This year, architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, has been granted to Grafton Architects, a Dublin-based architectural firm mainly ran by female partners Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara. For the first time ever in its 42-year history, due to the constraints set by Covid-19 global pandemic, the organizers of the Pritzker Prize decided to use Livestream the award ceremony. Having reached the end of 2020, ArchDaily has summed up what current and previous Pritzker Prize winners have accomplished during this turbulent year.
2020 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara
Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, the 2020 Pritzker Prize winners, have completed Town House – a £50m landmark teaching building for Kingston University in London. The Dublin-based practice was selected to design the scheme from a five-strong shortlist following a competition initiated by Kingston University in conjunction with RIBA in 2013.
Grafton Architects was also selected as the winning firm to design the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation at the University of Arkansas. In collaboration with Modus Studio for the planned campus design research center, the design of the project is scheduled to begin this summer.
2019 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Arata Isozaki
Arata Isozaki, the 2019 Pritzker Prize winner, designed Shanghai Symphonic Orchestra, now open to the public. The design pays careful attention to acoustics. The project was carried out with acoustics expert Yasuhisa Toyota Ikaj. Inside a stunning and celebrated architectural mass, the new 65,000 square foot facility features two world-class performance venues—a 1,200-seat vineyard-style concert hall and a 400-seat recital hall, which also functions as a state-of-the-art recording facility.
2018 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Balkrishna Doshi
Balkrishna Doshi, the 2018 Pritzker Prize winner, in September 2020 held his first US retrospective “Balkrishna Doshi: Architecture for the People” in partnership with the Vitra Design Museum of Germany and Wrightwood 659. During his 60 years of practice, Doshi realized a wide range of projects, adopting principles of modern architecture and adapting them to local culture, traditions, resources, and nature. The exhibition presents significant projects realized between 1958 and 2014, ranging in scale from entire cities and town planning projects to academic campuses as well as cultural institutions and public administrative offices, from private residences to interiors.
2017 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta
Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta, the 2017 Pritzker Prize winners, completed their design for L'Olivera 4. RCR Arquitectes developed an architectural concept that would honour the integrity of the natural environment. Water is a central element of the concept, intended as a meditative thread that runs through the L’Olivera. The house appears to be suspended in the air with water flowing from the entrance to the swimming pool creating a relaxing river drawing you into and through the home, each space invites its inhabitants to connect with the natural world.
2016 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Alejandro Aravena
Alejandro Aravena, the 2016 Pritzker Prize winner and the president of Elemental, has finished the construction of Casa Ocho Quebradas. Elemental's design draws on the rugged landscape of its site, a cliff on the coast of Chile, to create a rugged, even primitive weekend house design of concrete volumes. Inspired by their idea that "a weekend house is ultimately a kind of retreat where people allowed themselves to suspend the conventions of life and go back to a more essential living," the house is a simple composition that incorporates features such as the main room which can be opened up to the outdoors and a central open fire.
2014 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Shigeru Ban
Shigeru Ban, the 2014 Pritzker Prize winner, has designed two public toilets for the Tokyo Toilet project with transparent glass walls that become opaque when they are occupied. Built in the city's Yoyogi Fukamachi Mini Park and the Haru-no-Ogawa Community Park, the pair of restrooms feature tinted-glass walls to enable those approaching to easily check whether they are in use or not. This see-through quality was also selected to reassure users that the facilities are clean without them having to enter the toilet block first to check. For privacy, the glass walls become opaque once the occupant has entered and locked the door.
2013 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Toyo Ito
Toyo Ito, the 2013 Pritzker Prize winner, has designed rival proposal to build the 2020 Tokyo Olympic stadium, replacing Zaha Hadid's competition-winning design. Toyo Ito’s design features an oval plan and has an atrium surrounded by a wavering glass shelter. The design is estimated to cost ¥153.7 billion (£836 million).
2012 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Wang Shu & Lu Wenyu
Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, the 2012 Pritzker Prize winners, have designed Lin'an Museum, now open in Hangzhou. This building mixes traditional Chinese architecture with a contemporary way of rethinking these ancient ideas. The project comprises a commercial block, featuring shops selling local crafts, to the north, and the museum complex to the south. Both wings provide protection from the main road and create a secluded garden, parkland, and lake open to the public.
2010 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, the 2010 Pritzker Prize winners, have designed a library at japan women's university, an institution that Sejima herself attended. The multi-storey building, which forms part of the school’s mejirodai campus in bunkyō, contains a range of resources for students across its different floors. new trees have been planted at the entrance to the structure, while a covered pedestrian walkway that leads to a nearby kindergarten also forms part of the plan.
