The unity of form and restraint – Newspaper Kommersant No. 39 (7484) of 03/09/2023

The Pritzker Prize was awarded to 69-year-old Londoner David Chipperfield. The jury, which was led this year by the Chilean Alejandro Aravena, spoke in favor of “normal” architecture, awarding the author hundreds of famous buildings, equally successful both in the reconstruction of historical monuments and in the creation of new, own ones. About the new winner – Alexey Tarkhanov.

David Alan Chipperfield is one of those who made Britain the center of world contemporary architecture, along with James Sterling, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers, who were awarded the same prize in 1981, 1999, 2004 and 2007 respectively. After several years of tossing and searching for politically correct candidates, architects of the “third world”, the prize was given with some kind of even challenge to a “normal genius”, an elderly white European male. It is not for nothing that one of the formulations of the qualities of his style given by the jury is “radical in its restraint.”

Chipperfield has not been deprived of prizes before. Like the RIBA medal, or the Japanese Imperial Prize, or the Mies van der Rohe Prize, or national awards. But the Pritzker Prize is considered the highest score, even though it was established not by members of the world academy of architecture and not by figures of world culture, but by businessmen, the American Pritzker brothers, the creators of the Hayatt hotel chain.

For today’s world starchitects, a monetary value of $100,000 looks rather poor than modest, but over the forty years of its existence, it has already turned into an arch-Nobel and an arch-Oscar. Precisely because, as a rule, it was awarded unmistakably: so that the glory of the architect cast rays on the glory of the prize.

The current laureate has long been a knight of the British Empire. But Sir David does not work in the castle at all. I visited his workshop in 2016 when he received an award from Rolex. More precisely, not an award, but an important task: to select and educate a young master, becoming his “master”. David Chipperfield Architects, located in a far from central and not the most beautiful area of ​​London, reminded me of the architectural factories of the Soviet Mosproekt: the same abundance of stretchers and layouts, neglect of everyday life and attention to architecture, joint work on the eve of delivery, piles of drawings and cups of coffee on corner of the board.

Reminded, it seems, not in vain. Like many of his peers, David Chipperfield loved the Soviet architectural avant-garde. He was and remains a leftist, who willingly criticizes the current state of bourgeois architecture, mocking the different-sized London houses sticking out outside the windows of his workshop. “The British approach is total surrender to the market and the economy. Investors in Britain command the architects,” he complained to us.

Born in the year of Stalin’s death, Chipperfield felt a magical connection to the former USSR. The knight was very pleased with the new opportunities that Western architects had in Russia at the beginning of our century. In the 2000s, a feeling of complete openness of the market was born for a short time, especially since they finally tried to distribute projects fairly, by competition.

Chipperfield came to Arch-Moscow (foreign architects were frequent guests there), wanted to expand the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre, participated in the competition for the St. Petersburg Embankment of Europe and the Moscow Polytechnic, was among the consultants of Skolkovo.

His last attempt at cooperation with Russia was the reconstruction project of the Central Telegraph, on which David Chipperfield Architects worked together with KB Strelka. The new old building was scheduled to open in 2024, but then one plague followed another, and Chipperfield eventually refused to work. The Moscow Telegraph is not even mentioned in Pritzker’s list of the laureate’s selected projects.

But his work is richly represented in Venice, where Chipperfield received a dream commission, becoming a modern architect who was entrusted to work in Venice’s St. Mark’s Square. The project for the reconstruction of the Old Procurations shows in part what Moscow on Tverskaya could get in the building of Ivan Rerberg. Just as brilliant and attentive to history are the reconstruction projects of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, or the Athens Archaeological Museum, or the Zurich Kunsthaus.

Moscow did not become a second Berlin for Chipperfield, where he opened a branch of his bureau and became almost the main invited architect of the city. He recreated the 19th-century Neues Museum, destroyed by World War II bombs, from the ruins, built the ultra-modern and at the same time classical James Simon Gallery next to it, making it the entrance to the Berlin acropolis, and then reconstructed the masterpiece of the post-war 1960s – the New National Gallery (Neue Nationalgalerie by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Perhaps this is the key to the jury’s decision. Chipperfield, who builds excellent modern buildings, has become a specialist in saving architectural history.

From a classic modernist architect, a selfish creator of new worlds, he has become partly an architect who recycles junk. In the modern world, this sounds correct, but this is not about recycling garbage, but about creating new masterpieces where the old ones, unable to serve new functions, risked remaining a picturesque ruin until death.