British architect David Chipperfield won the 2023 Pritzker Prize

British architect David Alan Chipperfield has won the 2023 Pritzker Prize.

About this reports reported on the official website of the award, which is considered the highest award in the world of architecture. Yes, this year it was won by a British specialist whose focus is on environmental and social issues.

The award was given to the architect behind "adherence to the architecture of restraint, but transformative civic presence."

"He (Chipperfield - ed.) is confident, without arrogance, constantly eschewing fashion to confront and maintain connections between tradition and innovation, serving history and humanity," said Tom Pritzker, chairman of the Hyatt Foundation, which sponsors the award.

If in the 44 years of the award's existence, the jury usually awarded the award for unusual architectural forms, wide curves, and textured materials, this year they preferred the opposite. David Chipperfield's works have been described as "subtle but powerful, restrained but elegant."

The creative output of the architect includes more than 100 projects: public libraries, galleries, museums. In addition, his work on the reconstruction of the New Museum in Berlin in 2009 was noted, because the master managed to save some elements of the building that were damaged after the bombing in World War II and add new ones.

Photo: nytimes

Just look at the stepped atrium of the BBC headquarters in Scotland, the bold cantilevered pillars of the America's Cup Building in Valencia, or the gabled roof of the Jumex Museum in Mexico City.

All of the architect's projects are united by respect for each building and its context. According to Chipperfield himself, why, for what, and for whom a building exists is more important than how beautiful it is.

Architecture is experience and meaning, not fleeting images

“Our culture has been dominated by the visual because it's much easier to see a building on the front of the logbook than to feel it… I think we're changing now. And I think that the visual and the formal will become very subordinate to the process. How we build, what we build, where materials come from—the entire supply chain, both from a sustainability and ethical perspective—will become important. And we will see beauty in a different way," says the architect himself.

Photo: arquitecturaviva

David Chipperfield was born in London, where he founded his architectural firm David Chipperfield Architects in 1985, which has offices in four other cities. The craftsman grew up on a farm in the county of Devon. As he himself notes, it was the rural premises that formed his first ideas about architecture.

Chipperfield became the 52nd laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The winners receive a grant of 100 US dollars and a bronze medallion.

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