Queue up for that Pritzker, please

Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for such wildly diverse projects as the multi-chromatic Torre Agbar Tower in Barcelona and the exotically louvered Arab World Institute in Paris, has received the Pritzker Prize.

It seems that there was always a queue to get the Pritzker. Before the beginning of the century, you could almost make a good guess as to the future recipients of architecture’s top prize - Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Lord Norman Foster, Frank O. Gehry, Thom Mayne, Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, and now it seems only right that their Gallic contemporary Nouvel be added to the star studded list.

In architecture, there are only so many well-respected honours to be bestowed upon the incredible mass of architects that ply their trade in what is the period in history with the greatest ever proliferation of man-made construction. It was as if Francois Mitterand had taken over the international stage of architecture, and declared another band of Grand Projets to be erected the world over. With all the endless bravado on show, it is pretty obvious that there aren’t enough awards to go round. It says something of the status quo; with the glaring over-proliferation of design in the world. It is harder still to deny that this is post-modernism at its highest point. Can there ever be too much design?

To many critics, the Grand Projets in Paris are more like an old-fashioned effort at empire-building. In La Ville-lumière (The City of Lights) alone, the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, La Villette (with its famous park by Bernard Tschumi), the Institut du monde Arabe by Nouvel himself, the Opera at Place de la Bastille and Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre make up an intimidating, grand array of landmarks that dot the city.

If you took a step back to appreciate the world today, a startling parallel emerges. What Mitterand had envisioned only years before, seems a must-do endeavor that most governments of this present day are executing, down to the last detail. You might be familiar with the grand designs gracing the avenues and plazas of Dubai, Shanghai, or Beijing. The Beijing Olympics alone have become the biggest excuse of the century for big-architecture. Empowered by ever-improving strands of technology, architects and designers in kind are taking advantage of this technological revolution to create everything imaginable. It isn’t so much a question of how and why you create; the attitude that pervades is what-can-I-create-that’s-new and just-because-I-can create, I will. Very soon, we might need a Pritzker to honour the most-embellished city. And at the rate things are going, we might just need two.

In all this currency of design frenzy, it was interesting to stumble upon an important dialectic established by Sam Jacob and Lebbeus Woods’ essays published in the recent Yale Architecture Journal Perspecta 38. In essence, Jacob champions his self-coined concept of a Pop Vernacular, “promoting an architecture that unabashedly engages pluralism, commercialism, populist taste, and even formless kitsch.” On the other hand, Woods, in his essay titled After Form: After Forms, challenges architects “to substantiate the promiscuous forms that are so readily produced in a time when anything can be built…a certain formal discipline - previously necessitated by material techniques - is no longer present.”

Clockwise from Right: Pritzker Laureates Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Lord Norman Foster, Lord Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano

The purpose of the Pritzker Architecture Prize 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. To date, Nouvel’s work has achieved almost all of this, with rigorously contextual and intuitive responses to almost all of his built commissions, which manage in one way or another to connect to their surroundings and uplift the human spirit.

In the years of mass-construction to come, my only hope is that the Pritzker Prize maintains its unerring conferment of its prestigious medallion upon only the most deserving and apt recipients, for the sake of the profession and its inherent values and principles it has fought so hard to protect.

JJ is co-founder of 5ft Creatives and is currently based in New York.