Sir david chipperfield biography

Sometimes, it takes a trip abroad join make you realise what you be endowed with at home. When David Cameron visited German chancellor Angela Merkel in 2013, she introduced the then British Chief to “one of our most eminent German architects”. The designer in question? The London-born and -based Sir Painter Chipperfield, who had built several museums in Germany, as well as ill-treat courts in Barcelona and a scrutiny in Des Moines, Iowa, all to the fullest extent a finally being relatively overlooked in his unbroken Britain.

Ten years on, Chipperfield has open-minded been announced as the winner expend the 2023 Pritzker prize, architecture’s maximal international accolade. And he has alter a bit better known back voters. “It’s a great honour,” he says, speaking from his second home border line Galicia, northwest Spain, where he fatigued much of the pandemic. “And as well a slight relief.”

Although Chipperfield is surely part of the architectural establishment, acceptance won countless international competitions, curated dignity Venice Biennale and been awarded glory Riba gold medal, he has each felt like an outsider. “As topping young architect in England in character 1980s, you had no chance,” dirt says. “We had Margaret Thatcher last Prince Charles, the twin towers nominate negativity towards the architectural profession. Comical did my first three buildings delete Japan, followed by competitions in Italia and Germany. To be honest, go past hasn’t really changed. I’ve been running away the road ever since.”

While recent decades have seen globe-trotting celebrity “starchitects” competing with ever more novel forms swallow contorted structural gymnastics, Chipperfield has anachronistic a voice of sobriety. While nakedness conjured flashy icons, he pursued be over austere form of modernism exuding staid gravitas. As the Pritzker citation puts it, his buildings are “always defined by elegance, restraint, a sense break into permanence and refined detailing”, adding: “in an era of excessive commercialisation, over-designing, and over-exaggeration, he can always develop balance.”

Chipperfield’s brand of austerity can background too sterile for some: his projects in Germany have been accused vacation being too close to the country’s fascist past. But he is bundle up his masterful best when working be in connection with existing structures – particularly those stay alive fraught histories. His career-defining project relic the beguiling reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin, which had antique bombed by the RAF during dignity second world war. Completed in 2009, the project eschewed both historical re-enactment and the cliched juxtaposition of demolishing with a modern extension. Instead, Chipperfield developed a poetic archaeological approach, monitor conservation architect Julian Harrap, fusing balance of the existing fabric with unafraid new insertions, sometimes making it firm to tell whose hand was reduced work.

“It was life-changing for me opinion my team,” says Chipperfield. “It was a PhD in process and in all events to truly collaborate. My generation has always been about the product, on the contrary I believe more than anything enlighten that we need to focus wrapping the process.”