of the modern buildings, I fell in love with
deconstruction philosophy and architecture. I was so excited that I even
designed and built several deconstructive buildings myself. But throughout
the process I was confused by the same question, "Are my buildings deeply
rooted in my own culture?" This was one of the reasons why I chose to live
in seclusion in the 1990s. I withdrew from the professional architecture
system, and turned to the renovation of old buildings. I spent days and
nights working with local craftsmen. And I realized that compared with
modern buildings that are more about fabrication, there is another type of
building that recognizes things that are already in existence. Unlike modern
buildings that focus on abstract space, this other type of building focused on
creating a sense of place and connecting with the past. And compared with
buildings carrying a strong human imprint, traditional Chinese buildings are
closer to nature, taking architecture to a whole new horizon. It is an entirely
different world of architecture that I had never seen or learned before, but it
contains something more valuable than what modern buildings can offer. If
modern architecture is all about the professional architecture system, I
would rather call myself an amateur.
All my architectural activities so far have taken place in and for China, but
the issues involved in these activities are not confined to China. Many of the
architecture-related issues that have emerged in China amidst tectonic
changes in the past decades have all been experienced in other parts of the
world, although they are taking place in China on a larger scale, with a
stronger impact and at a faster speed. In a country that only had craftsmen
but not architects just 100 years ago, such changes have resulted in a sharp
conflict of civilizations. Therefore, architects should not just see themselves
as professional technicians, but also demonstrate a wider perspective,
deeper thinking, clearer values and conviction.

In all of my architectural design activities I have constantly asked myself the

following questions: How can an architecture founded on craftsmanship
survive in today's world? What is the relevance of the traditional Chinese
landscape system in a world filled with gigantic artificial structures? In a
society undergoing massive city-building campaigns, how should urban
development be handled without resorting to major demolition and
reconstruction? How can new urban buildings connect with memories of the
pastthat might be otherwise lost as structures are demolishedand re-
establish their cultural identities? What can be done in the realm of
architecture to overcome the stark contrast between urban and rural areas
in China? Is it possible to ensure that alongside the top-down professional
system of modern architecture, ordinary peoples right to initiate their own
building activities is also protected? Is it possible to find smarter ways for
addressing environmental and ecological challenges by drawing on the
wisdom found in traditional architecture and grassroots building activities? Is
there a way for us to express our architectural pursuit with stories and
feelings without resorting to gigantic, symbolic and iconic structures? How
can an independent architect maintain the attitude and work style against
the background of a powerful modern system?
I always say that I am not just designing a building, but a world of diversity
and difference and a path that leads us back to nature. These are the
questions I was asking myself when I learned I was given the award, and
these are the questions I will continue to focus on in my future endeavors.

Ceremony Speech
Lord Palumbo
Chairman of the Jury
There is a special resonance in the decision of the jury this year to award
the 2012 Pritzker Prize for Architecture to Wang Shu which is why I would
like to introduce to you, first of all, the members of that jury, who I will ask
to stand now for your approval.
Next, I wish to pay tribute to the Pritzker family. The Prize that bears their
name was the brainchild of Mrs. Cindy Pritzker and her late husband, Jay
Pritzker, in 1979. Most unfortunately, Mrs. Pritzker is unable to be with us
this afternoon, but we are delighted to see her son Tom together with his
wife, Margot. All three work tirelessly to support the Prize, now in its 33rd
year, in one of the most outstanding long-term acts of cultural patronage
that it is possible to imagine. What is certain is that the architectural
community the world over owes them a debt of gratitude that can never be
repaid.
In the last 20 years, the world has been enriched by Chinas remarkable
progression of success in commerce and industry. This rate-of-change can
only be described as phenomenal. The vitality of the economy has found
expression in architecture. In China, it is possible to build with confidence,
optimism and on a scale that is rarely seen elsewhere. With an entirely
healthy, burning ambition, China has become an architectural laboratory for
the world; and consequently the most competitive market in the world for
those who design buildings. To ensure global credibility, an architect must
have projects in China; equally, students, wherever their location, must
travel to China to experience first hand the full potential of contemporary
architecture. This competitive activity is stimulating the creation of a new
Chinese architecture that respects tradition and locality, but that also
recognizes and responds to the urgency of current needs.
This is a difficult balance to achieve, but in the works of Wang Shu, the jury
saw the emergence, for the first time, of truly authentic contemporary
Chinese architecture; for here are buildings of compelling originality that
address the future but draw meaning and value from the past. If the
architecture of Wang Shu is rooted in Chinas long and honorable culture,
tradition, and locality, it also sends important signals to the rest of the world
as a result of his distinctive architectural language that speaks to everyone.

That language is both subtle and rich, new and old, modern and traditional,
improvised yet meticulously considered; and like all great architecture in
any period, in any culture, it both expresses and directs the spirit of the age.
It also teaches us important lessons: Pragmatism is not the same as
compromise; the ordinary is not the same as the commonplace; the truly
modern is that which makes the most of contemporary possibilities; or as
the poet T.S. Eliot put it Only the genuinely new can ever be truly
traditional. In the final analysis, the buildings of Wang Shu are bargains
between monumentality and intimacy; between past and future; between
painterly and tectonic; between public and private space.
For all these reasons, Wang Shu is a worthy Laureate of the worlds most
prestigious architectural accolade. We also believe that he will be the first,
but by no means the last in a line of great contemporary Chinese architects.
In awarding the prize to Wang Shu, we celebrate his achievements and not
least his long, loving and immensely fruitful partnership with his wife and
life spirit Lu Wenyu. At the same time, we salute the vision, courage, and
commitment of his patrons who have done so much to make possible this
happy day.
It now gives me great pleasure to ask Mr. Tom Pritzker, the Chairman of the
Hyatt Foundation to present to Wang Shu, the 2012 Pritzker Prize for
Architecture.
Toyo Ito
2013 Laureate

Selected Works:
Silver Hut (house), Nakano-ku, Tokyo, Japan, 1984
Tower of Winds, Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa, Japan, 1986
Sendai Mediatheque Sendai-shi, Miyagi, Japan, 2000
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London, U.K., 2002
TODS Omotesando Building Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan, 2004
Meiso no Mori Municipal Funeral Hall Kakamigahara-shi, Gifu, Japan, 2006
Tama Art University Library (Hachiji campus), Hachioji-shi, Tokyo, Japan.
2007
Main Stadium for The World Games 2009, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 2009
Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture, Imabari-shi, Ehime, Japan, 2011

