Los Angeles, CA — Wang Shu, a 48 year old architect whose architectural practice is based in Hangzhou, The People’s Republic of China, will be the recipient of the 2012 Pritzker Architecture Prize, it was announced today by Thomas J. Pritzker, chairman of The Hyatt Foundation which sponsors the prize. The formal ceremony for what has come to be known throughout the world as architecture’s highest honor will be in Beijing on May 25.

In announcing the jury’s choice, Pritzker elaborated, “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. China’s unprecedented opportunities for urban planning and design will want to be in harmony with both its long and unique traditions of the past and with its future needs for sustainable development.”

The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, which was founded in 1979 by the late Jay A. Pritzker and his wife, Cindy, is to honor annually 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. The laureates receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion.

Pritzker Prize jury chairman, The Lord Palumbo, spoke from his home in the United Kingdom, quoting from the jury citation that focuses on the reasons for this year’s choice: “The question of the proper relation of present to past is particularly timely, for the recent process of urbanization in China invites debate as to whether architecture should be anchored in tradition or should look only toward the future. As with any great architecture, Wang Shu´s work is able to transcend that debate, producing an architecture that is timeless, deeply rooted in its context and yet universal.”

www.pritzkerprize.com

Despite eternal controversy to the organization of Biennale di Venezia and the numerous doubts expressed towards its real utility as an international event in the internet era, the Italian istitution shows to still be able to keep its cultural appealing.

A sign of its credibility is the proposal announced by the Australian Council to organize the redevelopment of the Australian pavilion at Biennale di Venezia, after it secured a significant donation to help fund the project.

The current pavilion, a pre-fabricated structure designed by Philip Cox in 1988, was intended to be a temporary space in order to organize exhibitions inside Venice’s Giardini. The building has been used for the Australian exhibitions since then. There have already been several campaigns in support of a new pavilion, including the Di Stasio Ideas Competition in 2008.

The Australian Council has recently proposed to organize a national competition by invitation for a new pavilion, an idea not welcomed by the Australian architects, who see it as a discriminatory criteria of selection. The degree of disappointment is so high, to have pushed an architect from Canberra to consider: “By invitation… what’s going on here? Where has the Australian spirit of egalitarianism and the fair go gone? Would Griffin, Utzon or Giurgola have gotten invitations to their competitions?”.

Meanwhile, the debate keep on going…

by Silvia Micheli

Brisbane, 9th September 2011

by Antony Moulis

The State Library of Queensland re-design by Donovan Hill (in association with Peddle Thorp Architects) completed in Brisbane, Queensland in 2006 is, for me, an architecture of great promise. The project has been a popular success, being something like a “termite’s nest” with a broad and diverse set of spaces and activities that create a sense of active public space within a previously insular institutional setting.

A critical aspect of the building’s form is its re-creation of domestic style space within public space. In a country such as Australia where domestic architecture is predominant in cultural terms, the “domestication” of public institutions is a way to have people feel “at home” in a city where the suburbs offer the main form of living. At the same time the building does not “talk down” to its public but seeks to engage it in playful ways. There are aspects of the building that recall the work of Alvar Aalto and his attempts to “humanise” architecture and public space. These values are important to a culture at the other fringe of the world that is dominated by an open and vast landscape that dwarfs attempts to make architecture at a similar scale. I like this building because it signals a new beginning for public space as an open experiment beyond the settings of Europe and America where such cultural questions about public space are usually answered through the repetition of, or reaction to, conventionally understood architectural forms. With the main interior actually being exterior space there is a delightful ambiguity to experience here. The sense of being enveloped in the larger landscape and the benign climate is ever present.

Yet the recent dramatic floods that engulfed Brisbane also inundated the building, breaking the fragile truce between nature and architecture that so strongly characterises this vast continent.

“John Portman Art & Architecture”

exhibition

Capital Museum in Beijing, China

April 15 - June 12, 2011

The exhibition features an impressive sampling of architecture, furniture, paintings and sculpture from renowned architect-developer-artist John C. Portman, Jr.’s five decades of work.

The exhibition, which kicked off in Portman’s hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, is curated by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta with the Beijing showing being co-organized by Beijing Design Week and Capital Museum, China. Beijing is the third stop for “John Portman Art & Architecture” — following the works being displayed at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center in 2010.

“John Portman has not only radically altered the skyline of his home city, Atlanta, but cities throughout the world,” stated Jeffrey Grove, who curated the exhibition. “His reconsideration of how architecture should function and the experience it should offer visitors completely changed the industry. Early in his career, Portman understood that to realize his vision completely, he must add developer to his role as architect. All these themes are addressed in the exhibition.”

An unusual Queenslander house in Brisbane, Australia