Herzog & de Meuron

They met in primary school, studied architecture together, and have since 1978 shared a studio in their native city, Basel, from which they have carried out some of the most influential works of the past decades, such as the signal box in Basel, the buildings for Ricola or the Dominus winery. The parallel biographies of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron now include the American Pritzker Prize, the profession’s most prestigious and most economically endowed award. This sanction for a joint career that began under the professorships of Aldo Rossi and Joseph Beuys comes at the firm’s most international moment. Besides culminating the transformation of a power plant along the Thames into London’s new Tate Modern, they are busy building in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Monticello, the mansion in Charlottesville, Virginia, designed by the architect and president Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of United States architecture, was the venue chosen for the ceremony; their intensely material work, which caters more to intellectual concerns than to stylistic reasons, has come to represent the panorama of Swiss architecture.