Announcement
Toyo Ito of Japan is the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
Los Angeles, CAToyo Ito, a 71 year old architect whose architectural
practice is based in Tokyo, Japan, will be the recipient of the 2013 Pritzker
Architecture Prize. It was announced today by Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman
of The Hyatt Foundation which sponsors the prize. Ito is the sixth Japanese
architect to become a Pritzker Laureate the first five being the late Kenzo
Tange in 1987, Fumihiko Maki in 1993, Tadao Ando in 1995, and the team of
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa in 2010.
The formal ceremony for what has come to be known throughout the world
as architectures highest honor will be at the John F. Kennedy Presidential
Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts on Wednesday, May 29. This
marks the first time the ceremony has been held in Boston, and the location
has particular significance because it was designed by another Pritzker
Laureate, Ieoh Ming Pei who received the prize in 1983.
In making the announcement, Pritzker elaborated, We are particularly
pleased to be holding our ceremony at the Kennedy Library, and it is even
more significant because the date is John F. Kennedys birthday.
The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which was founded in 1979 by
the late Jay A. Pritzker and his wife, Cindy, is to honor annually a living
architect 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. The laureates receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze
medallion.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, The Lord Palumbo, spoke from his home in the
United Kingdom, quoting from the jury citation that focuses on the reasons
for this years choice: Throughout his career, Toyo Ito has been able to
produce a body of work that combines conceptual innovation with superbly
executed buildings. Creating outstanding architecture for more than 40
years, he has successfully undertaken libraries, houses, parks, theaters,
shops, office buildings and pavilions, each time seeking to extend the
possibilities of architecture. A professional of unique talent, he is dedicated
to the process of discovery that comes from seeing the opportunities that lie
in each commission and each site.
Toyo Ito began working in the firm of Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates after he
graduated from Tokyo Universitys Department of Architecture in 1965. In
1971, he founded his own studio in Tokyo, and named it Urban Robot
(Urbot). In 1979, he changed the name to Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects.
He has received numerous international awards, including in 2010, the 22nd
Praemium Imperiale in Honor of Prince Takamatsu; and in 2006, The Royal
Institute of British Architects Royal Gold Medal; and in 2002, the Golden
Lion for Lifetime Achievement for 8th Venice Biennale International
Exhibition. Calling him a creator of timeless buildings, the Pritzker Jury
cites Ito for infusing his designs with a spiritual dimension and for the
poetics that transcend all his works.
Toyo Ito made this comment in reaction to winning the prize: Architecture is
bound by various social constraints. I have been designing architecture
bearing in mind that it would be possible to realize more comfortable spaces
if we are freed from all the restrictions even for a little bit. However, when
one building is completed, I become painfully aware of my own inadequacy,
and it turns into energy to challenge the next project. Probably this process
must keep repeating itself in the future.
Therefore, I will never fix my architectural style and never be satisfied with
my works, he concluded.
One of his first projects in 1971 was a home in a suburb of Tokyo. Called
Aluminum House, the structure consisted of wooden frame completely
covered in aluminum. Most of his early works were residences. In 1976, he
produced a home for his sister, who had recently lost her husband. The
house was called White U and generated a great deal of interest in Itos
works. Of most of his work in the 1980s, Ito explains that he was seeking to
erase conventional meaning from his works through minimalist tactics,
developing lightness in architecture that resembles air and wind.
He calls the Sendai Mediatheque, completed in 2001 in Sendai City, Miyagi,
Japan, one of the high points of his career. In the Phaidon book, Toyo Ito, he
explains, The Mediatheque differs from conventional public buildings in
many ways. While the building principally functions as a library and art
gallery, the administration has actively worked to relax divisions between
diverse programs, removing fixed barriers between various media to
progressively evoke an image of how cultural facilities should be from now
on. The jury commented on this project in their citation, saying, Ito has
said that he strives for architecture that is fluid and not confined by what he
considers to be the limitations of modern architecture. In the Sendai
Mediatheque he achieved this by structural tubes, which permitted new
interior spatial qualities.
Another of Itos projects commented on by the jury is the TODS
Omotesando building in Tokyo, where the building skin also serves as
structure, to quote the jury citation, and further, Innovative is a word often
used to describe Toyo Itos works. Citing the Municipal Funeral Hall in Gifu
Prefecture, Tokyos Tama Art University Library, and Londons 2002
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, the jury calls attention to some of his many
inspiring spaces.
The distinguished jury that selected the 2013 Pritzker Laureate consists of
its chairman, The Lord Palumbo, internationally known architectural patron
of London, chairman of the trustees, Serpentine Gallery, former chairman of
the Arts Council of Great Britain, former chairman of the Tate Gallery
Foundation, and former trustee of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at The
Museum of Modern Art, New York; and alphabetically: Alejandro Aravena,
architect and executive director of Elemental in Santiago, Chile; Stephen
Breyer, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Washington, D.C.; Yung Ho Chang,
architect and educator, Beijing, The Peoples Republic of China; Glenn
Murcutt, architect and 2002 Pritzker Laureate of Sydney, Australia; and
Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, professor and author of Helsinki, Finland. Martha
Thorne, associate dean for external relations, IE School of Architecture &
Design, Madrid, Spain, is the executive director of the prize.
In addition to the previous laureates already mentioned, the late Philip
Johnson was the first Pritzker Laureate in 1979. The late Luis Barragn of
Mexico was named in 1980. The late James Stirling of the United Kingdom
was elected in 1981, Kevin Roche in 1982, Ieoh Ming Pei in 1983, and
Richard Meier in 1984. Hans Hollein of Austria was the 1985 Laureate.
Gottfried Bhm of Germany received the prize in 1986. Robert Venturi
received the honor in 1991, and Alvaro Siza of Portugal in 1992. Christian de
Portzamparc of France was elected Pritzker Laureate in 1994. Frank Gehry of
the United States was the recipient in 1989, the late Aldo Rossi of Italy in
1990. In 1996, Rafael Moneo of Spain was the Laureate; in 1997 the late
Sverre Fehn of Norway; in 1998 Renzo Piano of Italy, in 1999 Sir Norman
Foster of the UK, and in 2000, Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands. Australian
Glenn Murcutt received the prize in 2002. The late Jrn Utzon of Denmark
was honored in 2003; Zaha Hadid of the UK in 2004; and Thom Mayne of the
United States in 2005. Paulo Mendes da Rocha of Brazil was the Laureate in
2006, and Richard Rogers received the prize in 2007. Jean Nouvel of France
was the Laureate in 2008. In 2009, Peter Zumthor of Switzerland received
the award. In 2010, two Japanese architects were honored, partners Kazuyo
Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, Inc. In 2011, Eduardo Souto de Moura
of Portugal was the laureate. Last year, Wang Shu of The Peoples Republic
of China became the laureate.
The field of architecture was chosen by the Pritzker family because of their
keen interest in building due to their involvement with developing the Hyatt
Hotels around the world, and because architecture was a creative endeavor
not included in the Nobel Prizes. The procedures were modeled after the
Nobels, with the final selection being made by the international jury with all
deliberations and voting in secret. Nominations are continuous from year to
year with hundreds of nominees from countries all around the world being
considered each year.

