N. 222 David Chipperfield 2015 2023. Digital

Sir David Chipperfield -CH, CBE, RA, RDI, RIBA, BDA- was born in London in 1953. He studied at Kingston School of Art and the Architectural Association in London before founding his own practice in 1985. He has developed a design methodology that is now used across five offices in London, Berlin, Milan, Shanghai and Santiago de Compostela.

David Chipperfield is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an honorary fellow of both the American Institute of Architects and the Bund Deutscher Architekten. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004, appointed a Royal Designer for Industry in 2006, and elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008. Among the accolades he has received are the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, awarded in 2009, and a knighthood for services to architecture in the UK and Germany, awarded in 2010. In 2021 David Chipperfield was appointed a member of the UK's Order of the Companions of Honour and in 2023 he was elected into Germany's Orden Pour le mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, awarded Spain's Encomienda de la Orden de Isabel la Católica and selected as the 2023 Laureate of The Pritzker Architecture Prize.

In addition to design work, David Chipperfield has taught and lectured worldwide at schools of architecture in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. He holds honorary doctorates from Kingston University and the University of Kent. In 2012 he curated the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale under the title Common Ground. He served as the mentor for architecture from 2016–17 for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. In 2017 he founded Fundación RIA, a private, non-profit entity that works towards meaningful economic, environmental and cultural development in Galicia, Spain.

David Chipperfield has published numerous books and articles, including On Planning – A Thought Experiment (2018), a publication that explores and theorizes the urban qualities of contemporary development. He was the 2020 guest editor of Italian design magazine Domus.

Portrait by Christian Werner