The European Award for Architecture 2020 was won by Wolfgang Tschapeller
The European Center for Architecture, Art, Design, and Urbanism, based partly in Dublin, Ireland, and Athens, Greece, together with the private foundation Chicago Athenaeum, has decided to award this year's European Prize for Architecture to the Viennese visionary Wolfgang Tschapeller, who has become the first Austrian recipient in the ten-year history of the prize.
Wolfgang Tschapeller is an architect based in Vienna. He was born in 1956 in the East Tyrolean town of Dölsach, where he trained as a carpenter. He graduated in architecture from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Cornell University in New York, where he obtained a master's degree in 1987. From 2004 to 2005, he taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo and the university in Linz, Austria. Since 2005, he has been a professor of architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (head of the Institute of Architecture since 2012) and has been a visiting professor at Cornell University in Ithaca since 2015, where last year he completed a library whose shelves holding 125,000 volumes were suspended in a historic building dating from 1911.
As the foundation's president Christian Narkiewicz-Laine pointed out, the award is not given for lifetime achievement but encourages discussion about architecture, which Tschapeller, who operates more in the academic field, perfectly embodies. His realized works, competition projects, and student assignments draw from sculpture and philosophy.
The award, which has been granted annually since 2010, has previously been received by figures such as Bjarke Ingels, Santiago Calatrava, Marco Casagrande, and Manuele Gautrand.
Reasoning of the selection by the judges:
“Wolfgang Tschapeller’s works are stunning, dense, multifarious, complex, and remarkable achievements of the highest complexity, that complement the longstanding history of the craft and mastery of the architectural form and purpose; balancing strength and delicacy and upholding the reverence for pursuing the intellectual qualities inherent in design that has made architecture, as the ancient Greeks believed, the first and highest art form.
The words ‘brilliant’ and ‘provocative’ are understatements in describing this architect’s work.
He designs with exemplary, uncompromising radicalism, turning with daring virtuosity even the most insignificant project, from a house to an urban plaza, into a startling and elaborate Utopian vision. He never compromises in his intellectual approach for unflawed perfection.
Tschapeller is a ‘thinking architect’ alongside Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Wenzel Jamnitzer, Abraham Bosse, Girard Desargues, and Père Nicon. He is the ultimate architect-philosopher.
His avant-garde approach is fluid, concise, and brilliantly astonishing, adjusting to the needs and influences of each environment that he crafts and through a concept of interrelated time and architectonic space.“
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Wolfgang Tschapeller is an architect based in Vienna. He was born in 1956 in the East Tyrolean town of Dölsach, where he trained as a carpenter. He graduated in architecture from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Cornell University in New York, where he obtained a master's degree in 1987. From 2004 to 2005, he taught at the State University of New York in Buffalo and the university in Linz, Austria. Since 2005, he has been a professor of architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (head of the Institute of Architecture since 2012) and has been a visiting professor at Cornell University in Ithaca since 2015, where last year he completed a library whose shelves holding 125,000 volumes were suspended in a historic building dating from 1911.
As the foundation's president Christian Narkiewicz-Laine pointed out, the award is not given for lifetime achievement but encourages discussion about architecture, which Tschapeller, who operates more in the academic field, perfectly embodies. His realized works, competition projects, and student assignments draw from sculpture and philosophy.
The award, which has been granted annually since 2010, has previously been received by figures such as Bjarke Ingels, Santiago Calatrava, Marco Casagrande, and Manuele Gautrand.
Reasoning of the selection by the judges:
“Wolfgang Tschapeller’s works are stunning, dense, multifarious, complex, and remarkable achievements of the highest complexity, that complement the longstanding history of the craft and mastery of the architectural form and purpose; balancing strength and delicacy and upholding the reverence for pursuing the intellectual qualities inherent in design that has made architecture, as the ancient Greeks believed, the first and highest art form.
The words ‘brilliant’ and ‘provocative’ are understatements in describing this architect’s work.
He designs with exemplary, uncompromising radicalism, turning with daring virtuosity even the most insignificant project, from a house to an urban plaza, into a startling and elaborate Utopian vision. He never compromises in his intellectual approach for unflawed perfection.
Tschapeller is a ‘thinking architect’ alongside Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, Wenzel Jamnitzer, Abraham Bosse, Girard Desargues, and Père Nicon. He is the ultimate architect-philosopher.
His avant-garde approach is fluid, concise, and brilliantly astonishing, adjusting to the needs and influences of each environment that he crafts and through a concept of interrelated time and architectonic space.“
More information >
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