Ryue Nishizawa has designed ochoquebradas house in Chile. The residence is located on the Chilean coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The dwelling is topped with an undulating concrete roof that references the waves crashing against the shoreline. The project is located in close proximity to another concrete house designed by Alejandro Aravena.
2009 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Peter Zumthor
Peter Zumthor, the 2009 Pritzker Prize winner, has designed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), scheduled for construction soon. LACMA has revealed images of the interior gallery spaces that will hold the institution’s collection. These galleries will be located on one level, a horizontal design that the museum says ‘offers an egalitarian experience’.
“Displaying all art on a single level avoids giving more prominence to any specific culture, tradition, or era, offering visitors a multitude of perspectives on art and art history in a more accessible, inclusive way,” LACMA continues. “the single-level gallery floor will also be more intuitive to navigate and easier to access, especially for wheelchairs and strollers, and its perimeter of transparent glass will provide energizing natural light and views to the park and urban environment, with views from outside into the galleries.”
2008 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Jean Nouvel
Jean Nouvel, the 2008 Pritzker Prize winner, has his project The Artists’ Garden under construction in Qingdao, China. The architect aims to create a poetic space for artists and those who are passionate about art, a place where emotional responses to seeing the sea can be shared, a great central garden, with fishermen and their boats, a small creek, parasols, and a rectangular harbour. The museum needs to be flexible, but it should also remain a museum. Jean Nouvel proposes to link up several large rooms, extremely well-identified in the world of museography. He also suggests an ‘outside-inside’ promenade that will travel through the museum’s main rooms along the water’s edge and among the trees, with carefully chosen and controlled views over the sea and deep into the undergrowth. He proposes a clearly identifiable line that will align several buildings of contrasting characters.
2007 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Richard Rogers
Richard Rogers, the 2008 Pritzker Prize winner, has retired after 43 years of practice. He came to prominence in the 1970s and 80s with two buildings that were controversial at the time for putting amenities like lifts and air conditioning ducts on the outside - the Pompidou, which he designed with Renzo Piano, and the Lloyds building in London.
His company will now be led by partners Ivan Harbour and Graham Stirk, and under its constitution will drop Rogers' name within the next two years, according to Building Design.
2005 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Thom Mayne
Thom Mayne, the 2005 Pritzker Prize winner, has designed the New Nanjing Conference Center for the city of Nanjing in China. The project is situated between China’s eastern coastal cities and the Yangtze River Delta region. The conference center design was made as a flagship project to embody a charter for sustainable and ecologically-sensitive development.
As Morphosis explains, the building is located at a geographical and cultural junction in Nanjing, bordering the banks of the Yangtze River, the commercial edge of the Jianbei District, and the historic fabric of the Nanjing Metropolitan area.
2001 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the 2001 Pritzker Prize winners, revealed conceptual design of the Grand Canal Museum Complex in Hangzhou, China. The project illustrates the story of the Grand Canal, through a continuous dialogue between the water and the museum.
Anchored by “a large mountain-shaped conference center-hotel complex on the east side of the plot”, embodying a classic Chinese ideal of “water in the front, mountain in the back”, the project is directly in relation to the city and the natural environment. The façade consisting of large concave cast glass elements resembles “the sparkle of rippling water and amplifies the natural beauty of the Grand Canal”, whereas the other façade facing the “Mountain” is mineral and solid. Finally, the landscape design is conceived as a conceptual representation of the various regional floras found throughout China.
2000 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Rem Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas, the 2000 Pritzker Prize winner, has completed construction for his new work Axel Springer SE in Germany. Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA proposed a building that lavishly broadcasted the work of individuals for shared analysis. The new office block is injected with a central atrium that opens up to the existing Springer buildings - a new center of the Springer campus.
The design was developed around a series of terraced floors that together form a digital valley. Each floor contains a covered part as a traditional work environment, which is then uncovered on the terraces. Halfway through the building, the valley is mirrored to generate a three-dimensional canopy. The common space formed by the interconnected terraces offers an alternative to the formal office space in the solid part of the building, allowing for an unprecedented expansion of the vocabulary of workspaces: a building that can absorb all the question marks of the digital future.
1999 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Norman Foster
Norman Foster, the 1999 Pritzker Prize winner, has designed Apple Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, now open to the public. Apple Marina Bay Sands is set to have a distinctive presence on the bay, with a 30-metre diameter dome that is a contemporary interpretation of the geodesic dome, using minimal material to enclose the maximum space. Imagined as a clear bubble in the water, it references the sister pavilion through its materiality and site. It is fully glazed, with a black glass base, creating an island joined only by a small bridge.
