David Chipperfield, British architect, known in Spain for being the author of the City of Justice in Barcelona, the Veles e Vents building, in the port of Valencia and a group of social housing in Villaverde, in Madrid, is the winner of the Pritzker for Architecture in 2023. Chipperfield succeeds Burkinabe architect Francis Keré, winner in 2022.
«In his persistent search for a diverse, robust and coherent body of work, David Chipperfield has managed never to lose sight of a sense of genius loci, the spirit of the place and cultural contexts in which he works. We do not see an instantly recognizable David Chipperfield building as such in different cities, but rather we see different David Chipperfield buildings designed specifically for each circumstance," the Pritzker jury wrote in their ruling.
Chipperfield's choice seems a slightly ironic reply to the accession to the throne of King Charles III of England, architecture critic, countryman and almost contemporary of the new Pritzker. If the monarch has refuted the architecture of the 20th century in many texts and manifestations and has expressed the popular distrust in his country towards the work of the modern movement, Chipperfield has taken the tradition of the Smithsons, Fosters and Rogers (with whom he worked at beginning of his career) and has worked to make it better, more moral and kinder, to make it more understandable. To link it to the architecture of the continent, too.
Chipperfield graduated as an architect in the late 1970s, founded his studio in 1984 and along the way opened an art gallery whose purpose was to publicize the work of his European colleagues. He built shops, private homes and found a wealth of clients, colleagues and inspiration in Japan.
The other country that has marked Chipperfield has been Germany. His career took off for good in the 1990s, when he was commissioned to rehabilitate the Neies Museum on Berlin's Museum Island, in ruins since the war. A decade after his former boss Norman Foster built the Reichstag as an amusement park of parliamentarianism, the austerity of the Neues Museum became a shock. Almost immediately, Chipperfield returned to Berlin to restore the Nationalgalerie in the Tiergarten, perhaps the most iconic building of the 20th century. His meeting with Mies Van der Rohe is probably one of the great merits that explain the Pritzker.
Unlike the British architects of the previous generation, marked by technological optimism, Chipperfield has always refused to explain himself through a theme, a style, a mission or a material. When the ICO Museum presented an exhibition dedicated to his work in Madrid, the message was complex and subtle: in Chipperfield there is a concern for composition and harmony that is not geometric rigidity. There is an almost scientific trial-and-error approach, and there is a sense of containment and synthesis that seems like a poetic thing.
Chipperfield's relationship with Spain is long. In addition to the great built works, his studio is the author of the Pereda Center project, the headquarters of the Santander Foundation in the Cantabrian capital, built on the facades of two historic buildings on the first line of the expansion that will remain intact. And also facing the Bay of Biscay, in Corrubedo, in the province of La Coruña, Chipperfield is the author of his family's summer house. Not only that: the architect has insisted on keeping the town's tavern open, in which he has acted as a businessman/benefactor. In case King Carlos III reads us: he has not turned it into a snobbish and very expensive restaurant. He has only maintained it and improved it.
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