Biography
Toyo Ito was born on June 1, 1941 in Keijo (Seoul), Korea (Japanese). His
father was a business man with a special interest in the early ceramic ware
of the Yi Dynasty of Korea and Japanese style paintings. He also was a sports
fan of baseball and golf. In 1943, Ito, his mother, and his two elder sisters
moved back to Japan. Two years later, his father returned to Japan as well,
and they all lived in his fathers hometown of Shimosuwa-machi in Nagano
Prefecture. His father died in 1953, when he was 12. After that the rest of
family operated a miso (bean paste) making factory. At present, all but one
sister who is three years older than Ito, have died.
Ito established his own architecture office in 1971, and the following year he
married. His wife died in 2010. They had one daughter who is now 40 and is
editing Vogue Nippon.
In his youth, Ito admits to not having a great interest in architecture. There
were several early influences however. His grandfather was a lumber dealer,
and his father liked to draw plans for his friends houses. When Ito was a
freshman in high school, his mother asked the early Modernist architect,
Yoshinobu Ashihara, who had just returned to Japan from the U.S. where he
worked at Marcel Breuers office, to design their home in Tokyo.
He was in the third grade of junior high school when he moved to Tokyo and
went to Hibiya High School. At the time, he never dreamed he would
become an architecthis passion was baseball. It was while attending the
University of Tokyo that architecture became his main interest. For his
undergraduate diploma design, he submitted a proposal for the
reconstruction of Ueno Park, which won the top prize of the University of
Tokyo.
Toyo Ito began working in the firm of Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates after he
graduated from Tokyo Universitys Department of Architecture in 1965. By
1971, he was ready to start his own studio in Tokyo, and named it Urban
Robot (Urbot). In 1979, he changed the name to Toyo Ito & Associates,
Architects.
He has received numerous international awards, including in 2010, the 22nd
Praemium Imperiale in Honor of Prince Takamatsu; in 2006, The Royal
Institute of British Architects Royal Gold Medal; and in 2002, the Golden
Lion for Lifetime Achievement for the 8th Venice Biennale International
Exhibition. All of his honors are listed in the fact summary of this media kit.
He has been a guest professor at the University of Tokyo, Columbia
University, the University of California, Los Angeles, Kyoto University, Tama
Art University, and in the spring semester of 2012, he hosted an overseas
studio for Harvards Graduate School of Design, the first in Asia.
His works have been the subject of museum exhibitions in England,
Denmark, the United States, France, Italy, Chile, Taiwan, Belgium, and
numerous cities in Japan. Publications by and about him have appeared in
all of those countries and more. He holds Honorary Fellowships in the
American Institute of Architects, Royal Institute of British Architects, the
Architecture Institute of Japan, the Tokyo Society of Architects and Building
Engineers, and the American Academy of

Arts and Sciences.

One of his first projects in 1971 was a home in a suburb of Tokyo. Called
Aluminum House, the structure consisted of wooden frame completely
covered in aluminum. Most of his early works were residences. In 1976, he
produced a home for his sister, who had recently lost her husband. The
house was called White U and generated a great deal of interest in Itos
works. It was demolished in 1997. Of most of his work in the 1980s, Ito
explains that he was seeking to erase conventional meaning from his works
through minimalist tactics, developing lightness in architecture that
resembles air and wind.
He calls the Sendai Mediatheque, completed in 2001 in Sendai City, Miyagi,
Japan, one of the high points of his career. In the Phaidon book, Toyo Ito, he
explains, The Mediatheque differs from conventional public buildings in
many ways. While the building principally functions as a library and art
gallery, the administration has actively worked to relax divisions between
diverse programs, removing fixed barriers between various media to
progressively evoke an image of how cultural facilities should be from now
on. This openness is the direct result of its simple structure, consisting of flat
concrete slabs (which are honey-comb steel plates with concrete)
penetrated by 13 tubes. Walls on each floor are kept to an absolute
minimum, allowing the various functions to be freely distributed throughout
the open areas between the tubes.
In delivering the Kenneth Kassler lecture at Princeton University in 2009, Ito
explained his general thoughts on architecture:
The natural world is extremely complicated and variable, and its systems
are fluid it is built on a fluid world. In contrast to this, architecture has
always tried to establish a more stable system. To be very simplistic, one
could say that the system of the grid was established in the twentieth
century. This system became popular throughout the world, as it allowed a
huge amount of architecture to be built in a short period of time.
However, it also made the worlds cities homogenous. One might even say
that it made the people living and working there homogenous too. In
response to that, over the last ten years, by modifying the grid slightly I
have been attempting to find a way of creating relationships that bring
buildings closer to their surroundings and environment. Ito amends that
last thought to their natural environment.
In the fashionable Omotesando area of Tokyo, Ito designed a building in
2004 for TODS, an Italian shoe and handbag company, in which trees
provided a source of inspiration. The Ito office provides its own description
of the project:
Trees are natural objects that stand by themselves, and their shape has an
inherent structural rationality. The pattern of overlapping tree silhouettes
also generates a rational flow of forces. Having adapted the branched tree
diagram, the higher up the building, the thinner and more numerous the
branches become, with a higher ration of openings. Similarly, the building
unfolds as interior spaces with slightly different atmospheres relating to the
various intended uses.
Rejecting the obvious distinctions between walls and opening, lines and
planes, two- and three dimensions, transparency and opaqueness, this
building is characterized by a distinctive type of abstractness. The tree
silhouette creates a new image with a constant tension generated between
the buildings symbolic concreteness and its abstractness. For this project,
we (Ito and his staff) intended to create a building that through its
architectural newness expresses both the vivid presence of a fashion brand
and strength in the cityscape that will withstand the passage of time.
After designing critically-acclaimed buildings like Sendai Mediatheque, Ito
became an architect of international importance during the early-2000s
leading to projects throughout Asia, Europe, North America and South
America. Ito designed the Main Stadium for the 2009 World Games in
Kaohsiung and the under-construction Taichung Metropolitan Opera House,
both in Taiwan. In Europe, Ito and his firm renovated the faade of the Suites
Avenue Apartments with striking stainless steel waves and, in 2002,
designed the celebrated temporary Serpentine Pavilion Gallery in Londons
Hyde Park. Other projects during this time include the White O residence in
Marbella, Chile and the never-built University of California, Berkeley Art
Museum/Pacific Film Archive in California.
Perhaps most important to Ito, however, are the projects in his home
country, made more pressing by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11,
2011. The disaster spurred Ito and a group of other Japanese architects to
develop the concept of Home-for-All communal space for survivors. As Ito
says in Toyo Ito - Forces of Nature published by Princeton Architectural
Press:
The relief centers offer no privacy and scarcely enough room to stretch out
and sleep, while the hastily tacked up temporary housing units are little
more than rows of empty shells: grim living conditions either way. Yet even
under such conditions, people try to smile and make do. They gather to
share and communicate in extreme circumstances a moving vision of
community at its most basic. Likewise, what we see here are very origins of
architecture, the minimal shaping of communal spaces.
An architect is someone who can make such spaces for meager meals show
a little more humanity, make them a little more beautiful, a little more
comfortable.
For Ito, the fundamental tenets of modern architecture were called into
question by Home-for-All. He adds, In the modern period, architecture has
been rated highest for its originality. As a result, the most primal themes
why a building is made and for whomhave been forgotten. A disaster
zone, where everything is lost offers the opportunity for us to take a fresh
look, from the ground up, at what architecture really is. Home-for-all may
consist of small buildings, but it calls to the fore the vital question of what
form architecture should take in the modern eraeven calling into question
the most primal themes, the very meaning of architecture.
The Pritzker Jury commented on Itos direct expression of his sense of social
responsibility citing his work on Home-for-All.
Recently, Ito has also thought of his legacy, as apparent by the museum of
architecture that bears his name on the small island of Omishima in the Seto
Inland Sea. Also designed by Ito, the museum opened in 2011 and
showcases his past projects as well as serving as a workshop for young
architects. Two buildings comprise the complex, the main building Steel
Hut and the nearby Silver Hut, which is a recreation of the architects
former home in Tokyo, built in 1984.

