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design
mag
In 1979 Jay Pritzker (1922-1999), the
Chicago billionaire who founded the Hyatt
Hotel chain, together with his wife Cindy,
established the Pritzker Architecture Prize
“to honour a living architect 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.”This annual award is often
referred to as “the Nobel Prize of
architecture,” such is the high esteem in
which it is held.Winners of the Pritzker
receive US$100,000 and a bronze medal
that bears the inscription,“firmness,
commodity and delight,”which are three
basic architectural values that date back
to the first-century B.C. Roman architect,
engineer and writer, Marcus Vitruvius.
Chinese architect Wang Shu won the 2012
Pritzker Architecture Prize. Born in 1963, he is
the fourth-youngest recipient of the award
and only the second Chinese winner. (I.M.
Pei, who was born in Guangzhou in 1917
and moved to the United States in 1935, won
the Pritzker in 1983.)
Wang’s win comes on the heels of another
very distinguished individual award that he
received last year, the 2011 Gold Medal from
the Academy of Architecture in France.“In
awarding the Pritzker Prize to Wang Shu, a
young Chinese architect, the jury has sought
both to reward past work that meets the
prize’s high standards and to send a
message of optimism, recognizing and
encouraging the promise of similar work in
the future,” said Stephen Breyer, a United
States Supreme Court Justice who was one
of the nine judges of this year’s award.
The eldest son of the founders of the prize,
Thomas J. Pritzker, also highlighted the
importance of presenting the award to an
architect from mainland China:“The fact
that an architect from China has been
selected by the jury represents a significant
step in acknowledging the role that China
will play in the development of
architectural ideals […] In addition, over
the coming decades China’s success at
urbanization will be important to China
and to the world.This urbanization, like
urbanization around the world, needs to be
in harmony with local needs and culture.”
Wang Shu studied architecture at the
Nanjing Institute of Technology where he
earned his Bachelor’s degree in 1985 and
a Master’s degree in 1988. His first job
following architecture school was to
research a number of old buildings that
were scheduled for renovation at the
