Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta win the 2017 Pritzker Prize

Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta, founders of Catalonian studio RCR Arquitectes, are the three winners of the 2017 Pritzker Prize. This is the first time the prestigious prize, considered the Nobel Prize of architecture, has been awarded to three architects together, and the second time it has been awarded to Spanish architects, the first being Rafael Moneo in 1996.

The buildings constructed by Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramón Vilalta include public and private spaces, institutions and educational facilities, and places of cultural interest such as Soulages Museum in Rodez (France), presented in Floornature. All of their projects reveal a profound attention to the connections between interior and exterior, as revealed in the photographs by Hisao Suzuki shown on this page. Characteristics underlined by Tom Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation, which awards the prize, and architect Glenn Murcutt, who presided over the panel of judges; he noted that the three architects’ partnership has produced uncompromising architecture of great poetic value, with great respect for the past but projected into the present and the future.
The image cited in the jury’s motivation is particularly poetic and significant, in which RCR Arquitectes’ works are described as having strong roots in the earth but arms open to the rest of the world and cited it as an example of how we can overcome our fear of losing local values and traditions in a globalised world.

(Agnese Bifulco)

Images courtesy of the Pritzker Architecture Prize
Photo by: Javier Lorenzo Domínguez. Eugeni Pons, Hisao Suzuki

www.pritzkerprize.com
www.rcrarquitectes.es

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