Rigorous. Rational. Weighty. These words imply seriousness. They also begin to evoke the work of David Chipperfield Architects, one of the world’s leading practices whose work encompasses civic, commercial, cultural projects, private houses, and, increasingly, multifamily urban housing. These multifamily buildings – while not as well-known as their great museums – have a quiet power. And though they are expressions of the advanced capitalist world in which architecture now operates, they also represent a stubborn resistance, a necessary corrective to the disposable housing that markets encourage and often demand.

If you speak to David Chipperfield or hear him lecture, you will sense his seriousness, tinged with world-weariness. You may also get a glimpse of his humour, his wryness. It is somewhere in the juncture between seriousness, worldliness, and intelligent wit, that his deeply humane and dignified architecture is formed (that is not to say that he is the sole author of his buildings – we all know that that is not how a studio such as David Chipperfield Architects operates – but David’s imprint and values informs all the firm’s work). He is also – to use an unfashionable word – a man of taste. Taste, not in the superficial or snobbish sense, but in the sense of discernment, of fitness. He is concerned with the substance of architecture – form, space, light, proportion, materiality – elements he consistently combines in ways that feel just right...