Jury Citation
Throughout his career, Toyo Ito has been able to produce a body of work
that combines conceptual innovation with superbly executed buildings.
Creating outstanding architecture for more than 40 years, he has
successfully undertaken libraries, houses, parks, theaters, shops, office
buildings and pavilions, each time seeking to extend the possibilities of
architecture. A professional of unique talent, he is dedicated to the process
of discovery that comes from seeing the opportunities that lie in each
commission and each site.
Whoever reviews Itos works notices not only a variety of functional
programs, but also a spectrum of architectural languages. He has gradually
developed and perfected a personal architectural syntax, which combines
structural and technical ingenuity with formal clarity. His forms do not
comply with either a minimalist or a parametric approach. Different
circumstances lead to different answers. From the outset, he developed
works that were modern, using standard industrial materials and
components for his lightweight structures, such as tubes, expanded meshes,
perforated aluminum sheeting and permeable fabrics. His later expressive
works have been formed using mostly reinforced concrete. In a truly
extraordinary way, he is able to keep structure, space, setting, technology,
and place on equal footing. Although the resulting buildings seem
effortlessly in balance, they are the result of his deep knowledge of his craft
and his ability to deal with all the aspects of architecture simultaneously. In
spite of the complexity of his works, their high degree of synthesis means
that his works attain a level of calmness that ultimately allows the
inhabitants to freely develop their activities within them.
Innovative is a word often used to describe Toyo Itos works. This is apparent
in the temporary pavilion created in Bruges in 2002 and the TODS building
in Tokyo in 2004 where the building skin also serves as structure. Innovation
can also be demonstrated through his use of traditional materials in
nonconventional ways, such as using concrete to create flowing organic
forms as he did in the commercial development of VivoCity in Singapore. In
addition, his buildings abound with new technological inventions, as can be
seen in the Dome in Odate or the Tower of Winds of Yokohama. This
innovation is only possible through Itos process of carefully and objectively
analyzing each situation before proposing a solution.
Ito has said that he strives for architecture that is fluid and not confined by
what he considers to be the limitations of modern architecture. In the Sendai
Mediatheque, 2000, he achieved this by structural tubes, which permitted
new interior spatial qualities. In the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, the
horizontal and vertical network of spaces creates opportunities for
communication and connection. Seeking freedom from the rigidity of a grid,
Ito is interested in relationships between rooms, exterior and interior, and
building and surroundings. Toyo Itos work has drawn on inspiration from the
principles of nature, as evidenced by the unity achieved between organic-
like structures, surface and skin.
Toyo Itos personal creative agenda is always coupled with public
responsibility. It is far more complex and riskier to innovate while working on
buildings where the public is concerned, but this has not deterred him. He
has said that architecture must not only respond to ones physical needs,
but also to ones senses. Of his many inspiring spaces, the Municipal Funeral
Hall in Gifu Prefecture of 2006 or the Tama Art University Library in Tokyo,
2007 or the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London in 2002 are but three
examples that illustrate Itos cognizant understanding of the people and the
activities within his buildings. His work in favor of Home-for-All or small
communal spaces for those affected by the earthquake in Japan in 2011 is a
direct expression of his sense of social responsibility.
The education of future architects has always been a concern of Toyo Ito.
This is apparent in his teaching positions and in the recent rebuilding of the
Silver Hut as part of the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture in Omishima, which
is used for workshops and research. Perhaps a more perfect example is his
office, which is like a school where young architects come to work and learn.
It is evident that while innovating and pushing the boundaries of
architecture forward, he does not close the road behind him. He is a pioneer
and encourages others to benefit from his discoveries and for them to
advance in their own directions as well. In that sense, he is a true master
who produces oxygen rather than just consumes it.
Toyo Ito is a creator of timeless buildings, who at the same time boldly
charts new paths. His architecture projects an air of optimism, lightness and
joy, and is infused with both a sense of uniqueness and universality. For
these reasons and for his synthesis of structure, space and form that creates
inviting places, for his sensitivity to landscape, for infusing his designs with
a spiritual dimension and for the poetics that transcend all his works, Toyo
Ito is awarded the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Ceremony
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum Boston, Massachusetts
The 115,000 square foot presidential library and museum sits in a 10-acre
park overlooking the Atlantic Ocean to one side and the city of Boston the
other. It consists of a nine-story, stark white, precast concrete tower, 125
feet high, which is contiguous to a glass-and-steel contemplation pavilion.
The upper floors of the tower contain office, research, and document
storage facilities. The lower floors house two elliptical-shaped 230-seat
theaters, and an 18,000 square foot exhibition area. Designed by the fifth
Pritzker Prize laureate I.M.Pei, the original building was completed in 1979. A
waterfront addition for educational and cultural programming was
completed in 1991 also by the firm.Photo: Renzodionigi/flickr
Visitors descend into the exhibitions to learn of JFKs life and
administrations. From this darkened area, they are guided into the light filled
space-framed glass pavilion. The space contains only a giant American flag.
All the focus is on the impressive panoramic views to the sky, sea and
distant horizons.

The simple yet bold form of the librarys stately structure rising at the end of
the peninsula is characteristic of Peis buildings in dialogue with their
settings. The JFK Presidential Library is a strong architectural presence
representing both memorial and monument.

