David Chipperfield

David Chipperfield (born December 18, 1953, London, England) is a British architect who is especially known for quietly incorporating modern, minimal designs with historic buildings. He was praised for his reconstruction of the Neues Museum (2010) in Berlin, and the Procuratie Vecchie (2022; Old Procuracies), the 16th-century building on the north side of St. Mark’s Square, Venice, recognizable by its arched colonnade.

Chipperfield was raised on a farm in southwestern England and spent his childhood planning to become a veterinarian. He later graduated (1977) from the Architectural Association in London and worked with such award-winning architects as Richard Rogers and Norman Foster before establishing (1985) David Chipperfield Architects. Many of his early commissions were in Japan, where he gained an appreciation for the mundane aspects of daily life, a philosophy that profoundly impacted his design. He also worked often in Germany and maintained offices in Berlin as well as in London, Milan, and Shanghai.

Chipperfield’s work earned numerous accolades over the years. Most notably, in a 15-year span (1998–2013), seven buildings designed by his firm were nominated for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Stirling Prize, with the Marbach Museum of Modern Literature, Germany, awarded the prize in 2007. Other short-listed projects were an office and studio building in Düsseldorf, Germany (1998); the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire (1999); Ernsting Service Centre in Coesfeld-Lette, Germany (2002); the America’s Cup Building in Valencia, Spain (2007); the reconstructed Neues Museum, which was the culmination of a mammoth 12-year project; and the Hepworth Wakefield Art Gallery in West Yorkshire (2012). Other notable works include the East Building (2013) of the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, a light-filled structure featuring skylights, floor-to-ceiling windows on the front, and a concrete facade that was composed of locally sourced river aggregates.

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Chipperfield also built a number of private homes, apartment buildings (One Kensington Gardens [2015], London), and mixed-income housing (Hoxton Press [2018], London). His designs for retail spaces included the Valentino flagship stores in New York (2014) and London (2016) and a new entrance to Selfridge’s department store (2018), London. Chipperfield’s long-awaited restoration of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie—designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1968—was completed in 2021.

In addition to buildings, Chipperfield also designed furniture, lighting, tableware, and other objects. In 2020 he was the guest editor for Domus, the Italian architecture magazine. Chipperfield was the recipient of several awards for his entire body of work, including the Pritzker Prize (2023), architecture’s highest honour. He was also granted the RIBA Gold Medal for lifetime achievement in 2011, the same year that he was awarded the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture–Mies van der Rohe Award. His other awards include the Heinrich Tessenow Medal (1999), election to the Royal Academy (2008), Germany’s Order of Merit (2009), and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale (2013).

David Chipperfield Architects was one of four U.K.-based firms chosen to contribute to the British pavilion, “City Visionaries,” at the 2000 Venice Biennale. A dozen years later Chipperfield served as the Biennale’s first British curator for the 13th International Architecture Exhibition (2012), which he titled “Common Ground.” After having been made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2004, Chipperfield was knighted in the 2010 New Year Honours. Eleven years later he was added to the exclusive Order of the Companions of Honour.