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 to minimalism – no concessions to historic design precedents.
RCR was founded in 1988 and, in keeping with their low profile to date, has done its work largely in Olot and its province of Girona. Its few more distant works cited in the Pritzker announcement are in Barcelona and in southern France, none more than a few hours by car from their home base.
Their works are notable for their carefully considered relationship to not only their physical settings, but to their communities and their roles in them. The result is, in the words of the jury citation, “buildings and places that are both local and universal.”
>Of the Bell-Lloc Winery (2007) near Girona, Spain, the jurors note that the buildings are embedded in the ground, like the soil that produces the grapes and the cool, dark cellars where the wine is aged.
>The dining and event space of the Les Cols Restaurant (2011) in Olot is said to remind the jurors of “places for countryside meals with family and friends” – here under a transparent polymer canopy suspended between volcanic stone supports.
>The partners’ own workspaces, which they call Barberí Laboratory (2007), were created by inserting their own books and equipment within an old industrial building otherwise left largely “as is.”
>For a row house in Olot, a new residence was sensitively inserted in the space between two old row houses, retaining its original front, but re-conceiving its interior as platforms “floating” within a single volume.
>About the El Petit Comte kindergarten (2010), in collaboration with J. Puigcorbé) in Girona province, the jury observes: “It is obvious when seeing the rainbow colors of the tubes that define the exterior…that this is for children’s enjoyment, creativity and fantasy.”
>The La Lira Theater Public Open Space (2011), in collaboration with J. Puigcorbé fills a void in the historic center of Ripoli, in Girona province, left by the demolition of a previous theater. The jury was impressed by the way the new covered square frames views of river and city and provides a setting for a variety of public activities.
>Concerning the Sant Antoni – Joan Oliver Library, Senior Center and Cándida Pérez Gardens in Barcelona (2007), the jury notes that, like many of RCR’s projects, it was a commission won through design competition, and that the organization of its diverse parts around a courtyard on the interior of a city block encourages senior citizens to mingle with children and library-goers.
>La Cuisine Art Center, Nègrepelisse, France (2014) is impressive for the way it accommodates a cultural program focusing on arts and cuisine, involving both exhibition and teaching, inside of and in additions to a 13th century castle.
>The Soulages Museum (2014), in collaboration with G. Trégouët) impressed the jury for its “strong geometrical shapes” clad in Cor-Ten steel, cantilevering over the site and forming “a symbiosis” with the works of the abstract painter Pierre Soulange.
The majority of the Pritzker laureates since the prize was inaugurated in 1979 have been internationally recognized architects such as I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, who had completed works on more than one continent. The only previous winner from Spain, Rafael Moneo (1996), had designed projects in several countries, including the U.S.
But some earlier honorees had worked only in their home country and were hardly any better known than the RCR trio. The second Pritzker winner, Luis Barragan (1980), while widely admired, had built nothing outside Mexico; Wang Shu (2012) had worked only in China, with virtually no prior international recognition; and Glenn Murcutt (2002) – who happens to have chaired this year’s jury – had done buildings of modest scale only in Australia.
In recent years the recognition for women has been a steadily mounting concern, as their participation in architecture inches forward. Pritzker juries faced objections for recognizing Robert Venturi in 1991 without including his wife-partner Denise Scott Brown, and similarly for not recognizing Wang Shu’s wife-partner Lu Wenyu in 2012. In 2010 the Pritzker went to the man-woman partnership of Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima, who are not a married couple (while two of this year’s honored three, Pigem and Vilalta are married).
We can’t of course discount individual genius. But the current sentiment is toward teamwork, toward recognizing the contributions of women, and toward celebrating the little known over the idolized. And this year’s choice of Aranda, Pigem and Vilalta is very much in synch with that mindset.