“The careful, well-crafted, precise and calm responses he has offered to the goals aspired to in his buildings can only originate in a deep and sustained knowledge of the discipline. Yet, those responses are never self-centred, nor do they serve in any way as art for art’s sake: rather, they always remained focused on the higher purpose of the undertaking and on the pursuit of civic and public good”.

With these words, an international jury has announced David Chipperfield as the winner of the 2023 edition of the prize awarded annually by the Pritzker Foundation, broadly recognized as the “Nobel Prize for architecture”.

Words that seem to echo those Chipperfield himself had used in his experience as guest editor of Domus through the most difficult months of 2020, filled with emergencies that architecture was facing as well, with the obligation to find meaning and direction: “We must learn how to concentrate our skills and use our ability to mediate scale, from a consideration of the tangible and experiential to the conditions of community which involve proactive analysis and planning". 

Born and trained in London, Chipperfield has started David Chipperfield Architects in 1985 – a now global firm with offices in London, Berlin, Milan, and Shanghai – immediately taking an alternative stance to both the then dominant postmodernist and High Tech trends, focusing on a minimalism made of materiality and attention to place and its often public dimension, as shown by projects such as the Des Moines Public Library, or the more recent museum experiences of Museumsinsel and Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Jumex in Mexico, or Procuratie Vecchie in Venice (the latter  commissioned by Generali Real Estate).