The Pritzker Architecture Prize, also known as the “Nobel Prize for Architecture,” is now in its 46th year, and on Tuesday, March 7, the prize for 2023 was awarded.
The winner is British architect David Chipperfield (1953), who in the past has signed the design of the MUDEC in Milan, among others, and more recently worked on the restoration of the Procuratie Vecchie surrounding the three sides of St. Mark’s Square in Venice (2022).
Among past winners, the first woman was Zaha Hadid, and out of forty-six awards given, two are Italian. Aldo Rossi was awarded the prize in 1990 while Renzo Piano in 1998. The last winner in 2022, however, was Diébédo Francis Kéré (Burkina Faso), the first architect of African descent to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
The award was established in 1979 by the Hyatt Foundation of the Pritzker family and involves the awarding of a medal and a $100,000 prize. The family comes from a lineage of Jewish lawyers of Ukrainian origin who emigrated to the U.S. ten years after the Great Chicago Fire (1871), moving from Kiev to this very city. The disastrous event allowed the city, through total reconstruction and the invention of the elevator, to pioneer a new way of conceiving space with a revolutionary new structure, that of the skyscraper.
The structure and role of Chicago – the world’s first vertical city – undoubtedly influenced Jay Pritzker, entrepreneur and founder of the Hyatt hotel chain, who, aware of the power and importance of architecture, founded with his wife Cindy an annual award for great designers. The award, as the official manifesto states, is given “to honor a living architect whose completed works demonstrate a combination of talent, vision and commitment, and who has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.”
