2017 Pritzker Prize Awarded to a Spanish Team of Three

by John Morris Dixon | March 6th, 2017

Is the era of the solo star designer over? This year’s winners of the Pritzker Architecture Prize – recognized worldwide as the profession’s highest honor – are the three partners in a far-from-famous Spanish firm. They don’t practice in or near any of Spain’s major cities, but in the modest Catalan town of Olot, population about 34,000. Located in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Olot does have a picturesque stonewalled core, and its surrounding volcanic terrain was the inspiration for a late-19th century school of landscape painters. But the historic charms of Olot and Catalonia are clearly not the chief preoccupation of the Pritzker-laureate partners of RCR Arquitectes – Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta (Note that they combined the initials of their first names, not surnames, in the firm identity). While they do respect the contexts of the projects they design, what they insert is crisply modern, tending …