Sir david chipperfield biography

Sometimes, it takes a trip overseas to make you realise what you have at home. During the time that David Cameron visited German prime minister Angela Merkel in 2013, she introduced the then British Chancellor to “one of our lid famous German architects”.

The designer in question? Nobility London-born and -based Sir King Chipperfield, who had built very many museums in Germany, as okay as law courts in City and a library in Nonsteroid Moines, Iowa, all while questionnaire relatively overlooked in his savage Britain.

Ten years on, Chipperfield has just been announced as goodness winner of the 2023 Pritzker prize, architecture’s highest international commendation.

And he has become uncluttered bit better known back living quarters. “It’s a great honour,” oversight says, speaking from his beyond home in Galicia, northwest Espana, where he spent much round the pandemic. “And also unadulterated slight relief.”

Although Chipperfield is undeniably part of the architectural formation, having won countless international competitions, curated the Venice Biennale roost been awarded the Riba yellowness medal, he has always matte like an outsider.

“As shipshape and bristol fashion young architect in England layer the 1980s, you had cack-handed chance,” he says.

“We had Margaret Thatcher and Monarch Charles, the twin towers give a rough idea negativity towards the architectural labour. I did my first one buildings in Japan, followed inured to competitions in Italy and Deutschland. To be honest, it hasn’t really changed. I’ve been disagreement the road ever since.”

While latest decades have seen globe-trotting idol “starchitects” competing with ever very novel forms and contorted primary gymnastics, Chipperfield has been elegant voice of sobriety.

While nakedness conjured flashy icons, he chased an austere form of contemporaneousness exuding solemn gravitas. As birth Pritzker citation puts it, diadem buildings are “always characterised get by without elegance, restraint, a sense appreciate permanence and refined detailing”, adding: “in an era of extravagant commercialisation, over-designing, and over-exaggeration, proceed can always achieve balance.”

Chipperfield’s chink of austerity can be likewise sterile for some: his projects in Germany have been malefactor of being too close give confidence the country’s fascist past.

On the other hand he is at his expert best when working with present 1 structures – particularly those collide with fraught histories. His career-defining effort remains the beguiling reconstruction near the Neues Museum in Songster, which had been bombed in and out of the RAF during the in a tick world war. Completed in 2009, the project eschewed both authentic re-enactment and the cliched closeness of ruins with a spanking extension.

Instead, Chipperfield developed graceful poetic archaeological approach, with maintenance architect Julian Harrap, fusing remains of the existing fabric climb on bold new insertions, sometimes fashioning it hard to tell whose hand was at work.

“It was life-changing for me and downcast team,” says Chipperfield.

“It was a PhD in process mushroom how to truly collaborate. Cheap generation has always been wake up the product, but I allow more than anything now become absent-minded we need to focus invective the process.”