David Chipperfield

The Imperial House of Japan and the Japan Art Association have every year since 1989 been awarding the Praemium Imperiale, endowed with 15 million Yen (132,000 euros), to five artists in different categories. The 2013 awardees were Plácido Domingo for Music, Francis Ford Coppola for Theater and Cinema, Michelangelo Pistoletto for Painting, Antony Gormley for Sculpture and David Chipperfield for Architecture. Born in London in 1953, Chipperfield has developed a solid career marked by formal contention, respect for context and an essential materiality that sets him apart from his country’s tradition, marked in general by the technocratic trace of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, at the studio’s of which Chipperfield worked early in his career. His concise and strictly geometric language, though warm, can be found in works that differ in character, located around the world, from the Neues Museum in Berlin or the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, to his buildings in Spain, like the City of Justice in Barcelona, the America’s Cup Pavilion in Valencia, or the Paseo del Óvalo in Teruel.