Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena has been appointed chair of the Pritzker Architecture Prize jury.
Aravena, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2016, will oversee deliberations for the 43rd year of the prize in 2021. He also served on the jury from 2009 to 2015.
As the founder of the firm Elemental, Aravena is known for his work designing housing for Chile’s poor and for public space, infrastructure and transportation with a social impact.
“Historically, architecture has been about creating innovative alternatives and imagining possibilities, but it is also intimately connected with society,” he said. “As jurors, our task is, first, to be sensitive to those questions society would like the architectural profession to address, and to identify those architects that are trying to use the discipline’s body of knowledge to translate those questions into projects.”
Aravena will head a jury comprising Barry Bergdoll, a Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, curator and author, New York, United States; Deborah Berke, architect and Dean of Yale School of Architecture, New York, United States; André Corrêa do Lago, architectural critic, curator, and Brazilian Ambassador to India, Delhi; Kazuyo Sejima, architect, educator and 2010 Pritzker Laureate, Tokyo, Japan; Benedetta Tagliabue, architect, Barcelona, Spain; and Wang Shu, architect, educator, and 2012 Pritzker Laureate, Hangzhou, China.
Aravena takes over US supreme court justice Stephen Breyer, who will remain on the jury. Previous jury chairs have included Australia’s only Pritzker Prize laureate Glenn Murcutt.
The organizers of the prize also announced that Manuela Lucá-Dazio, most recently an executive director at the Venice Biennale, has been appointed as an advisor to the prize and the next executive director, beginning in March 2021.
She has managed the International Art Exhibition and the International Architecture Exhibition since 2009 and holds a PhD in the history of architecture from the University of Roma-Chieti, Italy.
“It is for me an enormous honor to become the next executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, an essential point of reference in the architecture world, and even more at such a key historical moment for the architectural discourse and practice,” she said.
The 2020 Pritzker Prize was awarded to Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, of Dublin, Ireland. The 2021 Laureate will be announced around March, at the begining of the northern hemisphere spring.
