The significance of the Pritzker award
The Pritzker Award is one of the most famous and prestigious awards a living architect can receive. The purpose of the award is to honor an architect or architects whose work “demonstrates a combination of those qualities of talent, vision, and commitment, which has produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture.” Jay A. Pritzker, (1922-1999), founded the prize with his wife, Cindy, through their Hyatt Foundation in 1979. The Pritzker name is synonymous with Hyatt Hotels which are located throughout the world.
The award is considered to be akin to the Nobel Prize of Architecture. The architects who have received this honor are considered to be some of the most influential architects of their time. A full list of Pritzker recipients can be found here. Pritzker recipients are selected from an esteemed panel of individuals, or “jurors,” with deep expertise in the architectural field, including past laureates, architects, academics, critics, politicians, professionals involved in cultural endeavors, and persons of diverse fields who have an expertise and interest in the field of architecture. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, notable jurors have included J. Carter Brown, former director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Italian businessman Giovanni Agnelli; architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable; art historian Kenneth Clark; and major architects such as Philip Johnson (the first recipient of the prize), Maki Fumihiko, Frank O. Gehry, and Cesar Pelli. The panel’s prestige confirms the Pritzker Prize as the closest award the architectural community has to a Nobel Prize, and the $100,000 prize for the recipient does not hurt either!
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Pritzker Architecture Prize Recipients by year (1989-2017)
Recipient(s) Nation
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1989 Frank Gehry
Italy
1990 Aldo Rossi
United States
1991 Robert Venturi
Portugal
1992 Alvaro Siza
Japan
1993 Fumihiko Maki
France
1994 Christian de Portzamparc
Japan
1995 Tadao Ando
Spain
1996 Rafael Moneo
Norway
1997 Sverre Fehn
Italy
1998 Renzo Piano
Great Britain
1999 Norman Foster
Netherlands
2000 Rem Koolhaas
Switzerland
2001 Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron
Australia
2002 Glenn Murcutt
Denmark
2003 Jørn Utzon
Great Britain
2004 Zaha Hadid[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]United States
2005 Thom Mayne
Brazil
2006 Paulo Mendes da Rocha
Great Britain
2007 Richard Rogers
France
2008 Jean Nouvel
Switzerland
2009 Peter Zumthor
Japan
2010 Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa
Portugal
2011 Eduardo Souto de Moura
China
2012 Wang Shu
japan
2013 Toyo Ito
2014 Shigeru Ban
Germany
2015 Frei Otto
Chile
2016 Alejandro Aravena
Spain
2017 Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, and Ramon Vilalta Spain[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]