Two British architects who have foundations in Spain were feted in the month of May: Norman Foster inaugurated the largest retrospective ever done on his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and David Chipperfield was awarded the Pritzker Prize at the Agora of Athens. Both events were also celebrations of European architecture, which despite the continent’s economic and demographic decline continues to show an intellectual and aesthetic density that is hard to find in other regions of the world. The sixty years of Foster’s career trace a trajectory of constant anticipation of the future, an awareness that the only permanent thing in our lives is change; and the forty years of Chipperfield’s oeuvre constitute a firm endeavor to protect the past, an unflinching attention to continuity in our buildings and our cities. Innovation and tradition coexist in the spirit of a continent whose rich heritage is no impediment to looking forward. Surely it is symbolic that the Parisian exhibition is being held in the building that has best expressed architecture’s visionary ambition, and the Athenian ceremony in the historical context that most eloquently encapsulates the cultural and political roots of European democracy.

The 9th of May is Europe Day because it is the date of the Schuman Declaration, in 1950, which was the first step toward a European integration based on the double pillar of peace and solidarity, and though the opening of Foster’s exhibition took place on a 9th of May, not one of the French authorities who delivered speeches mentioned the coincidence, which could have been a perfect opportunity to speak of the rightfulness of gathering in Paris in a building designed by an Italian and a Briton, stressing how architecture prefigures and gives form to the European dream. For its part, the accolade for Chipperfield was given in the presence of the Prime Minister of Greece, whose wife took advantage of the attendance of numerous citizens of the United Kingdom to demand the return of the Elgin Marbles – the Parthenon sculptures on display at the British Museum in London – and to suggest that the Pritzker go to a Greek architect, instead of using the occasion to rejoice over the links that the common market of architecture and projects is forging among Europeans.

Months after the end of Foster’s huge show – whose first room alone, displaying an extraordinary collection of drawings, is by itself worth a visit – the Pompidou will close its doors for five years, leaving the French capital’s offer of the latest in art in the hands of two museums owned by fashion magnates, the rhetorically expressionist building erected by Frank Gehry for Louis Vuitton in the Bois de Boulogne and the refinedly geometric one raised by Tadao Ando for the Pinault Collection in the historic Bourse de Commerce. As for Athens, it awaits the remodeling and enlargement of its dazzling National Archaeological Museum, which Chipperfield himself will be carrying out with the respect and elegance that he has more than proven in Berlin, and in the meantime the city has to tolerate both the controversial interventions on the Acropolis and the unfortunate museum built at its foot by Bernard Tschumi. The laurels of May have left a bittersweet aftertaste that embroils the brilliance of the honored architects with the uncertain light of the European project.