Acceptance Speech
Good evening ladies and gentlemen! I am thrilled and honored to be
awarded the Pritzker Prize in the presence of so many dear friends and
distinguished architects from around the world. It is also a special pleasure
to be here, in the John F. Kennedy Library, on the birthday of John F.
Kennedy, the 35th President. I do believe this is the best day of my life in
architecture so far!
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude first to the Pritzker Family: Mrs.
Cindy Pritzker, Mr. Thomas J. Pritzker, and Mrs. Margot Pritzker. I also thank
the jury members, Lord Peter Palumbo, Mr. Alejandro Aravena, Mr. Juhani
Pallasmaa, Mr. Glenn Murcutt, Justice Stephen Breyer, Mr. Yung Ho Chang,
and Ms. Martha Thorne.
At the same time, being here in Boston, I cannot help but think of the
bombing that happened here last month. Please allow me to offer my
condolences to the victims and to all of those whose lives were affected by
those horrific events.
It has been 42 years since I first opened my studio. Making architecture is
not something one does alone; one must be blessed with many good
collaborators to make it happen. I would like to express my deep thanks to
Mr. Mutsuro Sasaki, who is an extremely talented structural engineer, and
who is here with us today. For almost twenty years now, Mr. Sasaki has
provided me with a steady stream of creative structural ideas for which I am
extremely grateful. I would also like to thank my current and former staff for
sticking with me and sharing so much hard work and struggle over so many
years.
To make architecture is to attempt to establish order in the midst of an
unstable and ceaselessly changing social and natural world. It often
happens, however, that in this search for order we settle into old or
conventional solutions and find ourselves boxed into restrictive frameworks.
For me, the task of the architect is to release people from those restrictive
frameworks by creating spaces in which they feel at ease and in which they
can attain some degree of freedom.
This is why I was especially pleased to read the Jury Citation about my work.
The jury members wrote that I am "seeking to extend the possibilities of
architecture," and that my works, "attain a level of calmness that ultimately
allows the inhabitants to freely develop their activities within them." I have
always tried to push my architecture forward without allowing my style to
remain static. And I have done this in the interest both of architectural
"innovation" and in order to attain "a level of calmness."
The architecture of the cities we live in today had its beginnings in the early
part of the twentieth century. In New York and Chicago, Mies Van der Rohe
and others created skyscrapers like nothing that had ever existed before in
human history. In Europe, Le Corbusier and his colleagues proposed their
shiny, white living spaces in cubic form, along with many other ideas for a
new urbanism. This kind of innovative architecture seemed to offer limitless
possibilities for the city of the future.
These experimental and pioneering efforts brought with them a new urban
age, and populations began to concentrate in the cities. Today's cities are
brimming with skyscrapers and already they accommodate 50 percent of
the world's population. In the near future that number will rise to 70
percent. Modernist architecture, based on the idea that quickly developing
technology would allow for inexpensive mass production of the same kinds
of architecture at any spot on the globe, made possible the migration of
more and more people into urban areas. This same idea, however, also
meant that the world's cities lost their local identities as they were reduced
to a series of uniform and indistinguishable grids.
The idea of "modernity" was of course originally about the liberation of
rational and autonomous individuals from traditional communities, and the
formation of a civil society based on respect for the freedom of individuals. It
also entailed the belief that nature could be conquered through
technological innovation. I think it can be said that the twentieth century
achieved this ideal of modernity and that the realization of such a civil
society has created a better life for us today.
Today's cities, however, look quite different from the cities of the future
imagined by our predecessors a century ago. City dwellers are too often
confined within monotonous grids, their connections to other people are
severed, and they are condemned to an isolated existence. By now, those
who migrated to the cities dreaming of a life of freedom and abundance
have lost their spirited expressions and been reduced to a crowd of
alienated individuals. Modernist architecture built a wall between itself and
nature and relied on technology to create artificial environments with no
connection to nature. It privileged function and efficiency, and cut itself off
from the unique history and culture of its local settings. This kind of isolation
from nature and rejection of the local community is to blame for the
uniformity of today's cities and the people who live in them.
My work has always been about tearing down this wall that separates
modern architecture from nature and the local community, in order to create
architecture that is open to both. I was very happy to see that the jury
members took note of this aspect of my work as well. They wrote, Seeking
freedom from the rigidity of a grid, Ito is interested in relationships
between rooms, exterior and interior, and building and surroundings. Toyo
Itos work has drawn on inspiration from the principles of nature, as
evidenced by the unity achieved between organic-like structures, surface
and skin.
I make it a point to keep visiting the site of the earthquake and tsunami that
hit Japan two years ago on March 11, and each time I go I am reminded of
the powerlessness of technology in the face of nature's fury. This was a
catastrophe brought about by human pride vis vis nature. I believe that
the time has come for us to take back our closeness to nature, to open our
humdrum city grids to nature's abundance, and to rebuild a more vibrant
and human environment. I urge all of us architects to work together to send
out a new message to the next century, one that is as bright and full of hope
as the one transmitted by our predecessors a century ago. In order for this
to happen, we architects must transform ourselves. Let us not fixate on
minor differences, but rather work together to find a message for the next
generation that we can all share.
In his inaugural address of 1961, John F. Kennedy said, "My fellow citizens of
the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can
do for the freedom of man. Even now, a half-century later, there are no
words that inspire us quite like these. Now too, we are being asked: what
can we ourselves do for the freedom of man?
Thank you very much.

Ceremony Speech
Lord Palumbo
Chairman of the Jury
Just over a century ago, in 1910 to be precise, a gentleman by the name of
John Collins Bossidy coined a jingle for a toast at the Holy Cross Alumni
Reunion Dinner in Boston. With the passage of time the words of that jingle
became so well-known, so popular, and so celebrated, that it came as no
surprise when it achieved immortality in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
where it remains, incidentally, to this day! Bostonians, of course, will know it
by heart; whilst for others it may be no more than a faded memory. It goes
like this:
And here in good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God
If we were tempted to re-formulate these words in the context of this
evenings stellar event, I suppose we might say:
And here in good old Boston,
In the glorious month of May,
We come to honour the Pritzker,
On JFKs Birthday!
Be that as it may, it really is an enormous privilege to stand in the John F
Kennedy Library Building, in front of such distinguished company, whilst
calling to mind at one and the same time, the words of President Kennedy
himself during the course of a speech that he gave at Amherst College, fifty
years ago, in 1963: And the nation, he said, that disdains the mission of
art, invites the fate of having nothing to look backward to with pride, and
nothing to look forward to with hope. Now, it must be the kiss of death for
any nation to be deprived of pride or hope, but happily those two precious
commodities are on display in abundance to-day first of all, From this time
and place as President Kennedy would have said of his beloved city of
Boston: And now, with the Award of this years Pritzker Prize for Architecture
to the Japanese Master, Toyo Ito.
For well over 30 years, Toyo Ito has been on a voyage of discovery. Had he
been a navigator in the mould of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, or
James Cook, he would have been Master of the good ship Innovation
ploughing uncharted waters with only the stars in the night sky and his own
unerring conceptual instinct as a guide. Despite this, or perhaps because of
it, he would have made landfall successfully time and time again at points of
the compass quite unknown to others, turning concept into reality in the
process: And equally impressive, he would have circumnavigated the globe,
and found for each and every port of call a new and different architectural
solution suited to specific need and environment.
The buildings that have emerged from his hand are superbly executed,
concept merging seamlessly and effortlessly with reality, to produce an
ordered calm that is all too rarely achieved. In addition, his acute sense of
social responsibility to those who inhabit his buildings, offers them the
utmost versatility within which to fulfil their varying activities.
The work involved in bringing these projects to a successful conclusion is
prodigious, yet Toyo Ito still finds time to devote to the mentoring of aspiring
young architects, encouraging them to develop pioneering techniques of
their own. Only an endlessly patient, open, and generous mind, together
with a breadth of palette that knows no bounds, could contemplate such a
program that continues to break new ground with every passing year.
The long and arduous voyage of exploration and discovery has been a
resounding success. It has enabled Toyo Ito to perfect an architectural
syntax of his own, combining structural and technical ingenuity, with clarity
of form. It has underlined the challenge that all great architects confront,
accept, and overcome, - namely, that the creative process is a lonely and an
isolating experience, initiated at high altitude, where the wind howls and the
air is thin, with no guarantee of success, but simply the thrill of the chase of
an elusive, three-dimensional vapour-trail, otherwise known as Vision. And
finally this resounding success has brought the revelation that however
brutal the battering of a ship by a storm of epic proportions there always
follows the promise of a dawn of unimaginable beauty: a soft swell: and the
quiet satisfaction of dropping anchor in a safe, untroubled, haven.
Toyo Ito has been called an Architect for All Seasons, and it is true that his
buildings have about them a timeless, magical aura that represents his
distillation of a lifetimes experience. As we are honoured to name Toyo Ito
the Laureate of the 2013 Pritzker Prize for Architecture, we are left to ponder
the rhetorical question: Who could possibly ask for more?

