The Pritzker Architecture Prize is an international architecture award presented annually "to honor a living architect or architects whose built 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.” Founded in 1979 by Jay A. Pritzker and his wife Cindy, the award is funded by the Pritzker family and sponsored by the Hyatt Foundation. It is considered to be one of the world's premier architecture prizes, and is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of architecture.
Gordon Bunshaft was an American architect, a leading proponent of modern design in the mid-twentieth century. A partner in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Bunshaft joined the firm in 1937 and remained with it for more than 40 years. His notable buildings include Lever House in New York, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the National Commercial Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 140 Broadway, and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Branch Bank in New York.
Herzog & de Meuron Basel Ltd. is a Swiss architecture firm headquartered in Basel (Switzerland), founded by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.
The year 1996 in architecture involved some significant architectural events and new buildings.
Álvaro Joaquim de Melo Siza Vieira is a Portuguese architect, and architectural educator. He is internationally known as Álvaro Siza and in Portugal as Siza Vieira.
José Rafael Moneo Vallés is a Spanish architect. He won the Pritzker Prize for architecture in 1996, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2003, and La Biennale's Golden Lion in 2021.
The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is the graduate school of design at Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It offers master's and doctoral programs in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, urban design, real estate, design engineering, and design studies.
Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi OAL was an Indian architect. He is an important figure in Indian architecture and noted for his contributions to the evolution of architectural discourse in India. Having worked under Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, he was a pioneer of modernist and brutalist architecture in India.
Benedetta Tagliabue is an Italian architect, and she lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. Benedetta Tagliabue was born in Milan, Italy. She graduated from the Istituto Universitaria di Architettura di Venezia in 1989. She is internationally renowned architect founder with Enric Miralles (1955-2000) of the international studio EMBT Architects, with offices in Barcelona (HQ), Shanghai, and Paris. She is renowned for her attentiveness to context, yet experimental, approach to forms and materials in her creations. Her Barcelona-based company EMBT has become one of the most renowned Spanish practices of the twenty-first century as a result of her varied and intricate works.
Elena Ochoa Foster, Baroness Foster is a Spanish publisher and art curator, and formerly a professor of psychopathology. She is the founder and chief executive officer of Ivorypress.
Shashi Caan a design futurist, educator and author, her dedication to furthering human betterment through and by design is reflected in her 25-year design career.
Duccio Malagamba is an Italian architectural photographer.
Yvonne Farrell is an Irish architect and academic. She is the co-founder, together with Shelley McNamara, of Grafton Architects, which won the World Building of the Year award in 2008 for their Bocconi University building in Milan. The practice won the inaugural RIBA International Prize in 2016 for their Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología building in Lima, Peru, and was awarded the 2020 Royal Gold Medal. In 2017 she was appointed, along with Shelley McNamara, as curator of the 16th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2018. She won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2020, also with McNamara.
Women in architecture have been documented for many centuries, as professional practitioners, educators and clients. Since architecture became organized as a profession in 1857, the number of women in architecture has been low. At the end of the 19th century, starting in Finland, certain schools of architecture in Europe began to admit women to their programmes of study. In 1980 M. Rosaria Piomelli, born in Italy, became the first woman to hold a deanship of any school of architecture in the United States, as Dean of the City College of New York School of Architecture. In recent years, women have begun to achieve wider recognition within the profession, however, the percentage receiving awards for their work remains low. As of 2023, 11.5% of Pritzker Prize Laureates have been female.
Alejandro Gastón Aravena Mori is a Chilean architect and executive director of the firm Elemental S.A. He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2016, and was the director and curator of the Architecture Section of the 2016 Venice Biennale.
Kristin Feireiss is a German architectural and design curator, writer, and editor. Her career has included co-founding the Aedes Architecture Forum in Berlin, serving as director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and participating as an international juror and commissioner at the Architecture Biennale in Venice. In 2013, Feireiss became a Pritzker Architecture Prize juror.
Shelley McNamara is an Irish architect and academic. She attended University College Dublin and graduated in 1974 with a Bachelor of Architecture. She founded Grafton Architects with Yvonne Farrell in 1978. Grafton rose to prominence in the early 2010s, specialising in stark, weighty but spacious buildings for higher education. McNamara has taught architecture at University College Dublin since 1976 and at several other universities.
Anne Lacaton is a French architect and educator. She runs the architectural practice Lacaton & Vassal, with Jean-Philippe Vassal. The pair were jointly awarded the 2021 Pritzker Prize.
Georgina Huljich is an Argentinean-American architect and educator. She is a partner in PATTERNS, a Los Angeles-based architecture firm. She has been teaching at the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA as an associate professor since 2006.
Francisco González de Canales is a Spanish architect, professor, critic and poet educated in Seville, Barcelona and Harvard.
