David Chipperfield established David Chipperfield Architects in 1985. He was Professor of Architecture at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart from 1995 to 2001 and Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University in 2011, and he has taught and lectured worldwide at schools of architecture in Austria, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 2012, he curated the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.
“[David’s buildings] tend to have a strong presence, with right angles and straight lines predominant, ” writes Rowan Moore in The Guardian. “He likes solid masonry and concrete, where you can see the stuff that is holding a building up, and sense its mass. In this he deliberately opposes the way that the modern construction industry likes to build things, which is to assemble factory-made pieces into flimsy-looking structures. He adheres, arguably too much, to the classical idea that architecture is about naked materials and structure seen in daylight. Mobility, surface, illusion, or the way artificial lighting forms cities at night, are less important to him. ”
David 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 in 2008. In 2009 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and in 2010 he was knighted for services to architecture in the UK and Germany. In 2011 he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture, and in 2013, the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, both given in recognition of a lifetime’s work.
David Chipperfield Architects is known for its commitment to the collaborative aspect of creating architecture and a strong focus on refining design ideas to arrive at a solution which is architecturally, socially and intellectually coherent.