-------------------

Before stepping down, I would like to introduce to you the individual

members of the jury who I will ask to stand as I call out their names in
alphabetical order.
The distinguished architect from Santiago, Chile, Alejandro Aravena.
The distinguished Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of
America, from Washington DC, Stephen Breyer.

The distinguished art historian, writer, architectural curator, communicator

and educator extraordinary, from Berlin, Germany, Kristin Feireiss.
The distinguished architect and Pritzker Prize Laureate in 2002, from
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, Glenn Murcutt.
The distinguished architect, architectural historian and professor, from
Helsinki, Finland, Juhani Pallasmaa.
The distinguished industrialist and until recently Chairman of the Group that
bears his name, from Mumbai, India, Ratan Tata.
And last, but by no means least, the distinguished architect and educator,
from Beijing, the Peoples Republic of China, Yung Ho Chang.
Shigeru Ban
2014 Laureate

Selected Works:
Curtain Wall House, Tokyo, Japan, 1995
Paper Church, Kobe, Japan, 1995
Naked House, Saitama, Japan, 2000
Paper Log House, Bhuj, India, 2001
Centre Pompidou-Metz, France, 2010
Paper Emergency Shelter for Haiti, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2010
Haesley Nine Bridges Golf Club House, Korea, 2010
Tamedia Building, Zurich, Switzerland, 2013
Cardboard Cathedral, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2013

Announcement
Shigeru Ban, a Tokyo-born, 56-year-old architect with offices in Tokyo, Paris
and New York, is rare in the field of architecture. He designs elegant,
innovative work for private clients, and uses the same inventive and
resourceful design approach for his extensive humanitarian efforts. For
twenty years Ban has traveled to sites of natural and man-made disasters
around the world, to work with local citizens, volunteers and students, to
design and construct simple, dignified, low-cost, recyclable shelters and
community buildings for the disaster victims.
Reached at his Paris office, Shigeru Ban said, Receiving this prize is a great
honor, and with it, I must be careful. I must continue to listen to the people I
work for, in my private residential commissions and in my disaster relief
work. I see this prize as encouragement for me to keep doing what I am
doing not to change what I am doing, but to grow.
In all parts of his practice, Ban finds a wide variety of design solutions, often
based around structure, materials, view, natural ventilation and light, and a
drive to make comfortable places for the people who use them. From private
residences and corporate headquarters, to museums, concert halls and
other civic buildings, Ban is known for the originality, economy, and
ingeniousness of his works, which do not rely on todays common high-tech
solutions.
The Swiss media company Tamedia asked Ban to create pleasant spaces for
their employees.
He responded by designing a seven-story headquarters with the main
structural system entirely in timber. The wooden beams interlock, requiring
no metal joints.
For the Centre Pompidou-Metz, in France, Ban designed an airy, undulating
latticework of wooden strips to form the roof, which covers the complex
museum program underneath and creates an open and accessible public
plaza.
To construct his disaster relief shelters, Ban often employs recyclable
cardboard paper tubes for columns, walls and beams, as they are locally
available; inexpensive; easy to transport, mount and dismantle; and they
can be water- and fire-proofed, and recycled. He says that his Japanese
upbringing helps account for his wish to waste no materials.
As a boy, Shigeru Ban observed traditional Japanese carpenters working at
his parents house and to him their tools, the construction, and the smells of
wood were magic. He would save cast aside pieces of wood and build small
models with them. He wanted to become a carpenter. But at age eleven, his
teacher asked the class to design a simple house and Bans was displayed in
the school as the best. Since then, to be an architect was his dream.
Bans humanitarian work began in response to the 1994 conflict in Rwanda,
which threw millions of people into tragic living conditions. Ban proposed
paper-tube shelters to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
and they hired him as a consultant. After the 1995 earthquake in Kobe,
Japan, he again donated his time and talent. There, Ban developed the
Paper Log House, for Vietnamese refugees in the area, with donated beer
crates filled with sandbags for the foundation, he lined up the paper
cardboard tubes vertically, to create the walls of the houses. Ban also
designed Paper Church, as a community center of paper tubes for the
victims of Kobe. It was later disassembled and sent to Taiwan, and
reconstructed there, in 2008.
Ban works with local victims, students, and other volunteers to get these
disaster relief projects built. In 1995, he founded a non-governmental
organization (NGO) called VAN: Voluntary Architects Network. With VAN,
following earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes, and war, he has conducted this
work in Japan, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, China, Haiti, Italy, New Zealand, and
currently, the Philippines.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, The Lord Palumbo, said, Shigeru Ban is a force
of nature, which is entirely appropriate in the light of his voluntary work for
the homeless and dispossessed in areas that have been devastated by
natural disasters. But he also ticks the several boxes for qualification to the
Architectural Pantheon a profound knowledge of his subject with a
particular emphasis on cutting-edge materials and technology; total
curiosity and commitment; endless innovation; an infallible eye; an acute
sensibility to name but a few.
The citation from the Pritzker Prize jury underscores Bans experimental
approach to common materials such as paper tubes and shipping
containers, his structural innovations, and creative use of unconventional
materials such as bamboo, fabric, paper, and composites of recycled paper
fiber and plastics.
The jury cites Naked House (2000) in Saitama, Japan, in which Ban clad the
external walls in clear corrugated plastic and sections of white acrylic
stretched internally across a timber frame. The layering of translucent
panels evokes the glowing light of shoji screens. The client asked for no
family member to be secluded, so the house consists of one unique large
space, two-stories high, in which four personal rooms on casters can be
moved about freely.
In Curtain Wall House (1995) in Tokyo, two-story-high white curtains along
the perimeter of the house can be opened to let the outside flow in or closed
to provide a cocoon-like setting. The 14-story Nicolas G. Hayek Center
(2007) in Tokyo features tall glass shutters on the front and back facades
that can be fully opened.
Ban used transportation containers as ready-made elements to construct
the Nomadic Museum (New York, 2005; Santa Monica, California, 2006;
Tokyo, 2007). His design for the Aspen Art Museum is slated to open in
August 2014.
His architecture is often called sustainable, and environmentally friendly,
but he says, When I started working this way, almost thirty years ago,
nobody was talking about the environment. But this way of working came
naturally to me. I was always interested in low cost, local, reusable
materials.
Shigeru Ban served as a member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury from
2006 to 2009. He lectures and teaches at architecture schools around the
world and is currently a professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design.
Ban attended architecture school first at the Southern California Institute of
Architecture (then based in Santa Monica, California), and earned his
bachelors degree in architecture from Cooper Union in New York City in
1984.
Shigeru Ban will be the seventh Japanese architect to become a Pritzker
Laureate the first six being the late Kenzo Tange in 1987, Fumihiko Maki in
1993, Tadao Ando in 1995, the team of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa
in 2010, and Toyo Ito in 2013.
The award ceremony will take place on June 13, 2014, at the Rijksmuseum
in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The Pritzker Prize ceremony is held each
year at a culturally or historically significant venue around the world. This
marks the first time the ceremony will be in the Netherlands. The ceremony
will be streamed live on PritzkerPrize.com, the website of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize.
The distinguished jury that selected the 2014 Pritzker Laureate consists of
its chairman, The Lord Palumbo, internationally known architectural patron
of London, Chairman Emeritus of the Trustees, Serpentine Galleries, former
Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, former Chairman of the Tate
Gallery Foundation; and alphabetically: Alejandro Aravena, architect and
Executive Director of Elemental in Santiago, Chile; Stephen Breyer, U.S.
Supreme Court Justice, Washington, D.C.; Yung Ho Chang, architect and
educator, Beijing, The Peoples Republic of China; Kristin Feireiss,
architecture curator, writer, and editor, Berlin, Germany; Glenn Murcutt,
architect and 2002 Pritzker Laureate, Sydney, Australia; Juhani Pallasmaa,
architect, professor and author, Helsinki, Finland; and Ratan N. Tata,
Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group,
Mumbai, India. Martha Thorne, Associate Dean for External relations, IE
School of Architecture & Design, Madrid, Spain, is the Executive Director of
the prize.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize was founded in 1979 by the late Jay A.
Pritzker and his wife, Cindy. Its purpose is to honor annually a living architect
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. The laureates receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze
medallion.
In announcing this years laureate, Tom Pritzker said, Shigeru Ban's
commitment to humanitarian causes through his disaster relief work is an
example for all. Innovation is not limited by building type and compassion is
not limited by budget. Shigeru has made our world a better place.

