LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.- ’Michelangelo is often thought of principally as a sculptor and painter, rather than as an architect,’ says J. Carter Brown, chairman of the jury that selects the Pritzker Laureate each year. ’But right in the religious and political center of Rome, he was commissioned to design a remarkable architectural project at the top of the Capitoline Hill, the Campidoglio, Rome’s ancient Capitol Hill. It is a place spanning more than 2000 years of history. In 1471, Pope Sixtus IV donated large bronze statues to the Campidoglio, creating what is now arguably the oldest public museum in the world. The She-wolf suckling the two traditional founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, was placed inside the Palazzo dei Conservatori, and became the symbol of the city. With Papal authority, Michelangelo moved the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius to the center of the plaza, and created a magically beautiful star-shaped pavement design. (His design was not in fact actually completed until 1940; and to conserve the statue, one of the great monuments of antiquity, the original has been moved into the adjoining museum, and a faithful replica installed in the center of the plaza, following Michelangelo’s design.)’
The guests assembling from around the world for the Pritzker Prize on May 29, will walk up the monumental ramp (cordonata) to the top of the Capitoline Hill, where chairs will be placed on the piazza facing the central building (the Palazzo Senatorio which today houses the offices of the mayor and the city council chambers), where, in front of the fountain, the ceremony will take place to present the $100,000 Pritzker Architecture Prize to Australian architect Glenn Murcutt. On either side of the piazza is the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Nuovo, both of which comprise the Capitoline Museum.
Following the ceremony, guests will be transported to the Palazzo Colonna for a reception and dinner. The first historical information on the Colonna family residence dates from the 13th century. Since that time, the family has provided numerous princes of the Catholic Church, including several Cardinals and Popes. Today, the family home doubles as a private art gallery for the art collections that span six centuries.
The international prize, which is awarded each year to a living architect for lifetime achievement, was established by the Pritzker family of Chicago through their Hyatt Foundation in 1979. Often referred to as ’architecture’s Nobel’ and ’the profession’s highest honor,’ the Pritzker Prize has been awarded to seven Americans, and (including this year) nineteen architects from thirteen other countries. The presentation ceremonies move around the world each year paying homage to the architecture of other eras and/or works by previous laureates of the prize.
Thomas J. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, in expressing gratitude to the Mayor of Rome, Honorable Walter Veltroni, for making it possible to hold the event in this remarkable setting, stated, ’Last year, we were in Monticello, the home designed by one of the fathers of our country, Thomas Jefferson. It is relevant that Jefferson’s American architecture talents owed a primary debt to Italy. He was very much inspired by the 16th century Italian architect Andrea Palladio’s book, I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura; and the dome of Monticello was modeled after the ancient temple of Vesta in Rome, just as the dome of the library of his University of Virginia was inspired by Rome’s Pantheon.’ Pritzker went on to describe how Jefferson wrote to a friend,, ’Roman taste, genius, and magnificence excite ideas.’ ’This year,’ Pritzker continued, ’we will be in Rome, virtually the cradle of much of our western civilization, and more specifically, in a space designed by Michelangelo in the 16th century that is still functioning today as the seat of government for this great city. And this magnificent setting overlooks the heart of the ancient city, the Roman Forum.’
Coinciding with the Pritzker Architecture Prize ceremony being held in Rome, the American Academy in Rome will host a Pritzker Symposium on New Century, New World, The Globalization of Architecture.
The co-chairs of the event are Bill Lacy, executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and Adele Chatfield-Taylor, president of the American Academy in Rome. Participants will include: J. Carter Brown, Charles Correa, Rolf Fehlbaum, Anthony Grafton, Zaha Hadid, Dogon Hasol, Ricardo Legorreta, and Karen Stein.
The Pritzker Prize has a tradition of moving the ceremony to sites of architectural significance around the world. This is the second time the ceremony has been held in Italy, the first being in 1990 at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice when the late Aldo Rossi received the prize. As the sites are chosen each year before the laureate, there is no intended connection beyond celebrating architectural excellence. Retrospectively, buildings by Laureates of the Pritzker Prize, such as the National Gallery of Art’s East Building designed by I.M. Pei, or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, or Richard Meier’s new Getty Center in Los Angeles have been used. In some instances, places of historic interest such as France’s Palace of Versailles and Grand Trianon, or Todai-ji Buddhist Temple in Japan, or Prague Castle in The Czech Republic have been chosen as ceremony venues. Some of the most beautiful museums have hosted the event, including the already mentioned Palazzo Grassi: Chicago’s Art Institute (using the Chicago Stock Exchange Trading Room designed by Louis Sullivan and his partner, Dankmar Adler, which was preserved when the Stock Exchange building was torn down in 1972. The Trading Room was then reconstructed in the museum’s new wing in 1977). New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art provided the setting of 1982 Laureate Kevin Roche’s pavilion for the Temple of Dendur. In homage to the late Louis Kahn, the ceremony was held in Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum in 1987. California’s Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens was the setting in l985. In 1992, the just-completed Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago was the location where Alvaro Siza of Portugal received the prize. The 20th anniversary of the prize was hosted at the White House since in a way, the Pritzker Prize roots are in Washington where the first two ceremonies were held at Dumbarton Oaks, where a major addition to the original estate, had been designed by yet another Pritzker Laureate, the very first, Philip Johnson. In 2000 in Jerusalem, on the Herodian Street excavation in the shadow of the Temple Mount was the most ancient of the venues. The ceremonies have evolved over the years, becoming, in effect, an international grand tour of architecture.
One of the founding jurors of the Pritzker Prize, the late Lord Clark of Saltwood, as art historian Kenneth Clark, perhaps best known for his television series and book, Civilisation, said at one of the ceremonies, ’A great historical episode can exist in our imagination almost entirely in the form of architecture. Very few of us have read the texts of early Egyptian literature. Yet we feel we know those infinitely remote people almost as well as our immediate ancestors, chiefly because of their sculpture and architecture.’
