Christian de Portzamparc wins 2018 Praemium Imperiale Award

The Japan Art Association today announced the laureates of its prestigious Praemium Imperiale Award, and French Pritzker-winning architect Christian de Portzamparc is this year's top honoree in the Architecture category. 

Celebrating extraordinary achievements in a variety of creative fields in its 30th year, the award program also recognized Pierre Alechinsky (Painting), Fujiko Nakaya (Sculpture), Riccardo Muti (Music), and actress Catherine Deneuve (Theater/Film). 

The Praemium Imperiale Award gold medals will be officially presented to the five winners on October 23 at a ceremony in Tokyo.

"His imaginative architectural style is known for its distinctive features such as bold designs, an artistic approach and the creativity that comes from him also as a watercolor painter," reads the Japan Art Association's laureate description of de Portzamparc. "He is especially esteemed as a designer of concert halls and an urban planner."

"He studied architecture in Paris and New York, and became famous for his creation of the rue des Hautes Formes dwellings in Paris and the large scale project for François Mitterrand called the City of Music (1995), which involved creating music halls of different sizes, a music museum and many dwelling places."

"His important works include NexusII (1991), a residential complex in Fukuoka, LVMH Tower (1999), and two skyscrapers (2015) in New York, the Philharmonie Luxembourg (2005), the City of Arts (2013), a cultural complex in Rio de Janeiro, and the Paris La Défense Arena (2017), an indoor stadium in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris."

"Currently he is engaged in large-scale projects as in Casablanca for the larger theater in Africa and in China, for opera house in Shanghai and the Suzhou Cultural Center, scheduled to be completed in 2019."

The list of previous Praemium Imperiale Award winners in the Architecture category includes Kenzo Tange, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Alvaro Siza, David Chipperfield, Peter Zumthor, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and more recently, Rafael Moneo, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Dominique Perrault, and Steven Holl.