The winner of the 46th Pritzker Architecture Prize was announced Tuesday: Arata Isozaki, an architect, urban designer and theorist. So what is this award? And why is it so important?
The Pritzker Prize is frequently called the Nobel of architecture.
This annual international award recognizes a living architect or architects whose work “has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity through the art of architecture.” The prominent Pritzker family of Chicago established the award through the Hyatt Foundation in 1979, when American architect Philip Johnson became the first winner, for a body of work that includes the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. The prize consists of $100,000 and a bronze medallion.
Does it matter?
Many in the field see the Pritzker not only as a validation of an individual’s work but also as a validation of the profession.
“People rarely think about architecture as an art or architecture as creative expression,” said Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture.
With its scope, the prize implies that innovation and quality work are “not coming out of one place,” said Thom Mayne, who won in 2005. Mayne, founder of the Los Angeles-based firm Morphosis, said the diversity of the laureatesemphasized that the field was not just about formal design. “It connects the quality of architecture to broader social, political, cultural attributes,” he added.
How are the laureates chosen?
The executive director of the Pritzker Prize solicits nominations from past laureates, academics, architects, critics and others in the field. Any licensed architect can also submit a nomination for consideration.
The laureate is selected by an independent jury of five to nine professionals, who serve for several years so that each panel includes past and new members.
Who are some past laureates?
The Pritzker has been given to a number of Western “starchitects,” like Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid. It has also been presented to significant figures such as Balkrishna Doshi, the Indian architect, who won at 90, and to the Spanish trio Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta — the first time the award was bestowed on three people at one time.
Of the 46 laureates, nearly half were from Europe.
Have there been controversies?
Only three women have won the award, with Hadid, in 2004, the only solo female architect to win. In 2010, Kazuyo Sejima, a co-founder of Sanaa, the Japanese architectural team, shared the prize with her colleague Ryue Nishizawa; Pigem of RCR Arquitectes was honored in 2017, along with her male partners.
In 2013, Denise Scott Brown asked to be retroactively acknowledged for the award that had excluded her in 1991, when her design partner and husband, Robert Venturi, won. Thousands of professionals signed a petition requesting the same, but the Pritzker committee declined to revisit the decision, saying, “A later jury cannot reopen or second guess the work of an earlier jury, and none has ever done so.” At the time of the prize, Scott Brown had been a partner at the couple’s practice, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, for 22 years and had co-authored with her husband the seminal postmodern text “Learning From Las Vegas.”
On Sunday, Berke said that the global nature of the prize should be applauded but that the gender disparity “needs to be addressed.”
How much does the award affect a laureate’s career?
That depends. Mayne said there was no way of knowing how much it affected his work, while Pigem said that since receiving the prize two years ago, her team senses that there are more eyes on them. And with heightened awareness, she added, “it helps you to have more responsibility.”
When Norman Foster won in 1999, he used the prize money to start a fund to grant traveling scholarships to students through the Norman Foster Foundation. “Many have already benefited — so will many others still to come,” Foster said by email.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.