Biography
Shigeru Ban was born in Tokyo on August 5, 1957. His father was a
businessman at Toyota, and his mother is a womens clothing haute
couture designer. Bans father was very fond of classical music and made
Ban learn the violin at a young age. His mother traveled to Europe every
year for the fashion weeks in Paris and Milan, which roused Bans longing to
travel overseas. When Ban was young, carpenters were often hired to
renovate the family home, a wooden house. Ban was fascinated by the
traditional work of the carpenters, and he liked to pick pieces of wood to
build things. Ban decided he wanted to become a carpenter.
Ban excelled at arts and crafts in primary school and junior high school. The
model of a house he designed for an assignment during his 9th-grade
summer holiday was displayed in his school as the best. He then decided
that he wanted to become an architect. In parallel with this dream was his
love of rugby. He had played rugby since the age of ten, and while in junior
high school, was selected as a member of the junior Tokyo regional team
that competed against the Korean national team. Ban hoped to attend
Waseda University in order to pursuit both rugby and architecture. After
learning of a drawing examination to enter that university, he spent every
Sunday, starting in 10th grade, learning how to draw at a painters atelier,
and from the 11th grade, he went to a drawing school every day after his
rugby training at school. Ban was selected as a regular member of his rugby
team when he was in 11th grade and played on the national tournament;
however, his team was defeated on the first round. He then decided to give
up his plans to enter Waseda University, known for its strength in rugby, and
go to Tokyo University of the Arts to focus on studying architecture. From the
12th grade, Ban joined the evening classes of a preparation school to enter
the university. He learned structural modeling using paper, wood, and
bamboo for the first time, and his exceptional ability quickly proved him to
be peerless in this area. His teacher at the evening school was Tomoharu
Makabe, a graduate from the architecture department of the Tokyo
University of the Arts. One day, at Makabes house, Ban came across an
article on John Hejduk, the paper architect and then-dean of Cooper
Unions School of Architecture in New York. Bans encounter with the models
and plans of these unbuilt buildings was revolutionary for him, and he
decided to go to the United States and study architecture at Cooper Union.
In 1977, Ban traveled to California to study English. At that time, he
discovered that Cooper Union did not accept students from abroad and only
accepted students who transferred from other schools within the United
States. Ban searched for a school from which he could transfer and decided
to attend the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), which
had just been founded and used an old renovated warehouse as the school
building. Ban was fascinated by the exciting studio and the school
environment. The famous architect and founder of the SCI-Arc, Raymond
Kappe, interviewed him, and although Ban could not speak English well at
the time, Kappe, impressed by Bans portfolio, allowed him to enter the
institute as a sophomore. Ban was very inspired by the series of Case Study
Houses, which were influenced by traditional Japanese architecture. In 1980,
after finishing the 4th year at SCI-Arc, Ban transferred to Cooper Union. All
students transferring from other schools started at the sophomore level, and
among Bans classmates were his current partner in the New York office,
Dean Maltz, and other notable architects such as Nanako Umemoto (Reiser
+ Umemoto), and Laurie Hawkinson (Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects).
His teachers were Ricardo Scofidio, Tod Williams, Diana Agrest, Bernard
Tschumi, Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk, among others. At the end of the
fourth year, Ban took a year of absence from Cooper Union and worked at
Arata Isozakis office in Tokyo. Ban went back to Cooper Union and received
his Bachelor of Architecture in 1984. After graduating, Ban accompanied the
photographer Yukio Fukagawa on a trip to Europe, where he visited Alvar
Aaltos architecture in Finland for the first time. Ban was stunned by how
Aaltos architecture emphasized regional context and material.
In 1985, Ban started his own practice in Tokyo without any work experience.
Between 1985 and 1986, he organized and designed the installations of an
Emilio Ambasz exhibition, Alvar Aalto exhibition, and a Judith Turner
exhibition, as the curator of the Axis Gallery in Tokyo. While developing the
paper-tube structures that he implemented for the first time at the Aalto
exhibition, Ban designed his PC Pile House, House of Double-Roof,
Furniture House, Curtain Wall House, 2/5 House, Wall-Less House,
and Naked House as a series of case studies.
When Ban discovered that the two million refugees from the 1994 Rwandan
Civil War were forced to live in terrible conditions, he proposed his paper-
tube shelters to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and
they hired him as a consultant. After the Great Hanshin or Kobe Earthquake
in 1995, he built the Paper Log House for the former Vietnamese refugees
who did not have the possibility to live in the temporary houses provided by
the Japanese government. He also built the Takatori Paper Church, with
student volunteers. This was the trigger to establish the NGO Voluntary
Architects Network (VAN) and to start disaster relief activities. VAN built
temporary housing in Turkey in 1999, western India in 2001, and Sri Lanka in
2004. A temporary school was built after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, a
concert hall in LAquila, Italy, and shelters after the 2010 earthquake in
Haiti. After the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, VAN set up 1800 paper
partition systems in more than 50 shelters, to give families more privacy.
VAN also built temporary housing at Onagawa, Miyagi prefecture, Japan. This
brought great improvements in the quality of life in shelters and the
temporary housing environment, neglected by the government. Following
the devastation of the New Zealand Canterbury earthquake in 2011, Ban
built the Cardboard Cathedral as a symbol of reconstruction of the city of
Christchurch.
In 1995, Bans paper-tube structure development received the permanent
architecture certificate from the Minister of Construction in Japan and he
completed the Paper House. In 2000, in collaboration with German
architect/structural engineer Frei Otto, Ban constructed an enormous paper-
tube grid shell structure for the Hanover Expos Japan Pavilion in Germany.
This structure drew attention from all over the world for its recyclable
architecture.
In 1998, Nobutaka Higara became Bans partner at his Tokyo office.
In 2004, Ban teamed up with Jean de Gastines (partner at his Paris office
since 2004) and Philip Gumuchdjian, and won the Pompidou Centre-Metz
competition. He gathered Japanese and European students and built a
temporary office made of paper-tube structure on the terrace on a top floor
of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
In 2001, Ban was named a professor on the Faculty of Environment and
Information Studies at Keio University. After he won the competition of
Centre Pompidou-Metz, he established a private practice in Paris with his
partner Jean de Gastines. In 2008 he resigned from Keio University and in
2010 he worked as a visiting professor at Harvard University and Cornell
University. In 2011, he became a professor at Kyoto University of Art and
Design.