A gentle ramp from the boardwalk leads up to the fully glazed dome, which offers a 360-degree view of the entire marina through large 12-meter x 3-meter panels of curved glass. The glass dome comprises 112 pieces of glass treated with frit and coatings to allow a fully glazed external appearance with dramatic, integrated solar shading to the interior.
1998 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Renzo Piano
Renzo Piano, the 1998 Pritzker Prize winner, has designed new JNBY Headquarters in Hangzhou, China. The concept is defined by placing the majority of the office building bulk around the perimeter of the site to create a large protected interior green space, “Urban Park” or an “Oasis”. This Park, is about 90 meters x 120 meters and can easily accommodate a grand piazza, gardens for people to gather about or loiter through and water features for reflections and background noise to provide intimacy and interest. The buildings surrounding the Park will be permeable for pedestrian access to the interior green space that will allow for an easy flow for any major programmed event. All the buildings, with their lobbies and retail spaces will be oriented inwards, towards the Urban Park.
1995 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Tadao Ando
Tadao Ando, the 1995 Pritzker Prize winner, has completed construction for his design of He Art Museum in China. The museum is made from a stack of staggered, concrete disks that wrap around a pair of sweeping helical staircases at its centre. The He Art Museum was commissioned by Midea Group director He Jianfeng, son of billionaire He Xiangjian, as the home for He family's contemporary Chinese art collection. Ando's design evolved from the family's name, He, which translates to harmony, balance and union.
A wall in Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester, which forms part of Tadao Ando's only building in the UK, has been scheduled for demolition. Ando designed the pavilion and freestanding wall as part of the regeneration of the city centre. In recent years the area has had problems with antisocial behavior and the wall has been covered in graffiti. In 2016, more than 20,000 people signed a Manchester Evening News petition to restore Piccadilly Gardens and tear down the wall.
1994 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Christian de Portzamparc
Christian de Portzamparc, the 1994 Pritzker Prize winner, has his Cultural Centre of Suzhou completed in December 2020. The Suzhou Cultural Center is part of a series of emblematic projects initiated by the city through the Wujiang Lakefront Masterplan. The program had two parts: the music and performance halls on one side of the axis, and museums and pedagogical places on the other side. Two wings would appear at the arrival of the pedestrian axis on the lake. Christian de Portzamparc chose to connect these two wings on the roof to create at this very central place a huge opening to the sky in the form of an arch visible from afar on the pedestrian axis.
1993 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Fumihiko Maki
Fumihiko Maki, the 1993 Pritzker Prize winner, has participated in the Tokyo Toilet project and designed a public washroom for the Ebisu East Park, a popular neighborhood park that is used as a children's playground and is filled with lush greenery. Fumihiko Maki wanted this facility to function not only as a public restroom but as a public space that serves as a park pavilion equipped with a rest area.
Thinking about a variety of users, from children to people on their way to work, Fumihiko Maki wanted to create a safe and comfortable space that uses a decentralized layout to allow for good sight lines throughout the facility. The cheerful roof that integrates the different sections promotes ventilation and natural light, creating a bright and clean environment while giving the facility a unique appearance similar to playground equipment.
1992 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Álvaro Siza
Álvaro Siza, the 1992 Pritzker Prize winner, collaborated with Carlos Castanheira and Jun Sung Kim to design Mimesis Museum for modern art in South Korea. Mimesis Museum has a flowing concrete form that wraps around a central courtyard and was inspired by a sketch of a cat that Siza drew upon arriving at the site. The three-story building has services in the basement, gallery spaces and reception on the ground floor overlooked by a mezzanine with a cafe and staff area, while the first floor is entirely gallery space. The interior has whitewashed walls and ceilings, and marble and timber floors on the ground and first floor respectively.
1989 Pritzker Prize Laureate
Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry, the 1989 Pritzker Prize winner, has his twisting Luma Arles tower nearing completion in France. The structure was designed by Gehry as the centerpiece of the Luma Arles, an arts center established by Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann that began construction in 2014. The project has transformed an abandoned rail yard once owned by SNCF that was left vacant in 1986. The distinctive facade of the Luma Arles tower, which is finished with 11,000 aluminum panels irregularly arranged around its concrete and steel frame. Described by architecture critic Frank Miller as a "stainless-steel tornado", the cladding was designed by Gehry to evoke the craggy limestone cliffs around the city for which it is known.
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topic: 2020 In Review. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and projects. Learn more about our monthly topics. As always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.
