British architect David Chipperfield wins the 2023 Pritzker Prize — ‘We can’t deny responsibility any more’

I was a little surprised when it was announced that David Chipperfield had been awarded the Pritzker Prize. Mostly because, even though I’ve been covering the announcements for almost a quarter of a century, I assumed that one of the most internationally admired, articulate and urbane of architects had already won it.

Chipperfield has constructed an oeuvre of incredible coherence, elegance and often self-effacing unshowiness. He has defied contemporary expectations of self-conscious shape-making and flashy gestures, attempting to stitch pieces of cities back together, working with historic buildings not to overwhelm them but to allow them to work and to breathe. He has been a consistent critic of the dumbing down of architecture and a proponent of culture in its broadest understanding. He is also, perhaps, the last in a line of great British architects beginning with Norman Foster and Richard Rogers (both of whom he worked for early in his career) to have had a major impact on global design.

Although he is based in London, I spoke to him from his other home in Corrubedo, Galicia, where he has become a big figure on a rather small local scene (he has even opened a café bar there and is working on building his foundation in nearby Santiago de Compostela). I asked him what impact his winning the Pritzker would have. “The village will go crazy,” he remarked, wryly. “Though they won’t know what the Pritzker Prize is.”

With a long career embracing major cultural projects from Anchorage to Kyoto via Berlin and Margate, I ask Chipperfield (who is dressed, as he always is, in white jeans and a black polo-neck) what he has tried to do with his architecture. He thinks quite hard. “Hmmm. It’s an important question,” he says. “Because over the last, say, 30 years, there has been a tendency for architecture to become much more about itself. For the generation before us, architecture was understood as something with a sense of social purpose, with planning, housing and a public programme. But there has been a shift away, towards investment as a way of building our cities. Architecture has been commodified. I’ve always tried to question what contribution each project can make. With museums it is easier — they have a social and cultural purpose embedded. It gets much harder with commercial buildings.”

Throughout our conversation, and in a chat I had with him the previous week in Athens (where he is designing a major extension to the neoclassical National Archaeological Museum), he keeps coming back to his work on Berlin’s complex of museums, the Museum Island, and in particular to the city’s Neues Museum. This 30-year project saw the rebuilding and restoration of the German capital’s war-scarred museum quarter, including the bombed-out shell of the 19th-century Neues Museum. Is this the project he is most proud of? “I don’t know about most proud,” he hesitates, “but it was the epitome of the collaborative process. It might sound a little strange for an architect to admit that the pinnacle of their career was the restoration of an old ruin. But the process is more important than the product and the Neues Museum was a symphony of process which gave it a robustness and an idea of meaning.

“We could have just done a straightforward copy of the original building and we would have fulfilled our brief, most people would have been perfectly happy. But it wouldn’t have meant that much, or it would have meant the wrong thing.” Instead, they meticulously restored some elements and left the scars viscerally visible throughout, revealing its history through surface and damage.

So working with existing buildings makes a better outcome? “Not quite,” he replies. “But when you are designing a new building, you have to become a salesman. We become politicians promising something without evidence. You have to make people trust you, but it is tiring and can be fragile. If you’re asked to renovate or expand an existing building, it is because it is already cherished, there is a shared emotional commitment with a common object.”

If Chipperfield is now best known for museums and galleries (including London’s Royal Academy, The Hepworth Wakefield, the Saint Louis Art Museum and Museo Jumex, Mexico City), he also heads a surprisingly commercial practice that designs offices and upscale residential and retail, from Selfridges to Valentino flagship stores in New York, London and Rome to the rarefied Bryant building in New York and the One Kensington Gardens development in London. There have been some misfires. And fires — he was unceremoniously dropped from a years-long process of trying to reimagine the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while some buildings, such as Barcelona’s vast City of Justice, have been criticised for an alienating iciness.

“I don’t believe in a purely artistic practice,” he says. “You can’t design three buildings in a career and let everything else around you be rubbish. I’ve always tried to build a commercially viable office. It isn’t easy.”

Does he still have confidence that architecture can change things? “All architects believe that architecture can play a role in improving our lives,” he says. “We have to believe that. I think we’re at a pivotal moment where, as a profession, we claim a level of impotence, that by the time we are called in, a lot of the big questions have already been asked. But with the two big issues we are confronting now, climate change and social inequality, we can’t deny responsibility any more.

“We know social inequality can be addressed by giving people a decent place to live,” he says, “and we know the construction industry is a huge contributor to climate change. We need to deal with this collectively.”

This has been one of Chipperfield’s enduring preoccupations. “Our profession has organised itself in a competitive manner,” he says. “We have to be careful. In recent years we have emphasised our individual identities and not our collective responsibilities. We need to encourage common purpose and collaboration, participation and engagement, with society and the profession.”

But doesn’t a prize like the Pritzker reinforce individual identity? “Hmm,” he mumbles. “It is an uncomfortable moment for us. I wonder if in the future they might see my generation as dinosaurs. It will be less about a moment of genius to the individual creator, more about collaboration. I gave a lecture the other day and said, ‘Don’t copy us, don’t do what we did, but always think about new ways of practice.’”

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