Ban is currently working on creating architecture, he volunteers for disaster

relief, lectures widely, and teaches. He continues to develop material and
structure systems. This work led to not only the paper-tube structures, also
laminated bamboo (Bamboo Furniture House, 2002), structural systems
constructed of shipping containers (Nomadic Museum, New York, in 2005,
Santa Monica in 2006, Tokyo in 2007; Container Temporary Housing,
Onagawa, 2011), and wooden structures without metal connectors (Centre
Pompidou-Metz, 2010; Haesley Nine Bridges Golf Clubhouse, 2010; Tamedia
New Office Building, 2013; Aspen Art Museum, 2014). In addition, he creates
furniture and architecture made with carbon fiber (Carbon Fiber Chair, 2009,
and Museum Rietberg Summer Pavilion, 2013).

Jury Citation
Since its establishment thirty-five years ago, the goal of the Pritzker
Architecture Prize is to recognize living architects for excellence in built work
and who make a significant and consistent contribution to humanity.
Shigeru Ban, the 2014 laureate, reflects this spirit of the prize to the fullest.
He is an outstanding architect who, for twenty years, has been responding
with creativity and high quality design to extreme situations caused by
devastating natural disasters. His buildings provide shelter, community
centers, and spiritual places for those who have suffered tremendous loss
and destruction. When tragedy strikes, he is often there from the beginning,
as in Rwanda, Turkey, India, China, Italy, and Haiti, and his home country of
Japan, among others.
His creative approach and innovation, especially related to building
materials and structures, not merely good intentions, are present in all his
works. Through excellent design, in response to pressing challenges,
Shigeru Ban has expanded the role of the profession; he has made a place
at the table for architects to participate in the dialogue with governments
and public agencies, philanthropists, and the affected communities. His
sense of responsibility and positive action to create architecture of quality to
serve societys needs, combined with his original approach to these
humanitarian challenges, make this years winner an exemplary
professional.
The recipient has an exceptionally wide-ranging career. Since founding his
first office in Tokyo in 1985 and later expanding to New York and Paris, he
has undertaken projects that range from minimal dwellings, experimental
houses and housing, to museums, exhibition pavilions, conference and
concert venues, and office buildings.
An underpinning uniting much of his built work is his experimental
approach. He has expanded the architectural field regarding not only the
problems and challenges he tackles, but also regarding the tools and
techniques to deal with them. He is able to see in standard components and
common materials, such as paper tubes, packing materials or shipping
containers, opportunities to use them in new ways. He is especially known
for his structural innovations and the creative use of unconventional
materials like bamboo, fabric, paper, and composites of recycled paper fiber
and plastics.
In Naked House, he was able to question the traditional notion of rooms and
consequently domestic life, and simultaneously create a translucent, almost
magical atmosphere. This was done with modest means: walls externally
clad in clear corrugated plastic and sections of white acrylic stretched
internally across a timber frame. This sophisticated layered composition of
ordinary materials used in a natural and efficient way, provides comfort,
efficient environmental performance and simultaneously a sensual quality of
light.
His own studio, atop a terrace at the Pompidou Center in Paris for the six
years he was working on the museum project for Metz, was built using
cardboard tubes and a membrane covering the arched roof. He has also
used transportation containers as ready-made elements in museum
construction. His body of work is proof of his ability to add value through
design. Further new conceptual and structural ideas were developed and
can be seen in PC Pile House, House of Double Roof, Furniture House, Wall-
less House, and Nine-Square Grid House.

Another theme that runs through his work is the spatial continuity between
interior and exterior spaces. In Curtain Wall House, he uses tent-like
movable curtains to easily link interior and exterior, yet provide privacy
when needed. The fourteen-story Nicolas G. Hayek Center in Tokyo is
covered with glass shutters on front and back facades that can be fully
opened.
For Shigeru Ban, sustainability is not a concept to add on after the fact;
rather, it is intrinsic to architecture. His works strive for appropriate products
and systems that are in concert with the environment and the specific
context, using renewable and locally produced materials, whenever
possible. Just one example is his newly opened Tamedia office building in
Zurich, which uses an interlocking timber structural system, completely
devoid of joint hardware and glue.
His great knowledge of structure and his appreciation for such masters as
Mies van der Rohe and Frei Otto have contributed to the development and
clarity of his buildings. His own architecture is direct and honest. However, it
is never ordinary, and each new project has an inspired freshness about it.
The elegant simplicity and apparent effortlessness of his works are really the
result of years of practice and a love for building. Above all, his respect for
the people who inhabit his buildings, whether victims of natural disaster or
private clients or the public, is always revealed through his thoughtful
approach, functional plans, carefully selected appropriate materials, and the
richness of spaces he creates.
Shigeru Ban is a tireless architect whose work exudes optimism. Where
others may see insurmountable challenges, Ban sees a call to action. Where
others might take a tested path, he sees the opportunity to innovate. He is a
committed teacher who is not only a role model for younger generations,
but also an inspiration.
For all these reasons, Shigeru Ban is the 2014 Pritzker Architecture Prize
Laureate.

Ceremony
The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
The RijksmuseumThe Rijksmuseum, or State Museum, is one of the most
popular and highly regarded art museums of the world. It holds an
outstanding collection of art, including masterpieces of Dutch art by
Rembrandt and Vermeer. The collections are housed in an impressive
building from 1885, designed by Dutch architect Pierre J.H. Cuypers, in the
then-fashionable Dutch neo-Renaissance style, with elements of neo-Gothic.
The Rijksmuseum
The Rijksmuseum reopened in 2013 after ten years of renovation and
restoration, to bring the building back to its former glory and take it into the
21st century. Spanish architects Cruz and Ortiz designed the restoration.
After removing the many decades of additions and changes within each
courtyard and the various galleries, the architects created a continuous
plaza below ground for the museum, and kept a public passageway above
so pedestrians and cyclists can easily pass through the building. The new
design combines the grandeur that defines the Rijksmuseum, plus facilities
such as an auditorium, museum caf, a shop and, to preserve the art,
climate-control and security features necessary for todays requirements.
Past Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremonies have been held at Frances
Palace of Versailles and Grand Trianon, Todai-ji Buddhist Temple in Japan,
Prague Castle in The Czech Republic, the White House in Washington, D.C.,
and Beijings Great Hall of the People. Some of the most beautiful museums
in the United States have hosted the event, from Chicagos Art Institute to
New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fort Worths Kimbell Art
Museum.